by Eva Chase
“Hold on, Ice Queen,” he said as I moved to walk away. His tiny golden dagger earring winked with the sunlight filtering through the leaves overhead.
I raised my eyebrows at him, unable to hold back the question. “I get to be queen after all?”
His mouth had settled into a lazy smile that only emphasized everything that was attractive in his boyishly wicked face. “After that little display the other day, I think you’ve earned the title.”
That was unexpected. After my initial, rather pathetic attempt at freezing Malcolm in place to stop him from harassing some junior student, Jude had made a game out of calling me as many ridiculous ice-themed nicknames as he could. I couldn’t tell what he was playing at now.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
“Back to school,” I said, because he’d figure that out soon enough just by watching me.
“So was I. I’ll walk with you.”
That would be a no. I raised my chin. “I wasn’t looking for company. Anyway, I thought you preferred the path.”
“Depends on who I’m walking with.” He spread his hands in a gesture of appeal. “Can’t we get along as fellow scions? You’ve proven yourself, beat the hell out of the assessment. I respect that. No need for us to be at each other’s throats. We are going to have to work together someday.”
I’d always had a hard time figuring Jude out, but he was outdoing himself today. Did he expect me to believe this white flag was genuine?
I shifted my weight. “Malcolm doesn’t seem to think the war is over.”
Jude made a show of peering around himself every which way, giving me an excellent view of his leanly muscled body in his dress shirt and slacks. “Just as I thought. The heir of Nightwood doesn’t have me on a leash. Malcolm’s a stubborn prick, I’ll give you that. I see more value in flexibility.”
And that would be great, except I don’t believe you.
My skepticism must have shown on my face as I debated what to say. Jude waggled a finger at me. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you about stubbornness. Was I really that awful to you?”
Oh, did he want a list of transgressions? I counted them off on one hand. “You ripped into me in Insight class and made sure everyone heard all the embarrassing memories you dug up. You made fun of me after I had to relive my parents’ murders in Desensitization. You helped kidnap my familiar and did everything you could to convince me yours was going to eat it piece by piece. And that’s only the things I know for sure.” Who knew how much he might have helped Malcolm with one scheme or another along the way?
Jude hummed to himself. “It seems to me that my first crime came after you’d already taken a jab at me—”
“I was just completing the exercise!” I said. “And if you’re going to get technical about it, you still took the first jab.”
“—and insulted me and the other scions in front of most of your dorm, without any provocation I can think of.”
“How about the provocation of you’d been acting like jerks the entire time I’d been around you?” I grumbled.
Jude ignored me, sailing smoothly onward. “I don’t recall making any snarky remarks to you after your desensitization session until you’d already insulted my intelligence. And your familiar wasn’t the slightest bit hurt.”
“It was still a horrible situation to put me in.”
“We were testing you. Making sure you’d live up to your title. That’s how things work here and out there.” He motioned in the general direction of town, but I knew he meant the wider fearmancer community. “You rose to the challenge; I recognize that. It’s done.”
Was it really that easy for him and everyone else here to shrug off the way they treated each other?
“I didn’t grow up like all of you did,” I said. “Those aren’t the kinds of rules I follow.”
“But you’re here now, and we didn’t grow up the way you did. You don’t join a symphony and get mad that no one will jam along with your ukulele.”
I didn’t want to “join” at all, I shouted inside my head, but it wouldn’t be smart to say that out loud. I still needed to give some appearance of wanting to be here, or I’d never get enough access to figure out how to undermine the place.
“Fine,” I said. “You were doing what seemed to you like normal things to do. That doesn’t mean I have to like it—or want to see what the hell you might decide to do to me next. Do you honestly like living this way, always at each other’s throats?”
Jude paused. For the first time, a more serious cast came over his expression. When he smiled again, the edges were sharper.
“Maybe I don’t,” he said archly. “Maybe that’s why I’m here talking to you right now.”
I really didn’t know what to make of that. In my silence, he shrugged.
“Forget all of that, then. Let’s make it simple. Your life would be easier having me as a friend rather than an enemy, if you get to choose, wouldn’t it?”
“Is that a threat?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, it’s just a question. Friend versus person-you-have-nothing-to-do-with, if you’re going to get nitpicky.”
“I guess it would,” I said. If I could have trusted him to be an actual friend.
“There you go. Maybe you haven’t developed the fearmancer taste for blood yet, but you’re already as practical as one.”
I bristled, wishing I could take back my answer, but to my relief Jude stepped back.
“You need some time to stew on it,” he said. “I can take a hint. Think hard and well, Ice Queen.”
With a jaunty salute, he strolled off toward the path.
I waited until he was out of sight, all my senses gradually easing off of high alert, before I continued toward campus. Had that been the opening to some new scheme from the scions? Or had he actually meant what he’d said?
It didn’t really matter. I couldn’t picture ever calling Jude Killbrook a “friend.” But there was some truth to that old saying about keeping friends close but enemies closer.
The wind picked up as I reached the edge of the campus, thick and damp. When I tugged my hair back behind my ears, the currents of the air yanked at the dark waves a second later.
A small group of mages—juniors from the look of them—stood farther down the line of the forest tossing birds I assumed were their familiars up into the air and laughing. To train them for bad weather? To drink in the animals’ fear at trying to fly in the growing gale? Lord only knew in this place.
I’d taken three steps across the field when a wrenching groan filled my ears. I spun around in time to see a huge oak topple over right into the group of mages.
I looked up at the sound of footsteps where I was sitting on a stiffly cushioned chair in the reception area of the health center. Professor Banefield stepped inside, his gaze moving straight to me. He sat his barrel-chested form down on the chair across from me.
“I heard you were here,” he said. “Did you know one of the injured students?”
I shook my head. “I just—I saw it happen. I wanted to make sure— No one will tell me if they’re okay. Do you know if they’re okay?” I’d been sitting here for two hours, waiting for news. One of the kids had walked out with a brace on her wrist and a couple bruises, but two others were still off in the inner rooms.
“I believe one has finished treatment and is simply resting as he fully recovers. The other— From what I heard, there was damage to her skull. A brain injury is no easy thing even with magic.”
Especially not magic designed for tormenting people. My jaw clenched, but some of the anger in me snuffed out when I looked at Banefield. His shoulders were slumped, his expression as weary as if he hadn’t slept in days.
He might have known at least one of the kids. He taught the junior Insight classes. Hell, he probably knew all three of them.
Maybe I did have a taste for blood after all, because I couldn’t help saying, all the same, “That was the tree Shelby was talking about. The one
she was worried had rotted.”
“Yes,” Banefield said. “Clearly.”
He looked at me like a man before a firing squad, waiting for me to take the next shot. The killing blow. If you’d just listened to me…
No, I didn’t really want blood after all. There was enough of it already on the ground under that fallen tree.
“They’re still people,” I said instead. “We’re still people, not gods or something. Sometimes they’re going to be right. Sometimes we’ll make mistakes. That’s all I was trying to say before.”
Which the current disaster had proven amply true. A swell of guilt overwhelmed any remaining anger. I dropped my face into my hands. “I should have pushed harder. I should have gone to talk to the maintenance staff myself.”
“Rory…” Banefield cleared his throat and shifted forward on his chair to rest a hand on my head in an almost fatherly gesture. “This isn’t on you.”
I couldn’t stop a little bitterness from leaking into my voice as I swiped at my eyes. “I guess this is just more of that weakness you talked about, caring about other people.”
Banefield was silent for a moment. “No,” he said. “I don’t think it is.”
He withdrew his hand. We sat there without speaking for a while as I gathered my composure. Then he got up. “There isn’t anything useful either of us can do here. Why don’t you go back to your dorm and take some time for yourself? We can talk more later. If you need to reach out to someone in the next day, you can speak to Ms. Grimsworth or any of your professors. I have to take a trip off campus.”
A trip? Now—to go where? But he was already heading out the door. All I got was a glimpse of determination tensing his exhausted face before he was gone.
Chapter Six
Malcolm
Taking a run with Connar was always a good challenge. He might be as big as a linebacker, but he could keep up a good pace for an hour without breaking much of a sweat. My own tee was sticking damp to my back by the time we started to slow as we passed the lake for the sixth time. My familiar, loping alongside us, pulled ahead and then glanced back at me with one of those wolf expressions that seemed to say, Is that all you’ve got?
The early morning breeze cooled the sweat on my skin in an instant. I swiped the workout towel over the back of my neck. The burn of the exercise had spread through my calves up into my chest, exactly the way I liked it. You couldn’t keep up magical endurance unless you had the physical endurance to support it.
Shadow circled us with a huff. “You need more of a challenge?” I said with a smile, and fished the rubber ball he was oddly fond of out of my pocket. He twitched with anticipation at the sight of it. I whipped it across the field as hard as I could, and he dashed after it in a blur with a joyful panting. My smile stretched into a grin as I watched. He’d have run the whole day if he could.
Connar and I had fallen into the casual jog of our cooldown, which made it easier to talk. “Sometime we’ll have to drag Jude and Declan along on one of these runs,” I said, mainly for the snort I knew I’d get from him in response.
“They’d fall over before we were halfway through,” he replied, but his amused smile only lasted an instant. Insight might be the one area I couldn’t claim a strength in, but I thought I could say the guy had been even grimmer and more taciturn than usual in the past week.
I could take a few guesses at the reason. The main one was named Rory Bloodstone.
“All the more reason they should start working up to it.” I nodded to the triangle of buildings we were coming up on. “At least Declan’s making himself useful in other ways. Sinleigh set him up as our Bloodstone scion’s tutor. That should get us some good material to work with.”
Connar’s jaw tightened. “She’s picked herself up pretty well since the assessment. And she was awfully hard to shake before that too.”
He didn’t need to remind me. A prickle of tension ran down my spine thinking of her dazed but triumphant expression when Ms. Grimsworth had announced her results, my brief encounter with her afterward when she’d answered my threat with one of her own. The way she’d asked about the burn mark I hadn’t been hiding well enough, my defenses momentarily lowered because I thought I was alone… I wasn’t going to let her see another hint of vulnerability, that was for sure.
I waved my hand dismissively. “Maybe we came on too strong to begin with and that backfired a bit. There are plenty of subtle tactics that can do the trick. Don’t worry, we’ve got this. No way in hell are we letting her spend the rest of her time here reciting joymancer philosophies and mouthing off at us.”
I hadn’t worked my ass off and endured everything I had to cement my position only to have this girl barge into our lives like a bolt of lightning and bring it all crashing down. She might be riding high now, but I’d seen how quickly currents could shift, especially when there was blood in the water.
Connar hadn’t seemed all that concerned at first by the feud that had developed between the four of us and Rory, happy to lend support as needed and otherwise to let Jude and me lay our plans. Apparently her defiance had been gnawing at him underneath. I’d never seen him go off on someone out of the blue like when he’d ripped into her that one day while we’d been matching Declan’s hawk against another senior’s falcon. His temper could be explosive, sure, but you could generally see it coming with the lighting of the fuse.
Rory hadn’t said a word to us, hadn’t even been looking at us, as far as I’d been able to tell. He’d simply snapped at the sight of her.
Connar’s expression didn’t shift. “What plans have you got in the works now?”
“It starts with a slow build, and then we’ll ramp it up fast once she starts to wobble. She’s still a fish out of water here. She’s not going to find much support. We make her feel completely unstable in all those righteous attitudes of hers, and she’ll have to turn to the authorities for help. Who better to set her straight than her fellow scions? With Declan there, we’ve already got one foot in the door.”
“She might just crash and burn on her own.”
I grimaced. “It already looks bad that she’s gotten away with so much crap in the first place. We need her in line before she undermines our authority in any permanent way. And the barons want her ready to join in the pentacle as soon as possible—with the appropriate respect in place.”
Dad had given me a nice long lecture about that this weekend, along with the cut now scabbed over but stinging on the inside of my arm. As always I’d cast an illusion to hide the injury. More training. A Nightwood should never let anyone see he was wounded. A year after I’d started at Blood U, my parents had started dealing out those sorts of lessons with less care in the expectation that I had the skills to pick up the slack.
“Well, you know if you need anything from me…”
“Of course.” I cuffed him lightly on the side. “We just want her to struggle… in quiet sorts of ways. Has she ended up in any of your classes?”
“One of my Physicality seminars,” he said.
“Perfect. Even you should be able to do subtle in your own league.” I shot him a teasing grin. “Funny how her conjurings will just keep falling apart for no reason she can see.”
“Yeah. I can manage that.”
He didn’t sound all that happy about the prospect. I eyed him as we slowed to a walk, Shadow running wolfish circles around us. “Is something else eating at you?” If Professor Darksend had been hassling Connar about the stupid tourney again, I’d shove his head up his ass.
“What?” Connar looked momentarily unsettled, or maybe I misread that, because a second later he was smiling his usual quiet smile. “No. I’m good to go, whatever you need.”
“There’s nothing left to do for this bit. I set up this morning’s move last night. We should be just in time…”
With a glance at the time, I motioned for him to follow me toward Ashgrave Hall. It was still so early that only a couple of students had ventured out onto the gr
een. Most of the dorm room windows stood at least a little open to let in the fresh spring air. I expected we’d have heard Rory even without that factor, though.
We were about ten feet distant when the first shout carried from her room at the top right corner of the building, opposite mine. Rory’s voice broke through the air hollering a wordless sound of frustration and then sputtered into a flurry of swearing. Connar gave me a quizzical look.
I chuckled. “She’s still asleep. She doesn’t even know what she’s doing.”
When I listened carefully, I made out the rasp of tearing fabric. Exactly as designed. Everyone in her dorm would be hearing that commotion. She wasn’t the only person who’d think she was getting unstable.
Connar’s stance had tensed, but he nodded to me. “Sounds like you got her good. I’d better shower before I have to get to class.”
“If you don’t mind missing the end of the show.”
“I can tell there’s lots more to come.”
He disappeared into the building. Rory’s voice had petered out. She’d have woken up by now. Given the state she should find herself in, I’d imagine it wouldn’t take long before she made an appearance.
I whistled to Shadow and crouched down as he loped over. He dropped the ball at my feet and ducked his head for a scratch between the ears. I gave him a good one, his dark fur coarse but soft beneath my fingers.
Ms. Grimsworth had decreed that because of my familiar’s size, he had to keep to the kennel during class hours. I’d campaigned against the idea, but I hadn’t won that fight.
It wasn’t right. Wolves weren’t meant to be kept caged. Leaving him behind in that building on the edge of campus always jabbed a thorn of guilt into my side. When we left Blood U, I’d make sure he had free run all day wherever we ended up going.
“You’ve got another hour or so, boy,” I said, extending the scratching to the crook of his jaw for good measure. “You want to give the woods another roam?”
His ears perked up, probably detecting my meaning as much through our familiar bond as the words themselves. “I can’t come with you,” I added. “We’ll go for a proper hunt tonight.”