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Rory’s mouth narrows, sliding to the side without any mirth. “If so, it has a funny way of showing it.” I note it’s not a complete refutation. Rory glances sideways at me. “He sacrificed the crown, didn’t he?”
I nod, and again the sick feeling returns. “It was the only thing we had.” I pause, feeling nervous. “He didn’t want to but…” I swallow, and reiterate softly, “It was the only thing we had.”
Rory strokes my hand with his thumb. “I didn’t expect Luke to be chosen,” he mutters. “The possibility never even entered my mind — and if it had, I would never have told him to wear that crown.” He gives me a grim expression. “So on a scale of one to infinity, how paranoid do you think I’m feeling right now?” He blows out a long breath. “The only thing keeping me going is that the ritual is a balance: it takes but it also gives.”
“So safety and protection for Lochkelvin in exchange for… what?”
Rory doesn’t reply. Instead, his jaw tightens.
As we reach our next room, I notice a small light glittering through the glass panel of the door to politics class. I raise an eyebrow at Rory.
“Can’t hear much inside,” Rory says as he presses his ear to the wooden portion of the door, and in a caustic tone he adds beneath his breath, “so at least he’s not fucking a student.”
All of a sudden, the door is wrenched open and Dr. Moncrieff stares back at us. He’s wearing a shapeless gray cardigan, the kind normally favored by the elderly, and having been up close to his moods on many occasions, I recognize the sheer nervy exhaustion patterned across his face.
“What are you doing here?” he demands, and the crackle and bloom of sound comes from the speakers of his old-fashioned wireless behind him. It’s full of low-voiced serious discussion. When he notices me trying to listen in, he instantly attempts to close the door behind him, whatever’s on the radio so scandalous that he’d rather shut himself out of the room to spare us from it instead.
But it’s too late. Because slicing through the air come the distinct words that all three of us can hear — it’s a passing fragment of a phrase, a footnote in a conversation, from one of the low-voiced scholars on the radio during their intense discussion on what seems to be royal protocol, but it strikes as hard and meaningful as a full sentence. It strikes like violence. “The former, self-appointed Queen Regent of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Sophia Milton, has died.”
