Felix unlocked the door and turned the handle. ‘They’re all gone for the day anyway.’
The door gave way on the second push of Felix’s shoulder and hip. It groaned as it swung open into the dark. Asta groped on the wall for a light switch, but Felix was quicker. He conjured a little slow-moving flame and set it on his shoulder. The illusory light it shed was strangely cool and flat, but it did the trick, and they looked around the place where they had found themselves.
They stood in a narrow corridor with a scratched and stained pine floor. There were closed doors to either side of them. Felix opened the second door on the right. It was a closet, and the magic light on his shoulder fell on metal shelves of carefully labeled bankers’ boxes. He closed the door again.
‘Whoops,’ Felix said, his voice just above a whisper. ‘Wrong door.’ He moved on to the next one. This one had a set of stairs behind it. The smell that drifted out when Felix opened the door was dusty and dry.
‘Where are we going?’ Asta asked.
But Felix just began to climb.
Asta followed the shape of him up the stairs. He paused at a small landing and fiddled with something on the wall, and a crack of light split the dark. Asta realized it was a window that had been shuttered tight.
She peeked through the open shutter, pressed close at his shoulder. He smelled nice, like the bed of pine needles in the grove by the gazebo.
They were looking out the back of the admin building over the training fields. Some of their classmates were out there now, getting ready for tomorrow’s scrimmage. One rider was running their dragon over a pair of fences– jumping and then circling back and jumping again. Someone else leapt from the top of the scramble, but their dragon didn’t quite nail the footing and struggled to stay airborne, flapping awkwardly before a hard landing.
Felix closed the shutter again and kept climbing. The darkness was lessening as they neared the third floor, and Asta realized this was because there was no closed door at the top of the staircase. It opened into another hallway with an unshuttered window at the far end. As on the ground level, the rest of the doors in the hallway were closed, keeping it gloomy and dim. There were broken chairs stacked near the window down the hall.
Felix extinguished his magic flame and sat on the top step. He began to unlace his boots. ‘Just so no one hears us,’ he said. Asta sat beside him and did the same with her sneakers.
‘I thought everyone had gone home.’
He tipped his head uncertainly. ‘Just in case.’
‘This is very unlike you, Felix Seraphin,’ Asta said. ‘You’re usually so well behaved.’
‘That’s what I let them think,’ he said, smiling at his fingers as they loosened his shoelaces.
Asta looked at his face, but the dimness of the light made it hard to read.
In their socks, Felix and Asta crept down the hall. Felix stopped at one of the doors on the left-hand side of the hallway and opened it. Two windows, bright with the evening sun, filled the room with light. Asta followed him through the doorway, and he closed the door softly behind her.
Inside, the wall abutting the hallway was lined with filing cabinets. On top of those were disused dragon models and rolled-up posters from bygone eras at the Pillar School. Half the room was crowded with shabby furniture– desks stacked on desks and dressers that were missing pull handles. The other side of the room, where they were standing, had been cleared except for a wide wooden table with two chairs beside it.
‘What is this?’ Asta asked.
‘It’s a storage room,’ Felix said.
Asta rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, I can see that. But why did you bring me here?’
‘Check out the view,’ Felix said, going to the table and leaning over it to look out of the dormer windows.
Half of the Pillar School campus sprawled outside the window. The ivy-covered dorms, the centuries-old trees that stretched their limbs over the walkways, the stables, the training pools, and the exercise trails. Below that, the valley with the village of Crown’s Crossing nestled in it. The sun was nearing its golden hour, and everything looked as if it had been painted in place.
Felix hiked himself up on the edge of the table. His legs swung gently off the side. ‘When I was little, my parents were Pillar trustees—’
‘Of course they were,’ Asta said under her breath.
‘—and they’d come here for meetings a couple of times a year. I would tag along, but the only other kids there were too young to be any fun. So I would go exploring. I found this room one time, and I used to play up here by myself.’
‘That’s kind of sad. Lonely little Felix.’ Asta smiled, imagining Felix playing up here in this stuffy old room while his parents decided the fate of the school in one of the larger rooms below.
‘Someone told me these were the servants’ rooms, and I used to pretend I was one. I had to practice my magic illusions for the lords of the manor to use for their races.’
‘Did your illusions please them?’
Felix laughed. ‘Oh, I would have been whipped, for sure. Actually. . .’ He trailed off and went to one of the filing cabinets, pulling at drawers until one of them opened. He drew a scrap of paper out of the bottom of the drawer. ‘Here it is. One of my old spells. Hang on.’ He mouthed the instructions to himself. ‘Okay, got it.’ He shut his eyes, his fingers working in the air as he engaged the magic.
