To live or die at loreli.., p.2
To Live Or Die At Lorelight Academy, page 2
Uhhhhhh.
I blink.
“Yes,” I say. “I…know how boy girl make love.”
Burta nods professionally. “Good. Good.”
“Yep.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, I’ve gotta get going—”
Burta rolls her eyes and shoves me by the shoulder back down to my chair. “Other things. We talk about girls.”
“Oh, interesting idea. I refuse.”
“We. Talk. About. Girls.”
I…I have a hard time talking to girls.
I don’t know why.
I don’t treat them any differently. I don’t think they’re a different species or anything wild like that.
My opinion of girls is that they are people, simple as that.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t help my inability to carry a conversation with them.
I just…fail.
Miserably.
I don’t know why.
“I think I’ll just get used to them at Lorelight.”
“Yes,” Burta concedes, “but we practice.”
“…Practice?”
“I pretend to be girl, and you talk to me.”
“Oh, Burta…not a chance. I gotta go, I gotta—”
“You talk to girl,” she says, eyes narrowing. “At new school…many girl will demand you. You talk to girl.”
It’s a threat.
“We begin.”
I realize I’m still standing up when Burta jabs a finger down at my chair and forces me to sit.
“H-hello,” I say.
“Hello,” she says, smiling back at me.
We stare at one another until I look away and scratch my head.
Burta rolls her eyes.
“We pretend you read book, and I start.”
“Okay.”
“Chello,” she says in that thick Ternian accent. “You are read book! What book you read?”
I feel chills go down my arms.
I should have anticipated this question.
I try to think of a book.
Any book.
“The…”
I can’t think of anything.
“Chronicles…”
“Of…”
“…Balta…garde…nome…non…agon.”
Burta blinks.
I clear my throat.
“The Chronicles of Baltagardenomenonagon,” I say, trying to sound confident.
“It sounds interesting,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “What is about?”
“I don’t know Burta, I just made it up!”
“You made up book?!” she blurts, incredulous. “All you do is read book! You no remember one single book?!”
“I…no, I mean, not when you…ask me…to name a specific one!”
“Chronicles of…what was?” she asks.
“Baltegardenomenonagon,” I say, hanging my head.
“Okay, well,” she says, frowning and folding her arms. “You find big, strong, Ternian girl who is charm by how small you are and want to protect.”
“Thank you for believing in me.”
Burta smiles.
“I do.”
I smile back.
“I know you do.”
“I am going to miss you so much, William,” she says and breaks out into a sob, giving me a bear hug. Once I free my arms from my compressed rib cage, I hug her back.
“There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about,” I say.
I pull out an envelope.
Lorelight can be dangerous. It’s rare, but students do die. Usually, one every three or four years. For that reason, when I was accepted, I needed to form a last will and testament. The township authority already has the original copy safe and sound, but I have a copy here for Burta. She’s relevant in it.
“You know this is your home, right?” I ask her.
Burta laughs.
“No sad laugh,” I accuse.
“Sorry,” Burta says, blushing. “I guess I go chop wood. I am hired caretaker, William—”
“Burta,” I say flatly. “You’re family. You’re my family. And…”
I take out the will and hand it to her. “If anything happens to me, and once Grandpa dies…that means you’re the last member of the family left.”
Her eyes scan the will, and narrow.
Then they go wide.
“It’s all yours,” I say softly.
She stares.
“No.”
I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “I mean it, Burta. This is your home.”
Her eyes well up with tears again, and again, she gives me a hug and pats my back hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I suck it up and don’t let out a peep, though, just for her.
Creaking wheels and the clomp of hooves ring out from the cobblestone road leading from the village proper to the estate.
The escort is here.
“I have to go, Burta.”
She wipes a tear away and nods.
I wipe away one of my own. I didn’t even realize I was crying.
“You will do amazing, William,” she says, still wiping away tears. “You are strong like bear.”
I laugh.
“No sad laugh!” I say before she can beat me to it, and we laugh again together.
“Does this look strong like bear?” I say, and flex the thin section of my arm where a bicep muscle would normally be.
“You are…tenacious like bear, then,” she says, considering.
“Okay,” I say. “I guess that sort of works.”
Her frown deepens.
“You are…smart like bear?”
“Are bears especially smart?”
“You are…problem solve like bear when…under situation where…bear very good at problem-solving.”
“Thank you, Burta.”
She leads me to the door.
“You are strong like bear, William,” she encourages one last time, and we embrace.
I take one last look at the mansion. So many rooms, so many windows. The shutters are all closed, on all but three rooms.
I wonder when they’ll close my shutter too.
“Love you, Burta.”
“Oh, I love you too, little William!” she calls as the carriage takes off. “You do wonderful! Everything great! You have whole future! Strong like bear!”
“Strong like bear!”
I settle into the bench of the cabin as the carriage sets off, and, eventually, the winding pathway hides the mansion from view altogether.
It’s almost a week’s journey from here to Lorelight.
And that’s it, then.
The start of something new.
Something new and exciting.
I press my forehead into the glass window of the carriage and sigh. It fogs up the glass.
“I think this is the rest of my life,” I say softly into the fog on the window, and the fog spreads a little.
The bumps in the cobblestone road begin to jostle me, and soon the village joins my home behind me.
Chapter
Three
The carriage driver’s name is Philip.
We’ve used him before—my parents mostly.
He and his husband run a small inn down toward the village center, and during slow seasons, Philip or Mitchell use one of their horses to take on driver contracts. They’re more family friends than anything else, by now.
The pair are some of the nicest guys I’ve met.
They don’t look it.
They look tough as nails.
It goes away once they open their mouths, or smile, or do anything of the like. But they’re both well over six foot, built like brick barnhouses, and each has a resting scowl.
It’s just a resting scowl that’s easy to wake into something bright.
The pair have started taking advantage of their appearance.
In recent years this driving side business of theirs has been gaining ground, and while I’m glad for their success, I think it’s in no small part due to the way things have been going lately.
What I mean is…the roads aren’t as safe as they used to be.
I don’t know all the details. Burta berates me sometimes for staying “locked up” in the library.
Except she doesn’t get out much either.
Tensions feel high, though. Now matter how many days I spend in the library, no matter how deeply I sink into those leather chairs…I can feel the tensions.
The point is, I don’t know the situation exactly, and neither does Burta.
I do hear a few rumors, though.
I’ve heard the King Regent wants a war to cut his teeth on, since the last war went so well for his father.
It makes sense, only…I’m not sure who exactly we would go to war with.
We’ve got no enemies nearby.
Things, for most of my life, and my parents’ tragically short lives, have been peaceful.
My grandfather remembers Roether’s War, and escaped conscription because of his bad leg.
But tensions are rising again, and at least in my—admittedly limited—seventeen years of life, I haven’t felt anything like it.
I can feel it whenever I go out into the village.
I can feel it at home.
I can feel it when I read the histories and start to get a strange feeling, a prickle at the back of my neck. Like war is watching us from the trees. Some dark predator stalking us, watching us with amber eyes, and the fur on its hackles is rising…and it’s getting ready to strike.
All that is to say—Philip and Mitchell look tough, and it helps their business.
But they’re sweethearts.
Philip picks me up in the early morning, and the first day of traveling passes without incident.
Without any need for that toughness.
That changes.
On the second day of traveling, we creak by a couple of men standing on the side of the road.
I can see them from the little window in the carriage.
The men look thin, and whipcord lean. Both have newly shaved heads that their skull-shapes don’t quite agree with.
Both are wearing old, faded military tabards and leather armor that hangs off them like it doesn’t quite fit—like the armor belongs to someone else. One’s holding a spear, and the other is holding a wooden crossbow covered in scratches and chips.
We drive past without incident—Philip carries a crossbow of his own.
It sits on his lap while he drives, and he shifts slightly as we pass to make it ever the slightest bit more visible to the men on the road.
It’s called a double-loader—it’s two smaller one-handed crossbows stacked atop one another and clipped together with metal latches.
It takes up a lot of space, and looks menacing by itself.
Philip combos it with a stare of pinprick eyes that make you think he could pick off a circling hawk just by instinct.
It was a very expensive weapon, bought with funds gained from their side business.
I don’t think it’s ever been fired.
Philip and Mitchell don’t even hunt.
The pair don’t eat meat at all, in fact.
When we pass by the two men on the road, I revise my opinion about their armor belonging to someone else.
It belonged to them at one point.
Richer, fatter times, maybe. When conscription was a risk-free way to gain a bit of coin in exchange for training you’d never use.
There’s still no call for conscription, but times have grown lean.
These men have, too.
They watch me, side-eyed, their gaze painting me with contempt.
Then we’re past, and it’s over.
More traveling without incident, and another complication rears its head.
Lorelight Arcane Academy is still three days away when the wheel breaks.
The sun has set, and unlike the last few nights where we rested in villages, this was the one night Philip was going to push through and drive while I sleep.
I’m starting to doze off when…
Crack.
I jolt awake with the sensation of falling as the left corner of the carriage cabin drops to the ground and grinds against the mud.
“…Crap,” Philip mutters from the lead.
I hear him dismount, and stir myself back to full wakefulness as I open the door to the carriage.
He nods curtly and offers a hand to help me down, but when I decline, he moves on to the wheel.
I hop down, my ankle twisting slightly in the slippery mud when it doesn’t land at the angle I wanted it to.
I let out a small, irritated sound, and Philip shoots me a look that matches my irritation.
“I could have helped you down, but you didn’t want my help,” the look says. His eyebrows shift ever so slightly, and his mouth twists into a line. “We’ve got bigger problems, though,” the look now says.
The wheel got stuck in a deep patch of mud, and the carriage tried to move on without it. That’s what appears to have happened.
“Can we fix it?”
“We have a spare wheel,” Philip concedes. “But the axle will need to be replaced. Lensbourge will have everything we need, but unfortunately…”
He trails off.
Unfortunately, Lensbourge is the next town over.
The one we needed to ride all night to get to.
Philip sighs and scratches his head.
“I’ll pay for the repairs,” I offer.
Philip shrugs at this, like he wasn’t expecting it. He opens his mouth, no doubt to graciously accept my offer.
Then his eyebrows shoot down, and he turns away.
A lot of solitary thinking, this guy. Mitchell calls his husband the “strong and silent type.”
A person can’t be the “strong and silent type” just by being strong.
I’m like…the…weak and silent type, I think to myself. Is there an equivalent expression? I’m not sure.
“Well…you already paid me. This brings up, um…an issue,” Philip says, and looks up toward the sky, glancing at the moon, then back down at me. “Lorelight’s new semester begins at the first of the month?”
I nod.
“Then they close the gates, right?”
I’m surprised for a moment that Philip knows about this, although I really shouldn’t be.
Lorelight Arcane Academy famously closes its gates a few days after a semester start. No one comes in. No visitors, no travelers.
No students late for the semester.
No one leaves, either, though that isn’t quite our concern.
He sucks in wind through his front teeth.
“Shit.”
I get a sinking drop in my stomach.
“Shit? Why shit? What’s the shit? You don’t think we can make it in time? We’ll just go on horseback from here. I can handle it.”
“First of all, I’ve got one saddle, and Mitchell will kill me if I ride without, given the state of my back.”
“Not a problem, we’ve got two horses. I’ll go on the horse with no saddle.”
Philip’s eyebrows rise.
“You’ve done that before?”
“Well…no,” I admit. “I’ve actually never ridden a horse whatsoever. But how hard could it be?”
I go for a friendly, nervous smile.
“Yeah—no,” Philip says. “Not good for you or for the horse. Not for the next three days. We’ll need the carriage fixed.”
He sighs.
“I think I know the best way to do it,” he says. “But it’ll cut your arrival close.”
My heart sinks more.
What is the penalty for being late?
There’s a reason the Academy provides transportation. Everyone is to start at the same time. Same day.
I thought Philip was the safer bet.
“We’re going to ride into Lensbourge tonight, because we’ll need to no matter what. I’ll take the horse without the saddle. Then we’ll pick up a new axle, we’ll ride back, fix the carriage, and resume from where we are right here.”
My mouth hangs open.
“Unless you want to hire another driver in Lensbourge, which would be completely understandable.”
I frown. “Maybe we could buy a new carriage?”
“How important is your stuff?”
“It can be replaced.”
We pause for a moment, then a sudden thought comes over me.
A feeling.
I find myself shaking my head.
“No, no—you need to take me to Lorelight.”
“I’ll try,” he laughs, “but I’d understand if—”
“No,” I say, frowning at myself even as I say the words. “No, I mean…it has to be you who takes me to Lorelight.”
The horses shuffle uneasily, their shoulders twitching.
I can almost see Philip’s hackles rise.
“What do you mean?” he asks quietly.
People are wary of magic.
Wary of anything they don’t understand.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Gut feeling,” I lie. That’s almost it. Not quite. But—people certainly understand gut feelings.
Philip sighs, and shrugs.
“Alright well, I appreciate you trusting me.”
I nod.
“Sorry about your legs, and sorry about your nuts,” he says.
“My legs? My…nuts?!”
In response, Philip unhooks his horses. He tosses a saddle on the horse to the right, and clambers onto the horse on the left himself.
“What about my…things?”
“I think no matter the plan, they get left here, and we hope no one takes them.”
“Better than being late.”
We’re off into the night, and by the time we do ride into the town, my legs and nuts have not yet accepted Philip’s apology.
“Mitchell and I will compensate you for the lost time,” Philip says when we return with the replacement axle. “And the, uh…this.”
Almost nothing about the situation has changed in the morning light—the carriage is still lying immobile exactly where it was before, with its left corner and axle still dipped into the mud.
There is one difference, though.
The back compartment, which had in fact been locked, is a mess of fractured wood. The lock held, at least.
The wooden box itself did not.
All my things are gone. All my clothes, all the books I was encouraged to buy, all the books I brought for myself to read for fun, even the books that aren’t quite “fun” but I thought might be helpful—books, clothes, and everything else.
I blink.
“Yes,” I say. “I…know how boy girl make love.”
Burta nods professionally. “Good. Good.”
“Yep.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, well, I’ve gotta get going—”
Burta rolls her eyes and shoves me by the shoulder back down to my chair. “Other things. We talk about girls.”
“Oh, interesting idea. I refuse.”
“We. Talk. About. Girls.”
I…I have a hard time talking to girls.
I don’t know why.
I don’t treat them any differently. I don’t think they’re a different species or anything wild like that.
My opinion of girls is that they are people, simple as that.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t help my inability to carry a conversation with them.
I just…fail.
Miserably.
I don’t know why.
“I think I’ll just get used to them at Lorelight.”
“Yes,” Burta concedes, “but we practice.”
“…Practice?”
“I pretend to be girl, and you talk to me.”
“Oh, Burta…not a chance. I gotta go, I gotta—”
“You talk to girl,” she says, eyes narrowing. “At new school…many girl will demand you. You talk to girl.”
It’s a threat.
“We begin.”
I realize I’m still standing up when Burta jabs a finger down at my chair and forces me to sit.
“H-hello,” I say.
“Hello,” she says, smiling back at me.
We stare at one another until I look away and scratch my head.
Burta rolls her eyes.
“We pretend you read book, and I start.”
“Okay.”
“Chello,” she says in that thick Ternian accent. “You are read book! What book you read?”
I feel chills go down my arms.
I should have anticipated this question.
I try to think of a book.
Any book.
“The…”
I can’t think of anything.
“Chronicles…”
“Of…”
“…Balta…garde…nome…non…agon.”
Burta blinks.
I clear my throat.
“The Chronicles of Baltagardenomenonagon,” I say, trying to sound confident.
“It sounds interesting,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “What is about?”
“I don’t know Burta, I just made it up!”
“You made up book?!” she blurts, incredulous. “All you do is read book! You no remember one single book?!”
“I…no, I mean, not when you…ask me…to name a specific one!”
“Chronicles of…what was?” she asks.
“Baltegardenomenonagon,” I say, hanging my head.
“Okay, well,” she says, frowning and folding her arms. “You find big, strong, Ternian girl who is charm by how small you are and want to protect.”
“Thank you for believing in me.”
Burta smiles.
“I do.”
I smile back.
“I know you do.”
“I am going to miss you so much, William,” she says and breaks out into a sob, giving me a bear hug. Once I free my arms from my compressed rib cage, I hug her back.
“There’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about,” I say.
I pull out an envelope.
Lorelight can be dangerous. It’s rare, but students do die. Usually, one every three or four years. For that reason, when I was accepted, I needed to form a last will and testament. The township authority already has the original copy safe and sound, but I have a copy here for Burta. She’s relevant in it.
“You know this is your home, right?” I ask her.
Burta laughs.
“No sad laugh,” I accuse.
“Sorry,” Burta says, blushing. “I guess I go chop wood. I am hired caretaker, William—”
“Burta,” I say flatly. “You’re family. You’re my family. And…”
I take out the will and hand it to her. “If anything happens to me, and once Grandpa dies…that means you’re the last member of the family left.”
Her eyes scan the will, and narrow.
Then they go wide.
“It’s all yours,” I say softly.
She stares.
“No.”
I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “I mean it, Burta. This is your home.”
Her eyes well up with tears again, and again, she gives me a hug and pats my back hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I suck it up and don’t let out a peep, though, just for her.
Creaking wheels and the clomp of hooves ring out from the cobblestone road leading from the village proper to the estate.
The escort is here.
“I have to go, Burta.”
She wipes a tear away and nods.
I wipe away one of my own. I didn’t even realize I was crying.
“You will do amazing, William,” she says, still wiping away tears. “You are strong like bear.”
I laugh.
“No sad laugh!” I say before she can beat me to it, and we laugh again together.
“Does this look strong like bear?” I say, and flex the thin section of my arm where a bicep muscle would normally be.
“You are…tenacious like bear, then,” she says, considering.
“Okay,” I say. “I guess that sort of works.”
Her frown deepens.
“You are…smart like bear?”
“Are bears especially smart?”
“You are…problem solve like bear when…under situation where…bear very good at problem-solving.”
“Thank you, Burta.”
She leads me to the door.
“You are strong like bear, William,” she encourages one last time, and we embrace.
I take one last look at the mansion. So many rooms, so many windows. The shutters are all closed, on all but three rooms.
I wonder when they’ll close my shutter too.
“Love you, Burta.”
“Oh, I love you too, little William!” she calls as the carriage takes off. “You do wonderful! Everything great! You have whole future! Strong like bear!”
“Strong like bear!”
I settle into the bench of the cabin as the carriage sets off, and, eventually, the winding pathway hides the mansion from view altogether.
It’s almost a week’s journey from here to Lorelight.
And that’s it, then.
The start of something new.
Something new and exciting.
I press my forehead into the glass window of the carriage and sigh. It fogs up the glass.
“I think this is the rest of my life,” I say softly into the fog on the window, and the fog spreads a little.
The bumps in the cobblestone road begin to jostle me, and soon the village joins my home behind me.
Chapter
Three
The carriage driver’s name is Philip.
We’ve used him before—my parents mostly.
He and his husband run a small inn down toward the village center, and during slow seasons, Philip or Mitchell use one of their horses to take on driver contracts. They’re more family friends than anything else, by now.
The pair are some of the nicest guys I’ve met.
They don’t look it.
They look tough as nails.
It goes away once they open their mouths, or smile, or do anything of the like. But they’re both well over six foot, built like brick barnhouses, and each has a resting scowl.
It’s just a resting scowl that’s easy to wake into something bright.
The pair have started taking advantage of their appearance.
In recent years this driving side business of theirs has been gaining ground, and while I’m glad for their success, I think it’s in no small part due to the way things have been going lately.
What I mean is…the roads aren’t as safe as they used to be.
I don’t know all the details. Burta berates me sometimes for staying “locked up” in the library.
Except she doesn’t get out much either.
Tensions feel high, though. Now matter how many days I spend in the library, no matter how deeply I sink into those leather chairs…I can feel the tensions.
The point is, I don’t know the situation exactly, and neither does Burta.
I do hear a few rumors, though.
I’ve heard the King Regent wants a war to cut his teeth on, since the last war went so well for his father.
It makes sense, only…I’m not sure who exactly we would go to war with.
We’ve got no enemies nearby.
Things, for most of my life, and my parents’ tragically short lives, have been peaceful.
My grandfather remembers Roether’s War, and escaped conscription because of his bad leg.
But tensions are rising again, and at least in my—admittedly limited—seventeen years of life, I haven’t felt anything like it.
I can feel it whenever I go out into the village.
I can feel it at home.
I can feel it when I read the histories and start to get a strange feeling, a prickle at the back of my neck. Like war is watching us from the trees. Some dark predator stalking us, watching us with amber eyes, and the fur on its hackles is rising…and it’s getting ready to strike.
All that is to say—Philip and Mitchell look tough, and it helps their business.
But they’re sweethearts.
Philip picks me up in the early morning, and the first day of traveling passes without incident.
Without any need for that toughness.
That changes.
On the second day of traveling, we creak by a couple of men standing on the side of the road.
I can see them from the little window in the carriage.
The men look thin, and whipcord lean. Both have newly shaved heads that their skull-shapes don’t quite agree with.
Both are wearing old, faded military tabards and leather armor that hangs off them like it doesn’t quite fit—like the armor belongs to someone else. One’s holding a spear, and the other is holding a wooden crossbow covered in scratches and chips.
We drive past without incident—Philip carries a crossbow of his own.
It sits on his lap while he drives, and he shifts slightly as we pass to make it ever the slightest bit more visible to the men on the road.
It’s called a double-loader—it’s two smaller one-handed crossbows stacked atop one another and clipped together with metal latches.
It takes up a lot of space, and looks menacing by itself.
Philip combos it with a stare of pinprick eyes that make you think he could pick off a circling hawk just by instinct.
It was a very expensive weapon, bought with funds gained from their side business.
I don’t think it’s ever been fired.
Philip and Mitchell don’t even hunt.
The pair don’t eat meat at all, in fact.
When we pass by the two men on the road, I revise my opinion about their armor belonging to someone else.
It belonged to them at one point.
Richer, fatter times, maybe. When conscription was a risk-free way to gain a bit of coin in exchange for training you’d never use.
There’s still no call for conscription, but times have grown lean.
These men have, too.
They watch me, side-eyed, their gaze painting me with contempt.
Then we’re past, and it’s over.
More traveling without incident, and another complication rears its head.
Lorelight Arcane Academy is still three days away when the wheel breaks.
The sun has set, and unlike the last few nights where we rested in villages, this was the one night Philip was going to push through and drive while I sleep.
I’m starting to doze off when…
Crack.
I jolt awake with the sensation of falling as the left corner of the carriage cabin drops to the ground and grinds against the mud.
“…Crap,” Philip mutters from the lead.
I hear him dismount, and stir myself back to full wakefulness as I open the door to the carriage.
He nods curtly and offers a hand to help me down, but when I decline, he moves on to the wheel.
I hop down, my ankle twisting slightly in the slippery mud when it doesn’t land at the angle I wanted it to.
I let out a small, irritated sound, and Philip shoots me a look that matches my irritation.
“I could have helped you down, but you didn’t want my help,” the look says. His eyebrows shift ever so slightly, and his mouth twists into a line. “We’ve got bigger problems, though,” the look now says.
The wheel got stuck in a deep patch of mud, and the carriage tried to move on without it. That’s what appears to have happened.
“Can we fix it?”
“We have a spare wheel,” Philip concedes. “But the axle will need to be replaced. Lensbourge will have everything we need, but unfortunately…”
He trails off.
Unfortunately, Lensbourge is the next town over.
The one we needed to ride all night to get to.
Philip sighs and scratches his head.
“I’ll pay for the repairs,” I offer.
Philip shrugs at this, like he wasn’t expecting it. He opens his mouth, no doubt to graciously accept my offer.
Then his eyebrows shoot down, and he turns away.
A lot of solitary thinking, this guy. Mitchell calls his husband the “strong and silent type.”
A person can’t be the “strong and silent type” just by being strong.
I’m like…the…weak and silent type, I think to myself. Is there an equivalent expression? I’m not sure.
“Well…you already paid me. This brings up, um…an issue,” Philip says, and looks up toward the sky, glancing at the moon, then back down at me. “Lorelight’s new semester begins at the first of the month?”
I nod.
“Then they close the gates, right?”
I’m surprised for a moment that Philip knows about this, although I really shouldn’t be.
Lorelight Arcane Academy famously closes its gates a few days after a semester start. No one comes in. No visitors, no travelers.
No students late for the semester.
No one leaves, either, though that isn’t quite our concern.
He sucks in wind through his front teeth.
“Shit.”
I get a sinking drop in my stomach.
“Shit? Why shit? What’s the shit? You don’t think we can make it in time? We’ll just go on horseback from here. I can handle it.”
“First of all, I’ve got one saddle, and Mitchell will kill me if I ride without, given the state of my back.”
“Not a problem, we’ve got two horses. I’ll go on the horse with no saddle.”
Philip’s eyebrows rise.
“You’ve done that before?”
“Well…no,” I admit. “I’ve actually never ridden a horse whatsoever. But how hard could it be?”
I go for a friendly, nervous smile.
“Yeah—no,” Philip says. “Not good for you or for the horse. Not for the next three days. We’ll need the carriage fixed.”
He sighs.
“I think I know the best way to do it,” he says. “But it’ll cut your arrival close.”
My heart sinks more.
What is the penalty for being late?
There’s a reason the Academy provides transportation. Everyone is to start at the same time. Same day.
I thought Philip was the safer bet.
“We’re going to ride into Lensbourge tonight, because we’ll need to no matter what. I’ll take the horse without the saddle. Then we’ll pick up a new axle, we’ll ride back, fix the carriage, and resume from where we are right here.”
My mouth hangs open.
“Unless you want to hire another driver in Lensbourge, which would be completely understandable.”
I frown. “Maybe we could buy a new carriage?”
“How important is your stuff?”
“It can be replaced.”
We pause for a moment, then a sudden thought comes over me.
A feeling.
I find myself shaking my head.
“No, no—you need to take me to Lorelight.”
“I’ll try,” he laughs, “but I’d understand if—”
“No,” I say, frowning at myself even as I say the words. “No, I mean…it has to be you who takes me to Lorelight.”
The horses shuffle uneasily, their shoulders twitching.
I can almost see Philip’s hackles rise.
“What do you mean?” he asks quietly.
People are wary of magic.
Wary of anything they don’t understand.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Gut feeling,” I lie. That’s almost it. Not quite. But—people certainly understand gut feelings.
Philip sighs, and shrugs.
“Alright well, I appreciate you trusting me.”
I nod.
“Sorry about your legs, and sorry about your nuts,” he says.
“My legs? My…nuts?!”
In response, Philip unhooks his horses. He tosses a saddle on the horse to the right, and clambers onto the horse on the left himself.
“What about my…things?”
“I think no matter the plan, they get left here, and we hope no one takes them.”
“Better than being late.”
We’re off into the night, and by the time we do ride into the town, my legs and nuts have not yet accepted Philip’s apology.
“Mitchell and I will compensate you for the lost time,” Philip says when we return with the replacement axle. “And the, uh…this.”
Almost nothing about the situation has changed in the morning light—the carriage is still lying immobile exactly where it was before, with its left corner and axle still dipped into the mud.
There is one difference, though.
The back compartment, which had in fact been locked, is a mess of fractured wood. The lock held, at least.
The wooden box itself did not.
All my things are gone. All my clothes, all the books I was encouraged to buy, all the books I brought for myself to read for fun, even the books that aren’t quite “fun” but I thought might be helpful—books, clothes, and everything else.
