The Unfairfolk (Valenbound Book 1)

by Sara Wolf

  “Watched? Like how?”

  “You know how everyone has a driver? Well, not everyone everyone, but -”

  “Yeah. Most students, right? So?”

  “They aren’t just drivers,” She fiddles with her Hello Kitty pen. “They’ve been hired to drive, and also to report.”

  “To who?” My stomach tightens. “No way. Their parents?

  Ana nods. “Everywhere that student goes. Everyone they’re friends with, or what their grades are like. Some parents ask for reports on diets. Who they’re talking to. Just talking to.”

  “Christ,” I hiss through my teeth. “You’re not joking.”

  “How can I joke about it?” She smiles sadly. “When it’s my life?”

  My mouth knits shut, but she presses on. She claps her hands, smiling. An empty-ish smile.

  “So. Fun is different for us. If, hypothetically, I was to drink a bottle of cherry schnapps and go skinny dipping with my friends in a fountain, there’d be at least one man following us with a camera taking pictures. Sometimes they get clever and hire an old woman, or a child with a phone - people who stand out less. But it doesn’t matter. Tomorrow morning those pictures will be front page in every gossip magazine and every article on the internet. Papa will call his secretary, and she’ll have to call his PR people, and they’ll spend a few hundred million reais getting the pictures taken down, and quickly, because he’s going to Spain next month and the politicians there don’t appreciate un-Catholic behavior.”

  It’s a far too-specific example.

  “And that means…” I lead. Ana’s gone completely still, now, smile gone and pen bouncing anxiously back and forth in her fingers.

  “They’ll refuse to meet with him publicly if they know his daughter is getting drunk and making a show of herself. Bad for appearances. For the public’s opinion. So I’d be putting Papa’s job at risk - his international job, on an international stage.”

  “Oh.” My chest sinks. “Oh shit.”

  She tries so hard to keep her shrug light it breaks my heart.

  “Some people’s situation isn’t as bad as mine. But some have it much worse. We’re different, is all. Everyone at Silvere is…you know. Different. We’re the pride of our families. The ones to carry on their legacy. Full of potential. Given all the best things in the world. And god forbid we waste them.”

  Ana’s bitter smile fades as her scribbling intensifies. I had no idea. Not one fuckin’ clue. Is Lionel - is Lionel like the other drivers? Has he been asked to keep tabs on me by William?

  I push that horrible thought down and focus on who’s really hurting right now. Ana. What happened to being a kid? Being allowed to be a kid? To fuck up and have fun and make mistakes and memories - that’s what being this age is all about. I think. Lord knows I’ve done my fair share of screwing up. Ana’s dark braids skim her bedspread as she translates the homework, and my heart contracts. Maybe she’s never been allowed to fuck up, always walking this tightrope of being the U.N. representative’s daughter. Since she was born, maybe.

  “There’s Genevieve’s exam, I suppose,” Ana finally sighs and waves the pen dismissively. “But that’s for other people.”

  “Genevieve’s what?”

  “It’s a codename for a party some students throw every month. It’s in the woods behind the school, so none of the professors can find it.”

  “What about the security?” I ask. “I saw ‘em - they’re huge.”

  “Yeah, they’re awfully strict.” Ana agrees. “And they show up out of nowhere, no matter how quiet you are. Especially if you get close to Knight Durand.”

  “The one that’s being renovated, right?”

  She nods. “But, I mean. It’s been ‘being renovated’ for years now. It was being renovated when my Mama went here.”

  “And how long ago was that?”

  She shrugs. “Thirty years?”

  “And that’s not weird to you?”

  “It totally is. You’d think Von Arx would just hire people and be done with it. She has the means.”

  By ‘means’, Ana means ‘money’. Of course Von Arx has the money. Silvere is swimming in fuckin’ money. So why? Why would the renovations of Durand take so damn long? I exhale.

  “I mean, wouldn’t the security hear a party?”

  “Maybe. But they don’t ever go beyond the campus perimeter.”

  “What? Are they seriously that lazy?”

  Ana shrugs again. “I can’t blame them. The idea of trying to wrangle fifty drunk teenagers isn’t my idea of fun, either. They’ve never broken up Genevieve’s exam, and we’ve always held it outside the campus property line. But that was for the music volume, you know? Just to be safe. We only noticed the security-not-busting-us stuff way later.

  “So you’ve never gone to this party -”

  “Please, Lilith.” She looks around, then whispers. “Exam.”

  “Riiight. You’ve never been to this, uh, exam?”

  Ana shakes her head. “No. I don’t want to risk Papa finding out, and I don’t want to disappoint him. There aren’t paparazzi who care about me here, but you never know when a phone will take a picture of the wrong thing at the wrong time and tag me in it. The media is always watching. Waiting for me to -”

  She swallows and goes silent, writing with a furious speed. By the time she hands me my homework back, I’ve fully formulated a flawless plan.

  “I owe you,” I say.

  She laughs softly. “It’s just a bit of French. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “Fine. I don’t owe you. The world owes you.”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re going to the next Genevieve’s exam. Me and you. I’ll watch for people taking pictures the whole time.”

  Her dark eyes widen. “But -”

  I smile crookedly at her. “Just this one time, Ana. Just once, you should get to fuck up like the rest of us.”

  I leave Ana’s room with my perfectly translated homework clutched in my beijinho-grubby fist - coconut bits and a lingering sadness. The halls are practically empty at this time of night, people walking around in fuzzy pajamas and robes with face masks on, and I know I should go into my room and start working on this fucking shit, but I just can’t. It doesn’t sit right with me - the whole thing. Parents shouldn’t spy. I know that in my bones. All the trust I have with Mom is because she’s never once pried into my personal life. I’ve always felt like I’ve been able to tell her everything - janky knee aside. All my emotional problems, all my feelings…I’ve told her everything on my own terms. When I was ready. And she’s been open with me about everything, too. Her struggles, her fears, her joys. That’s the only way to communicate, now that I think about it. With anybody. Open and honest, on your own terms. When you wanna be. Being spied on - especially by the people you’re supposed to call ‘family’ - is just unfair. It takes all your agency away. It’s fuckin’ cruel. Manipulative. It’s forcing you to tell things before you’re ready.

  But I know, sort of, what it feels like not to trust your parents. Half of them, anyway. I can’t imagine not trusting both. Can’t imagine how fucked in the head I would’ve ended up if Mom hadn’t of been there for me.

  Is that why? Is that why the glances in the classroom, in the halls, always feel so suspicious? So appraising, like they’re trying to figure out what I’m made of, and why, and how best to use it.

  “Lilith?”

  I look up at the silky-smooth voice. Weighed down by everything that’s happened today, my heart only has enough energy to skip a single beat at the guy who rounds the corner. The guy.

  “Ciel,” I say. “You - hi. Where’re you off to?”

  “Ah, well,” His silver eyes slide over to a door down the hall. “It’s not so much where I’m going but where I’m coming back from, I suppose.”

  I blink. His hair’s a little disheveled, the first few buttons undone from his shirt. The most messy I’ve ever seen him, really. Right now, in the soft moonlight filter
ing in through the windows, everything feels floaty. Not-real. My piranha nerves aren’t frenzying at the sight of him for once. Is he the same as Ana? As the rest of the kids here?

  “Can I ask you a weird question?” I start. His smile is thin, but not unwelcoming.

  “Always.”

  “Do your parents…do they spy on you?”

  It’s his turn to look surprised, his eyes widening slightly before his smile does. “With a driver, you mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. It’s only your second day here, but you’re learning all the ins and outs pretty quick.”

  I hug myself a little, trying not to let the compliment get to me. “I’m not the type to learn good, so. Might as well learn quick, you know?”

  He laughs. Laughs! Just a bit, and under his breath, but all my insides start floating in zero-g anyway.

  “No,” He says finally. “My parents don’t spy on me. But sometimes I wish they did.”

  “Why?”

  He turns to leave, and the moonlight gleam in his smile turns cold and heartbreaking.

  “Because that would mean they care.”

  The deep pang that runs through me roots me to the too-shiny wooden floor, and I watch him walk away.

  It’s unfair.

  It feels unfair. Not for me. But for him.

  For everyone here.

  It’s only when I’ve given up on my half-finished homework, doodling a very detailed anime eye on it, when I realize things; things that feel stupid compared to the loneliness in his voice. But it makes sense, now. Why Ciel was standing there, disheveled, glancing ruefully at a door down the hall from mine.

  My pencil freezes and the words fall out.

  “Oh. This is the girl’s side of the dorm, isn’t it?”

  18

  The Candle (Or, How you want to run like a river, riotously, uncaring whether you’re clean or dirty)

  A golden-haired boy of sixteen years and four months stands on a hill, looking for magic.

  Tonight, his hair is disheveled. Tonight, his peers float around him holding hands, giggling, traipsing the flowered paths. Ignorant. Or maybe, he thinks, they’ve found a different kind of magic. One made of brain chemicals and shared tenderness and manufactured experiences. One he’ll never know. A pale, manmade imitation, no different than hallucinogenic drugs or alcohol or serotonin. Just chemicals, just reactions in a body’s chemistry. He’s sampled them all, sampled them just minutes ago in a girl’s bed, and he knows it’s a magic only made by fooling the brain. This magic is not for him - he will not settle for imitation.

  It would not satisfy him. It has never.

  He’s after the real thing.

  He wants something real, in an unreal world.

  Silver eyes pierce the star-strewn horizon, raking the darkness of the forest surrounding the school. It has to be here, somewhere. He saw it once. He can see it again. He didn’t imagine it - it wasn’t a fluke. It was real. He still remembers the ashen smell of its skin, the acrid smell of the white deer’s blood.

  The golden-haired boy looks over his shoulder, left and right. Only idiots, and none of them watching. He strides quickly to the edge of the forest, pine greeting him as he plunges greedily into its breast like an arrow. He pushes past thorn bushes, swinging branches aside, breaking a path inward.

  It has to be here; the red eyes. The teeth. The white fur.

  It wasn’t a dream. Alistair was there, too. It was real, there one blink and gone the next.

  No matter how short, it was real.

  He knows it was real, because the white deer is real. A legend, the urban sort, whispered from old students to new ones, but always the same; there’s a white deer in the forests around campus, and seeing it is good luck. It’s never died. It’s always been there. As far back as he could find, as far back as Silvere has been a school, the white deer rumor has existed.

  And that day nine years ago, he and Alistair saw it being eaten.

  Saw it disappear into thin air.

  But the rumors didn’t stop. Students still saw it - posts on old message boards, cleaners working on campus upwards of thirty years insisting they’d seen it recently, whole and healthy. How many pure white deer could there be in the forest of such a small area?

  Just one.

  One that has died, and returned.

  Magic.

  He pushes deeper into the woods, dress shoes cracking twigs and vines, towards the crumbling Knight Durand, it’s empty shell beckoning him inward like an old enemy. Durand has always been falling apart. It’s always been guarded. He can remember coming to it so many times, being chased away by the damned pinpoint-perfect security over and over, always when he crosses the same thirty-meter boundary. Never until then. Never after then.

  Only Durand.

  They’ve only ever stopped him near Durand.

  He’s seen the chateau so many times; quiet and dark. But he’s seen it lit, too, broken windows humming with eerie candlelight. He’s heard it speak, voices like song, deep chanting echoing in the trees. If he reaches far back enough into his childhood memory, he fuzzily remembers gold robes, and beaked golden masks. Dozens of them walking the thorny path into Durand - a Durand with its perfect doors flung open, beckoning.

  It has to be here. He’s looked for so long, come into this wood so many times, but never close enough to Durand. Tonight it changes. No more skulking. No more childish, fearful tiptoeing. He has nothing more to lose.

  Maybe he never had anything to lose to begin with.

  “Where are you?” He bellows, French searing the air. “Show yourself!”

  The forest rewards him with silence and blood from his scratched hands. He shouts again, a twisted laugh tinging his words;

  “I saw you! I saw you, and you can’t take that from me!”

  A flash of white in the branches. His heart soars. It’s there, and he crashes after it, the thorns begging him to stay, the roots demanding he slow down, but they can’t stop him. He’s his own force, a finger of lightning, illuminated from the inside by the fire of hope.

  Finally.

  FINALLY -

  “You there.”

  He doesn’t pause for the voice, but it pauses for him. More than one voice, coming out of nowhere. There one second, gone the next. Hulking men in suits, black sunglasses impenetrable as they shoulder themselves into his path. Red-hot acid licks at his patience. The golden-haired boy can’t be bothered with niceties, his beautiful face contorting.

  “Move, you titanic bastards.”

  Three. He can take three. With a sword. Any weapon. But the only weapon he has now is the pink one in his mouth, and it cuts like a whip.

  “Get out of my fucking way!”

  “Headmistress’s orders,” The middle security guard deadpans soullessly. “For your safety, you will go no further.”

  He seethes, a volcano with a million hidden parasitic cones venting sea upon sea of lava. A punch, a clawing hand caught mid-throw, but he has two of them. The second connects with the guard’s cheek, but the enormous man barely staggers, and then his hands are roughly caught behind his back. Restrained. He bucks like a rabid thing, his obscenities echoing off the trees, incendiary as they are futile. If his classmates could see him, they wouldn’t know him. They’d see an animal - a golden, thrashing, furious beast. The security pick him up like a doll, like he hasn’t a muscle in his body when his body is nothing but muscle. Muscle and pain and sorrow and a keening desire for the white thing, for the black thing, for the forest’s secrets.

  For magic.

  For an escape. At last.

  He scratches, bites, but there are no screams from the guards, no flinching, and in his delirium his teeth taste something like dandelion sap.

  19

  The Mother (Or, How you learned to build your armor piece by piece as you were fleeing)

  This is the part where I throw a fit, right? Or buy a pint of ice cream and eat it all while crying at rom-coms. Something drastic.
Something drastic should happen here, all my training tells me. All my years of reading books and watching shows tells me if the guy you like sleeps with someone else, you should feel devastated. That’s how it goes in movies.

  And I guess I am. A little.

  I mean, I knew it, right? Deep down? Someone who looks like Ciel doesn’t not get hit on. The girls and guys squealing over him during the duel was sort of a dead giveaway. I had to know, obviously. I’m not the only one who likes him. But I’m the only one who’s got an allergic reaction to getting close to people. Which means I’m probably the only one without kissing exp. If this was a videogame I’d be level 1, and he’d be like, level 69.

  The sex number. Ha-ha.

  I groan and experimentally hit my head on a nearby railing. Maybe it’ll reset me. Maybe I’ll black out. Either way, big win. No - I clench my fist. My version of a pint of ice cream is a burrito, and it’s waiting for me. No moping. Only munching.

  But still, it haunts me. If I could just be…not me. If I could just be normal, normal height, normal jokes, normal smile. If I could just show Ciel I’m normal, he’d see I’m worth it. He’d kiss me too. Right?

  When I finally pull myself out of my own ass and head downstairs, I realize my eyes are searching around campus for the security guards. No hulking men in suits patrolling. Or if they are, they’re in the woods. But why be concerned with the woods, when the chateaus are where the prince-related royalty students and expensive paintings are? What’s so important about the forest that they have to guard it 24/7, instead of the chateaus?

  I try and fail not to look over at the looming pine trees.

  Lionel offers me a faint smile as I walk up and I’m about to grill him on everything - maybe-spying on me, what I heard him and Von Arx talking about, but I’m so bummed out and desperate for that damn burrito all human language fails me. I pull the tinfoil back and almost weep at the holy sight.

  “Thanks,” I mutter around a massive bite of beans. “If I don’t eat cheese at least once every 72 hours I go into a despair coma.”