Chapter 52
Talisa
The first prank went live a week later in the Second-Year Quad.
I was walking with my sisters to our Fundamentals of Magecraft II lecture when I heard Lord Ethmond Valens’s voice, usually a nasal, imperious drawl, suddenly shift mid-sentence into the florid, overwrought diction of a historical play set two hundred years ago.
“—wherefore, common whelp, thou dost trespass upon mine noble patience with thine insolent—” Ethmond stopped, visibly confused.
“Varrix’s anti-bullying charm really works!” Juno whispered, grinning from ear to ear.
We stopped to see what would happen next.
The first-year commoner Ethmond had been talking to—and presumably insulting—was a skinny boy whose name I didn’t know. The first-year stood frozen, mouth slightly open in a bewildered expression.
Someone in the crowd of aristocratic students passing by snorted. Then I heard a giggle rising from their midst, quickly smothered.
They stopped walking to watch Ethmond and his victim.
His next attempt at speech emerged as, “Verily, I say unto thee, begone from mine august presence ere I summon the celestial wrath of mine ancestors to smite thee!”
His pimply face turned red. He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again like a fish gasping on dry land. “Forsooth! I am betrayed by mine own tongue!” he croaked. “What sorcerous fellcraft hath—”
Then he clapped both hands over his mouth and fled the quad, his academic gown flapping around his ankles.
Mira’s hand found mine and squeezed so hard my knuckles cracked. She stopped laughing long enough to murmur, “Priceless! Were you the one who did this?”
To protect them, I hadn’t told the twins of the plot I’d hatched with Elio, Dante, Mavie, Varrix, and some of the other older students.
I shook my head. “I don’t know how to cast that kind of charm,” I whispered back, silently blessing Varrix Carbo and his fellow fourth-years.
∞∞∞
That afternoon, Lady Helene Morgrave’s silver thorn ring turned into a braided daisy chain in the middle of Mage-Instructor Varro’s Intermediate Potions lab.
I watched it happen from three workbenches away.
One moment, her ring was its usual menacing silver, the polished garnet catching the light as she measured crushed valerian root with fastidious care.
Then, suddenly, it transformed into a circle of braided green stems crowned with tiny white daisies, like the flower rings and bracelets village children made from the flowers growing all around Bernswick.
Her shriek tore through the lab like a saw through a tree trunk.
“My ring! What’s happening?” She held her hand out as if the daisies might bite her, her eyes wide with horror. “Someone has—Mage-Instructor, someone is using illicit spells!”
Varro crossed the lab in three strides, his silver hair catching the mage-light, his supercilious mouth set in a thin line. He examined the flowers without touching them, then his gaze sought me out. “Miss Bernswick. A word, if you please.”
I followed him out of the lab and into the colonnade just outside. My pulse drummed in my ears. Everyone crowded around the windows, watching us avidly as he leaned close.
“Remove the glamor. Now.” His nostrils flared.
“But I didn’t cast any spells, Mage-Instructor,” I said truthfully.
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t play the innocent with me, girl. I know you’re responsible for this!”
I took a deep breath and chose my words carefully. “I’m flattered you think so highly of my abilities, Mage-Instructor. But I assure you, I don’t know how to create a glamor like that. I’m only a first-year student. We haven’t learned about those kinds of charms yet in Fundamentals of Magecraft.”
Varro studied my face for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then his eyes unfocused, and I knew he’d opened his second sight to examine me for any betraying traces of spell-working.
Of course, he found nothing. He huffed and turned away, striding back inside the lab.
I followed him through the doorway just in time to hear him say impatiently, “Lady Helene, control yourself. It’s just a simple glamor. It will fade soon enough.”
I heard the ripple of snickers moving through the lab, coming from aristocratic and commoner students alike. Even Helene’s friend, Lady Beatrix Fairhaven, was covering her mouth with her hand, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.
The only people who looked unamused were Mage-Instructor Varro and Lukhan FitzMurad.
In the days that followed, the pranks engineered by the Circle of the Open Hand grew bolder.
Two days later, after breakfast, the statue of Dominus Victor Augustus the First, located right outside the Central Library, began reciting Custodes slogans in a singsong, mocking cadence whenever a silver-ring wearer passed within ten paces.
“Purity prevail, purity prevail, watch the commoners fail, fail, fail!” it sang in a high, piping voice that carried across the forecourt to the dining hall.
The following afternoon, according to Dante and Mavia’s gleeful account, the next prank sowed temporary chaos in the History of Magecraft and the Dominion II lecture.
Midway through her long-winded lecture, the text on Professor Mahaut de Varenne’s blackboard suddenly changed.
It now displayed the genealogical chart of the ducal House of Espola with several key changes to suggest that the current duke’s grandmother was actually a notorious courtesan rather than the noblewoman recorded in the imperial archives.
The resulting panic was beautiful to behold. With an angry shout, Bernardo shot to his feet so fast that his chair tipped over backward.
Professor de Varenne, peering at the board through her thick-lensed spectacles, reached for her chalk to correct the errors.
The incorrect family tree instantly vanished, replaced by the original one she’d written out, but not before the lecture hall erupted in a mixture of enraged protests and mocking laughter.
The next prank, a glamor on the fountain in the dining hall’s forecourt, drew a crowd.
I was on my way to lunch with Juno and Mira when I heard the exclamations, followed by laughter. We changed course, pushing through the gathering crowd until we reached the fountain’s edge.
Water sculptures rose from the basin and resolved into a circle of kneeling, hooded figures with thorn-crowned heads.
One figure held aloft a chalice that glimmered with something dark and viscous that might have been wine or might have been blood.
The ritual unfolded with the grave, ridiculous solemnity of children playing at being adults, and the water caught the midday sun and threw it back in dazzling fragments across the faces of the watching crowd.
I heard one of the first-years ask, “Is that supposed to be the secret initiation rite of the—?”
“Shut up! We’re not supposed to talk about them,” hissed the second-year girl beside him, but she was laughing too.
I scanned the edges of the crowd and found what I was looking for: a group of known Custodians.
Lord Ormond stood in a small group with his cousin Montplaisir, Lady Cresta, and, of course, her ever-present companion Bernardo beside her. I noticed his hand resting on the small of her back in a gesture that looked both protective and proprietary.
All of them were wearing their silver thorn rings.
Cresta’s mouth was pressed into a bloodless line, and Bernardo’s jaw worked as if he were chewing on something that tasted awful. Ormond’s expression was the most frightening—as if sensing my eyes on him, he met my gaze, looking as calm and measured and cold as wind off a glacier.
I realized he knew who was behind this onslaught of pranks targeting the Custodes Sanguinis.
I also knew they couldn’t prove it. Not yet.
“Talisa!” Elio called, pushing his way ruthlessly through the crowd. He embraced me and gave me a quick kiss.
When I looked up at him, his eyes were alight with fierce joy. “It looked even better than Varrix and Flavia promised,” he murmured.
I nodded. “We can’t get cocky,” I warned him in a whisper. “Look at Ormond. They’ll hit back hard. This isn’t over.”
Elio scoffed, and we walked into the dining hall together, Juno chattering excitedly about the fountain, Mira hanging on my arm with a smile I hadn’t seen on her face in weeks.
The atmosphere inside the hall felt electric, like a gathering storm; the mood shifting from desperate solidarity to something that felt hopeful and triumphant.
As I looked out at the joyful, eager faces turned toward us, I recognized the emotions radiating from my fellow commoners as akin to the moment Elio and I had reached for the Aurelian Ring together.
And I allowed myself to believe that this might actually be enough to win against our tormentors.
∞∞∞
Damien
I was on my way from the Intermediate Potions lecture, my satchel heavy with Varro’s assigned reading, when I heard the laughter. I followed it to the dining hall forecourt, where the something happening in the fountain had drawn a crowd three layers deep.
I looked over the heads of the gathered students and stopped dead when I saw what was happening.
The fountain in front of the dining hall was a large, shallow marble basin, with a carved image of Ishkur Stormbringer holding the wine jug with which he’d poured out salt water to create the ocean, and a metal spout jetting water from the wine jug.
Now, water rose from the basin in articulated, flowing sculptures that held their shape with a precision that spoke of experienced spell-casting.
I saw hooded figures gathered in a ritual circle, and a parody of an initiation ceremony unfolding step by step as onlookers hooted in appreciation and laughed.
It’s brilliant.
Whoever had crafted this hadn’t just wanted to mock the Custodes. They wanted to expose them. To take something secret and semi-sacred and drag it into the sunlight where everyone could see how ridiculous it looked when you stripped away the candlelit darkness, the fear, and the mystique.