I froze.
Tom wasn’t sick. Tom was dead.
Tom was a Revenant. Someone had raised Tom from the dead and sent him after me. Had they killed poor, sweet Tom or had he simply died conveniently in some accident and the Necromancer took advantage? A Necromancer. We had a Necromancer on the grounds of a girls’ school. How did that happen? No one was supposed to know how to do this anymore.
Movement now. Questions later. I felt in my sleeve for my blade. On the one occasion where having a nine-inch dagger on my person would be incredibly helpful, I’d left Wit in its purifying salt bed in my room.
“Don’t come any closer!” I exclaimed, trying to put as much authority into my voice as possible.
I was alone. No one was going to help me. Eying Tom’s movements carefully, I gathered my skirts in my hands and planted my feet in preparation to dodge. I could hear blood pounding in my ears and heat humming under my skin. I would get around Tom. I had to move as fast as my feet would carry me back to the school building and to Headmistress Lockwood’s office. Surely, she had some weapons in there.
Tom’s mouth dropped open and the dank, sour smell of new mulch hit my nose like a slap. I retched, pressing my hand over my mouth. He reached toward me, his limp fingers barely passing within two feet of my shoulder as I ducked around him and the tree and ran for the building.
Unfortunately, that two-foot radius was just enough to grab a hank of my hair and jerk me back with shocking strength. I stepped on my own hem, sending me sprawling on the grass. Kicking loose from my tangled skirts, I tried to crawl away, but Tom’s hands closed around my shoulders, shoving me into the ground.
I was going to die. Killed by my own skirts.
“Get away from me!” I yelled. His pale lips parted over his teeth, and he let loose a rasping grunt. His cold fingers closed around my throat and began to squeeze. I shrieked, clawing at his wrists. Squirming against the grass, I tried to roll away, but Tom’s grip was too tight.
I reached up, pushing at his shoulders, anything to get him away from me. I felt heat, strong and thick, spreading from the metalwork on my hands, burning through the material of my dress. The smoke spiraled up around Tom’s face, but he ignored it, wholly concentrated on squeezing the breath from me.
I tried to pull the thick rope of heat back into my hands, away from Tom’s body, but as my lungs burned for air, I felt a final push from within my heart and against Tom’s shoulders.
“Please,” I wheezed, letting that wave of energy loose up my arms and through my hands, against his shoulders. The metal dragonfly vibrated with panicked, angry energy, warming my hands through.
A bubble of white heat exploded around us. Tom was thrown off of me, and I rolled, stumbling to my feet, tripping over my skirts. I crawled on my knees, kicking off the thick material, winding around my ankles. Something pale brushed against my hand. A branch about the thickness of my thumb. I grabbed it, just as I felt Tom’s weight drop on my back. Again, his cold hands wrapped around my neck and squeezed. Gasping, I pushed against the ground with all of my might and squirmed onto my back. In the process, the branch snapped into a jagged point.
Birch purified.
I jabbed the branch into Tom’s hand and he lost his grip. I rolled onto my back. For the briefest moment, Tom’s eyes went clear and focused on my face. The expression on his face was so frightened that it might have broken my heart if not for his continued efforts to strangle me. With all of the strength I had left, I stabbed the branch into Tom’s neck.
Suddenly, a burst of blue-black smoke rolled out of his mouth and his body went slack, dropping to the ground beside me. I laid still on the cold ground, trying to count the body parts that didn’t hurt. There weren’t many.
I closed my eyes. I owed my life to a stick. Ridiculous.
I wasn’t sure how long I lay there, cold and exhausted, the clouds rolling overhead. Tom was still and quiet beside me.
“Miss Reed? Are you all right?”
I looked up to see Miss Morton, standing over me, her head tilted to the side. She seemed to be looking around me, perhaps searching for signs of life from Tom? I lifted my head far enough to inspect the ground around me. “I’m not sure.”
Miss Morton crouched over me, reaching for my books. I scooped them up quickly, but I let her help me to my feet.
“What’s happened here?” she asked. “Is that Tom? What did – Did he attack you?”
I sat up slowly. “Yes, but I don’t think he was entirely under his own power, Miss Morton.”
“What happened?” Miss Morton asked, tsking as she inspected the raw spots on my neck. “You must tell me everything, so I can help you.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, hissing as her fingers prodded my bruises. “I was sitting under the tree, and he just stumbled toward me. He tried to choke me. But I think… I think he was dead, Miss Morton.”
Miss Morton frowned. “Oh, no, Cassandra, that’s not possible. You were just frightened.”
“Miss Reed? Miss Morton?” Headmistress Lockwood’s voice snapped from across the lawn. I whipped my head towards her voice and immediately regretted it. My neck was tender. Her steely eyes went wide at the sight of Tom’s body. Miss Morton dropped her hands and backed away from me immediately.
“What has happened here?” Headmistress Lockwood demanded. “Cassandra? Are you all right?”
Miss Morton put an arm around me. “Tom attacked Miss Reed.”
Headmistress Lockwood peered down at the body and immediately began shaking her head, so hair that her hair shook loose from its prim bun. “Impossible. He’s been dead for a day or more,” the headmistress said, examining his hands. “You see the blue-black tinge along his fingernails? That’s a sign of poisoning, mostly likely fungal.”
“He was walking around,” I insisted. “He tried to strangle me.”
The headmistress peered down her nose, peeling the collar of my dress away from my throat.
“That’s not what happened,” she told me. “You’re just frightened out of your wits.”
“I am not,” I shot back.
“To make a man walk after death is the blackest magic there is, Miss Reed. The texts on it were sealed long ago,” protested Miss Morton.
“Well, someone has opened them up, because he was on his feet,” I said.
“Could it be… a Revenant?” Miss Morton gasped, scrambling back from Tom’s body and clutching at her collar in horror.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Morton. Pull yourself together. Now, Miss Reed, you don’t look well,” Headmistress Lockwood informed me, pulling at my cheeks so she could examine the whites of my eyes. “Pale, dark circles under the eyes.”
“I was just attacked by a dead person,” I noted.
“And clearly you have sustained some head trauma if you think that is the appropriate tone to use with your headmistress,” she said dryly. “Have you been sleeping lately?”
“When I’m not studying,” I insisted. “I just came out here for a little fresh air.”
Headmistress Lockwood lifted a dark brow. “But you still feel tired?”
I nodded.
“I am sure our dear Miss Reed is just concerned about passing her exams.” Miss Morton tsked, her spectacles slipping down her nose. “Being a first-year student herself, she has to be nervous about being prepared.”
“Well, your devotion to your studies is admirable, but not at the expense of your health,” Miss Lockwood told me. “Report to the infirmary and have Nurse Waxwing tend to your bruises and ask her for a valerian tisane. It’s a tonic that will help with a more restful sleep. Tell no one of what happened today. I will not have you frightening the other girls with wild tales.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but she cut me off, adding. “And tell your familiar to keep a closer eye on you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You are dismissed,” Headmistress Lockwood said. “Miss Morton and I will attend to the body disposal.”
“Wh
y do I get the feeling that’s not the first time those words have been uttered on this campus?” I sighed as I trudged toward the school building.
After the shock wore off, my body and my magic seemed just to give out, leaving me bruised and listless. I limped to my room, grabbed the Mother Book from its cabinet, collapsed on my bed and slept, paying no heed to the dirt and grass still speckling my skirts.
Ivy and Alicia were not amused by my non-appearance at luncheon, dinner, or breakfast. Ivy undid the wards on my door with embarrassing ease and stormed through, with Alicia at her side.
I lifted my head from the pillow and squinted up at them.
“Where have you been?” Ivy demanded, hands on her hips.
“Stomach ailment,” I said, before dropping my head back to the soft linens, wincing as the sore muscles in my neck twinged.
“A stomach ailment that left grassy bits and mud on your skirts?” Alicia asked.
“A very rare stomach ailment,” I mumbled.
“Have you seen Nurse Waxwing?” Ivy asked, opening the curtains. Phillip twittered and darted over to the wash basin on my dresser, as if directing her to bring me a cold compress, too.
“Yes,” I groaned, shielding my eyes from the sunlight. Alicia climbed up on my vanity and used her blade to scry a message for the kitchens, asking for tea and toast for three.
“You look just awful,” Ivy said.
“I feel awful,” I muttered.
“Well, that works out, then,” Alicia chirped.
“Is this an elaborate ruse to shirk your semester exams?” Ivy asked. “Because we agreed that if we were going to use elaborate ruses, they would be complicated enough to get all three of us out of our exams.”
“Trust me when I say no,” I said, rolling to a sitting position. I gasped at the pain in my ribs. Sleeping in a four layers of day dress was not something I would recommend to anyone with nerve endings. Both girls looked at me, expectantly.
I couldn’t keep this inside. I was holding on to too many secrets as it was. I couldn’t keep this from them, too. And if more people rose like Tom, I wanted my friends to be able to protect themselves. I would make them little reticule-sized birch stakes if it would help.
“Tom the gardener, he tried to hurt me,” I said carefully.
“Are you all right?” Ivy demanded, rushing to me and checking me over for injuries. “I don’t see any bruising, but that can take hours to develop. Have you told Headmistress Lockwood? Should we write your family?”
“Ivy, Ivy, it’s under control, I promise. Headmistress Lockwood is handling it now.”
“This just doesn’t sound like Tom,” Ivy mused. “It’s not that I doubt what you’re saying, Cassandra, but Tom’s always so gentle and quiet. Was he drunk? Under a spell? Maybe someone like Callista put him up to it?”
“It doesn’t matter. Tom deserves to be fired!” Alicia exclaimed, a sparking angry glower showing behind her green eyes for the first time since I’d known her. “And the authorities should be contacted now. He belongs in a prison. And if Headmistress Lockwood won’t take care of it, I’m sure my family knows someone who would. Gavin—”
“Don’t write to Gavin!” I exclaimed. “Look, the both of you, calm down. Especially you.” I pointed to Alicia, who pouted. “I’m fine. I wasn’t seriously hurt. And Tom will not be going to prison because Tom is dead.”
Ivy’s mouth dropped open. “You killed him? With your magic?”
“No.”
“Did you use your athame?” Alicia asked. “That’s very dark, Cassandra. You can’t work with it again or you risk a terrible curse—”
“I didn’t stab him with my blade,” I told her, deciding to omit the detail about stabbing Tom with a tree branch, for everyone’s peace of mind. “And I didn’t kill Tom because he was already dead.”
Alicia and Ivy stared at me.
“Did you hit your head, Cassie?” Ivy asked carefully.
“No, I didn’t hit my head,” I groaned, covering my face with my hands. The dragonfly scraped gently at my cheeks, humming with warmth. “Tom was dead. Walking around, but dead. Committed to choking the life out of me, but dead. I thought he was drunk at first, or sick, but he was dead. And he just kept coming for me and I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared.”
And for reasons I didn’t understand, there were tears streaming down my cheeks. Ivy scrambled next to me on the bed and wrapped her arms around me. She hugged me tight as Alicia climbed onto my other side.
“I don’t know why I’m crying now.” I sniffed into Ivy’s shoulder. “I made it through the attack and talking to Headmistress Lockwood without blubbering all over myself. It’s silly. I’m fine!”
“You were frightened and now you know you’re safe,” Alicia told me. “You didn’t feel safe before.”
“Are you sure that Tom was dead?” Ivy said. “Necromancy is a magical skill that died off centuries ago, rightly so. It would take a considerable amount of power to do something like that and I don’t think anyone here would be powerful enough to do it.”
“I’m sure,” I told her. “I don’t know who could have raised him or why or if they sent him after me or if it was just a coincidence.”
“It’s probably something to do with the Mother Book,” Alicia said. “I hear people talking when they don’t realize I’m around. The girls repeat what they hear at home. Some of the more prominent families aren’t thrilled with an unknown girl from a minor house being named Translator. Maybe someone thinks that if they take you out of the equation, the Book will select another girl from one of their families.”
“You arrived at the conclusion rather quickly,” Ivy noted.
Alicia shrugged.
“Mr. Crenshaw didn’t seem pleased with my being chosen,” I said. “And he does have an owl on the top of his cane. Is it possible he could have some family connection to the Grimstelles?”
“It’s possible,” Ivy said. “But so many people do. The Grimstelles married into a lot of different houses and then disavowed their roots. It’s possible I have a family connection to the Grimstelles.”
Alicia’s lips lifted into a smirk.
“I don’t,” Ivy said, whacking Alicia with a pillow and knocking her over. “I’m just saying the owl cane doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He could just be an awful person who likes owls but not you. I think you would do better to focus on some of your enemies at the school.”
“I don’t have enemies,” I protested. Both girls raised their eyebrows this time. “I have people I disagree with on a philosophical level.”
Both girls were smirking now.
“Oh, stop it, both of you.”
The girls snickered and I flopped back on my bed. “What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to write to Mrs. Winter and keep her apprised of the situation. You’re going to get some rest here in your room. I’ll order a tray from the kitchens and we’ll eat a light supper and you will feel better,” Alicia said. “And we will think on this problem until we come up with a solution.”
“And we can camp out here in your room for the next few days while you recover, and help you study for exams,” Ivy said. “Your crystallography marks have improved, but you are still horrid with ward construction – my specialty. I can help you there. And Alicia needs help with her potions, where you seem to have gained some ground. See? We can all help each other.”
When Headmistress Lockwood arrived to check on me, she was not pleased about all three girls planning to miss classes for one girl’s “illness.” Ivy observed that if Headmistress Lockwood wouldn’t approve of the scheme, perhaps I would heal more quickly if she wrote a letter to her gossipy mother asking for a faster remedy for my bruising. It was the most underhanded, sneaky thing Ivy had ever done. I couldn’t help but feel rather proud of her. The girls slept on cots in my room in between sessions in Ivy’s rigorous study schedule. She’d built a careful web of study periods centered on our strong academic suits, so we could ea
ch help each other. And while they slept on their cots, I studied the Mother Book. Well, I stared at the Mother Book, a small crayfire lamp at my bedside casting a soft blue haze on the pages.
I read and re-read the page on Revenants, grateful that the spells used to make them were still untranslated, because I was not ready to know that. But, given the list of signs on the page – cold, clammy skin, inability to speak, insane strength, moving dead person – Tom had definitely been turned into a Revenant. Stabbing him with the birch branch had been the least violent treatment to release his body from the enchantment.
“Why did this happen to poor Tom?” I whispered to myself. “Who did that to him? What does it mean?”
The book’s pages turned to the now-familiar chart of House sigils. The top of the page glowed and rippled down to the minor houses, lingering on the Grimstelle owl. “All right then.”
15
Masquerade Bawl
I didn’t recognize myself.
This strange, beautiful creature standing in the Lavender Room’s full-length mirror could not be the creature so spindly just a few months ago that I couldn’t lift a vase without help.
Madame DuPont had outdone herself, making my costume for Mrs. Winter’s annual masquerade. The ball was the opening event to the month-long Yule social season, and invitations were fought over like small principalities.
I studied my reflection, trying my best not to preen. Surely, nice girls didn’t preen. My dress was tailored, to give me the illusion of a figure, with straps around my shoulders consisting of deep purple silk larkspur. The underskirts were a lovely blue with filmy purple overskirts, sewn to resemble dragonfly wings. Martha left my hair down, with the exception of complicated braids at the crown with larkspur woven into them. Combined with the silver filigree mask fashioned into dragonfly wings, I looked like a fairy queen.
Changeling (Sorcery and Society Book 1) Page 19