Chapter 53
Damien
Lukhan had been avoiding me ever since my disastrous attempt to make him see that Talisa of Bernswick posed no threat to him. And I missed him desperately.
But he’d ordered me out of his apartment with such anger and loathing that my pride prevented me from cornering him and forcing him to talk to me.
What if he never forgives me?
I groaned and tried to focus on Mundise’s assigned reading in The Theory and Practice of Magecraft.
Midterms were next week, and I’d been staring at the same passage for the better part of an hour.
Instead studying for my exams, I’d spent the past few days spying on Cresta with the aid of a custom magical construct.
Sancha of Mencía was a sixth-year student who had a business creating illicit constructs for her fellow students.
I’d sought her out and lied, “I think my lover is cheating on me. I need to know for sure.”
“Ah, yes, we’ve all heard that the divine Lord Lukhan seems to have moved on. He favors Lord Ormond these days, no?” she asked, sounding bored.
Shock ran through me. I’ve become the subject of common gossip?
But it gave me the plausible excuse I needed to hide my true intentions.
I heaved a dramatic sigh. “I need to know whether I’ve truly been replaced in his affections. You understand, I require complete discretion in this matter.”
“Of course. My business relies on maintaining confidentiality,” she assured me before asking what I wanted the construct to do. Then she named a price that equaled my monthly allowance.
I’d paid it without blinking.
The construct she delivered the next day was beautifully crafted. It was a beetle the size of my thumbnail, its carapace a deep emerald sheen, its legs jointed with lifelike precision.
As circumstances required, it could scuttle along the ground, cling to clothing, or fly. Its purpose was to eavesdrop without being noticed.
I’d bribed the work/study student who cleaned Cresta’s apartment for some strands of hair from Cresta’s brush, and Sancha had used them as the construct’s focus. Wherever Cresta went, the construct-beetle would follow.
The sympathetic link was a small silver hoop earring, etched with runes linking it to the construct. It also contained a strand of Cresta’s hair. The earring relayed whatever Cresta said, in a murmur only I could hear.
There followed three tedious days of listening to mundane conversations and a startling amount of gossip. It seemed Cresta heard all the juiciest tidbits and passed them on without fail.
Now, as I tried to focus on Mage Sancola’s dry prose, I heard Cresta’s voice coming through my earring once again.
I straightened up as I heard her say, “—want you to deliver a message to Mira and Juno of Bernswick in the Western Tower.”
A pause. Someone else replied, but their voice was muffled and the words indistinct.
“Good.” Cresta again. “That’s why we’ve been paying you to report on them. Tell the twins their sister is waiting for them in the First-Year Quad and that it’s urgent.”
Another murmur of assent.
“If they ask questions, tell them it’s something to do with your precious Circle of the Open Hand, but you can’t go into details. Their sister will explain everything.” A beat of silence.
The First-Year Quad would be deserted at this hour, with the mage-instructors off duty and students studying in the library or in their dormitories.
Whatever Cresta was planning, she didn’t want witnesses.
A mixture of excitement and terror shot through me. Before I could think, I was already on my feet.
The building where I lived was separated from the commoners’ Western Tower by the complex of student quads and the central plaza with the library and dining hall.
I knew Talisa would likely be at the Central Library—she spent every evening studying there with Elio, according to the gossip Cresta had collected.
No time to warn the twins before they left their suite. By the time I crossed that much ground, they’d already be on their way to the First-Year Quad, responding to the false summons from their sister.
The only place I could intercept them was the First-Year Quad itself.
I flung open my door. The corridor outside was empty. Good. No one to ask questions about why I’m dashing down the hallway and stairs like a man possessed.
Night had fallen, and the campus pathways were lit with the soft blue glow of mage-lamps. I ran past the other aristocratic dormitory buildings, and around the vast bulk of the Administration Quad, all its windows darkened.
Frantic to reach the First-Year Quad in time to prevent whatever Cresta and Bernardo planned to do, I rounded the last corner of the Administration Quad and saw the First-Year Quad directly ahead of me.
Racing through the First-Year Quad’s eastern entrance, I came to a stop just inside the quad’s large courtyard. I was gasping for breath, and my heart hammered like a prisoner trying to break out from the cage of my ribs.
During the day, the quad was crowded with students hurrying between classes or talking in the courtyard. Now, it stood eerily empty. The mage-lamps set high on poles along the walkways left pools of shadow that were deep enough to hide anything.
Or anyone.
I spotted two petite figures enter at a run through the western entrance.
“Talisa?” Juno called as they stopped and looked around the deserted quad. “Where are you?”
Then I felt the prickle of magic brush my skin and saw something move in the shadows nearby.
Cresta stepped forward, her arm extended, hand fisted.
With a sound like cloth tearing, a gust tore through the quad.
The wind pulled the light with it, bending the mage-lamp’s glow into a tight, whirling vortex, invisible but for the distortion it carved through the air.
It condensed around Cresta’s fist into something shaped like a spear—
I shouted a warning.
My body acted before my brain had time to catch up.
I hurled myself across the quad with my arms outstretched and nothing between me and Cresta’s spell but the desperate certainty that I had to reach Mira and Juno before her spell did.
Cresta’s lance of air hit me with the force of a battering ram. As the impact lifted me off my feet, I heard something crack—not a single crack, but a series of them, rapid and wet, like green branches breaking underfoot.
Agony ripped through my arms, my chest, my side. For one suspended moment, I was airborne. The world spun by, everything blurring as if the academy itself had been upended and shaken.
Then I hit the rim of the quad’s central fountain. I dropped to the pavement, and my head thumped against the flagstones. My vision whited out, then flooded back in jagged, nauseating bursts of light and shadow.
Liquid, thick, salty, and metallic, filled my mouth. I tried to cough, and a spray of red spattered across the stones.
My chest felt impossibly tight, and the worst pain I’d ever felt clawed me like a ravenous beast. I couldn’t breathe. I felt as if I were drowning on dry land.
I’m going to die.
Distantly, I heard Mira and Juno screaming.
And Bernardo’s voice, high and shaking: “Divine Mother—Cresta, you’ve killed him! You fucking killed General Corvellan’s son! What are we going to do?”
“Shut up!” Cresta ordered. “He jumped in front of those girls!” Then her voice cracked. “Why? Why did he do that? Where did he come from? I didn’t see him, I swear by all the gods I didn’t see him—”
The rest of her words blurred into the roar of blood in my ears and the relentless iron bands of agony squeezing my breath from my body. The edges of my vision were dark and fuzzy, the center pulsing and dimming with each painful beat of my heart.
Through it, I saw two small shapes running toward me.
Hands on my chest.
I would’ve screamed with the sudden jolt of pain, but I had no breath left.
Someone touched my face with exquisite gentleness, and instantly, cool green light soothed the terrible white-hot sparks of pain ricocheting around the inside of my skull.
More green light poured over me, sinking into me like cool water. Suddenly, I could breathe again. My vision flickered, rallied, then flickered once more.
“Please don’t die.” Juno sounded strange and distant, as if she were shouting down a well. “Mira, help me apply Mage Armand’s Stabilizing Charm. You remember it, right?”
The green glow intensified. It stopped soothing almost instantly. As the twins chanted above me, the light now sent fresh waves of agony through me as it slid inside me and probed at every place that hurt.
I felt something shift inside me as their spell brushed it. The blood in my mouth went from warm to a hot gush, pouring over my lower lip and down my chin.
A blanket of ice was spreading everywhere, weighing down my limbs. The green light dimmed. I couldn’t feel their hands on my chest anymore, only a distant, muffled sensation of pressure.
“Help!” Juno was screaming now, her voice raw. “Somebody help! He’s dying! He’s dying right here!”
I thought of Lukhan. Will he come to see me when he hears I’m dead? Will he stand over my body and tell everyone I was a damned fool?
Then darkness crashed down like an avalanche and swallowed me whole.
∞∞∞
Talisa
As we left the library and began the walk back to the Western Tower, my head was stuffed with Sancola’s formulae and rune sequences. I was determined to do well on my midterms and prove to Julissa—and everyone else—that I belonged here.
Elio was telling me a story about his parents’ import/export business. “—so naturally, the captain argued the storm was an act of divine intervention, which voided his contractual obligation to deliver his cargo of cinnamon bark by Victory Day, and my mother—”
Distant screams cut through his sentence like a knife. We both froze.
“That sounds like Juno,” I said, my stomach twisting in sudden terror.
“And it’s coming from the First-Year Quad.” Elio seized my hand. “Let’s go!”