Royals of Villain Academy 6: Foul Conjuring

by Eva Chase

  I suspected she’d brought up that subject specifically to needle me, even though in theory she was talking to her friends. She knew I hated the insulting slang so many of the fearmancers used for Naries and that I’d come to the defense of the school’s Nary students more than once.

  “I know,” Cressida said in a bored tone, but she gave me a wary glance when I got up, her fingers fidgeting with the end of her ice-blond French braid. She and I hadn’t exactly called a truce, but we’d made a magical deal where I owed her a favor in exchange for the testimony that had cleared me of the murder charge. I couldn’t tell whether she was worried she might somehow lose my end of the agreement or if she’d gained a little respect for me somewhere along the way.

  The “feeb” comment had rankled, but I held my temper as I rinsed my plate. The three girls were from major families among the fearmancers. It was possible they’d heard something about the new students that my fellow scions hadn’t, especially since their parents had gotten particularly cagey about sharing information with their heirs.

  “It’s odd that Ms. Grimsworth brought them in partway through the term,” I said casually, as if I’d been included in the other girls’ conversation. “I wonder why she made that decision.”

  Victory pursed her lips as if she’d eaten something sour, but Sinclair piped up, apparently eager to show off her inside knowledge. “I heard they were off the waiting list,” she said, flicking her black bob back from her face. “It was getting really long, and the feebs recommending people were starting to ask awkward questions.”

  Victory gave her friend a look both puzzled and pointed. “You heard that where?” Obviously she hadn’t known even that much.

  Sinclair’s cheeks turned pink. She ducked her head with an awkward shrug. “It was just some teachers talking. I don’t know the whole situation. It was something like that.”

  I wouldn’t have thought Ms. Grimsworth would be intimidated by a few impatient Naries, but admittedly, I didn’t know much about how she ran the school. Having more nonmagical students might not be such a bad thing anyway. It could mean the bullying would be spread out more, and who knew, there was even the slight chance a fearmancer student or two would get to know one well enough to realize they weren’t so “feeble.”

  It didn’t look like I was going to get anything else out of the trio, so I rinsed my dishes and headed out. I didn’t have class for another hour, but being in my dorm bedroom reminded me too much of my familiar’s absence. I went down to the library to catch up on the studies I’d missed while I was in California.

  As I reached the library doorway, a young woman hurried over to me. “Miss Bloodstone?” she said in a hushed voice. “You’re wanted in the maintenance building, as soon as you can stop by.”

  The maintenance building? I’d only been to the squat structure at the west side of campus once—with Imogen, when she’d still been alive, to ask for her father’s help with a construction project I’d been encouraging the Naries in. Mr. Wakeburn was head of the department, though I’d heard he’d understandably taken leave since his daughter’s murder. I didn’t know anyone else who worked there at all.

  “What about?” I asked.

  The woman twisted her hands together in front of her, looking nervous but not malicious in any way I could decipher. “It’s a personal matter. If you’re busy, you don’t have to come right away. I was just asked to deliver the message.”

  If I didn’t find out what this was about right now, it’d distract me until I did. I turned away from the library. “I can come now. Is there someone specific who wanted to see me?”

  She bobbed her head with a grateful smile. “Just go to Mr. Wakeburn’s office.”

  I didn’t actually expect to see Mr. Wakeburn and not a temporary replacement in his office until I knocked on the door in the maintenance building a few minutes later and a familiar voice called out, “Come in.” Imogen’s father sounded wearier than when I’d talked to him before, but his tone managed to hold some of the same warmth.

  I eased open the office door tentatively. When I’d met the man, he’d struck me as a California surfer type: shaggy dark blond hair, eyes that crinkled with his smile. Today, his hair was brushed back in much more somber fashion, and he didn’t smile at all, although relief crossed his face at the sight of me. He stood up as I closed the door behind me. All his clothes were mourning black.

  “Miss Bloodstone,” he said. “I’m glad you came—and so quickly.”

  His grief came through so clearly in everything from his demeanor to his outfit that my chest clenched up. “I should have come by sooner—I would have if I’d known you were back. I’m so sorry about Imogen. If I could have done anything to help her—”

  He raised his hand to stop me. “I’ve read the reports. By the time you found her, it’s clear there was no saving her. That’s not— It never sounded right to me, the accusations— I can’t place any responsibility for that on your shoulders.”

  I was responsible, though, on a deeper level than he’d have let himself consider. My enemies had arranged Imogen’s murder specifically so they could frame me for it, knowing they’d be able to exert much more control over my actions if I were convicted. If Imogen and I hadn’t been friendly, if she’d happened to be in another dorm, they wouldn’t have picked her.

  The knowledge added to the pressure in my chest, even though I couldn’t admit any of it to the man in front of me.

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “No. It shouldn’t.” Mr. Wakeburn dragged in a breath. “I know the two of you were friendly, even if you had your disagreements in the past. I was hoping you’d consider doing the one thing that might help her in some small way now. The blacksuits haven’t made any progress—I’m not sure who else to ask. In your position as scion, you might be able to accomplish something.”

  A quiver of suspicion passed through me. I resisted the urge to tense up. “What are you asking?”

  He looked me straight in the eyes then, his gaze steady and pleading. “No one can bring my daughter back, but that doesn’t mean her murderer should get away unpunished. She deserves some kind of justice. Will you do what you can to see that happen?”

  That’s what I’d thought he was getting at. He wanted me to help find and bring in her killer. How could he ever imagine that the woman responsible was high up in the exact organization he trusted to bring him that justice? I knew who’d murdered Imogen… and I wasn’t sure I had any hope in hell of ever proving it, let alone making Lillian Ravenguard pay for that crime.

  I couldn’t admit to any of that either, but with Imogen’s father looking at me like that, I couldn’t rebuff him either. Imogen did deserve that justice, and so did Mr. Wakeburn. And if I couldn’t make that happen, no one would.

  “I want to see her get justice too,” I said. “If I can make that happen, I promise you I will.”

  Chapter Five

  Rory

  Bloodstones recover quickly, my mother had said a couple days ago, and from the moment I arrived on the main family property, I had proof of that right in front of me.

  She sat straight but not stiffly in the sitting room armchair kitty-corner to me, her eyes alert and her hand steady as she brought her cup of tea to her lips. I sipped from my own cup, the sweetly nutty flavor of the green tea she’d said was her favorite coating my tongue. The click of the grandfather clock’s swinging pendulum carried through the room. My mother closed her eyes as she drank.

  How long had she gone without this favorite tea? Without so many other things she must have enjoyed that the joymancers would never have supplied her with? Despite my trepidations about her interest in vengeance and the fact that she still wasn’t much more than a stranger to me, a flicker of my own anger shot through me at the thought.

  The joymancers had stolen all that from her. And on top of it, they’d stolen from me the chance to know this woman as more than a stranger when she should
have been the pinnacle of my world. Maybe I would discover that separation had been for the best, but it wasn’t as if they’d done it for my benefit. They’d wanted to control and contain me as much as they had her. It’d just been easier with a child who couldn’t remember where she’d come from.

  “You picked Insight as your specialty and your league,” my mother said, her gaze returning to me. “Tell me about that.”

  As I was often finding with her, I couldn’t tell whether the request contained any judgment or only curiosity. Insight had turned out to be a valuable skill, but many fearmancers saw it as lesser than the other areas of magic simply because its effects were subtle rather than vividly impressive. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that out of the other four baronies, the Ashgraves were the ones who tended toward that area. I wasn’t sure whether the Bloodstones had a particular pattern.

  I thought back to the moment when Ms. Grimsworth had asked me to choose after the assessment that had shown my strengths in all four areas of magic. “I was torn between that and Physicality. I used to make sculptures and things, before… I do like constructing with magic too. But when there were so many people around me who seemed to want a lot from me, not all of it good, I wanted every chance I could get of recognizing unkind intentions ahead of time.”

  I’d also picked it to honor the attitudes I’d inherited from my joymancer parents. Mom and Dad had always encouraged me to pay attention to people’s expressions and actions to figure out what might be important to them, the way they did when deciding how to most easily stir up joy to power their magic. I didn’t think my birth mother would react well to that part of the explanation, though.

  She made a humming sound that sounded accepting if not outright approving.

  “What’s your specialty?” I had to ask. Almost as much, I’d have liked to know which area she wasn’t quite powerful enough in to call it a strength, but that question might have raised eyebrows.

  A slight smile curled my mother’s lips. “I’m fond of a good conjuring myself. But I find it’s most useful to be able to cut to the chase and simply demand what you need directly. Persuasion hasn’t failed me often.”

  An uneasy sensation crawled down my back. That was one more way she’d aligned herself with the Nightwoods—with Malcolm’s father and his domineering cruelty. Did she have any idea he’d turned that cruelty on me, repeatedly?

  That was one of the subjects I’d most wanted to bring up with her during this visit. I could have had an opening there, but before I could say anything else, Eloise, the house manager, slipped into the room with a fresh pot of tea on a small tray.

  Normally one of the maids would have handled basic tasks like that, but Eloise obviously felt the newly returned lady of the house required a more thorough level of attention. From what I’d gathered, she’d already been hired on as assistant to the previous house manager in the last few years before my mother’s disappearance. Most of the current staff wouldn’t have worked under my mother at all.

  Eloise nudged aside the older pot and set the new one in its place at the end of the coffee table. She tweaked the handle as if to set it at just the perfect angle for my mother’s reach. My mother’s eyes narrowed as she watched.

  “That’s enough,” she said briskly, with a hint of an edge to her tone. “Let it be.”

  The older woman paled. “Yes, of course. My apologies, Baron.” She scooped up the old pot and stepped back. “If there’s anything else you need at the moment—”

  My mother dismissed the manager with a jerk of her hand. “That’s all.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of her apparent irritation until she leaned toward the new pot with the murmur of a casting word. Like every experienced fearmancer I’d met, she cast her spells using combinations of syllables that sounded like nonsense to anyone else—an easy way to avoid giving warning to those around you of what magic you were going to send their way.

  It took more practice to use made-up casting words instead of ones that had a literal meaning that fit your intention. You had to come up with sounds that had a personal resonance with your meaning in the spur of the moment. For the six months I’d been learning how to use my magic, I’d mainly relied on literal words. Watching my mother, I couldn’t help thinking it was about time I worked on disguising my own castings, for discretion if nothing else.

  I might not have understood the sounds she’d spoken, but her behavior suggested the intention of the spell well enough. She brushed her hand over the pot, studying it intently, as if she were checking it to make sure it was… safe? Did she really think her own house manager, a woman who’d known her since her first years as baron and who from what I’d seen was treating her with nothing but fawning subservience would have poisoned her tea, magically or otherwise?

  Had she always been that cautious, or was it an aftereffect of her imprisonment?

  The casting appeared to satisfy her, in any case. She refilled her cup with a soft sigh. I took the opportunity to steer the conversation the way I’d been about to before.

  “Have you spoken to the other barons since you’ve come back?” I asked.

  My mother gave me a considering look. “They’ve come to give their respects and so forth, as one would expect. I’ll be back at the table of the pentacle soon enough.”

  “I’m sure they’re happy to have you back.”

  Her smile returned, wryer this time. “They’d better be. What’s on your mind, Persephone?”

  I wet my lips. “Well, I— Obviously I don’t know what would be normal. But they haven’t exactly been welcoming to me since I arrived here. The full barons, anyway.” I wasn’t going to throw Declan under the bus. My tentative phrasing didn’t raise any specific complaints, but it gave me the opening to go there depending on how my mother responded.

  My mother continued to study me for a long moment—long enough that the hairs on the back of my neck started to rise. I instinctively felt for my mental shields, even though she hadn’t spoken a casting word.

  “In what way?” she asked.

  In the way that they’d given my mentor professor a deadly illness to stop him from warning me about their plans and enchanted him to try to injure me beyond the ability to cast if he were cured. In the way that they’d conspired to have me arrested and prosecuted for a murder they themselves had ordered committed. And a whole lot of other things I couldn’t definitively prove if my mother needed more than my word for it. I resisted the urge to worry at my lip with my teeth.

  “Baron Nightwood came by campus not long after I began classes and said some pretty harsh things,” I said, figuring that was safe enough to mention as a start. “None of them stood up for me when I was accused of murder. Even when they thought I might be baron soon, they haven’t seemed to want to treat me as a respected part of the pentacle.” Not as long as I refused to go along with their ideas of how to rule, anyway.

  My mother leaned back in her chair. “Well, we all must look after ourselves and our own. A Bloodstone doesn’t rely on handouts. Given your… uncharacteristic upbringing, even though it wasn’t your fault at all, I can understand why they’d have exercised some caution in their initial dealings with you. Let’s not hold that against them. I’m sure you can prove yourself worthy of that respect in the years you have now before you take on the mantle of baron yourself.”

  That was a typical fearmancer view of the situation. It was a dog-eat-dog world with everyone out for themselves, and so powerplays and attempted manipulation were par for the course.

  From what the other scions had told me, when it came to me the barons had gone beyond the scope of what even their society would consider acceptable treatment, but if I couldn’t convince my mother of that… She’d grown up with the Barons Nightwood and Killbrook; considered at least Nightwood a close friend. Just as I barely knew her, she barely knew me. Counting on familial loyalty to smooth over such a huge accusation didn’t seem wise this early on.

  Possibly catching some of
my uneasiness in my expression, my mother’s gaze sharpened again. “I understand it must have been a difficult transition for you with the unfortunate lack of preparation you faced, but as a barony, we can’t afford to dwell on our setbacks. You’ll rule over your peers in your time as I did before and will now, and to be effective, you need to show them only strength. Any coddling offered to you would have undermined your position, even if it would have been comforting at the time.”

  “I know,” I said automatically, although I wouldn’t so much have wanted coddling as not being actively attacked on a regular basis. Although from a fearmancer perspective, those might be nearly the same thing. “I think I’ve stood up for myself pretty well.”

  There were a lot of other things I’d have liked to ask. Would she stand up for me if she found out the other barons were purposefully trying to undermine me? Would she accept the fact that I wasn’t going to treat the Naries as lesser beings or demand the respect I was supposed to get by hurting people?

  Those weren’t the kind of questions I could expect a straight answer to, though. I’d have to figure out what sort of a mother she’d be to me as we went.

  The memory of Connar’s hostility flitted through my mind with a clenching of my stomach. That was a more current act of aggression against me. But again, I couldn’t prove that his parents were behind it. Even if I could, it was way too easy to imagine my mother brushing that incident off as a family matter that it wasn’t our business to interfere with. He’d been hostile to the other scions too, and it wasn’t as if he’d hurt me in any way that showed.

  Were the barons going to let up on me now that they didn’t need my cooperation to run the pentacle? I guessed I’d have to wait and find that out too.