that cause, now’s the time to spill the beans!
Harriet didn’t take the remark the way I’d hoped, though, at least not out loud. She nodded in what I suspected she meant to be a sage way and turned her teacup in her hands. “It didn’t take long for you to see the truth about the new barons, did it?”
Well, I couldn’t blame her for wanting to feel out my loyalties for herself before risking her neck. I forced a grimace. “Let’s just say what I thought I was fighting for wasn’t quite how things turned out. And my help wasn’t anywhere near as appreciated as I’d been led to believe.”
Harriet hummed to herself. “They claim to stand for all of us, to have been protecting us from the true barons, but they simply wanted the power for their own ends. None of them ever asked what we would have liked our leaders to stand for.”
It would have been difficult to please everyone when so many fearmancers wanted different things—but that was my real opinion, not what she’d want to hear from a contrite, disillusioned loyalist.
“They’re definitely… very caught up in their idea of themselves as righteous, almost like they see themselves as some kind of saviors,” I said. “But once we were ‘saved’… It just turned out there wasn’t much of a place for me. They were obviously always going to hold my past against me—especially since I clashed pretty majorly with Baron Bloodstone when she first arrived at the university.”
Harriet leaned forward a smidge, the eager gleam coming back into her eyes. “I haven’t had the chance to see her face-to-face yet, but I hear she’s quite the piece of work. Came down on you hard when she didn’t need you anymore, did she?”
The thought of bad-mouthing Rory directly made my stomach knot, but I didn’t have much choice. Harriet was looking for confirmation that there was no way I’d be going back to the new barons, and she’d already risked saying a few negative things. It was only the two of us; I couldn’t avoid the subject without showing I didn’t trust her at all.
The sooner I earned her trust and got her to open up about this reaper conspiracy, the sooner I could be done with all the subterfuge.
“That’s the size of it,” I said, the words prickling over my tongue. “She thinks she’s better than just about everyone—and these days she isn’t so shy about saying it. She told me outright that she wasn’t going to have anything to do with me from now on.”
Harriet tutted. “And all those poor kids still at school there with the bunch of them hovering all the time. It must be torture having them constantly laying down the law on you. I don’t know how you stood it for so long.”
“It was hard, I’ll tell you that.” My throat constricted. What if I was only stirring up more hate toward the barons? But Harriet clearly hated them plenty already, and I was doing this for the pentacle’s benefit. I forced myself to keep going. “Anyone who isn’t from a family they approve of gets treated like a second-class citizen. Better that the feebs get that kind of treatment, not us.” I suppressed a wince at referring to the Naries by the slur.
“What are they up to these days anyway, all these big plans they had in mind that were so much better than their parents’?”
She was looking to pump me for info now. Thankfully with my cover story, I could believably say, “I wasn’t part of those conversations anymore. They didn’t trust me at all, even after everything I’d done for them.”
That statement was such a lie given how much the new barons were trusting me right now that the weight in my gut grew.
“I’m sure you must have seen things, enough to make a guess or two,” Harriet wheedled.
I shook my head. “I wish. I’d have gone straight to my parents with it if I’d picked up anything that seemed at all useful. Maybe if I’d been able to work together with some of the other students… but everyone was so nervous about breaking from the new status quo, you couldn’t tell who might tattle on you. At least I’m away from that now.”
I managed to smile despite my queasiness. I’d lobbed the ball back into her court—that was something, right? Even if I’d had to paint a horrible picture of life at Blood U to do it.
“There are