7
I land on my knees, hard.
The pitch of my shout disturbs the pixies nested in the lampshade that rattles with my fall. Their hisses are pin-needle shrieks as a swarm of them spears down on me.
I care nothing about the pixies. Mere annoying pests swarming my head.
I fall onto my side with a groan, then slump.
All night.
All night I was stuck like that. Most of the following day, too, I’m sure.
The spell contained me for too long. My feet feel like nothing more than stretched, pulled and twisted taffy. The ache in my calves is a shredding feeling, and my spine is searing hot. Through that, I can hardly spare much mind to the fact that I have definitely wet myself.
The gross sensation of damp shorts sticks to my skin.
For a while, I just lie here.
Can’t do much more than that. I don’t think my legs could hold me up if I tried to stand.
I stay, slumped, my temple rested on the edge of the plush rug. I watch the pixies dive into the fine woollen threads. Abandoning their attack of me, they disperse into the rug and disappear—in search of food, bugs and crumbs.
I could eat.
That’s what has me guessing that the night, and also a chunk of the day, has gone. How deep the ache in my stirring stomach goes. Acidic.
How lucky I am isn’t lost on me.
Most of the students, if not all, were in bed for the night I was stuck here at the tapestry. And being the cigar room with smaller water closets than the bathrooms off the grand parlour, only two juniors stumbled upon me.
Two eighteen-year-olds I know from aristos circles.
They didn’t harm me. But they knew better than to do anything about it. They knew better than to do what I did.
Interfere .
They got their asses out of this room, and I think they are smart for it, even if I was wishing that they would get help.
No help came.
No teachers came.
Not even Courtney.
If she’s looking for me at all, she’ll be looking in broom cupboards, probably. That’s where Dray sometimes locks me away. The longest was two days and a quarter. A groundskeeper found me, took me to the infirmary. The witchdoctor had to put me on a fluid IV, I was so dehydrated.
Sometimes I think about it. Wonder if Dray would have come back for me, let me out once he realised that I was at the three-day mark without food or water, and no one had found me.
I wonder how he sleeps knowing he’s trapped me somewhere.
Likely, he sleeps as well as a wolf after a meal.
My face twists before I summon the courage to roll onto my back. I manage with as little as a gasp unribboning from between my chapped lips.
My mind flickers back to the witchdoctor. Hope she has a bed ready for a new patient. Because the infirmary is the first place I’ll drag myself once I can summon the energy.
But right now…
I just need to rest.
It’s all I can do.
I just stare at the toppled lampshade, not completely fallen over, but askew. The pixies that didn’t go off foraging, they peer their wrinkled faces over the edge to watch me. Their naked, grey bodies are a ghastly sight, but how odd they must think I am, to lie here out in the open, a vulnerable target if Dray decides to wander back to the cigar room and see if his spell still has me.
I clench my eyelids shut, then open, shut, then open.
A burn prickles at my eyeballs, not unlike a thousand needles just nick and nick and nick at them. Somewhere between the salty tears that won’t stop falling from them, and the spell that had my eyelids frozen in place, open, and so they are all dried up.
They burn .
Another complaint I’ll have for the witchdoctor.
I’ll have a list for her today.
It took an hour after the spell faded before I finally managed to peel myself off the floor.
I made it to the infirmary, though it was a trek of limping and leaning my weight on the walls and bannisters, and I arrived with my hair like a wild mane, dark circles smearing my eyes, and a too-puffy face from all the self-pitying sobs I had to shudder back.
The witchdoctor didn’t ask questions. She never does.
She’s the old-fashioned sort of witch. The one who feeds on youthful blood to keep her beauty, the kind that definitely uses human sacrifices in her rituals, and she’s never all that interested in us, the students.
She’s here for the stable income.
After all, she is low gentry.
But she’s damn good at what she does.
Balms, mostly, she kneads into my muscles, tonics for my mind, and a calcium drip for my bones.
I’m released before curfew, and though I’m as fatigued as if I have spent the day skiing on the slopes, and there are still blooming aches in my body, some blemishes of scattered bruises around my knees, I manage well enough to take my sick certificate to the masters of the classes I missed and will miss tomorrow.
I don’t really need to take tomorrow off.
But that didn’t stop me from negotiating an extra day with the witchdoctor. Just some money from one hand to another, and I am medically advised to have the rest of the week off.
It doesn’t stop the masters from dishing out assignments and giving me work to catch up on.
I keep to my dorm room for the rest of the night.
I do some good. I do something that would make Father nod his gentle, reassuring approval. A slight gesture, but a powerful one.
I start my assignments.
Mathematics is easiest.
I polish that one off first. Probably got most of the answers wrong, algebra isn’t my strong suit, but I do like puzzles, and maths isn’t so different to a puzzle.
It’s History I struggle with tonight.
Papers and books sprawled all over my bed, pencils and highlighters scattering the pages, I look up as the door creaks open, and the draught from the corridor rushes in.
Courtney bustles inside, a puffy yellow snow jacket bulking her up like a pee-stained marshmallow. The Home for the Misplaced might need some more funding—or a nudge in the right direction for shopping locations, because that is ghastliest puffer jacket I have ever seen.
My mouth turns down at the corners.
But maybe it’s more seeing Courtney that does that, not so much the jacket.
She finds me on the bed with her gaze. Her shoulders slump, the softest gesture of relief. “You’re back.”
I bite down on the end of my pencil. My teeth dent the wood, and I watch her move around the foot of my bed for her own.
The other two beds are unoccupied.
I don’t care where Serena and Asta are, I just hope they stay gone for a while.
Courtney tugs off the damp jacket, then tosses it onto the dresser. “Where have you been?”
“In the cigar room,” I say, luring the pencil’s end out of my mouth. I tap it on the bone of my knee. It smarts a little, but what smarts more is Courtney’s disinterest in my vanishing act. “Did you look for me?”
She nods, her cheeks and nose all red, and so I know she has been outside this evening. “I checked the infirmary before breakfast.”
“And…?” I hike my brows, waiting for more places she checked, more of a search effort.
“You weren’t there.” She drops onto the foot of her bed and kicks off her snowboots. “I ran into Master Welham on the staircase, so I told him you were missing. He sent some imps to look for you in all the vacant classrooms and broom closets”
“I wasn’t in a classroom.” I toss the pencil down. It smacks onto the spread of papers. “I was just downstairs. You didn’t think to check the toilets in the cigar room?”
That is, after all, where I had gone. Where she knew I was going.
“Why would I check the toilets in the cigar room?” She throws a frown at me, and the red of her face is ugly in the firelight. “Only juniors use those toilets. It’s on the other side of the Living Quarter.”
“Because you knew that’s where I was going,” I snap and strike at my books. “You told me to go there.”
Her brows hike and she stares at me, a blank look of surprise and offense. “I did not.”
I cock my head to the side as I imitate her in an unkind pitch, “ Go to the cigar room, it’ll be empty at this time .”
“Olivia,” she scoffs. “I didn’t say that.”
I’m about to say it, the obvious question with the obvious answer.
Well who the fuck did say it, then?
But the answer comes before the question.
I slide my gaze to the bed in the far corner.
Asta’s bed.
Asta, the illusionist—and the only thing she can manipulate is sound.
“Fuck.” I hiss and fall back into my pillows. “Asta,” I say with a bleak look at Courtney. “Asta used your voice—and made it sound like it was coming from your bed.”
And I wouldn’t have known it, because the curtains were pulled over just enough that, if I’d bothered to look, I wouldn’t have seen that Courtney wasn’t awake, her mouth not moving with the words she wasn’t speaking.
It clicks, and I realise I am a fucking idiot.
Courtney’s drapes were pulled closed all the way. The muted enchantments would be in place—she wouldn’t have heard me bicker with Asta, or toss and turn, or even the door shutting.
Asta’s curtains were only partially closed.
I’m so stupid.
So fucking stupid.
After a moment, Courtney shakes her head. “Alright, new rule. If we don’t see each other, then we can’t trust that it’s us.”
I would nod if the trap didn’t stun me so much.
Did Asta spend all that time, all those hours, in the room just waiting for a way to lure me out? She must have known I would need to use the bathroom at some point. Maybe I am wrong, maybe she truly did try to sleep and I annoyed her so much that she decided to throw me into Dray’s warpath so she could get some shut eye.
Or maybe the witch stayed awake, waiting .
Dray had a lookout in the cigar room, while he enjoyed his time in the grand parlour, and that lookout snitched.
Asta must have known that, known that Mikal was there.
A bitter laugh escapes me.
Courtney frowns my way, a touch of worry on her twisted mouth.
But I let the laugh jolt my chest.
Because I am a fucking idiot.
I’m going to need to tread awfully careful this year.
At least better than I have been doing.
I spend so much time locked up in the dorm room, rushing through my assignments, that I manage to hand them all in before the morning of the weekend.
How decent the assignments are is questionable, but at least they are done. Most teachers tend to up-score me anyway, given my surname, or they take pity on me for my handicap.
Either way, I take the extra grade.
Keeps my father somewhat happy with me.
The last assignment in my hand, the folded notebook paper of scribbles and rubbed out pencil markings, is the one I delayed turning in.
Save the best for last, right?
I make my way through the chilly corridors of the old chalet. My tights are thermal-lined, but they do only so much to stop the cold of the night air from creeping over my legs. My slippers scuff and slap on the floors as I rush to the East Quarter, where the tower reaches up to the misty skies.
I don’t know if Eric is on duty tonight, if he is teacher or student, if he will even be in the tower at all. But I prepared for the maybe. I pinched my cheeks, lightly colour blotted my lips, brushed out my braids into soft waves, and tugged on an off-the-shoulder ivory sweater that shows the distinct lack of bra strap down my left shoulder.
It’s bold of me to assume he will even notice—or care.
But I have to be a little on the bold side.
My latest encounter with Dray, it just reinforces my need for protection. The ultimate protection for a woman witch in my world is marriage.
Not to get ahead of myself, but this bold flirtation, it is little more than playing politics.
As my wretched Grandmother Ethel sometimes says, ‘ Those who wait are left behind. ’
I’m already lagging.
So I go looking for Eric Harling.
But he finds me, instead.
A door opens down the corridor that separates me from the mouth of the tower’s zigzagging staircase—and Eric steps out of the small faculty lounge tucked down the way.
“Hey!” Ok, sue me, I couldn’t come up with a better way to get his attention. I don’t know whether to call him Eric or Sir, but I got the result because he arches a brow right at me.
His lashes flutter with a hesitant blink before he pulls away from the door with a small smile tugging at his rosy lips.
My cheeks are hot, flushed, as I make to close the distance between us. “Um, I have my—” I flap the folded paper. “—assignment. And uh, I know I wasn’t in class, so… I came to apologise for that.”
Eric’s bemused glint sharpens his caramel gaze. But the smile that dances on his lips is soft enough that I’m put at ease.
He extends his hand, as if to take the folded paper pinched between my fingers—but his hand bypasses the assignment… and lifts to my cheek.
The brush of his thumb on my temple is tender and fleeting. His hand comes away too soon, and I am too shocked, too stunned to react when I should.
I watch his hand recede—then I blink on the fluorescent yellow streak that stains his thumb.
Highlighter.
I feel the instant burn on my face, the heat I can’t contain.
I had fucking highlighter on me.
My mouth sucks inwards, and I just glare at the streak of yellow on his thumb, and I wonder, fleetingly, how easy it would be to lob myself off the nearest tower.
“You have been catching up on your work, then,” he decides, and finally, the smile takes root, it turns crooked on his lovely mouth. “Witchdoctor Urma sent Milton a sick card. You were poorly?”
He must see the blush that is eating me up whole, because I feel it as though someone has set me alight. Ruminating on the highlighter. Of all the times I’ve wished to be swallowed up by the ground…
“Better now,” I say with a loosened breath.
“You look it.”
Those words strike me.
Eric doesn’t question how sick I was, doesn’t question the legitimacy of it. I think… he’s flirting?
No other teacher would give such an unnecessary comment, an inappropriate comment one could argue.
It lures my gaze to his.
“Are you my teacher today?” I blurt out the question in a breathy sound. My toes take the weight of my body as I lean closer, as if ready to step closer—and I know I’m in danger of a major fuck up. And still, I add, “You aren’t wearing your robes.”
Eric gives a lazy, one-shouldered shrug. But the heat that crawls over his cheeks like a frosty wind has hit him, it tells me enough.
“It’s Friday night,” he says, soft, his gaze flickering over my bare shoulder. He forces his eyes back to meet mine. “I’m just Eric.”
I lean into that step, and I lift my chin to meet his gaze. “Well, Just Eric , will you accept my assignment?”
He reaches for it in the small space between us, too tight a space between a teacher and a student. But he isn’t a teacher tonight. Said so himself. So this isn’t wretchedly terrible, is it?
He pinches it between his middle and index finger. But his gaze doesn’t stray from mine.
“Ok,” I choke on the word, my face splitting, hot, and I stagger back a step. “Have a good Friday, Just Eric.”
Still, his eyes glitter into mine. “You, too, Olivia.”
I bite down on my bottom lip before I turn my back on him. It’s all I can do to not giggle like a flustered teenager, and I loathe myself for that.
I leave with a bounce in my step—and I’m sure, Eric’s gaze running over my ass as I go. I don’t look back.