He pulled open the door. “One more thing.” He inclined his head toward my dresser. “Don’t wear it to my classroom.”
The door clicked softly behind him.
After he left, I picked absentmindedly at my dinner, ignoring the three new messages I’d received from Belinda. With the supplies Skye bought me at Briary’s, I drew a pretty bad picture of a mermaid on a sheet of parchment, wroteWelcome to Creatusat the top, then left it on Skye’s bed.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
EMBER
Where afflictions of the mind are concerned, a Healer’s touch will do no good. Though it sometimes happens the patient requires a Shield, and for that, the patient must seek a Creator.
— Ydris Ledoux, Echelon to the
School of Healing
Over the next week, I developed a routine: run to the city district in the morning, get food from the cafeteria to eat in my room, learn the ins and outs of Creatus, research at the library, and stay away from Leland.
For almost all of us, our days were filled with downtime. Classes didn’t start until August, and, based on the laughter that floated up from the arcade every night, I guessed the fourth-year teachers used this time to enjoy each other’s company and get settled in the academy before the school year started. No Echelons were around, Starvos was always at the palace, and non-student teachers lived in the city.
Leland, the busiest of all of us, spent most days working in either Gnarlton or Hartik’s Hollow. I knew this because I always woke up to a message from him telling me where he would be.I figured it was his way of telling me to stay inside, be safe, make his life easy — though he never directly told menotto go anywhere.
We brushed shoulders at breakfast, usually by the bacon, but we said nothing and didn’t see each other again until dinner, when he sat at the end of the long fourth-year table with Vyra on his lap, acting like he didn’t see me.
Skye vacillated between insisting I walk the passages of the academy with her, backward and blindfolded until we’d timed out every escape route from every direction, and being sleep-deprived and irritable from my phantom flu waking me —us— up with my screaming. Rayne smiled. Belinda tried to get to know me. I tried to not be around.
And I never went back to Hartik’s Hollow.
* * *
I passed the majority of my time in the library, a grand, spectacular room with a gold, wrap-around mezzanine, overhead twinkly lights and recessed sconces, and wall-to-wall texts spanning the two floors. I went there to be alone, but for whatever reason, the library keeper, Loree Flores, never wanted to let me read. She spent most of her time reorganizing the sections surrounding my reading table, shaking her head at the mess, even though I’d never had a problem finding anything alphabetically.
“The Blackburn Artifacts,” she said one morning, spying the text I was reading. “A beautiful new edition.” Her chin-length, dark-brown hair tucked behind her ears, I watched her dangling, candy-red earrings dance as she spoke. “Is that the kind of book you like to read? You haven’t taken your nose out of that one all morning.”
“No,” I sighed, repressing the urge to toss the text on the library cart with the other texts Loree was archiving. Twohundred pages in, I’d barely made a dent in learning about the pair of letterboxes, and there were three more artifacts to go. “I’d rather be reading anything else. This is research.”
“Oh, well, if you don’t like that one, there’s plenty more good texts to read here. Tell me what you like. I’ll pull a few for you.”
I liked everything, but what I was in the mood for was historical romance, a story of a king falling in love with his queen, ideally the kind where they aren’t cousins, per the complex genealogy chart in the front matter. Though those, I told Loree, I never really looked at.
“You’re very right about that!” she agreed. “They all have the same names, or close enough anyway. John the son of John the son of Richard. When a book’s good, the story teaches you the names that matter.”
But as I sat alone one night, lights out but for a dying lantern at my small round table, slumped over another one of Helen’s biographies, I read the genealogy chart in the front pages and nothing else.
Skye found me rushing through the arcade afterward.
“Slow the fuck down,” she yelled, pointing downward at the freshly mopped and glistening floor.
“The Goddess?” I demanded.
“Yeah? What about Her?”
“She’s Helen’s ancestor.”Ten generations between them.
“Technically also yours.”
“No one told me.”
