Page 70
I couldn’t tell Gileon that it hadn’t been his fault, that it had been me who’d moved the desk with a third power, while we stood on campus grounds. And if I tried to tell him mind-to-mind, he might be too shocked to hear my voice in his head to process what I was even saying, since I hadn’t told him about my second brand either.
“Well?” Rodhi asked with a single cocked eyebrow before I could mull over the problem right in front of me. “Are we going to meet the others behind the Arboretum, or are we going to keep standing here listening to their dumb chatter?”
He jerked his head at the butterflies, who broke into a frenzy of offended remarks in soft, ethereal tones that completely contradicted the few words I was able to pick out among the hundreds of overlapping voices.
“Dumb chatter?”
“Speak for yourself.”
“You humans should really try a cocoon and metamorphosis.”
“Or how about diapause? That way we’d finally get some peace.”
Meanwhile, I gaped at Rodhi, trying to process what he’d said right before insulting them.
“What? How did you know we were going to meet…?”
A few spiders dangled from sparkling webs above his head, and I shook my head in bemusement. Leave it to Rodhi to invite himself to a secret rendezvous he’d discovered through his eight-legged friends.
“Does anyone else know?” I asked urgently. If any of the instructors or pre-elites found out we planned to leave the Esholian Institute in five minutes’ time, I’d have to figure out how to warn Coen before he materialized in the jungle.
Rodhi shook his head. “Just me, but…”
His eyes wandered over to Gileon, who was staring at the two of us in apparent confusion. I sucked in a breath, nodding, just as two more pairs of footsteps slapped against cobblestone and their owners rounded the corner.
“Oh, are we fraternizing with butterflies now?” Wren asked, frowning as she took in the four of us standing between puddles. Her gaze swung from Rodhi to Gileon. “What’s wrong, Gil?”
Emelle was the one who answered for him in a whisper. “Nuisance is gone.”
Despite all the times she’d cursed the beetle’s existence, all the blood drained from Wren’s face. Lander took one look at Gileon’s tearstained cheeks and plucked a leaf from one of the greenbriers on the wall.
“Here, man,” he said softly, the leaf morphing into a checkered handkerchief right in front of our eyes.
Gileon took it with a quiet thank you, and my decision snapped into place.
This was it: all the people I trusted at the Esholian Institute in one place, the friends who knew injustice and wanted to fight it just as much as I did. All of them had felt the weight of the Good Council’s control just as much as I had, and all of them had capabilities beyond mine. Emelle, the kindest person I’d ever met. Lander, the most loyal and just. Wren, the shrewdest. Rodhi, the most gregarious.
And Gileon, the gentlest despite his immense size.
My heart warmed against my ribcage, and I nodded.
“Let’s go.”
CHAPTER
22
COEN
“Wait a moment.”
I turned back to face the ornate silver mirror, where Queen Mydusia’s reflection wavered in the glass. Her veil fluttered over her eyes, as if she’d somehow sucked the winds of the sea into the mirror’s surface.
She had just finished updating me about the human ambassador, Noris Madran, and the magic-infused goblet she’d gifted him—unsurprisingly, Pliyith’s governor had sent a messenger to report that the goblet’s smoke had dissipated soon after crossing into the human territories with a plea to help fix the broken spell.
A fact Queen Mydusia, apparently, found amusing. Her lips had pulled tight in a satisfied smirk mere moments ago when I’d made to dismiss myself, repulsed.
Because of her refusal to honor the Treaty by helping our allies protect themselves against the vampires, more humans would disappear and die. But I smoothed the disgust from my face and responded with a curt, “Yes, Your Majesty?”
