Page 5
Poppy has her hand clasped over her mouth, holding back laughter. Her freckles are being swallowed by the redness in her cheeks.
Nurse Verne grumbles, “Hold still, girl, unless you want this leg to look like impressionist artwork.”
The door to the infirmary crashes open, and I turn to see the rest of our cohort flow in. Hugo jogs ahead of the rest, coming to Poppy’s side. “I was searching the woods with Orla and Ollinde. I didn’t know you found her. Oh Saints, Pop. What happened?” He raises a hand as if he wants to put it on her shoulder, her face, her hand . . . but he can’t seem to bring himself to touch her, and he settles for letting his arm rest at his side, clenching and unclenching his fist as he asks her how she is.
Nurse Verne waves him away so he can keep treating her. Hugo reluctantly sidles up beside me. “You know, you’ve got some savior complex.”
“Do not,” I say. “What did you do with my shoes, by the way? My toes are near death.”
He looks down at my feet. “That’s ’cause you’re still wearing those damn soaked stockings. Adding martyrdom to your complexes. You’re getting quite the collection.”
“And I’m adding troublemaking to yours.”
“Ah, but see, that’s not a defect. It’s a feature.”
“Well, if my toes fall off, it’ll be your fault.”
My stepsiblings have taken up the foot of the bed. Orla has her arms folded tightly around her chest, her hair hanging in a straight, white sheet around her sour face. But despite that, she talks softly with Poppy, who has always done a better job of relating to my prickly stepsister than I have. Her sibling, Ollinde, looks at me as if Poppy’s injury were my fault.
Ollinde is a changeling, taking the creation principle of Light magic very literally. They rarely ever look the same, changing out faces like clothing. It’s only their eyes that don’t change—yellowish-green irises always set them apart. That, and the way they can cut me down with a glance. When in a human form, they shift between genders at will, sometimes blending both. Today, their face is a perfect balance of masculine and feminine—strong nose, delicate brow and lips, defined jaw, and absurdly tight golden curls that remind me of a powdered wig.
My stepsiblings are not particularly fond of me. In some twisted way, I understand. My father left me his estate, to be awarded on my twentieth birthday. Technically speaking, whether they and their mother have a place to call home after that is entirely up to me. It doesn’t matter that I would never turn them out into the cold, regardless of how horrible they can be. They either don’t believe me or simply resent the power I hold over them.
“Interesting,” Ollinde says with all the bite of a viper, “how these sorts of accidents keep happening. And always when you’re around, Vesper.”
I open my mouth to retort, but Poppy inserts herself instead. “If she hadn’t come after me, this would all be worse. I might be dead.”
“Yes, we should all thank the Saints for Vesper’s impulsivity and Lonan’s compulsion to cover up her messes,” says Orla.
“Bleeding Saints, Orla,” Hugo says. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I’d think you’d be most upset at Vesper. It’s your girlfriend’s leg that’s been mangled.”
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Poppy says, blushing to her roots.
“Stop,” commands Lonan. Since he’s been our captain, he’s developed this tone he uses when he’s keeping us in line—all command, no compromise. It’s very annoying. “It’s the Solstice and then end of term, and all of you have let it go to your heads. Picking at each other like kids. Sloppy. Tighten up.” He takes a breath and then lowers his voice. “I don’t care what night it is, what hour it is, or what’s happening around us. At this school, in this cohort, you stay sharp. And you have each other’s backs. Call it what you want, but Vesper had Poppy’s back tonight.”
I’m surprised he’s complimenting me. But then his black-diamond eyes meet mine from behind his spectacles. “But before you go patting yourself on the back, know that marching off into the Blood Woods alone was the most asinine thing I’ve seen in all the years we’ve been here. I’ve had about enough of your thoughtlessness and self-reliance, Vesper. You think you know better than the rest of us. You don’t. You think you don’t need your team. You do. Learn that lesson, or I won’t be recommending you for advancement at the end of the year.”
My stomach hollows out as my jaw drops in rage. I need the approval of my captain to graduate Gossemort and be inducted into the meiga forces fighting for Gault. I’m nearly the best in our year—only occasionally surpassed by Lonan when he can manage it. The idea that he could hold me back, keep me from serving as my father did . . .
Oh, how he has miscalculated. He thinks he can hurt me, that he can scare me into compliance. But my heart is in pieces, and when I’m attacked, it goes ice-cold.
I step close to him, so close that we share the same breath, that our noses nearly touch. I narrow my eyes at him, and when I speak, my voice could cut to marrow. “You think your threats work on me? You small little man. I will ruin you.”
Something like power and the frigidity of resolve pass over Lonan’s face. It’s an expression I’ve seen on him before—just before he does terrible things, just before he wraps himself in the very evil he claims to fight.
Everyone thinks Lonan and I bite at each other’s heels because we jockey for the first and second rank among our class at Gossemort. At a school as cutthroat as ours, where students have been known to spend a week in the infirmary due to stress, where being able to outshine one another feels life-or-death, you need little other reason to make an enemy. But that is not why I can’t stand Lonan. I loathe him for one simple, unshakable reason: I know things about him that I should not know, things that, if they came to light, would make any one of his admirers despise him as much as I do. He parades himself around this school like the paragon of goodness, perfect champion of the Light.
In truth, he is anything but.
“Tread carefully, Fontaine,” he whispers. “Remember who your friends are.”
So much is layered into those words.
Who my friends are—the people surrounding us, meigas of the Light who have no idea who I really am or what secrets Lonan and I share.
Who my friends are—the two people who actually know my secrets. Lonan and my godfather.
