Mrs. MacDannan shook her head.
“You mean Wendy MacDannan?” Rachel asked softly.
“Yes.” Their tutor nodded briskly. “My niece, Wendy Darling, who is in your class, is named for her. In fact, Wendy—the original Wendy—reminded me a bit of you, Miss Griffin.”
“Really, why is that?” asked Rachel, startled.
“She was an ace on a steeplechaser.”
Rachel recalled Mr. Badger’s comment: There’s no one who can outfly a little girl on a steeplechaser! Her lips parted in awe. Could the practice room in the gym have been set up by Wendy MacDannan?
“They’re both crazy?” shouted Charybdis, who had apparently missed the comment about the steeplechaser. This sparked a great deal of laughter from the Drake students.
Mrs. MacDannan gave them a long steady look. But, to Rachel’s surprise, the tutor was not the only one who came to her defense.
Joy O’Keefe jumped to her feet. “Will you all stop picking on Rachel! What is it with you losers? I saw what you did to her at breakfast. Are you so lame that you have to pick on little girls half your size? You do something like that again, and your hair will turn a much worse color than puke green! It will be on fire! Right, Lucky!” She sat down.
Lucky, who had been sunning himself on the table, raised his head and blew out a long plume of red-orange flame in the direction of the Drake girls. Charybdis screamed.
A warm glow spread slowly through Rachel, temporarily driving back a little bit of the darkness. Maybe she could not talk to her friends about her memory troubles, but suddenly she did not feel as alone.
“Mr. Dragon.” Scarlett MacDannan lowered her glasses and glared over the top of them. Her rat had leapt up, startled. He scampered up her body and hid under her bushy hair again. “Please behave yourself, if you wish to remain in my class.”
Sigfried said casually, “Lucky’s last name is Smith.”
But Lucky hung his head. “Yes, Ma’am.”
The Dare kids were used to Lucky talking, but the Drake students gaped in a amazement.
“It talked!” cried Cydney Graves, who had not spoken in weeks, except to answer the tutor’s direct questions.
“Cool!” grinned Napoleon Powers, slicking back his dark hair. “Talking dragon! Where can I get one of those?”
Recovering from her Lucky-induced fright, Charybdis Nutt waved her hand, “Ooo! Ooo! Is it true that the alchemy tutor, Mr. Fisher, was dating Wendy Darling before she went…you know…totally bonkers?”
Scarlett MacDannan pinned Charybdis with such a fierce look that the girl quailed.
“It is not true.” Their tutor’s eyes snapped with anger. “And that is quite enough. Class, please turn to Euclid Book Two, Proposition 18.”
The class returned to their work, unwilling to push the fiery-tempered teacher. Rachel’s eyes rested on the page, but she had memorized all of Euclid’s Propositions two years ago. Her thoughts returned to the subject of Moving Day.
Dee Hall called to her. It was the place she had dreamed of living for so many years. It had also been Gaius’s first choice. She would have bookshelves in her walls, bookshelves under her stairs, bookshelves in her doors, and libraries for common rooms. She could live surrounded by books, books, books, and more books. Should she move into this book-lover’s paradise?
It was tempting, so tempting.
More than her room would change, however, if she moved. Her classes would change, too. She would be in the Dee Hall core group, with Valerie Hunt, Wanda Zukov, and Rowan Vanderdecken—the granddaughter of the captain of the Flying Dutchman and the great-granddaughter of Old Thom, the sailor ghost Rachel had helped after the Dead Man’s Ball—as well as with a few other students. Did she want that?
She glanced over at Nastasia, who gave her a kind, encouraging smile; at Joy, who was still red in the face from her outburst but who winked at Rachel and gave her a thumbs-up; at Sigfried, who was whispering to Lucky and glaring at their tutor; and at Astrid, who usually spoke to no one, but who now gave her a timid, shy smile.
Scarlett Mallory MacDannan was correct. It was the people who made Dare Hall worth calling home.
Chapter Thirty:
The Weapon Deep Within Our Heart
After weeks of snow and frost, the weather grew warm in early February. It rained for three days straight, melting the snow that had carpeted the campus since November. There had been no sign of the Heer since he retreated to Dunderberg, so it was decided that classes should continue. Even with the great, floating umbrellas hovering rim to rim above the gravel paths, walking between the buildings meant splashing through large puddles. Everything was wet, rainy, and gray, almost as if the world itself wept with Rachel.
Even cloudy weather could not dampen the spirits of the general student body, however. The approaching ball in honor of the Year of the Dragon was fast becoming the main topic of conversation. Students rushed to find partners and assemble costumes. As the masquerade was being sponsored by the Sacred Days Club, Nastasia decided to enroll in the club, eager to become involved in the choosing of decorations and future events. Joy immediately volunteered to join, as well. They tried to convince Rachel to join them, but she was unable to muster the necessary enthusiasm.
The dark mood that enveloped her, despite her best efforts to dispel, it was not improved by the letter she received from her father. He wrote that she should not worry. He would be fine. He called her Little Dart, which he had not done since she first started flying, nearly two years before. Seeing it on the page brought tears to her eyes. It drove home the truth, that he had forgotten everything since then. At the bottom of his note, he thanked her for the origami griffin. The envelope also contained a stack of pretty origami paper that he noted came from her mother.
The Tuesday Morning before the ball, word spread among the students that the melting snow had caused the creek to flood the forest to the north, above the waterfalls, and there would be a school-wide skating party that evening.
Rachel did not feel like moving, much less trekking uphill for twenty minutes in the cold of the late afternoon. However, she loved skating. She loved the hemlock forest to the north, too. When the others insisted she accompany them, she sighed and tagged along.
They went to the gym and took skates from a large locker behind one of the doors. Like all conjured item, the skates would last twenty-four hours. Then they all trekked across campus, past Roanoke Hall, and into the forest behind it. The weather had grown cold again, and it had snowed for an hour or so earlier in the afternoon, so that a light dusting of white powder lay over everything. Rachel walked along, swinging her skates by the blades. and listening to the girls chatter and the boys boast. As they headed up the hill toward the designated skating area, Rachel heard a familiar voice. Ivan Romanov strolled by her group, surrounded by several laughing college girls.
A spasm of black wrath seized Rachel. She hated Ivan! She hated his grandfather! She hated everything! How could he be so handsome and cavalier when such horrible things were done by his family!
These dark thoughts stayed with her during the long walk. Finally, her group crested the hill and came to where the creek normally flowed. The whole forest floor was flooded, as far as Rachel could see. Water spread between the hemlock trunks, quiet and dark, a striking contrast to the whiteness of the newly fallen snow.
“How can we skate on that?” asked Joy. “It’s wet.”
Her sister Faith, the dark haired O’Keefe who worked in the Storm King Café, chuckled, “Watch and learn, O lowly Padawan.”
Two lovely Asian girls with chestnut hair walked forward and knelt in the snow at the water’s edge. One was younger with a cheerful smile, her hair piled high upon her head. The older one was more somber with short bangs and long straight locks. They bore a family resemblance.
The two sisters leaned over and touched the water. Feathers of ice extended from their fingertips across the surface, forming fractals and jagged patterns. The spread of ice wa
s slow at first. Then, with a soft crackling, it began to move across the waters and between the dark trunks until the ice spread at lightning speeds. As the effect spread downward, the surface grew opaque. Soon the entire body of floodwater beneath the hemlocks was one solid block of ice.
Gasps of delight rose from the watching crowd. The two girls stood up and bowed low. The gathered throng clapped and sat down in the snow or on the ice to fasten on their skates.
“Who are they?” Rachel asked Faith.
“The Ko girls,” Faith replied, as she unlaced her pretty white skates.
Rachel’s eyes grew wide. “You mean, as in Chancellor Ko?”
When Faith nodded, Rachel looked at the girls with more interest. Their father was Snireth Ko, the leader of the Parliament of the Wise. Chancellor Ko’s wife, she recalled, was a frost maiden.
Faith returned to lacing her skates. Rachel noticed that, like Faith, all her friends had chosen white skates. She looked down. Hers were black. That meant that in her gloom-induced daze, she had accidentally picked boys’ skates. She had no objection to wearing black skates but had she picked the correct size? Men’s sizes and women’s sizes differed.
Sitting down, she soon confirmed that her skates were two sizes too big. With ice skates, a proper fit was very important. They needed to be snug around the ankle. These wobbled like a Bongo Board. There was no way she could skate in them.
Rachel watched as the first few people who had taken to the ice swirled and glided. Eve March spun in a tight circle, her hands in the air like a ballerina on a music box. Her brother Joshua zipped between tree trunks with consummate grace. To the left, a college boy from Marlowe conjured a puck and a pile of hockey sticks, with the help of his familiar, a marmoset. He threw a stick to Joshua, who caught it, grinning.
Other young men gathered, and one or two girls. A group of boys from Drake joined the hockey players. Among them were the sullen dark-skinned college student with sunglasses and his friend with freckles and stringy red hair whom Rachel recognized from the battle in the Summoning Chamber under Drake Hall her first week of school. They had been among the geased students whom Dr. Mordeau had ordered to attack the campus. The boy from Marlowe scowled and told them that they needed to provide their own hockey sticks. The young man in the sunglasses objected loudly that this was unfair, as everyone knew that thaumaturges were not good at conjuring. The conjurers merely snickered.
Another young man with the Drake crowd, serious-looking and scholarly, with brown hair that hung in his eyes—Rachel knew, from the Knights of Walpurgis, that his name was Herbert Sorrows—shrugged and said that he could not do hockey sticks, but he had some experience making tools. With the help of his snake, which he carried concealed beneath his coat, he conjured long-handled pickaxes for him and his friends. Turning them upside-down, they began hitting a puck around with the metal tips and laughing raucously. The boy from Marlowe objected. The Drake boys scowled and skated off among the trees to play their own dangerous game of pickaxe-hockey with several other boys from their own dorm.
Closer to Rachel, some girls were trying figure-skating moves, gliding with one foot in the air or executing perfect turns. One girl in a pretty gold and green skating outfit even dared a twirling jump. Some of those still lacing their skates clapped, impressed. Nearby, a group of girls from De Vere—including the pink-haired Kris Serenity Wright, her roommates Rhiannon Cosgrove, and the dryad’s daughter—were playing tag on the ice. Also among the De Vere girls, Rachel spotted Chalandra Druess looking snug and warm in Laurel’s old winter jacket. She waved to Rachel as she skated by.
Rachel gazed longingly at the ice. Then she looked over her shoulder down the hill that she had just climbed. It would take the better part of an hour to go back, switch her skates, and come back again. She sighed, too heavy of heart to lug herself all that way.
Something soft rubbed against her leg. Rachel looked down. A small and tawny Lion, the size of a house cat, purred in the snow beside her. Rachel squatted and stroked his golden mane. The little beast felt warm and comforting, like curling up in a big chair with a favorite book. It licked her nose with its rough, pink tongue.
“Is it true,” Rachel asked suddenly, “that your father made Sigfried?”
“It is.” The tiny Lion purred.
Rachel blinked. Her blood brother had been made by an emperor? Was he actually a robot? Was that why she had grown dizzy when the two of them mingled their blood during the blood brother ceremony?
“Leander,” Rachel knelt and stroke the tiny feline’s soft fur. She spoke in a soft sigh, “I am so tired of being angry. Isn’t there…something I can do? All these terrible things that happened. I think my visit to my father went awry, in part, because I was still angry at him—from the time Gaius ended up in the Halls of Healing. I know that was Peter’s fault, but, at the time, I thought otherwise. And now I can’t seem to forgive my father.”
The tiny Lion batted at a clump of snow. The impromptu snowball slid across the ice.
“It is the same thing with Ivan Romanov! I know that Laurel does not want to marry him. She has a stealth boyfriend. And yet…” she shrugged helplessly.
The Comfort Lion spoke in his rich, deep voice. The words seemed to come from both inside and outside her head. “Forgiveness is not a simple thing, child. Some will tell you it is ignoring a slight or an injury. That is not so. You must accept in your heart that someone has harmed you. Then, you must be willing to release the pain they have caused. It will not be possible, unless you can truly release the person who has hurt you from responsibility. Remember, it is an act of kindness. It is giving a gift to someone, and a gift is not something that is deserved. It is so much harder to imagine giving a gift to someone you dislike than someone you love, is it not?”
Rachel thought about that. It made a strange kind of sense. “I guess…actually, that’s not so hard. Imagining giving them a gift. I’ll work on that.”
The little tawny feline put its paw on her knee. Its golden eyes bore into hers. “Do not render evil for evil, or insult for insult. Instead, be forgiving, and know that as I have asked this of you, I shall bless you. The only way to overcome evil is with good.”
Rachel nodded and petted the little creature, her interest piqued by the thought that she might receive a blessing. Rising, she gazed over at where Ivan was sitting on a fallen log, lacing his skates. He seemed so repugnant, sitting there cheerfully oozing charm. Could she bear to give him a gift? And, if so, what?
Rachel patted her coat and robes, searching for something she could give away. Her robes contained two pencils, a small pocket knife inset with mother-of-pearl, hairclips, the key-shaped lightning charm Sigfried had given her, and a pack of tissues. In the pocket of her red wool coat, she found some lavender lip balm, two bottles of Bogey Away left from Yule, and a blue origami crane that she had made that morning with her mother’s gift paper. The pencils and the lip balm had been used. He probably had his own lightning charm, nearly everyone on campus did. The knife and the lavender spray struck her as hard to explain, and she was not even going to consider the hairclips or the pink and blue package of tissues. She looked back at the crisply-folded, blue paper crane.
Should she give it to him?
But if she forgave him, she would not be able to enjoy hating him anymore.
Rachel started. Was that what she really thought? Did she want to hate him? What a vile thing!
Closing her eyes, she imagined walking up and handing him the crane. She imagined him smiling his handsome smile. His offenses against her, and those of his family, pressed upon her. Were not the Romanovs the ones who had robbed her father of his memories? She deliberately ignored these nagging thoughts and concentrated on the joy of giving.
Her hatred popped like a soap bubble. One moment, its cold harshness held her like a vise, a prisoner of dark revenge fantasies. By the next, the burden had lifted. She was not even certain why her anger had felt so important. She felt free. It was the
most wonderful feeling.
Rachel crossed the ice in her boots, sliding carefully over to where Ivan sat. Arriving beside him, she extended her arm, straight, with the crane resting on her palm. “Sorry about being so mad at you.”
He took the blue paper bird and flashed her a clean, charming smile. “Well, this is a fine gift, I must say! I apologize that my jests were taken more than lightly. I will be more careful in the future. Don’t take it the wrong way, your sister’s a wonderful young lady.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “She was holding out on me. She has a stealth boyfriend!”
Ivan did not seem to know what to do with that information.
“I hope you find someone almost as nice as my sister to marry,” Rachel added kindly.
He nodded. “Me, too.”
As Rachel walked away, she felt much lighter of heart than she had in some time. Cheered, she looked around. Whom else could she forgive?
Many people were on the ice now. Some glided elegantly. Others stumbled and fell or shuffled stiff-legged from tree trunk to tree trunk. Wanda Zukov skated by, followed by her mini-polar bear. She waved to Rachel. Nearby, loud snarling and barking erupted as a dog fight broke out between several canine familiars. Shouts rang out as the owners tried to break up the battle.
When the yapping and growling died away, strains of The Skaters’ Waltz could be heard floating among the merrymakers. Glancing around, Rachel saw the Ginger Snaps—a musical group consisting of the ginger-haired MacDannans, their cousins the Darlings, and a few of their friends—were playing on the ice. Oonagh had put her tuba aside in favor of a violin. Rachel caught glimpses of Eve March, Panther Fabian, Iolanthe Towers, and other young women dancing to the music on their skates.
Rachel paused to listen to her favorite waltz. Over by a clump of birches, Eunice Chase skated with a few girls from her class. Rachel recoiled. There was no way she was forgiving her. After all the humiliations she had suffered at Eunice’s hands this winter, she would enjoy hating her forever!
The Awful Truth About Forgetting (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 4) Page 35