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I know. You’ve got nothing to justify anyway. Even if I was still properly here, none of them weremine, at least no farther than I was using them. I got what I needed.
Maybe that’s a story she tells herself too, to lessen the sting of what she’s lost. “You cared about them more than that.”
I liked them well enough, and they liked me. But there wasn’t much to it. It appears that in a couple of weeks, you’ve given them something I didn’t bother to in the months we were working together. I think they’ve all told you things they never told me.
I don’t know how much she’s mourning the life she lost in general or the chances she didn’t take, but her attempt at a breezy tone can’t hide the sorrow.
“Once we take down Wendos and Ster. Torstem and whoever else, I’ll be done here,” I remind her. “I won’t have them either.”
She tuts.I passed up whatever chance I might have had. Why should you? I doubt any of them is going to kick you out the door. Whether you’re aiming for one in particular or a whole set like another Signy.
I make a dismissive sound, hoping she can’t feel the flicker of exhilaration that passed through me at the thought of having all four of the men standing by me in all sorts of ways.
She doesn’t know the most vital thing about me any more than they do. It’s a lot more complicated than simply reaching for what I want.
And who knows how any of them will look at me once the danger has passed, regardless.
I lean forward on the sofa, opening my mouth to say as much, and a tremor quakes through the room hard enough to rattle my bones.
Thirty-Seven
The books on the shelves jitter. A quill topples off the edge of Stavros’s desk.
An unearthly groan reverberates through the walls.
With a lurch of my heart, I spring off the sofa. As I dash to the window, the view outside already looks wrong.
The second I reach the glass, I understand why.
One of the Quadring’s four towers is collapsing.
A flood of dislodged stone and crumbling mortar tumbles to the ground in an earth-shaking thunder. The floor heaves beneath my feet, leaving me clutching the edge of the window.
Shouts carry across the courtyard, loud enough to penetrate the glass but too muddled to be all that coherent. I back away, a cold sweat breaking over my back.
The floor gives another shudder.
This doesn’t seem good,Julita says in a taut voice.
I snatch up the sword from where I dropped it and lash the belt around my waist. “It doesn’t. Stavros will have to forgive me for leaving when it looks like the ceiling’s about to fall on our heads.”
When I shove out into the hall, a few professors are already bustling toward the stairwell ahead of me.
“We’ve got to evacuate now,” one of them is saying. “The spirits have gone absolutely insane.”
Another nods. “Check the dorms. Get all the students out into the courtyard. The dean’s disabling the locking system on the second and third floors so no one gets locked in their bedroom injured and beyond reach.”
Her statement sinks in through the hammering of my pulse. The dorm room locks will be disabled?
That means I could get right into Wendos’s room. Look through his private things.
None of the men have set off the alert in the locket. They haven’t found him yet.
And who knows how much worse this disaster will get if we don’t figure out what Julita’s old nemesis and the other scourge sorcerers are up to soon?
I dash after the professors, racing on down the stairs after they veer off to tackle the third-floor dorms.
I saw Wendos leaving his dorm room before, after I visited Julita’s during my first trip to the college. In the back of my mind, I bring up the mental picture that matches the marked blueprint Stavros showed me.
