3. What Exactly Constitutes an Attic Person #4
Briar twists around to discover that something odd is happening in the courtyard; silence is spreading from one corner like an inkblot, engulfing scholars in droves.
The students who’ve come that way have their eyes down, shoulders hunched, and they’re moving with quiet purpose, even in their pushy gangs.
Mons doesn’t mean anything at all to Briar. Gun to their head, perhaps it means ‘mountain’? In . . . Latin? Honestly, the first thing that sprung to mind was mons pubis, which seems very unlikely to apply here.
As the crowd moves, the corner starts to clear, revealing a small boy standing alone.
Briar watches, confused, as he drops to his knees, his head bowed.
Four older students approach, towering over him; they’re wearing long black capes in addition to their uniforms, fastened at the throat with opulent, mayoral silver chains, hoods up. Ridiculous.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Westby says quietly, as Briar cranes their neck to look. He sounds genuinely concerned, which makes Briar all the more curious.
The caped scholars have a certain shine to them.
They’re probably Briar’s age, about to graduate, and there’s a mannish, adult quality to them that sets them apart from the rest. They aren’t fidgeting or laughing, they’re straight-backed and neatly dressed, elegant as all but one lower their hoods.
Cheekbones and jawlines have already carved through their features, sharpening their sneers to something predatory and dangerous.
One of them is openly smoking, a cigarette dangling from his long fingers.
Surely that’s not allowed. Surely none of this is allowed. Briar’s nerves hum with apprehension.
One of the caped scholars leans down to say something in the younger boy’s ear; the kneeler looks petrified, but he’s clearly trying to appear attentive, because he’s nodding away even as tears gather and spill.
When the older scholar straightens up, his victim offers up a slightly crushed croissant.
The tall scholar, who has polished hardwood curls and a sculpted face kissed with a frequent flyer’s tan, sucks in his cheeks and then spits extravagantly onto the pastry.
His accomplice next to him spits on it, too.
The crowd is silent as the unhooded scholars take turns - and then the first one knocks the croissant carelessly from the boy’s hand, watches it roll to a stop and then grinds it very precisely into the mossy stone with the heel of his perfect shoe.
‘Go on, then,’ he says, bored already. ‘Eat it.’
Briar darts a look at Westby, expecting to see horror on his face, but Westby is only grimacing and looking away, as if this sort of humiliating torture is just a fact of daily life.
It’s vile. They’re all utterly vile. The perpetrators, the onlookers. It’s as if all the colour has bleached out of the day. Briar feels swelteringly hot under their polyester collar; they can feel their heartbeat hammering in their throat.
The kneeling boy picks up the croissant with a shaking hand but seems unable to bring it to his lips.
Then, to Briar’s continuing confusion, the only scholar still hooded steps forward and puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
He leans in to say something in a low voice, almost kindly, and the boy listens with vacant eyes.
The scholar touches his face, the backs of two slender fingers brushing against his cheek, coaxing an upward tilt of the chin like he’s bestowing a blessing - and, unbelievably, the boy smiles back at him.
When the hooded scholar moves away, the boy picks up the disgusting mess of pastry and begins to eat it, still smiling, tear tracks on his cheeks, wolfing it down like he’s starving and it’s the greatest thing he’s ever tasted.
Anger is rising in Briar in a molten wave.
They’re going to say something. The Temple scholars might be too cowardly, but Briar certainly isn’t.
All these gutless bystanders have been given an incredible gift, a gift Briar would have killed for, and they won’t even use it to protect a kid with a croissant. Pathetic.
‘Jones,’ Westby says warningly as Briar takes off, ‘don’t.’
Briar makes it as far as the first scholar with no plan, and then very abruptly there’s no need for one; one of the caped boys must have sensed them approaching, because they feel the strange, stomach-dropping sensation of tripping over a non-existent wire and then hit the ground shockingly hard, skinning their palms, nauseating pain rattling through their bones.
As Briar’s very first introduction to magic, it’s not ideal.
The hooded scholar is the only one who’s turned around; his hood has half-fallen, revealing an angular, striking face and incongruous hair, shoulder-length and prematurely silver-shot in a way that doesn’t look natural but also doesn’t look dyed.
Briar is on the verge of calling him a nasty, shit-eating bastard when the words shrivel and die on their tongue, replaced by something that feels like a neat punch to the solar plexus and an icy shower all at once.
Because of course, that shit-eating bastard is Sebastian Wolfe.