90. Seb
SEB
He looked up at the knock on the doorframe to see a freshman player he vaguely knew, twitchy with nerves.
“Hey, uh, Allsaires?” Seb stared. “Mr. Allsaires?” He tried on the correction, grimacing. “There’s someone here to see you.”
Seb checked his phone. “We’re supposed to be sealed.”
“Yeah, um. I know. But it seemed…important.”
He felt a little guilty at how much pleasure he was getting from watching this freshman squirm.
“Important how?”
What little composure the kid had—how did he seem so much younger than Seb, anyway? —left him.
“It’s Hawthorn Bellarius, man. He said he needed to talk to you.”
Oh.
Seb checked his phone again for the opportunity to control his face. His heart and brain raced in opposite, horrible directions.
“Where is he?” He stood up, zipping his plastron, checking his hair in the mirror while the intruder’s back was turned.
As he moved toward the door, he caught sight of his foil and Orb, prepped and ready.
He stopped. He’d never left his equipment, never once let it out of sight before a match. The intruder followed his eyes.
“I can watch your stuff. I’ll keep it safe, I promise.”
“I shouldn’t…”
A bead of sweat rolled down the kid’s forehead. “I promise. Bellarius seemed really pissed.” He swallowed thickly. “He said if I didn’t go get you, he’d talk to Meade about getting me barred from the geomancy track.”
A bad feeling coursed through Seb’s blood, tied to Bellarius, to leaving his gear, to everything about this moment.
“Fine.”
The kid heaved an enormous sigh and collapsed wordlessly onto one of the far benches.
As he left the locker room, every one of Seb’s heartbeats felt like tripping the wire to a land mine.
His chest exploded, kept exploding. By the time he faced Bellarius, in his driving coat and leather gloves, with his sweep of silver hair and his silver eyes, his entire body ran with minute tremors.
Again, he was struck by how he could see nothing of Lily in this man, and he was thankful for it.
He tried to imagine a Lily raised in the echoing vastness of Hemlock Hall—how cold she would be—but of course it was an impossibility.
There was no version of Lily in this reality that could have grown up in that gilded coffin.
He could see the resemblance, though, between Hawthorn and his daughter, but even then, it was nearly impossible to reconcile the former Bellarius heir with Lily’s mother.
He knew she was a different person now, possibly entirely from the woman who might have been his aunt.
Looking at Bellarius in front of him, it seemed like Lily had gotten all of her DNA from her father and all of her tenacity from her mother.
“Mister Bellarius.”
“Mister Allsaires,” Bellarius replied, his eyes an arctic wasteland. “Walk with me.”
They walked all the way to the grove. Seb felt the seconds slipping by, closer and closer to when he should have been meditating alone, gathering Magic around him.
The sky was a swimmy, bruised purple. He could hear the oaks rustling in his bloodstream, pulling around his heart.
The moon was just starting to rise, a beacon, a beckon.
“I believe you have something of mine.” The oak leaves cut Bellarius’s pale face into grotesque shapes.
Seb’s first instinct was, as always, to fight, to say, “It doesn’t belong to you.” He quashed it neatly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He made sure to meet Bellarius’s dead-eyed stare with one of his own.
Bellarius sighed. “I thought you might say that.”
Seb remained silent.
“I’ve been considering our previous conversation. I thought about what kind of individual one would have to be to say one thing while stealing another. Certainly not the type of person our community seems to think them.”
He couldn’t say what exactly it was about the man’s words, or the way he said them, but Seb was suddenly very afraid. He was afraid because he knew he didn’t know what Bellarius would say next. He thought of the Thornshrike, growing in monstrous geometry.
“I thought, briefly, of stealing it back. But that would not be gentlemanly of me. Though of course you, Sebastian, are not a gentleman at all.”
Seb hated how deeply the words slapped him.
“And then I remembered, of course, that House Bellarius and House Allsaires have always been close allies.” He fixed Seb with his pale gaze.
“Did you know that only a generation back, we came very close to joining our two houses? It was a great disappointment, of course. Your father and I hoped that it could be accomplished in this generation instead.”
Seb wanted to say something, was capable of nothing.
“I realized that were I in your father’s position, I would want to know what kind of son I had actually raised.”
The words obliterated Seb. He felt them more acutely than the Giant’s blow to his ribs earlier. The pain gasped back, piercing upward into his lungs. His vision blurred at the edges. Bellarius favored him with a ghost of a smile.
“Never mind interfering with Tribunal business. Never mind theft and tampering with curses. You know how those are punishable, of course. No, if it were me, I would want to know that my son was a liar. I would want to know that instead of the future I’d strived to lay out for him, he was throwing it all away, sabotaging the family line for mundanity.
My heart aches to think of how disappointed Genevieve would be if she knew. ”
At the mention of his mother, a sick ache settled against the crushing in his ribs. He wasn’t close with his mother; sometimes wasn’t even sure if he actually loved her in a concrete way, but he had done much over the years to avoid disappointing her.
“And that’s not even to mention the other rumors.
Of other dalliances.” He didn’t need to catch Bellarius’s gaze to know what rumors.
“But perhaps Fabian already knows about those. Perhaps he is more…open-minded than most.” He looked at Seb, waiting for a response that didn’t come.
“So, I came here, Sebastian, to give you the opportunity to do the right thing: to return what you’ve taken.
Otherwise, if I were you, I’d hope that I won that Elumnara tonight. Because I do believe you’ll need it.”
Seb’s breath came in very rapidly. He couldn’t hide it; he was far past the point of caring.
“Well, Sebastian? Do we have a deal?”
Seb turned and walked away.