my eyes. “I’m sorry. I never wanted to see you hurt. You were never supposed to be in any danger.”
Of course he still didn’t see anything wrong with keeping me a nice, safe prisoner in the name of House Redbriar. He just didn’t want my literal blood on his hands. “Too late now,” I said.
“It won’t happen again,” Aegis insisted. “You’ll be safe in the dorms while we bring in whatever resources needed to protect Cly.”
I didn’t have the energy to reply. Easier to lean my forehead against Aegis's shoulder and close my eyes. Aegis might be Cly’s bodyguard, but I knew her better than he did.
#
We heard laughter through the door of Cly’s room as we approached. Inside, Cly looked up from whatever she was watching on the bed—and laughed harder at the sight of me, with the glee of a bully, not even bothering to throw a fit at the sight of Aegis carrying me through the door. “Oh, thank god that wasn’t me!” she sneered. “You thought you were so strong, Cassandra. You thought you were so much better than me! But even I didn’t come back looking like I’d fallen face-first into pasta sauce.”
“Cly,” said Aegis, sounding pained. “Can we talk about this? This is going beyond what we’d planned for.”
Cly barked an incredulous laugh. “Are you kidding me? This is the first good thing to happen since we got here! Finally, I’m not the one getting shoved around anymore.”
“I’ll ask your mother to bring in the Threefold Stone if we have to. We won’t spare any resource to keep you safe—”
“No!” Cly interrupted. “Don’t bring in a thing. I like today’s arrangement just fine. I finally get some freedom, like I deserve. Cassandra here gets beaten up at school, which serves her right. It’s perfect! I’m going to do this every day!”
“Cly—”
She narrowed her eyes, face reddening. “Don’t try to argue. And if you try to intervene, or tattle to Mother, I’ll never forgive you.”
Cly leaned back in bed. “Now, my necklace is running out of power. Better recharge it.”
For a moment, Aegis just looked at her dumbly. But he was her bodyguard, sworn to her service, which meant he’d had a lot of practice at working around his own conscience. Moving heavily, he set me down on the sofa, got out his tools, and went over to transfer the ruby to me.
It was a petty piece of cruelty on Cly’s part, draining my magic with the necklace so I couldn’t recover enough to heal myself fully. But that too played into my hands. Every time she saw my injuries in the days to come, her combination of cowardice and viciousness would reinforce her decision to stay home and leave me to face the dangers of Wraithwood Academy.
I shut my eyes, willing myself to focus through the pain. I was going to win my freedom and save Mom, no matter what it cost in blood.
Chapter 9
The next day, I got to see what the rest of my courses were like.
Alchemy and Divination were easy electives; they gave you a good grade for minimal effort, while you put your main attention into courses that actually mattered. For alchemy, I spent most of the class pouring various substances into each other and writing down lab notes on the results. The experiments were simple enough that I had plenty of time at the end of class to organize my notes into a short report. It would’ve taken effort to leave the labs with anything left to do as homework, like Cly did.
Divination was even less work. We went outside and watched a flock of birds, then had to write an essay on what their movements told us about the future. Bullshitting was not only accepted, but encouraged. The girls sitting next to me talked among themselves the whole time, mentioning that one of their upperclassman friends, who’d taken the class last year, had turned in a blank sheet of paper for every single assignment, arguing that it symbolized how mages’ futile efforts to know the future revealed only the great void of the unknown, vast and overwhelming beyond comprehension. She’d passed with a B for her philosophical consistency.
The one thing of value I learned from the class came when I tried to join in on those girls’ conversation. For a moment, they’d given me a wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights look. Then they’d ducked away, carrying on their previous conversation with a somewhat strained quality to their voices, pretending they hadn’t