Blood of the Fey (Morgana Trilogy) (22 page)

I barely manage to keep myself from nodding off onto my plate as the argument continues throughout dinner. Finally, Bri jerks me awake to head back to the dorms. I drag my feet after them up the steep staircase to the top floor, where Jack leaves us to go to the boys’ section.

“How are you going to wake up tomorrow?” Bri asks me. “We usually have the Lauds bells to help us, but they don’t ring that early.”

“Don’t look at me,” Keva says, pushing the solid door to our section open. “I’m so not waking up at three.”

“I’ll lend you my clock,” Bri says. “It’s the winding kind, so it works without a problem.

“You have one?” Keva says, alarmed.

Without bothering to answer, I head straight for the showers. If I go to my room now, I’m going to collapse fully clothed in bed and never wake up. And though Keva appears to be bearing with me thus far, I doubt she’d let me stink up the place without either pouring a pail of water on my face or throwing me out the window.

Before I manage to crawl into bed, two layers of skin dutifully scrubbed off, I make my nightly prayer.

Dear Lord, thank you for letting me survive yet another day. I apologize for all the bad things I’ve done and said, but really, if you were a little nicer to me and didn’t give me quite so many things to test my temper, I would be much kinder. Amen.

Every day seems to bring me closer and closer to death. I go through my daily schedule in full walking-corpse mode: up at three, clean bathrooms, Mass at six, classes, then training, with a few hours reserved for meals and study. By the time the freshman boat breaks the lake’s surface marking the beginning of the weekend, I barely notice that it’s raining.

“Ask if I can come over this weekend,” Keva whispers in my ear as I head to the car. “Just, uh…” She pauses, looking nervously at Dean. “Ask your parents instead of him. He doesn’t seem too nice.”

If I weren’t so exhausted, I’d laugh—if only she knew how things truly stood. Instead, I slide inside Dean’s car, where Arthur’s already waiting, and we make the trip back to the house without a single word crossing our lips.

When we arrive home, Arthur pauses on the front porch.

“Listen,” he starts, “about this week, I—”

I brush past him without waiting for the rest of his explanation, push inside, and head straight up to my room. I don’t care what he has to say for himself. I don’t care what anyone has to say to me. All I want is to be left alone to hibernate for the rest of the year.

My great master plan is defective, however, for I wake up a few hours later to a growling stomach. I stare up at the ceiling, making pictures of the tiny cracks and lines that spread out from the corners closest to the windows, wishing I’d been able to stay at my old school. At least there I had only one year left before I’d be free from this family.

My gaze slides down to the cross hanging over my door.

“I don’t know what to do,” I say to myself.

You could just continue with what you did last time
, says my guardian angel, as if he’s been dying for me to ask that question.

“And then what? They won’t let me do any EM back at school, even if I did know how to handle elementals better than the rest of the class.”

But that’s because they don’t think you can do it.

“Or they don’t want me to,” I mumble into my pillow.

I know I don’t make any sense; they need as many knights as possible, and they’d never have sent me to Lake High if they didn’t expect me to pull my own weight at some point. My eyes drop even lower, and I notice a note has been slipped under my door.

I roll out of bed and snatch it up; it’s a message from Arthur.

Please come see me when you wake up. I’d like to have a word with you.

Arthur

“Don’t think so, you moronic-two-faced-sucker!” I say.

I crumple the piece of paper and toss it in the wastebasket, then reach for my backpack. Smiling, I pull out the
Basic Dictionary of Runes
, glad that, even in my stupor, I haven’t forgotten to bring this monster of a book with me. I’m still in my school uniform, but I don’t care to change out of it and head downstairs, the old glove in my jacket pocket.

“Good afternoon, mistress,” Ella says as I trot through her pristine kitchen.

I smile at her; Fey or not, the poor woman must not have an easy life, being in my mother’s employ. I grab a couple of apples from the basket by the window and head out into the backyard.

The weather in Wisconsin’s upper world is definitely not as peaceful as it is back in Lake High. The clouds rolling in from Lake Superior are the color of slate, promising rain by the foot.

“Better get to the shed before it starts pouring,” I tell myself, accelerating the pace.

It doesn’t take me nearly as much time to get through the broken window as last weekend, and I land in a respectable crouch without breaking anything. I take stock of the inside of the cabin. Nothing has changed since last I came here, which means nobody, not even a single spider, has gotten wind of my trespassing.

I sit on the spotless floor, close to the window, and take out my glove. Angling it to the gray light streaming through, I prod the ogham, its black surface silky smooth to the touch.

Wishing I knew how to differentiate gems, I riffle through the pages, looking for the rune that will match a black stone. Thankfully, there’s only one in the whole book related to elementals, an onyx.

“Hagalaz,” I whisper, reading the name off the page.

The stone seems to gleam, but the light disappears before I can ascertain whether it’s actually responding to its name or just a trick of the light.

My heartbeat kicks up a notch. “Hagalaz,” I say, louder.

The stone shimmers, and, for a split second, I can see a pale
H
form at its center, the horizontal bar droopy on one end.

“Saint George’s balls, I did it!” I exclaim, holding the glove to my heart.

I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited in my life, except perhaps the time I was allowed to hybridize my first iris.

I’m so eager to see what it can do that I nearly rip the glove to pieces when I put it on. I check the dictionary once more. The rune is a standard for ice. Does that mean I ought to practice outside? The pitter-patter announcing the beginning of rain makes the decision for me. I point my fist, stone first, to the empty wall opposite me.

“Hagalaz,” I say.

I wait for a second, squinting. Was there a slight condensation of the air?

“Hagalaz,” I say, louder.

The wall appears to pulsate with a dull yellow glow that intensifies until I see the outline of a door form. A few moments later, it opens, and in walks Arthur.

If I hadn’t already been seated, I would have fallen down.

“Wh-What are you doing here?” I ask, quickly hiding my hand behind my back.

Arthur looks pissed, rainwater dripping off him onto the dusty floor. “What are
you
doing here?” he shoots back.

“Having a little fun,” I say, not daring to look him in the eye.

In two steps he reaches me, kneels down, and grabs my hand.

“Ouch!” I try to pull away, but his grip’s too strong. “You don’t have to manhandle me!”

Arthur rips the glove off me, stares at the small ogham, and turns livid. “Were you practicing EM on your own?” he asks, his voice shaking.

“So what if I was?”

His fingers tighten around my wrist, and I wince.

“You’re hurting me,” I say.

“Do you even realize what could have happened?” Arthur yells, practically slapping me in the face with my glove. “Morgan, didn’t you see what happened to your classmate?”

With a pang of guilt, I again remember Owen facing the fiery bull.

“Do you realize how dangerous it is for you to train like this, unsupervised? Not to mention this is the surface world, where any layperson can see you! I thought someone like you would’ve known better!”

I raise my chin. “I was in here, away from prying eyes. Nobody would’ve seen anything.”

Arthur shakes me so hard my teeth rattle. “Not if you’d lost control,” he yells. “Damn it, Morgan, somebody could have gotten hurt! You could have been killed!”

“Well I wasn’t!” I retort. Not my best comeback, I admit, but I never expected this kind of outburst from Arthur, he who’s always so controlled. “And yes, for your information, I do remember what happened to Owen. That’s his name, in case you care to know. And that bull-salamander Fey didn’t try to hurt me. He just wanted to go to the forest when they called him, and I happened to be in the way!”

Arthur’s frown deepens. “What are you talking about?”

“The horn, Arthur. It heard the horn and tried to go to it. It wasn’t planning on hurting anyone.”

“What horn?”

A long pause settles between us, during which we stare at each other.

Finally, I ask, “You mean you didn’t hear it?”

“Nobody heard anything,” he says carefully.

I try to see whether he’s making fun of me, but he’s dead serious. Could I have heard wrong? Could I, in my shock and terror, have made it all up?

Arthur lets go of my arm and gets up. Rubbing my bruised wrist, I do the same.

“So what now?” I ask. “Are you going to punish me again?” I’m already feeling the loss of my one and only ogham, my dreams of telling everyone off gone up in smoke.

“No,” he says. “I’m going to give you a private lesson.”

“Concentrate,” Arthur says, standing behind me. “You need to be able to feel the Fey through its iron casing when you call it out.”

I try to feel whatever connection Arthur’s talking about, imagining a link between my hand and the ogham. A prickly sensation, perhaps, or a thread attached from my finger to the gem.

“Hagalaz!” I say, pretending to want to push myself through my hand and the stone, and into the air in a shower of hail.

Nothing.

Disappointment, added to hours of practice without food, makes me sway on my feet.

Arthur sighs. “That’s enough for today.”

I lie down on the floor, my vision a blanket of fuzzy grays, and my ears ringing.

“Did you see anything?” I whisper, shivering with cold.

“No.”

It’s my turn to sigh. “Maybe…maybe I just can’t do it.”

“Then you wouldn’t be able to go to Lake High,” he says.

I rub at the spot on my left shoulder where an old ache has started to act up again.

“Maybe my father wasn’t a knight after all,” I say. “Maybe he was a layman and I inherited his lack of talent.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

I close my eyes, trying not to show how disappointed I am. “You don’t know anything about him,” I say, hating how my voice quavers.

I feel something soft on my face and find Arthur dabbing my sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. “Better get going,” he says, “it’s nearly dinnertime.”

When we get to the house, Irene jumps on us, all talons out. “What were you two up to?” she asks, deep suspicion seeping out of her in cold waves.

Arthur shrugs. “Just teaching her a few moves,” he says. He makes for the staircase.

“What kind of moves?” Irene asks, sticking to him.

Ella slips a sandwich in my pocket before I follow them up. I hear a door close, then slam open.

“I asked you a question, buster!”

Irene’s standing before Arthur’s bedroom, her tiny hands resting in fists at her hips, over a wide metallic belt.

I remain on the landing, unsure what to do. The safest bet would be to head to my own bedroom, but I can’t resist knowing what Arthur’s going to say next. I’d always imagined him to be the golden child who couldn’t do anything wrong, so seeing Irene get angry at him is surprising…and a little satisfying.

“I was trying to teach her to fight,” Arthur says, popping back out of his room while buttoning up a shirt.

Irene’s face goes white, then turns as red as a boiled lobster. Her voice drops a threatening two octaves. “You did what?”

My mouth hangs open, my mind unable to comprehend the one thing that goes against every physics rule—Arthur’s lied? But why?

I make myself inconspicuous as Arthur pushes past her, then heads back down to the entry hall, Irene trotting after him.