She waved my concern away. “I’ll deal with the brothers. They’re in need of a little reminder that they’re not yet gods … that they’re still sols and students of this academy,subjectto the power of those employed by the academy.”
I fell silent then. Arguing with crazy got you nowhere—even though she was very wrong about the Abcurse sols. They were as close to gods as one could get on Minatsol, before actual death turned them into full gods. They would destroy Elowin when they got their hands on her, and then they would come for me. I knew it. They would tear this academy to the ground, because I had accidently forced myself into their group, and they protected their own.
Hope …it was scary to let myself have any, especially when things looked grim, but if I didn’t have something to hold on to, I would lose my mind. Or …more.I’d lose it even more.
Elowin, Henchman Number One, and Henchman Number Two stepped back, each of them bestowing one last look on me before the door slammed shut behind them. I ran at it, fast as I could through all the pain my body was currently in, and wrenched the handle. No movement, nothing at all to indicate that there was even a door there. It felt as solid as the stone wall surrounding it. There was no opening for me to look out of, and something told me that screaming would not help. Everything would be deadened by the acoustics of this place.
I slammed my hand against the stone and fought back another sob. “Don’t leave me here alone!” My yells echoed around, just as I had predicted. Doing nothing but tormenting me with my current situation.
Turning around, I sank against the wall, my arms wrapping across my ribs as I attempted to keep it together. I was not someone who dealt well with being alone, just my own company, no distractions. I think it was half the reason I was always causing trouble in the village.
The ache in my chest intensified. The Abcurses were moving further away from me. I wondered how much distance it would take before I died, because I could feel that possibility sawing away at my insides. I was beginning to gag, and my vision was becoming blurry, my breath rasping with each dry heave. I was right now teetering on the edge of death. I hadn’t told Elowin that her plan had one very real flaw: I was connected to the Abcurses, and I couldn’t be separated from them, which meant that they were either going to find me soon, or I was going to die. Both of which would not be good for her.
It didn’t take long for my legs to give out beneath me, and I slumped to the stone floor, my head falling into my hands.
“Come on, Soldier,” I muttered to myself, the words getting stuck in my throat. “You’ve been in trouble before. It’s no big deal. You can find a way out of this …”
Except … no. I really couldn’t. The room was completely sealed-up. No windows. No rat-holes. There wasn’t even a crack in the wall where the door frame should have been, as though it had been sealed right to the wall with magic. I screamed, slamming my fists against the door again, and then I drew away.
I had to dosomething. The Abcurses should have found me by now. There had to be a reason they were staying away. Someone had to bekeepingthem away.
What if they’re in danger?Why can’t they hear me?
I paced around the edges of the room, the pain tearing at me a little more with each step, my heart thudding painfully hard. It was working overtime, it seemed. Beating so fast, so heavily, that I couldn’t help but feel like I was starting the dying process already. My skin was feverish and my pulse fluttered weakly. It was a familiar feeling, because I had almost died from a sickness that ate away at me from the inside when I was nine life-cycles old.
Back then, it had been caused by a cut on my leg. I’d torn my skin on a piece of metal sticking out of the metalworker’s stall, and three sun-cycles later, I could no longer walk. The healer had come to our home and covered my legs and arms in leeches, giving Emmy special brews of tea to keep me sustained, since nothing else would stay in my stomach.
Now …
Now, it seemed to be caused by another cut. More than one, even. The five slices through my soul that had separated me into pieces. They were slowly becoming infected, slowly poisoning my body, slowly trying to take me from the world of the living.
Ihadto do something.
The door handle kept catching my eye, since it was the only thing in the room that glinted silver, standing out against the bleak, stone backdrop. I moved back to it, slumping against the door, my eyes assessing every angle of it. There was a small mechanism attached to the base of the handle, almost like a tiny pin, popping out. I frowned, picking at it with my nail. It clicked out of place, and the handle moved, just a little bit. I grabbed it triumphantly, yanking it downwards, expecting the door to magically become a door again and swing open.
Instead, the handle snapped off.
“You guys are so freaking funny,” I cursed, directing my eyes heavenward, to the asshole gods who might have been watching …
But that wasn’t possible. Elowin had even admitted that the gods were keeping an eye on me, so why would she hide me within Blesswood? It must have had something to do with the stone room. It must have been under some kind of magical influence—that was already obvious, by the way the door seemed to have disappeared. It would also explain why the Abcurses couldn’t find me or hear me calling out to them. Thisforgottenwing of the castle must have been drowning in dangerous enchantments.
Unfortunately for Elowin, I had life-cycles upon life-cycles of half-lectures piled up in my head, all narrated by the voice of my best friend, Emmy The Sol-Lover. They were only half-lectures because I usually worked to tune her out pretty quickly, but half-lectures were enough. They were enough for me to know that physical materials put under the strain of magic for too long were always weakened by that magic.
I looked down at the broken door handle, turning it over, and then I kneeled, taking a moment to close my eyes and concentrate through the worsening agony. After a moment, I refocused, gripping the stem in my hand and scraping the handle part against the stone. It had the effect that scraping something partly metal against rough stone would have. Both showed signs of wear. I scraped harder, wearing the handle down on both sides until it was tapered off at the end, and sharp. It didn’t take as long as it normally would have, because both the handle and the stone had already been weakened by the heavy burden of magic. I moved back to the door, inserting the sharp point against the spot where the door should have met the stone, and stabbed.
A jarringclangreverberated right up to my shoulder, but I repositioned the handle, and slammed it down again, over and over, until a crack started to appear. When it was large enough, I wedged the battered point of the handle into it and used it as leverage to widen the crack. My hands were getting sore, blisters covering my palms, so I worked on getting the crack to spread all the way to the ground, and then I sat, wedging it in harder so that I could notch my foot against it and kick it toward the wall.
The sound of splintering wood was like music to my ears. I kicked again, my energy renewed, the adrenaline of a possible escape rushing right through me, making it so much easier to ignore the pain. Eventually, I managed to separate the door from its lock entirely, and then I was prying it open.
Take that, bitch-face, I growled internally, not even sure if I was aiming the curse at Elowin, or the door. I slipped through, turned around and flipped the room my middle finger, before sprinting off down the hallway. If anyone else had been stuck in there, I was sure that they never would have found their way out; the hallways all looked the same, and some of the stairways led to nowhere. The wing wanted to keep people locked up. That much was clear. But the wing couldn’t do shit against a soul-splintered dweller, with an in-built tracking device leading right back to her Abcurses.
I mean, not mine.TheAbcurses.
I spilled out into a main corridor of the academy just as another girl passed by, colliding with me.
“Oh, gods, I’m so sorry—Willa?” Emmy screeched, before grabbing my shoulders and shaking me, far too violently for my protesting bones. “Do you haveany idea—ugh, you know what. Never mind. Tell me what happened. I saw Elowin throw a bag over your head and drag you this way like three rotations ago, but then she disappeared and I couldn’t follow her. Your … sols were nowhere I could find so I’ve just been scouring these hallways …”
I pushed her hands away and pulled her into a hug. “Thank you,” I muttered, pressing my face into her shoulder.
