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The deeper we went into the bowels of the castle, the more my anxiety grew. I would never be able to find my way out on my own. And what were they keeping down here anyway? A torture chamber? A freaking Balrog?
After many twists and turns, she brought us to a tall door. I could feel the magic wafting off of it, making my skin bristle. The woman chanted an incantation, and the barrier fell. The door opened without her touching it, and she ushered us inside. It was a small waiting room, complete with out-of-date magazines and a television that looked like it had been haphazardly transplanted from 1952.
“Oran and Neil, have a seat, please. Piper, with me.” There was a subtle power in her voice that I recognized. Persuasion? Whatever. The men sat down with a familiar dazed look on their faces, and I followed her through another enchanted door at the far end of the room. It was dark inside. The only light was a blazing bright spotlight over a crescent-shaped table. Toland sat at the far side. The healer, Cassandra, sat on his right, and an old woman sat on his left. A man who looked like an anxious professor sat on her left, and the assistant took the seat on the nurse’s right.
That only left one seat for me. The one on the inner curve of the crescent, where I would be surrounded by all of these stern-faced people. My anxiety had long since passed my own personal threshold and had morphed into something more closely related to fury.
“Very theatric,” I said, nodding at the whole setup as I sat down. “Is there a point to it, or do you just like intimidating students?”
Toland looked me over slowly. “There is a point to everything. You know why you are here.”
I wanted to say something sassy, so I just bit my tongue and nodded. I was already on thin ice, and my self-control was wearing thin.
“Before we get started, is there anything you would like to confess? We are a very understanding group. You have shown yourself to be an inquisitive and adventurous sort of person. If you inadvertently released the sprites without knowing what they were capable of, that is certainly a thing we could understand.”
I raised a brow. “What kind of judge are you? You’re just going to hand the culprit an out like that? Are you insane?”
Toland’s eyes twinkled briefly, but he kept a somber expression. “It is important our students feel like they can trust us, Piper. Especially with something as egregious as this. It could have been a simple mistake, or a bit of mischief. It could also have been deliberate sabotage. We wouldn’t want to punish someone for sabotage unnecessarily, you see.” The twinkle was gone, replaced with steel.
“Let me guess, a one-way ticket to the underworld?”
Toland merely blinked at me.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Well, I’ll tell you. I didn’t sabotage the school. I didn’t wreak any havoc, inadvertent or otherwise. I was sparring with Hannah in the Combat room when the sprites started doing their spritely thing, and I’m sure other people can back me up on that. Sonja’s flunkies could, but they won’t.”
Toland raised his brows. “Oh? And why won’t they?”
“Because she hates me, and she wants nothing more than to get me kicked out of this school. Her friends go along with it. If she tells them I was absent that day, they’ll parrot that lie until doomsday. But Beedle talked to me directly a couple of times, he could tell you.”
Toland nodded then turned to the healer. “Cassandra, if you would.”
“If she would what?”
Toland gestured for Cassandra to speak, and I turned to her. When her mouth opened, she didn’t speak though. She sang. Softly, wordlessly. I could feel her spell spinning around my brain, coaxing me to give her everything and anything she wanted. I felt the insane urge to strip out of my clothes and give them to her. I would have turned cartwheels across the table if it would have earned her approval.
I could have fought her off. Persuasion was a familiar tool for me; I could feel the strength of will lying dormant in my chest, and I knew exactly how to tap it. But I didn’t. I had nothing to hide.
“Tell me your secrets,” she whispered. How did she whisper while holding a note? Damn, that was some good magic. My mouth was moving before I had even thought of what to tell her.
“There’s an empty tower above my room. I use it all the time for practice and privacy. I fucked Jayce in a closet after I left your office that day. I cheated on a math test in sixth grade. I cheated on my boyfriend in eighth grade. I—”
“Tell me about the sprites,” she whispered.
“Sprites. Like little liquid firecrackers of destruction. They were attacking everybody, I had to stop them. People were getting hurt. Lots of people. Everybody was running in different directions. They needed to be organized. I persuaded them to fight.”
Oh, God. It was my fault. The wall...
“Guilt!” the old woman next to me piped up. “Guilt, guilt!”
“Tell me your guilt,” Cassandra whispered through her music.
“So many people were hurt when the wall went down. Did anybody die? No, don’t tell me, I can’t stand it. I told them to fight. They broke the wall. That was my fault. That kid who got a brick to the head. That was my fault.”
I was still staring vacantly at Cassandra, but tears were streaming down my face. It was too late to fight it. I was too far under her spell. But goddammit, I hated crying in front of people.
“Charles?” Toland’s voice sounded like it came from somewhere very far away.
A high tenor—the professor dude, I assume—spoke behind me. “No counter-spells detected.”
