forced down a couple of bites—it was so tasty, it seemed a shame to not eat it—but my stomach was so busy twisting and churning with nerves, there wasn’t any room for food.
“What do you think they’re going to teach us?” Fred had just about reduced his biscuit to crumbs, smearing and resmearing it with strawberry preserves, until Peter reached over and pried the jam pot out of his hands.
“This is a school, right. So school stuff,” I said, trying to convince myself.
“Isn’t your sister … Doesn’t she run this school? Didn’t she tell you anything?” Fred asked.
“No. She just said this was a school for ords.” And I hadn’t asked her about anything else, I hadn’t
cared,
because I thought if Alexa was in charge, then nothing bad could happen. Now I wished I had. “We’ll learn ord stuff, I guess. Like …” What did ords do, besides get kidnapped by adventurers? “Camping.”
“Or how to escape from a camp,” Fred joked.
And Peter suggested, “The proper way to get captured.”
On the other side of the table, Cesar’s eyes flicked up briefly from his plate, and then he went back to shoving bacon in his mouth.
“ Maybe this is just a normal school ,” Frances whispered, barely loud enough for us to hear over the breakfast buzz. “ Maybe the only thing different about here is that they let ords in. ”
I turned to the Majid sisters. They were seated at the far side of the table, chairs edged together and heads bowed. They’d been chatting to themselves and ignoring us since we sat down. I asked, “What do you guys think?” And then I felt silly, because what if they didn’t even speak Westren?
They stopped talking and stared me down. After an endless moment one said, “They will teach us what we need to know.”
“That’s really helpful,” Peter remarked.
“What
you
need to know,” the other said. “We have no reason to be here. Maj take care of our own,” she finished imperiously.
Peter snorted and said what we were all thinking. “Even ords?”
“Maj take care of family. All family. It is their duty.”
“Then why are you here?” he demanded.
Before they could answer, there was a chime and the servers raced through, snatching our plates off the table, even if there was still food on them. Cesar grabbed the last three biscuits out of the basket—so fast you’d miss it if you blinked—and stuffed them in his pockets.
Mr. O’Hara appeared next to our table as the rest of the students began to file out. “Good morning. I hope you ate well. It’s going to be a long day.”
Fran was right; it was just a normal school. Sort of. At first.
We were prepared for weird. You can’t be an ord headed to an ord school without expecting weird, especially after a summer of people telling you “you are different” and that your life is never going to be the same. Which is why it was so unnerving at first, because our morning classes weren’t weird at all. It was the stuff everybody learns—you know, math and history and reading (which Mr. O’Hara called literature). Stuff you would learn in any school, no matter what kind of kid you were. In those classes, things almost seemed normal.
First period was Mr. O’Hara’s literature class. He led us up the stairs and down a hall to a fresh-scrubbed classroom with desks and chairs that had to be pulled out by hand—no magic here—and a wall of windows that overlooked the courtyard. We sat in uneasy silence as he tried to get us talking about thelast thing we had learned in our other schools, and when had we gotten kicked out, and what books we liked, and what we “expected to get out of this class.” Nobody said anything, but he just kept asking questions, long after other teachers would have broken down and started lecturing about what
they
expected us to get out of class to save everyone the trouble of answering. After ten minutes of keeping silent, I finally raised my hand and told Mr. O’Hara I loved
John Sandford
Don Perrin
Judith Arnold
Stacey Espino
Jim Butcher
John Fante
Patricia Reilly Giff
Joan Kilby
Diane Greenwood Muir
David Drake