Chapter 8
Eight
Peeking around the bend in the hall at the stocky guy who set off Julita’s concern, I raise an eyebrow in question.
Benedikt said Wendos was playing cards when she was murdered. Why does she still assume he could be involved?
Trust me, she says. Whether he’s directly responsible or not, he’s no shining soul.
I have to take her word for it. Nothing about the man I’m watching provokes my own defensive instincts.
He raises his hand in greeting to another guy coming out farther down the hall and calls out an easy-going challenge. “I’ll see you on the archery range later. You’d better be prepared!”
Then he ambles off in the direction I was headed, toward the main staircase. No sign of subterfuge or a guilty conscience.
“Nothing about him looks particularly murderer-y to me,” I say under my breath.
Julita simply hums in answer. When Wendos has disappeared from view, she gives me a mental nudge. We might as well get going, then.
We don’t catch up with Wendos, wherever Julita’s villain has gone within the school, but as I step out of the Domi, my gaze catches on a now unnervingly familiar head of dark red hair.
The former General Stavros is poised about thirty feet away across the sprawling field between the Domi and the square outer building of the Quadring.
He’s exchanged his hand-like prosthetic for one more like what I saw the night he led the riven sorcerer’s execution two years ago: a broad, boxy loop of metal bent into a hook-like curve.
It gleams in the sunlight as he raises it.
Some twenty students are standing around him, watching with rapt attention. One is just stepping forward.
Stavros says something brief, the boy nods, and then the former general lunges faster than I would have thought his massive frame would be capable of.
He snags his prosthetic hook around the guy’s upper arm, yanks him in, and lets his other fist fly. It stops at a mere tap of the guy’s nose. Then he whips his hook up to show how he could slam one of the boxy corners straight into the guy’s temple.
A shiver creeps over my skin. That is not a man I’d want to make an enemy of.
But he already is my enemy simply by virtue of the power I never asked for, which is twisting in my chest at the sight of him.
The king assigned Stav to teach combat and strategy here after he couldn’t keep up on the battlefield anymore, Julita says. Everyone in the military division vies to get into his classes.
I’ll bet.
Stavros eases back from his student with a coolly cocky smile, and the guy whose skull he could have split open laughs as he adjusts his stance. The other students gathered around are grinning, their expressions avid.
I slow as I take in the class, remembering that Julita wanted to tell her allies about the wind-controlling powers her attacker might have wielded. But Stavros glances across the field then, and his gaze slides right over me as if I’m not there.
Julita prods me. You can’t talk to him here. We keep our meetings secret so no one knows we’re associating at all. If it wasn’t for that, whoever cut me down would be after the guys next.
A reasonable precaution. Better not to let murderous conspirators know you’re on to them until you can actually cut them down.
Walking out of the college is much simpler than walking in. I stride down the grand entrance hall and through the gate with no sign of the maze I had to navigate on the way in or any irritating tickles of magic.
On the street outside, I hurry away from the trio of royal buildings. The tightness in my chest doesn’t quite release until the Temple of the Crown is hidden by the looming stone buildings of the main downtown thoroughfare.
I veer down the smaller laneways, instinctively making for my home base. It’s too early to sneak into my attic room over the cloth factory, but I’ve stashed a more discreet change of clothes in one of the bathhouse cubbies.
It definitely won’t do me any good roaming around the fringes of the city in this faux-noble get-up.
And then what? As much as Julita is an unwelcome intruder in my head, it feels bizarrely rude to ask her when she plans to take off.
I’m not even sure she knows how to get out of my head… and if she does, would that mean she’d immediately complete her death and pass on into the embrace of her chosen godlen?
I’d basically be asking her to kill herself. Other than the part where technically she’s already dead.
It also technically isn’t my problem, but that fact doesn’t diminish the uneasy twinge in my gut. So instead, once I’m weaving through less crowded streets, I bring up a different topic that’s been niggling at me.
“Why are you so suspicious of Wendos? What did he do that made you think he’s part of the conspiracy?”
The men she’s gathered to help her investigate seemed skeptical, so obviously Julita’s wariness was based on something they haven’t seen or don’t believe.
Julita stays silent for long enough that I might have wondered if she’s taken her leave of her own accord. But a faint tingle remains by the back of my skull, that I’m starting to recognize indicates her presence.
Finally, she sighs. He hasn’t done anything at the college that I’ve been able to uncover.
But I know he has an interest in scourge sorcery.
Before—he was close friends with my older brother growing up…
A little while after their dedication ceremonies, he and Borys both got it into their heads that it would be exciting to expand their magic.
She doesn’t need to elaborate for a chill to run down my back.
A couple of teenage boys dabbling in the most brutal form of sorcery? That sounds like a recipe for a disaster.
Especially when I now have to ask: “How did you find out?”
Julita’s next silence stretches even longer.
I’m not sure how far they actually went.
I’m not aware of any human sacrifices, and probably they couldn’t have gotten away with that.
There might have been animals. But they also experimented with mere blood-letting.
And since I was younger and right there where my brother could exert his authority, I was the easiest subject for them to practice on.
The chill coils right around my gut. Blood-letting.
Only a sacrifice at a dedication ceremony can result in a permanent gift, but under certain circumstances, you can bargain flesh or blood for a temporary effect. It’s expected that you bargain your own flesh or blood, though.
Julita’s brother and Wendos used her in whatever makeshift rituals they were able to cobble together based on the sketchy knowledge of scourge sorcery the average noble kid would be able to dig up. Cutting her. Spilling her blood in smaller sacrifices.
Hoping her pain would lend them power.
Julita’s voice turns more strident. It only lasted a couple of years. Then I dedicated myself and got my own gift, and I could put a stop to it. But it seems like it’d be an incredible coincidence if there’s scourge sorcery being practiced at the college right now and Wendos isn’t a part of it.
I can’t argue with her logic. “What about your brother? Is he attending the college too?”
He was supposed to, but he was either waylaid or ran off when traveling to Florian. I suspect the latter. Borys was never much for studying… I wouldn’t be surprised if he went off to join the infantry so he could see some action.
So there’s only Wendos at the college. A frown crosses my lips. “Are you sure that what you’ve seen is a whole conspiracy and not just Wendos continuing their old experiments?”
Julita shivers. I wish it were that simple. Even when he and my brother were dabbling together, the daimon on my estate never acted strangely. For them to be so disturbed at the college, it has to be a much larger effort.
It’s hard to argue her logic—both in that and that there’s a good chance of Wendos being involved. So why would the men doubt it? “Did you tell Stavros and the others what the two of them used to—”
No, Julita cuts in abruptly. Not the part about me being involved. Just that I could tell he and my brother were getting up to things. I saw some of the materials they used—like the dartling eggshell powder. That should be enough.
From her tone, I don’t think she’s very happy about having exposed that much of her harrowing childhood even to me.
My gut has twisted into a knot. She spent years getting tortured by hopeful scourge sorcerers, ran into more the second she left home, and then got murdered by one.
It’s hard to imagine that the little bit of information I was able to pass on to her friends is going to be enough to get her justice. And because she’s still here in her ghostly form, she’ll know that as well as I do.
My mouth moves before I’ve quite thought through the offer I’m about to make. “There’s a place I could ask around. See if anyone involved in black-market dealings has heard about your murder or whatever else to do with illegal sorcery.”
The tingle in the back of my head seems to perk up.
Really? Julita says, in a softer but eager tone. I guess those are the sorts of people you typically mingle with?
I make a face at her assumption, already feeling a twinge of regret. But the thought of going back on my suggestion now is more horrible than going through with it.
“Not if I can help it. I don’t really mingle with anyone ‘typically.’ But I know how to find them when I need them.”
Dropping in on Crow’s Close will definitely require a costume change, though.
As evening falls, I approach the Frolic Theater in Tangleside, a neighborhood so called because of the confusing twists of its streets. One of my hooded tunics drapes me from the top of my head to mid-thigh, and five knives lie concealed but in easy reach.