Chapter Ten #2
his teeth. His suddenly very sharp, very numerous teeth.
She wasn’t about to be intimidated, however.
“How do you even talk with those razor blades in your mouth?” she scoffed.
And it seemed to work. His expression went back to something less predatory.
“That’s the question you want to ask me? The breadth of my knowledge, my skills. The fact that I am a near-mythical creature to everything
you were before this. And your curiosity is about where my teeth go when I’m speaking.”
“Oh, I’m sorry I wasn’t appropriately awed, your lordship,” she said, as she doffed an imaginary cap. “Please do tell me about
the time you sat on a throne of skulls in Calabaraia, as the King of the Fen handed you a giant crown made from the blood
of your defeated foes.”
“There is no King of the Fen.”
“I was joking. I know hierarchies don’t exist there.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? And do you know why?”
“Of course I do. Because they are completely baffled by the idea of anything ruling over anything else. They can’t understand it, even when we explain.
There, only a kind of chaos reigns,” she said—and now both his eyebrows were up.
In something like surprised admiration, she thought it was.
Though it melted down into withering so quickly, she couldn’t really claim it definitely had been.
“You should really stop reading and accepting all the unsanctioned accounts. You’re going to get yourself in trouble, bookworm,”
he said, as he shook his head in this weary of her nonsense sort of way.
She had no idea why, however.
“How much trouble can that be, when those accounts are in the library?”
“The library does whatever it wants. Students do whatever they are told.”
“So everyone else just reads whatever any professor says you should.”
He spread his hands again. “Exactly so, yes.”
“But what if they’re lying? What if what they say is dusty and dry and doesn’t help you at all? I could fall into the Underneath
and get melted by fen, because I thought you should bow to royalty that isn’t actually real,” she said, and though he looked
annoyed, he didn’t do anything other than sigh. So she stuck it to him. “You don’t actually have an answer for that, do you?”
“Well, apart from the obvious one: that this is precisely why it’s a bad idea for someone like you to be in a place like here.
I knew it as soon as I saw you. So sure of what’s right and fair, you completely forget nobody else cares, and that every
one of them resent how it makes them feel to hear you do.”
“One look through a windshield couldn’t have told you that.”
“You only think that because you didn’t see the expression on your own face.”
“The expression is irrelevant when nothing I’ve done backs that assessment up. I just slink to lectures and lurk in the library
and say nothing about how unjust this whole goddamn place is.”
“You say it to that little friend of yours. You’re saying it now, to your worst fucking enemy,” he said, half laughing with incredulity as he did. And to be fair to him, it did sound ridiculous, when he put it like
that. Or at least, ridiculous enough that she could somewhat accept it.
“So that’s why you don’t like me. Some idea of me as too bold.”
“Stop searching for reasons. I am Areifen, fickle chaos. I need none.”
“Then let’s just go back to the lessons. I mean, it’s not like I relish talking to you, anyway,” she said, more sour sounding
than she intended. As if she was actually enjoying the conversation or wanted to know about his deep-down feelings. Instead
of seeming as normal and furious at him as she wanted to be.
Though if he noticed, he didn’t let it show.
He just folded his arms across his chest. Leaned back against the rickety stage behind him. It groaned in protest at his enormous
body, but it held. “Fine,” he said. “You’re gathering wrong.”
“And you think I’m not aware of that fact.”
“I think you’re aware of it. I don’t think you know why you’re fucking up.”
“Well, maybe somebody here should give lectures on that, before they give lectures on the entire life story of a man who didn’t
even discover the Underneath, was a terrible magic wielder, and eventually got eaten by a goblin that had replaced his son.”
They were on part three of the same story so far.
Cobble was a kind professor—he was sweeter and more approachable than Hargreaves, or Yates who supposedly taught Horticulture but spent lectures screaming at everyone for being useless, or even the elusive headmaster, who everyone just referred to as the overseer. But he was also a rambler.
She had gotten more from one book than she had from hours of his lessons.
Hell, she was getting more from Harker, even though he’d yet to really teach her a thing. “They don’t have to for everyone
else. Everyone else has already been told,” he said, and all she could think was at least he’s willing to admit it. Even if she kept her response sharp.
“Yes, I’m aware of what money and station and access to inner circles affords people. And what that means for someone like
me. Or even for the things that magic is used for. That doesn’t change the fact that they should do things differently. That they should start with how to make a fucking shield, before a deranged vampire burns your fucking
face off.”
“I told you. I didn’t aim for your face.”
“Maybe not. But other people could.”
He went to say something after that. Something exasperated and contemptuous, she figured. Only for some reason, he stopped
midway through making the words. The eyes he was almost rolling went to her instead. And for just a second, she thought she
saw something flash across them.
Before he glanced away, in a manner that said it hadn’t.
He looked almost bored suddenly. And he sounded it, too.
“Was it that third year? Sebastian something or other?” he asked, as offhandedly as he’d mentioned the forest thing. The trick he had said some student she didn’t even know had wanted to play. They hadn’t, so she had wondered ever since if he had been lying. If he had just tried to scare her.
But something about this said otherwise.
It made her think of the sandy-haired boy she had seen in the dining hall the other day, glaring at her over his soup. And
hadn’t he shoved by her in the hall once? Maybe, she thought. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody ever offers their names, when they’re busy being rude over my charity shop
clothes, or the hair I can’t even spell dry. Never mind style into anything they’d approve of.”
“So it’s just insults. No one is physically hurting you.”
“Not as of yet, no. I just mean that they could.”
“And you’re telling the truth there. You’re not lying to me.”
“Why would I lie about something like that? It’s hardly a risk for me to tell you that you have a rival for your murderous
intentions. Worst-case scenario is you let him do what he was going to do anyway. Best-case scenario, you kill him to secure
first dibs on my beating heart. Or have I got which is worse and which is best the wrong way around?” She gave him a little
faux-musing. “I suppose it depends on which way he wants to go about ending my life. Dismembering sounds more horrible than
being drained of blood, after all.”
“Don’t say dismem—” he started to tell her. But then he seemed to cut himself off, before he could get the whole word out.
He pinched his lips together; she saw the muscles in his jaw clench. Like he knew he was getting too frustrated, over something
he shouldn’t have been frustrated over at all.
What did it matter if someone decided to remove her arms? It was a strange thing for him to seethe about.
But he did it all the same, for a second.
And then he seemed to wrestle himself back under control. I bet that countdown clock to extreme thirst is spinning like a top thanks to all your taunting, she thought, and that seemed to fit. He turned his back, and when he looked at her again, there was something steely in
his expression. Resolved.
Ready to get this over with.
“You think gathering is about getting hand placement exactly right; it’s not. Like all the basic forms, it’s just a way to
help you get into the right frame of mind. Then the others focus on whatever you manage to call to you. Like a pen—once you
pick it up, you know what’s going to happen, and you can then decide what you want to flow out of the tip and onto the page.
But first, before you do, you have to do whatever it is that fills it with ink,” he said, all in a big burst. He even did
hand gestures of the kind you might expect to see from a swimming instructor trying to explain how to breaststroke, while
someone drowns right in front of them. Spread, hitting the air over and over, full of impatience.
But she couldn’t deny it: Damn, he explained it well.
It hit better than anything she’d read. Suddenly, it seemed clear.
She couldn’t praise him for it, however. “All right, then. What does fill it?”
“Emotions. And the stronger you feel them, the better.”
“That can’t be true,” she insisted. “Every book says it’s clarity of mind.”
“Yeah, honestly, I think most of them just wish that was the case.”
She shot him a skeptical look. “Why would they wish a thing like that?”
“Because they were written by old, stuffy, rich white men.”
“Careful, Harker. Now who’s the one questioning things?”
He sighed for that. And he didn’t just gesture, when he started speaking again.
He paced. “That wasn’t questioning, it’s just the truth.
Barrett’s Guide, The Complete History, A Secret Etymology—they were all written by the sort of humans who would vastly prefer everything run on reason, and rationality, and clean,
cool logic. But it just doesn’t. You already know it doesn’t. You’ve met chaos in the flesh. You’ve accepted that chaos runs
the Underneath. You’ve felt the chaos here, seething under the surface of the brick and mortar and wood they’ve tried to contain
it within. What else could it be but purest feeling?” he asked, by the end so almost passionate about it that she had to believe