“What if it doesn’t have to be?” she asked.
“No. We’re not having this conversation again.” Royal took a deep breath and said, “The Four have secrets. They have their reasons and that’s good enough for me. We cannot conceive of what they know and the responsibilities they have. And you want to accuse them of malevolence and slap them in the face. Well, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And none of this would have happened if you had just followed the rules.”
“The green flames would still be there if we hadn’t followed the rules,” Brom said.
“You think you’ve discovered something,” Royal said. “But you’re jumping at shadows. All you’ve done is seen something you don’t understand, then made a wild accusation and threatened our chances of becoming Quadrons. Quad mates don’t do that.”
“Actually that’s exactly what an Anima does,” Vale said. “He’s supposed to look deeper. He’s supposed to push boundaries, to seek wisdom.”
Royal glared up at her in her tree.
“We’re supposed to push each other.” She glared back. “We’re supposed to force each other to grow. Brom is doing more for us than anyone.”
“Antagonizing The Four isn’t an act of wisdom,” Oriana said. “It’s the act of a belligerent child.”
“Thank you!” Royal blasted.
Brom looked at them with such rebelliousness that Royal thought he’d storm away. He stayed that way for a long moment, and all they could hear was the rushing of the river.
“Maybe you’re right,” Brom finally forced out through stiff lips. His defiance softened, and for a moment, Royal thought he looked sad. Brom looked down for a long moment, and then he said, “You’re right. I don’t know exactly what I saw. I certainly didn’t understand it. I only know how I felt.”
“What?” Vale said. She stared down at Brom from her tree branch in disbelief. She seemed about to say something, then closed her mouth. She pushed that smug, assured smile back onto her face, but Royal could see it was forced.
“I think,” Oriana said solemnly, using what Royal had come to think of as her queen’s voice, “that Brom has overstepped his bounds. He achieved a great accomplishment, but he did it at great danger to all of us. And Brom, Vale...” She fixed them each with a hard stare in turn. “If you continue to flaunt the rules of the academy, they will expel you. And none of us become Quadrons. What you did, even accidentally, threatened us all.”
Brom looked thoughtful. Vale looked outraged. She perched on the edge of her branch like an angry cat, like she was going to leap down and scratch them.
Brom looked increasingly more guilty and self-aware, thank Fendra. Perhaps he was finally realizing what he’d almost brought down upon them all.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “That wasn’t my intention.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Oriana said. “It sounds like you stepped into this unknowingly, but it doesn’t change the fact that you stepped into it. I think we should try to stop that from happening again. I propose that we make a pact.”
“You sound like one of the masters.” Vale rolled her eyes.
“Perhaps one of us should.”
“I’m not taking orders from you, princess,” Vale said scathingly.
“You don’t take orders from anybody,” Royal cut in.
“You’re fucking right I don’t.” She jumped down from the branch and pointed up at Royal’s face. “I’m not bowing to these gods-be-damned masters. What did they ever do for me?”
Royal clenched his fists. Oriana’s countenance went ice cold, like she’d been that entire first year.
“They let you train here,” Brom interrupted softly.
“What?” Vale turned her burning gaze on him.
“They let you train. That’s what they did for you,” he said, his eyes sad.
“The masters haven’t done shit,” Vale said. “The only reason I know anything is because of Oriana and you and Royal. I sharpened my skills against you. I pored over books in the library on my own. I put the time in to be a Motus!”
“Yes. You did the work. But you never could have if you weren’t here,” Brom said. “Whether you like the masters or not, whether you want to hear it or not, you need this place. The masters and The Four are part of that. We have to respect them. Without this school, we fail. It’s over.”
“You’re siding with them?” Vale said, aghast.
Brom frowned. “There is no them, Vale. There’s us. We’re Quad Brilliant. We’re in this together, live or die. Our first year should have taught us that.”
Vale opened her mouth, but she shut it again, crossed her arms, and leaned back against the trunk of the willow tree.
“Fine. What’s your pact?” She flung the words at Oriana. “As if I didn’t know,” she murmured.
“I submit that we follow the rules,” Oriana said. “All of the rules.”
“What a surprise.”
“I agree with Oriana,” Royal said.
“Another shock,” Vale murmured, and Royal frowned at her.
Brom looked at the ground, thoughtful, his brow furrowed. “I think...” He hesitated. “I think they’re right.” He looked up, found Vale’s angry gaze. “Please, Vale. Once we graduate, we can explore these mysteries to our heart’s content. Once we’re Quadrons. Then everything will be different. We can do what we want.”
Vale didn’t say anything.
“Then we are agreed?” Royal asked.
“I agree,” Oriana said formally.
“I agree,” Brom said.
Vale pushed away from the trunk. “You’re idiots. The masters, The Four...they don’t give a shit about you. Whatever Brom stumbled across, whatever nasty thing they’re doing to us, you’re just going to let them continue to do it because you’re too scared to find out more.”
Royal opened his mouth to speak when Vale took the words way from him.
“But I do care about all of you,” she said, looking up into Royal’s eyes. He felt her genuine affection. Her gaze shifted, came to rest on Oriana. “We’re Quad mates. So I’m with you. If this is our path, I’ll walk it.”
“Thank you,” Royal and Oriana said together.
“But it’s us against them.” She shook her head. “If you don’t see that, you’re blind. They wanted our Quad to fail from the moment we arrived.” She turned and vanished through the veil of willow fronds.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Brom
The next day, they attended their classes—the first on advanced Soulblock division, and the second on the external aspects of the magic paths. It was all knowledge they already knew, due to Oriana’s and Vale’s diligent off-hours research, but Brom listened anyway. There were a couple of things about advanced Soulblock division theory he hadn’t known. He watched Oriana’s face during the lesson, her finger on her chin as she recorded the information in the library of her mind.
That afternoon, when Brom came to the practice room, Vale was already there, which he had expected. He thought she might flaunt the new pact from the start, just once, just to show she didn’t need to listen to Oriana. But, true to her word, she was where she was supposed to be at this hour, in the practice room with the rest of them. They stayed and worked on their skills in silence until the prescribed time was finished, and they all went to the Floating Hall for the evening meal. They sat with over a hundred other academy students at the long marble tables and ate their goat stew in silence.
After, Brom went into his room with a mounting thrill of excitement, shut the door, and carefully locked it.
He turned to find Vale sitting on his bed.
“You’re a bit of a squirrel when it comes to climbing, aren’t you?” he said.
“How did you like my performance?”
“Convincing,” he said.
She smiled wide. “I didn’t think for a second you agreed with them, but they did.”
She was gleeful, but Brom felt a little sick. He didn’t want to lie to Oriana and Royal. There ju
st wasn’t any other way around it. They would never convince Royal to question The Four. And it was almost as unlikely they’d convince Oriana.
But after what Brom had seen, there wasn’t any other choice. Something horrible was happening at the Champion’s Academy, and he couldn’t ignore it.
“So what’s our pact?” she asked.
“We don’t get caught. We get caught and we lose everything.”
Her smug expression faded, and she nodded solemnly. She knew what he meant. They wouldn’t just get reprimanded or punished by the masters; they would lose the Quad. In a way, that was worse than expulsion.
“We owe it to our Quad mates to unmask this danger,” Brom said. “We can’t just stand by and let...whatever is happening just happen. But they’ll never see it that way.”
Vale nodded.
“Over the next couple of days,” he continued, “we do nothing except study how to fool a Mentis. Oriana will know what we’re doing the moment she looks into our heads if we don’t find out how to stop her. And if we tell her never to look inside our heads, she’ll be immediately suspicious. So...you’re our researcher. Find out what we need to know, then we practice until we’re ready. Then, and only then, I’ll tell you my plan.”
“Okay,” she said, and then the excitement and mischief vanished from her face.
“What is it?” he asked
“Your emotions were all over me that night,” she said. Her liquid brown eyes were huge. “By the wall. I’ve never seen you so scared.”
“I thought they’d kill us. They would have, if they caught us. I’m sure of that. I’m still reeling.”
“You’re sure it was The Four?”
“If The Four were standing right next to me, I wouldn’t know it,” Brom said. “Nobody has ever seen them except the Quadrons who graduate. But I’m sure. That spell... Well, Royal was right about one thing. I couldn’t comprehend it. I still can’t conceive of how a Quadron could do that. It was made by someone who is so far beyond what we’re doing. It was The Four.”
“Okay.”
He pressed his lips into a determined line. “But they didn’t kill us, and that was their mistake. Now we’re going to piece together this mystery. The Champions Academy isn’t what they say it is, and we’re going to find out the truth.”
“You’re damned right,” she said, and she kissed him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Brom
It turned out that an unsuspecting Mentis wasn’t nearly as difficult to fool as Brom had thought. Apparently, reading surface thoughts was relatively easy for a Mentis, but it took far more effort to delve into a person’s memories. Memories were not thoughts, according to the tome Vale had unearthed, unless a person was actively thinking about them while they were being read by the Mentis. So unless Vale and Brom thought about their plan during their practices with the Quad, Oriana wouldn’t pick up on it unless she did a deep memory dive.
Which meant all Vale and Brom had to do was be diligent about their thoughts during practice.
In an effort to allay the suspicion of the Quad mates, both Brom and Vale chose to mellow their rebellious natures. Brom stopped taking midnight runs by the river. He practiced in the practice room. He went to all his classes. He didn’t draw any undue attention to himself. Royal and Oriana watched with vigilant gazes, always alert for infractions now.
And Quad mates aside, The Four might still be searching for Brom. Even now, they could be watching all of the students, looking for the culprit who had seen their green fire spell.
So Brom adhered to the rules. Mostly.
One rule he couldn’t stop breaking was loving Vale. During the day, she scoured the library for references to The Four, and Brom strove to break Anima boundaries, relaying new revelations about connecting to the Soul of the World.
At night, they made love and matched notes.
“There are no records of Quadrons before The Four,” Vale said, lounging on the bed with her back against the wall. She draped her naked leg across his while he read a passage from one of the books she’d taken from the library.
“We knew that,” Brom said.
“There had to be Quadrons before The Four,” she said.
“The Four invented the term,” he said. “No Quadrons before The Four.”
“Don’t be a dung head,” she said. “Call them whatever you want. I’m saying there was magic before The Four, so there had to be magic users.”
“The stories say The Four were the first to make Soulblocks. If there were others who tried, they died,” he said. “They drained their soul because they didn’t know how to divide it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It was a hundred years ago, Vale.”
“So?”
“So people didn’t know how to work magic yet.”
“Have you ever actually seen a non-initiate drain their soul?”
“It’s grisly.”
“You’ve never seen it,” she said.
“I have heard the stories.”
“Stories,” she emphasized.
He finally put his book down on his lap. He wasn’t going to be able to retain anything he read with her hammering on him. “There are numerous accounts in these very books.” He tapped the book. “You’re saying soul-drain isn’t a real thing?”
“Oh, it’s real. But maybe it doesn’t happen every time.”
“You really don’t trust anything.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s in the books!”
“The Four could be telling us lies,” she said.
“These books weren’t written by The Four,” he said.
“Who cares who wrote them? The Four control the academy. No one even questions how they put the school together. Why?”
“Because they’re The Four,” he murmured.
“Because they’re The Four,” she repeated. “That’s as far as people think. They’re demigods. They’re protectors. The entirety of the two kingdoms relies on The Four. Everyone believes this, like Royal, but nobody can answer why. It’s simply unquestioned that they’re working for our benefit.”
Even though Brom thought The Four might be darker than they’d originally thought, he hadn’t stopped to consider that everything—the entire academy and everything in it—might also be the enemy. Including the library. The foreboding wriggled in his belly.
“They’ve had a hundred years to remove whatever books they don’t want others to see,” Brom said.
“Yes,” she said. She scooted behind him, wrapping her legs around him. She put her chin on his shoulder, pulled a book from her stack and placed it on top of the one he was reading. The book was bound in thick, warped hide, and it still had goat fur clinging to it in spots. “But even The Four are human. I found this,” she said, flipping the book open to a marked page.
He pulled at a tuft of fur. “You found a book made of an animal?”
“It’s old.”
“And maybe still alive?”
“I took it from the masters’ collection.”
He looked at her sharply over his shoulder. “Vale!”
She kissed him on the nose. “Read.”
“I thought we weren’t breaking any rules right now.”
“Says the man with his Quad mate’s legs wrapped around his waist. Read.”
He perused the page, blinked, then quickly reread it. It showed a roster of graduating Quads from almost a hundred years ago. Two of them graduated as entire Quads.
He looked back over his shoulder. “Entire Quads have passed the Test of Separation,” he whispered, stunned.
“Interesting, yes?” she asked. “But apparently only at the beginning of the school.”
“What... What does that mean?” He leaned back against her, thoughtful. She was warm and soft.
Students were told that full Quads could pass the Test of Separation together, but that none ever had. According to this passage, that was a lie.
“Why wouldn’t they tell u
s about this?” Brom asked.
“Why indeed?” she echoed.
She brought another book forward and laid it over the top of the first two, then flipped it open to a marked page. It appeared to be a daily tally of goods by the academy’s quartermaster, which listed the number of sheep in the school’s new flock, the poundage of vegetables taken in with the harvest. Carrots, cabbage, potatoes, and leeks. It also recounted recent news from nearby villages. The last entry had one of Vale’s bookmarks stuck between the pages. It told of the death of a Quadron.
“He’s from one of the full Quads that graduated from the brand new school,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Same year. Same Quad name.” She laid another book atop the stack on his knees. It was getting heavy. Brom read where she had marked. It was the following year. It also talked about herds and harvests, and it noted the death of a Quadron from a town to the north.
“Let me guess...” he said.
“Another dead. And from the other full Quad that had graduated.”
Brom felt cold.
“They killed them,” she said. “They went after them after they passed the Test of Separation. And they killed them.”
They. The Four.
“Why?” he breathed.
“Maybe they were naughty students,” she said sarcastically.
She placed another book on his lap, flipped it open. “Here’s another.” She put another on his lap, open to another page that talked of harvests and deaths. “And another.”
He couldn’t sit still anymore. He pushed the books onto the bed and stood up.
“Gods Vale...” he said. “You’re saying...”
“That The Four are fucking murderers,” she said. “They don’t want a full Quad loose in the two kingdoms. The Test of Separation is a slaughterhouse, a way for them to make sure no full Quad gets free of the school. I don’t think it’s because a Quad isn’t strong enough to pass. I think it’s because they fucking kill them.”
“Why...” he trailed off, and his imagination went wild. “Why even create the school in the first place? If they wanted all the students dead, why even train them how to create Soulblocks? Let them open their souls, drain themselves, and die.”
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