Chapter 2 #3
It wasn’t only my friends who stared.
They definitely weren’t the only ones reading the newspaper over breakfast, either. The entire dining hall fell silent when I entered the high-ceilinged, cathedral-like room.
The difference with my friends was that they looked scared.
They watched me approach, faces pale and serious, eyes strangely wide. Then I saw the photo of my face on the newspaper Draken held, and that Miranda, Luc, Jolie, Nyx, and Darragh all huddled around, reading over Draken’s shoulder.
Seemingly every table in the second years’ dining hall had its own copy of one of the four major newspapers in Magical Britain. On the one Draken held, a photo of me stared out from under a bolded headline, looking blood-streaked and deathly pale.
“BONES HEIR SAVED BY HALF-MAGICAL!”
In smaller print, it read: “What was she doing in Caelum’s Room?”
The crazy thing was, the headlines weren’t even that negative. Apart from the frequent insinuations that I must be sleeping with Bones (cough), they certainly could have been far worse, in terms of their overall language.
I remember being relieved by that.
That relief, in retrospect, was ludicrously naive.
I even thought maybe the fallout wouldn’t be too terrible, given how Caelum and Malefic were being respectively portrayed by the press. I didn’t think either of us would come off as heroes, exactly, but maybe at least not as the primary villains?
The headlines more or less continued in that vein as I looked around the room.
“THE ROYAL AND THE HALF-brEED: THE FUTURE OF MAGICAL brITAIN?”
“HYbrID PROTECTS BONES HEIR IN VIOLENT CONFRONTATION!”
And the significantly less-dramatic: “LA FEY HYbrID QUESTIONED AT SCENE.”
The somewhat positive or at least neutral spin in headlines didn’t help me in the slightest, of course.
It had been difficult enough to get through the last few days of classes.
No one had known exactly what happened at that point, and even the papers seemed to be mostly speculating based on half-truths, rumors, and sensationalist interviews of students who knew Bones, along with teachers and relatives who had no idea what truly happened.
Once the headlines with me in them started to appear, all of that changed.
Over the course of a few hours, the campus went crazy.
The first rumors, and the ones that seemed to stick with the most people, involved Bones’s father bursting in on us having sex, losing his mind with rage, and attacking both of us, which is how he nearly killed his son.
The next wave of stories Jolie told me about involved Bones hiding me to keep his father from murdering me in some kind of blood ritual meant to curse all of those born of hybrid blood.
That one still had us sleeping together, but complicated the story with politics and conspiracy theories that postulated Bones acting as a spy for the Praecuri and the Ethnarch.
It was definitely the most generous to me and to Bones, and, ironically, the closest to the truth.
I also hadn’t met a single person who believed that version.
The third set of rumors came from the royals themselves: they were convinced I worked for a pro-human terrorist faction, and that I’d used chimaeras to manipulate Bones’s mind for the purpose of turning him against his own father, and against those with royal blood more generally.
They thought I’d broken Bones, essentially, which is how I convinced him to destroy Dark Cathedral, and to aid me in murdering anyone who got in my way.
In the more elaborate versions of that story, my role got wrapped into conspiracies around the Ethnarch consolidating power to push out those with royal blood.
According to Jolie, those conspiracies far predated my arrival in Magique, and had long been used by The Priest to fire up Dark Cathedral sympathizers.
Royals invested in the Ethnarch story thought I likely worked for Forsooth, the British Magus Imperius, and the Ethnarch himself as part of an anti-imperial crusade. They speculated that the Ethnarch would use me, Bones, and others to go after the King himself soon.
I got threatened, of course.
The threats got bad enough, and credible enough, I ended up needing a praecurus escort to go with me to take my last four finals. I was ordered by my cousin to stay in my dormitory whenever possible, at least until the winter break.
I had no idea if Forsooth was right about the source of the leak being the Praecuri, but it was true I talked to a lot of them after Malefic tried to kill me.
The rest of that Saturday and all day Sunday I got hauled into empty classrooms to answer questions from a variety of different agents, mostly Praecuri from the insignias on their uniforms, but also British Magical Enforcement (B.M.E.) and the version of Magical police that covered Federation Europa, known as E.A.M.E.s.
I even spoke to two agents from the Guild of Regulatory Enforcement (G.O.R.E.), the international Magical police.
In all, I think I spoke to fourteen different Magical interrogators, roughly two at a time, and several more than once. I told the story of what happened to me and what I’d done from beginning to end until it all began to blur in my head.
I also got interrogated by at least one Oracle, who worked for the Praecuri and read my mind while I recounted everything.
In a different interview, a fluffy, round-eyed, purple and green-striped creature sat on my shoulder flicking its strangely floating tail.
During my questioning, it meeped different tones by my ear whenever I gave an answer.
I was told later that the creature was called a trunkle, and could sense if someone was telling the truth.
It definitely made a lot of chirping, meeping noises when I claimed to have stopped by Bones’s tower to talk to him about my final exam, so I had to guess it was good at its job.
The Praecuri agents were either too tactful to make an issue of it, or they decided it wasn’t relevant to the inquiry, but I caught a few exchanged looks during those parts of my interviews.
They never came out and confronted me directly about my lies.
After they finished questioning me at Malcroix Mansion, I was brought to London for a formal hearing on Sunday night.
That took place in a government office building. I had to use a special mirror in Forsooth’s tower to get there, accompanied by two Praecuri in full uniform, including formal black capes and insignia pins. My cousin hadn’t been with them.
Worse, they took me into formal custody for that part; I wore magical restraints for the hearing itself, which had me shaking, I admit.
I’d honestly worried I was about to go to prison.
But they must’ve believed the important parts of my story, or they simply didn’t care about me enough to imprison me, because they let me return to Forsooth’s office once my formal statement had been given.
I heard from Forsooth after, while I drank tea by his fireplace, still shaky from the experience, that Bones had his memories taken, too.
So did Malefic, which maybe shouldn’t have surprised me.
I didn’t hear formally until the next day that Bones and I had been cleared of all charges.
Malefic, on the other hand, had not been.
His photo had been in the papers even more frequently than mine or Bones’s.
In every image, he glared out of the front page with murder in his eyes.
They showed his arm bandaged with black, metallic-looking cloth, which, I admit, disappointed me at first, until I read that his arm had been reattached, but he would never regain full use of it.
The magic I’d used in the severing hex had done damage beyond what the magi-physicians could heal.
As for Bones himself, I hadn’t seen him since he’d been unconscious on his bedroom’s stone floor, his face swollen and bloody, bones broken, his skin deathly pale, his magical aura scarcely visible.
I tried to obtain permission to visit him at the hospital, but got repeatedly denied.
I wasn’t even sure who denied the request, if it had been his mother, or Malefic, or the hospital staff, the Praecuri watching over him, or even Bones himself.
My cousin didn’t come out and say it, but I knew from the papers they’d received death threats against Bones.
He’d gotten a lot of them, according to the articles I read, particularly from The Priest’s groupies.
I suspected the larger threat came from Dark Cathedral itself, although the newspapers were careful never to call them out by name.
I also read there’d been several attempts against his life already.
I wished I could stop thinking about it.
It’s not like there was anything I could do. I had to accept that I had no idea when or where Bones might reappear, or what condition he’d be in when he did.
For now, I needed a change of scenery.
My options were limited, but in the end I decided to bundle up and walk over to Frumpy’s.
I had a number of projects to keep my mind busy.
Those projects, which were really just one project I’d broken into several different sections, had grown more urgent over the past week.
I tried to tell myself it was less urgent with Malefic in prison, but I couldn’t make myself believe it.
I’d spent over a year trying to figure out what was wrong with Bones’s magic. Whenever I thought I might be close to an answer, I would learn something that sent me back to the drawing board, looking through a new set of magical mutations.
Nothing quite fit. Nothing I’d found yet, anyway.
Now I’d have the library pretty much to myself for the next three to four weeks to research the subject for real.
First, though, I owed my brother a letter.
I was long overdue in writing him some kind of explanation.
From what he’d written me last, Archie had already seen at least one newspaper with my face on it, despite how isolated the Obeah supposedly kept their students inside the Sanctum Occulus.
Arcturus, understandably, had a lot of questions about what he’d read, and I needed to answer him with something with more than vague assurances that the whole thing had been overblown.
I hadn’t written him so far mostly due to time.
Interrogations, classes, revising, finals, meetings with Forsooth and my cousin, attempts to get in to see Bones, fielding questions from my friends, dealing with my Praecuri guard dogs––all of that took up my days from that Saturday morning until everyone left campus a week later.
Those things sucked up every bit of my mental energy, too, not to mention fending off the frequent curses, hexes, magical creatures, and hostile chimaeras as I traveled between classrooms, although my praecuri bodyguards fielded at least some of those.
I didn’t have any of that now.
I dumped an excess of cat food in Wraith’s bowls and refreshed all of her water.
I put on thick leggings, a long skirt and a long jumper, and tugged on the only decent boots I had against the snow.
Wrapping a scarf around my neck that Jolie bought me, I grabbed my winter coat, a thick wool hat, gloves, and my book satchel as I headed towards the door.
In my satchel, which I’d packed first, I’d already stuffed a stack of blank parchment, four quills, two pots of ink, five library books I checked out earlier that week on magical birth defects, and a novel I’d picked up on a whim during my last trip to Bonescastle.
By the time I made it outside, the snow was coming down a lot harder.
The landscape and sky looked eerily dark.
I trudged through a wall of thick, wet, falling flakes, which muffled sound and brought a faint panic as my visibility dramatically dimmed.
It felt like I trudged through a snow globe, like nothing existed outside the swirl of white and the tiny section of trail I could see disappearing rapidly in front of me.
When I looked up, I could just make out the orange and gold glow of Malcroix Mansion.
The second floor appeared to be well lit, as was the East Walkway and the central building.
The Southeast Tower glowed from the first story all the way up to the top, and I wondered who remained behind to work in there, and if it might be Blackstone and Luc.
That tower held the offices of a number of senior professors.
Then I noticed the smallest tower.
Bones’s Tower, as I thought of it in my mind, was the furthest away, on the far northwest edge of the castle. I likely wouldn’t have seen it at all if I wasn’t on the slight hill overlooking the field and gardens where the Mansion lived, and if the tower itself hadn’t been lit.
It took another second for that information to sink in.
The tower was lit.
I sucked in a breath, feeling my heart start to hammer violently in my chest.
That tower had been dark the entire week. I knew, because I’d checked.
Today was the first time it had really snowed in that time, at least during the day, so the view had been clear, even from the window in my room, which happened to be the furthest west in our suite, which was the furthest northwest in Valarian.
Now the very top windows of that tower shone with a greenish-gold hue.
My feet moved faster down the path as the realization sunk in.
Bones was back.
My throat closed at the thought.
Bones was back. How was he back? When had he gotten here?
Had the Praecuri used the cover of everyone leaving campus to move him?
My boot slipped in my hurry to get down the snow-covered stone steps.
I landed on my arse, let out an embarrassed half-laugh, but managed to climb back to my feet without falling again.
The snow was up to my shins now that I’d gotten halfway down the hill.
I’d started to wonder just how stupid I’d been to leave Valarian in the middle of a blizzard, but all those thoughts vanished as I stared up at the glowing, greenish windows in the far distance.
The tower slowly disappeared as I reached the edge of Malcroix Gardens.
I didn’t care, though.
As soon as the path flattened, and I could see the front steps of the nearest entrance to the Mansion’s ground floor, I broke into a near-run.