Page 64 of Great Falls Cadet
My mouth is dry, my heart racing my breath. Shade’s wolf holds its position against my thigh, hackles raised.
You know this wolf,I shout at Coal in my mind.Remember him. Bloody remember.
“Fae craft.” Katita’s voice shatters the silence. “Osprey summoned a wolf to her aid.”
“He walked through the door.” Beside Katita, Arisha’s thin voice sounds barely above a whisper. When gazes turn to her, the girl blanches but stands her ground. “The wolf wasn’t conjured. He walked through the open door. We all saw it.”
My amulet heats, agreeing with Arisha’s words. Slowly, the others nod along despite themselves. They can’t help it. The veil tells them what to believe, and Arisha plays to the veil.
Arisha swallows. “And he didn’t just appear. That’s Lera’s pet. Ruffle. I’ve seen him before.”
The amulet stays cool. That fiction I made up all on my own.
“It doesn’t matter. Only a fae would have a wolf as a pet,” Katita says, recovering her wits first. “Put him down, Master Sage.”
“You can’t do that,” I gasp, gripping Shade’s thick gray fur desperately. Stomach bile claws at my throat, and my eyes dart around the room, looking for a single sane face. She can’t. I can’t let her.
“I don’t think you understand how this kingdom works, Lera,” says Katita.
“Katita is the heir to the throne,”Arisha’s voice reminds me.“She can do as she wishes.”
My gaze flows to River, his intelligent gray eyes watching me. Watching everyone. As he always does. Watching, thinking, evaluating, carrying the weight of responsibility that would crush a lesser being. Katita may be a princess of a small kingdom, but River is the king of an immortal court.
And River can’t do as he wishes. Never could.
I gasp, the sudden realization slowing the world around me. I can see the room I’m in—River is tightening his brow, Sage is fingering his handkerchief, the logs are crackling in the flame—but my mind is too busy to pay attention to that. What is more powerful than the king of Slait court, so powerful that it makes the king himself bend a knee?—It is the welfare of Slait itself.
“No,” I whisper, turning to face Katita, knowing the move I need to make. Myonemove. “No, I do understand how your kingdom works, Your Highness. Which is why you can’t turn me over to the magistrate. Or Arisha. Or Tye. Not without announcing to the whole Continental Alliance that Ckridel has been compromised by magic. That the very Academy they’ve sent their children to has been under siege from those hog beasts for weeks, and your officers kept it quiet.”
Letting go of Shade, I step toward Katita, my voice becoming more powerful with each word.
“Men and women around the continent have been tortured and executed for charges so frivolous that it makes the evidence you laid out today a case for the newsleafs. But that’s the problem, Katita. There is no magic breach in all those other places. No magical blight. No hog beasts. Just accusations of ‘fae craft’ levied against people who’ve never seen magic. But here, inyourkingdom, inyourfamed Academy that’s stood for two hundred years, there is true danger. Enough of it that if the alliance learns your secret, Ckridel may find itself all alone. So, here is what you are going to do, Katita of Ckridel, heir to King Zenith’s throne: you will get on your knees and beg everyone in this room to keep that secret.”
Katita’s face has gone white. I know through my bones that she has never been given such an order in her life. The danger of what I’m doing thuds in my temples, but I hold my ground.
Katita’s nostrils flare, her good hand opening and closing at her side. Wide teal eyes study me, the pure hatred in them tempered only by dawning comprehension.
I take another step closer. “And after that, Your Highness,” I say, my voice ringing through the room, “you will beg that we continue pooling our swords and our minds and our research to work out how to pull your kingdom out of this blight. Because those drawings and theories are all we have standing between the mortal lands and disaster.”
The last is not true. The mortal realm has more than drawing and theories. The mortal realm hasme.
18
Coal
“And did she?” Shade asked Coal, his soft voice riding under the din of dining hall conversation. “Did Katita get on her knees?”
The clink of silverware on china echoed delicately around the great tapestry-lined dining hall, the crystal chandeliers overhead scattering candlelight on all the finely dressed diners below.
“Yes.” Coal dug his fork into a slice of roasted pig. He tasted none of it—though that didn’t stop him from eating every bite—which he was focused on now with more industry than the task required. No matter how he angled his chair, he could not help seeing Lera at the other end of the hall, her red dress as bright as the fire glowing inside her. It was strapless, tightly hugging her breasts and torso, then flowing down from her waist in textured waves of silky crimson. She was eating. Talking. Smiling at Arisha as if she had no concept of what that dress was doing to every male in the dining hall—and, knowing her, she probably didn’t. The dress, the creamy shoulders and clavicle, her fiery hair, the shadowed V of her breasts, inviting the eye lower and lower. It was enough to make a man mad.
But Lera didn’t notice. She was moving on with life, doing all the normal things Coal found near impossible after the morning’s near horror.
Coal still didn’t know what he would have done had a bloody wolf not walked into Sage’s chamber just when the headmaster ordered Coal to seize Lera. How far he’d have let things get before breaking the girl out, no matter what it took. Coal wanted to think it was because no one deserved to fall victim to the fae hunts plaguing the continent, but he knew it was more than that. Coal hadn’t beenworriedorconcernedas Princess Katita laid out her deadly accusations—he’d been terrified down to his core.
“Leralynn. Stars,” Shade said softly, shaking his head. “I’ve little notion what just might come into that girl’s mind next. And speaking of Katita—her wrist really is broken. Don’t let her push it.”
Coal nodded, paused, then schooled his voice to a quiet nonchalance. “When you left to get supplies for a splint, where did you go?”
