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A young man with shaggy coffee-brown hair and coppery skin is just shutting one of the other dorm-room doors behind him, his back to us. Julita’s command is urgent enough that I jerk back around the corner, bracing myself by the pale plaster wall while I peer at him.
That’s Wendos, Julita says in an ominous tone.I wonder how muchheknows about the knife that ended up in my throat.
Eight
Peeking around the bend in the hall at the stocky guy who set off Julita’s concern, I raise an eyebrow in question.
Benedikt said Wendos was playing cards when she was murdered. Why does she still assume he could be involved?
Trust me, she says.Whether he’s directly responsible or not, he’s no shining soul.
I have to take her word for it. Nothing about the man I’m watching provokes my own defensive instincts.
He raises his hand in greeting to another guy coming out farther down the hall and calls out an easy-going challenge. “I’ll see you on the archery range later. You’d better be prepared!”
Then he ambles off in the direction I was headed, toward the main staircase. No sign of subterfuge or a guilty conscience.
“Nothing about him looks particularly murderer-y to me,” I say under my breath.
Julita simply hums in answer. When Wendos has disappeared from view, she gives me a mental nudge.We might as well get going, then.
We don’t catch up with Wendos, wherever Julita’s villain has gone within the school, but as I step out of the Domi, my gaze catches on a now unnervingly familiar head of dark red hair.
The former General Stavros is poised about thirty feet away across the sprawling field between the Domi and the square outer building of the Quadring. He’s exchanged his hand-like prosthetic for one more like what I saw the night he led the riven sorcerer’s execution two years ago: a broad, boxy loop of metal bent into a hook-like curve. It gleams in the sunlight as he raises it.
Some twenty students are standing around him, watching with rapt attention. One is just stepping forward.
Stavros says something brief, the boy nods, and then the former general lunges faster than I would have thought his massive frame would be capable of.
He snags his prosthetic hook around the guy’s upper arm, yanks him in, and lets his other fist fly. It stops at a mere tap of the guy’s nose. Then he whips his hook up to show how he could slam one of the boxy corners straight into the guy’s temple.
A shiver creeps over my skin. That is not a man I’d want to make an enemy of.
But he already is my enemy simply by virtue of the power I never asked for, which is twisting in my chest at the sight of him.
The king assigned Stav to teach combat and strategy here after he couldn’t keep up on the battlefield anymore,Julita says.Everyone in the military division vies to get into his classes.
I’ll bet.
Stavros eases back from his student with a coolly cocky smile, and the guy whose skull he could have split open laughs as he adjusts his stance. The other students gathered around are grinning, their expressions avid.
I slow as I take in the class, remembering that Julita wanted to tell her allies about the wind-controlling powers her attacker might have wielded. But Stavros glances across the field then, and his gaze slides right over me as if I’m not there.
Julita prods me.You can’t talk to him here. We keep our meetings secret so no one knows we’re associating at all. If it wasn’t for that, whoever cut me down would be after the guys next.
A reasonable precaution. Better not to let murderous conspirators know you’re on to them until you can actually cutthemdown.
Walking out of the college is much simpler than walking in. I stride down the grand entrance hall and through the gate with no sign of the maze I had to navigate on the way in or any irritating tickles of magic.
On the street outside, I hurry away from the trio of royal buildings. The tightness in my chest doesn’t quite release until the Temple of the Crown is hidden by the looming stone buildings of the main downtown thoroughfare.
I veer down the smaller laneways, instinctively making for my home base. It’s too early to sneak into my attic room over the cloth factory, but I’ve stashed a more discreet change of clothes in one of the bathhouse cubbies.
It definitely won’t do me any good roaming around the fringes of the city in this faux-noble get-up.
And then what? As much as Julita is an unwelcome intruder in my head, it feels bizarrely rude to ask her when she plans to take off.
I’m not even sure she knows how to get out of my head… and if she does, would that mean she’d immediately complete her death and pass on into the embrace of her chosen godlen?
