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“Precisely,” Horacio said.
I was exhausted by the whole thing. On the one hand, it seemed as if King Julius had a scheme to make certain his subjects remained fed through the winter—though whether the supplies they were given were sufficient was anyone’s guess. On the other, it was the perfect way to constantly monitor the population.
The entire idea of freedom was quickly disappearing from the frontier.
“Horacio! Stop interfering with the students,” another man, who stood at the back of one of the wagons, called out. “You know we’re not allowed.”
I couldn’t tell if the man was a friend or an enemy. I had a feeling no one could tell who was who anymore.
“I’m not supposed to speak to you,” Horacio said, a tiny bit of light in his eyes. “But that’s not going to stop me from keeping connections where connections can be kept.”
“Friends are everything,” Appius said.
The way he and Horacio nodded and smiled at each other made me feel like their words were some sort of code of the countryside, or that they meant something.
“I’ll try to stop by to speak to you again when I see you,” I said, taking a step back so that Horacio’s fellow workers would report him to whoever might get him in trouble.
“I’d like that,” Horacio said, his expression suddenly vulnerable, especially considering how tough and masculine he was. He glanced over his shoulder, out the back gate. “It’s not a friendly place out there anymore.”
Those words stuck with me as Appius, Mara, and I walked back to the house. I hoped the Old Realm would recover from this madness quickly, but even if King Julius’s tyranny was short-lived, it would almost certainly cause a problem for me when it came time to leave the college and to head back over the mountains. I wasn’t certain I would even be able to leave Royersford, let alone get to the mountains. And that was before I even tried to climb them.
The students that had been part of the advanced class when I arrived at the end of the summer had technically finished the course, and even though most of them had asked to return home so they could be with their families, word had gotten around that they’d been sent to military barracks to serve as healers for the soldiers—both in Royersford and in other cities in the Old Realm—instead. A few students—ones I suspected were connected to revolutionaries and who would have been in serious trouble if they’d been found out—had been kept on at the college as special instructors, but the college could only get away with that so many times.
I had no idea what would happen to me once I finished the course in a few months.
“You look worried,” Mara said once we made it back to our house. “Is everything alright?”
I stared flatly at her. “Are you really asking me that question?” I asked as I dropped my books on the table in the common room.
“No,” Mara said with a sigh, moving to the stove so she could fix me and Appius tea.
I could hear Leander and Darius in their bedroom, doing what Leander and Darius had taken to doing all the time as a way to cope with the horror we were all living through. By the sound of things, they had a friend with them, and they were just about finished.
“I’m surprised that the king’s rules against people wandering around the streets apply to you,” I told Mara as I helped her by taking the tin of tea that we somehow, miraculously, had in our house from the cupboard and setting it on the side of the stove.
Mara laughed humorlessly. “I have immunity,” she said.
My eyes went wide, but only for a moment. “Of course you do,” I said, continuing to help prepare tea.
“Just because I have it, that doesn’t mean I’ll use it,” she said. When I stared at her again, she went on with, “I haven’t been back to the palace since Solstice. I’ve argued with my mother about it, but she seems to either accept the argument that it’s safer for me to stay here, or she’s given up on drawing me back into the family.”
“Do you want to be drawn back into the family?” I asked.
It was Mara’s turn to stare flatly at me. “What do you think?”
I didn’t need to answer. We’d been friends long enough and under such intense conditions that we knew where each other stood without having to discuss it at length.
The activity in Leander and Darius’s room reached its end with a series of cries and groans of pleasure. I had to grin at the way Appius stood near the door, gaping at it as if he could see right through it to what was happening on the other side. I also noticed that his trousers weren’t lying flat.
“Appius, what are you staring at?” I teased him.
Appius snapped his mouth shut and jumped. His face went beet-red, and he sent me a guilty look. “Nothing,” he mumbled, then dashed into my room, presumably to put his books down—and to wait until his cock wasn’t standing up.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Aren’t the two of you fucking?” Mara asked as she filled the kettle from the bucket of water we kept in the kitchen area of the house. “Shouldn’t he know what all the noise is about by now?”
“We sleep naked together,” I said, “and I blow him whenever I want a cock in my mouth, but I haven’t fucked him yet.”
