“Your mother’s, you fool!” she hisses back.
I’m so shocked I stumble backward and nearly drop the sword. It fumbles through my loose fingers and I only just stop it from falling to the ground.
“My mother,” I repeat.
I grip the sword more firmly in my hand.
No.
No, she’s trying to distract me again. She’s playing her usual mind games.
“Your mother,” she repeats. “I have been removing students on your mother’s orders.”
I squeeze her more tightly, my magic cutting into her skin and her bones cracking and groaning beneath my grip.
“You’re lying,” I say, aiming the tip of the sword right above her dead heart. “You’re a psychopath. You kill for fun. This has nothing to do with my mother.”
“It has everything to do with your mother, and your realm, and your people. Imagine the risk to them all if the ordinaries were to learn that there are some among them with powers. Powers that may be even stronger than yours. Imagine the questions. Imagine the threat to your hold on the realm. The whole system your people have created – the Quarters, the realm, the border – all of it would fall. All of it would collapse into anarchy. And you would lose everything.”
“No!” I say. “That’s wrong. My mother has been searching for ordinaries with powers. Our numbers are dwindling, our powers are weakening, and all the time the demons are growing in numbers and in strength. We need to find more fighters withpowers. My mother doesn’t care where they come from. That’s why Professor Tudor teaches that class. That’s why the academy exists.”
“Fox teaches that class, Beaufort Lincoln, to help us identify any ordinaries with interesting or strange talents and abilities. Abilities like your thrall. Talents like her sister’s.”
“No,” I mutter, a million thoughts crashing through my head, colliding with one another and sparking a thousand more.
This can’t be true. It can’t be.
And yet…
Why has my mother never questioned the deaths at the academy? Why, as Briony has often pondered, is it the ordinaries who die there while the shadow weavers thrive?
And yet…
Why would my mother want to remove children from the realm with abilities and powers – abilities and powers we desperately need in our fight against the demons?
“Oh, you poor little thing,” Bardin says. “Look at all those wheels spinning in your head at once.”
“You’re lying,” I spit.
“That’s why she sent you here, Beaufort. She wants your little girl dead – a lumomancer – she’s far too dangerous to the status quo. Her existence will send the whole system tumbling down. But she couldn’t just remove her – though I tried in that trial – because you and your little bond brothers would try to save her. So she sent you here to die! All of you!”
“Nonsense!” I say.
It has to be.
“Did you really never see it? Did you really never question it? You really believed everything she told you – that you, the shadow weavers, deserve everything you’ve earned? That you deserve to live in luxury while the others in your realm live in squalor and poverty?”
“Because we are the ones protecting the realm. We are the ones giving our lives. We are the ones fighting the demons.”
“And who, my darling, do you suppose created the demons?” she asks.
I blink at her, my grip sliding for a moment.
She smiles.
“W-w-what?”
“I said, who do you suppose created the demons?”
