Page 146 of Serpent and Shadow

31

Recovering

Ispent the entire weekend in my old dormitory with Miranda and Jolie.

It was wonderful and strange being back there, suddenly thrust back into their lives full time. I rocked between happy and wonder as I caught up on everything going on in their lives, everything Jolie and Nyx hadn’t felt comfortable telling me, given the strangeness of our old group dynamic. Relief suffused me to have them all back in my life again.

I also ended up feeling incredibly sad at how much I’d missed.

Draken and Jolie were dating, as it turned out.

So were Luc and Miranda, which honestly shocked me more.

I’d definitely known they were spending a lot of time together, if only because I felt Mir on Luc’s magic so often. I’d also long suspected Luc had feelings for her, although I’d never been entirely sure how she felt about him.

Now that I knew about both couples, everyone involved just seemed to relax.

It hadn’t even occurred to me in all of those months that at least some of the tension I’d picked up on with Luc and Jolie had been them feeling torn in their loyalties and unable to tell me important things going on in their lives.

Everything came out all at once now.

Nyx had also been seeing someone, a witch she met in Bonescastle who ran an apothecary and potion ingredients supply store a few blocks north of Academy Square.

I sat at the base of one of the common room chairs while Nyx braided my hair, and watched Jolie lean against Draken while Luc sat on the couch with a stretched out Miranda, casually massaging her feet. None of them stopped talking while we sat in roughly those spots, and did roughly those things, and all of it felt so domestic and normal, I felt like the odd one out, given I was the only one having to accustom myself to the new dynamic.

No one asked me about Bones directly for all of Saturday.

Sunday morning, when Miranda brought brunch for all of us up from the dining room (I’d still shied away from going down there with the rest of them), I happened to see the Sunday edition of the London Twilight on her chair and opened it up.

Bones took up the entire front image of the news.

The “photograph,” or video, really, was one of those images that had been animated by magic, probably because they knew the drama of the image would compel people to buy the edition. In that moving image, Bones was on an endless loop, his hands moving gracefully in a series of mudras executed so quickly and smoothly I couldn’t even pull them all apart.

He wore the mask I’d seen him with when he appeared in my bedroom, which I knew to be gold, but that merely shone as metallic in the black and white image. His eyes glowed through the holes of the mask, and his hood was down, showing his white hair, shaggy and longer than it used to be, whipping in the wind from nearby fires.

He looked utterly inhuman.

In the foreground, the image only showed the back of someone, the clear target of his spell. The end of the loop was that person being slammed backwards by the force of the spell Bones threw at them.

It looked like an image of Bones murdering someone.

It was difficult, even for me, to deny that’s what it was.

I hadn’t asked him exactly what he did during those attacks he conducted for his father, but I knew people had died in those raids. The death counts showed up in newspapers after each one, and a few had gone over one hundred for larger cities.

The headline at the top of the paper read: Magus Imperius “Willing to Talk.” The subtitle directly below the bold added: London Government looks to end “Royal Rebellion” and restore order in negotiation conference to take place this afternoon.

I skimmed through the story to find the raid the night before took place in Guildford, right outside of London. Clearly, the government was getting nervous about a direct attack on the capitol. The image of Bones didn’t have a caption of any kind, but I looked through the rest of the paper to try and find out more about the attack of the night before, who the other person was in the image, whether they were one of the dead.

There was nothing specific about either, only a paragraph in the main story that listed out deaths (24), and injuries (148) from the previous night’s attack. It was part of a running tabulation that also included damage to prominent buildings and estates.

The only other thing I found, in that newspaper, at least, was a related story about attacks occurring across Magical Europe, including in the vicinity of the Ethnarch’s palace.

I bit my lip, thinking.

At the Black Tower, that mage had said the Great Ritual would be happening soon. Something told me the date of their supposed “Great Ritual,” was fast-approaching. Everything Malefic was doing right now seemed to be leading to something, something that felt a lot bigger than just threatening London or even the Ethnarch.

I didn’t fully realize that I’d just been standing there, in my old kitchen, staring down at the front page of the newspaper, until I noticed the silence in the rest of the room. I glanced over at all of them, and they all looked away, seemingly in the same instant. Everyone but Nyx, who walked over to where I stood, and wrapped an arm around my waist.