Blackwood Academy: Of Ice and Fire

The car climbed the last hill just as the fog broke, and Blackwood Academy appeared the way expensive things always seemed to appear in Anya Petrova’s life — suddenly, and already certain of its own worth.

She pressed her palm against the cool window glass and watched the towers rise out of the mist: grey stone softened by two centuries of ivy, copper roofs gone green with age, a bell tower that had rung for graduating classes since before her great-grandfather had made his first ruble. Blackwood was not a school so much as an institution that occasionally allowed students to pass through it. At twenty years old, Anya was one of perhaps forty people admitted to its final, most exclusive year — the Finishing Cohort, as it was called, the last polish applied to the heirs and heiresses of the world’s oldest fortunes before they were sent out to run the businesses, marriages, and scandals waiting for them.

“You’ll want to sit up straight for this part,” said Yuri, her father’s driver, catching her eye in the mirror. He had known her since she was six and had never once let her slouch through an arrival. “Petrovas do not slump.”

“Petrovas do not sleep either, apparently,” Anya muttered, but she straightened anyway, smoothing the front of her charcoal coat. She had been awake since four, unable to settle, running through the same tired loop of thoughts: her father’s voice on the phone last night, low and precise, reminding her that this year mattered more than any that had come before it. You are not attending Blackwood to make friends, Anya. You are attending to become the woman who will one day sit across the table from men who have spent their whole lives learning how to take things from people like us.

She loved her father. She was also, increasingly, exhausted by him.

The car eased through the iron gates, past a guard who inclined his head at the Petrova crest stamped into the door, and rolled to a stop in a courtyard already crowded with luggage, chauffeurs, and the quiet, glittering chaos of old money reuniting after a summer apart. Anya stepped out into air that smelled of cut grass and coming rain, and for a moment — just a moment — she let herself feel something other than dread. There was a strange beauty to Blackwood, whatever else it was. The kind of beauty that made you forget, briefly, how lonely a gilded life could be.

“Anya Petrova.” A voice like a struck bell, delighted and a little too loud. Anya turned to find Priya Malhotra jogging toward her in heels no sane person would jog in, dark hair flying loose from its pins. Priya was the daughter of a shipping dynasty and the closest thing Anya had to a friend in this world — which was to say, someone who understood the particular exhaustion of being born expensive.

“You cut your hair,” Anya said, hugging her.

“You didn’t,” Priya said, pulling back to inspect her. “God, you look like you haven’t slept since June.”

“I haven’t.”

“Well.” Priya looped their arms together and steered her toward the main hall, chattering about the summer, about her family’s new yacht, about a boy from the Milan campus who had apparently broken her heart in a spectacular and public fashion. Anya let the words wash over her, grateful for the noise, until Priya’s voice dropped suddenly into something conspiratorial.

“Okay. Don’t turn around too fast. But you need to see this.”

Anya turned around too fast.

Across the courtyard, framed by the arched doorway of Ashford House like something deliberately staged, stood a young man in a black wool coat, unhurried amid the scramble of trunks and greetings, entirely still. He was tall in the particular way that made stillness look like power rather than idleness, dark hair pushed back from a face that belonged on old currency — sharp, symmetrical, faintly cruel in its perfection. He was speaking to no one. He was looking at no one. He simply existed at the center of the courtyard’s attention without once acknowledging that he held it.

“Who is that,” Anya said. It wasn’t really a question.

“Damian Sterling.” Priya said the name the way people said the names of storms. “Third generation Sterling Holdings. Number one in the cohort every year since we started. They call him the Ice Prince — not to his face, obviously, unless you enjoy being socially erased.”

“Because he’s cold?”

“Because he’s cold, and rich, and beautiful, and has never, in three years, said more than four sentences to anyone who wasn’t a professor or his family’s lawyer.” Priya lowered her voice further. “Genevieve Ashcombe asked him to the Founders’ Ball last year. In front of everyone. He said, and I quote, I have other obligations, and walked away before she finished her sentence. She cried in the east bathroom for an hour. It’s practically a Blackwood legend now.”

Anya should have felt secondhand embarrassment for Genevieve, whoever she was. Instead, something in her chest tightened with an interest she didn’t examine too closely — a small, curious pull, like the beginning of a dare.

As if he’d felt her looking, Damian Sterling’s gaze slid across the courtyard and landed, briefly, on her.

It lasted no more than two seconds. Dark eyes, assessing and utterly unreadable, moved over her once — her face, the crest on her coat, the way she stood — and then away, already bored, already elsewhere, as though she were a line item he’d finished reading. He turned and disappeared into Ashford House without a backward glance.

Two seconds. Anya was furious at herself for how much those two seconds occupied her for the rest of the afternoon.

“See,” Priya said, watching her face with open delight. “That’s the look. Everyone gets the look exactly once. After that he simply forgets you exist. It’s very efficient of him.”

“I don’t care,” Anya said, which was a lie large enough that Priya actually laughed out loud.

They were shown to their rooms in Highgate Hall, the west dormitory reserved for the young women of the Finishing Cohort, all mullioned windows and creaking floors and a view of the lake that Anya suspected cost more than most people’s homes. She unpacked slowly, methodically, the way her mother had taught her before she died — fold twice, never crease the silk, keep the important things where you can reach them in the dark — and tried not to think about her father’s voice, or the merger he wanted her to understand before winter break, or the marriage he had never quite stopped hinting at to the son of some banking family in Geneva.

She tried, and largely failed, not to think about a pair of dark, assessing eyes that had looked at her for two seconds and found her unremarkable.

That evening, the Finishing Cohort gathered in the Great Hall for the opening address — five long tables beneath a vaulted ceiling painted with a mural of stars, a hundred candles, the Headmistress’s voice rolling out ancient platitudes about legacy and discipline and the weight of the Blackwood name. Anya sat between Priya and a boy named Felix who talked at length about polo, and let her eyes drift, without meaning to, to the far end of the room.

Damian Sterling sat alone at the end of his table, apart from the cluster of students around him, eating with the mechanical precision of someone completing a chore. He did not laugh at whatever joke passed down the table. He did not look up when the Headmistress mentioned, with visible pride, that a Sterling had endowed the very hall they sat in. He simply existed inside some private, glass-walled room that no one else was invited into.

There’s a person in there, Anya thought, with the sudden, illogical certainty of someone about to make a terrible decision. Somewhere under all that ice, there’s an actual person, and everyone’s given up trying to find him.

She had spent her whole life being told what she would become — whose daughter she was, whose wife she might be, whose legacy she carried. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she found herself wanting something that had nothing to do with any of it.

She wanted to know what was underneath the ice.

Across the hall, as if he’d heard the thought, Damian Sterling looked up. This time his gaze held on her for three full seconds before he looked away — and Anya, watching him go, felt the small, dangerous click of a door deciding, very quietly, to open.

“You have that face again,” Priya said under her breath, not looking up from her plate.

“What face?”

“The one you got right before you signed up for competitive fencing because a boy in Geneva told you it was impossible for someone like you to be any good at it. You broke his nose in the semifinal, if I recall.”

“That was an accident.”

“Was it.” Priya finally glanced sideways at her, eyebrows raised in fond warning. “Anya. Leave the Ice Prince alone. He’s not a project. He’s not a wall you climb because someone told you it couldn’t be done. People who go looking for whatever’s underneath Damian Sterling tend to come back colder than when they started.”

Anya said nothing, because there was nothing true she could say that wouldn’t sound like exactly the kind of reckless promise she was already making to herself. Outside the tall windows, the fog had thickened into a soft, silvering rain, blurring the lake and the dark line of trees beyond it, and somewhere under all that stone and centuries and old, careful money, the term was quietly, irrevocably beginning.