Chapter 15: Sable's Breaking Point in the East Courtyard

The East Courtyard was not the kind of place students went voluntarily in November.

It was a service space more than anything — a gap between the main hall's east face and the older stone of the Tower's connecting wing, paved with the same unmortared flat stones as the sub-basement, which Elliot noticed for the first time now and couldn't un-notice. Two drainpipes ran down the main hall's wall and disappeared into a grate that was doing something complicated with the overnight rain. The Tower itself was visible from here in a way it wasn't from most of the courtyard's named, intended spaces — close and undecorated, without the softening distance that the front prospect gave it. From here you could see where the mortar between its stones was a different color, older, mixed by different hands with different materials. From here it looked like what it was: something that had been here first, and then had a school built around it.

Sable was sitting on the low stone lip of one of the drainpipe housings with her arms crossed over her knees and her back straight in the particular way of someone who has decided that posture is the last thing they control. She was not wearing a coat. She was looking at the Tower.