Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives)

by Courtney Grace Powers

  As Reece unconsciously stooped a little, Mr. Rice laughed nervously. “I’ll, uh, I’ll just leave you to find out.” Reece shot him a desperate look, but Hugh made an apologetic face and handed him the lantern. “I have…some books…yes, some books to…read.”

  Hayden’s father shuffled away, leaving Reece to stare catatonically at the duke, feeling strangely disembodied. His father began circling him, hands clasped behind his back.

  “It is not particularly pleasant,” Thaddeus Sheppard began thoughtfully, “to hear news of my son visiting someone else’s father while I am but a corridor away.”

  Reece found his voice in a key too high. “I came to see you.”

  The duke said nothing, keeping enough distance to leave his face in uncertain shadows. He was big-chested, if slender, taller than Reece by some inches, all sharp lines and hard panes. The right breast of his dark green jacket glinted with medals and ribbons and honors.

  “Have you swallowed your tongue, boy?”

  Reece double-checked to make sure he hadn’t and nodded. Something horrible was creeping over him. Here he’d taken every painstaking precaution to avoid this confrontation for two years, and now that it was here, instead of laying on the duke like he deserved, he was getting an uncomfortable lump in his throat. He did what anyone would have done. He panicked.

  “I came to warn you,” he said quickly. “I know about The Kreft. Eldritch, he’s rotting Parliament from the inside out. He’s in control of the Veritas. He wants to get rid of the dukeship.”

  The duke listened to his rant passively, his frown deepening ever so slightly. When Reece had finished and drawn a shaky breath, he calmly reached and took the rattling lantern from him with a white-gloved hand.

  “I’d rather you not drop this,” he said. “You would send the whole library up in flames. Walk with me.”

  Reece didn’t let himself feel relieved. Instead, when he felt a small stab of frustration over the duke’s coolness, he latched onto it, let it carry him away. Anger. That was what he wanted to feel towards the duke; that was what he deserved.

  “I would ask how you’ve come to such fantastical conclusions, but I’m certain you would not do the story justice with our unfortunate time constraints. So I will make this brief, and you will listen to me.” If the duke’s face changed at all as he spoke, it was about as much change as a rock went through when it turned into a stone. “When you leave The Guild House shortly, you will go home to Emathia and write me a detailed account of whom you have been talking to and what questions you have been asking. Then you will pack your things, take the Dryad, go to your Uncle Uriah’s house in Olbia, and stay there.”

  Reece didn’t have to work at all to feel angry now. This was just like what had happened two years ago—the duke had tried to ship him out of his and everyone else’s life then too. “Until I go off to war, you mean. The Kreft’s war, whatever it bleeding is.”

  “Until I tell you otherwise is what I mean,” the duke replied evenly.

  “If I’m going to war, I’m going to spend my last few months at The Owl with my friends, not at Abigail’s loopy brother’s house on the other side of Honora.”

  “An understandable sentiment, but the order remains the same. The headmaster and Parliament are none of your concern.”

  It was more than any sane person could take, and Reece wasn’t entirely sure if he was completely sane anymore anyways. He stopped walking and shouted at the duke’s back, “They’re going to have you killed!”

  Ten paces away, the duke paused and slowly turned. Reece had thought his expression had been serious before, but he had been wrong, because this new one made Gideon’s meanest face look totally benign.

  Reece plunged ahead blindly, not knowing what he meant to say until it was out of his mouth. “If you want to abandon Mum and me, fine, but you can’t leave Honora to Eldritch—I won’t let you!”

  Slowly, like a statue melting out of its stiffness, the duke lowered his lantern arm. As he walked towards Reece, he said thoughtfully, “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  Reece studied his father’s face. “Yes.”

  The duke’s lips stretched into a tight smile that filled Reece’s mind with more misty, almost-forgotten memories. He clasped the back of Reece’s neck with one hand. “Good boy,” he said quietly. “Good boy.”

  It was a small thing to completely shatter Reece’s composure, but there it was. His throat made a strange sort of choking sound as it constricted, and he jerked away from the duke before he could make any more of a sod out of himself.

  After a moment, he and the duke began walking again, closer together than they had been before, but still with a certain distance between them that had nothing to do with proximity.

  “What happened to your hand?” the duke asked, managing to sound not the least bit curious.

  Distracted, Reece glanced down at the straightener on his bad wrist and caught himself before he snorted. This probably wasn’t the time or place to mention that he had tried to take on the Vee that he was holding captive in his friend’s grandfather’s basement.

  “I sprained it. Listen, you are going to do something, aren’t you? About Eldritch? About…them?”

  “I will do what I judge to be right. That will have to do.”

  “So you have something planned?”

  “On the contrary, my lack of planning is very contrived.”

  “What does that even mean? You’re going to do nothing? Didn’t you hear what I said before? You’re in danger. The Kreft want you out of the way. Eldritch is planning to—” Reece couldn’t even say it aloud without cringing. “—to assassinate you!”

  There came a deep, throaty sound from the duke, and Reece realized he was chuckling. “Do not underestimate your old father, boy. Mr. Rice.”

  A flustered-looking Hugh sank out of the shadows as if he’d been waiting for them just out of earshot, holding a stack of books. “Sir?”

  “Escort Reece to the road. I imagine you are still driving around that loud contraption?”

  “It’s called a bim. But I don’t understand—”

  “I want it to be known,” the duke smoothly continued overtop of Reece’s complaint, “that if you choose to disobey me and return to The Aurelian Academy, I will have a public log put out to Caldonia’s Sentry Center with an order to bring you under immediate house arrest if you are seen setting foot on Honora.”

  Reece thought the pop of his eyes should have been audible. “What?”

  “Mr. Rice, if you will.”

  And then the duke started to turn away, leaving Hugh and Reece at the end of the labyrinth, a short walk from the library’s oval front doors.

  “You can’t—The Kreft—why should—I am going back to The Owl!” Reece yelled, straining against Hugh, who was holding fast to the back of his jacket.

  The echo of the duke’s voice, bouncing back to them as he disappeared, sounded amused. “Then I suggest, this time, you stay there.”

  XVIII

  Captain Pleasant’s Hairstuffs for Gents and Other Dangerous Things

  “I’m not going.”

  “Well, if he’s not going, I sure as heck ain’t.”

  Glowering down at Gideon and Reece, who were sitting on Mordecai’s back lawn watching the sun rise over the trees, Hayden crossed his arms and sighed, “He is going. We all are.”

  With an exaggerated yawn, Reece spread out on his back and closed his eyes. It didn’t matter that he’d gotten a full night’s sleep; early was early, and a sleep full of bad dreams wasn’t much of a sleep at all. “Be reasonable, Hayden. With everything else we’ve got on our plates, can you really expect us to take class seriously? Besides, it’s Honoran History. Point of interest,” he held up a finger, “we’ve just recently learned that our history is totally wrong.”

  “Peh.” Gideon coughed a laugh as he tore up a handful of yellowing grass and tossed into the breeze. “Count me out.”

  Swelling up indignantly, Hayden sai
d, “We agreed last night that one day of classes would throw some suspicion off us. And we’re going to have to be eligible to graduate whether there’s a war coming or not!”

  “The Vee—” Reece began.

  “Mordecai and Nivy will watch him, and if it really makes you so nervous, we can check back on break. Please?”

  Groaning, Reece lifted his pocket watch and glared blurrily at its face. The only bright side to Honoran History was that it was the GR the three of them shared. That meant that on a normal class day, they could all sit at the back of the classroom so Gid and Reece could play paper rockets under the radar while Hayden took enough notes for all three of them (not on purpose—he would be caught smuggling Freherian Tobacco with Mordecai before he was caught cheating). Today, that just meant none of them had to worry about being upbraided in front of class alone.

  Hayden must have sensed he was winning Reece over, because he smiled and started for the workshop door. “I’ll grab our books.”

  Gideon glared over his shoulder at Reece. “We really doin’ this?”

  “I don’t know what else we would do today,” Reece admitted. “Plus, we might be able to use the school library to cross-reference clues about The Kreft—where they’ve been, what they’re ultimately up to. Get a better handle on what we’re dealing with.”

  “Soundin’ a little like Aitch, there, Cap’n.”

  Reece hesitated. “I think there’s a chance some of the tutors might be Kreft. It’s all about making the population subservient, isn’t it? So who better to pollute the minds of the next generation?”

  Gideon just stared at him, bored.

  “We might run into Eldritch.”

  “I’d like that.” Gid nodded pointedly at his holster. “But you don’t sound exactly hopeful.”

  Sitting up with effort and dusting damp grass off the back of his untucked uniform jacket, Reece shrugged. “Much as I wish Eldritch would spend his free time wandering around campus rather than furthering his people’s nefarious plans of world domination, I doubt we can count on it.”

  Gideon thought on this a moment, and then, as if just seeing the dark humor in it, laughed. Until a grinning Hayden came out to them carrying three stuffed leather satchels—then he cut off abruptly.

  Because they had spent so much time arguing, they were already running late when they pulled into The Owl and hurriedly parked in the motor vehicle stables. With the Social Economy Building on the other side of the lake, a half a mile from where they were standing when they got off their bims, they would have to sprint to make it to class before Tutor Flint shut the classroom door. Which was alright for Reece and Gideon, but Hayden kept tripping on his pant legs and losing his bifocals and consequentially going blind.

  Sliding to a noisy, panting stop in the handsome corridor outside Flint’s classroom, they paused to smarten up, Reece pushing down his hair, Hayden smacking dust off his shoulders, Gideon grumblingly tucking in the loose tail of his undershirt. The door was shut, but not all the way, not yet. Reece did the honors. Drawing a breath, he knocked once and pushed the door open into the circular wooden classroom with vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows.

  Standing beside the podium at the front of the room, Tutor Flint turned to inspect him through horned bifocals. He’d forgotten how much like a bird she looked—a bony, sharp-nosed bird, with cheeks that were always a little puckered.

  “Well, if it isn’t our very own Mr. Sheppard come back home,” she said in the dusky voice that had lectured Reece to sleep many classes before. “Mr. Ailey, Mr. Ailey, if you would move to the back, I think Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Rice would both benefit from a front row seat.”

  Silas and Jesse stared at Reece in wonder as they scooped up their things and went to the back of the class to fill two of the three empty desks that were usually Reece and his friends’. Trying to smile at the old vulture charading as their tutor, Reece slid into Silas’s desk and started setting up camp, plugging the power cord of the desk’s recording mechanism into his datascope. Hayden had unpacked into Jesse’s desk before they both looked up and saw Gid waiting at the door with a strange look on his face.

  Written across the blackboard, big and bold and unpleasant, was the headline, “The Battle of Eudora and The Pantedan Massacre, L.F. 1283”.

  Tutor Flint descended upon Gideon as Reece ducked out from behind his desk and hurried after her. The classroom was positively hissing with whispers.

  “I don’t think today is perhaps the best day for you to be here,” Flint said, her cheeks sinking deeper as she frowned.

  Gideon just kept staring at the blackboard, a vein ticking in his jaw.

  “It’s not as though he hasn’t heard it all before,” Reece told her quietly. He wondered if there was a way to tell if a person was Kreft or not. Flint and Eldritch didn’t have many physical similarities apart from their skeletal height, but…

  If Flint had been a bird, she would have huffily ruffled her feathers. “Take a seat, Mr. Sheppard.”

  “I just don’t see why—”

  “I will not tell you again!”

  There was a moment’s silence after Flint’s shrill shout, and then Gideon turned to leave, the back of his neck an angry red. His pulse beating in his ears, Reece swept everything from his desktop into his arms and glanced over at Hayden, who looked frozen to his desk.

  “Hayden?”

  With a start, Hayden glanced from him to the unsmiling Flint and the blackboard, and then dropped his eyes to his lap. Reece got the idea. Following in Gideon’s footsteps, he left the room and made sure to pull the door shut hard enough to rumble some eardrums.

  He found Gideon standing by the lake with his hands in his pockets, watching the indigenous blue swans of Atlas glide around on the slate-colored water. Not far from him, a group of well-dressed girls in bustles were setting up some sort of booth. The flag on the front of it read, “Masquerade Volunteer Committee”.

  Shifting his feet, Gideon muttered, “Didn’t want to go to class anyway.”

  “Me neither,” said Reece honestly. He dug up a small flat stone with the toe of his boot, dusted it off, and spun it into the lake, where it skipped and startled the swans into flight.

  “You think Tutor Flint could be Kreft?”

  “No,” Gideon said simply. He didn’t look at Reece. “She’s Honoran. You can tell.”

  “Reece! Gideon!”

  They looked over their shoulders at Hayden as he tripped off the front step of the Social Economy Building and came running to join them. Reece had to cover his laugh with a cough when the Masquerade Committee saw him as an excited student rushing to volunteer and bombarded him with posters and even a few artful invitations to send a log if he had any questions. When Hayden joined them, there wasn’t a bit of skin showing on him that hadn’t gone as red at the swans were blue.

  “Stop laughing,” he pleaded, mortified, and shoved some of the duplicate posters at them. Gideon promptly started folding his into a hat. “I managed to get all our homework from Tutor Flint. I was going to stay, but that…that wasn’t very good of her, was it?”

  Reece just shook his head and stared out over the lake again. Angry though their clash with Tutor Flint had briefly made him, he welcomed the normalness of it; it felt like stepping back into sync.

  “What other classes do you have today? I want to take a look at as many tutors as possible.”

  Hayden checked his schedule on his datascope. “Botany. But Tutor White is an old friend of my parents’…he was born down the road from my mum.”

  “Ship Repelling. Tutor Rowe is a real numpty, so I guess he could fit the profile. I’ll check him out,” Gideon answered as he twirled his hat around his finger. Looking past Reece, he raised an eyebrow and quirked his head to the side. “You know her?”

  Reece glanced at the slight blonde figure bouncing his way. Po walked right through the middle of the Masquerade Committee’s posters and bustles and insulted gasps and joined Reece and the others at the
water’s edge with a freckly grin.

  “Heya, Reece!” She blinked at Gid and Hayden. “Hi! Reece’s friends?”

  Reece didn’t appreciate how they looked at each other for confirmation before nodding. He rolled his eyes ungratefully. “Po Trimble,” he gestured to Po, “Hayden Rice, Gideon Creed.”

  “Hi!” Po repeated, and shook Hayden’s hand so hard that his bifocals fell off one ear. Her eyes homed in on the paper hat in Gideon’s hands and twinkled. “Did you make that? Clever! You’d prolly be good with engines too, you know, because’a all the geometry that goes into it. Oh wow!” She moved as fast as a hummingbird, from Gideon’s hat, to Hayden’s auto-encrypting journal. She doubled over with her hands on her knees to look at the book in his hands. “I ain’t never seen one’a those before, not outta a store window, anyhow. You know that chip technology, that’s some’a the same stuff that’s used in the smallest engine there is, the Flutterbee—but you prolly already knew that.”

  Straightening up, Po sighed happily and looked around at the three of them. “Well, I’d better go. I’m workin’ on the bus-ships today, all ten’a them. Don’t wanna get a late start!” Spinning to face Reece so quickly that her white braid swung over her shoulder, she told him earnestly, “Your friends are real nice, Reece.”

  When she had gone, Hayden and Gideon turned to him with looks of complete bewilderment.

  “She seems…nice,” Hayden said.

  “She frightens me,” Gideon decided, staring at the hat hooked on his finger with a thoughtful frown.

  They had an hour to kill now that they didn’t have Honoran History and the lovely Tutor Flint to enjoy, and they spent it walking around the lake, joking like this was two months ago and they didn’t have a hundred worries to go home to tonight. They didn’t talk about the Vee, Nivy, or Eldritch, about The Kreft or going to war or Liem, even though Reece’s fingers were secretly wrapped around the cufflinks in his trouser pocket. He could really only forget for so long.