Other witches and mages surelywouldnotice, wouldn’t they? He was the richest person currently enrolled in Malcroix, not to mention the unofficial male slut of our year, so I definitely wouldn’t be the only one to notice if his eyes started rippling and morphing with supernatural fire every other handful of minutes.
I swore he’d gotten taller over the summer.
More delusion.
No one gained height at twenty-two years old, or however old he must be now.
Hedidlook taller, though. As much as I scoffed at myself for imagining things, I swore his shoulders looked broader too, compared to how they’d looked the previous year.
He was also definitely limping, and moving strangely, especially for him.
He looked exhausted.
He looked positively awful to me, throughout the entire banquet. Although I’d thought I noticed it in the carriage, it was impossible not to see it here.
Dark circles hollowed out his eyes, and made the gold irises appear paler, even with those disconcerting flames. His skin looked paler, and his body, despite being more muscular than I remembered, struck me as leaner than it should be.
His features looked more angular, too, even with his added bulk, and something about the way he sat there, oddly still and straight, yet a little apart from Alaric and the rest of the royal clique, made my chest clench, maybe even in… Eye of Ra, was Iworriedabout him?
Ifthatwasn’t delusional, I had no idea what was.
But I’d scarcely seen him eat throughout the fancy, beginning-of-term feast.
He’d pretended to eat, picking at the Beef Wellington-type thing on his plate. He’d smiled wryly at things the other royals said, and sipped at his glass of wine. His expression remained fixed in a careful, knowing smirk, his fingers toying at the stem of his glass. But, despite all those things, I’d rarely seen the fork make it to his lips.
He’d barely looked around at anyone from his corner of Worm Hall.
Given that the start-of-term banquet was, by a good margin, the best meal we’d be served at school all year, I couldn’t helpbut find it odd he’d choose to skip it. Unlike the other royals Bones spent his time with, I’d never once seen him leave campus to eat at one of the posh restaurants in Bonescastle, not even for a coffee, not even on a weekend, nor with a single one of his numerous sexual conquests. He never left the school grounds at all, from what I could observe, for reasons I’d never managed to puzzle out, not in the entire previous year.
Then again, I didn’t exactly have the inside track on his comings and goings. He’d ignored me, and outrightavoidedme the entire second half of the year, which included keeping as far away from me physically as he possibly could. That seemed doubly true whenever he was forced to share the same room as me, like now.
I told myself, over and over, that I couldn’t care about this anymore.
So much time had passed, whyshouldI care?
I’d absolutely no reason to give a toss about the prince prick, other than to know if he was the mage behind the Priest. I certainly had no reason to wonder what was wrong with him, or whether he’d hurt himself somehow, and that’s why he sat so straight, or why he’d even bothered to show up for the banquet at all if he didn’t intend to eat the food, or if he had a single friend among the royals he could confide in.
Alaric was that friend, wasn’t he?
He confided in Alaric. He must.
I was still staring at him, somehow, despite all those thoughts, when whispers broke out on the side of the room where the main doors to the Hall lived.
My eyes swiveled that way with the rest of them.
I flinched when I saw the four mages and three witches in black uniforms who’d just entered the hall, walking in military-straight lines, with one in front, and three and three behind. I immediately knewwhatthey were, if not who.
Praecuri.
What were the Praecuri doing here?
There was no question of what they were. I recognized the uniforms, the symbols they wore. The intersecting worlds insignias on their arms and chests were difficult to miss.
Instead of looking windswept and field-weary, sweaty and dirty, or even combat-ready but clean, like they had in the various memories I’d seen in Anhka’s mind, they wore what looked like dress uniforms, complete with black capes with silver undersides. Their hair showed not a strand out of place, as if their heads had all been magicked by the same spell into perfect, sleek shapes.
I blanched when I realized they were walking straight for our table.
That’s when it really hit me. The Praecuri had come here, to Malcroix Bones Academy, in the middle of our beginning-of-year banquet.
