The Trail of Blood
Chapter Twelve
THE TRAIL OF BLOOD
Lady Sibba
W inwold College held little in common with the fine elvish institutions Lady Sibba had known.
It was the pace of it, mostly. Traditional elvish education was an exercise in patience. Few completed their studies in less than a decade, and some took considerably longer than that.
Not so at Winwold. It was a thoroughly modern place, with shortened requirements to accommodate the shorter lifespans of most of the students, and to Lady Sibba, it moved in such a whirlwind that she wasn’t surprised a cyclone had spun up near it.
Lady Sibba had always known she wanted to be an educator. She had passed her girlish years forcing the other children on the island to sit in on her “lectures.” She’d made them complete very important (and often impossible) assignments, like feeding candy syrup to a hummingbird by hand and counting the fronds on a palm tree. Then she’d given them marks based on their performance.
As a result, she had few friends, but that had never bothered her. She had a purpose.
Her purpose now was a foolish one. She’d seen the way the wind blew through the trees from the dormitory she and Weyland shared earlier in the day. This kind of storm was not to be underestimated. They belonged in the buttressed dining hall, not out here in the shoddily constructed corridors that connected the main halls with a much newer, and much weaker, building.
Weyland would never stand for that, and she knew it.
It was what she loved about him. Weyland was simple. That wasn’t to say he was unintelligent; in fact, she had been pleasantly surprised by his intellectual curiosity once she’d gotten to know him better. But to him, the world was a simple place. People were good or they were bad. You helped good people if you could. You stayed out of the way of the bad ones.
Ceri was a good one; a young one, but a good one so far. Lady Sibba had expected Weyland to feel a resentment towards the princess and her brother. They were the king’s children, after all.
He had surprised her. Perhaps he saw in them a shadow of himself. They were victims of King Derkomai as much as he was.
“Do you know how to use the long-talker if we find it?” asked Weyland.
That was a good question. They had been invented before Lady Sibba came to Wilderise, but those early models probably had little in common with what they were using now.
“I don’t know,” said Lady Sibba. “Did they have one in the castle?”
“If they did, I wasn’t allowed to use it.”
One positive thing the summer’s shenanigans had given Weyland was the ability to talk freely about his time being held captive. Freely for him, at least.
Lady Sibba had written to Weyland during his captivity. She wasn’t sure why she’d done it. She’d seen him grow up in Herot’s Hollow, but only from a distance: his father, the former blacksmith, had kept him from the schoolhouse. When they met again after his father died, he’d grown into the mountain of a man that he was.
Perhaps that was part of it, she had to admit. What person that liked men could resist a mountain of a man?
There was also the fact that he’d been kind to her after Lady Willana had passed on. Lady Willana was the reason she’d come to Herot’s Hollow at all, and with her gone, she had been ready to abandon the schoolhouse and to return home to start over. But Weyland had come by while she was packing up, and she’d never forget what he told her: “It’s better with you here.”
That was how she felt about Weyland, too. It was better when he was around.
They passed a pair of guards as they finally entered the dormitory wing.
“You need to get back to the dining hall,” they told them. “Whatever is in your dorm can wait.”
Lady Sibba looked at Weyland, amused to be mistaken for a student. “We’re not students. We’re visiting scholars. We’re out here looking for Princess Ceridwen. She’s not in the dining hall. Have you seen her?”
They hadn’t, of course, but they were so preoccupied with their new task that they left Weyland and Lady Sibba to theirs.
“Idiots,” muttered Weyland. These were some of Weyland’s bad people. Lady Sibba didn’t blame him for that particular opinion.
They climbed a flight of stairs. Ceri’s dorm was somewhere around here. Neither of them had thought to ask for her exact room number, but it didn’t matter: they had hands to knock with.
Weyland started beating on the doors on the right side of the hall. “Ceri? Ceri, are you in there?”
Lady Sibba took the left. “Ceri? Are you there, princess?”
They’d made it to roughly the middle of the corridor when the lights went out. Lady Sibba was prepared for this eventuality; she had the match and candle already in hand. She struck the match against the bottom of her boot and lit the candle.
Then she used hers to light Weyland’s as he fumbled for his match.
“We’d better hurry,” said Lady Sibba. “Those long-talkers have power-savers in them, but they won’t last long.”
“I’ll keep trying the doors. You try the long-talker.”
Lady Sibba nodded. She headed to the end of the hall.
The long-talker was somewhat like she remembered it. It had a rotary dial on it now with numbers. She wasn’t sure what to do with that. She hoped operators still existed.
“Number, please.”
Good. At least there was someone to speak to. “Um, hello. I need the ‘lectrics lab at High House. Part of Winwold College.”
“You’re calling from Winwold College, ma’am. Is this an emergency?”
“Yes, I know I’m calling from Winwold. No, it’s not an emergency. I just need to get to the lab.”
“I can’t make internal connections. Check if there are numbers on the side of the box. Have a good night.”
The receiver clicked before Lady Sibba could respond.
Check the side of the box, the operator had said. Sure enough, there was a list of numbers there.
Professor Marin, ‘Lectrics. 090.
Lady Sibba tried pressing those numbers in order, but nothing happened. “Come on…”
The pounding of Weyland’s fist on the doors was echoed by the pounding of shutters against windows. Lady Sibba knew why they hadn’t been able to board up the entire college on short notice, but it disturbed her to hear it. Those windows wouldn’t hold if it continued like this for long.
Lady Sibba tried again, this time turning the round dial from each number.
That seemed to work. There was a ringing sound on the receiver.
“Sibba?”
“It’s ringing,” she said. “No answer yet.”
The phone rang and rang. Well, at least if they weren’t there, there was no reason for them to have to go outside.
“Sib, you need to see this. Sib!”
“Just a minute.”
How long should she let it go unanswered before she gave up? She thought about the size of Professor Marin’s lab. There were a few rooms other than the main workshop where they spent most of their time. An office, the toilets, a small classroom. The long-talker was probably in the office, meaning they’d hear it from almost anywhere—
“SIBBA!”
Lady Sibba’s blood ran cold. Weyland was terrified. She rushed over to him, trying not to let the speed of her movement put the candle out but going as fast as she dared.
She saw the gleam of it, the reflection of the candlelight, before she saw Weyland.
Blood.
Unmistakably. A large pool of it, and a trail leading away.
“Ceri!” they both shouted as they followed the bloody trail.
What could have happened? The only people that should have been out here were their own group and the guards, unless…
“It can’t be Professor Marin,” said Weyland. “She was in the dining hall when we left. You saw her.”
“What if she crossed the courtyard? She would have beaten us here.”
“You think she went out in that?”
The rain crashed against the windows in waves.
“No, I suppose not.”
Lady Sibba had been ashamed of her prejudice against Professor Marin, but she’d truly believed vampires to be bloodthirsty killers by nature for most of her life. It was hard to rewrite something like that in her mind, but she was trying.
“The trail ends here.”
They had followed the trail down the corridor, down the stairs, and to the door leading to the woods behind the campus.
The door rattled in its casing, battered by the winds outside.
Weyland reached for the handle anyway.
“Wait,” said Lady Sibba.
She knelt and lowered the candle to the bloodstain on the doormat. “This isn’t right,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
It had been decades, but Lady Sibba had seen violence firsthand. It had been during her travels through the eastern continent, not long before she came to Herot’s Hollow. The Unified Pantheon hadn’t taken in that part of the world. Out there, there were still bloody conflicts over the faces of the death god or whether it was the goddess of the hearth or the goddess of the home. The kind of fight that had plagued the peoples of the world since they’d first drawn air.
Lady Sibba had seen blood spilled. She knew the way it poured out of wounds, the way it could splatter from a violent thrust, the way it trickled from small cuts. This blood looked like it had been dropped from a bucket from several feet up.
“It’s fake,” she said. “These aren’t real bloodstains.”
“They look pretty real, Sib.”
“They aren’t. Look at that splash. It’s like spilled milk. Blood doesn’t splash like that, not even from an artery. It forms arcs with the beat of the heart.”
Weyland gave her a look that said he’d ask her later how she knew this, but he believed her.
“If it’s fake, who did it?”
“I don’t know,” said Lady Sibba. “But I’m willing to bet it wasn’t Ceri. Let’s go back.”
They looked to the ground to follow the trail back, but it was gone.
“Impossible,” said Weyland.
“Magic,” said Lady Sibba. “Be on your guard. There’s something going on.”
She looked up at him. He nodded at her, his red face resolute. He was determined to keep them safe.
If you had to be stuck in the magically haunted hallways of an ancient college campus during a hurricane, there were worse people to be stuck with.