“Apparently my thrilling weekend plans include stopping by the TA room at five. I’ll bring pastries.” He gave me a teasing salute and headed out.
Noah’s time in Paris had given him excellent taste in all things patisserie. Since I’d nearly swooned over an éclair he’d brought me as a thank you for one of our early tutoring sessions last term, contributing baked goods to our sessions had become a sort of tradition of his. It took a little of the sting out of my suspicion that his main purpose was to ensure I held no continuing allegiance to my family.
As I descended the tower and stepped out onto the green, I was thinking too much about the delectable canelés or madeleines I might be enjoying tomorrow to notice the girl hustling over to me until I was practically tripping over her. One glance at her pinched, wide-eyed face told me she was a junior student, probably in her first year. I’d seen that bushy strawberry blond hair around, but I didn’t know her name.
“Cressida?” she said in a thin voice, and shoved her hands toward me. “I have to give you this.”
The urgency in her voice made me tense up before she’d even moved. There was a certain frantic note that crept in when someone was operating under the influence of persuasive magic—when they didn’t really want to be saying what they were. Between my parents’ use of it and Victory’s, I was far too acquainted with that sound.
She’d thrust the object she was holding at me so abruptly that I grasped it automatically. A thick linen envelope creased between my fingers. My heart stuttered as a jolt of understanding hit me, and I jerked my arm to hurl the thing away from me—too late.
The envelope burst open with a shrieking surge of energy that smacked straight into my face. Into my mouth, clogging it like a fist. Into my eyes, blacking out my vision. There was nothing around me—nothing but suffocating darkness. Like when… Like when…
Icy horror surged through my veins. Even though I knew the effect was only a potent mix of illusion and physicality—my parents’ respective specialties—and that it would fade on its own, my terror had a mind of its own.
My lungs heaved for air. My hands leapt up to claw at my face as if I could pull the thing off. I’d have shrieked myself if the spell hadn’t been choking me.
Then the magic disintegrated, just in time for one small yelp to escape me. I found myself standing alone on the green, panting and clutching the sides of my face, my cheeks stinging where my fingernails had scratched them. The girl whom my parents or one of their staff must have persuaded into delivering that message had scurried away. The other witnesses, various classmates and younger students, had pulled back to the fringes of the green while they stared.
Heat flared beneath my skin. I fixed my eyes on the dorm windows of Ashgrave Hall ahead of me and marched toward the building with my head held high, as if I wasn’t burning with embarrassment. As if my nerves weren’t still quaking all through my body.
My parents would know the blow had landed, even from a distance. My panic would’ve flowed straight into them to fuel whatever other awful spells they cast next. Just like they knew I couldn’t stand being in total darkness. They’d always taunted me about the nightlights I’d used to conjure in my bedroom back home.
They’d sculpted their spell specifically to provoke that fear, because right now what Mom and Dad wanted more than anything was to cut me as deeply as they could. And they probably also knew that those seconds of oblivion hurt more than if they’d persuaded the girl to stab me with a knife.
There was nothing I could do about that but pretend it wasn’t true and keep on walking.
Chapter Two
I’d just returned to my bedroom after my shower the next morning when my phone lit up with a text from the newly minted Baron Bloodstone. Can you come to the Office of the Pentacle at 1pm? There’s something we’d like to discuss with you.
Somehow I suspected that when the former barons had called a person to a meeting of the pentacle, they hadn’t been half as casual or considerate about it. I wouldn’t know, though, because thankfully the older barons had never paid any attention to me. The summons still made my pulse stutter, as if I might have committed some horrible crime I’d totally forgotten about that the rulers of all fearmancer society were going to come down on me for.
Unless I’d taken up murderous sleepwalking—and sleep-covered my tracks incredibly well—I definitely hadn’t committed any horrible crimes recently. Maybe it had something to do with the malicious “letter” from my parents and my freak-out on the green?
Whatever the case, even though the request was phrased like a question, I didn’t feel like I could refuse any more than if it’d come from the ruthless barons who’d ruled before.
I can do that, I typed, and risked adding, What’s this about?
I wasn’t really surprised when Rory wrote back, We’ll fill you in during the meeting. At least, because it was Rory, she was benevolent enough to follow that with, It’s nothing you should be worried about.
Since the new barons had established a base of operations at the university, I could take a little additional comfort in the fact that I didn’t need to trek all the way out to the Fortress of the Pentacle for this meeting. They’d set up their “office” right across the green in Killbrook Hall in a large renovated room that had once been a teacher’s office and apartment.
I showed up at the door five minutes early. I’d done my best to appear poised, picking an outfit more professional than fashion-forward and hiding the scratch marks that still stung faintly on my cheeks under a careful cosmetic illusion. Hopefully they wouldn’t add any new scars to go with the faint one left over from a magical wound I’d taken during the final battle with the old barons.
Despite my efforts, trepidation coiled around my gut. No matter what Rory had said, I didn’t see how being called on like this could be a good thing.
Malcolm Nightwood’s little sister, Agnes, poked her head out of the office a moment later. “Well, come in,” she said, as if I should know the proper way of handling a summons like this, but at least she flashed me a quick grin.
Inside, the furniture was arranged into five points, just like the pentagram table I knew meetings took place around in the Fortress. Each broad desk around the expansive room had at least a couple of chairs behind it, and in those chairs sat all of the current barons and the scions old enough to be attending the university.
The points on either side of the doorway were the Ashgraves—Noah and his older brother Declan—and the Stormhursts—Connar and his twin brother Holden. Beyond them, Agnes went to join her brother at the Nightwood desk, across from the Killbrooks. All the way at the far end, at what felt like the head of the pentacle, Rory and her cousin Maggie occupied the Bloodstone desk.
Technically, Jude’s uncle Hector was the only Killbrook serving on the pentacle until his two kids and Jude’s toddler sister came of age. Jude had decided to shrug off the barony completely, although somehow they’d persuaded him to stay on for at least a little while as an “advisor.” Tipped back in his chair with his hands behind his head and his feet propped on the desk, he looked to be taking the role about as seriously as he did anything, which was not very much.