Chapter 4
It was a forgotten rooftop, one of Umbrveyl’s many, where Lesya and Cassian spent the afternoon. The tiled roofs of the towers above provided ample shade from the sun, and the castle’s bizarre mix of architecture and magic ensured that there was a constant breeze.
It also happened to be the rooftop behind Cassian’s office, a short jump down from his window.
There were no railings on this rooftop, but it was a very flat and broad surface.
From here, Cassian and Lesya, wrapped in each other’s arms, could see the stretch of hills and forests and the little town of Crook Haven.
It was twenty miles to the south after a long stretch of forest. Its little roofs and cobbled streets were just barely visible from this vantage point.
“You’re hiding things from me, Cass,” Lesya said, pulling his arm tighter around her.
Cassian stayed quiet. He stroked her hair and reclined against the pillow they’d taken from his office, along with a blanket. They lay on the blanket, snug against each other.
“You don’t let me in that part of your mind,” she said, staring at the flock of birds making its way toward the hills. “You don’t tell me where you disappear every week and with whom…”
“Les,” Cassian said, sitting up, retracting his arm from around her. “I’m bound to an oath of secrecy. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”
“The headmaster didn’t bring you in just to teach,” Lesya said, frowning at him. “That was just an excuse, wasn’t it?”
“You know I can’t say anything.” Cassian sighed. “Even if I wanted to.”
“Say around it then. You’re clever. The oath may prohibit you from spilling the exact details, but there’s gotta be something you can give me,” she said, her tone growing more frustrated. She got up to her feet and began pacing around the roof.
Cassian never liked it when she started pacing nervously, especially when she did it on this roof. She could fall. She knew he got worried. This was a tactic she was deploying.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, getting up and going after her.
“Are you in danger?”
“I can’t quite say.”
“Do you go alone on these missions?”
“I’m…accompanied by some of the faculty.”
“Does this have to do with what happened last night?”
A red streak appeared on Cassian’s face, his veins flaring up as he tried to speak but could get no words out. He stood there with his mouth half-open, tongue wagging but no words forming. He gasped in pain and shot back, putting his hand on the castle wall for support.
“Cassian?” she asked, forgetting her frustration. Worry took its place. His face was strained, and there were marks all over his forearms, bright red like fire lashes.
“Dammit, Les,” he groaned. “You may trick me, but there’s no tricking the oath.”
“Fuck the oath,” Lesya snapped. “I don’t see you for days; you only come to teach one advanced class in the entire week, and that’s the only time I see you!”
“Lesya!” Cassian hissed, striding forward and holding her by her arms, his intense green eyes bearing into hers. “I honestly don’t know how to deal with you at times. You possess the capacity for such great wisdom and discernment, but when it comes to me, you behave like a child!”
“You should have thought of that before—” she snapped, breaking her arms free from his grip.
“Before what!?”
“Before you gave me your heart!”
There was a seething silence between them, Cassian standing by the wall, Lesya standing against the edge of the roof.
“Don’t stand there,” Cassian said. “Les, please.”
“If you’re not even going to tell me about your life, if we can’t tell anyone about us… What are we doing, Cassian?”
“You don’t mean that,” Cassian said, hurt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, tears spilling. “I need some time to think.”
“Les, wait!”
But she didn’t listen to him. She leaped back from the roof and fell through the air.
At the last moment, she flicked her glove and levitated off the ground, landing on her feet.
She looked up and saw the speck that was Cassian’s head poking from the roof.
He couldn’t do that. No one was allowed to jump from the castle’s roofs.
To do so was to break one of the many rules of Umbrveyl and?—
“Lesya Rosefield!” a loud voice boomed from behind her. She cringed and turned around to face Armen Drow, the discipline manager. He stood towering over her, one-eyed, holding a wooden cane, his old leather coat flailing in the wind. “Jumping off the Alchemy Department’s rooftop! Again!”
“Bite me, Armen,” she said, turning away to walk toward the campus.
“Twenty demerits! Detention!” he screamed after her, but she was too brokenhearted to worry about a detention session in the evening. The whole merit thing was a scam anyway. None of the House Balthazar students ever gave a shit about it.
Let House Solaris take the Merit Cup and find a dark and tight place to shove it.
* * *
At dinner, Lesya sat at the second table, the one farthest from the center of the hall and the House Solaris tables, even though most of the seats were empty.
The faculty dined separately, sometimes in their own dining hall and sometimes in their own quarters.
But today there were faculty members in the main hall, strolling along its length to keep an eye on the students.
It was one of the biggest halls of Umbrveyl, also one of the most widely used.
The students from both houses ate here thrice a day.
The end of year exams took place within the same hall.
Dueling club, ceremonies, assemblies, and any and all functions took place here.
Twelve long stained-glass windows rose fifty feet on each side.
Chandeliers hung from the arched roof. The walls of the hall were stone, but because of the lamps, sconces, and brassieres along the length of the hall, it felt like a very warm place.
At the head of the hall was a raised platform for the faculty to sit and attend.
There was a main door that was nearly half the width of the hall.
It swung open every now and then when a student walked in.
There were smaller doors throughout the hall leading to different rooms, including the kitchen.
The door Lesya sat in front of led directly out into the lawns.
Most of the time, this door was locked, but whenever the cleaning crew came, they opened it so that they could take out the garbage.
She was as uninterested in her chicken fried rice and side of vegetables as she was in what was happening at the House Solaris tables. They were all of them gathered around Elias Solwyn and talking really loudly, animatedly.
Her own housemates were sitting three feet away, Trisha talking in hushed whispers with Sara Cliffe and Rheannon Dorth, two girls who had been forced to attend the summer session because they were failing horribly in most of their classes.
A regular pair of rulebreakers, those two.
Not a single academic bone in their body.
Sara was the red-haired one and Rheannon had dark curly tresses.
They paid no regard to the uniform rules and made sure to walk about the campus in their lowcut skirts and their shirts that were unbuttoned at the front and tied above their midriffs.
Their academic inaptitude did not mean, however, that they were not well-versed in magic. They held control over more than half the black market that operated in Umbrveyl and Crook Haven, their merchandise including everything from enhanced drugs to cursed items.
Lesya did not like either of them.
“Whatchu staring at, Rosefield?” Sid Vercliff called from the other side. He sat with Miles Farrow, Orin Hallowshaw, and Tobias Bradley, another advanced class student. “Cat got your tongue?”
“More like Cass got her tongue,” Tobias Bradley sneered.
He did not understand what happened to him the next second.
He tried to scream but he couldn’t. His mouth had melted shut, a brown scar where his lips were.
His hands were stuck to the table. He tried to squirm free, but it was to no avail.
The guys sitting around him tried to help him, some with their magic, others with a brute force of strength, but the curse held.
Lesya eyed the two faculty members, Professor Rhys and Hannah Monroe. They were both at the head of the hall, immersed in conversation with each other, completely unaware of what was going on at the House Balthazar tables.
Tobias’s eyes began to bleed.
“Fucking stop that shit, Rosefield!” Sid exclaimed. “He didn’t mean it.”
“I didn’t do it!” Lesya retorted.
“I did,” Sara Cliffe said, walking over to Lesya. “You’ve got some nerve, Toby.” She flicked her spellblade and undid the curse she’d laid upon Tobias.
Tobias gasped, holding his throat, wiping the blood from his eyes, feeling his lips frantically with his fingers. “Mother Aeterna, you could have killed me!”
“Oh? I remember you used to beg me for it,” Sara said, grinning. “Wouldn’t cum without it.”
Tobias’s face went extremely red, the boys sitting around him laughing and jeering.
“Stop hassling one of our own,” Sara said firmly.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” Tobias said, his head dropped low.
“Is that a spellblade I see being brandished in the hall!?” Armen Drow yelled from a corner of the hall. “That’s ten demerits for you, Ms. Cliffe! Detention in the evening!”
Sara didn’t even acknowledge the discipline manager.
Everyone on campus knew that the old one-eyed man with the cane could not conjure a sheet of tissue paper to wipe his ass.
Empty were his threats, and his detentions were as tame as they came.
All you had to do was sit with a parchment and quill and write whatever it was he told you to write for an hour.
The only thing terrible about the detentions were how humiliating they were, a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds being made to sit through punishment meant for teenagers.