Chapter Two
“Viola!” Someone shouts my name, but I barely hear it over the ringing in my ears.
Prince Roze is splayed on the ground, staring up at me, utterly shocked, while Waffles attacks his pant leg, growling and drooling. Blood trickles from his nose—proof that he is at least somewhat human, I suppose. I should be horrified at what I’ve done. But I’m not. In fact, I feel damn good.
My knuckles burn where they’ve contacted his face, and I don’t even see the crowd around me—only Roze’s furious eyes, silver and sharp as bayonets.
I don’t hear the shouting—only the sound of my pounding heart as I stretch my fingers, feeling my shadows pushing at their boundaries as the Prince stares up at me.
A hand grips my shoulder, and I blink, snapping out of it. My vision clears. The shadows dissipate.
“Vi, are you all right?”
I turn, and Cerise is looking at me with her brows shoved together in half rage, half concern as she takes in the scene, particularly the royal sprawled on the ground and my heaving breaths.
I’m not surprised that she’s checking on me, not on him, even though he’s the one on the ground.
Roze has endeared himself to no one. Cerise on the other hand is the sort of person willing to go to war for those she cares about. She can be rather hotheaded that way.
“I’m fine,” I reassure her. If I don’t, I know she’ll do a lot worse than punch the Prince.
“What’s going on?”
A boy with wire-rimmed glasses and smartly combed auburn hair shoves his way through the crowd, and a wave of relief hits me—Kole. He’s a prefect and one of the only other people who won’t let Roze’s antics fly. Except … I’ve just punched Roze, which means I am now the one deserving punishment.
The crowd parts for him, and as Kole glances between the Prince and me, I hate how I must look to him. I’m shaking—I have none of the cool calm that I long for. I open my mouth to explain, but he cuts me off.
“All right,” Kole says, turning to the crowds. “Back inside, all of you! And someone give Johnson his clothes back.”
A few students giggle as the crowds begin to filter out.
“Get off me, you little monster,” Roze growls, kicking Waffles aside and shoving himself to his feet. He rounds on me. “You—”
Kole stops him with a hand to the Prince’s chest. My breath catches as Roze freezes, staring down at the hand. He looks up, lethally slow.
Kole drops his hand and clears his throat. “Apologies, Your Highness.”
I hate that he’s cowering before Roze. This is the problem. We are all beholden to him simply because of his family name.
Roze does what he pleases. To whomever he pleases. The absolute prick.
“Are we good?” he snarls at Kole.
Kole frowns and nods stiffly.
Roze’s eyes flash to mine, and there’s a promise in them—this isn’t over.
He straightens the lapels of his school jacket and struts off.
I take small satisfaction when I see him pull a handkerchief from his pocket to stop his bleeding nose.
He makes it twenty feet before Waffles chases after him with a tiny, ferocious roar, and Roze nearly sprints from the Commons.
I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing.
When his back is turned, Cerise sends the Prince a rude gesture.
“Did I really see you hit him, Viola?” Kole asks.
“He deserved it,” Cerise mumbles.
I sigh, turning back to him and hating the look of disappointment in his peat-green eyes. “Yes, but he was bullying that boy.”
“Johnson?”
My mouth twitches at the name—Saints, I know I shouldn’t find it funny. Kole raises his eyebrows.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“Viola.” His mouth is creased with concern. “I thought better of you. Brawling in the Commons?”
“I know,” I say.
“She wasn’t brawling,” Cerise cuts in.
“I’m going to have to report this to the dean. You realize that, right?” says Kole.
A stone drops in my gut, but still I say, “I understand.”
Cerise’s jaw drops. “Come on, Belcamp. You know how the Prince is to her. So she snapped one time—”
He shakes his head. “It’s no excuse. You know you can’t stoop to his level.
” He looks at me, his expression genuinely sorry.
“How will it look if I don’t report you after half the school saw you hit the Prince?
Of all the people to pick a fight with …
” He pauses for a long moment. “I’m sorry. Really, I am.”
I nod, wrapping my arms around myself. Kole raises a hand, as though to put it on my shoulder, but then he drops it, as though he’s changed his mind. And now I am colder than ever.
“I’ll see you both at dinner.” He hurries off, presumably to inform the dean that I’ve assaulted a member of the royal family.
I watch Kole go—his lean figure, the smart crop of his auburn hair. After that display, how far have I fallen from grace in his eyes?
What a fine day this is shaping up to be.
“I think Roze saw my shadows,” I whisper to Cerise. “Maybe … I’m not sure. He called me a witch. That’s why I hit him. I was … I don’t know. Scared.”
The true terror of what just happened hits me.
Several weeks ago, our King died rather suddenly, and since then, the Queen seems to be expressing her grief through a renewed zeal for exposing and punishing meigas—Traitors!
Heretics! A plague of debauchery! So the Queen and her minions call us, stirring up suspicion, turning neighbor against neighbor.
The public executions that result are a convenient distraction from issues that are apparently of less concern to the Crown, like the dwindling food supply.
There’s little to eat in a kingdom where we can only consume what can be grown and bred inside these castle walls. For those of us who are not a part of the gentry, it means a daily diet of oat pottage, mushroom tea, and root vegetables.
Hunger turns people desperate. Poverty turns them mutinous. The Queen knows this and turns their attention toward heretics like me to keep their eyes off her. I’ll be condemned to the gallows if anyone so much as suspects I might be a meiga.
And now … Roze could know. Of all people in the Kingdom, the one person who hates me beyond restraint or reason could know my secret, the one person with the power to do something with that sensitive information. Shit.
Cerise comes close and rests her head on my shoulder.
“There’s nothing wrong with your magic,” she says quietly.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. You couldn’t help—”
I glare at her. She gives me a sheepish look. “Sorry.”
Cerise doesn’t understand. She has no clue what it’s like for your whole life to ride on keeping a secret.
I was born with shadows in my bones, and they have brought me nothing but misery.
If I could produce even a tongue of flame instead of shadow, it would at least help me read after dark.
Keep me warm. Light a candle. But what can shadows do?
These slivers of night do nothing but force me into hiding, corner me into a life of fear.
But I can’t be frustrated with Cerise. She’s the only person I’ve ever trusted enough to tell her about the darkness inside me—the only person I’ve let get close enough.
I can’t say why exactly I knew I could trust Cerise after everyone else had proven themselves untrustworthy.
Even my parents abandoned me when they learned what I was. Not Cerise. Never Cerise.
She gives me a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Come on,” she says, grabbing my elbow. “Let’s get you a cup of tea.”
She leads me out of the Commons, and as she does, I force myself not to look at the thing lurking in my peripheral vision.
In a high window of Berlaise House, overlooking the Commons, the wispy gray ghost of a little boy peers through the casement windows, grim eyes set on me. And he’s crying.
The day only gets worse.
The atmosphere in Vandenberghe has been tense and drawn since the death of the King on All Hallows Eve.
Classes have continued as normal, but voices are more hushed, laughter is more subdued, and rumors spread over cups of tea in the common room late at night.
People wonder how the King could have died so suddenly, why no one has been told how he died, and what the grieving, merciless Queen will do about it, besides continue her crusade against meigas.
Since the All Hallows Eve masquerade, death has hung in the air, and the gloom is palpable in the common room of Berlaise House that evening.
I sit before the hearth with Cerise and Kole, curled up on the sofa.
Waffles snoozes lightly in my lap next to my homework.
I try to focus on my translations for my advanced ancient Aragoise class, but I’ve been staring at the same paragraph for ten minutes while I fiddle with the chain of my locket.
Because for the last several minutes Kole’s thigh has been lazily brushing against mine, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
It hasn’t seemed to affect his concentration.
He and Cerise are prattling on with their theories about the King’s death, as they and many others often do these days, as though he can’t feel the heat of our bodies through our school uniforms.
“Well, I think it was his heart,” Cerise says. “Sort of given to fits of rage, wasn’t he?”
She stretches her long legs out on the rug, her back leaning against an armchair.
Her trousers are tucked into her boots, her school blazer sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and her tie hangs loose around her neck.
Cerise is tall and lithe, her dark hair pulled back in strict cornrows, her eyes sharp and mirthful as she looks at Kole and me, occasionally glancing at where our knees touch and back up to me.
“Could be,” Kole answers. My heart flutters strangely at the way the glow of the fire outlines his strong jaw. He removes his glasses and sighs while he cleans them with the tail of his shirt, shifting his leg against mine … moving closer.
“Maybe it was the Huntsman,” Cerise says with a sly grin.
Kole groans, and I smile. Cerise doesn’t really believe that the Queen would compel her rumored personal assassin to kill the King, but it’s a conspiracy theory that she adores to goad Kole with.
“Not this again,” he says, throwing his head against the back of the sofa.
“Everyone knows they didn’t get along. And the King’s been half loony for ages. Maybe she was tired of seeing an incompetent man in power when she thought she could do a better job.”
“Not that she is doing a better job,” I mutter.
“You’re forgetting that the simplest explanation is often the correct one. The King wasn’t well. He most likely died of illness,” Kole argues.
“A convenient cover-up for murder,” Cerise shoots back.
“Saints below, you’re impossible.” Kole wipes a frustrated hand over his face while Cerise smiles like a menace.
“What’s that you’re working on?” I interrupt, eyeing the small gold something Kole has in his lap.
He loves to tinker—always has some new contraption he’s working on. He and Cerise are in Marquet-Blanc House, the house for students who plan on going into the sciences. Vandenberghe sets students on career tracks early, making them as useful as possible as soon as possible.
Marquet-Blanc has its own common room, but they prefer to spend evenings with me in Berlaise House, the house of the humanities and the arts.
Our common room is far cozier—plush chairs and sofas all in Berlaise blue, chess tables, bookshelves that reach to the ceiling covering every wall, and even an upright piano submerged beneath the scrawled pages of half-composed melodies, stacks of books, and dripped candle wax.
Kole holds the small object up for me to see. “It’s a key,” he says, handing it to me.
It’s a strange little thing. I turn it over in my hands, running the pads of my fingers along a row of impossibly tiny gears in the handle.
Kole leans over, pointing, and I can feel his breath on my neck. “It can open any door,” he whispers.
“It’s wonderful,” I say, looking up at him.
He smiles crookedly at me, and I think my heart stops for a full beat. Cerise clears her throat, and Kole blinks, looking away. He plucks the key from my hand.
“Thanks,” he mutters.
The common room door opens behind us, and Cerise’s head pops up, peering over the back of the sofa. Her mouth forms a cocky grin I know all too well as she sings, “Hi there, Bianca.”
A girl with poofy blond hair, who a moment ago was walking purposefully toward us, halts at Cerise’s greeting.
“Oh. Hi.” An unmistakable blush tints her pale cheeks, and Cerise’s grin broadens. I roll my eyes. The merciless flirt.
“Viola, Professor Borges sent me to find you,” Bianca says.
“What, now? Why?”
Professor Borges is my academic adviser, but we don’t have a meeting scheduled.
Besides, it’s well past nightfall. My mind goes straight to the altercation with Roze in the Commons, and I resist the urge to glance at Kole.
He must’ve told the dean—it was the right thing to do, after all.
I broke school rules. It would have been worse for everyone if he’d said nothing.
But if this is about that … why is my adviser calling for me and not the dean herself ?
Bianca shrugs. “I don’t know, but she said it was urgent.”
“Vi,” Kole says, and I force myself to look him in the eye. “I didn’t say anything to Dean Gomes.”
“What?”
He shakes his head. “I haven’t said anything. I … couldn’t.”
A lump forms in my throat. Maybe it’s not about the fight in the Commons. But I can’t fathom what else would cause the professor to summon me at this hour.
“I’ll go,” I say, lifting myself from my seat. “Bianca, will you help Cerise put Waffles back in my room?”
Bianca’s eyes widen a little, and she says, “Sure.”
From behind her, Cerise holds her hand over her heart and mouths, “You’re the best.”
I wink on my way out of the room.