Chapter 25 Things Made of Memories
Things Made of Memories
Desdemona
A
s Lucian leaves, I exhale. Fleur immediately enters the room, standing at the doorway with her hand on her hip.
“You should really stay away from him.”
“That’s the least of our concerns.” I step toward the exit.
Fleur frowns, but she can’t disagree. She follows me out, crossing the living area to what was once our suitemate’s room. Fleur steps forward and opens the closet doors.
Artica’s hand flops onto the floor, heavy. I stare at her gray lips and sightless eyes.
We have two options: tell someone or dispose of the body. For the first time in my life, I’m not the killer of the corpse I’m dealing with. But with Fleur here, I almost feel responsible. I’m the more experienced of us. Still, I can hardly recommend we burn her. I don’t know the girl—but Fleur did.
“Go to Headmistress Constance,” she says.
“How about Leiholan?” I ask.
Fleur turns to me, eyebrows rising. “The Nepenthe?”
There’s no disdain in her voice. It makes me feel guilty for ever speaking to him the way I had. Not that he remembers.
Maybe someday he will.
“He’s trustworthy,” I say, realizing Fleur has probably never met him. She’s a Eunoia, and they’re not allowed in Combat Training. “He’s the best person here.”
Fleur feels for Artica’s pulse again, as if something might still be beating beneath her pale skin. I’m quiet as I say, “She’s dead.”
Fleur takes a deep breath. “I want to know why.”
I nod, saying, “I’ll be back.”
“Where are you going?” she calls. I don’t answer as I exit, darting across the campus to Leiholan’s combat room.
The sight is the saddest one yet. I watch as he struggles to balance a sword and grip a crutch at the same time.
The crutch falls, then the sword follows.
He swears as he goes down too, finally turning to me.
“Maybe it’s a good thing.” My quiet words echo through the room. “You never really wanted that sword.”
Leiholan stares at his fallen blade, a tremor in his hands and sweat on his forehead.
“There were three people I knew I’d miss when I left,” I say, walking toward him. “And you’re kind of the most important.”
“Would mean more to me if I remembered you,” he grumbles, falling to his back. Sweat soaks through his shirt.
“A lot of things would mean more to a lot of people if they remembered me.” There’s nothing like it: loving people who’ve never had the chance to love you back. “Someone died in my suite,” I say. “You once told me to stay away from the headmistress… so I didn’t know who else to go to.”
Leiholan sits up as he looks at me. “I told you that?”
I swallow and nod.
“You were more important to me than I thought,” he says. There’s a slur to his speech, but it isn’t the same as when he’s drunk. His words blur together as if he’s too tired to enunciate.
“Why do you say that?” I ask, my throat tight.
I know I was important to him—he wouldn’t have jumped in front of the kapha and lost his leg for me otherwise. But hearing him say it… it’s almost like I could be important again.
Leiholan shrugs, his finger running along the ridge of the bottle. “I wouldn’t risk speaking against Cynthia.”
What do I do with that information? I’m the one who knows he cared—not him. No amount of words will make it so. Nothing will make him remember except that damn Soul Ruby.
It’s not enough for people to know they loved me; they need to feel it again. Until they do, I can’t put too much emotion into them—because they’ll never understand it if they don’t know our history.
“So…” I lick my lips and stand taller. I came for one reason, and it wasn’t sentimentality. “The dead person in my suite?”
Leiholan chuckles, honest but followed by a cough. “You’re a mess, kid. But I don’t know what you want me to do about a dead student. If they could pin me to a murder, I don’t doubt they would.”
I sigh, but I nod, because of course I understand. Of course I do.
“My apologies,” he adds.
My breath hitches. In two words, he makes it clear—he doesn’t know he saved my life. He doesn’t know how we fought. He doesn’t remember my apology.
I meet his gaze, but it’s indifferent.
It’s like someone tore out my heart and ate it in front of me, my blood staining their smiling teeth.
I turn toward the door, saying, “Don’t worry about it.”
I don’t know what the right thing to do is, but I can’t stay with Leiholan, looking into eyes that once viewed me with love, now seeing me with apathy, like everyone else.
I head straight for the headmistress. It’s probably not the right thing to do, but when I arrive, she isn’t there. Defeated, I walk back to the suite. When I enter, Lilac’s with Fleur.
“Hey,” Lilac whispers, her eyebrows furrowing. “Is Leiholan coming?”
I shake my head.
“The headmistress?” Fleur asks.
“She wasn’t here.”
“What about Leiholan? Why isn’t he with you?” Lilac asks.
I’m quiet for a moment too long. “I couldn’t find him.”
“I can alert my mother,” Lilac says, not missing a beat. “We don’t have to bother anyone else.”
I shiver at the thought of Queen Leiana, the ghost of pain settling back into my fingers.
Lilac kneels next to Fleur, both of them looking at Artica. Lilac lowers her voice, saying, “Poor girl.”
She doesn’t stay long before heading back into her room.
Fleur and I walk to ours. The moment the door creaks closed, she whispers, “Why did you lie?”
“I didn’t.” Or, I don’t remember lying. But if I had, Fleur would be the first to know.
As her eyes glow green, I concede, asking, “About what?”
“Leiholan,” Fleur mutters. “You said you couldn’t find him.”
I shake my head, realizing I forgot I lied. “I don’t know. Just a gut feeling.”
This can’t be pinned on him.
Fleur lies on her bed, staring at the ceiling. “I know a lot has happened, and this may seem like the least of your problems, but you really should stay away from Lucian.”
For a moment, the simplicity of talking to my roommate reminds me so much of Aralia. It presses against my chest.
“Why?” I ask. Fleur doesn’t answer, and when I turn to her, her white hair falls off the bed, her eyes wide open. “Fleur,” I whisper. “Why?”
When her eyes meet mine, they’re glassy. “Forgive me,” she says, dabbing at her cheeks to catch the tears. “Artica is getting to me.”
“Why do you think I should stay away from Lucian?”
“I suppose it’s nothing he did. It’s what happens around him.”
“What happens around him?” I ask.
“Things go wrong,” she whispers. “People get hurt.”
Tell me about it. When he actually knew me, he tried to kill me once. And when he didn’t know me, he actually did.
“All my life,” Fleur continues, “Eleanora and I imagined what it would be like to be with him. We even made a pact…” Her voice breaks.
“It seems absurd now, but we promised to each try to win his affection. Then he shattered Eleanora’s heart, and I failed to see it—I believed our pact still held.
It destroyed our friendship.” She takes a trembling breath.
“Then Lucian slays a monster and is hailed as a hero. But Eleanora vanishes, and no one seems to care at all.”
I don’t know what to say. I killed Eleanora. No one knows why she’s gone.
My throat is tight, my chest tighter, as I say, “That sucks.”
“Yes.” Fleur licks her lips again. “It sounds foolish aloud. It scarcely even sounds like Lucian’s fault…
But I miss her. And it’s as though the whole world, the universe, has moved on.
As if she never existed at all.” Fleur breaks off then, tears spilling freely, her breaths breaking.
“No one hears me when I speak of her. What if the same fate awaits Artica?”
Both sides of that coin make sense to me—being the one forgotten and the one doomed to remember.
I stand, walking to her side of the room and sitting on her bed.
Then I hug her. I have to. I can’t imagine a world where I wouldn’t.
One day I’ll tell her what happened to Eleanora. I promise myself that.
Fleur sits up abruptly, flinging me off her and looking at me like I’m an enemy—or more like dirt on the bottom of her shoe. The conversation is over, but it can’t be. There’s more I need.
“How many languages do you speak?”
Fleur raises an eyebrow. “Visnatus teaches the Eunoia a lot of things.”
I tuck my hair behind my ear, saying, “I have a book.”
“Just because we talked about Eleanora doesn’t make us friends,” Fleur says, her voice sharp.
I pause a moment.
“I know.” Does she think I don’t?
“Favors aren’t free,” she says. “Are you willing to open a debt?”
I narrow my eyes. “If you tell a soul about this, don’t expect to be repaid.”
Fleur nods, extending her hand. I settle the book in her palm.
?
When it’s time for Elemental Magic, I exit the school into the garden, just like every day.
The sun is bright in my eyes, and the path is harder to follow than I remember. Branches press in where they didn’t before.
I pass the purple tree where I used to meet Aralia. It’s thicker than it should be—and I almost don’t notice Aralia sitting under it, joint in hand. I stop. I should just keep walking, but I stop. It must be awkward. I must look strange. I step away—
“Hey,” she says, voice light.
I turn toward her. “Hey.”
She holds the joint up, balanced between her fingers. “I saw you looking.” She shrugs. “Want some?”
I pause a moment. Try to nod. “Yeah.”
“Come get it.”
I laugh a little. There’s no reason to be this awkward. It’s just Aralia.
She hands me the joint as I sit down and lean back. “You’re new here?”
I inhale the smoke. “Yeah.”
“And how are you enjoying our lovely institution?”
It feels like the same girl, just different circumstances. That’s supposed to mean everything—but she’s the same. It’s me who changed.
“The joints are better than the magic,” I mutter.
“That’s why I don’t see you in Elemental Magic?”
“I’m a Fire Folk. I’m not all that welcome.” The second half is far more true than the first.
If I used fire right now, would blood magic rise, outing me as an Arcane? Could someone see it isn’t just the Flame, but the Soul Flame? No matter how much Mial taught me about blood, I still lack control. Almost every time I use it, someone dies.
What am I supposed to do with that?
Aralia nods. “I wouldn’t want to be there, either. I hardly do now.”
I smile a little. “That’s why you’re skipping?”
“That much is obvious, no? But you’re with the prince. You should be fine.”
“What?” I ask, blowing out smoke.
She gives me a sidelong glance, a little smirk drawing at the corners of her lips. “I saw you with Lucian.”
Apparently, from the outside, we seem less like a necessary alliance and more like we genuinely want to be around each other. But I think of waking up next to him. He said he wants to know me—wants his memories back. I didn’t think we’d get this far, now that I’m an Arcane to him. But here we are.
It complicates things.
“He’s not so well-liked right now,” I say, glancing down and running my fingers through the grass.
“True,” Aralia says. “His reputation might be worse than mine. But it won’t stick like mine will.”
I glance up at her. She never talked like this before. Maybe she’s not the same. Soon, all these kids will ascend into political roles. I don’t know what I’ll do when that happens or where I’ll go.
The world will move on without me, like it always has.
I have never had a place in it.
My chest tightens, and my fingers curl into the dirt, ripping out blades of grass.
“Why not?” I ask, trying to stop thinking about my unreliable future.
Aralia tugs the joint out of my hand. “He has power.”
I thought the same thing before I met him—but after watching Piphany nearly slit his throat, I’m not so sure. I could imagine Queen Leiana killing him. I wonder what she’s already done to him. Just as my mom stealing my memories has shaped who I am, I’m sure the queen’s abuse has shaped him.
But at the end of the day, to everyone else, Lucian looks like he has influence, which I guess is just as powerful.
“You won’t be here forever,” I say to Aralia. “I doubt your reputation will follow you.”
“I don’t see how it wouldn’t.” She shrugs, tapping the ash off the joint. “All the same people will be around me.”
I won’t be around her. I never belonged in this world, and I don’t think there was ever a future where I would’ve stayed.
But Lucian will never escape, just like Aralia won’t.
It strikes me as a world I don’t want to be a part of.
Aralia bumps her shoulder into mine, startling me as I glance up.
“Don’t look so glum,” she says, forcing a smile. “It’s the way of the worlds.”
I’ve never believed in change—not in a way that truly helps people. But right now, I almost want to. For her. For me.
“Maybe the worlds should burn.”
At that, Aralia laughs. It still sounds the same. For a second, I can see us on our bedroom floor, whispering in the night. I always planned to use her, but I think I needed a friend more than anything.
“Get me a match,” she remarks, glancing at me over her shoulder. With the joint between her lips, she adds, her voice muffled, “Not that you’d need one.”
I don’t know how she does it, but I laugh at that, the feeling warm in my chest.