Even so, my heart continued to hammer in my chest. Whoever had left that note for me had wanted me here, and now I had to figure out why.
I scanned the sky, for what I wasn’t certain. Then I started to step around the open space. Maybe there was some other hint or secret about this place that I was supposed to find.
I could see no light in any direction. I couldn’t even see the mountains that surrounded us.
In one moment, when the wind died down a bit, I could hear the waterfall, forever cascading down to the pool. I heard no other sound.
I scanned the landscape and wondered where the river came from. Probably, I told myself, just higher up into the cold mountains. That was the thing that had struck me most about the water in the pond below the waterfall: the cold.
Just then something caught the corner of my eye. I spun around, but too slowly. As I did, the wellspring of magic deep inside of me flared and slashed.
Something crashed into me and I gasped. Pain blossomed on my side.
With no warning, I was under ruthless attack.
My arm started tingling, then moved faster than I could ever have made it move voluntarily.
With my eyes watering from the wind, I still saw the shape that was making its way toward me as a blurry form. In the darkness it looked like a shadow, not solid. The wind buffeted us, but the shadow came on.
“Are you the Shadow?” My words were taken by the wind, and the Shadow didn’t respond, he didn’t even slow down his steps. Instead he pulled out a long blade from somewhere in the folds of his billowing clothes.
I swallowed hard. I had no corresponding blade. First year students were learning swordplay, but only a little at a time. We weren’t allowed actual swords.
I did keep a small knife in my boot, however, and I fished it out now. I didn’t think the Shadow had a sense of humor, but I wondered if right now it might be laughing at me.
My eyes narrowed to a point. Without thinking, I threw the knife. The Shadow didn’t even move as my knife flipped end over end and skated right through it as if it wasn’t there.
I gasped and tried to focus.
“I guess we’re going to do this the old-fashioned way,” I said.
Then the Shadow attacked with the sword. I twisted out of the way and tried to shove the Shadow, but my hand simply slipped through the dark material.
I stumbled and tried to throw myself clear of the attack. The Shadow came at me again and again and yet again. I tried to get back to the door I had come through, but the Shadow blocked my exit. The only consolation was that I was finally able to pick up my knife.
I lunged with it again. There was no point in playing defense when my life was at risk. The Shadow stepped out of the way of my lunge, and just as he did I felt a hand on my back. Shocked, because the Shadow hadn’t appeared solid, I felt myself being shoved forward, over, and down. And then I was airborne, plummeting toward the hard earth.
My body tumbled through the air, my mouth open in a wordless scream. I was only aware of it at all because the air was so cold my teeth hurt. The deep black night was so thick I couldn’t see the ground as I fell.
Just as my mind exploded with images of a horrific death, pain blossomed across my back and my speed slowed as wings of magic burst out of me.
The next instant, I was clinging to the side of the tower. There were tiny handholds, inconsistencies in the rock, but I still didn’t understand how I was able to hold on.
There was no telling how long I clung there. Not long enough for the sun to rise, but it still felt like forever.
A couple of times I tried to climb, but there was no hope of that. My back hurt so much, the tears trickled out of my eyes.
Just as I was losing hope, I felt something clunk against my arm. I whispered to the gods not to let me fall. My numbed fingers felt for whatever it was.
It turned out to be a frayed rope, thrown over the side of the tower in the darkness. I pushed off, clinging to the rope, only to slam my shoulder into the cold stone.
The air was knocked out of my lungs and I coughed in pain while my cold fingers tried desperately to hold on to the rope. I managed it, if barely, and my frantic movements slowed as I swung away from the tower and then slammed back again, hitting my already injured body one more time.
If whoever was trying to kill me had thrown that rope, they could have released it at any moment and I would have fallen.
Down, down, down . . .
And that would have been the end.
I gasped in shock, and an unfamiliar watery sensation touched my eyes again. Damn crying. How could I possibly be crying at a time like this?
“Hold still,” a man’s voice growled from above.
I cocked my head. Had it been my imagination? No, the wind had stilled. I was alone with the noise from the waterfall and the voice of someone speaking to me, echoing off the stones and cold air. A voice I didn’t recognize.
Slowly, and then faster, I was pulled upward. My shoulder screamed, my bruised body resisted, and a trickle of blood between my fingers made them slick. Somehow, I held on anyhow.
Dizziness had started to overtake me when rough hands suddenly grabbed me under my arms. Hard stone pressed into my stomach as I was bent over the parapet of the tower, being saved.
A large mass of darkness pulled me over, a man I couldn’t really see. As he dumped me unceremoniously on the stone floor, two stunning eyes flashed out.
Then the world exploded, every fiber of my being tangled together and going from hot to cold and back again. My arms and legs curled all around me a burst of light. The seasons flashed past, summer heat and sun, the orange, red, and yellow of autumn, cold white winter and blistering blue ice.
And finally, spring passed before my eyes, with everything so beautiful again, stenciled outlines of leaves shifting from green to brown and back again.
Just as suddenly as the vision had risen, I was back to myself. My temples pounded and my hands dropped. I found myself trying to rise from the floor because of the simple fact that staying still hurt too much.
Colly stared at me, his expression impossible to read. My chest rose and fell as I took in hard gulps of air. He was breathing just as hard.
Then, with the slowest of movements, Colly raised his hand. I saw the caved slope of his wrist at the base of his thumb as his arm came toward me. He stopped short of touching me, but his body stayed there, close to mine.
After a few moments I coughed from the cold, and that snapped Colly out of his trance. He spun around to pick something up, and then, suddenly, he was standing in front of me, wrapping my hands in a cloth.
I blinked at him as if I had never seen him before. He’d been the one who had yelled down to me to hang on. That strong, crisp voice belonged to someone who never used it.
He raised his eyebrows at me as I assessed him.
I grinned tiredly back at him.
“So you can talk,” I said at last.
Chapter Nineteen
I was freezing cold and my teeth were chattering. I stared at Colly as he took off his jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders, but he wasn’t meeting my gaze. He just wanted to make sure I was all right.
“What were you doing up here?” I asked. My throat was raw. My whole body was ice.
Colly glanced at me, then turned away again without responding.
“You know this conversation would go a lot better if it weren’t so one-sided. And by definition I think a conversation probably requires two fae. You could always try saying something,” I suggested.
He looked up at me again, and this time he went entirely still, so still that I went still along with him. I wasn’t even breathing as his eyes locked on mine, that crazy color shining in the darkness.
“Where did you get eyes like that? How did you know I was here?” I wondered.
He ignored the first question but spoke at last to answer the second. “I don’t sleep well. Nighttime is the only time I get to myself, so I walk the
halls. I’m always careful to avoid anything that would let the guards catch me, of course. Tonight I was surprised to realize that I still wasn’t alone.”
“Ruining your solitude,” I said. So, I told myself, he too did what was expressly forbidden on campus.
He nodded, then asked, “Can you stand?”
“Course I can,” I nearly spat out.
Colly suggesting I couldn’t even walk, the nerve! It could have been my imagination, but as I wobbled to my feet I thought he might have smiled.
I have never walked down a flight of stairs so slowly in my life. My whole body ached, but all the way I could feel Colly behind me, probably – I told myself – judging my slowness. If he was, he at least kept quiet about it.
Good thing, I thought. Because I was tempted to turn around and punch him for what I imagined he was thinking.
When we made it to the bottom he stayed with me. I didn’t even know where the men’s dorm was, so I had no idea where he might have gone otherwise.
“Are you going to walk me all the way back to my dorm?” I demanded.
He didn’t respond. He seemed to have used up his word quota for the day. Maybe the month.
I wanted to say something irritable to him about it, but I didn’t bother. Being sarcastic wasn’t as much fun when you didn’t even get a response.
Slowly I made my way back to the dormitory, feeling as though I’d been pummeled by rocks. Maybe because I had.
Someone had to get that murderer. This couldn’t be allowed to stand.
It took me so long to ease my sore, bruised muscles down the stairs the next morning that I was late for kitchen duty. For my trouble, the kitchen lady gave me extra work to do. All the guys saw that I was struggling, though, and helped me out when Penny wasn’t looking.
“I don’t know what to do. Do we carry her up the stairs?” Lewis whispered to Batham.
Unfortunately for him, he had whispered to Batham within my earshot. “I will not be carried anywhere, thank you very much,” I snapped, glancing at Colly.
Given the looks I was getting, I had a feeling he had shared with the others what had happened in the night, or at least with the prince and Batham. Lewis might still be in the dark, at least for the moment.
I rubbed the back of my neck and tried to concentrate.
As soon as we were finished I headed straight for the door. “I’ll see you all in class,” I told them, not waiting for a reply.
Sometimes I did try and join my friends for breakfast in the atrium, but not today. I just wasn’t hungry; the bread and butter I had eaten in the kitchen had been more than enough.
Clouda’s class was the first of the day; I made my way there alone. Philosophy was my least favorite subject, and the one with the most reading, so I usually felt the most behind in that class.
Still, I had yet to be called on. I managed to pass the tests and quizzes because of the studying I had done and the snatches of conversation I had heard around the library. My rudimentary ability to read, and even to write a little, helped me answer questions when I already knew the subject matter, but it was all still painful and time-consuming.
Also, we usually went over the reading in class the next day, so even though I hadn’t done it, I gathered a lot from what fae said about it. There were a handful of quizzes I’d managed to take by the skin of my teeth, just sounding out words that were familiar to me in class. I hadn’t done well on the quizzes, but I’d managed to get through.
Clouda watched us walk in and sit down, then cleared her throat. Her eyes met mine, and I knew my luck was about to run out.
“Did you do the reading?” she asked, staring pointedly at me.
For a heartbeat I didn’t move. Then I slowly shook my head.
“Maybe you could give us a summary,” she suggested. When I didn’t move or speak, her tone sharpened. She sensed blood. “Stand up when you address me,” she ordered.
I stood up. A hundred pairs of eyes watched me, including the prince’s from behind my back, but I felt Nerys’s most of all. She was already smirking, turning to Cuthbert and laughing at me from behind her hand. But she wasn’t alone; by now the entire class was laughing at me.
All I wanted to do was disappear. I didn’t get embarrassed, and yet I could barely move for the mortification of it all.
Nerys had never gotten over my presence at her school. But after Vayvin and Esmeralda had started spending more time with me, she had been pushed somewhat to the side.
Even so, as much I tried to ignore her, I just couldn’t manage it. This was almost more terrifying than fighting an unbeatable shadow on a tower ledge in the middle of the night.
“I didn’t do the reading last night,” I admitted.
“Why is that?” Clouda asked.
“I guess I just didn’t get to it,” I said.
Clouda allowed a full minute to pass as she stood there staring at me. Then she turned around and called on somebody else.
Feeling miserable, I sat down. The worst of it was, I knew this wouldn’t be the end of it.
At the end of class, Clouda looked at me again. “Eddi, could you come see me please?” she asked. Her voice was surprisingly friendly. I knew it was a ruse.
Vayvin gave me a sympathetic look as I gathered my things. I nodded miserably and Vayvin headed down the stairs without me.
Clouda was packing up her own possessions as everyone else filed out, but some fae seemed to be going more slowly than they should have. They probably wanted to hear me get yelled at.
“Have you done any of the reading?” she asked. “Do you really think you can get away without punishment if you skip all my homework assignments?”
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Sorry isn’t good enough. I expect a paper on my desk by week’s end. Or you fail this class,” she said.
She knew as well as I did what a failure meant for me, so it was a supremely nasty threat. Then again, Clouda had been extra nasty to me since I’d arrived, so why would I think anything would be different now? Only because I was foolish, I guessed.
I nodded my head and made my way out. This was the first writing assignment she had given all year, and I hadn’t developed a plan for what I would do when I got one.
Maybe I had half-consciously thought I’d pick up the ability to read by osmosis by this time, but I hadn’t. I didn’t know enough to do this on my own.
It was clear that Clouda was counting on as much, that she’d be perfectly happy if I left the academy and never came back.
I swallowed hard. I could always ask Vayvin for help, but I hated that idea.
I didn’t know where to go. I felt caged, when all I wanted was to run and climb and get away and never look back. The only problem was that I was still exhausted from my fight with the Shadow the night before.
Had that Shadow been the Shadow? I had to believe that it was. And Colly had just happened to be at the top of the tower in time to save me. Had he really not seen or passed the Shadow on his way up?
Now I had to ask myself the really hard question: Was it possible that Colly himself was the Shadow? It was hard to believe, given that he was protecting one of the princes. He could have attacked the prince at any time, and yet the prince seemed to be the best protected of all of us.
No, there had to be some other explanation. I just had no clue what it was.
The rest of the day was so busy I barely had time to think any more about the Shadow, or my predicament in Clouda’s class. Not until evening did the fear overtake me.
When the day was over and the clouds had turned purple in preparation for night, I made my way down to the kitchen. My body hadn’t entirely healed from the battering it had taken on the tower, so I was still moving slowly.
I didn’t know what led me down to the kitchen; I was following some urge I didn’t understand. Maybe it was a need to go somewhere comforting in a castle where there were precious few places where I felt safe.
Maybe, in fact, the kitchen was th
e only place I liked going to at the academy. Within these massive stone walls I had never felt comfortable in any one place, but the kitchen came close.
The massive kitchen was silent when I arrived. I had never seen it so fresh and clean, all shined up and waiting for the next day’s mayhem. It almost made me smile. Dinner was long over and everyone had gone to their rooms. The lights were dimmed. The fire had burned down to embers.
I started to wander through it. I passed the far corner where the chopping usually happened. And then there were the stoves. I ran my hand across a countertop and it came away perfectly clean. A warm embarrassment settled over me like I hadn’t felt since Clouda had called on me.
Then something caught my attention, a sweep, sweep, sweep sound.
I wandered in the direction of the noise, expecting to see that one of the kitchen hands had stayed late doing his due diligence to make sure the place was spotless and ready for morning.
As I rounded the corner to face the fire, I saw that it wasn’t a kitchen assistant at all.
It was Colly.
He glanced up at me as I appeared. For once he looked startled.
“Where’s the prince?” I asked. Colly shook his head. He didn’t want to tell me.
“Here I was thinking that most students just spent their evenings in the dorms. You’re rather lively,” I said.
This was the second time in two nights that I had ventured out and run into him. Did he make a habit of following me?
He leaned on his broom, inspecting me. It was a look he had given me before, and I hated it. I glared back at him, and a ghost of a smile sputtered across his lips. He knew I hated it, I realized. The bastard.
“Can’t you just sit still? Don’t you have homework?” I demanded.
Saying nothing, he looked around the room. It was empty except for one thing that was out of place now that he’d made me notice it: a second broom.
He reached over his shoulder, grabbed it, and held it out to me. I took a big breath, then reached for the broom and took it from him.
“Fine. If you’re too lazy to do it by yourself, I suppose I could help you,” I said.
Noble Fae Academy: Year One Page 13
