Midnight Jewel (The Glittering Court #2)(8)

But Clara wasn’t done with me. Instead of slander, she unleashed a renewed flood of actions to make my life miserable. Stealing my assignments. Tripping me in dance class. Always making little gibes here and there. They were annoying, but I could tolerate them.

And I wasn’t done with her either. I began experimenting with the lock picks in secret around the house. Sometimes I did it just to learn the tools and see what I could do. Other times, I actively searched for blackmail material. My boldest act involved breaking into Clara’s room and going through her possessions. I didn’t uncover any secrets, but I did manage to open a jewelry box with a complicated lock. I felt like I’d passed an exam.

“We have a few changes to our schedule today,” Mistress Masterson told us one morning over breakfast. We all stopped eating and stared up at the imposing figure she always made, sharp featured with her gray hair pulled severely back. “Your regular classes are canceled. You’ll each have a private meeting with Professor Brewer to determine the most essential language skills you need to improve on and will just focus on them during your language lessons now, in order to speed up their progress. Ah, well, everyone except Adelaide, of course. You won’t be meeting with him and can spend the morning studying.”

Adelaide brightened, probably because she had no intention of actually studying. Professor Brewer tutored us in speech. I might be the only one here born outside of Osfrid, but many girls had come with local dialects far worse than anything of mine. If the Thorns wanted to prove to our suitors that we could hold our own with the upper class, then we needed to sound like the upper class. After first meeting Professor Brewer, Adelaide had been excused from further lessons. Her refined Osfridian was the only thing she’d perfectly picked up from her time as a fine lady’s maid.

“After the assessments,” continued Mistress Masterson, “we’ll have a special guest over lunch.”

We left breakfast in a buzz. Mistress Masterson maintained a strict regimen in our manor. Deviations rarely occurred. Most girls were excited to have a break from classes, but Tamsin was suspicious.

“Something’s going on,” she told Adelaide and me. “This isn’t normal. This is a break from the Glittering Court’s routine.”

“We have assessments all the time,” I reminded her.

Tamsin shook her head. “We already have private sessions with Professor Brewer. What’s so special about this one that they’d cancel classes for it? And why suddenly try to speed up linguistics? We have five months left. Plenty of time to fix our core language issues and then work on embellishments that’ll really impress those Adorian gentlemen. I’m telling you, something weird is happening.”

“You aren’t actually worried about how you’ll do, are you?” asked Adelaide. She put on her mischievous grin. She had a thousand different smiles. “Both of you sound incredible. Just try not to use ‘bloody’ so much, Tamsin.”

Tamsin didn’t smile back. She remained thoughtful all morning, barely saying a word to me as we sat outside the office where Professor Brewer conducted the meetings. But even while introspective, Tamsin never missed anything around her—like when Clara attempted a shot at me.

“You must be nervous, Mira. Anyone who looks at you might think you’re Osfridian. But once you open your mouth? There’s no question where you’re from. I wonder if the Thorns have ever had a girl without any offers.”

“Oh, hush, Clara,” Tamsin snapped. “You still sound so much like the butchers’ district, I can almost smell the pork rotting. If you haven’t shaken that by now, you’re never going to.”

Clara’s eyes bugged, but her name was called before she could retort. I grinned, happy to see the return of the feisty Tamsin I knew, but it was short-lived. She grew introspective once more, her sharp mind still trying to puzzle out what was going on.

Professor Brewer beamed when my turn came. I fretted constantly about my accent but knew I was one of his favorites. He’d told me on the first day that he liked new linguistic challenges. “You’re much more interesting than curing girls who overuse ‘bloody,’” he had said. “Not sure how much more of that I can take.”

I sat down opposite him now and smiled back, still a little nervous after all these months. “You’re probably going to have a hard time narrowing down my worst problems,” I noted.

He scoffed. “Hardly. You’re imagining you sound worse than you do. And don’t think for an instant that the Adorians—the ones born and raised there—don’t have atrocious accents of their own. Just because you’re being trained to act like nobility doesn’t mean your future husbands are. They sound like Flatlanders, only worse. They stress all the wrong syllables and do unbelievable things with their vowels. Did you know they say vayse instead of vahz?”

“I still wish I sounded like a native.”

“You know the grammatical and phonetic rules by heart—better than most of the girls here. It’s all practice now, correcting the sounds imprinted by your first language. Training your mouth to say sh and get those short vowels right. Keep up with that, over and over.” His wizened face turned thoughtful. He’d once been a professor at the university Cedric attended. “You know, one exercise I’ve seen that can help people improve their Osfridian is learning the accents of other languages from Evaria.”