Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
As I stare at Esmae’s body, a series of thumps resonate from somewhere behind me. It takes some time for the sound to register through the ringing of shock that’s blaring in my head.
Stavros’s voice calls through the dorm-room door. “Ivy? Are you still in here?”
His fist bangs against the wood again. I open my mouth, but no sound comes out.
The former general must be aware of the tricks Julita mentioned for unlocking doors, or else professors have extra access. There’s a mutter and a different sort of bump, and the click of the hinges swinging.
I have a sudden image of the massive man barging through the dorm’s lounge area, calling out my name, and somehow that propels me to my feet. I shove Esmae’s bedroom door open just as the first syllable leaves his lips.
“Iv—”
He freezes by one of the sofas, our gazes locking. Whatever he sees in my face, it makes his eyes flash with fury.
Stavros strides over like an ornery stallion, the muscles in his broad shoulders tensing beneath his shirt and vest. “What happened? Did— You’re bleeding.”
A bolt of panic crackles through my shocked daze. What am I doing? He’s going to see—he’s going to know—
I stumble backward, but he practically leaps the last few paces to grasp my hand. My pulse rattling, I hold still and tensed as he examines the thin cut Esmae carved in my forearm.
There’s no hiding it, is there? And he needs to know what we’re up against.
That’s more important than my life.
My lips part again, and I manage to do a little more than croak. “She—it was her. It was always her.”
Stavros’s expression turns even stormier. He shoulders past me into the room.
I follow with my shaking hands balled tight at my sides.
He’s going to see the wound on her chest, the one she already bandaged. He’s going to wonder how that happened when I claimed I never saw my attacker yesterday, let alone had a chance to fight back.
And what if he sees some sign of the riven magic he’s tracked down before?
The survival instinct I apparently haven’t lost completely stops me from dropping to my knees and begging for mercy. I still wobble on my feet as Stavros stares down at Esmae’s limp form.
His head twitches. “That’s your knife.”
Of course he’d recognize it. He doesn’t seem concerned about anything else, not yet, but I guess that’s understandable.
The facts. I can simply state the facts—the ones that won’t get me executed.
At least not immediately.
I grip the back of the same chair I did when I was first talking to Esmae.
“I came in to make sure she was okay, and she attacked me. It was her yesterday—it was her with Julita—she has a gift for conveying messages on the wind, and she managed to twist it into carrying weapons too. I—I didn’t want to kill her, but the way she came at me… ”
The worst of the knotted feelings inside me surges to the fore, hitting me so hard my voice breaks. “I thought she was my friend.”
“Ivy.” Stavros catches my elbow. I find myself grasping his shirt sleeve as tightly as I’m clutching the chair, and not because of the tremor that resonates through the floor at that moment.
A raw laugh reverberates up my throat. “I should have known better. I don’t have friends. It doesn’t work.”
“This isn’t your fault. This isn’t—” Stavros looks down at Esmae again, his forehead furrowing. “She’s practicing scourge sorcery?”
Through the whirl of my emotions, something hardens inside me. She wasn’t—and I have to get a grip on myself.
I have to make sure that the man who’s actually responsible for this horror gets what he deserves.
My legs stiffen under me. I draw my spine straight against the turmoil inside me, the mess I don’t have time to sort through right now.
“Julita was right all along. Wendos is part of the conspiracy—he manipulated Esmae into thinking Julita was sabotaging her career chances. I think he was trying to lead me in the wrong direction too. We have to find him before he can hurt anyone else.”
Stavros blinks at me as if taken aback by my shift in demeanor. But only for a moment. He isn’t a celebrated general for nothing.
“Wendos,” he mutters. “Once a prick, always a prick, apparently. All right. Let’s get you out of here, call on the others, and we’ll pull together a plan.”
He spares Esmae one final glance. “The king can decide what he wants to do about her after we’ve dealt with the more urgent problems.”
He ushers me out of her bedroom, letting the door close and lock to hide her bloody body.
My gaze darts over my dress, catching on the flecks of blood that’ve marred the pale green fabric. I pull my cloak closer around me to hide them.
Stavros nods approvingly. “Good. Straight down to the archive room.”
I form a tight smile. “No time to waste.”
I hurry with him down the staircase at a similarly swift pace to my way up. As I reach for the sconce in the hall of tapestries, Stavros pulls out a silver trinket that matches Casimir’s, the one that’s tucked in my pocket.
We burst into the small archive room. Stavros walks straight to one of the shelves and retrieves a scroll that he unfurls on the desk.
It’s a blueprint of one level of the Domi—one of the dorm-level floors, based on the layout of the rooms drawn onto it.
There’s already a small mark on one of them. Stavros taps it. “That’s Wendos’s dorm. I’ll need to call for soldiers to be sent there, but I don’t know if he’s likely to linger anywhere obvious when he must realize his deception is coming unraveled.”
Yes, he’s probably heard about the attack on me and guessed who was behind it and why. And he’ll know Esmae failed.
Julita speaks up in a thin voice. Even though I knew Wendos couldn’t be trusted…
He tricked me too. Not just with the note.
Our two classmates that I pointed out to you during the hunt—who knows if they’ve done anything at all?
He might have realized I was keeping an eye on him and purposefully gotten close with them when I was around to lead me astray.
After everything else Wendos has done, I wouldn’t be surprised.
My jaw clenches. “We need to find out who his actual associates are. And we can’t go by Julita’s observations—or maybe mine either. He was suspicious of us, so he did whatever he could to confuse the situation.”
“Who did?” Alek demands, just slipping from the conjured passage. “What’s happening?”
“Wendos,” I say darkly. I’m coming to share Julita’s automatic revulsion to the name. “He’s been involved all along.”
Alek’s eyes widen within the frame of his mask. “He really— Gods. With Julita watching him that closely, it must have taken him a lot to hide what he was up to.”
I grimace. “Seems that way.”
Benedikt hustles from the passage, nearly bumping into Alek in his haste. His stride turns jauntier as he veers around the other man and glances us over. “Another emergency. Exciting times we’re living in.”
I wrinkle my nose at him. “I’m not sure ‘exciting’ is the word I’d use.”
He pauses, his gaze lingering on me, and I’m abruptly reminded that this is the first time we’ve spoken to each other since my near-murder. Since his mocking comments in this very room.
Benedikt dips his golden head and reaches a tentative hand to brush my arm through my cloak. “It’s good to see you on your feet again, whatever the circumstances. You gave us quite a scare there.”
I can’t stop my voice from going tart. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t have been that great a loss.”
He winces, and I see Alek stiffen at the edge of my vision.
Benedikt’s hand drops to his side. “We were all in a bit of a lather about the whole situation—I said things I shouldn’t have. I would vastly prefer to tackle scourge sorcerers with you at our side than without.”
“Yes,” Alek says quickly. “In case I didn’t make that clear enough earlier, I completely agree.”
Nothing like almost dying to shake a little sense into people, apparently, however much they’ll mean it when the current crisis is over. I notice Stavros hasn’t bothered to outright apologize so far, even though he laid into me the most.
I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t care what any of them think of me. It hardly counts when they don’t know the worst part of me anyway.
So I shove down the pang that’s filled my heart with their words and keep my tone firm.
“I wouldn’t be here at all if this mission didn’t matter to me more than anything else I could be doing.” I look from Benedikt to Alek, feeling the former general’s presence looming behind me.
Any response they might have given is interrupted by Casimir’s arrival. As he emerges from the wall, his face tight with worry, another shudder of the building’s foundation makes my pulse hiccup.
Nothing at all is going to matter unless we fix this catastrophe fast.
I clap my hands. “All right. Here’s the deal.
Wendos has been jerking around a whole lot of people to cover up his involvement in the conspiracy.
He arranged Julita’s murder. And he’s got to be up to something even worse right now—him and the others.
The daimon have never been this worked up before. We have to stop them, fast.”
Benedikt and Casimir take the revelation in with a flicker of shock that they don’t let interfere with the discussion ahead.
“All right,” Casimir says, soft but steady, and looks at Stavros. “Can you get the Crown’s Watch involved at this point?”
Stavros nods. “That’s my next stop. But the guards are awfully noticeable—easy to dodge. I think we’ll have a better chance of tracking the prick down first.”
Especially if Wendos hasn’t realized who Julita and I have on our side.
I glance down at the blueprint. “So someone needs to check his dorm. Obviously the dining hall is a possibility. Benedikt, you said you’ve played cards with him before, didn’t you? And isn’t he in one of the clubs Ster. Torstem runs—the one for studying bugs?”
The corner of Benedikt’s mouth kicks upward. “You’ve got it all figured out. I can sweep the ground floor of the Domi to check the dining hall and the recreational rooms.”