89. Lily
LILY
She wasn’t sure if the anxiety pressing her into her bed like a leaden blanket was real or leftover from the nightmare that had woken her up.
She stared at the gauzy pinkness of her ceiling for a while, telling herself she was safe.
There was something from the nightmare, something she needed to remember, but she couldn’t.
When she finally got out of bed, she flipped open her laptop absently, eyes unfocused on the street below her desk, until her mail app pinged.
Mr. Freer, the archivist, had forwarded her facsimiles of Van Bergen’s letters.
Suddenly awake, Lily clicked the first attachment, only to be met by a spidery script more incomprehensible than Seb’s chicken scratch at its most frenetic.
Deciphering these…she checked the zip file…
twenty-eight documents would take a spell, and she didn’t have time for spells, not when Seb’s first match started in ninety minutes.
She ran downstairs and poured herself coffee, drowning it in milk so that she could gulp it down, then hurled herself into the shower.
She made it to campus, out of breath and already sweaty, with fifteen minutes before the match.
Not enough time to see Seb, but still enough time that he’d still be checking his phone while he paced around the empty locker room.
The stands were packed for the quarterfinals day. She waded toward Asher’s hair, where she found the whole pack, including the Méridas and a glum-looking Liesl. While Liesl was a pretty good player, Lily thought she’d done as well as she possibly could have, given the competition.
“Does he know to go for his right ribs after a melee?” Liesl offered, which Lily found generous.
“Yeah. Feint early, feint often.”
Liesl nodded and placed her chin in her hands.
“We can make them move over,” Tori offered, glaring at a pack of freshmen who occupied the seat on her right.
“No, it’s fine, I’ll watch from up there.”
Lily made her way up to her favorite corner and found Chant already there. He raised his eyebrows by way of greeting.
“Too good for the cohort?”
“I need to pay attention.”
“Will it make a difference?” Chant offered her some of his kettle corn.
“No,” Lily admitted, leaning forward, elbows on her knees as Dean Meade entered the stands, flanked by a silver-haired man. The way in which he was familiar was on the tip of her tongue, and then, as he glanced up with iced-over eyes, her elbow slipped off her knee as she gasped.
Chant frowned down at the scene as a hush swept through the stands.
“Is that Hawthorn Bellarius?” Chant glanced at her in a specific sort of way, gauging.
Lily’s tongue was stuck rigid with panic, but in his glance she knew. Chant knew her bloodline, but she didn’t know how. Had Seb told him? Dean Meade? But why? Her insides crunched. Her grandfather sat down fastidiously with Dean Meade in the first row.
From the tunnel below the eastern stands, the Giant emerged, blindingly orange in M I need to finish my next spells. Besides, if it’s a fracture, there’s nothing they can do.”
He was right. The only mundane cure for broken ribs was time. “I can fix you well enough for the next bout.”
He sighed, “As long as the double back doesn’t hit in the next five hours—”
“I’ll take it.”
The muscles on his side shivered, thoroughbred-like, as he looked down at her with his moss-flecked eyes.
“This is my—”
“I’ll. Take. It.”
It was an order, not an offer. Seb needed to make it to the finals. He needed to win. She needed it for him. However bad the hit hurt doubled was worth it. His face was a war zone of internal struggle.
“Please. Let me do this for you.”
He closed his eyes, his expression tight with pain. “People keep saying that,” he whispered. “And I don’t deserve it.”
She frowned at him. “What people?”
“Nothing,” he stuttered. “Just…Just enough for me to play. Nothing more.”
“Sure.”
This time he was the one ordering, his gaze steely. “Lily. Nothing more.”
She nodded. “Nothing more.”
The pain debit hit four hours later, a half hour before Seb’s second match.
Lily was walking back to the stadium with Daphne and Asher, golden hour washing the quad in magic, and then she was doubled over.
She clutched Asher’s arm with one hand and her side with the other, her ribs a nebula of pain, each breath sharp agony.
Lily was no stranger to pain. The flu-y ache of muscles pushed past their limit was an old friend.
She knew muscle pulls and strains. She’d had sprains and breaks of her own.
At nineteen, her whole body cracked and popped in a small symphony of joints regularly used for things that pushed its limits.
Seb’s ribs were definitely broken. Her doubled facsimile of his pain felt like one of her ribs was stabbing straight into her lungs.
She could barely stand. Lily couldn’t even begin to imagine how much of this pain was only half.
As she gasped out an explanation, Asher and Daphne slung her arms over their shoulders and half-carried her the rest of the way.
They slipped in a side entrance and took the little-used elevator to the top of the stands, depositing her as softly as they could into the nearest seat.
She’d meant to visit him before the bout, but that was an impossibility now.
The locker rooms were sealed to everyone except players fifteen minutes before matches.
A dull roar blanketed the stands. As she surveyed the packed seats through pain-white eyes, she saw Chant, up in the same corner as earlier.
Tori and Liesl sat together with some of Liesl’s friends; the Méridas were ringed by fellow Vadoria students.
Gemma was near the front with Violet and the equestrian crew, and there was Hawleyhurst, flanked by both Braithwhites and most of the lacrosse team.
Everyone was here. Everyone, including her grandfather, entering again at the last moment, his rage a palpable thing, even from this distance.
He took a seat next to a man who bore a striking resemblance to Sebastian.
Her brain, dulled by the pain, realized a little slowly that the man in the navy wool coat with perfect hair who looked like Seb must be his father.
Next to him sat a slim, serious woman, wearing her dark hair slicked back into a surgically perfect chignon, and Seb’s nose.
As Lily’s grandfather leaned into her, speaking quietly, she looked up in their direction and smiled thinly.
Asher waved politely back. Lily’s stomach plummeted into the lowest of the nine hells.
She whimpered audibly.
Asher turned to her, eyebrow raised.
Her heart beat so fast, her breath came so shallowly in her panic, that it took her a full ten seconds to master her body enough to speak.
“He told them,” she whispered, but her voice was carried away in the roar as Sebastian entered the ring.
Too fast, the official stepped in, performed the formalities, and the match began.