17 #3
‘The secret fourth pillar!’ Felix gasped. ‘Maybe we only find out when we graduate.’
‘It’s probably the pillar of privilege. The pillar of nepotism?’
‘Ha ha,’ Felix said wryly. He guided her around the side of the manor house and, rounding a large rhododendron bush, cut in toward a small side door that sat slightly lower than ground level, with two mossy steps leading down to it. Felix drew a key from his pocket.
‘What are you doing? How do you have a key?’
Felix lowered his voice dramatically. ‘I have my ways.’
Playing along, Asta looked back and forth like a spy in a movie. ‘Are we supposed to be here?’
‘Well, no,’ Felix answered in his normal voice. ‘But you never enjoy yourself unless you’re breaking some rules.’
Asta was practically vibrating with excitement. All that ugliness with Pikki was streaming away from her like smoke in the wind.
Felix unlocked the door and turned the handle. ‘They’re all gone for the day anyway.’
The door gave way on the second push of Felix’s shoulder and hip.
It groaned as it swung open into the dark.
Asta groped on the wall for a light switch, but Felix was quicker.
He conjured a little slow-moving flame and set it on his shoulder.
The illusory light it shed was strangely cool and flat, but it did the trick, and they looked around the place where they had found themselves.
They stood in a narrow corridor with a scratched and stained pine floor.
There were closed doors to either side of them.
Felix opened the second door on the right.
It was a closet, and the magic light on his shoulder fell on metal shelves of carefully labeled bankers’ boxes. He closed the door again.
‘Whoops,’ Felix said, his voice just above a whisper. ‘Wrong door.’ He moved on to the next one. This one had a set of stairs behind it. The smell that drifted out when Felix opened the door was dusty and dry.
‘Where are we going?’ Asta asked.
But Felix just began to climb.
Asta followed the shape of him up the stairs. He paused at a small landing and fiddled with something on the wall, and a crack of light split the dark. Asta realized it was a window that had been shuttered tight.
She peeked through the open shutter, pressed close at his shoulder. He smelled nice, like the bed of pine needles in the grove by the gazebo.
They were looking out the back of the admin building over the training fields.
Some of their classmates were out there now, getting ready for tomorrow’s scrimmage.
One rider was running their dragon over a pair of fences – jumping and then circling back and jumping again.
Someone else leapt from the top of the scramble, but their dragon didn’t quite nail the footing and struggled to stay airborne, flapping awkwardly before a hard landing.
Felix closed the shutter again and kept climbing.
The darkness was lessening as they neared the third floor, and Asta realized this was because there was no closed door at the top of the staircase.
It opened into another hallway with an unshuttered window at the far end.
As on the ground level, the rest of the doors in the hallway were closed, keeping it gloomy and dim.
There were broken chairs stacked near the window down the hall.
Felix extinguished his magic flame and sat on the top step. He began to unlace his boots. ‘Just so no one hears us,’ he said. Asta sat beside him and did the same with her sneakers.
‘I thought everyone had gone home.’
He tipped his head uncertainly. ‘Just in case.’
‘This is very unlike you, Felix Seraphin,’ Asta said. ‘You’re usually so well behaved.’
‘That’s what I let them think,’ he said, smiling at his fingers as they loosened his shoelaces.
Asta looked at his face, but the dimness of the light made it hard to read.
In their socks, Felix and Asta crept down the hall. Felix stopped at one of the doors on the left-hand side of the hallway and opened it. Two windows, bright with the evening sun, filled the room with light. Asta followed him through the doorway, and he closed the door softly behind her.
Inside, the wall abutting the hallway was lined with filing cabinets.
On top of those were disused dragon models and rolled-up posters from bygone eras at the Pillar School.
Half the room was crowded with shabby furniture – desks stacked on desks and dressers that were missing pull handles.
The other side of the room, where they were standing, had been cleared except for a wide wooden table with two chairs beside it.
‘What is this?’ Asta asked.
‘It’s a storage room,’ Felix said.
Asta rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, I can see that. But why did you bring me here?’
‘Check out the view,’ Felix said, going to the table and leaning over it to look out of the dormer windows.
Half of the Pillar School campus sprawled outside the window.
The ivy-covered dorms, the centuries-old trees that stretched their limbs over the walkways, the stables, the training pools, and the exercise trails.
Below that, the valley with the village of Crown’s Crossing nestled in it.
The sun was nearing its golden hour, and everything looked as if it had been painted in place.
Felix hiked himself up on the edge of the table. His legs swung gently off the side. ‘When I was little, my parents were Pillar trustees—’
‘Of course they were,’ Asta said under her breath.
‘—and they’d come here for meetings a couple of times a year. I would tag along, but the only other kids there were too young to be any fun. So I would go exploring. I found this room one time, and I used to play up here by myself.’
‘That’s kind of sad. Lonely little Felix.’ Asta smiled, imagining Felix playing up here in this stuffy old room while his parents decided the fate of the school in one of the larger rooms below.
‘Someone told me these were the servants’ rooms, and I used to pretend I was one. I had to practice my magic illusions for the lords of the manor to use for their races.’
‘Did your illusions please them?’
Felix laughed. ‘Oh, I would have been whipped, for sure. Actually . . .’ He trailed off and went to one of the filing cabinets, pulling at drawers until one of them opened.
He drew a scrap of paper out of the bottom of the drawer.
‘Here it is. One of my old spells. Hang on.’ He mouthed the instructions to himself.
‘Okay, got it.’ He shut his eyes, his fingers working in the air as he engaged the magic.
A barrel-shaped creature with a flat head and stiff, uneven legs glimmered into sight in the middle of the room. Asta recoiled, stepping behind Felix in mock fear – it gave her an excuse to curl against his back and put her chin on his shoulder.
‘Oh my, what is it?’ she rasped, exaggerating her nervousness to keep up the game.
‘You needn’t fear, my lady. It’s just a goat.’
Asta tried to stifle her laughter. ‘A goat? It looks like a pig that got its head run over.’
Felix glared at her out of the corner of his eye. ‘Hey, I was learning. I think it’s a pretty good goat.’ He tilted his head at it. ‘Sort of.’
Asta regarded the strange creature skeptically. ‘If you say so.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Felix stepped away as her shield and directed the squash-headed goat-pig toward her.
‘You don’t like Humphrey?’ The illusion lumbered closer, and in spite of herself, Asta found she was a little unnerved.
‘He’s my oldest friend in the world, Asta.
My creation. My own!’ Felix’s eyes were wide and crazed.
Asta backed away from the abomination, but it kept coming. She found herself pinned against a tower of student desks with battered corners. She spotted an opening and darted past Humphrey. But she cut too close to the desks, and they tottered.
‘Asta!’ Felix dropped the illusion, and it dissipated into spiraling motes of light. He rushed forward to stop the desks from falling. Asta spun and grabbed the leg of the second desk in the stack, just as it began to tip. Panting, they eased the tower back into place.
Asta smiled at Felix, her eyes twinkling. ‘We’re so going to get caught. We should get our story straight.’
‘I’ll say I was tutoring you.’
Asta slapped Felix’s arm. ‘Shut up! As if I need tutoring from you.’
‘From what I hear about that course design—’
Asta gasped. ‘Shut! Up!’ She punctuated her words with playful punches.
‘Ow!’ Felix grabbed her wrist and spun her around, an arm around her waist. His face was beside hers, and his breath tickled at her neck. ‘How about I say that I am crazy about you, and I can’t think about anything else, and all this was a ploy to get you to myself?’
Asta made a half-hearted effort to struggle out of his grasp. ‘That’s a good one. And I could say that maybe this us-being-apart plan wasn’t as great an idea as I thought it was.’ Felix’s grip on her tightened. He was holding his breath. ‘I’ve proven myself, haven’t I? On my own.’
When he spoke, his words came out hot against her neck and sent bolts of electricity through Asta’s body. ‘Yes. All by yourself.’
Asta pried his hands open, and he let her. She turned to face him. ‘I’m going to win tomorrow, and Pikki won’t be able to say shit anymore.’
Felix pulled back. ‘You aren’t going to go easy on me, Ekenberg?’
Asta smirked at him. ‘I will never go easy on you.’
Felix raised his hands to cradle her neck, his fingers digging into her loose hair.
Asta grabbed at his back and pulled him tight against her.
A thousand, thousand times, she had imagined this moment and told herself she could not have it.
At last, it was happening. All that waiting now seemed both entirely pointless and entirely worth it. She had him – finally – in her arms.
Their kisses were open and hungry. Felix ran his lips down the side of her neck. The touch of them was unbelievably soft, like the petals of snapdragons. The golden light of the evening poured over their reaching hands, their bodies pressed close together.