by Maria Amor
“They’ll keep it to themselves for the most part,” Ruth said. “They’re going to be as intrigued by the prospect of Julia eventually taking over the mantle of Regina Sylphaea as anyone else is.” Dylan still wasn’t certain that the members of the community who thought that about Julia weren’t counting their chickens long before they were hatched.
The sound of Julia’s voice called Dylan out of his thoughts. “What?”
“I said, ‘can you believe it’?” Julia flourished an engraved invitation at him. “How many parties do people think I really want to go to during break?”
“Looks like you have enough invitations there to be at one a night,” Dylan remarked. Julia rolled her eyes.
“Like I’d even want to be at one of these stupid, stuffy functions every night of my break. I thought I was supposed to have some—I don’t know—some kind of…” Julia let out a groan. “I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with this until next summer.”
“You don’t have to go to all of them, you know,” Dylan pointed out.
“But then I’ll get accused of playing favorites,” Julia said sardonically. “And someone will start a rumor that the reason is that I don’t want to be allied with this or that or the other family, when it’s really just that I don’t want to spend five hours standing around hearing about fae politics or the problem with the gnomes’ negotiations with the djinn, or whatever-the-hell else.” She sighed.
“It’s tough being one of the most promising young Guardians,” Dylan said wryly.
“Stop it,” Julia said petulantly. “It’s annoying as hell to have to deal with this all the time, and obviously, it’s not going to change anytime soon.” She sighed. “You’re telling me you’d actually enjoy having to pretend to be interested in all this bull?”
“No,” Dylan admitted. “But all you have to do is say no. Or don’t go. Who cares what rumors people put out there about you?”
“I do, because rumors turn into someone talking to my parents, or to Ruth, and then I have to deal with them.” Julia sighed and sat down on the bottom stair leading down to the mail room. “I wish the school wouldn’t allow mail from people we don’t know—that’d be a change I could actually enjoy.”
“But then you wouldn’t have gotten all those birthday presents,” Dylan said with a little grin. When they’d gone back to campus after Julia’s birthday, the mail room had been cluttered with gifts from different families looking to get to know Julia better: jewelry and antiques from earth-aligned families, books and music from air-aligned families, candles of different kinds, antique lighters, and bits of fire-related magical relics from that quarter, and from the water-aligned families more cups and bowls made of water-aligned materials than a student living in a dormitory could possibly need.
“They could have sent them to the apartment,” Julia said glumly. “I had to pay for shipping them there anyway—they could have saved me that money, at least.”
“I think part of it was they wanted it to be visible to other people here,” Dylan pointed out. He watched Julia intently, trying to read her mood. It had gotten harder to do since her birthday, with Julia’s energies more powerful than his. The mutability, the flow of his water-aligned essence still made it possible for him to tamp down her emotional highs, but he knew that he’d be working with Ruth through winter break to learn more ways to help Julia.
“We need to get to class,” Julia said, sighing. They had one class together left for the day, and Dylan was looking forward to the trip home, to Thanksgiving with his family and Julia’s, and to the weeks of break that would follow it before they had to be back at Sandrine for exams. They’d come to the mail room for the air-aligned wing of the dorms just after the mail had come in for the day, knowing that there wouldn’t be anything else between then and when they left—unless there were couriers from someone important.
Dylan handed Julia her backpack and she crammed the invitations and other mail into the bag, slinging it over her shoulder. She followed him up the stairs, and by the time they reached the floor above them—the ground floor of the building—Dylan saw that she’d regained some of her usual cheer, even without his interference.
One of the things that had been most difficult for Dylan to adapt to as Julia entered the transition—or “blossoming” as their professors insisted on calling it—into her full abilities and powers as a Guardian of Air was the way that her moods shifted so quickly. It would only get worse as she became more and more powerful, he knew, and Dylan could only hope that he could manage to keep an even keel through it all.
“What’s going on?” she asked. Dylan looked up to see students milling around the central courtyard, muttering and murmuring amongst themselves.
“No idea,” Dylan said. He tried to catch something—anything—about why everyone had decided, seemingly as one, to congregate; the courtyard wasn’t quite big enough to support all of the students, especially when many of them were in agitated states, flickering with their energies, some of the were-creatures shifting between human and animal forms from the excitement.
“Julia? Didn’t you hear?” Keegan spotted them and came over, squeezing and shifting to get through the press of students.
“I was going through today’s mail avalanche,” Julia said. “What’s going on?” Keegan’s eyes went wide.
“A delegation of the changelings has come to the school,” Keegan said, just loudly enough for them to both hear. Julia stared at the girl, and Dylan could feel the mercurial pulse of her energy—and he wasn’t the only one. The air of excitement and curiosity around them intensified in reaction to the press of Julia’s energies. Julia’s reaction was no wonder: the changelings had been one of the major groups targeted by false theft claims.
Normal humans thought that changelings—like so many of the supernatural creatures that occasionally roamed the world—were nothing more than myth; and at that, they generally got the myth wrong. Instead of being fae children left behind to replace stolen human babies, changelings were the result of human-fae relationships and marriages, with unpredictable results.
The changelings had their own system, enacted long before the School of Sandrine had existed. Dylan knew only a little about them, but from what he understood and had seen, the changelings were every bit as proud as either their human sides or their fae sides could boast, and had a magic that was all their own.
Ruth had, Dylan knew, tried to figure out what was going on at the school, and tried to take some of the pressure off of the water-aligned students, but Dean Dimitrios along with some of his new employees, had continued the investigations and the punishments both.
“What’s going on? Why are the changelings here?” Dylan looked at Julia, who had an expression on her face as if she’d figured it out but didn’t want to say.
Before he could prompt her to answer, the doors to the administration building opened, and Dylan caught sight of the Changeling delegation itself: glowing with fae energy, more beautiful than a regular human but not as ethereally lovely as the fae tended to be, they strode out of the school offices, heads held high. “All Changeling students will pack their bags and be in front of the school in one hour,” the leader of the delegation called out, repeating the command in another language that Dylan couldn’t understand—but he knew it had to be the same.
“They’re pulling the changelings?” Dylan looked at Julia, and saw that she was not entirely stunned by the information.
“Come on,” she said. “No one’s going to be in the classrooms anyway, not with the day all screwed up like it is.” Julia grabbed his hand and Dylan winced as he felt the influence of her tumultuous energy hitting him. He followed her through the crowd, not knowing where Julia wanted them to go, not having any idea what she had in mind—except that he could feel the press of her intensity, the excitement in her mind.
They ducked into an empty classroom along the hallway closest to the courtyard, and Dylan pulled his hand free of Julia’s grip, trying to reasse
rt his own emotional tone on his mind. He took a deep breath and felt himself calming, felt the watery essence of his energy turning into a deep pool instead of a rippling river. “Okay—what’s up?”
“Dylan, the changelings are taking all of their kids out of the school,” Julia said firmly. “Even you have to admit that if they’re doing that, there’s something going on—and obviously whatever Ruth is doing to figure out the situation isn’t working fast enough.”
“You’re not on this again, are you?” Dylan crossed his arms over his chest. “You and I are juniors. We’re not even eighteen. We have no authority to do anything about this.”
“I’m a Guardian of Air, and apparently the most powerful one in this school,” Julia said tartly. “If I’m going to have to deal with everyone climbing all over me to try and convince me to join their family, or—whatever—then I might as well have the prerogative to investigate something that directly affects my people, right?” She raised an eyebrow and held his gaze, and Dylan tried to think of a counter-argument that would be more compelling than the ones that he’d already forwarded.
He had to admit that the adults in their lives didn’t seem to have found a way to deal with the situation effectively. Obviously, the changelings had lost all faith in the usual way that things were done, and Dylan had to think that other groups of air-aligned creatures would follow suit—that the fae were only one or two steps behind pulling all of their students from Sandrine as well. “How the hell are we going to find anything out that no one else has been able to?” That was a solid argument, Dylan thought—it had to be.
“Because they won’t expect it,” Julia countered. “I can go to some of these parties, see if I can get word from someone who might be on the school’s advisory board, maybe talk to some of the new professors.”
“They’re not going to tell a student,” Dylan protested.
“I can be very persuasive, and very charming, and you know it,” Julia insisted. “Besides, it’ll probably be more like eavesdropping than actually asking them outright, if we play our cards the right way.”
“Do you have some kind of plan for this?” Dylan stared at the girl in bewilderment. “How long ago did you decide you were going to do this?”
“When you told me that if Ruth couldn’t make things right at the school, we’d figure out how I was going to storm the castle,” Julia replied, giving him a sarcastic smile. “I knew we needed a contingency plan, and I think I might have one figured out.” She took a deep breath. “But I’m going to need your help to make it work.”
“Jules, this is insane,” Dylan said, shaking his head. “We can’t do this.”
“We can,” Julia said. “And as the most powerful emissary to the air-aligned creatures in this school, who else is going to do it? The fae themselves aren’t doing it—and the professors who aren’t buddies with Dimitrios are too scared of being fired to do anything about it. The council either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about what’s happening here. The advisory board is just rubber-stamping everything he does.”
She waved her hands around. “If it’s not us, then I don’t know who else is going to make it happen. Now are you going to help me?” Dylan took a deep breath; he could feel the insidious tendrils of Julia’s energy trying to influence him, pushing against his mind, but he resisted. If he was going to help her, he wanted to do it out of his own free will—and he made a mental note to talk to Ruth about this new ability his friend seemed to have developed.
“What do you want me to do?”
CHAPTER 15
Julia kicked off her shoes as she stepped into the apartment, bending over to pick them up off the floor as Dylan began to take off his own dress shoes. They’d gone to four different parties between Thanksgiving and the week before Christmas, and she was no closer to figuring out who she could get information from about the situation at Sandrine.
“Maybe we’ll just have to wait until we go back in January,” Dylan suggested, and Julia shook her head.
“Someone, somewhere, has to know something,” she insisted—as she had with every party that they’d gone to. She’d made a point of focusing on the fire and earth-aligned families’ invitations, using the excuse that most of the functions her grandmother had sent her to over the summer had been water-dominated, and she already had good contacts amongst her own alignment. “I’m just getting tired of spending hours in high heels and a dress that could pay someone’s rent, for hours on end listening to some earth Guardian-in-training talk about his rock collection.”
Ostensibly, the parties she was invited to were supposed to introduce Julia to different high-ranking families—and their mating-age sons—so that she could make an informed choice once she came fully into her abilities and could start to decide on who to form a relationship with. But she’d gone into each of the parties with the intention of finding something out—finding out who might know something about Dean Dimitrios’ hiring at Sandrine, or why the theft accusations were going unchecked, even though there was no merit in them. Julia had thought that she would at least figure out a lead from one of the people at the parties she attended, but thus far, she had gotten nowhere.
“I’m sure someone, somewhere, does know something,” Dylan said.
“Can you unzip me?” Somewhere along the line—Julia wasn’t sure when—she’d come to rely on Dylan’s presence, and just accept his help with little things, as if he were her brother. She felt the zipper along her back sliding down, and held the fabric of her dress against the slip underneath it, turning to look at Dylan. “We need to figure out what’s going on, and the parties aren’t accomplishing that.”
“We have a break from them next week,” Dylan pointed out to her. “Maybe you’ll deign to let me in on your long-term planning on this, so we can take it from the top and actually—you know—work together?” Julia smiled at him; she had plans that she wanted to implement when they got back to Sandrine in January—plans that would take his help to accomplish—but without a viable lead, she didn’t know how to aim the efforts of her friends and allies, much less Dylan.
“We can talk about it,” Julia said. She stepped into the hall and opened the door to her room, tossing her shoes in the direction of her closet. As she slipped the dress off and carefully extricated herself from the complicated undergarments underneath it, she considered what it was that she actually could tell Dylan about her long-range plans for investigating what was going on at Sandrine.
Julia pulled on a pair of pajama pants, a long-sleeved shirt softer than silk from multiple washes, and warm socks—the floor in the living room always seemed to suck the heat from her body in the winter—and stepped out of her bedroom once more.
Dylan had changed clothes as well, and her parents had left some snacks for them for when they came back from the party; there was a thermos of hot cider, a plate of cookies, and some leftover turkey and bread, along with an unopened container of mayonnaise and a bottle of mustard. A note on the tray said that they expected to be back in the city in the morning, and not to stay up too late. “Go get the cranberry sauce out of the fridge,” Julia suggested to Dylan. He nodded, grinning slightly.
“So,” Dylan said when he returned with the bowl of cranberry-blueberry sauce, homemade by Julia from a recipe she’d found online when she’d been twelve and a staple of the holiday season ever after. “What are we going to do?” Julia made herself a quick sandwich, spreading mayo on the bread to keep it from going soggy with the cranberry sauce, and layering turkey and cranberries until she knew it would be a little tricky to eat. Dylan helped himself to a few cookies, waiting for his turn to make a sandwich.
“I need to figure out who to go after at the school,” Julia explained. “I keep trying to find someone who might know something.”
“Well—what do you think is going on?” Dylan made himself a sandwich, and Julia ate the first two bites of the one she’d made for herself, considering.
“Obviously, Dimitrios is up to something
,” Julia said finally, pouring some of the hot, spiced cider into one of the waiting mugs. The tart-sweet-spice of the drink was perfect with the cranberry sauce and the turkey. “Accusing air-aligned creatures and Guardians of stealing things when there’s no evidence just doesn’t make sense unless there’s something bigger going on.”
“Maybe his goal is to get rid of the air-aligned students—for whatever reason. Isn’t that big enough?” Julia shook her head.
“Getting rid of the air-aligned students doesn’t make sense as a goal,” she said. “Even if he’s some kind of weird anti-elemental air bigot, what does it accomplish? And why would the advisory board go along with something that could close down the school?” She finished off her sandwich in a few more bites and drank down about half of her cider. “There’s something he’s getting out of this, and I need to figure out who knows what that is.”
“The professors he’s so chummy with probably do,” Dylan pointed out.
“Yeah, but who’s specifically helping him?” Julia raised an eyebrow and snagged a cookie from the tray. It was oatmeal-cranberry, her favorite. “It can’t be all of them, or at least they can’t all be helping him the same way.” She shook her head again. “We need to figure out who’s doing what, or who’s gaining the most from this, and we need to figure it out fast.”
“How are the parties going to do that?” Dylan frowned in confusion.
“Dimitrios is earth-aligned,” Julia pointed out. “The new professors are almost all either earth-aligned or fire-aligned.”
“So, you think someone at these parties is going to know something about one or more of the professors?” Julia nodded.
“I think if there’s something going on at the school—something big—that it has to have some kind of connection to the highest-ranking earth or fire Guardians,” Julia explained. “I mean, how did Dimitrios get his job? And why are so many of the old professors gone?” That was the element of the situation that seemed to be a missing puzzle piece—but Julia couldn’t, for the life of her, see where it could possibly go.