A/N: Hey all, sorry for the long wait. A bit of context for this chapter that I couldn't quite find a way to fit in: Most southern elves never cross the sea once in their whole lives. Most southern families don't even send their children to Foxfire. They either teach them themselves or hire a tutor—and that tutor is almost always southern, unlike Sofia (who you'll meet in this chapter).

CHAPTER TWO
TO STAY OR TO GO

Five Years Later…

Linh chewed the end of her pencil.

"Tam, what's a synonym for 'better'?"

"Of superior quality," he answered. She scribbled it down.

"How about 'a government ruled by the seas'?"

Her twin looked up from his book. "What are you even writing your essay about?"

"The overseas migration of nomadic troll tribes from the Rocktwist to the Scarlet Mountains during the Era of a Thousand Councils."

He shook his head incredulously. "Thalassiarchy."

"Thank you," she said with exaggerated politeness. She could almost feel him rolling his eyes.

"You're so northern."

"I am n-not!"

She coughed quickly to cover up her mistake. Her stutter had faded with time, but she would still occasionally slip up.

"Yes, you are. 'The overseas migration of nomadic troll tribes from the Rocktwist to the Scarlet Mountains during the Era of a Thousand Councils,'" he mocked.

She finished the last sentence of her essay and signed it with a flourish. Then she spun around once in her spinny desk chair. "If I was northern, would Lady Sofia have given me a gold star on my last five essays?"

"Just what I'm saying. You're northern. Mom and Dad and Sofia have brainwashed you."

She frowned. "Well then you're n-northern too!"

"You don't even know what that word means."

Linh didn't answer him. She didn't want to admit that he was right.

"What are you writing your essay on, then?"

"I haven't started it yet."

"Tam…"

"All I need is an hour or so to write it. It'll be good enough."

"Don't you want to be more than good enough?"

"What's the point in that?"

Linh had just opened her mouth to reply when their bedroom door was thrown open.

"Knock, please," she and Tam said in unison. Not that it mattered—their parents had been entering their room unannounced for years, regardless of how many times the twins had asked them not to.

When she saw who was at the door, Linh spun out of her chair, papers in hand. "Lady Sofia, I've finished my essay!"

Lady Sofia was dressed immaculately as usual. She wore a sleeveless cherry-red dress and a matching cape that stood out against her warm taupe skin. Red beads and feathers were braided into her long silver hair. Linh had always envied her hair. She would have liked to dye her own hair silver, but she knew her parents would never allow it.

But what was most striking about Lady Sofia was her eyes. While everyone else Linh knew had silver flecks in their eyes, hers were pure blue like the ocean, with a tiny bit of green at the edges. Her eyes and her northern dress would always set her apart and remind everyone that she had come from across the sea.

Linh had the feeling that Lady Sofia would rather wear pants and let her hair lie loose like all the southern families did, but Quan and Mai wanted her to look professional. She never objected. She was Talentless, after all. She didn't want to lose her job.

She reached out and took the sheaf of papers from Linh. She glanced at the first page and frowned.

"Linh, you have to be more organized." She tapped a red-painted nail on the page. "No more cross-outs or extra notes in the margins, or I'll have to start taking off points."

"Why are you here?" Tam said from his bed at the other end of the room.

"Because she's our tutor," Linh said back to him.

"Don't be mean to your twin, Linh," Lady Sofia chastised gently. That was another thing Linh liked about her tutor—she never called Tam her brother, like their parents did. She always called him her twin.

"Your parents would like you to join them for dinner tonight," she said. She raised an eyebrow at Linh's shorts and Tam's pajamas. "I suggest you both change into something more appropriate."

Linh walked to her closet to look for a dress. "Why do they want us to come to dinner?"

"Yeah, what for?" Tam chimed in. He didn't move from his spot on the bed.

"They'd like it to be a surprise."

Linh picked up a pale blue gown from the shag carpeting. It was a little crumpled, but it would probably take her an hour to find another dress—or even a clean shirt—in the mess that was her closet.

She turned on the closet light and closed the door to change. As she struggled to pull the gown over her head—she hadn't worn it in a year, and it was a little small—she heard Tam talking to Lady Sofia.

"Why now?" he asked her. "It's not a holiday. It's not our birthday, and it's not their anniversary. Why today?"

"I told you, it's a surprise."

"Whatever they're going to accuse us of having done, it wasn't me."

"Tam—"

"Okay, fine. It was probably me."

Linh giggled. She floofed her skirt a little bit and opened the closet door.

"I promise you this dinner will be nothing of the sort—" Lady Sofia stopped when she saw Linh. She sighed and hurried to Linh's side, where she tried in vain to smooth over the wrinkles in her dress.

"Tam, get your twin a hairbrush. It's like a rat's nest up there."

Linh stood just behind the massive archway to the dining room. Her head really hurt. Lady Sofia had teased and yanked and curled her hair until it sat on top of her head in an enormous bun, with ringlets on each side. When he had seen her hair, Tam had laughed at her and called her northern again.

Of course, the ringlets had come out five minutes after the irons had been taken out, and now her hair hung on either side of her head like a pair of limp noodles. Linh tucked a strand behind her ear.

"You can go in," Lady Sofia whispered. She gave Linh a little nudge.

Linh didn't know why she was so nervous. They were only her parents, after all. But she had never felt comfortable around them, maybe because she didn't know them all that well. Her father was always working—he was an Emissary for the northern Council—and her mother… well, her mother never spent much time with her.

Too late, she realized her hands were sweaty and shaking.

Tam must have noticed, because he placed his warm hand in her palm. She gripped it tight. Finally, she felt brave enough to cross the archway.

The twins matched each other step for step as they made their way toward the dining table. The cold of the black marble floor seeped through her thin slippers. The entire room had sheer black walls and drawn curtains. It was lit only by a balefire lantern at each corner of the table. But even so, Linh felt like she was walking under a spotlight. With her free hand, she tried to flatten the creases in her skirt. She hoped neither of her parents would notice.

"Tam, Linh, we're so glad you decided to join us," her father said. He was all right angles—rectangular shoulders, jutting chin, square jaw. But his pale silver eyes were soft. They danced in the dim blue candlelight.

"Sit down," said her mother. Mai Song's voice was flinty and made Linh want to flinch every time she spoke to her. Like Lady Sofia, she dressed like she was going to a Council meeting every day. Tonight she was wearing a midnight blue dress and cape that spilled all over her chair like water. As Linh pulled out her chair and sat down, she couldn't help but feel a bit like an ugly duckling, especially when her mother narrowed her eyes at her daughter's wrinkled dress.

She snapped her fingers, and four covered dishes appeared before each of them. She had a comically sour look on her face as she lifted the lid from her plate, as if she resented having to do all this work herself. Linh had to keep her eyes on her plate to stop herself from laughing out loud.

She twirled the glass noodles around her chopsticks, wincing at the sound they made when she picked them up. The discomfiture in the room was palpable. It occurred to her that her parents didn't know what to say to their children any more than she and Tam knew what to say to them.

Finally, her father cleared his throat and spoke. "How are your tutoring sessions going?"

"Well." The word came out as a hiccup. She tried again. "They're going well."

"That's good. Tam?"

"Same."

"Lady Sofia says you both have a lot of skill. She says that you, Tam, have a gift for memorization. And that Linh is remarkably astute for a girl of ten."

"Eleven," Linh corrected. She looked up from her plate. "I'm eleven, Dad. Tam and I are twins, remember?"

"Er—"

"I don't know where you two got that idea," her mother interjected. "You are not twins, and I of all people should know—I'm the one who gave birth to you. You're ten and Tam is eleven. He's the firstborn, and he'll be attending Foxfire in the fall."

"What?" Tam shouted.

Mai picked up her glass and took a small sip. "Don't raise your voice, Tam, you know how that makes me feel faint."

Quan put a comforting hand on his wife's shoulder. "Now, nothing has been finalized yet. The entrance exam will still have to be passed a few months from now. Although Lady Sofia is confident of your abilities, Tam, you will have to study."

"No one here sends their kids to Foxfire."

"My parents did," said Quan. "Your mother and I would like for you to have the same opportunity as I did—to be in the nobility, working for the Council. That's what you want, right?"

"No." Tam was shaking his head. "That's what you want."

I'd like to work for the Council, Linh thought. But she didn't say it. No one ever listened to her when she said those kinds of things anyway.

"Why do you want me to be like them?" said Tam. "Don't think I can't see what you're doing. Hiring Sofia as our tutor, wearing jewels at home, even having our house built facing the ocean—why do you want me to be northern?"

He threw down his chopsticks and stormed out.

"Tam!" Linh reached out a hand as he disappeared through the archway. As if that would have stopped him.

She had two options: to stay or to go. Her parents were both looking at her expectantly. They wanted her to stay. She wanted to stay, too.

Let me go to Foxfire, she wanted to say to them. If Tam doesn't want to go, sign me up instead.

It would have been so easy to say it. But she didn't. She put down her chopsticks and got up from her chair. She had to say something. Something that would make it seem like she wasn't blindly following Tam into whatever mess he was getting himself into. But what could she say? Her tongue was frozen.

"I'm e-eleven," she stammered. "N-not ten."

Then she stumbled out of the dining room, tripping over her feet as she went.

A/N: Thalassiarchy (also thalassocracy) is a real word (albeit an obscure one) meaning "sovereignty of the seas". It's derived from the Greek thalassa (θάλασσα), meaning "sea", and the Latin archia, meaning "rule". So, rule by seas.

Obsidian, which is what the walls of the Songs' dining room is made of, is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an igneous rock. It is created when lava from a volcano cools extremely rapidly without any crystallization, producing a glasslike rock. Pure obsidian is black or blackish green, but the presence of other minerals (known as impurities) in the rock can alter its color slightly. For example, cristobalite crystals can produce blotchy white patches, creating what is known as snowflake obsidian. Magnenite nanoparticles can give the rock an iridescent sheen, and these are known as rainbow obsidian. Also, gas bubbles from the lava sometimes give the obsidian a golden sheen, making sheen obsidian.

Glass noodles (also known as cellophane noodles, bean threads, and Chinese vermicelli) are a type of Asian noodle made from starch (usually potatoes or mung beans). I actually had to look up what they were called in English because I only knew them as japchae (잡채), which is a Korean dish made with cellophane noodles.

This last one isn't a researched fact, but I know from personal experience that Linh's Asian hair struggles are one hundred percent real. If I curl my hair, all it takes is a tiny poke and it's straight again. And the buns, the buns, the buns. I once was at this kiosk at the mall that sold magnetic hair accessories (they were actually pretty cool) and was run by a Korean woman who must have summoned the devil and made a deal with him because she put my hair in a beautiful, perfect bun in about five seconds. To this day, I still have no clue how she could have done it without divine assistance because putting my hair in a decent-looking bun requires half an hour, three hairties, and a tub full of bobby pins and tears.