To live or die at loreli.., p.17
To Live Or Die At Lorelight Academy, page 17
“I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.”
“It’s both, I suppose.”
Lucien was handsome. Not prince-of-fable handsome—Eustace wasn’t exactly blown away—but he wasn’t a fabled prince, either.
He was Prince Regent.
So he was Regent-Handsome, that made sense.
The Regency were the custodians of the throne, protecting legacy and tradition until the world could sort itself out and find a way to bring peace through the return of the true Dynasty.
As the centuries stretched, Eustace, and many others, were starting to wonder if perhaps the Regents were not so dedicated to finding the true heirs to the empire as they claimed.
“So this verbal sparring—” he said. “Charming, obviously. I assume that’s the intent? A little bickering? A little jousting, to show you’re prickly and hard to win?”
“Sure,” she said sarcastically.
The Prince frowned.
“That’s what you’d say, though. If you were trying to be prickly just to charm me.”
“Damn. It is. Now I’m the one who feels a little trapped,” Eustace said. “Not literally, Bravonn,” she added, waving a halting hand toward Bravonn, who hadn’t moved a muscle. “Thank you, though.”
Eustace cleared her throat.
“Sorry about this,” she said, all apology absent from her voice.
Then she opened her mouth wide, covered it with her hands and pointed her finger.
“Oh my gosh! He’s here! He’s over here!” she said. “I found him! He’s dressed like a student! Oh, I can’t believe it! He’s really here. He’s so handsome!”
“Thanks,” Lucien grumbled as a large pack of ravenous eyes zeroed in on their location.
“Prince Regent!”
“There he is!”
“My Lord!”
A series of admiring calls were yelled over a string quartet playing in the corner that stood no chance, and that were drowned out completely by the stampede of heels and flats.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it!” Eustace said briskly.
Lucien only grunted.
She turned to leave and took a few strides when something caught her eye. Something she’d seen a thousand times, and a thousand more in her sleep.
Something familiar.
Something that felt like home.
Like a familiar friend, or a sister she saw every day.
This familiar friend appeared out of context though, in the strangest of places, and it made the familiar presence here jarring and surreal.
It came from within the crowd of women.
The familiar “something” was the flicker of steel.
Her blade was out before she had a chance to consciously think about it.
“Back!” Bravonn yelled.
Eustace felt the man’s large paws on her shoulders, starting to drag her away from the Prince Regent.
Not me, you idiot!
She had time to think, but not speak.
All she had time to do was raise the tip of the blade, and flick twice.
A cascade of knives came sailing through the air at the Prince Regent. She caught one with the edge of her blade, and twisted to catch and deflect a second. Then Bravonn pulled her away. The bodyguard was already realizing his mistake, but the motion was in progress.
Two knives, she caught with her sword.
One went wide.
One stuck in Bravonn’s shoulder as he attempted to move in front of the path of the torrent of daggers.
Three more knives went wide completely.
The final two caught Lucien in the gut.
“For the Republic!” a middle-aged woman from the back cried. Then she turned and tried to flee before being tackled to the ground by a multitude of parties, including two royal bodyguards and a group of students, Mary included.
Even more bodyguards rushed in and Lucien disappeared from behind her, lifted into Bravonn’s arms.
“Bring her!” the Prince Regent’s main bodyguard called, and Eustace felt more hands take her and drive her toward where the rest of the royal retinue was bringing the Prince.
Scholars appeared seemingly from nowhere, following her and the rest of the bodyguards down one of the main halls of the Box and barging into an unoccupied study room.
A Scholar, one Eustace didn’t particularly like by the name of Samos Pent, was nearly barreling over the bodyguards.
No doubt Scholar Pent, one of Lorelight’s experts in Life magic, was feeling the weight of the Academy’s responsibility.
Tonight’s celebration was no honorary visit.
After years of private tutelage, the Prince Regent was officially joining Lorelight as a regular student. The purpose of this gala was to “get it all over with,” according to sources close to him.
But admission was complete.
The Box, ugly as it was, was on Lorelight campus.
The Prince’s safety fell squarely on the Lorelight staff, and on the evening of his arrival, they had already shown their shortcomings.
“Out of the way!” Pent cried, shoving past the guardsmen who were half carrying, half escorting Eustace into the study hall.
A dozen guards piled into the small study room before the door shut.
“Half of you, out!” Pent yelled again, and the bodyguards closest to the door immediately retreated. That included the ones holding Eustace.
“Not her,” Bravonn said.
“She’s a student—useless. A Metalhead, as I’ve heard the students say. All about sword blades and duel tourneys. Out with her.”
Metalhead!
Samos, you insufferable bastard.
Someone tried once more to tug her out of the room.
“She stays,” Bravonn growled.
“She leaves,” Pent snapped.
“She stays,” Lucien grunted as he was propped up on a table. One of the bodyguards reached for the knives, still trembling with magical energy, stuck in the Prince Regent’s gut.
“I swear to the gods above if you yank that knife out you’ve murdered him,” Pent said flatly, and the guard retreated a hand, leaving the knife in.
“Bravonn’s got his lucky charm sense,” Lucien explained in a weak voice. “I’m afraid she must stay, now. This is all a ruse, by the way,” he told her. “To get you to take care of me.”
He coughed into his hand, which came back specked with blood.
“Is it working?”
Eustace opened her mouth, but no words came out.
Lucien squirmed in obviously very real pain, and tried a pathetic smile at her.
“No!” she blurted, shaking her head. “I literally cannot fathom a capacity in which this is working in any way. It does not humor me, it does not sexually arouse me, and it is clearly catastrophic for your physical person.”
“Drat,” Lucien cursed.
Then the remaining color in his face drained, and he passed out.
“I-Is h-h-he—” Bravonn began, the large man stuttering and nearly to the point of tears.
“No,” Pent said, literally rolling up his sleeves and approaching the Prince.
Pent’s hands stiffened.
Samos Pent’s hands were so damned stereotypical for a Scholar. He had long, bony fingers, meant for surgery or piano or spiderlike manipulation. It was the latter the Scholar favored. Though he did so magically.
“I’m going to need something from you,” he said to Bravonn, who nodded.
“What?”
“Blood.”
All the blood vessels in the large man’s eyes blew out at once, rimming his blue irises with a band of deep red.
Apparently, Samos Pent did not ask permission.
The bodyguard grunted and a trickle spilled from his lips.
“There we are,” Pent purred, and the leak at Bravonn’s lips grew, and his mouth opened. Then came an outpouring of blood.
Eustace grew dizzy.
Dammit.
This always happened.
A duelist who can’t stand the sight of blood, she marveled. What a useful trait.
She held her ground, though.
Bravonn staggered and fell to the ground, crashing into a bookshelf Lorelight hadn’t had time to stock yet.
“You’ve killed him!” Eustace accused.
“Not yet,” Pent said. “We’ll save him if we have time. You can help with that, if you wish.”
“No, thanks,” she mumbled, earning a few looks from the bewildered and, admittedly, stressed royal bodyguards.
“I’m alright,” Bravonn grunted from the ground.
He felt around weakly.
Eustace flowed down to the ground. To clutch the bodyguard’s hand.
“How is he?” the man groaned.
Behind them, Pent wove blood in and out of Lucien’s body.
“Quite a bit of blood, isn’t there,” Bravonn said quietly. “Is…mosssuff mine?”
The bodyguard sounded hopeful.
“I’m not sure anymore,” Eustace admitted.
“What’s he doing?”
“Life magic,” Eustace spat.
Only Samos Pent could find the most perverted aspect of Life magic and fall in love with it.
I’ve got a lecture scheduled with him, it reminded her. She’d move it. There were other electives to take, handy as Life magic could be. She didn’t want to learn it from him, and gods knew Pent hated teaching.
Next to her, Lucien’s bodyguard was still amazed.
“Some form of magic this is,” Bravonn whispered.
“Does the Prince not have magical bodyguards?” Eustace asked.
Bravonn opened his mouth to respond, when another voice answered. A new entrant to the room.
“They were forbidden from stepping foot on campus.”
Eustace turned.
The Archscholar in the doorway was someone she’d never seen before.
The robes made no mystery as to her station, though.
Eustace didn’t know her name, and the woman didn’t introduce herself.
“I have something perhaps of use,” she said.
She withdrew something small from her robe, and handed it to Pent, who gave the woman a brief and curt nod of deference.
Eustace felt a single eyebrow rise.
Coming from Samos Pent, that brief respectful nod was the equivalent of kissing her boots.
Eustace got only a passing glance at the object. It was jewelry of some kind. A small necklace, ring, or a large earring—hard to tell. Three overlapping silver rings held a jewel that looked more like the sort of thing Eustace would find in a cave or by a river. It even had a bit of dirt on it, as if, impossibly, no one had washed it before affixing the silver chain onto it.
Was it an opal? Dyed quartz? She wasn’t sure.
Pent took the object without a questioning word.
With a touch of Air magic, Pent held the object above the Prince’s gut.
“This will work,” he said almost immediately. “But I still need to do the transfusion.”
The woman nodded.
Pent frowned, examining the crystal.
“My,” he said, throat dry, in an almost aroused tone. “Where did you get this piece of—”
Pent stopped talking when he noticed the woman was no longer beside him.
Eustace turned a full circle herself, but the woman was altogether no longer in the study room.
“Fascinating,” Pent whispered to himself, as the daggers in the Prince Regent’s stomach began to turn from bright silver, glimmering with the sheen of magic, to a mundane steel color. Then the metal turned matte, as if it wasn’t metal at all, just a coat of flat grey paint. Then the daggers crumbled and rose into the air, freeing themselves from Lucien’s abdomen and disappearing into the air.
The wound beneath was ugly and open, but closing, as the tendrils of blood Pent wove in the air traded in and out of the wound. The tendrils in the air began to grow thinner as the Prince Regent retained more and more.
The wounds were sewing themselves shut. At first, Eustace thought the blue, orange, and pink colors along the wound were just the multitude of colors the body could dye itself with trauma. By the time the wounds closed completely, however, she knew better.
These were not platelets. No natural sutures, these.
They were the same almost-crystalline material as the object still hovering above the Prince’s chest—the Prince who, to the relief of seemingly everyone in the room besides Pent, was slowly breathing deeper and deeper as color returned.
“Stable,” Pent said, stiffening to his full height and nodding to himself.
He brushed his hands on his robe, which only now Eustace noticed was dark and crusted, and filthy with blood. She grew a sick feeling in her stomach.
The blood crusted on the hands seemed old.
Hours old.
That’s why Eustace was watching Samos Pent’s hands as he removed the strange necklace that had helped heal the Prince Regent, and placed it swiftly and inconspicuously in his pocket.
A few moments later, Lucien stirred.
“Wh…wh…”
The Prince Regent blinked. Then, startled, his hands flew to his chest, no doubt expecting to find the pair of daggers protruding there.
He found no such thing.
“Am I alive?” he asked.
“Alive,” Samos said. “Privileged, ignorant, wealthy—congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Lucien said, looking earnestly at Pent.
“Those were insults, but of course you missed that,” the Scholar said flatly.
“No—I mean for saving my life,” Lucien said, earnest and unperturbed.
“Oh,” Samos said, as if the idea had never occurred to him. “Of course.”
Then the Scholar gazed at Eustace, and then at the bodyguards one after the other. “He rests for a week,” he instructed them. “No lifting greater than three pounds. He may get out of bed, but not unassisted. No movement beyond walking. He is not to touch…not to touch the wound.”
“Yes, Scholar,” Bravonn said. “The Regency thanks—”
“No problem,” Pent said, waving it away. He stopped at the door. “Oh—would you like your blood back?”
Everyone in the room turned to look at where a fluid knot of blood hovered midair.
“…I think I’ll get it back the old-fashioned way,” Bravonn said finally.
“Suit yourself.”
Without another word, the Scholar departed, leaving the tendrils of blood to splash unceremoniously to the floor.
Chapter
Fourteen
“So where is everybody?”
It’s the question on both of our minds as we crouch on the ground before the entryway to Yoostie.
I feel very exposed, suddenly.
Farah rubs her arm and peers around, telling me she’s feeling the same thing.
It’s empty here.
Meant to be spacious and welcoming, no doubt.
Yet we find ourselves hiding in a circle made from the packs we’ve brought.
“I’m trying to remember the agenda,” Farah says. “Maybe we can place when this all happened.”
“You think people were in class? In lectures?”
“Only electives during this stretch of summer, but it’s possible,” she says. Then she shakes her head. “But it shouldn’t be this empty. Statistically—statistically there should be a few students in the corridor on their way to the bathroom if nothing else.”
“Does this change the plan?” I ask.
I’m not just asking Farah—it’s a question aloud for both of us.
She’s the one who’s been on Lorelight campus for a full year, not two days, like me. But she’s not in charge.
It brings about a strange feeling—because the reality isn’t that I’m in charge and that she isn’t—it feels as though we’re together but somehow separate.
Farah and I are, as far as we know, the only sane and living souls.
Sampson is still kicking around Albright tower, but I clarified “sane.”
That should mean we’re a team.
It should mean we’re in this together and can work together, bound together by the iron tether of being stuck in the same catastrophe.
We’re working together, no doubt.
But there’s a tension here—an overwhelming feeling that we are separate. It’s as though every time circumstances change we must address the same question: Are we still aligned?
So when I ask “Does this change the plan?” I’m not just asking if the lack of Infected students in the passage halls of Yoostie has tactical implication that the Infected are therefore somewhere else, and we should change our approach because of it.
I am asking that question, sure—but I’m also asking if we are still going to move forward together.
“I think Yoostie still has tools we can use,” Farah says, thinking on each word carefully. “I still think Yoostie is likely crawling with Infected. I still think clearing Yoostie is important to progressing to the tool library, to Albright, to everywhere else. I think we expected resistance. And we accepted that resistance. I think we still need to clear Yoostie of hostile forces, and claim what we can.”
“I think so too.”
So that settles our alignment, for now at least.
We are on the same page.
The tension between us leaves. We don’t have to worry about a conflict of pursuits, at least for the next little bit.
But, as one conflict fades, another comes to the forefront.
It comes stark and unmistakable in the stale and spacious air of Yoostie’s entryway. In the ghostly bright new banners celebrating a welcome week gone wrong. It’s heavy and laden upon the flagstone floor, which is hard and unforgiving beneath my feet.
All directions.
That’s where they could come at us from.
All directions.
“I feel exposed,” Farah says, shivering slightly.
“Me too.”
“Left or right?” she asks.
“I think right,” I say.
“I’ve been lucky with left,” Farah says at the same time.
We stop and share an awkward chuckle.
“Left is fine,” I say.
“Right is great,” she says at the same time.
No awkward chuckle this time.
