by Alex Lidell
At least I’m not making things worse for everyone, which should count for something.
With dinner approaching, the keep has raised a rich gold standard in place of the morning red, marking the Academy’s daily shift from a military protocol to the evening palace court atmosphere. Around me, the manicured courtyard walkways are filled with cadets in attire suited for their high birth—long satin and taffeta gowns in every color of the rainbow, carefully made-up faces and gleaming hair. Clusters of young women move together toward the dining hall, laughing and whispering as they eye matching clusters of men in crisp evening suits. Lifting my face into the breeze that seems to forever course through the open spaces on this exposed hilltop, I inhale the scent of young grass and fresh-cut shrubbery, the satin magenta dress I’ve chosen sliding coolly over my hips.
I scowl at my choice of attire. The open back and thigh-high slit give the long sleeves no chance to offer protection against the elements, which take perverse delight in perking my nipples—a fact I notice the same time as a boy walking toward me does, his gaze sliding across my chest and hips. I hug my books to my chest, ending the show, my body too new and foreign for me to feel comfortable in.
If Autumn were here, she’d enjoy taking in the different fashions of the Continental Alliance kingdoms, from the billowing skirts with bamboo ribbing favored by the ladies in the north to the sensual, revealing silks of the southern kingdoms. If Autumn were here, she’d likely have me decked out like a new doll each day. Except, she isn’t.
“Perhaps Osprey is weak of mind?” a girl’s voice says. For a moment, I think someone is beside me, but quickly realize my immortal ears are a little too adept at picking up conversations—this one being carried from a group of ladies ten paces away.
“I believe she is bright enough,” the girl’s companion answers thoughtfully. “It’s something else.”
Ah, that would be the growing commentary about my class performance.
A third girl clicks her tongue. “She’s simply spoilt. Allowed to indulge in swords and horses with no mind paid to tutors—I’ve a brother of that same ilk. Too bad for her Master River will not put up with such nonsense for long.”
I quicken my step to get out of earshot, the mere mention of River’s name sending an uncomfortable shiver though me. I’ve barely seen him in three days, and when I have, he’s as remote as ever. I shudder to imagine his response when my lack of prior education does finally reach his attention. My attempt to sit in on one of Arisha’s tutoring sessions with Tye diffused any desire to try that route again—and not just because my body and mind couldn’t agree whether I wanted to kill the male or kiss him. The reality is that with math skills extending little beyond sums and only enough reading ability to make out instructions, the whole mess was as humiliating as it was useless. My failure to turn in an assignment for Master Erik’s Understanding Islanders’ Goals and Strategies has already earned me extra work, which I’ve no way of completing. By week’s end, I’ll be in the same predicament with Master Briar’s mathematics.
How the bloody hell am I supposed to stay in the Academy long enough for Lunos to send help when I can’t do even the basic coursework? I want to tear off the amulet around my neck and grind it into the dirt. Why did it give me a student persona if I had no ability to be a student? Why not make me something more suitable? A scullery maid, perhaps, or a stable hand.
The dormitories are deserted by the time I make it there, with everyone already at dinner. Holding up my books as a ready explanation should any stranger wonder why I’m walking in the wrong direction, I climb the external stone stairs to my floor, then walk quickly down the torch-lined hallway to my bedchamber. Perhaps I might skip dinner altogether today, keeping the empty room company and sparing Arisha awkward conversation.
Sliding my key into the lock, I feel my body stiffen at the lack of resistance. The door is open. My heart quickens, my senses wakening. Arisha would have been in last, and she never forgets to lock a door. Or fold a shirt. Or anything except how to braid hair and swing a sword.
Reaching to draw the boot knife Coal gifted me back in Lunos, I find the sheath empty and swear softly. I used the blade in the stables to cut the twine, and after getting distracted with Czar throwing a fit over Sprite being in heat, I never tucked the weapon back. Damn it. Forcing myself to breathe, I slowly open the door and inhale the stench of undiluted terror.
Arisha. Rushing inside, I find the girl pressed tightly against one of the dorm room’s high white walls, her small freckled face drained of blood.
“Arisha—?”
“Shh.” She seems unwilling—or unable—to move a muscle, even to turn her head in my direction. Dressed in nothing but smallclothes—a white chest wrap and undershorts—with her uniform grays folded neatly on the bed, the girl seems to have been in the middle of changing for dinner when…
When what?
Dropping the books to the floor, I survey the room…and see nothing. With the smell of Arisha’s fear so thick, I can sense little else on that front as well.
“Behind you,” Arisha whispers, still not moving a muscle. Her blue eyes are wide, her chest rising with shallow rapid breaths. “Under the bed. Move very, very slowly or it will—” She gasps as a low growl fills the room. “It doesn’t like movement.”
My back tightens, my body shifting protectively between Arisha and the bed as I glance around for a weapon. “What is it?” I ask in a voice too calm to be mine.
“I don’t know.” She swallows. “But it has teeth. And yellow eyes. And…a tail. Gray.”
Eyes, teeth, tail. A feather of disbelief runs down my spine. Turning around, I narrow my eyes into the under-bed darkness.
“Grrrrr.” The darkness replies in a lupine whine I know too well.
8
8. Lera
My eyes widen, my heart stuttering for a beat before leaving my chest. The instinctive unbearable longing to throw my arms around Shade’s warm neck flashes through my soul, stopping short against a cold kind of terror. Arisha already thinks something is wrong with me. How do I explain a bloody wolf in our room? If she makes an accusation… If Arisha makes an accusation, it won’t be just my head in the noose. River will have the whole guard searching for Shade’s wolf. And if he keeps being this reckless, eventually they’ll find him.
Think, I order myself, drawing a covert breath. Think, think, think.
Facts race through my mind, shifting like rules in a mathematics formula. Shade is under my bed. No, Shade’s wolf is under my bed. Arisha has seen the animal, and I can’t make her unsee him.
“That’s my dog,” I blurt to fill the pounding silence. “Ruffle. I didn’t think he’d follow me all the way from Osprey. I’m so sorry he scared you, Arisha.”
The girl points a trembling finger at my bed. “That thing isn’t a dog.”
“I mean, he’s tame. Like a dog.” I need to do better. How does one make a humongous wolf seem harmless? Grabbing a pitcher of water from the small hanging shelf in the room, I head for Shade’s hiding spot. “Look. I’ll show you.”
Before I can reconsider the wisdom of what I’m about to do, I swing the pitcher, emptying the cold liquid into the growling darkness.
Arisha’s high-pitched screech hurts my ears, the noise mercifully stopping a heartbeat later when a large yellow-eyed wolf belly-crawls from beneath my bed and shakes himself off, hundreds of tiny droplets flying at both me and my bedding.
Shade’s wolf tilts his head as if finding the concept of a talking girl to be fascinatingly curious, his black muzzle opening into a gentle, easy-to-please pant. Then, with great lumbering laziness, the beast arches his back down, indulging in an extended stretch.
Arisha whimpers.
“See? He’s friendly.” The words tumble from my mouth and I beg the stars to make them true. The amulet around my neck remains cool, spinning no veil to explain Shade’s appearance. A wolf belongs in the mortal world, after all. Even if he’ll be hunted. My voice turns
desperate. “Please. Just let me introduce you. He won’t hurt you. Won’t hurt anyone. But I don’t know what Masters River and Sage might do if they find him.”
“Wait.” Arisha closes her eyes and draws several deep breaths, her strained breathing filling the silence. When she opens them again, her shoulders are set in a fair imitation of bravery, though her hands wring each other until they’re bone white. “Is it… Stars. I can’t.” She shakes her head. “I shouldn’t say—”
On the other side of the room, Shade is now circling in place, his wet nose chasing a slowly moving tail. When Arisha takes a step, however, the wolf snaps his teeth, and she cowers back against the wall. I swallow a curse. Shade’s wolf scents my fear and, with no one else in the room, has concluded Arisha to be its source.
“Stop that,” I snap at Shade. Turning back to Arisha, I hold out my hands placatingly. “What were you going to say?”
“Is that your f-familiar?” Arisha says quickly.
“A familiar?” I blink in bewilderment. “Like…in children’s tales about witches?”
She nods, her face reddening.
“I’m not a witch.” I clear my throat, not sure how to react. “Witches aren’t actually real. I mean, so far as I know.” In Arisha’s defense, witches figure in human tales and legends as much as fae, the difference being that the latter aren’t fiction.
“No. Of course not. I know that,” Arisha says quickly, then cringes at her own words. “I mean, I’m not gullible—I just didn’t want to assume things.”
“For the record, I understand what you just said about as well as I understand my mathematics homework.”
Arisha rubs her face. “Well, we’ve proof of fae and not witches, but how can one prove that something doesn’t exist? It’s like proving a negative. You can’t prove a negative. And that isn’t a dog. There has to—”
“You are babbling,” I tell Arisha.
“And you are fae,” she shoots back. “So that makes us even.”
Silence settles through the room. Arisha hugs herself. I cross my arms over my chest, my head cold and blank. Shade growls. The silence grows thicker, heavier. Outside our tall open window, the slowly lowering sun casts a warm peachy light over the spring evening—a bizarre contrast to the tension in this room.
Something. I have to do something. Say something. But what?
Arisha covers her face with her hands, rubbing her forehead. When she speaks, her voice shakes slightly, as if she’s fighting her own better judgment. “Gavriel is my uncle. So I know…everything.” She lowers her hands. “It’s not just gossip. I’m training for the Guild, so he had good reason tell me. And yes, I know it’s forbidden to interfere, but whoever wrote that rule wasn’t stuck in a room with—” She waves her hand at Shade’s wolf, now snapping at a fly daring to buzz around his head, “Ruffle.”
I drop onto my bed, sitting right atop a still very damp Shade, who somehow managed to sprawl across the covers when I wasn’t paying attention. The wolf huffs his displeasure before shifting over. A hollow ringing fills my ears, as if someone just struck me over the head with a club. “How long?” I ask.
Arisha looks at her bare feet. “Two day after you came. When you were out with Coal.”
“Is that why you—” I pause as the rest of the words Arisha said finally catch up with me. “What did you say about not interfering?”
“The Guild is not supposed to do anything to influence any fae that might cross—it’s one of the Guild’s tenets,” says Arisha, plainly regaining her footing with a chance to offer up information, reminding me so much of Autumn for a brief moment that my chest squeezes. “The ancients were very clear on wanting no fraternization between the worlds, hence the wards and Mystwood and all. And more practically, it keeps the peace. Without the noninterference vow, you’d have the whole Guild maneuvering to try to influence the Protector instead of cooperating and sharing knowledge.”
“Wait.” I hold up my hand. “What you are describing is not Gavriel.”
“You’re telling me,” she says with a snort. “That’s why the Guild threw him out… He didn’t tell you that part, did he?”
“No.”
Arisha blushes. “It looks like I’m little better. Stars. All the rules make so much sense on parchment, but reality is never quite so clean.”
“Is this why you’ve been avoiding me?” I ask, biting my lip. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d been missing Arisha’s friendship until this moment.
The wave of relief rushing through me at Arisha’s nod makes me sink into Shade’s fur.
Shade.
I straighten up, suddenly remembering how we got into this conversation. “So, about the wolf. Could you possibly not mention him to, well, anyone?”
Arisha eyes Shade warily. With his head resting on furry paws, the wolf seems to be following the conversation, one long ear flickering now and again. With new attention suddenly on him, Shade lifts his black snout and sneezes, sending a new cloud of gray fur and lupine drool into the air.
“Is he really a pet from Lunos?” Arisha asks, her face filled with momentary curiosity before her eyes widen again. With a shriek, she rushes to grab the bedspread off her cot, hastily covering her still mostly naked body. “It’s one of them, isn’t it? One of the four males. Stars. Coal? Is that Coal in our room? Did you empty a pitcher of water on bloody Coal? I was already doing badly enough in his lessons—”
“It’s not Coal,” I say quickly. “I promise.”
Arisha’s gaze narrows. “But it is one of them?”
I wince. So much for keeping my head down until rescue arrives. “Shade.”
“I’ll never step into the infirmary again without turning so red I set the walls on fire,” Arisha whispers hoarsely.
“If it makes you feel better, Shade won’t be aware of this. I mean, the version of Shade you think you know doesn’t know he’s fae, much less that he shifts into a wolf now and again.” I drop flat onto my mattress, ignoring the wolf’s indignant rumble. If he wants to take up the entire mattress, then he can hardly complain when I use him for a footrest. “It’s a mess all around.”
Arisha tilts her head in consideration. “All right. So will you tell Shade the truth? I imagine waking with a belly full of meat—or whatever that beast you are using as a pillow does with its teeth—is rather disconcerting.”
“If I accused you of being fae while also claiming that everything you think you know about your life is an utter lie and that you secretly turn into a wild beast, what would you do?”
“At best, I’d think you daft. At worst… I’d think you were conjuring an accusation as a threat—that you are thinking of making the claim to the inquisitors.” Arisha winces. “And by the time those inquisitor bastards are done seeking proof—wait. Proof. What if you had proof?”
“I tried that,” I say, recounting what happened when I forced Coal to touch his own ear, my stomach turning at his phantom screams. “The veil magic is fighting for its survival, and I think it attacks when cornered. That means I stay the hell clear of anything that might provoke it until someone who knows what they are doing comes.”
“Right.” Arisha nods slowly. “For all we know, each time the veil reacts, it might grow stronger, like a muscle. All right, so no placing the males in the crossfire between the real truth and the veil magic’s truth.”
I bite my lip. “What if I didn’t tell Shade that he is fae, but just took off the amulet to show him who I am?”
“He’d likely turn you in, Lera,” says Arisha. “Or else be in danger just for knowing the truth. It seems that when the males absorbed their veil amulets, they truly inherited the fictional personas. If the amulet is fighting to keep the veil’s illusion alive, it may very well compel Shade to turn you in, just to protect itself.”
I curse softly. Arisha has a point.
“We’ll work this out,” she says softly.
I tense, turning my head to find her gaze. “We?”
“We.
” Arisha stands, squaring her shoulders before remembering she is still half-naked and yelping as she snatches up her sheet. “If I’m going to break some of the Guild rules, I might as well break all of them. Unless you’d rather I not—”
Bouncing off my bed, I throw my arms around Arisha, holding her slim body so tightly that I’m not sure the girl can breathe. “I want we,” I say into Arisha’s shoulder, not realizing my eyes are stinging until I blink back the moisture. “I want there to be a ‘we’ very, very much.”
The dong of the dinner bell breaks us apart in a distant reminder that the Academy’s life is flowing on, whether we are ready or not. Despite my assuredness that Shade will have no memory of what his wolf sees, Arisha insists I keep his attention while she changes into evening attire.
“Go on ahead,” I tell Arisha, helping her tie the back laces of her midnight-blue gown. “I want a few more moments with this beast.”
A quarter hour later, I’m within scenting distance of the dining hall—the smells of roasted lamb and baked apples making my stomach growl—when a horse’s distant whinny reminds me of the knife I forgot in the stable. At once, my weaponless boot feels too light. Promising my stomach that lamb is not far off, I turn down a narrow courtyard path toward the tall row of flowering mountain laurels separating the Academy’s east and west sides, the plants’ thick fragrance enveloping me as I pass.
My delicate high-laced boots and low-backed magenta dress look as out of place on the dirt-packed trails as the cadets’ training grays seem in the luxurious breakfast hall. My stomach growls. Picking up the pace, I hurry toward the stables, the vast training corrals—perfectly mowed and raked for the coming morning—ghostly around me. Everyone is eating—cadets, guards, hostlers. Everyone except me.