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Magister Marcellus walked into the room from an office to one side as she asked. “Even them,” he said. “All students of the college are to line up in the main hall tomorrow for counting,” he went on. “Magister Titus was dragged out of bed last night to provide a list of students and staff at the college. When they come tomorrow, we all have to be there. And while we’re being counted, soldiers will search every room, closet, and outhouse within the walls.”
My breath caught, and immediately I wondered if I had any items, papers, or letters that would land me or my housemates in hot water.
Of course, I didn’t, and from their puzzled looks, Leander and Darius didn’t either—unless the soldiers worked out that the two of them shared a bed, and not just for sleeping—but Mara and Lucius both went pale and shifted anxiously.
Magister Marcellus noticed as well. “We are all extraordinarily fortunate that we have until tomorrow morning before the inspection.” He shifted his weight from one foot to another, then cleared his throat. “On acompletely unrelated note, there will be a bonfire in the back cloisters at noon today so that we might cook our midday meal over an open fire and give the cooks in the kitchens a rest.”
I straightened, sucking in a breath. The bonfire could be the difference between life and death for some of the students under the college’s protection. It could protect the college itself.
“As you all are on infirmary duty today,” Magister Marcellus went on, as though nothing were amiss, “you will help strip the beds, take the sheets to the laundry, and assist in scrubbing floors.”
“Yes, Magister Marcellus,” I answered right away, as did Lucius and Mara, which surprised me just a little.
Leander and Darius were a bit slower to catch on, but as we all went about our assignments, they didn’t say much and worked harder than they usually did.
I noticed that Mara and Lucius had disappeared from the infirmary halfway through the morning. They didn’t come back before lunch, and just as I’d expected, we found them, along with about a dozen other students, helping Magister Marcellus build the bonfire when Leander, Darius, and I left for lunch.
The bonfire was alight with logs, dried straw, and a surprising number of papers. I caught sight of Lucius holding a bundle of letters to his chest, eyes closed, head bowed, for a moment before he kissed them and tossed them into the fire.
It was a sign of how paranoid I’d gotten in the last few months that the bonfire made me so nervous I almost couldn’t eat the toasted cheese bread we all made for lunch. It wasn’t even close to celebratory, Solstice fare, but if the soldiers came and demanded to know why they saw smoke rising from the center of the college grounds, we would be able to say we weren’t celebrating Solstice, just cooking over an open flame.
I shouldn’t have had to think about things like whether or not I looked suspicious to a soldier. I shouldn’t have jumped at every sound within the confines of the college, or stared at my fellow students, wondering which of them were revolutionaries and which were loyal to the king and might turn the other ones in. Even in the worst days of the Dying Winter on the frontier—before that, even, when I’d been afraid of being found out as someone who loved men—I’d never felt so paranoid.
All of it made me miss Dushka terribly. I missed his gruff, dirty sense of humor. I missed his large body and the way his chest hair tickled my back when he fucked me that way. I missed his crude comments when I sucked his cock, or the way he would make eye contact with me when he had someone else fuck me so he could watch.
But more than that, I missed his wise counsel and his easy conversation. I missed knowing that he loved me and would protect me against anything that threatened me. He would have been fierce if he was here in Royersford now. He would have seen even the slightest hint of worry in me and wrapped his thick arms around me, holding me tight, and whispered something wicked before kissing me and promising no harm would come to me.
He would have cleared away the boulders from the mountain pass and rebuilt the bridges with his own hands if it meant I could get back to him. In fact, I wondered if he already had plans to try to reach me over the mountains, the same way I was already planning to do everything I could to get back to him.
“Hey,” Leander snapped me out of my thoughts later that day, as the evening meal wound down and everyone got up to head back to their own houses.
I started to get up, huddling into my coat, but Leander moved closer to me, his eyes flashing with mischief.
“We’re going to play a game to pass the time,” he said.
“A game?” I asked.
I glanced around and saw that a little over a dozen other students were peeking suspiciously at us. Darius had moved over to whisper to a few others as well. Everyone seemed to be headed to the bathhouse instead of to their own houses.
“Yeah,” Leander said. “Just a little something to cut the tension and give us all a happy Solstice.”
So it was an orgy, then. Not particularly original, but with the mood I was in, the mood everyone was in, a little indiscriminate fucking was exactly what I needed to clear my head.
I was sort of right, but as we all wandered into the bathhouse, undressed, and waded into the long, warm pool in the center of the bathing room, I learned that Leander and Darius were cleverer about these sorts of things than I could have imagined.
“The game is simple,” Darius explained, bringing out a small box and several small pieces of wood that looked like kindling from the bonfire. “We’ve written everyone’s names on these sticks.”
“We’ll start by drawing one out,” Leander picked up the explanation. “Whoever’s name is on that stick will come pick out another one. They will then spend fifteen minutes locked in the supply closet with that person.”
“Anything can happen in the supply closet,” Darius said with an impish sparkle in his eyes. “That’s why the game is called Locked in the Closet.”
“I think we all know what will happen in the closet,” one of the older students said, which got a laugh from everyone.
“There’s more than one supply closet in the bathhouse,” Leander continued the explanation, “so we’ll have more than one couple go at it at a time.”
“What about the rest of us?” another student in our class asked.
Leander and Darius exchanged a look, then Leander said, “Well, there’s this lovely, warm pool, and it’s difficult to see what’s going on under the water, isn’t it?”
