The Unfairfolk (Valenbound Book 1)

by Sara Wolf

“What if there aren’t,” I counter. “And I’m special?”

  “You’re not.”

  “Damn.” I snap my fingers softly, suddenly noticing the glitter-ink smear on my blazer. “Damn times two.”

  “Pierce,” Professor Guillard calls. I leap out of my skin.

  “Yes!”

  “Which Byzantine emperor sent spies to China to retrieve silkworm eggs?”

  “Uh,” I start eloquently. “Um.”

  My eyes dart around for any answer, any hint, but the circle of students just stares dead-eyed at me, offering nothing. Faces empty, expecting something. Some of them smirk, waiting for me to say the ridiculous thing. They’re finally looking up from their phones, their doodling - with that one Destiny’s Child joke, I’ve established myself as the latest entertainment for the circle of lions.

  Next to me, Bianca’s manicured nail taps out rhythmic boredom on her textbook. Even she’s fed up waiting for me to invent something. It’s gotta be mind-bending for someone as smart as her, sitting next to the only person in class who doesn’t know jackshit -

  My eyes catch on her nail. On the word where her nail’s stopped. Just. Just. An emperor’s name. Just…in? It was something like that, wasn’t it? It sounded almost modern, I remember that. Something tries to claw out through my deep brain-fog.

  Justin. No, fancier. Justinian.

  “Emperor…Justinian?” I whisper. I know I’m right because the waiting circle sags into their chairs again, the potential for excitement over. A smirk pull at Bianca’s glossed lips. Professor Guillard gives me a beaming smile - one of the ones he usually aims at her.

  “Very good, Miss Pierce. This theft of eggs resulted in silk production in northern Greece and other parts of the Byzantine empire, thereby reducing demand from the west, though the quality left something to be desired - ”

  Oh shit. Oh shitting shit, I did it. I actually answered a question right! What is this feeling in my chest? Is it smartness? Is this what smartness feels like? Damn. No wonder people go to school. It’s a totally different experience when you do what the oldies want instead of what they specifically don’t want.

  When the bell rings, Bianca packs up her bag instantly.

  “Hey,” I start. “Thanks for the assist.”

  She shrugs one shoulder. “I didn’t do anything. You knew it.”

  “Yeah, but you pretty much gave me the answer.”

  “You gave it to yourself.” She argues, indigo eyes darting up to Guillard’s back at the window. “Now stop talking. I have a headache.”

  I watch her go, smiling. Alistair hiding his bleeding knuckles behind his sleeve, her giving me the answer just now. These Silvere kids sure have bizarre, twisted ways of being nice.

  I close my notebook, the pages catching where the seam is jagged. Where Rose’s picture used to be. I noticed it the first day I got it back, after I’d calmed down from Von Arx scream-fest. All the pages were still there, except for the one picture of that shadow thing. She must’ve torn it out. But it doesn’t matter.

  Because even if the picture isn’t there anymore, the shadow of it always is.

  The nights are getting easier. And by that I mean the groan of million-year-old wood doesn’t bother me as much, anymore. I know the auroras fade at midnightish, their ethereal light waning timidly from behind the white lace curtains. I sleep with Mr. Ursine tucked under my arm like a particularly fuzzy boyfriend and wake up with him on the floor, staunchly protecting me from the monsters under my bed.

  Or the monsters in the forest.

  Because that’s what it feels like every time I look out any window ever. The jagged, dark trees yawn open like teeth, rising and falling on the ridges of mountain and chewing the sky apart. Knight Durand broods between the teeth, skimming the tops with its fanged towers. I can’t shake the feeling it’s all just…waiting. For someone. For something. And as soon as they find it, they’ll rise up and swallow the school whole. But that’s just me. I’m just full of fear. It’s just one more fear on top of another, on a pile of them, and the camel has plenty of room still. The final straw’ll probably never come. It’s probably not even possible. My whole body has room for fear, shelves and spaces carved out on my rib bones, gouged inside my very organs.

  If Julien saw the man with red eyes before he disappeared…then what’s gonna happen to me?

  I try not to think about it. I try so hard not to think about it it’s all I can think about.

  Which is why I see the deer at all.

  It’s a dream - some horrible stress-dream jolting me awake, soaked in sweat. Mr. Ursine’s half-off the bed and my head rings and I’m convinced in that unreal-way the dream really happened. Dunno what it was - it slides away from me grain-by-grain like sand. Mom. I know Mom was in it. I check my phone, her texts unmoving from her last ‘goodnight’ to me. It’s too late - we’re on the same time zone. It’s three in the morning. I’ll worry her if I text ‘are you safe?’. Besides, she’s fine. She has to be. Real life is real life. Dreams are just dreams.

  “Dreams are just dreams,” I whisper, yanking on my bedside lamp and pulling Mr. Ursine close. Slowly, slowly, his stupid button-nose chases the lingering awful away, and my heartbeat stops being painful. My breathing stops being loud.

  But another rhythmic noise replaces it.

  At first I think I’m still dreaming. Because the sound I hear is out in the hall, and no one should be up at this time. Especially not in high heels. A calm, steady clip-clop, sharp and precise. Someone dressed up, at this time of night? The professors aren’t even allowed in the dorm buildings.

  I grab my sweater and tip-toe to the door. It’s so thick you can barely hear, but the footsteps are so loud it doesn’t matter. Wait. Four. There’s four clip-clops in close succession. Four footsteps. So two people in high-heels?

  The leftover dream-tar in my veins slows logic down. If I was clear-headed, I would’ve known what those steps were before I ever opened the door. But I crack the wood and peer blearily out into the moonlit hall. It’s a weak moon, the sort that washes the marble floors in diluted gray light. I can’t see much without my glasses, but I can tell the gilded windowsills and embroidered curtains have no power here. Gold has no power here. Silver is queen. Silver is silent empress, braiding the edges of statue-thrown shadows and portrait-painted eye sockets of people long dead. The hall seems like it goes on forever, the darkness of night infecting space and time, stretching it out, distorting it.

  And it’s then I notice the noise has stopped.

  The source, the two people it must be, have stopped moving. I see them down the hall - both dressed in pure white. Both of them…connected. As one thing, one white shape, thin in the legs and large in the waist - four legs. Spires of horn on one end.

  Not people.

  A deer.

  A perfectly white deer stands in the hall.

  I squint just in time to see it swing its head around to look at me. Two black lines of ink surrounded by yellow - sideways deer-pupils, deer eyes. Long lashes. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And the weirdest.

  “What are you doing here?” I whisper.

  The deer should bolt. It should, right? When I edge out of my doorway, it should panic and scrabble away. Deer aren’t a thing in the heart of LA, really. Coyotes, sure. Rats, cats. Skunks, sometimes. But I’ve seen enough movies, enough footage in nature shows on TV and shit. Deer are scared things. Sound-based, fear-based. Shy. They run.

  But this deer just watches me with its huge yellow eyes, patiently, limpidly. And then it swings its head back around, and starts to walk again one slow hoofstep at a time, the sound precise and clear against the wood as it steps a perfect line down the middle of the hallway like it…belongs here.

  Like it’s been here before.

  For a split-second I think about chasing it out, but then I realize it’s taller than me, and it’s all muscle. It’s basically a horse, and those things can kill you with a hoof if you so much as look at
them wrong.

  And then it stops.

  It stops in front of a window, and faces it like a person. Like it knows the windows show you outside. Are deer that smart? Maybe. Gotta be, right, to avoid getting eaten all the time?

  What is it looking at?

  The question burns me up, and basically-a-horse or not, I edge into the hallway, the wood bone-chilling cold against my feet. But I could give a shit. I walk slowly closer, ready for the white thing to skitter and turn on me at any second. But it just stands there, unblinking yellow eyes gazing out. It should have a smell, right? It should radiate heat, right? But it doesn’t. Or maybe I’m not close enough. I lean slowly into the massive window, looking where it’s looking, and what’s left of a fancy-salmon dinner roils in my stomach.

  The forest.

  No - not the forest. The deer’s staring right at the derelict spires of Knight Durand. Spires that aren’t dark, aren’t abandoned, but lit up, bright and blazing. With candlelight.

  With the silhouettes of people.

  And you can hear it.

  The chanting.

  Low and dull, like the kind you hear in churches. Musical, but just barely. Something about it feels wrong in that off-key way, but it’s not off-key. It just feels…wrong. Weird and wobbly and nonsensical. Like it wasn’t made for human ears at all. I can’t tear my eyes or my ears away. Knight Durand is abandoned. This has to be a dream. But realizing that doesn’t give me a sense of ease like it usually does. It just puts me more on edge.

  And then, from the darkness of the forest, from where the overgrown path to Knight Durand empties out onto the lawn steps a figure clad in gold.

  Pure, shimmering gold.

  A waterfall of it, a robe of it, draped around the person. No distinguishable features - I can’t tell who it is, or how old they are, or if they’re a man or woman. Just gold like water. And a mask. A gold mask, beaked like a plague doctor, staring with its dark eyeholes up at us. Right at us.

  The mask from Von Arx’s office.

  The deer looks at me, and I look at it, and its eyeballs rotate in its socket like a fucked-up clockhand, black horizontal pupil going completely vertical. From deer to snake. And the obvious dream ends, goes black, the feeling of my whole body falling back and a fear of hitting the ground jolting me awake.

  Sunshine through the curtains. Autumn leaves outside. I’m in my own bed. Not splayed out in the sheets like I usually am upon awaking, but tucked in too-tight. Too-perfect.

  Like a mother.

  Like someone was in my room with me.

  In only my pajamas, I check and double check my lock, running the card on it over and over again. Everyone else is already showered, uniforms pressed, watching me like I’m crazy.

  Because I am.

  There’s no way - I look around the floor for any sign of it. Any pile of poop, any hoofprints. But the shining woodfloor is clean. Zip-zero-nothing.

  Nothing, except for the tuft of pure white fur in front of my door.

  I pick it up, spinning it into one fiber and putting it in an old lipbalm case as proof. Proof it wasn’t a dream, or a hallucination. Proof, in case I need to reach into my backpack and remind myself I’m not going crazy all the time. Just mostly. Because if this fur is real…then the deer was too. Knight Durand lit up. The chanting, the silhouettes, the gold mask person.

  All of it, real.

  Real like the red-eyed man.

  Cursed, like the red-eyed man.

  “Did you see it last night?” I greet Ana in the morning with this very specific and not-confusing question.

  “See what?” She cocks her braids.

  “The white deer.”

  Ana’s cherubic face instantly lightens. “Oh! You saw the deer?”

  I try to hide my terror at her confirmation it’s real. Half-terror, half-relief.

  “Hard not to, when it’s walking around like it owns the place in the middle of the night.”

  “Wait, it was inside?” She gapes.

  “Just waltzing down the hall at like, three am.”

  “Weird,” She whispers. “I mean, not the deer. The white deer has been here forever.”

  “Oh yeah?” I push through the crowd, and feel Ana latch onto my backpack to trail in my empty wake. At five feet flat she’s learned real quick that my giantess stature comes in handy.

  “Yeah. If you see it before midterms, it’s supposed to be good luck. You’ll score really well. Or, that’s what people say. But we usually see it in the forest - I’ve never heard of it coming into the chateaus.” She gnaws her lip. “You think someone left a door open?”

  “Maybe,” I start. “But why would a deer come in?”

  “Food? The cold?”

  I shake my head. “You’re the expert, not me.”

  “This may surprise you, but there aren’t many deer in São Paulo.” She grins.

  “Then we’re at an impasse, my deer.”

  Her groan follows me into the cafe, and I snicker. It’s a joy that gets murdered pretty quick when I see a flash of that gold mask on the back of my eyelids, and remember. That mask….on Von Arx’s office wall.

  It wasn’t a dream, because I’ve seen that mask before.

  It wasn’t a dream, because the white deer is real.

  But it was just a dream.

  It was just a dream because I look at Knight Durand every night from then on and it’s dark. Even at three a.m when I get up for water - it’s completely silent and covered in night. Just an empty, ruined building, no matter how much I stare at it during archery practice.

  ‘Do we call a meeting in Durand?’

  Lionel said that. I overheard it, the first day I got here. Von Arx and him, talking. Was that what I saw? A ‘meeting’? What kind of fuckin’ meeting do you chant in the dead of night at?

  A cult.

  That one word makes the weirder-shaped puzzle pieces fit - why Lionel knows Von Arx so well, why there’s so much fuckin’ money here, royalty and CEO-kids aside. The weirdo security guys, the disdain the villagers have for Silvere. I don’t need to be smart to know this could be some straight-up Illuminati shit. And Mom’s marriage has dumped me right in the middle of the stinking pile. But I sound like a kid when I say it out-loud. I sound like Nic Cage in National Treasure having a fever dream. I sound guano-ass nutcracker-ass crazy. But that’s what they want you to think, right? If the Illuminati is real, they’d want you to think it was fake. Right?

  What would I even say to Mom? Hey, no big, but your new husband sent me to an maybe-cursed Illumanti school. I know, wild. Ticket back, plz kthnx?

  She wouldn’t believe me. I don’t fuckin’ believe me. She would get so worried that I was finally losing it. Unravelling. Because cursed shit doesn’t exist. Curses don’t exist. No matter how science-y Ana made future-seeing sound, no matter how much I touch the white fur in the lip balm case, no matter how much I prayed for it when I was eleven, Harry-Potty-ass magic doesn’t exist. The world is just the world. People are just people.

  But sometimes, they’re cultists.

  Does Alistair know? Does any student in this school know? Do the parents know? They have to. Do the professors…

  I watch Guillard point something out on the instructional hologram, and my stomach churns butter.

  Seven months.

  Life-goal update; play it cool for seven months, and get out of this cult-school alive.

  I figure out lightning-fast I can bury my looming fear in the soul-crushing stress that is academic achievement. Not that I’m deluded - no fuckin’ way am I gonna stand out here at Silvere for excellence or anything. Just keeping up with everyone else’s leisurely jog is like running a marathon for me, but then again, it always has been. Easy intelligence isn’t my thing. Swearing lots and getting attention, on the other hand? Hell yeah. I practically invented that shit. It doesn’t get easier to ask Ana for help translating worksheets. There’s still a lot of teeth-gritting involved and me shouting down the voice in my head that insists
her smiles are going to sour to snarls any second now, that’s she’s gonna leave because I’m a nuisance, but we manage through a combination of Ana’s cheery persistence and Bianca’s calm influence.

  Yeah. You heard that right. Bi-of-the-big-brain-anca. Ana saw us talking - well, sniping at each other, really - one day after class, and invited her to eat with us at breakfast. And defying all odds, Bianca agreed. She’s been at our table ever since. We make an odd trio; me shoving as many pastries as I can into my mouth, Bianca delicately sipping pure black coffee and only pure black coffee, and Ana gracefully consuming little spoonfuls of eggs whilst asking us our plans for the day. I do most of the talking, as always. Bianca doesn’t say much, unless its about the old books she’s poring through. Books for me maybe? For blood promises? But she never says those exact words - we share a look and decide in that instant to keep it quiet from Ana. From everybody else who isn’t us.

  Because who else would even care? They’re just fairytales.

  Because who else would even care that I’m dreaming about cultists and white deer?

  Ruby keeps asking if they’re my friends, but I can never answer straight. Maybe? I haven’t made friends in so long - not since her. I settle on ‘it’s too early to tell’. We haven’t hit critical mass yet, where people start figuring out what I’m really like and decide I’m not worth the hassle. That’s how it went with Shae, and Brittney, and Vanessa. Third, sixth, and eighth grade, respectively.

  That’s how it went with Dad.

  So. We’ll see. We’ll wait, in this impenetrable little mind-maze, and see.

  Speaking of mind-mazes, I catch Alistair in the halls sometimes. ‘Catch’ isn’t really the right word, I guess. I never see him first. It’s always his flanks, Maria and Rafe. Glimpses of a platinum bob, and I know he’s around. If I hear Rafe’s boisterous laugh, I know Prickland’s in the vicinity. They’re his alarms and his torchbearers - people scatter when they see Maria, or duck into their proper classrooms when Rafe swaggers by. ‘They’ve got the whole school Pavlovian-responsed', says Ana, and Bianca counters with ‘I think you mean Stockholm-syndromed’. I have to agree. I mean, I don’t, because I don’t have a single freakin’ clue what they’re talking about, but I get the gist. The disciplinary committee’s trimmed Silvere into ship-shape. Most of the fourth years are too scared to look Alistair in the eye, let alone do anything off-book.