“Morning,” said Batham.
He and Colly were sitting on a couple of overturned barrels, apparently washing something. I didn’t look too closely at what it was.
“Where’s Prince Reidar?” I demanded, appalled at their lack of judgment. They couldn’t very well leave the prince alone, could they?
“He’s going away for the weekend. Back home. He was summoned by the king,” Batham explained.
Colly had gone back to barely speaking. I had meant to ask him the other night if we could meet again in the library, but I had been feeling shy, and it was no better now.
What was that about? I wondered. I never felt shy. Then again, I still hated to ask for favors, and this felt like a really big favor.
Did he regret all the words he had wasted on me? Maybe he did.
He glanced up at me and then away.
“Isn’t traveling back to his home dangerous?” I asked, sticking to a safe subject.
Batham nodded. “Yes. We asked him if he wanted us to go. I think he did, but the King has sent his own guards. I don’t think the Shadow is going to follow him, although there are other dangers from the other provinces.”
I rubbed my temples. “I’ve been missing for days, and now he’s missing. All that means is more work,” I said.
“I hate work,” said Lewis, who came striding down the stairs just then. He slapped me so hard on the shoulder that I staggered under the weight of the greeting.
Batham shook his head. “Sometimes you don’t know your own strength,” he told Lewis.
Lewis shrugged and looked at me. “Sorry.”
Then we all got to work.
“I have an idea for an organization,” I told them.
“You thought of that just now while we’ve been peeling potatoes? What do you mean you have an idea for an organization?” Batham demanded.
“Yes. We’re supposed to join an organization by the end of the week, right? But all the organizations are full or boring or both, and I don’t want to join any of them anyhow. Besides, I’m supposed to make myself a target.”
“I think you’ve done an excellent job of that already,” said Lewis. I couldn’t tell from his tone what he thought about that, but I had the impression that he might actually be worried about me.
“Right. So here’s my idea,” I plowed on.
Batham and Colly nodded encouragingly. It was about as engaged as Colly ever got.
“I think we should start a history organization. A history of this kingdom. We should research where it all went wrong and how magic played a role. At the end of the term we should give a talk about it,” I said.
Lewis immediately raised his hand, which caused him to stop peeling potatoes. One of the chefs glared at him, so Lewis hastened to continue peeling while he spoke.
“We’re all members of organizations already,” he said. “I’m on the diving team. I fish anybody out of the water who screws up at the waterfall.”
I looked at the other two.
“Being a bodyguard counts as being part of an organization. We’re already targets anyway,” Batham explained.
Colly, the only one not busy talking, had the biggest pile of peeled potatoes. I shook my head.
“We have to do something about what’s happening to the kingdom,” I said.
“Did you forget that you’re a prisoner? This kingdom threw you in jail after they attacked your family. Someone cuffed your magic. And you want to help the kingdom?” Lewis asked.
“I don’t know about help,” I shot back, “but I want to get to the bottom of what’s going on. I’ve spent my whole life running, with soldiers coming after me. I can’t exactly say I enjoy some super shadow trying to kill me, either, but one way or another you’d better believe I’m going to fight.”
I thought about the other night and what I’d seen after I left my private room. Had I left it just in time? What would have happened if I’d been sleeping when the Shadow arrived? My door had been locked, but I highly doubted that a lock provided any sort of deterrent to a killer like the one we were facing.
“You can do whatever you want. It still makes me wonder what you mean by ‘we,’” said Lewis.
I flipped my hair over my shoulder. “I need members in my group. Londa is free,” I said.
At that, Lewis stilled. I knew very well he thought my friends were cute, even though I wasn’t sure which one he liked best. But I had seen him looking at my friends a few times, and it was clear that he was suddenly a bit intrigued by what I was proposing.
As he continued to peel silently, Batham glanced first at Lewis and then at me. “I don’t think I can join an organization,” he said. “My time isn’t my own. It’s a good idea, though. If you don’t see what you want around here, create it yourself.”
“Brilliant, really,” Lewis said.
I found myself flushing at the compliment and ordered myself to get it together. I was a master criminal who was at the academy on borrowed time. I couldn’t exactly start mooning over compliments.
“Your cuffs look different today,” said Colly.
He had barely spoken all morning, and that made his comment all the more notable. I knew my cuffs looked different, I had simply been hoping that no one else would notice.
But of course Colly had.
I pulled my sleeves down further to hide my wrists. “I think it’ll be fine,” I said.
I didn’t like to look at my cuffs if I could help it. I had liked them when they were gold, but now they had turned the same blood red the sky had been when the magic storm came, and it made me queasy. I knew I should talk someone about it, but there was no one I trusted enough to ask.
After that we continued peeling potatoes in silence.
I needed to find Fallyan to tell him I wanted to start an organization. That should make the Shadow very happy. And me as well.
No more hiding. Time to confront death right out in the open.
Fallyan was skeptical of my idea at first. He didn’t think a prisoner should be able to create her own new organization, but on the other hand he liked the idea of reviewing the kingdom’s history and then making my fellow students aware of it.
“It sounds like a lot more studying. I can’t say that would be bad in these evil times,” he said, thinking hard. “Okay,” he said after a long pause. “I’m going to allow it, but on a trial basis only. If you’re ignoring your other work, you’ll have to give it up. Do you have any clear plan?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can I get back to you on that?”
He squinted at me. “Yes,” he said, “but don’t take too long. And get a few other members. Advertise at breakfast or something. Others will join. There are plenty of other students in need of organizations. And don’t forget to set up a plan for a hierarchy.”
I knew where that was going. We needed a group president. Someone at the top.
A target.
I smiled.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” I said.
Later that night I met Colly in the library. He had caught me at the end of kitchen duty and asked if I wanted to meet, and of course I had said yes. I had continued to look over the book he let me borrow. He gave me another one, too.
After an evening spent trying to read, I was fed up. I slammed the book closed and rubbed the back of my neck.
“I’m never going to learn this stuff in time,” I wailed.
Reading was hard. There were words that meant different things but were the same word. There were words that sounded the same but were spelled differently. It was all very confusing.
Without meaning to, I let slip that Clouda had told me to write a paper.
“Of course, she doesn’t know you can’t write,” said Colly. He scratched his chin. “Ask her if you can present it orally, like you were talking about with your group presentation. It could be a speech or a presentation. Tell her you’ll do a year-end paper once you’re ready. I think she might have some idea about your predicament,” he
said.
“More favors,” I muttered. I stretched my arms up and listened to my back crackle from sitting too long.
He leaned toward me. “What was that you said?”
“I said more favors. She’s going to have to do me a favor. I hate that,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s the way of the world. Just think of it this way. At least around here you have to ask. Being alone is worse,” he said.
“You’ve got that right,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Prince Reidar returned a couple of days later looking pale and drawn. For a few days he claimed to be sick and didn’t come to the kitchen, and I could see that both Batham and Colly were concerned. There was tension in their stances whenever I saw them.
After a few days, whatever his problem was eased, and Prince Reidar returned to his normal joking self.
The markings on my wrists had gone from red to pink, and I was still doing my level best to keep them covered. The sparkle inside me that went along with my magic was returning, but very slowly. I was getting tired of waiting. I had no idea how much power I had used that day, and now I would sit by myself in the library wishing I could look for a way to make my powers come back faster.
The weather had turned bitingly cold, and that made everything harder. I was often so cold my teeth would chatter. Even my feet were freezing. I had never experienced anything like it.
The pond froze over, but the waterfall didn’t. It continued to bubble into the lake.
Sometimes students took skates out onto the frozen surfaces, but I always watched from the castle. It looked like a horrible way to spend your time, but Vayvin delighted in it. Whenever we couldn’t find her, I knew we should look outside.
A lot of students had snowball fights. In fact, there was a campus-wide snowball fight, an ongoing game complete with teams. It made the teachers nervous.
Since the murder of Prince Connor there had been no sign of the Shadow around other students. But there was still tension everywhere and no one was letting their guard down. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the attacker struck again, despite all our precautions.
Guards were everywhere, always traveling in threes. There was no one for me to travel to the kitchen with. But unlike that time in the middle of the night when I thought the Shadow was coming for me, I never felt in at risk or alone in the mornings.
On the bright side, my reading was slowly improving. Colly turned out to be an excellent teacher. He made up for his lack of words with patience and kindness. He never once said a harsh word to me about being foolish or stupid or not knowing what I was doing. Unlike our teachers at the academy, he didn’t take a hard line.
Everyone in that castle flew so high and so fast. Wings held them up like magic, while I felt like I was constantly rooted to the ground, especially after the time when I had used all of my magic to literally scorch the grounds.
Fallyan had fixed any markings I’d left, but I still remembered the spot, which was now covered by snow. I liked to look out the windows at the cold-covered world.
You could see the mountain peaks amidst thick clouds on these winter days, and I wondered about the horsemen I had seen up there. There had been accusations that they were the Shadow. I’d heard about some kind of deal they’d made with the principal to prove to him that they couldn’t possibly have carried out the killings. And indeed, they didn’t seem to me like the type.
But what did I know?
The circumstances across Whessellond had become dire.
Soon it would explode.
Despite everything, my life was falling into place. I had never felt as if I belonged anywhere before. I had never really cared about what happened next except surviving and not getting caught. Where my next meal was going to come from, and staying one step ahead of guards and McGryth chasing me, those had been the things that were most important to me for a lot of my life.
Now it was different. I was the head of a new organization at the academy, one dedicated to studying the kingdom’s history. Just thinking about that made me laugh.
Granted it was about battles and feuds, magical disasters and betrayal. But I was in charge of it. On top of that I was actually less worried about my reading ability.
I wasn’t noble-born. I wasn’t even a lord. I didn’t expect to find out who my parents were. And yet I wanted to read.
In our world, learning to read was usually reserved for nobility. And here I was, being fancy.
And beyond all of that, there was my magic. The unadulterated power that had come out of me that day had made students and teachers alike look at me differently ever since.
Try as I might, that fear – for that was what the look was all about – hadn’t changed in the weeks since then. I still felt the careful consideration whenever they saw me.
Bottom line: they knew I was dangerous, probably even more so because I hadn’t intended to do what I did. I hadn’t intended to explode the earth around me, to send it flying in a million different directions until it was shattered into oblivion.
No, that had not been my intention. And yet it had happened. I was, not to put too fine a point upon it, the most successful of the prisoners.
The others hadn’t exactly thrived. I wasn’t sure what anyone could have expected, really. We had come from prison. The expectation that we would assimilate smoothly had been beyond foolish. And for most of us it had not happened.
And yet now, in the winter, I somehow felt as if I belonged.
And not just in the kitchen anymore, although that was still my favorite place to be.
Now the winter peacetime was coming up, a week in the dead of winter when there would be no work and no classes. Many families spent it together, recovering from a long year and also hunkering down against the bitter cold.
The weather was always atrocious that week, so no one wanted to work even if they could.
Loving families gathered, and so did the king’s court. Every night there was a different feast or party. Many of the students would be leaving the academy for that week and going home to spend time with their loved ones.
I, of course, had nowhere to go, and neither did any of the other former prisoners who were still at the academy. I didn’t know who else would be staying on campus, but I did know that the princes would be leaving. Nerys would certainly be going as well. She would never hang around with the riffraff who were stuck at the academy over break.
Clouda had given me a reprieve on the paper she’d demanded that I write, but now the assignment had come due. Colly’s suggestion had been a good one, and I had decided to ask her to let me give an oral presentation instead of a written paper. I could now read a little, but that was a far cry from being able to write an essay.
She had hesitated only a moment before agreeing. But then she looked up and told me that she wanted the presentation to be right then and there.
Luckily for me, I had already given it in my head, and the philosophical subject matter was a topic I was familiar with. I had been listening in class and learning all I could, not to mention that Colly had also started to go over class topics with me.
He would take out our textbook and read me the chapter headings, then he’d highlight key features from the chapters. I always remembered what he said.
Not once did he ask if I was paying attention. He could see how much I cared, how invested I was in the process.
So now, challenged by Clouda, I took a deep breath and started talking.
When I was finished, I scarcely dared to breathe. Looking hard into my face she said, “Very well. I don’t suppose I can fail you for that. At least not yet.”
I hoped against hope that she wouldn’t change her mind.
Before everyone left for the break, the academy had a party.
“It’s the time of year when we give gifts,” Vayvin explained.
I looked at her in surprise. “How can we possibly give gifts? I don’t have any coins to pay for them with,�
� I said.
Even asking the question felt strange. My memories of the clan were faded, but even there we hadn’t had the resources to give gifts. Here at the Noble Fae Academy, on the other hand, wealth was not an issue.
“Most of the students don’t have to worry about that,” she said, echoing my thoughts. Most of the students at the academy, with the exception of the prisoners, were blindingly wealthy.
“I’ll come up with something,” I said. “Who all do I give gifts to?” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it, it was just the first time I had had any friends to give gifts to.
“It’s not a have to, it’s a get to,” said Vayvin. “You’re lucky to have such good friends. Remember that.”
“Right. I will,” I told her.
I went away to think it over. At first I thought about stealing things to give as gifts. That had always been my recourse in the past when I needed something. Just take it. But I knew that wouldn’t go over well here. Here, you had to be careful. If I stole something I’d get caught and probably sent right back to prison. I had to figure out something else.
I never spoke to any of the other former prisoners, so I had no idea how they planned to handle the situation. Then again, they weren’t exactly friendly with anyone else, so maybe it wasn’t a problem for them.
I went off to wander the halls of the castle, thinking about what to do. I went alone, but there were so many guards I wasn’t worried. And I never went anywhere alone after dark. Those days were long gone.
As I walked, I chewed on the question I hadn’t gotten an answer to: Who all was I supposed to give gifts to, anyway? Should I give one to Prince Reidar? We were friends, but he was a prince and I was a nobody. Worse than a nobody, I was a released prisoner. I was expendable, he was not.
And what about his two bodyguards? I certainly felt as if I should give Colly a gift after all he’d done for me.
Noble Fae Academy: Year One Page 18
