29. High Hopes and Huge Falls
DESDEMONA
The Lucents do not only govern the powers of the future—they govern the subconscious. It is within the depths of minds that they thrive. No one knows the full extent of their power, for every few hundred years someone comes along with the inclination to rewrite their history.
– LUCENT MAGIC AND THE NATURE OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND BY CLEMENTINE PROTNUS
Breck is dead. I burned him alive. I knew it, but I didn’t want to. I’m sitting across from Headmistress Constance, face to face. “And Jermoine?”
“Jermoine lost both of his forearms, but he lives,” she says like it should be comforting.
I’d assumed Lucian told her it was me, but she told me no other Fire Folk in Visnatus could do the damage I did. I still think Lucian told her.
And Eleanora.
“So what’s my punishment?” I spit the words out.
“I don’t punish the Folk for reaching their potential.” She shrugs. As if killing a boy and burning off another’s arms is my potential.
It is, isn’t it?
The only thing of value I’ve ever done is kill.
“Okay.” I put my hands on the arms of the chair, pulling myself up. “Is that all?”
“No,” she says, nodding her head down to the chair, telling me to sit back down. “I believe you’re looking for something?”
My eyes meet hers, but I keep my face blank. There’s no way she has proof that I’m searching for forbidden text. The only thing I searched in the finder that could raise suspicion was about the war. Not illegal.
“I’m not looking for anything.” My mom, a way to the void, a way back home. I don’t show any of my longing, I swallow it, stuff it down so far that there’s no possible way that she could sense it.
Everything I want sits untouched in the deepest pits of my stomach.
She smiles at me and leans back in her cushy chair, intertwining her fingers together. “I’ll aid you,” she tells me. “For a favor.”
“Aid me in what.”
“Finding your mother. What else would it be?”
My heart stops, and she smiles. She’s smiling. I have to take a breath of air, get my heart pumping blood again, and ask her what she knows before I blindly accept.
“My mother is dead.”
“Desdemona, dear?” She sits up straight, leaning over her desk and into me. “Don’t treat me as if I am puerile.”
My eyes burn, with tears or power, I don’t know right now. “Did Lucian tell you?”
“That’s unimportant.” The headmistress stands up and walks to the back corner of the room. Her bookshelf. No way. There’s no way she’s about to give me what I need. I can’t let my hopes get so high. But hope is already what I’m feeling. She sits back down and opens a book, an old one.
No way.
“Did you know the Arcanes weren’t born? Most orphia have held a common belief that they were Ayan’s descendants. And perhaps they were.” She runs a long finger down the page of the book before flipping it. “But what they became used to be—back when we all had common sense, you see—seen as a punishment.” The book slides across the table to me. “Take a good look, dear. It’s the last of the tomes we have from the Irisan Archives.”
Nothing is written in the common language. Not even with the same letters. But in the middle of the page, there are three images of three creatures falling into each other. The first is tall, with wings the size of its body and a heart the size of its chest. The second lost its wings and its heart is half the size. The last has no heart, and where the wings once were there are bones, pulling the creature down, hunching its back.
Instinctively, I find myself running my fingers along the edges of the page.
“You’ve heard the story, yes? That they were responsible for the seventy percent of orphic lives lost. No one could kill them, so they sent them to a universe devoid of magic.”
I tear my eyes from the unreadable words and strange pictures, now looking at her.
I must not have covered my face enough, because she says, “You don’t?”
“Those aren’t the tales we have back home.”
“Yes,” she hisses and frowns. “The septic. What are the stories there?”
“Arcanes are like ghosts, I guess.” I’m trying not to stutter, but every time she frowns like that and narrows her eyes, she becomes a different person. Gaunt and gray. She must be very old, because the Lucents don’t tend to show such signs of aging until well into their two hundreds. “They take the bad girls and boys or the workers who don’t work enough in the middle of the night.” I shrug. “And everyone you love forgets you exist.”
But I remember my?—
“But you remember your mother?” She raises her eyebrows, bringing some life back to her face.
“I do.”
“You see, the reason the erasure of existence became the common legend of the creatures was because, after their defeat, mentions of someone named Mial were found throughout the universe. In every world, even in the few recovered tomes from the Irisan Archives.” She leans her head down but doesn’t take her eyes off mine. “But no one remembered him. Not even those who wrote his name.”
I feel uncomfortable. Like I need to get up and move. I stay entirely still under her scrutiny. The hope I felt before? It’s squandering.
“That’s very interesting.” My voice sounds far away and so incredibly monotone that I worry it sounds a little too fake.
“My apologies. We’ve gotten off track.” She settles her hand on top of mine, and I try not to visibly shiver. While her hand is cold like Lucian’s, it’s not the least bit comforting. It doesn’t take the edge off of my constantly burning skin. It just feels like dead weight.
“The void,” she starts, “created to be a universe devoid of magic. Now, you don’t know much I’ve noticed, nevertheless, you must know that it is impossible for a universe to be devoid of magic. You do know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She nods. “Good.” We’re both quiet for an annoyingly long moment. “That’s your answer, dear.”
“I didn’t ask a question,” I respond blankly.
“Of course you did. You want to get to the void. Everything you’ve learned of it claims it to be a universe devoid of magic. Though it’s only a universe with a different language.” The headmistress leans over, opens a drawer, and pulls something from it, juggling it between her hands. “Find yourself an Arcane, learn their way, make it to the void.”
I don’t laugh, I don’t even scoff. Is she really this much of a lunatic?
“They’re already here, my dear.” I make out what’s in her hand now. A white-and-blue box. “They’ve been back for hundreds of years, biding their time.”
I open my mouth and she strikes a match on the box. Before I can even sound out the first syllable, she throws the fire a foot away from me. A pile of books next to my chair is sent ablaze, too fast to not be doused in something flammable.
“Put it out,” she whispers.
My knuckles are white as I grip the armchairs. My heart is beating just as fast—if not faster—than when I danced with Lucian.
I look over my shoulder at her. “Are you insane?”
“Perhaps.” She shrugs. “Put it out.”
What? Put out a fire? She is insane. There’s absolutely no way I’d be able to do that. Here or anywhere. In a magicless universe or in a universe with more magic. I’m a Fire Folk. We live and die by the fire, we don’t control it.
Her red lips rise. “Or I’ll make sure every Royal knows of the attack the septic girl raised against the headmistress.”
My chest is rising and falling faster than the tide. I run my hands through my hair, tugging on the braids at the top of my head so hard that my scalp stings. The fire is stretching across the room. Two walls are already covered.
I’m gonna die.
This crazy hag is going to kill us both.
Suddenly, I feel cold. I haven’t felt cold in months. Now I’m shivering. Zola? I know I only come to you when it’s life or death, but Mom used to always tell me that I’m the thing that was here to right all the wrongs. The good to outdo the bad. I thought she was crazy, but maybe, by some slight crazy chance, you agreed, and if she was right then maybe, please, just maybe let me live? For the last time, I swear. This is the last time I’ll ask this of you. The fire is getting closer to me. It’s inches from my feet. Please let me live, please.
Let me live.
I close my eyes, because I guess I’d prefer to remember myself with soft, healthy skin and not burnt to a crisp. The fire touches my skin, and I’m not cold anymore.
Please, fire, go out. Please go out. I pretend it’s gone, like I’m in some pretty meadow. Like I’m in the septic. Maybe this is the aftermath of life. Alone, on the grass, under the sun.
Where’s Damien? Mom? Will they meet me?
Am I dead?
“Desdemona?” a voice asks. Lucian. He’s here. I hate that I’m smiling, but he’s looking at me like he used to. Back when he thought I was something different than I am. I think I’d like to be that person. I think that’s why I smile when he pushes the pieces of hair that I tugged out of my braid behind my ear. He looks at my lips, then at my eyes, and he smirks a little. “Open your eyes.”
I do.
I’m in my bed. The suite bed. My skin is fine from what I can see, but I check every inch anyway. I’m fine and I’m alive.
There’s something in my pocket.
The white-and-blue box of matches. My head is fuzzy. If what just happened with the headmistress was a dream, then where did this come from? Light fills my vision when I sit up. Dizzy.
Dehydrated.
There’s a bottle of water by Aralia’s bed. Screw her. I take it and I chug, but when I get to my feet I’m still wobbly.
It’s raining outside. It wasn’t the last time I was awake.
I’m not sure if I’m alive or dead, and I’m not sure how to figure it out either. Maybe I could try to talk to someone. I stumble out of the room and find Aralia on the couch.
Whatever. “Do you know how I got here?”
I think I see a hint of compassion in Aralia’s eyes. “You came back really droozed. You’ve been sleeping for a day.”
“Oh,” I say. I don’t believe it. “Thanks.”
My eyes sting. Why do my eyes sting so much? I start coughing, hacking really, but I pull myself together enough to get out of here.
“Hey!” Aralia says. “Can we talk?”
“What about?” She opens her mouth but says nothing. “I don’t have all day.”
“Um,” she hesitates. “You should eat cailiberries before you drink. It’ll help with the side effects.”
I’m still for a moment too long. She wanted to tell me to eat berries before getting droozed? After standing by while I was being attacked.
“Okay,” I say. Then I go right to the headmistress.
I decide to just replay what I already did yesterday—so I don’t have to risk letting her think I’ve lost my mind, which I think I may have.
But the matches.
“You wanted to see me?” I ask, sitting in the chair I was just sitting in when the fire raged through the room. The pile of books are gone, but there’s still one small black mark on the wall a few feet above my head. Like ash or burnt wallpaper.
She smiles at me, but it’s gone so fast I’m not sure it ever even happened. “You killed a boy on campus.” And burnt off another’s arms, right?
“Breck,” I say. She nods. “And Jermoine?”
“Jermoine lost both of his forearms, but he lives.”
“So what’s my punishment?”
“You don’t remember? Oh well. You’ll be sent back to the septic.” But my mom. “Or perhaps a test subject for the healers.” A test subject? Like they’re going to injure me and heal me, over and over? There’s no way I’d be able to hide my cauterizing wounds. “Unless,” she says, her fingers tapping the desk over and over in a steady rhythm that’s driving me mad, “you can tell me what happened.”
“You’re messing with my mind,” I say in realization and throw her matches on her desk as I stand up. “I’m not doing this again.”
“Keep them,” she says. I hover above my seat. “You’ll need practice.”
“Thanks, but I’m good.” I head for the door.
“I had to make sure you were strong enough,” she says, and I ignore her. My hand is inches from the doorknob. “You could be the most powerful of them all.” Her chair squeaks. “Imagine that: the girl from the septic outranking the elites.”
Power, more importantly, power that won’t kill me, sounds pretty damn good. Power is murder, power is power—I don’t know which I believe, but I know I want it.
I take a deep breath, and when I turn around she throws the matches at me. I catch them.
“And matches are gonna get me there?”
“No, dear.” The headmistress smiles. “I will.”
* * *
I go to the one person I have left to go to—Leiholan. What does that mean? The person I trust most in my life is a Nepenthe. The same eyes and powers as the keepers. The same nature? I don’t think they’d hug me while I’m crying and droozed over a murder I committed.
Four, not five. One person in Damien’s family is still alive, only without their arms.
A hand plants itself on my forearm, and I have the dagger at my thigh unsheathed and pointed at someone’s heart in a second. Lucian smirks at me, then puts both his hands on the hilt of the dagger—over mine. His touch feels different. The same hands with a different intention.
I force myself not to shutter when I think about lying on my bedroom floor, being choked to death by his shadows.
“What do you want?” I lower the blade to get my skin out of contact with his.
“I may have found your father,” he says with all the casualness as if he were telling me I dropped a pencil.
“I’m not in the mood for jokes.” I turn from him. To the worlds, my dad is Dalin Marquees, to me my dad is unknown, and to both of us, he’s dead.
“Freyr Alpine is in the basement waiting for you right now.”
“I don’t even know who that is,” I spit out without looking at him.
He spins me around so I’m facing him, and I consider punching him. With my knife. “He was engaged to your mother before she… you know.” He lazily drags a knife over his neck, a centimeter away from touching his skin.
My knife. I rip it from his hands.
“You really think I’m going to go to the basement with you?”
“I think you’ve always wanted to go to the basement with me.”
“I think I liked you better when you were less sociopathic, Prince.”
He smiles. “And I think I liked you better with your hands on me, Marquees. Or should I say Alpine?”
I turn away. “Screw you!”
“I’d have considered it if you said please,” he sings.
I don’t have a second to think better of myself before I unsheathe a dagger and throw it, just south of his ear. He lifts two fingers and pulls them away, red.
“Sadistic,” he notes.
I smirk and make a clear mockery of his voice when I sing, “Only for you.”
I go to Leiholan for the second time in two days. It’s like the universe has flipped itself inside out.
“You know I only have so many hours of free time in my days, and you’re starting to take way more than your share.” That’s how he greets me.
“How well do you know the headmistress?” I ask him while staring at the bullseye across the room.
“Not well.”
“Then why were you with her and Hogan when I showed up?” I thought they were all close.
“Coincidental.” He shrugs.
“No, no way. Don’t lie to me, Leiholan, you are literally the last person in this universe I trust right now.” Please, don’t lie to me.
“I’m truly touched that you trust me, sweetheart, but I’m telling you the truth.” He leans back and rests his hands behind his head. “You ever think about why I’m the only person you have left?”
“Because you’re the only one who didn’t run.” I shake my head. Pointless, this is pointless.
Leiholan chuckles. “Or, for your consideration, because I’m the only one you didn’t lie to.”
I raise a finger at him. “That’s not what this is about.” I lied to you too.
His bottom lip pouts and he looks around the room. “Oh, it’s not? Please, tell me why you’re alone. I’d love to hear what story you’ve cooked up.”
“Hm, well, I don’t know. Maybe because you’re all a bunch of pompous assholes!”
Leiholan leans forward again. “Do you ever stop and think,” he shrugs, raising his hands, gesturing toward me, “that maybe you’re the problem.”
“What is wrong with you!” I shout. “My fake best friend thinks I should just let them kill me because of where I’m from, I’m pretty sure—” I stutter, “Lucian wants me dead, and the headmistress is screwing with my mind! But somehow I’m the problem?”
“What did Cynthia do?” All humor is wiped from his expression.
Without me, your gift will be your undoing.
“Honestly? I have no idea.” I take a breath and another. “We had this weird conversation, and then in the middle of it I woke up in my room. Aralia told me I slept for a whole day and I went back to her and she just…” shaking my head, I say, “It wasn’t a dream.”
“Desdemona,” he whispers. His expression is serious. “Stay away from her at all costs.”
My eyes narrow, his are still wide. “You said you didn’t know her.”
“I don’t. Not personally. I do know that she’s mixed up in something dark. Has been since I got here. I don’t trust her, and you shouldn’t either.”
I cross my arms. Something dark is exactly the thing that I’m mixed up in. “Still think I’m the problem?”
“I think you have a lot of problems, and only one of them is who you are.” He stands up.
“Gee, thanks.”
“You’ll figure it out.” He pats my shoulder and walks past me, to his closet of vesi. He pulls out a new bottle and drinks and drinks. I wait a few moments. Let his faculties break down.
“That first day, when I told you my real name, why didn’t you believe me?”
He curses under his breath and rubs his hand against the scruff of his jaw but doesn’t turn to face me.
“Leiholan?”
“Yeah?” He doesn’t look at me, but my eyes are burning into the back of his head. “I knew a girl with your name before. Althenia,” he says slowly, almost like he misses the name. I do too. “I thought you were talking about her.”
“And she couldn’t have a kid?”
“She’s dead. Then again, so is your mom, but I knew Anise during the war.”
The war, he knew her when I was six. “Was she a Folk?” I ask. Althenia is a Folk name, not Nepenthe.
“Yep.” He takes another sip. “My wife too.”
“Did you fight?” I ask. “In the war?”
“I did.” Another sip. “And before you get snippy, Anise survived it.”
“Then what killed her?”
This time, he chugs his vesi. “Your Royals.” He looks up at me and laughs, the tip of his bottle pointed at me, and a small amount of the clear liquid spills on my feet. “Oh yeah, you should’ve seen what they did to us in the aftermath.” He tips the bottle back again. “But they’d never show you.”
“They kept bringing you guys back to the septic, to kill us, even after the war. They kept you all employed?—”
“Who do you think trained us to kill like that? All our facilities and schools are run by Folk. Trust me, it’s no incident that we’re your keepers,” he spits. Before I can begin to tell him off he adds, “I’m not having this conversation with you.”
“You never want to have any conversation with me other than the ones where you’re telling me what to do!” I shout.
“Because you’re never going to hear me!” His face is red, and a vein in his forehead is raised. I walk to the back of the room. I swing open the doors to the armoire and grab myself another spatha sword.
I used to hate it, but now I can’t imagine fighting with anything else.
“Day one, you told me if I won in a duel, you’d grovel for my cause. New rules—I win and you tell me your version of the truth.” I raise the spatha sword just like he taught me.
Leiholan claps while he laughs. “My version! You Folk are so vain. The saddest part is this: you’d be the first of the kids here to understand. What they do to you in the septic is exactly what they do to us.” He takes the sword that he has strapped to his back, and I raise mine, ready to fight. But he throws it clattering at my feet. “I’m not going to fight you, sweetheart.” My breath is ragged, and I still have the spatha ready to strike. “One of these days, when you’re ready to listen, maybe I’ll talk. But for now, get the fuck out.”
I throw my spatha sword down next to his, and then I get the fuck out.
What is wrong with me? Is Leiholan right? Am I the problem? He just told me his wife is dead and I—no, he turned it into a fight, not me. He started going on about how bad the Folk are when the Nepenthe have always been the killers.
Basement of the school, where are you? I open every door I’ve never considered before, but they’re only classrooms and closets. I try to ask students where the basement might be, but most of them walk fast in the opposite direction. The rest of them run.
Until one girl, who barely reaches my shoulder, tells me, “There is no basement.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Lucian could’ve been lying, and yet, if he was, what’s his goal? If he wants to kill me, he could do it anywhere, at any time. No one would stop it, they’d be closer to cheering him on.
An hour later, after opening door after door and walking in on things I shouldn’t have seen, I go into the rain.
There are a few doors along the side of the building, wooden and withered, and the few that open are rooms full of webs and no stairs. I walk along the building for a while longer.
And step on a trapdoor. Rusted to the floor, but as far as I can tell, it’s not locked by magic. I do the sane thing; find a big rock and smash it until my hand and head hurt and the lock snaps in half.
Gray, dirty stairs meet my eyes, then they meet my feet while I travel down.
It smells like bodily fluids and rain, and it’s not a basement. There are tons of cells. Why would a school need cells? At least they’re empty.
But the last one isn’t.