Chapter 11
ELEVEN
GWENNA
After Kai hightailed it out of Holy Grounds, Morgan and I only linger another few minutes longer.
There isn’t much more to say, our coffee has long gone cold, and my whole skull is ringing with Kai’s revelation.
Moroslav. Moroslav started that fire.
Moroslav, who came to see me at Renfrew.
Who found me there, somehow.
Who could still…
That explains it.
The rescue mission.
The guard duty.
The round-the-clock shifts…
I stumble on the last step out of the Divinity School basement, realizing.
Callahan. Lanz. Kai.
They’ve all taken their shifts, working their appointed hours as the sun came up, as it bleakly circled over the frosty Caliburn campus, as it sank into the black trees again. Now, at six p.m., with everything around us dark and silver-edged at dusk…
…there’s just one of them left to go.
We finish the last of the stairs and push through the doors into the the whip-sharp cold and—
—and there he is.
Kingston Pendragon stands, head slightly bowed against the wind, hands in his coat pockets, at the entrance to the Divinity School.
Waiting.
I haven’t really seen him, despite everything—not for long, anyway, not in a moment of relative calm—and now that I’m looking at him, he looks…
He looks exactly the same.
Serious. Intent. Resolved.
The only change I can see is the slight tinge of pink coloring the aristocratic cut of his cheekbones—the cold.
Seeing me—us—he nods.
“Hi,” he says. “Hello.”
His voice—
The sound makes my throat hurt.
I can practically feel Morgan stiffen next to me, like a cat arching its back. Me, I feel almost the opposite. Too soft. Too tender. Like I’m about to collapse, a slow-motion melt to the ground.
I hate it.
“Evening, King.” Morgan speaks first. “How’s everything with you, then?”
“Fine,” Kingston says dismissively, like he’s uninterested in himself. “How are you, Gwenna?”
How am I? What an absurd thing to ask. In general, and for him, of me.
“Still here,” I hear myself reply. In another context, the words could come off saucy, or even flirty. Now, they’re nothing more than a statement of fact.
Still. Here. I am still here.
Kingston presses his lips together. “I…see you’ve gotten your things from Morgan.”
Nothing to say to that.
“And the registrar’s informed me your classes are all arranged.”
“You might wanna talk to Kai,” Morgan interrupts. Kingston shoots her a look, and it’s only when he does that I realize he’s been staring at me.
I’ve been looking at nothing. The black void that is the center of his chest.
“Kai?” Kingston says, as if he’d rather not think about his foster brother.
“His attitude about this whole thing is, excuse my language, piss-poor. So maybe talk some sense into him. Some of that ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’ or whatever it is you do.” She shrugs, and turns to me. “Gwenna, I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got this—”
“Go,” I say. Whatever it is, she should go. Morgan should be writing essays or brewing potions or dermaplaning or basically anything that propping me back up. She’s already done more than her share.
Morgan casts a glance from me to her stepbrother. Then back to me. “Are you sure?”
Sure that she should get a break? Yes.
Sure about anything else? To be determined.
But I nod.
“Okay.” Morgan nods back, and reaches out to squeeze my elbow—“because I know you’re not much of a hugger.”
That actually gets a little laugh from me.
“Oh, and—” Morgan fishes around in the various pockets of her coat. “Here.” She produces a long brass key, which she hands over. “To my suite—our suite. So you can get back in.”
Kingston clears his throat. Morgan rolls her eyes.
“What?”
“She doesn’t need that,” he informs her. “We all have copies.”
We.
Morgan’s brow wrinkles. “Seriously? How did—you know what?” She abruptly shuts her mouth. “Never mind. I know how.” She pushes the key into the palm of my mitten. “You should have your own anyway.”
I clasp the key like a magic talisman—which, for all I know, it literally is. “Thanks.”
“See you later?” she says. “And don’t bother telling me not to wait up, because I will.”
I manage a smile and tell her okay, and she takes her leave, a candy-pink figure that I watch get smaller and smaller across the snow until she’s really and truly gone.
Now we are alone.
Kingston clears his throat again. For the first time, it occurs to me—is he nervous?
No. Stupid. Stupid thing for me to think, and stupid thing for him to be.
He has no right to be nervous.
Me, I don’t know what to do, where to go. I adjust my weight, the tang of night air sharp in my nose as I look from building to building, option A to option B.
Seeing my movement, Kingston takes a step toward the leftmost path. I look at him, alarmed, and those golden eyes meet mine.
No.
I look away.
“It’s below freezing,” he says.
Like I can’t tell. “Where are you going?”
He frowns.
“The dining hall,” he says. “I suppose you want to eat?”
You suppose wrong, I think. My stomach feels like a giant knot. “No. I’m…not hungry.”
Kingston presses his lips together, like somehow this is impolite of me, or like I’m thwarting some precise schedule he’s drawn up in his mind. But he says nothing, only nods.
“All right.” Kingston clasps his hands behind his back. “What, then?”
He’s still, at firm attention and unmoving except for a gust of wind that ruffles the front of his hair.
And I’m not sure why, but something about that is deeply satisfying to me—watching those few golden strands lift and move.
You can’t control everything, Kingston. You can’t control the wind. Take that.
I stand still, too.
What, then? I don’t know. I don’t want to make a decision on the spot.
I don’t want to have to do it in front of someone.
I just want to exist, for one fucking second, without justification.
And the longer I stand there, the more the steady hold of his gaze feels like it’s stifling me.
The familiar feeling of being not just seen or noticed, but observed.
A thought hits me.
I am literally going to be watched, 24/7, for the foreseeable future.
A cool wave of despair rolls over my skin.
“Gwenna?” Kingston says. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I snap. “Yes, I’m fine.”
I’m not fine. I’m never fine. But that’s so far beyond the point now.
“Library,” I say at last. “I need to…catch up. Is that okay?”
Kingston blinks. “You don’t need my permission to—”
Great. I set off on the footpath towards the library.
Hurried steps ring out behind me as Kingston catches up. We pass people in the gold patches of light thrown by the streetlamps; heads turn and whispers slip through the air.
Is that her?
Is that him?
I keep my gaze forward and my pace even. Let them talk. I can do nothing to stop them. Neither, even, can Kingston. Another uncontrollable force of nature: gravity, the wind, and campus gossip.
Gradually, the library rises before us, gray and grand as ever: the elegant archive, open to all.
My steps slow of their own accord.
If walking back into Emrys’s classroom felt like a dream, approaching the library is more like a nightmare.
Or, no: a hallucination, a return to a vision of something that just can’t be anymore.
I can’t really be here, can I? No, I’m imagining it.
This is just my safe space. I’m on Jessie the therapist’s couch, holding the pulsing plastic pucks, eyes closed, soft clothes—
A blast of cold air knifes through my scarf.
CALIBURN MEMORIAL LIbrARY, read the carved letters above the double archway. IN SCIENTIA IPSA PORTA.
A door into knowledge itself.
No, I think, watching a few pinprick snowflakes swirl over the doors. This is very, very real.
More students are traipsing by us, swiveling to look, murmuring. I turn just barely to the side and Kingston is standing an armslength away from me, waiting.
“Sorry,” I say, although why I’m apologizing I don’t know. “I’m…”
I can’t finish the sentence. Instead, I put one foot on the bottom step, feel the cold of the stone just start to seep through the sole of my boot, and push up.
One step.
Then another.
Then another.
Then the last one, and then I’m summiting onto the landing and walking to the broad wooden—
Something rushes in front of me—someone.
Kingston.
To hold the door open.
“Thank you,” I say, too surprised to forget my manners.
Kingston nods.
Of course. Stupid chivalry. Stupid stand on ceremony. Stupid…stupid everything.
Inside, the air has the dry bite of old buildings in winter, all static electricity and ancient forced-heat systems, and the leafy, sawdust smell of old books.
So familiar it makes my heart hurt.
The ceiling of the main reading room swoops overhead as I step across the terracotta of the entryway, the massive iron chandeliers like distant stars, evenly constellated across the vault.
It’s early enough for the tables to be populated, late enough that they’re not crammed elbow-to-elbow with students.
Good.
I find the books I need without much trouble.
I don’t bother with the card catalog or asking a librarian, just jump directly into the stacks armed with the call numbers I’d taken down in the registrar’s office.
I don’t even know that I care so much about maintaining any kind of course performance—since I doubt a waning GPA would warrant academic suspension for me, given everything—but the normalcy of it, the routine, of diligently finding the proper texts to read and settling in to study them, is nice. One little, ordinary, nice thing.
Ancien francais: exercises de morphologie
Except that each time I pull down a book—
Froissart: Chroniques
—Kingston is there.
Each time I move to another shelf—
Art of the European Iron Age: A study of the elusive image
Kingston follows.
I try to ignore it. Try to pretend this is not happening the way it’s happening, that I’m alone and invisible and not being observed at every turn by a broad-shouldered, black-clad presence.