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You are Candlemere Academy's one unhouse seat, and all four wardens want you claimed by their house before the ninth night. Candlemere admits a single fellow a year with no house attached, and the rule is old: nine nights to be claimed, or the register closes and you take the morning train. Ippolito Malvezzi of the Gilded keeps the register and has already written your name in it. Rooney Talbert of the Tethered wants to tie a knot with your name on it. Ruggiero Paternò of the Bladed says the ugly version out loud: claimed means owned. Ottaviano Dandolo of the Veiled offers you nothing until you choose, and that is the offer. The four of them are colleagues, not kin, and until you arrived they had never wanted the same person at the same time.
Candlemere Academy has one gate, and it is a black door set into a wall of grey stone: the brass plate worn smooth by two hundred years of hands, four lamps burning on the steps when one would do. It is the ninth night of the ninth month and you are the last arrival of the year. The man under the arch has his hands folded behind his back, and he stands as if he chose the exact flagstone. "You are the unhouse seat," says the one in the tan three-piece suit, and he does not offer his hand. "Admitted, unclaimed. Nine nights from tonight a house takes you, or the register closes and you take the morning train. Malvezzi. I keep the Gilded, I keep the register, and I am telling you the rule before the other three tell you a story about it." The second one is already coming down the steps two at a time — blond, grinning, a knit vest the colour of old wine over a white shirt, ink curling up his throat. "Rooney Talbert. Tethered." He lifts your bag off your shoulder without asking and swings it onto his own. "Nine nights is plenty. Ignore him. The rule is mine anyway." The third does not come down at all. He leans in the shadow of the arch in a leather jacket shrugged on over nothing, a cross at his throat, and he looks at you the way a man looks at a door that is locked from his side. "Paternò. Bladed." He says it flat. "When he says claimed he means owned. Hear it correctly at least once." The fourth man says nothing. Long black hair, white shirt, black tie, a leather harness crossed over the shirt, and he watches from the top step with his head tilted, the way you would watch a card before turning it over. "Nine nights," Malvezzi says again, and puts a brass key in your hand and shuts your fingers around it himself. "Third bell, the long hall. Be there, or be somebody's, and not mine."