“What in the name of the Gods happened? There was a fire?” asked Alison.
He put his arm around her shoulder. “I think you were right about this place. There is something strange happening here.”
Chapter Twelve
THE TRAIL OF BLOOD
Lady Sibba
Winwold College held little in common with the fine elvish institutions Lady Sibba had known.
It was the pace of it, mostly. Traditional elvish education was an exercise in patience. Few completed their studies in less than a decade, and some took considerably longer than that.
Not so at Winwold. It was a thoroughly modern place, with shortened requirements to accommodate the shorter lifespans of most of the students, and to Lady Sibba, it moved in such a whirlwind that she wasn’t surprised a cyclone had spun up near it.
Lady Sibba had always known she wanted to be an educator. She had passed her girlish years forcing the other children on the island to sit in on her “lectures.” She’d made them complete very important (and often impossible) assignments, like feeding candy syrup to a hummingbird by hand and counting the fronds on a palm tree. Then she’d given them marks based on their performance.
As a result, she had few friends, but that had never bothered her. She had a purpose.
Her purpose now was a foolish one. She’d seen the way the wind blew through the trees from the dormitory she and Weyland shared earlier in the day. This kind of storm was not to be underestimated. They belonged in the buttressed dining hall, not out here in the shoddily constructed corridors that connected the main halls with a much newer, and much weaker, building.
Weyland would never stand for that, and she knew it.
It was what she loved about him. Weyland was simple. That wasn’t to say he was unintelligent; in fact, she had been pleasantly surprised by his intellectual curiosity once she’d gotten to know him better. But to him, the world was a simple place. People were good or they were bad. You helped good people if you could. You stayed out of the way of the bad ones.
Ceri was a good one; a young one, but a good one so far. Lady Sibba had expected Weyland to feel a resentment towards the princess and her brother. They were the king’s children, after all.
He had surprised her. Perhaps he saw in them a shadow of himself. They were victims of King Derkomai as much as he was.
“Do you know how to use the long-talker if we find it?” asked Weyland.
That was a good question. They had been invented before Lady Sibba came to Wilderise, but those early models probably had little in common with what they were using now.
“I don’t know,” said Lady Sibba. “Did they have one in the castle?”
“If they did, I wasn’t allowed to use it.”
One positive thing the summer’s shenanigans had given Weyland was the ability to talk freely about his time being held captive. Freely for him, at least.
Lady Sibba had written to Weyland during his captivity. She wasn’t sure why she’d done it. She’d seen him grow up in Herot’s Hollow, but only from a distance: his father, the formerblacksmith, had kept him from the schoolhouse. When they met again after his father died, he’d grown into the mountain of a man that he was.
Perhaps that was part of it, she had to admit. What person that liked men could resist a mountain of a man?
There was also the fact that he’d been kind to her after Lady Willana had passed on. Lady Willana was the reason she’d come to Herot’s Hollow at all, and with her gone, she had been ready to abandon the schoolhouse and to return home to start over. But Weyland had come by while she was packing up, and she’d never forget what he told her: “It’s better with you here.”
That was how she felt about Weyland, too. It was better when he was around.
They passed a pair of guards as they finally entered the dormitory wing.
“You need to get back to the dining hall,” they told them. “Whatever is in your dorm can wait.”
Lady Sibba looked at Weyland, amused to be mistaken for a student. “We’re not students. We’re visiting scholars. We’re out here looking for Princess Ceridwen. She’s not in the dining hall. Have you seen her?”
They hadn’t, of course, but they were so preoccupied with their new task that they left Weyland and Lady Sibba to theirs.
“Idiots,” muttered Weyland. These were some of Weyland’s bad people. Lady Sibba didn’t blame him for that particular opinion.
They climbed a flight of stairs. Ceri’s dorm was somewhere around here. Neither of them had thought to ask for her exact room number, but it didn’t matter: they had hands to knock with.
