He glances out the classroom window to the dismal gray outdoors, and I can’t deny he’s right. If I can’t be enjoying a proper campus spring, at least I can be reading about leaves and flowers.
Kingston, maybe, is less content that Emrys is humoring us this way, easing up slightly and letting us more or less read for fun.
Not me. Humored is what I desperately need to be.
Because my other classes certainly aren’t relenting. Caliburn is still Caliburn, and its syllabi are still packed with the heaviest, densest, and most obscure of readings and assignments even in the latter half of Spring semester. I am tearing through hundreds of pages a week, scribbling page after page of notes in hour after hour of lecture, flipping through dictionaries in four languages and composing essays in two. I find Callahan to be the best study partner—less as a collaborator, per se, since wedon’t share any classes, and more as a human presence to read alongside—and we gradually stake out the first-floor study in the back corner of Camlann House as our workspace, where he remains sweet but painfully shy, as if he could easily never touch me again unlessIbroach the subject. Kai, for his part, keeps himself busy, almost suspiciously so, with whatever remains of Luther’s affairs, coming and going at strange hours to the point that I wonder if he’s consciously avoiding me. But not so much as Lanz, who, save for that encounter in the living room, has practically become a ghost. And Kingston…
Kingston I see in Latin class, of course. At meals in Camlann House. In passing, through the halls.
But also in his room. And my room. And the bathroom shower, once,
As far as the rest of campus knows, I am still Gwenna Vale, unwilling standout scholar in an already academically self-selecting student body and avowed social companion of the once-insular fencing team. I study in the library, I read over coffee in Holy Grounds. Some evenings I even tramp through snow to the dining hall with Morgan to circulate amongst our classmates, and…
And it’s not so bad. It’s…quite nice, really.
Because we are all here with a common purpose, for the short span of years we’ll share together in this strange, carved-out place. Everyone, every last student on the Caliburn campus, from Elena Shalott to Ponytail Brett, chose to come here because, on some level, they wanted to learn. To learn more than anything else, at least for a while. And everything here, from the dormitories to the dining hall to the library—of course—and even the chapel, is centered around that purpose. Learning, studying.
Where else on Earth can you find something like that?
Even when I wake up to another iron-gray sky, to temperatures verging on freezing and air that’s cracklingly dry and harsh, I am here.
A locus amoenus. A pleasant place.
Not that it’s perfect.
“Hey, dude.”
Someone knocks against my table at Holy Grounds, and I look up from my book to see the barista, an apologetic look under his facial hair.
“Sorry, but we’ve gotta close up.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, to the kitchen and coffee machines and trivia chalkboard askingIn the book of Exodus, how many plagues did God send upon the Egyptians?. “Pipes froze. No water.”
I blink. “Really?”Indoors?I add silently.
He does a comically exaggerated shrug. “Search me,” he says. “But can’t wash up, can’t serve food. Condolences.”
Or a few days later, crossing campus, how on the still-dead grass, these strange white patches start bloom up from under the earth. Not frost, not snow, but?—
“Salt?” Callahan nudges at a clump with the toe of his shoe, and it crumbles, sandy and glinting and stark white against the gray of the dirty slush. He looks up at me, concerned, and I can only shake my head—how should I know?
Or later that same night, nearly asleep on Kingston’s chest in the warm dark of his bedroom when something rankles the silence.
A buzzing.
Kingston hears it too. He slides out of bed, goes to the window, and catches something from the pane onto his finger.
A bee.
Frowning, Kingston leans over the window sill, cranks open one of the heavy panes, and the little thing zips out without somuch as a second thought—even though it’s bitterly chilly out and there are no flowers to be seen.
I don’t know why that, of all things, unsettles me. But it’s the first night since we got back that I don’t really sleep.
SIX
KINGSTON
On a weekday afternoon,I drive off-campus. Out of Sarrasford. Another town or two over. An anonymous parish, far enough away from Caliburn that no one would peg me as a student per se.
I sit in the parking lot for a while, hands on the steering wheel. Not moving.
