The Heir Chronicles: Books I-III

by Cinda Williams Chima

  “Yes.” One-word answers were safest.

  “One hears there are drugs, drinking, and so on.” Houghton paused and raised an eyebrow in inquiry, but Seph looked out the window, forcing himself to take deep, slow breaths.

  “Right,” Houghton said, disappointed. “Well, at any rate, we’ve managed to make those preposterous charges go away.”

  “Good.”

  “I mean, really. Flinging flame from your fingertips like a character from a graphic novel? Rubbish. But people become hysterical, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, the university has some liability in this. All summer-camp students are required to be in the dormitories by ten o’clock, so it said in the brochure. And yet, there you were, sixteen years old, running the streets of Toronto at four in the morning.”

  Seph was finally goaded into speech. “I wasn’t running the streets. I was at a party. I’ve gone to lots of parties, and nothing ever—”

  “Then they’re doubly liable. They knew, or should have known, that—”

  Seph leaned forward. “You know I go to clubs. You’ve been paying the bills.”

  Houghton cleared his throat loudly. Seph half expected him to stick his fingers in his ears. “Well, then. There you are. I think we can agree that your idea of spending the summer at the university in Toronto has been . . . a disaster.”

  “Toronto’s not the problem,” Seph said. “Toronto’s great. I ...”

  “No.” Houghton toyed nervously with a paperweight. His forehead gleamed with sweat. “Not this time. The Metropolitan Police have required my assurance that you will leave town as soon as possible.”

  Seph felt a great weight descending. “I thought you said the charges had been dismissed.”

  “There were a number of witnesses who tied you to the fire.”

  Seph gripped the arms of the chair. “Really? And what do you think?”

  Houghton mopped his brow with a snowy handkerchief. “What should I think? You seem to have a penchant for combustibles. There was that incident in Switzerland, the fires and explosions on the chapel roof, the . . . ah . . . demolition of the bell tower.”

  “I went up there with a . . . a friend. I did not go up there to blow a hole in the bell tower.” Marie wanted to see the stars, Seph thought. It was after they kissed that the fireworks began.

  “And that boy at St. Andrew’s. That Henri Armand. Attacked by a flock of ravens, wasn’t he?”

  Seph shrugged. He couldn’t conjure any regret about Henri. Armand was an older boarding student from Marseille, rumored to be the illegitimate son of the head of a French crime family. He was also a skilled street fighter, a talent unusual among private-school students.

  Armand had considered Marie to be his personal property, like his gaudy gold jewelry and his Italian sports car. When he’d heard about the incident on the chapel roof, he’d ambushed Seph in a remote corner of the campus, pounding away at his midsection so the bruises wouldn’t show.

  Then the ravens had come.

  “Those birds tore the boy’s clothing to shreds,” Houghton persisted.

  Armand had been so frightened he’d wet himself.

  Afterward, several of the huge black birds had settled gently onto Seph’s arms and shoulders, watching naked Armand with their shiny black eyes. Never mind that Seph was just as frightened of the birds as Armand.

  Well, maybe not quite as frightened.

  Seph looked at Houghton and raised an eyebrow. An appeal to logic was usually effective. “So you’re saying I sent a flock of ravens after Henri?”

  Houghton smiled a tight little smile. “I’m saying that you’ve been expelled from four schools in the past three years. We are running out of options.”

  “But I’m going to UTS. It’s all set.”

  “That is no longer possible.”

  “What about St. Michael’s, then?”

  “No.”

  Seph saw where this was going. He needed to stay in Toronto. He needed to find that girl Alicia and get some answers. She was the only lead he had.

  He was reduced to begging. “Please. Let me stay here for school. There has to be someplace that’ll let me in. I swear, I won’t get into trouble.” He extended his hand toward Houghton. If he could just make contact . . .

  Houghton put up his hands and leaned away, as if to fend Seph off. “Don’t . . . It won’t work. Not this time. Our hands are tied. The police have made their position quite clear.”

  “Let me talk to them.”

  “You’d better leave well enough alone. Thank God they’ve lost interest in you. It’s time you learned that you cannot talk yourself out of every situation.”

  “I already know that.”

  “Besides, it’s all arranged.”

  “What is?”

  “Your new school.”

  “Where?”

  “Maine.”

  “Maine?”

  “Seems a lovely place from the photographs. It’s right on the ocean.” Houghton thrust a brochure into Seph’s face. “Luckily for us, this came in the mail right after the warehouse story broke.”

  Seph took it reluctantly. “I hate the ocean.”

  “Perhaps you’ll grow to love it.”

  The front cover featured a sailboat. He scanned the text and shook his head. “A boys’ school?”

  Houghton shrugged. “Beggars can’t be choosers. And perhaps the absence of young ladies will help you . . . focus.”

  “You never asked me what I wanted.” Seph scraped the toe of his sneaker over the hand-knotted rug.

  “As I said. We didn’t have a lot of options this late in the day.”

  “Is there even a city in Maine?”

  “Yes, I think so. Portland, I believe it’s called.” He frowned and rubbed his chin. “Or is that in New Hampshire? Well, no matter,” he said briskly. “You’ll need to leave immediately. The term’s already begun.”

  Seph shrugged and slid the brochure into his pocket. Ordinarily, he would have continued to argue the matter. But just then he felt like he might deserve to go to Maine.

  Or any other place with a scarcity of people.

  Houghton looked at his watch, relieved that Seph hadn’t put up more of a fight. “So. Well. Do you have any questions?”

  “Yes. Who were my parents?”

  Houghton sighed. “Not that again. You’ve seen the documents. The photographs. I don’t know what else you—”

  “I know they’re fake. I’ve checked it out. I’ve been online. It’s made up.”

  Houghton stood and fussed with his cuffs, straightened the crease in his trousers, put a little more distance between himself and his client. “I know these past three years have been trying. It is difficult to lose one’s parents at a young age. And it is likely that your foster mother’s death has renewed your feelings of abandonment . . .”

  Seph came to his feet, and Houghton took a hasty step back. “You’re a lawyer. No one’s asking you to be a bloody psychiatrist.” Power prickled in his hands and arms, and he struggled to damp down his anger. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It’s not worth it.

  “. . . and now this . . . event at the warehouse. So tragic. That young girl. What was her name again?”

  “Maia.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Yes.” He was back to one-word answers.

  “Well, best not to noise that about. It could complicate matters just as things are settling.” Houghton hesitated, then cautiously draped an arm around Seph’s shoulders. He smelled of expensive tobacco, wool, and aftershave. Seph resisted the urge to flinch away.

  “It may be that this is just what you need, Joseph. Go to Maine. Focus on your studies. Get away from all this for a while.” The lawyer’s voice was not unkind. “You’ve managed to come away without a police record. Your grades are good. See if you can finish strong at the Havens. Then we can begin to talk about University. Perhaps you can even come back to Toronto for school.”

&
nbsp; Two more years, Seph was thinking. Two more years, and I claim the trust fund and dismiss Sloane, Houghton, and Smythe. Two more years, and I’ll have the time and money to find out who I really am.

  Two years sounded like an eternity.

  Chapter Two

  The Havens

  Seph pressed his face against the cool glass of the airplane window, watching the rugged New England coastline pass beneath him. From this altitude, the Atlantic seemed a gentle lake, a deep gray-green with a delicate frosting of lace where it broke against the beaches.

  The music pounding through his headphones was not enough to occupy his relentless mind.

  He thrust his hand under his sweatshirt, pulling free the half-melted cross Maia had made for him. Surprisingly old-fashioned for a free spirit like Maia. When he closed his eyes, he could still feel the ropy intensity of her embrace.

  Seph didn’t consider himself particularly attractive. He knew enough about art to realize he met no classical standard of beauty. His face looked like something he needed to grow into: all bony prominences and sharp angles. His hair tumbled into unruly loose curls if he didn’t gel it into submission. He’d grown so recently that he still felt awkward and poorly put together. But girls still made excuses to touch him, to play with his hair. Maia had always talked about his eyes: how they changed color with the light— brown, and then green or gold.

  And now she was dead. Because of him.

  He stared down at his hands. Murderer’s hands, though they looked like normal flesh and bone. He was . . . pathological. Was it merely a lack of knowledge, or was it some kind of fatal flaw?

  He pressed his fist against his chest, imagining that he could feel the weight within. “Vous avez un cristal sous votre coeur,” Genevieve had said. You have a crystal beneath your heart. A source of power that is different for each of the guilds. For sorcerers, enchanters, warriors, and seers, the use of power is more or less hardwired.

  But wizards needed training in order to use and control their power. Genevieve had told him that when magical accidents happened. So he wouldn’t think he was possessed, as the Jesuits had claimed when he was still small.

  But she hadn’t told him the truth about his parents. And for that, he felt betrayed.

  He needed a teacher. If he couldn’t learn to control his gift, it was better not to have it at all. Could the stone be removed, like a diseased gallbladder?

  At least Genevieve had not had to deal with the warehouse. She would have gone to church and lit a candle and prayed for him. She would tell him that in God’s eyes he was perfect, though how she knew this, Seph couldn’t say.

  Seph’s ears told him they’d begun their descent. The aircraft was a sixteen-seater, with only six other passengers—hunters and tourists, by the looks of them. Seph liked the intensity of small planes. Perhaps he’d buy a plane now that he was old enough for flying lessons. He smiled at the thought, his first smile of the day, and pulled off his headphones.

  The plane banked and circled. The ground rushed toward them and bumped down on the grassy runway. Before they had rolled to a stop, he was on his feet, pulling his bag from the overhead compartment.

  He closed his eyes and centered himself, as Genevieve had taught him. You can do this. You’ve done it before. You’re good at meeting people. Only, this new school was small, about one hundred students, according to the brochure. He’d never done well at small schools. He made too many waves to survive in a small pond.

  Somehow, he had to find a way to succeed here. Two years, and he could go back to the city and disappear.

  The airport boasted one battered, sheet-metal building. Grass feathered the asphalt of the parking lot.

  A man waited by the metal fence that surrounded the landing strip. He was tall—taller than Seph by at least half a foot. He was absolutely bald, but whether he was naturally so or shaved his head, Seph couldn’t tell. Despite the brisk weather, he wore a white, short-sleeved golf shirt that showed off his muscular arms. He looked to be about fifty, but it was hard to tell with bald men.

  Seph waited until the crew had unloaded the baggage compartment, then pulled his other bag from the cart, swinging it over his shoulder. As he walked toward the gate, the man stepped forward to meet him.

  “You must be Joseph McCauley,” he said in an upper-class British accent. “I’m Dr. Gregory Leicester, headmaster of the Havens.”

  Up close, the headmaster’s eyes were a peculiar flat gray color, like twin ball bearings. The absence of hair and the fact that his lips were the same color as the rest of his face gave him a strange, robotic quality.

  Relieved that the headmaster didn’t offer his hand, Seph conjured a smile and said, “Pleasure to meet you, sir.” Must be a small staff, he thought, if the headmaster comes to collect you at the airport.

  “Is that all you have?” Dr. Leicester asked, nodding toward the luggage.

  “That’s all. I shipped some books ahead, and my computer.” Seph traveled light, which was convenient when you moved around as much as he did.

  Of the half dozen vehicles clustered in the lot, Dr. Leicester directed Seph toward a white van with THE HAVENS and a sailboat stenciled in gold on the door. The van was unlocked. The headmaster took Seph’s bags and tossed them easily into the backseat. He motioned Seph to the shotgun position, and climbed in on the driver’s side.

  “We’re just about an hour away from school,” Leicester explained. “It will give us a chance to get to know each other.”

  They pulled out of the gravel parking lot and turned onto a two-lane highway. From the maps, Seph knew there was a small town south of the airport. But their destination was about fifty miles north, with nothing much in between. Why would anyone build a private school in such a remote location? A hunting lodge or a prison, he could understand.

  “Did you come directly from St. Andrew’s, or did you spend some time at home?” Leicester asked, keeping his gaze on the road.

  “I came from Toronto. I was at a camp there all summer,” Seph replied. His head ached, as if metal bands were tightening around his forehead, and he felt dizzy and disoriented. It could’ve been the aftereffects of the flight, though he was usually a good flyer.

  They swept past two gas stations, a scattering of houses, and then plunged into a thick forest of pine and aspen. He lowered the window, hoping the fresh air would revive him, and was rewarded with the sharp scent of evergreen.

  “You’ve had a long day, then.” Dr. Leicester broke into his reverie. “I hope you were able to sleep on the plane.”

  “Yes. Some.”

  “Where are you from originally?”

  “I was born in the States, but I grew up in Toronto.”

  “Do your parents still live in Toronto?”

  “My parents are dead.” Seph stared straight ahead.

  “Ah. Well. We’ve corresponded with your guardian, Mr. Houghton. I assume you have relatives in England, then?”

  “Mr. Houghton is just a solicitor. An attorney. I don’t know much about my family.” Nothing, in fact.

  What he’d been told of his parents was frail and colorless, like a line drawing, an outline of a story without the flesh and bone. His mother was a Toronto-based flight attendant; his father a software entrepreneur. They had died in a fire in their California canyon home when Seph was a year old. Genevieve LeClerc had been his childcare provider, and became his foster mother. That story had been repeated to him since he was very small.

  And now he knew it was a lie.

  “I think you’ll like it here, Joseph, once you settle in,” Leicester said. “I know you’ve changed schools several times. Often talented students get into difficulty when their needs are not met. Here at the Havens we rarely lose a student. In fact, we integrate high-achieving secondary students into our more specialized programs. We’re believers in tailoring the curriculum to the student.”

  “I see,” Seph said. “That sounds like a good approach.”

  He couldn’t help
being distracted by the view. He was a city creature. For the past half hour, he’d seen nothing but trees on either side of a fragile strip of pavement. Not even another car on the road. “It seems . . . um . . . isolated.”

  “You can wander for miles and never leave the property,” Leicester said, as if that were a plus.

  Many of the crossroads were now dirt roads that carried the names of beaches. Following a long stretch of unbroken trees, they reached a turnoff marked with a tasteful brick-and-stone sign that said, THE HAVENS and PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  A high stone wall extended in both directions, as far as he could see. To keep the trees from wandering, no doubt. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. The wall had a smudged and fuzzy quality, as if shrouded in tendrils of mist.

  Maybe he had a migraine coming on.

  They turned right, through a high wrought-iron gateway onto an oiled dirt road.

  Along the lane, the trees stood so close Seph could have reached out and touched them. Their leafy tops arched and met overhead, sieving the light into frail streamers that scarcely colored the ground. The air hung thick with the scent of green things long dead and half decayed. They drove through dense woodland until the trees thinned and the light grew. Glimpses of water and a freshening of the air said they’d reached their destination.

  They pulled up before a large cedar-and-stone building separated from the water by a broad boardwalk. A long dock ran out into the harbor. Several sailboats bobbed alongside, sails furled and tied to the masts.

  “This is the administration center,” Dr. Leicester explained. “The cafeteria, gymnasium, library, commons areas, and other student services are all in here.” He drove a hundred yards farther and stopped in front of another building. “This is Gareth Hall. Most classes are held here, with the exception of physical education, art, and music. We’ve been in session for several weeks now, so you’ll have some hard work ahead of you.”

  Art and music shared their own building. It couldn’t really be called a campus—there wasn’t enough open space for that. Each building stood isolated in its own clearing, the forest crowding in on all sides, as if struggling to hold it at bay. The tall, straight trunks of trees marched away until they collided in the gloom.