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I wished I could somehow contact Dushka, or even Magnus, to tell him what was going on. The frontier needed to know what was happening in the Old Realm, but not even information could get across the mountains now.
“What do we do about the revolutionaries we’ve already treated?” Virgil asked as he inched his way into the conversation.
Magister Titus scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “We need to get them out of the college as soon as they’re healed enough to be moved,” he said.
“We need them out of here before that,” Magister Flaccus said. “If it’s a choice between my life or the life of some…some bricklayer who tried to storm the palace and got stabbed for his efforts, I will save my life.”
I had to clench my jaw hard to stop myself from saying something that would end with me thrown out of the college in the snow. With the mountain pass ruined and the only friends I’d made in the Old Realm inside the college, being kicked out could be as good as a death sentence.
“We’ll treat the wounded we already have within our walls,” Magister Titus said in a decisive voice. “As soon as they’re well enough to be moved, they’ll be asked to leave. We won’t say anything about who is here at the infirmary unless we’re asked. It very well could be that the king’s men are too busy mopping up the last of the riot to go around to all of the infirmaries in the cities asking about who lies in the beds.”
I hated it, but in times such as the ones we now found ourselves in, it was the best we could do. I gave Magister Flaccus a final, scathing look before heading back to the wards to see who could be treated…and who needed to be buried.
Before noon that day, a messenger was sent to the college saying that, by decree of King Julius, all Solstice festivities, in public or in private, had been cancelled, and anyone celebrating the holiday would be considered guilty of treason.
I thought it was an odd order, until Mara sat down at the dining hall table across from where I sat with Leander and Darius, shook her head, and said, “It’s a deliberate move to crush the spirit of the revolutionaries. He’s taking away their hope of a better tomorrow, showing them that he controls every aspect of their lives.”
She made her point so well that I put down the spoon of soup I’d only gotten halfway to my mouth and breathed out heavily. In a backwards way, King Julius’s move reminded me of what Magnus was trying to do. Magnus was all about giving people hope, helping them to prosper and look to the future. If I ever made it back to the Wolf River Kingdom, I would suggest that he invent new holidays, one a month at least, to give the wolves something to celebrate and look forward to all the time.
But my chances of making it home, even with the research and preparation I’d already put into mountain climbing, were looking bleak. By the end of the day, word got back to the college that King Julius had declared all roads leading into and out of Royersford would be guarded until further notice, and that special permission would be required for anyone to leave.
“It’s so that revolutionaries can’t escape before the king ferrets them out,” Lucius said as all five of us made our way back to our house after another shift in the infirmary. “And so that the people who have been helping from the country can’t reach the city revolutionaries anymore.”
We’d just stepped into the house and were taking off our coats to hang them on the pegs by the door. I gaped at Lucius for a moment, prickles racing across my skin—which was becoming a near constant state for me now.
“What do you know about it?” I asked in a serious tone.
Lucius snapped to me, his eyes narrowed, as if he thought I was challenging him and calling him a liar. When he saw the gravity of my expression, he turned squirrely and said, “I might know a thing or two about what the revolutionaries have been planning.”
“Don’t hold out on us, Lulu,” Leander said in a jovial tone.
I wasn’t sure if Leander was teasing to lighten the mood or if he wasn’t grasping the danger we were all in.
“Yeah,” Darius said, grabbing Lucius around the neck and messing up his hair. “Are you a revolutionary now? Are you going to get us all killed?”
“Stop, you two,” I told the twins, raising my voice. “This is serious.”
Lucius yanked out of Darius’s hold and stomped deeper into the house. He didn’t acknowledge me coming to his defense, but he didn’t bite back at me either.
Of course, he also didn’t answer the question about whether he was a revolutionary. Which was as good as a yes to me.
I managed to sleep that night, but only because I was so exhausted after two intense days in the infirmary that my body refused to let me stay awake.
In the morning, the five of us got up, made our trips to the bathhouse, and got dressed for our shift at the infirmary as usual, even though it was Solstice Eve.
But when we got there, the entire infirmary was empty.
I stood where I was, just inside the doorway, gaping at rows of empty, disheveled beds. Washbasins and bedpans were scattered around, as if they’d been abandoned suddenly. A few other students, who I thought might have been on the night shift, wandered aimlessly through the room, pulling soiled sheets off of beds as if they would take them to the laundry or gathering up medicine bottles and taking them to the dispensary at the far end of the room.
“What happened here?” Darius asked when one of the students looked our way.
It was Elias, and his face was pale and drawn. The dark circles under his eyes stood out.
“The king’s soldiers arrived in the middle of the night and demanded that every patient return to their own home, regardless of their state. It seems there will be a census tomorrow, and everyone who isn’t in their own home will be either branded a criminal or killed on the spot if they’re found in the street or any building other than their own home, including an infirmary.”
My jaw dropped, and I glanced to my friends on either side of me. Telling healers not to heal was one thing, but forcing people who were unwell or bleeding to death to return to homes where there was no one trained to care for them, and declaring them criminals if they didn’t go, was outlandish.
“Even the people who were here before the riot?” Mara asked.
