He fell onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling and breathing hard. He’d burned the entirety of his third Soulblock, right down to the top of his fourth, and that seductive fourth longed to be used. It trembled, wanting to break open and give him the lightning he needed.
He mightily resisted the urge and barely stopped himself.
Exhaustion settled over him like a blanket made of midnight. Questions bounced in his mind. How had he flown up over the entire campus? He had never heard of anything like that, had never even read about anything like that.
And the green, vengeful eyes... The eyes! Would the eyes be able to track them even here? Vale... He had to protect Vale.
“You...have to go. Don’t...stay here.” If they tracked him, maybe they’d think it was only him. Maybe they wouldn’t think to look for Vale if she wasn’t here.
“What did you do?” she demanded, angry and worried, leaning over the bed. “Back at the wall, you were soul-seeking deeper than I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t wake you. You started twitching, and your emotions went ice blue with terror. And now you’re fucking weeping green goo!”
Brom could barely raise his arm, but he wiped his hand across his eyes. His fingers came away with streaks of iridescent green slime the same color as the flame. His chest hurt, and his heart beat so slowly it felt like it was pumping mud.
“I couldn’t...let them...find us.” Gods, it was hard to talk! It was like his head was a hundred pounds and his lips were made of lead.
“Let who find us?” she pressed.
The blanket of darkness moved up his body toward his head like oozing oil and pressed down on him. His eyelids grew heavy.
Vale leaned over him. “Gods damn it, Brom. Tell me what happened!”
But her voice was far away and getting farther. The midnight blanket pushed him into the bed, as if he were descending slowly into a grave lined with his own sheets.
“Brom?” Vale warbled. Her voice couldn’t quite get over the edges of that sheet-covered hole, couldn’t quite get down to him without becoming twisted.
“Kelto’s beard,” she warbled, the exclamation drawing out slowly. Her voice grew less distinct. He couldn’t understand the words. She gripped his shoulders and shook him, but he barely felt it.
“Brom!”
The midnight blanket oozed over his head, and everything went dark.
CHAPTER FIVE
Oriana
Oriana was sound asleep. Suddenly, fear and anger slammed into her. Her pleasant dream about riding horses across the Sediron Valley with Ayvra suddenly became a nightmare. Ayvra became Vale—sweaty and muddy—dark hair tangled, screaming at Oriana.
She gasped and sat up, silk sheets flying. Her heart thundered. Those weren’t her emotions. Vale had slammed her with a heart-spike, a form of Motus attack. Oriana’s nerves jangled like she’d drunk a cup of terror.
“Get up,” Vale whispered through the door.
“Kelto’s fist,” Oriana cursed, trying to find her equilibrium and stand up. After a wobbling moment, she mastered herself and strode barefoot across the floor. She undid the latch, and Vale burst through. She grabbed Oriana, turned, and pulled as if to haul her into the hallway in her nightgown.
Oriana twisted her wrist, breaking Vale’s grip. “Compose yourself,” she said.
Vale was as wild-eyed and wild-haired as she’d been in Oriana’s short nightmare. She smelled of river water and a hint of the Lavulin perfume Oriana had given her. Her boots were spattered with mud.
Oriana quickly put the pieces together.
Brom’s and Vale’s love affair had finally blown apart. Of course, Oriana knew that Brom and Vale had taken up with one another this past month, and it had finally ended in tragedy.
An inter-Quad love affair was idiocy on every level. First and foremost, they could all be expelled. But even without the immediate threat of expulsion, an inter-Quad romance would eventually split the Quad into pieces. If Vale and Brom had ever once thought about rules and why they were created, they’d see that. If things went sour between the two—and they would—it would split the Quad right down the middle. Vale was volatile. Brom had a wandering eye. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
In fact, Oriana would bet ten gold pieces that Vale was here because one of the masters had caught them. Or because she’d stabbed Brom for infidelity. One of the two.
Oh, she’d longed to call them out, to expose their secret to Royal and demand they put an end to it. She’d thought it through several different ways, but there was no satisfactory outcome. Every option split the Quad. If Royal knew, he’d never forgive them. If Oriana commanded them to stop, they’d rebel. Brom and Vale both hated authority, and the only reason the Quad had bonded in the first place was because they saw Oriana as a peer, not a princess. If she took up the mantle of princess again—something all of her Quad mates expected her to do—she would become the focus of their rebellion.
She had worked too hard—and Quad Brilliant was succeeding too brilliantly—to throw it away. Kelto alone would have to sort this mess. Oriana’s part was to play the supportive Quad mate. It was why she’d lent Vale the Lavulin perfume in the first place, even though she’d known where it would be used.
So she hadn’t warned them, hadn’t discouraged them or even told them that she knew. Oriana had clenched her teeth and said nothing, simply watching the quiet disaster build.
And now the moment she’d expected had finally come.
“Let me guess,” Oriana said. “You were cavorting with Brom by the river and you were caught by one of the masters.”
Vale’s eyebrows shot up. Due to the invasive nature of the Mentis path of magic, Vale would instantly assume Oriana had read her mind. But she hadn’t and wouldn’t. She took their collective oath—not to use magic on each other except with permission—very seriously.
Vale turned red and opened her mouth to speak, but Oriana cut her off.
“I didn’t read your mind,” she said. “The story is spattered on your boots, dabbed on your neck, and written on your face. And yes. I’ve known about you and Brom for some time.”
Vale’s mouth hung open for a moment, then clacked shut, and she narrowed her eyes. She waved it away. “I don’t care. This isn’t about that.”
“It isn’t,” Oriana said, unconvinced.
“It isn’t all about that,” Vale amended.
“Then speak plainly.”
“Come with me. Now.”
“I’m in my nightgown—”
“I think Brom unlocked his fourth Soulblock. He’s hurt. He might be dying.”
“What?” A spike of fear shot through Oriana. “Why?”
“Come on!” She pulled Oriana into the hallway, and this time Oriana didn’t resist. The Westfall Dormitory was a three-story building with dorm rooms all around a grand foyer in the center. The first floor was the entrance and the practice rooms. Levels two and three were housing for first-year and second-year students.
Oriana said, “Let’s get Royal—”
“We don’t need him,” Vale said. “And he’s probably not going to like what we were doing anyway.”
“Vale...”
“You know how he is about rules! We broke rules tonight. Royal won’t want any part of that.” Her hand gripped Oriana’s wrist even harder.
Oriana once again twisted her wrist and broke the grip. She opened her first Soulblock. Magic crackled into her, swirling like a storm in a bottle. With her mind, she reached across the expanse of the grand foyer between their walkway and Royal’s. Her magic went into his room and planted a loud thought in his head. It was the equivalent of banging a hammer on a cooking pot.
“Get up, Royal!” she shouted into his dreams, much like Vale had shouted into hers.
There was a muffled cry and a thud, as if someone had fallen off their bed. The seventh door from the end on the second level shot open, and Royal emerged with a sheet tied around his naked waist. He rubbed a fist in his eyes and blinked up at the
m.
Vale shot a venomous look at Oriana.
“We are Quad mates,” Oriana said calmly.
Royal seemed about to shout at them, but thankfully he wasn’t as dumb as his hulking appearance made him sometimes seem. He noticed they were running somewhere. Seeing Oriana in her nightgown, he must have absorbed the urgency.
“It’s Brom,” she sent to him.
That seemed enough information for Royal. Brom was the most likely to get into trouble. He had a knack for it. Like Oriana, Royal had probably anticipated the need to rescue Brom for months now. With a fierce yank, Royal secured the bed sheet around his muscular waist. Oriana gave a wry smile and kept running. While Royal was stringent about some rules, he had no modesty when it came to nudity. Most Impetus would probably run naked through the halls all day if it were allowed. Perhaps constant immersion in their own physicality made them this way.
Or perhaps they were all vain. Most Impetus were physically beautiful. Maybe the beautiful simply felt the need to cavort about in the nude.
The big man covered the distance to the stairway in a few strides, then leapt the entire flight in a single bound. He reached Brom’s door before Vale and Oriana.
Together, the three entered Brom’s room and shut the door. Vale and Oriana were breathing hard after the short run, though Royal showed no indication of exertion whatsoever.
Brom lay on the bed like a corpse.
“Fendra!” Royal whispered.
Oriana narrowed her eyes and concentrated. She unlocked the information in her mind relating to soul-shock, the deadly state that preceded the draining of a student’s fourth Soulblock.
The internal aspect of a Mentis enabled Oriana to create organized repositories of information inside her own mind and quickly access anything she’d ever read or heard as though she had just read or heard it. It was like having an entire library in her head, complete with a librarian who could move at lightning speed. The symptoms of soul-shock flicked through her mind.
Slow breathing. Deathly pallor. Half-lidded, unblinking eyes. No movement, as though his body had forgotten how.
All of these described Brom’s current state.
Kelto’s teeth, he wouldn’t really have been so stupid as to open his fourth Soulblock, would he? He was irreverent, certainly. He despised rules and hated authority. But he didn’t have a death wish. Surely he knew that the rule about the fourth Soulblock wasn’t optional. It was about life and death.
“Did he open his fourth Soulblock?” Vale asked.
“What?” Royal blurted, incredulous.
“I don’t know,” Oriana said, ignoring Royal’s outburst. “Calm down. Just...let me think a moment.”
There was no sure cure for a person who had drained their fourth Soulblock. Their entire Soulblock structure simply crumbled and they died. There were no accounts of someone opening their fourth Soulblock and surviving.
But there were a few rare accounts of soul-shock happening to a highly talented student who had opened their third Soulblock for the first time. For such a student, the rush of magic was so powerful that the soul-sickness was devastating.
“Well, what does it say?” Vale asked, annoyed. She knew exactly what Oriana was doing.
“Quiet.” She continued to review her memories. Apparently, in the instance of such a student, Quad mates could pump him full of their own magic to offset the devastation. And the sooner the better. Every minute a student lay in soul-shock, the harder the recovery would be.
Dammit. Oriana was no physician. What if there was something else, some other risk she hadn’t heard of? She flicked ahead of the text in her repository, all the way to the warning at the end.
There it was. Overloading someone with magic came with its own dangers. There was another reason a student could have these same symptoms.
A powerful Motus heart-spike could cause exactly the same symptoms as soul-shock. If given an overload of anger or spite, a student could fall into this same still, unseeing state. Such an attack filled the body with so much unused magic that they jumped past the typical soul-sickness to a comatose state. In that case, pumping them full of magic could kill them.
“What did he do?” Oriana asked.
“We were running,” Vale said immediately. “By the river. He wanted to test the constructive aspect of the Anima, tapping into the Soul of the World and giving it to me.”
“Giving it to you?” Royal repeated, like he hadn’t quite heard her right. “That’s fourth-year magic.”
“He can do it,” Vale said. “But then, something happened.”
“Were you attacked?” Oriana asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Vale, were you attacked?” Oriana insisted, annoyed.
After a moment, she nodded. “I think so. He was scared. He said someone was trying to get to us. To...to find us, he said. He seemed to think we’d escaped them, but...I don’t know.”
“Did you escape them or not?” Royal demanded.
“How the fuck should I know? He barely spoke to me, sprinted like a frightened deer, then fell over and started bleeding green from his eyes!”
Oriana and Royal leaned over Brom at the same time. There was definitely something green crusting around his eyelids. Oriana spent a critical moment searching frantically in her repository, but there was nothing about crying green slime. She thought about searching other places that might mention it, but they didn’t have the time. If this was soul-shock, he could slip into a coma if they didn’t do something right now.
Oriana took a deep, calming breath. Her father’s voice awoke in her mind.
A normal person can spend their entire lives second-guessing themselves. A ruler cannot.
“It’s soul-shock,” she said. “Let us hope it is only because he opened his third Soulblock and not his fourth.”
“Opening the third Soulblock can do this?” Royal asked, surprised.
“It’s rare,” she said. “But exceedingly talented students are sometimes overwhelmed by the power of their third Soulblock. We already know Brom is exceptionally talented, so let us hope. Give him one of your Soulblocks. Each of you,” she said, hoping to Kelto she was right. “Do it now.”
Royal, Vale, and Oriana clasped hands. A storm of magic crackled inside each of them. Power roared out, and they poured it into Brom.
Oriana clenched her teeth, waiting for the keening wail that would indicate Brom’s overload and death, but it didn’t happen.
Instead, he sat up so forcefully that he actually vaulted into the air. Royal reached out, his arm a blur, and caught Brom around the waist before he crashed through the window.
Brom wheezed like he’d been punched in the stomach. Royal held him up for a moment, then set him on the floor. Brom’s eyes were wide and wild.
“What did you do?” Brom gasped.
Vale breathed a sigh of relief.
“What did we do?” Royal growled. “What did you do?”
“We unfucked your soul-shock,” Vale explained. “Now tell us why we had to.”
“Good...” Brom murmured, nodding slowly at first, then faster. “Yes, that’s good.”
He had nearly plunged himself into a coma, but he was obviously still thinking about whatever had caused it. Oriana considered reading his mind without his permission, but she waited. The emergency was over. Her pact with her Quad mates was more important than her curiosity. For now.
Brom began shaking his head. “No. I mean bad,” he seemed to change his mind. “Okay, you need to go to bed. Right now.”
Vale swung at Brom. She meant to punch him in the face, but Royal caught her fist. Brom flinched.
Royal laughed. Physical confrontation wasn’t the same to Impetus as it was to everyone else. Punches were play. Royal didn’t fear a fight.
But Vale wasn’t amused. She ripped her fist out of Royal’s hand and glared at Brom. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what happened.”
“Brom, I’d like to read your mind to
get the story,” Oriana said.
“Brom, I’d like to kick you in your gods-damned penis!” Vale said.
“I’m sorry,” Brom said firmly, holding his hands up. “But I don’t want to tell you.”
“You don’t what?” Vale’s voice rose several octaves.
“We stumbled across something tonight. And we’re not out of danger yet.” He turned to Vale. “The thing that was looking for me is probably still looking. If it finds me, I want it to find just me. Right now, that means you need to go back to your rooms and lie down like you’re sleeping.”
“Who is looking for you?” Vale demanded.
“I’ll tell you. I promise I will. Oriana, you can read my mind tomorrow, but not tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because if they send a Mentis to read your minds, I don’t want you to know anything.”
“This is bullshit,” Vale snarled.
“Please,” Brom urged. “Go now.”
“Come on.” Royal put a hand on Vale. She dodged underneath it, but he put it back faster than she could escape. She bared her teeth at him, and for a moment Oriana thought Vale would attack. But she relented. Even Vale knew it was futile to fight an Impetu full of magic.
“I’m going to slice your nuts off,” Vale hissed and stormed out the door.
Brom’s gaze followed her with such a dreamy infatuation that Oriana rolled her eyes.
“Sleep, Brom. You have much to tell us tomorrow,” she said, and followed the other two out.
“In the morning,” he said. “I promise.”
“As you say.” Oriana closed the door and went back to her room.
CHAPTER SIX
Royal
Royal waited at the rail, his belly tight with worry, watching Vale and Oriana walk to their side of the dormitory, their feet slapping quietly on the marble floor. He thought about what he must do.
Vale and Brom, and ironically the princess of Keltovar of all people, had made Royal’s dreams come true, but now those dreams were broken.
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