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“Why is the headmistress looking for the New Zealand student?”
“As if you do not know, she has run away. I mean, you have run away. You will find that is not acceptable here at Birchbane,” the burly Swiss man says while the woman maintains her taciturn silence. “There are consequences for…”
“Storm!” Jane suddenly exclaims as she catches sight of Storm on a different slope, but not too far away. “Storm, come here this instant! That’s the missing student,” she explains to the security people. “That’s the one you’re looking for.”
She speaks with such conviction that they allow her to guide them away from Birchbane and down toward Storm, who is walking Kravik away from the school.
“You had better not run, young lady!” Jane calls out.
Storm doesn’t run. She stops and stands, making Jane’s life easy, for once. Jane is quite relieved to have so swiftly recovered her charge. She can only imagine what would happen if Storm were able to reach the town of Zermatt below, a major vacation hub with trains leaving multiple times per hour.
They draw close and Storm lets them, keeping Kravik close and on his leash as anybody being approached by strangers might.
“Wie gehts?” She greets them all in casual Swiss German and a slightly perplexed expression.
“Are you a student escaped from Birchbane?” The big Swiss man asks her the question in English.
There is a brief pause. “Nie!” Storm laughs.
“Storm,”Jane says warningly. She has a much better command of German than Storm does, and she takes pride in properness, so when she speaks it is in a more formal style with a harder accent. Storm came to Switzerland without a word of the language, and that means she speaks the way native students do. When the guards address her, she replies in Swiss German, a sort of languid version of German with all the hard der, die, das removed and replaced with casual d’s. Her cadence is much more sing-song and contains a lot more softened sounds. She’s also not making the mistake of talking too much and giving herself away.
On a superficial level, she’s also dressed like a Swiss teenager, which makes sense because she basically is at this point, plus she has a dog, which again makes her look like she lives here. Between the two of them, Jane looks and sounds far more like an escaped finishing school candidate.
“Etwas los?” Storm frowns slightly in confusion, asking if something is going on. She asks the question with just the right amount of teenage disinterest.
“Storm!” Jane snaps her name sharply, knowing that her only chance now is to force a confession by sheer force of will. “You will come with us this instant.”
Storm does not respond to her name at all. Instead, she takes in what must be the very pleasing sight of the woman who has caned and hairbrushed her bottom languishing in the custody of two burly Swiss mountain finishing school guards.
It is the closest Jane has been to losing her temper to have Storm right in front of her and not being able to do a single thing about it.
Storm smiles at her in a way only a girl resentful of her last punishment can and ignores the disciplinarian’s instructions. She’s already free, that’s the truth. There’s nothing Jane can do with two strict Swiss security personnel ready to grab her if she makes a move.
Storm gives her a littlehow does it feellook.
It has been quite some time since Jane felt even slightly powerless. It is an unsettling feeling, even though she knows this will all be sorted soon enough. She is more worried that Storm is about to walk away into the Swiss countryside in what is clearly a reckless and rebellious mood with no supervision whatsoever.
“We’ve seen enough,” the Swiss man says to Jane. “You’re coming with us, young lady.”
“Tchussli!” Storm waves to Jane with a casual Swiss-German farewell, turns and walks down the hill without any kind of hurriedness, Kravik faithfully at her heels.
There is a very small sliver of Jane that is impressed. Storm must have thought she was completely caught by Jane and the school guards, but she snatched victory from the jaws of defeat simply by not really caring what happened next and lying through her teeth. It was quite a little performance, one she will pay for many times over.
“The school has a new disciplinarian,” the guard says. “She will soon set you straight.”
“I am the new disciplinarian,” Jane sighs.
“You are far too young to be a disciplinarian,” he says. “And those lies will only get you into more trouble.”
Jane is marched back to the main chateau between two stern Swiss security, and taken directly to the principal, whose eyebrows practically clamber into her hairline for safety when Jane is escorted into her office.
"What is going on, Hannes?”
“We have retrieved the missing student, Headmeisterin Lotte.”
“You have?”
“Yes, she is right here,” he says, gesturing to Jane.
