Chapter 51
Talisa
Three days later
“I hate it here. I want to go home,” Mira said flatly.
Because it was only the three of us tonight, we spoke in our native Abbonethy instead of the Capitolan we used in class and with the others.
Ever since finding the gory magical constructs in our sitting room, we’d all been jumping at shadows. And with good cause. Despite religiously locking our door and checking it twice, we invariably discovered more anonymous threatening notes sitting on our table when we returned later in the day.
Tonight, Juno curled up on the sofa, knitting a sock with lackluster energy.
Mira sat beside me on the worn rug, her knees drawn up to her chest, her chipped teacup cradled in both hands.
She sniffled and began sobbing.
I turned, plucked the cup out of her hands and set it aside, then pulled her into my lap. She shook against me, tears streaking her cheeks.
“Mira.” I kissed her hair. “What’s wrong? Did something happen today that you haven’t told me about?”
She shook her head. The movement dislodged another tear, which slid down her nose. She wiped it with her sleeve.
“I just—” Her voice cracked. “I hate that someone can just walk in here whenever they want and leave things for us!”
Juno’s knitting needles stopped moving.
“I miss home,” Mira whispered. She looked up at me, and the raw longing in her eyes made my throat close. “I miss our house. I miss Mama. She would have known what to do about them. She would have marched straight up to someone like Lord Lukhan or Lady Cresta and looked them in the eye and—and—”
My sister shook her head, pressed her face into my shoulder, and sobbed.
Feeling helpless that I couldn’t do more to protect them against enemies I’d made, I wrapped her in my arms and patted her back. Poised on the edge of adolescence, she still felt like a child in my arms, all sharp angles and bird-bone fragility.
“I hate it here, too,” Juno said. Her eyes were fixed on the half-finished sock hanging from her needles.
“The classes are interesting, but people like Lord Lukhan and Lady Beatrix can do whatever they want to us, and Mundise is the only instructor who speaks up when something happens. No one else cares because they don’t want us here. ”
She swung her feet off the sofa and sat up, her entire body rigid with anger.
“They don’t want commoners at their precious academy. They want us to give up and go home so everything can go back to the way it used to be. And you know what? Maybe they’re right.”
I shook my head.
“We’re not going anywhere,” I said, hating myself for making them endure more of this treatment. “We have Elio. We have the Circle of the Open Hand. There are forty-seven members now, Juno. That’s not nothing.”
“It feels like nothing when Ethmond Valens can ruin my experiment in the Beginning Potions lab and Mage-Instructor Varro pretends nothing happened,” Juno muttered.
“And Assistant Chatelaine Julissa is telling everyone she knows Alara was the one who stole your Aurelian Trials awards, because her parents are farmers and she’s a work/study student.” Mira’s voice was muffled against my shoulder.
I stroked her hair. “I know. It’s not fair.” The words tasted hollow. I was so tired from the constant, grinding vigilance of the past few days that everything ached.
In every classroom, every corridor, and at every meal, I was constantly watching for silver thorn rings, and trying to figure out who in my classes was an ally, who was an enemy, and who was neutral.
I never relaxed. And I never felt safe.
“Why do we have to stay here, where no one wants us?” Juno asked. “Can’t we just transfer to the provincial academy in Parrish? Or someplace else?”
I closed my eyes. Leaving here and starting over in Parrish sounded so tempting.
I could even pay for the move with my remaining Champion’s Grant money.
Then my stubborn streak reared up.
No, I thought. I won’t let Lukhan and his friends win. I won’t shut the door on a better future for my sisters and me.
“What? And let those soft-handed deadweights think they can win just because they were born into the right families?” I responded, using a favorite village insult for someone who shirked honest work and relied on others to support them.
“The mages who graduate from this academy are considered the best of the best. If we can hang on, doors will open for us that we could only dream about if we attended a second-rate provincial academy. We can’t let them drive us away and make us give up our future prospects.
” I took a deep breath and pulled out the ultimate argument.
“Besides, Mama would be so disappointed if we left here. Remember how excited she was when Lady Adalburga told us we qualified for admission here?”
Outwardly, I knew I sounded confident.
But inwardly….
Memories of home overwhelmed me. I thought longingly of our half-timbered three-story house and the extensive herb garden Mama had tended with such dedication.
Elfrieda and I swimming in the river on hot summer days, and chasing my sisters along the shoreline, with lush grass and flowers springy under our bare feet… I missed it all so fiercely it hurt.
Bernswick had been safe. We knew everyone there, and they knew us. No one cared about bloodlines or magical affinities, or whose families sat on the Imperial Council. They only cared that they could come to our clinic when they got hurt or sick, and we would do everything we could to heal them.
Where the worst bully we’d ever faced was Eadwin Fugolson, and he’d backed down quickly enough after Juno taught him a lesson he’d never forget.
We could go home in a few weeks, when the mail-ships start sailing again.
It would be so easy to pack our things, board the ferry, and never look back. We could be back in Bernswick by the Blessing of the Seeds festival that kicked off planting season.
Papa would probably understand why we had to leave this place. Jacinthe would definitely understand. My older sister, with her mysterious foreign father’s fiery hair and deep brown skin, had been an outsider in our village all her life.
We could leave the threats, the daily harassment, the constant knot of fear in my belly and go back to a place where we were known and liked for exactly who we were.
Mama would have known the right thing to do.
But Mama was dead. That wound was still so raw that it bled at the slightest pressure. She was gone, and Papa was unreachable on the other side of the winter seas, and there was no one to tell me whether I was doing this right or catastrophically wrong.
Temptation flickered, bright and seductive. Run. Take your sisters and run far away from this hellhole.
Then reality intruded. But what about Elio? Can I abandon him? Maybe never see him again?
And is it fair to leave Alara, Benno, Dante, Mavia, Varrix and all the others in the Circle of the Open Hand?
Staying would be harder. It meant waking up every morning braced for the next attack, and watching my sisters flinch when someone moved too quickly near them.
It meant carrying the weight of forty-seven other people’s safety.
And my shoulders already ached from the effort of holding just myself upright in the face of unremitting persecution.
But I couldn’t protect my sisters—or myself, or the Open Hand—by just enduring. Endurance had limits. Mine were wearing thin.
And was it fair to ask Mira and Juno to endure more of this ill-treatment?
Juno reached across the space between us and touched my shoulder.
“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t want to let them win, either.”
Mira sniffled loudly. “Fine. But I still hate it here.”
I heaved a sigh. “We’ll just have to make things better.”
∞∞∞
“They took a whole family from the Leatherworkers’ District yesterday,” Benno said the next evening, during a Circle of the Open Hand meeting.
“My cousin, he works at the docks. He said the Genealogical Inquest officers came at midnight and arrested everyone, even the children. No one knows where they were taken.”
A ripple of unease moved through the room. Someone’s teacup clattered loudly against a saucer.
“That’s the third one this month,” Dante said. “There was a weaver’s family in the Solvian Quarter. And a baker near the Temple of the Twelve. All gone. They didn’t even have time to empty their shops.”
“Our Potions III teaching assistant disappeared last week,” a third-year girl I didn’t know well said.
Her voice was thin with worry. “Someone said she transferred to the provincial academy in Encantada, but I heard she left behind all her things—her clothes, books, even her hairbrush—in her rooms.”
“Rumor has it, the imperial officials are running scared,” Varrix said.
He pushed his spectacles up his nose and looked around the crowded common room.
“It’s that traitor, the Duke de Norhas. He’s in prison but he’s got supporters everywhere.
They’ve been raiding coastal supply depots and seizing any vessels with two masts or more.
My father says the imperial garrison at the port of Felicitas Victoria has been on alert for pirates for months now. ”
“Pirates killed our mother,” Juno said, and a murmur of sympathy rose in response.
“Mark my words, there’s a rebellion brewing,” Varrix stated. “I think Her Imperial Majesty is worried, and that’s why her officials are suddenly cracking down so hard.”
The room fragmented into smaller conversations, voices overlapping, theories multiplying.
De Norhas’s supporters suborning imperial legions.
The Duke of Frankia’s remaining allies plotting to free their lord from his prison cells.
The Imperial Genealogical Inquest Office rounding up anyone suspected of having Fae, Djinni, or Dragon ancestry.
I sipped my tea and listened with growing concern. Before this, events happening at the imperial court and in the capital had seemed distant, even unimportant.
Then I noticed Alara sitting at a nearby study table with tears tracking silently down her cheeks. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.