Chapter 9 A Cold Night
A Cold Night
Present Day
The Eyrie
Malcroix Bones Academy Grounds
The next few weeks flew by in a blur.
On the plus side, I managed to not get screamed at in Offensive and Defensive magic again, or sent to get beat up by Bones in his private practice arena.
I also never really relaxed.
I wouldn’t say I felt as manic as I had over the summer.
Even so, being cut off from any ability to know what might be happening outside of school, or with Dark Cathedral, or with the Priest, made me tense in a completely different way.
At least during the summer, I’d felt like I was doing something.
I’d been frustrated by our progress, by my difficulty with the traces, with how little we actually knew, but I had Alaric, and we’d both worked nearly every daylight hour of every day to bridge that gap.
It hadn’t fully occurred to me that all of that would simply cease, the instant I got on the carriage to Bonescastle.
I’d gone from being frustrated with our slow progress to feeling completely useless and totally cut out.
I couldn’t even work on it much alone. There was my schoolwork, for one, which took up a crazy amount of time, but even beyond that, I’d lost my connection to both the royals and Dark Cathedral.
Without Alaric, I had no access to Priest broadcasts, or even information about Priest broadcasts, nor any knowledge about other current developments within Dark Cathedral.
Alaric had warned me, before we got left London, that he’d likely not have access to much information himself, not without his drakai spies, as he was known as an “unbeliever” among the other royals.
Apparently, they all knew one another’s rough alignment to Dark Cathedral’s ideology.
Alaric listed families and individuals as falling into a number of different categories that were used regularly by the royals themselves: “true believers,” “loyalists,” who didn’t care about the ideology but where loyal to their caste and station, “fence-sitters” who were likely waiting to see which way the wind blew, followed by “apolitical,” “not interesteds,” and “hostile.”
The hostile faction got generally shunned.
So did a lot of the “not interesteds,” if they were vehement enough to get lumped in with the “hostiles.”
Alaric told me he’d carefully cultivated the “apolitical” designation for himself, which kept him from being shunned, but also locked him out of most confidences.
He also told me he wasn’t keen to change that designation, in case it got back to his father, and because it would likely draw all the wrong sorts of attention.
He promised to let me know when and if he learned anything either of us could use, but warned me that it would mostly be through luck, and from overhearing things not meant for his ears.
As for me, I’d been trying to give him space.
During the same conversation, Alaric warned me it would bring both of us grief if we were too open about our friendship, even if his friends and mine both knew about it.
I suspected it was his friends who worried him, not mine, but I didn’t argue the point.
I didn’t want to cause Alaric problems, especially given his worries about his father.
It was the last thing I wanted, so I made up my mind to let him come to me.
I told myself I needed to study. I also needed to spend time with my other friends, and try to minimize my obsessiveness long enough to not fail all my classes.
It was hard though, after seeing Alaric every day and most nights for weeks.
Now I could see him, but I couldn’t talk to him, or really even acknowledge his existence.
So far in the school year, we’d managed one, rushed, coffee date at the Black Fox Teahouse on Bonescastle Square while I was in town, ordering a dress for the Second Year’s Party.
Other than that, I’d only seen him in class, and occasionally in the Valarian dining hall.
Because of all those things, I couldn’t suppress the shiver of relieved, pleased excitement that ran through me when Alaric finally reached out.
A paper dragon winged through the air around where I sat in class, tilting its wings to make a full, swooping circle before landing on the wooden desk in front of me.
I watched it, marveling at the magic, and picked it up to unwrap it with some regret.
There were only a few people it could have come from.
Only one of them was in my Dark and Light Magicks 01 class that Friday morning.
I didn’t glance over at Alaric, but I wasn’t at all surprised to see his perfect, elegant, very royals-trained pen-strokes on the piece of parchment he’d magicked. I smoothed it out, and studied the symbols he’d carefully drawn.
We’d worked out a code for any communications we needed to keep private during the school year, but I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to use it.
It was the first time he’d used it to write to me, either, so I was instantly intrigued.
We’d both agreed we couldn’t leave the decoding key lying around, so we’d made an effort to memorize all of the symbols and their meanings, although I had the key written in a journal I hid in my dormitory, just in case.
As it turned out, I remembered the symbols well enough to not need it.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ☉ Ω ? ? ? ? μ ? ? ? Ω ?
Broadcast tonight. 10:30 p.m. Eyrie.
I read it twice, making sure of each symbol.
Then I set it on fire.
Blue and green flames swiftly turned the note to a pile of white ash, which I merged into my wooden desk with a different incantation and mudra.
Probably overkill, but I didn’t want to risk that someone watching me could reverse the fire spell well enough to realize “the hybrid” had received a coded message from an heir to one of the oldest families in the royal succession line.
Even if that person couldn’t read the actual message, it was a bad idea.
I felt a hard stare from Alaric’s direction as I finished.
When I glanced up, it wasn’t Alaric I found watching me, though.
Gold eyes focused briefly on my desk, right where the ash had been.
I froze, watching him frown as his irises slid briefly out of focus.
I recognized the look from the year before, back when we’d spent time together.
He was looking at my desk with that unusual magic of his.
That, or he was using it to look at me. I immediately blanked my mind.
I didn’t move until he glanced up, caught me watching him, and his lip curled.
He looked away before I could make sense of his expression, but I saw his jaw tic after he’d gone back to facing the front of the lecture hall.
I fought not to care.
Fuck Caelum Bones.
He was probably just trying to intimidate me.
Even so, my heart raced harder and faster in my chest. I told myself it didn’t matter, even if Bones had seen the note, even if he knew exactly who had sent it to me.
I couldn’t quite make myself believe it, though.
“Gods of the Underworld it’s cold!” Alaric blew on his hands, stamping his feet and watching me from behind the jagged wall. He wore an overcoat over a suit, but no gloves, and his lips looked nearly blue. “It’s like Persephone’s tit up here!”
I couldn’t help a stuttered laugh, but I didn’t disagree. I rubbed my arms over the thick coat I wore, wishing I’d worn more than the one jumper and long-sleeved tee under it. I’d thought, foolishly, it turned out, that it wouldn’t be this cold in October.
“You chose it,” I reminded him through numb lips.
“I know, I know,” he moaned. “And I absolutely detest flying, too.”
I knew that about him.
My teeth were already chattering as I drew in my wings, using my primal to detach them from my back, so that they fell to the stone of The Eyrie’s flat roof.
I had to scramble to catch hold of them when the wind started to lift them off the uneven surface.
Alaric helped me by grabbing one of the wings before the set could skitter too far.
As soon as we had them under control, I cast the spell to fold them smaller into themselves, and tucked them under my arm and against my side.
I’d finally bought my own set of wings that summer, so I would be really cross if I managed to lose them the first time I wore them at Malcroix outside of class.
They were iridescent green-black in color, much greener in direct sunlight, and I’d had them professionally fitted by a wing shop in London, so I was rather fond of them.
Alaric led me deeper into the walled area of the roof, away from the opening where I’d landed and well behind the curved shield around over three-fourths of the surface.
I saw the radio-like receiver sitting there already, glowing green and blue from the stone with its odd, spiral lines, right next to several pillows and a blanket.
“I spelled the blanket to be warmer,” Alaric said, his teeth chattering worse than mine. “And the air around the radio. If we can get to it, our extremities might even thaw.”
“When did you get up here?” I asked wonderingly.
“F-few hours ago…” he said through his chattering jaw. “Wanted to check the chimaeras. Make sure I could anchor them inside the shield.”
I nodded, but I was surprised.
“I could have helped,” I said, right as we reached his receiver.
“No, no.” He shook his head. “Better that we left at vastly different times. There’s a fair-few royals who think we’re shagging on the sly, already.”
I flinched a little at that. “Seriously?” I asked, then felt a little dumb for being so surprised. Half of the royals acted like I was a prostitute, so it pretty well tracked. “They’re not giving you a hard time about it, are you?”
Alaric scoffed.