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It was exactly what I needed, what we all needed.
I burst into a painful orgasm as Appius pulled his hand out, leaving just Leander inside me. I was vaguely aware of Appius’s gasp of pleasure and the warm wetness that painted my lower back. Everything from there was a blur of sensation that flashed from acute to thudding, and finally evened out to satiety.
I wasn’t sure about the others, but I fell asleep as soon as our cluster pulled apart and snuggled together in my too-small bed. It was nice in a completely wild and hedonistic way.
By morning, Leander and Darius were gone and Appius was snuggled against me. I was sore in so many ways, but the lingering pain ended up focusing me.
“Are you certain you don’t…mind what happened last night?” Appius asked me with a sheepish look as the two of us showered side by side in the bathhouse. He glanced around anxiously, as if our fellow students would notice the bruises on my body or the redness that was just visible between my asscheeks and that they would blame him for hurting me.
Which was a ridiculous concept, since everyone knew Appius wouldn’t hurt a fly.
“I don’t mind at all,” I said, rinsing the soap from my body with vigor. “It was refreshing and different.”
Appius stared at me for a long time, like my comment had made him feel bad. I waited for him to say something along the lines of him not being enough for me, but he drew in a breath and turned his face into the spray instead.
Whether his lack of further conversation was from embarrassment or guilt or even the realization that I wasn’t who Appius thought I was, I didn’t say anything to try to make things better. We had two days to gather enough supplies to save our lives and to plan something that would absolutely end in all of our deaths if we were caught.
If I died, would Dushka ever know? Would someone find a way to get a message to the frontier telling him what had happened to me? Or would he go the rest of his life thinking I’d abandoned him for the Old Realm?
I put that out of my mind as well. It made my heart sick to think that my lover would believe I’d left him. But Dushka had to know that I loved him and that I would move heaven and earth to return to him.
Moving heaven and earth was exactly what it felt like too. The biggest problem that the six of us faced in the two days leading up to our escape attempt was figuring out how to bring supplies fit for climbing over a mountain out of the college without the soldiers who would escort us to the south hills searching us and discovering things they shouldn’t.
“Clothing should be easy,” Mara said, the night before we would leave, as the six of us huddled together in the common room, inventorying the things we’d each been able to steal from the kitchens or infirmary. “We’ll all just have to wear more than one layer of clothing when we leave tomorrow morning.”
“Won’t we look bulky?” I asked. “Layers of clothing aren’t as easy to conceal as you’d think.”
“It’s still cool enough to get away with wearing a coat,” Mara argued. “The soldiers haven’t checked beneath our coats so far, so I don’t think they’ll check now.”
“We could sew things into the lining of our coats too,” Appius suggested. “Food and such.”
“And we could make false bottoms in our medical satchels to store other things,” Leander said.
I wasn’t exactly surprised that Leander had a legitimate suggestion, but he did tend not to take anything seriously.
Which made me nervous. We were all so serious, which meant this was really happening.
“That’s a good idea,” Mara told him with a nod.
“We should conceal our weapons in the false bottoms of our satchels,” Lucius said with a scowl.
I sent Lucius a wary look. I knew weapons were necessary for our flight, and I’d found a nice, sharp dagger and a slingshot that I had no idea how to use, but the cold, bloodthirsty look that entered Lucius’s eyes whenever he talked about weapons chilled me.
Of all of us, Lucius had turned out to be the one who hated King Julius and the Old Realm the most. He hadn’t been the same since Augustus died. I wanted to escape so I could go home. Appius was leaving both to accompany me and to return to his family in Aktau. I wasn’t certain why Mara wanted to leave, although I was relatively certain her head would be on the chopping block when and if King Julius was overthrown, since she was his niece. Leander and Darius wanted to go somewhere safe, where people wouldn’t question their attachment to each other. But Lucius was a whole other story. I had the feeling he wanted to leave the Old Realm so that he could raise an army to come back and flatten the place.
“Wherever we store our weapons,” Darius said, hinting that he and Leander had armed themselves as well, “it has to be where the soldiers won’t find them if they decide, out of the blue, to search us.”
“I think we’ll be alright if they find us carrying food out of the college,” Leander agreed, “but we won’t be able to explain away weapons as easily.”
“Agreed,” I said.
I stared at the pile we’d formed of everything we thought we might need for the escape attempt and the journey afterwards, if it was a success. In spite of what Horacio had said, I thought we would probably be able to purchase supplies in Aktau, thanks to Appius. Even if we had to send Appius out on his own—which I wasn’t crazy about—we could probably gather more food.
What we would really need once we reached the mountains was rope and the spiked shoes called crampons that I’d discovered while researching mountain-climbing, and hand axes. In the months since I’d begun planning, I hadn’t come anywhere close to finding those things, though. I figured they would be available in abundance in Aktau, but nothing was guaranteed at this point.
“All we can do is plan as much as possible and hope for the best tomorrow,” Mara said at last.
She was right. We spent the rest of the evening sewing food into our coats and creating false bottoms for our satchels. Every one of us knew we needed to sleep, but sleep seemed impossible when we teetered on the verge of taking such a huge step in the morning.
