Chapter 53 #2
We were running before he finished talking. We practically flew down the library steps and across the open space by the Ishkur Fountain before turning to head up the broad walkway that ran between the library and the dining hall.
Ahead of me, I saw Mage-Instructor Ilaria running from the direction of the Sixth-Year Quad, her brown hair loose and streaming around her shoulders.
Someone else—a man in an instructor’s robe, too far away to identify in the dim lighting—vanished through the gateway leading into the First-Year Quad.
Then the screams abruptly stopped, but the silence that followed was worse.
What’s happening? Are my sisters hurt? Dead?
Moments later, Elio and I burst into the quad from the tunnel-like gateway.
Elio swore loudly in Espolan. I just stopped and stared, shocked beyond words.
Damien Corvellan lay next to the fountain in the center of the quad.
A pool of blood spread from beneath his head in a dark, glossy crescent, catching the mage-light and throwing it back in garnet-colored highlights.
His face was almost unrecognizable behind a mask of blood, and his short golden hair was darkened with more blood and matted in tufts.
More blood poured from his mouth, nose, and ears.
Mother of All, what happened here?
Mira and Juno kneeled on either side of him, their hands pressed to his chest, a healing spell of some kind spilling from their palms in pulses. Mage-Instructor Ilaria cradled Damien’s bleeding head between her hands, working a spell of her own.
My sisters’ faces were streaked with tears and smeared with blood where they’d wiped their cheeks with bloody hands. But they both appeared uninjured.
Mira was chanting, and I recognized the stabilization charm Mama used to keep a severely injured patient alive before the real healing spells could begin.
Then I heard Cresta’s voice, low and vehement, and looked up to see her and Bernardo being restrained by Mage-Instructor Varro.
Varro looked murderously angry, his long fingers locked around the pair’s upper arms as Cresta fought, sobbing loudly, against his grip.
Bernardo stood unresisting, his expression blank, like someone who had just watched his world collapse.
Whatever had just happened here, the explanation could wait. My sisters were both alive and Damien Corvellan urgently needed my help.
I dropped to my knees beside Juno. My hands came to rest on his chest alongside theirs. It felt… wrong beneath my palms. Spongy.
Divine Mother! Something crushed his chest!
I joined my voice to Juno and Mira’s, chanting the words of Mage Armand’s Charm, and pushing Wood magic through my palms with everything I had.
The green light under my palms flared bright and sank into the ruin of Damien’s ribcage. What I sensed there made my stomach turn. Beneath the shattered ribs, one of his lungs had collapsed. Ruptured blood vessels were flooding the pleural cavity.
An instant later, I felt Elio at my back. His hands closed on my shoulders, and the magical connection between us opened, inviting me to draw on his power.
I drew on everything Mama had taught me about rendering first aid and frantically began a spell to staunch the worst of the bleeding.
Damien’s heartbeat was too rapid, and his skin felt cold and clammy beneath my hands. Not good.
“He jumped in front of us,” Juno said. Her voice was raw, scraped down to something that barely sounded like her.
“Talisa, Benno told us you wanted to meet with us here—and then Mr. Corvellan came out of nowhere, and then we saw Lady Cresta, and Mr. Corvellan just threw himself in front of us… and ended up like this.”
Benno lured them here? I thought disbelievingly. There had to be some kind of mistake.
“Nemara curse that little rat!” Elio exclaimed. “I’ve had a bad feeling about him ever since he started showing up for the tea circle. I knew we couldn’t trust him!”
“Benno lied to you. But we’ll talk about it later,” I told my sisters.
Right now, my priority was Damien’s limp, bleeding body under my hands, his fading pulse, and the terrible certainty that even Mama’s stabilizing charm and my healing spell weren’t doing enough for him.
Cresta did this.
The spell that had done this kind of damage to a large, sturdily built young man like Damien Corvellan would’ve turned my sisters to paste.
She had clearly wanted to murder Mira and Juno, and Damien had taken the blow instead. The thought was so devastating that I couldn’t think about it right now.
The three of us continued frantically to administer first aid and keep Damien alive for what seemed forever, but was probably less than ten minutes.
Then Mage-Healer Arsinoe was there, kneeling next to us, and pushing us gently but firmly aside. “You’ve done well, girls, now let us work. Ilaria, please let me take over.”
We withdrew and shakily climbed to our feet as the healer-mage and her assistants descended on Damien with practiced efficiency.
While one of Arsinoe’s apprentices checked Damien’s pupils with a mage-light stick, another rapidly unbuttoned his doublet and the shirt beneath, exposing a massive red blotch across his muscular chest and torso in the shape of a distorted handprint.
“Put him in a neck brace and backboard before you lift him onto the stretcher!” Arsinoe ordered her assistants.
She looked up at us. “You four did an excellent job rendering first aid, but he’s in critical condition.
Internal bleeding, pneumothorax, multiple rib fractures, possible cranial hemorrhage. ”
I watched as they lifted him onto a stretcher with careful, synchronized movements that spoke of drills rehearsed a hundred times, and carried him out of the quad.
“Mage-Instructor Varro, you have to believe me, it was just a prank!” Cresta’s voice was shrill, climbing toward hysteria. “We didn’t mean to hurt him! The spell wasn’t supposed to—it was just supposed to scare them a little, I swear it!”
“We didn’t know he was there,” Bernardo added, breathless with panic. “Corvellan came out of nowhere. He jumped in front of Cresta at the wrong moment!”
The rage running through my veins burned like dragonfire. “You sent Benno to lure my sisters here, didn’t you?” I snarled at Cresta.
Ilaria, who had joined Varro and now held Bernardo in her grasp, said, “Yes… good point.”
Varro’s gaze darted to Mira and Juno, as if noticing them for the first time.
“Lady Cresta, what were those two first-years doing here while you attacked my nephew?” he demanded.
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean to attack Damien—” Cresta sputtered.
Second-Year Assistant Chatelaine Serena Octavian arrived before I could speak, followed by Third-Year Assistant Chatelaine Leonor Urraca.
Serena immediately took charge. She was a tall woman with short iron-gray hair cut to frame her face. I’d seen her with the rest of the academy staff at the Aurelian Trials, but had never spoken with her.
She took in the scene with one sweeping glance that missed nothing: the blood on the flagstones, the twins’ bloody hands, Cresta in Varro’s grip, Bernardo with Ilaria.
Then Julissa arrived. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the pool of blood on the pavement. One hand flew to her mouth. Her accusing glare landed on me. “You again! What have you done now?” she demanded.
“Julissa, let’s not jump to conclusions,” Serena said. Her voice was low and measured.
Julissa crossed her arms, but didn’t reply.
Serena turned to me. “Miss Bernswick,” she said. She must’ve recognized me from the Aurelian Trials. “Did you see what happened here? Who attacked Mr. Corvellan?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t see anything, Assistant Chatelaine Serena.
I was walking back from the library when I heard my sisters screaming.
When I arrived here, I found Damien—I mean, Mr. Corvellan—lying injured, and Mage-Instructor Ilaria and my sisters administering first aid to him.
Lady Cresta and Lord Bernardo were already here, along with Mage-Instructor Varro. ”
“I see.” Serena’s attention shifted to the twins. “Did either of you see what happened?”
Mira nodded. She was shaking so badly her teeth chattered when she tried to speak. Juno looked as if she were holding herself together by sheer force of will.
“Our—our neighbor in the Western Tower, Benno da Vercelli,” Mira quavered.
“P-pounded on our door and told us Talisa needed us to come and m-meet her here right away and that it w-was urgent. When we got here, L-Lady Cresta was waiting in the shadows, and then there was this s-sound, like rushing wind, and then Mr. Corvellan jumped in front of us and Lady Cresta’s spell hit him instead of us, and he went flying halfway across the quad—”
She stopped. Swallowed hard. And looked down at her blood-smeared hands.
Third-Year Assistant Chatelaine Leonor turned to Cresta.
“Lady Cresta. You will accompany me to the chatelaine’s office.
Now. Lord Bernardo, you as well.” Her tone did not invite discussion.
She addressed the others. “Mage-Instructor Varro, Mage-Instructor Ilaria, please come with us to escort them. Assistant Chatelaine Julissa, Assistant Chatelaine Serena, with me. We need to inform Chatelaine Lirelle immediately.”
“You—you believe the Misses Bernswick?” Julissa objected.
“The evidence speaks for itself, does it not?” Something in Serena’s expression silenced further protests.
They all left, Cresta and Bernardo stumbling meekly in their midst. The quad emptied around us, academy staff shooing away the small crowd of onlookers. Elio’s arm came around my shoulders, and I leaned into him gratefully.
Damien Corvellan, I thought numbly. The same person who’d stood beside Lukhan for months, through every insult, every targeted insult, every cruel prank.
And he’d apparently just saved my sisters… possibly at the cost of his own life.