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Others around me weren’t as lucky. Several people vomited. A few screamed or burst into tears. One or two fainted.
Mara was as stoic as a statue beside me, but I could see the offense she took at the senseless deaths. The coldness in her eyes was almost as terrifying as the general’s actions. Beside her, Lucius looked like he might need someone to hold him back from charging at the general and cuttinghishead off.
On my other side, Appius was whimpering and looking as though his knees might give out. Beyond him, I saw Leander and Darius gazing desperately at each other and trying to inch closer together.
“These men were traitors to the king,” the general shouted at all of us. “Treasonous evidence was found among their belongings. All traitors to the king will be put to death instantly and without mercy. Let this be a warning to you all.”
With that, the general and all of the soldiers turned and marched out of the college.
Silence followed.
For a long time, no one moved. Not a single soul. I tried not to stare at Elias’s headless body, or the patch of red that spread quickly under the clerk’s body. Everything had happened so fast—after nothing had happened for hours—that more than just my feet felt frozen.
Finally, people began to break from their stupor and fall out of the lines we’d been forced into.
“Close the gates and lock them at once,” Magister Titus ordered, then sped to the far end of the line, where Elias and the clerk had been executed.
Magister Flaccus and Magister Marcellus broke out of the lines to join him, and I vaguely heard orders being issued at that part of the courtyard. I hoped they would dispose of the bodies before—
The thought had hardly formed in my head before Appius lurched toward me, all but tackling me as he threw his arms around me and sobbed.
I clamped my arms around him, hugging him tightly—more because I needed the comfort of a warm, friendly body against mine than because I felt capable of soothing the young man’s terror.
I was even more shocked when Leander and Darius clumped around the two of us, hugging indiscriminately so that the four of us clustered together in fear and grief. And if that wasn’t startling enough, a moment later, Lucius and Mara had joined our trembling huddle.
The six of us clung to each other in total shock. Someone was crying, or maybe all of us. The sounds within our group embrace were ragged and breathless, mournful and furious, but we were sharing those sounds and those emotions in a way that was totally new for me.
I hadn’t realized we’d bonded so much as housemates—and Appius—but the energy that swirled around us in that moment reminded me so much of the way I felt when I was together with the Sons that it took what little breath I had left.
“Neither Elias nor Calebe did anything wrong,” Lucius growled, shifting the emotion within our scrum. “General Reuben couldn’t have found anything. We were all so careful to destroy the evidence.”
“He just wanted to make an example to put the fear of the king into the rest of us,” Mara said.
My stomach had nearly rebelled when Elias was decapitated, and I nearly vomited listening to the two of them.
“I do not want to know what the two of you apparently know,” Darius said in a thick voice, saying exactly what I would have said.
“No offense, but neither do I,” I agreed.
“You shouldn’t know,” Mara said with a nod. “The fewer people who know, the better.”
She glanced to Lucius, who nodded in return.
“But if you need anything,” I added carefully, “anything that won’t end with my head lying in the snow, I’ll help.”
A thick silence fell over all of us. I liked the feeling of being a part of something, and our huddle provided warmth that I’d been missing for the last few hours, but my feet were so cold and numb that I was genuinely worried about frostbite.
I was relieved when Magister Flaccus walked back through the courtyard, telling the distraught groups of students who didn’t seem to know what to do, “Go back to your dormitories. Food will be brought to you all, but until we discuss what has happened and what needs to be done, all students will be confined to their houses.”
I was actually glad for the order. With the college gate closed and locked and everyone too stunned about what had just happened to function, the house was the only place I wanted to be.
Our group began to move, but Appius clung to me even harder.
“I don’t want to go back to my house,” he said with a sob that made him seem half his age. “I…I want to stay with you.”
Awkwardness washed through me. I understood where Appius was coming from, what his emotional state was. We’d fucked around the night before in the bathhouse, and we’d slept together afterwards. The pressure we were under now was the sort of thing that bound people together far faster than would usually happen.
But I knew the kind of look Appius gave me. He was getting attached. More than I was comfortable with. I hadn’t explained to him about Dushka yet, explained I was in love with someone else, and that anything between me and him would be temporary and skin-deep. We could be friends, but I had a lover already, and whether I would ever see him again or not, I was devoted to Dushka.
