The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 1) (16 page)

Rachel crept up to her private hallway and sat down against the wall, next to the suit of armor. She sat for about a minute in absolute silence, her limbs trembling. Then, shakily, she rose to her feet and began practicing with the door stop, knocking it off and floating it up again. Better to focus on practicing than to sit doing nothing. The latter just made her feel worse, and it didn’t help Nastasia.

She had encouraged the princess to disobey Xandra Black’s prediction, and something terrible had occurred. She felt so bad for her friend, so worried, so guilty. On top of the attack on Valerie, the princess’s visions, and the teacher who hated her father, this was hard to take.

That was before she considered the smaller things: having her breakfast knocked from her hands, or having her broom mocked, or not having been invited to join the YSL. Any one of those, by itself, might have ruined her day.

Next to the bigger things, however, they now seemed inconsequential.

Finally the class bell rang. Reluctantly, she returned downstairs and found Siggy and Joy. Joy’s eyes were red, and she kept blowing her nose. She reported that Nastasia had been moved to the Halls of Healing run by the Order of Asclepius, in New York City. Rachel was touched by how upset Miss O’Keefe was on Nastasia’s behalf.

Dinner was a quiet affair, except for Siggy, who vowed loudly to avenge the princess, if he could only identify the offending party. He repeated his offer to Valerie to avenge her, and asked Rachel if she needed avenging. Should they wish his help to burn off anyone’s face, he assured them, they need only say the word.

After dinner, Rachel practiced in the empty hallway again. Being by herself and concentrating on something concrete brought a sense of peace. Also, the work was paying off. She could now whistle the doorstop off the table and float it up again with ease. She searched around the unused tower rooms until she found a dusty tome much larger and heavier than the doorstop and began practicing with that.

On her way back to her dormitory, Rachel ran across Gaius Valiant. He stood in the hallway, studying the same painting he had been gazing at that morning. When he heard her footsteps, he turned and smiled at her.

“Ah, Miss Griffin. How are you this evening?”

“Just fine,” she spoke cheerfully, “and you?”

Rachel stopped beside him and examined the painting, too. It was a picture of a windblown field. In the distance were windmills and a farm house. A crest had been painted above the barn door. She peered at the pastoral scene, wondering what he saw in it.

Gaius said, “I am well. Did you have a good second day?”

Rachel answered flippantly. It was easier than sharing her true feelings with a stranger. “Very eventful. I’ve only been here two days and already my friends have been targeted for murder, fainted in the walled garden, and all number of other things.”

“Yes, it has been an eventful couple of days,” he said. “We must remain vigilant in times such as these and be sure that we watch out for our own.”

“Yeah. It would be a bummer if we accidentally watched out for someone else’s,” she replied with an intense seriousness available only to thirteen-year-old girls. It took her mother’s dissembling skills to keep herself from smirking.

He smiled at her comment. Rachel found herself suddenly smiling, too, but she shifted her weight nervously. His phrasing struck her as mildly sinister. And yet, something about this young man brought out a frivolity in her that she ordinarily kept contained.

His face became serious. “Tell me, do you know what a geas is?”

Rachel nodded. “Sure. A compulsion that makes you do something, like go on a quest. Or buy margarine instead of butter.”

Stepping a bit closer, he lowered his voice. “A geas is a type of ensorcellment that causes someone to lose their free will for a time. It’s very dangerous,
but
one of the good things is that people
know
they are under a spell. If the geas breaks, they remember they were being controlled. They can tell someone.”

He glanced cautiously in both directions, but there was no one in the hallway. “I have heard, from a reliable source, that a certain group has improved upon that spell. They have a new geas that doesn’t even leave you aware that you were controlled. I am not sure how exactly it works, but, if it’s true, it’s very dangerous. Extremely dangerous. There are geas-breakers among the Agents. They can release someone from a geas relatively quickly. If this new geas exists, they might not be able to break it. Or, if they do, the person won’t even know what happened.”

“That’s terrible!” Rachel blurted out.

“There are whispers that forces thought long vanquished are growing in power. If they can control the Parliament of the Wise with almost no trace, those of us who support law and order are at a severe disadvantage,” drawled Gaius.

Rachel’s eyes got bigger as he spoke, though she kept them trained on the painting. Who was this boy? From the look of him, she guessed he was a poor student, struggling with his classes like her classmates Remington Blake and Zachary Duff, both of whom, rumor had it, had not yet managed to pull off a single spell. Had this gotten him into some kind of trouble? Was he part of some very bad crowd from which he wanted to escape? Why was he telling this to her, the youngest child at the school?

He finished with, “It might behoove you to warn your father.”

Oh.
She nodded decisively, like a soldier receiving orders. “I will!”

Gaius added, “I would have told your brother Peter, but he doesn’t like me very much. I am not sure if it’s because I’m in Drake, or, more likely, because he’s jealous that I am so extremely handsome.” He winked at her and turned to leave.

The boy was rather good-looking, though not nearly as handsome as Peter, who—Rachel had it on good authority from girls who lived in Gryphon-on-Dart—was spectacularly attractive, almost as good-looking as their father. Still, the sheer arrogance of Gaius’s response amused her.

Keeping her voice deadpan, despite the mockery behind her words, she tapped her finger against her cheek, as if thinking.

“Yeah, I can see how that might daunt him,” she intoned sadly, “Poor Peter.”

Skipping away as the older boy snorted with amusement, she headed downstairs to the mail room. She managed not to start giggling until she was in the cellar with her paper out, starting to write.

Then, she giggled a lot.

When she eventually recovered from her giggle-fit, she composed a letter to her father recording what Gaius had told her. She included a report about Nastasia, complete with a description of her visions and Xandra Black’s prediction. She told her father everything. With all the strange and disorienting things going on, it made her feel sane to have someone to report to. Some of this information might be crucial to the security of the World of the Wise, and there was no one her Father could get it from except her. That made her feel both happy and significant. Smiling, she prepared an envelope and slipped the letter into the outgoing mail slot.

As she headed upstairs again, the wavering note of a flute sounded. Blue sparkles danced over Rachel’s body accompanied by the scent of pine. Her limbs locked up. She could neither move nor speak.

Cydney Graves, Charybdis Nott, and an older girl with dark skin who looked a great deal like a toad stood on the staircase, gazing down at her. Cydney put her hand over her mouth, as if very concerned.

“Oh my! I am so sorry!” cried Cydney, whose bat familiar hung upside down from her shoulder bag. If Rachel recalled correctly, a bat familiar granted echolocation. She wondered how useful that was. “We were just practicing dueling. I am such a horrible shot. I completely missed Lola and hit you.” The girls behind her snickered. “I will run and get Nurse Moth right away.”

Lola, the toad girl, wore a shiny green scarf around her neck. “No need. I know the counter spell.” She raised her hands, forming cantrip gestures. “
Gos-el lu siathe.
”

Rachel both felt and saw her nose swell, a frightening and unpleasant sensation. It more than doubled in size,. The obstruction in her line of vision disconcerted her. She felt ill. The girls snickered more loudly.

Lola stroked her shiny green scarf, which Rachel realized belatedly was not a scarf at all but a snake. Serpents were a popular familiar for thaumaturges. “Oh, I must have gotten the hand motion wrong. Let me try again.”

Lola repeated the gesture and the words. This time, Rachel’s chest suddenly felt unbalanced.

The girls laughed cruelly. Cydney stepped close to Rachel, leaning toward her in mock dismay. “Oh, I’m ever so sorry. We’ll get Nurse Moth.”

They ran up the stairs. Rachel could hear them giggling well into the distance. A strange calm settled over her, as if there was no purpose to becoming upset when she was incapable of acting. However, she did think,
Hasn’t Siggy been waiting for someone to call on him to revenge them?
She imagined Cydney and her friends with their hair on fire, screaming.

These girls would rue the day they attacked her!

Rue the day!

Time went by. A lock of hair fell across her face. It tickled, but she could not scratch. She wondered morosely if motion, when it returned, would be accompanied by painful, body-wide pins-and-needles.

A little dark-haired head poked around the top of the staircase. It was Magdalene Chase. She no longer had a black eye—but she had a fresh red handprint on one cheek. She peered around and then scuttled closer to Rachel.

Magdalene whispered, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you with them. I…just couldn’t. But I can help you now, if you promise not to tell them who released you. Promise?” She waited a moment. “I will take your silence as a yes.”

Stepping back, she raised her right hand in a fist with only her index finger sticking up and moved it before her in a straight horizontal line. “
Obé.
”

The muscles in Rachel’s jaw and arms and legs relaxed. There were no pins and needles, but she felt sore all over, as if she had been running for an hour straight. She realized that it had been her own muscles holding her in place

Magdalene looked at Rachel’s nose and chest. Her cheeks grew redder. “Um, I don’t know how to fix that.”

Rachel looked down. Her right breast and shoulder were enormously swollen. The sight terrified her. Her stomach twisted. She felt nauseous.

“Thank you so much! You have my undying gratitude.” Rachel managed to give Magdalene a sincere smile. “Of course, I’ll never tell anyone. But I owe you. So just ask if you need something, any time…especially from Siggy, the boy with the dragon? He’s dying to avenge someone. He’ll kick the bum of anyone whose bum you want kicked—you just let him know.”

Magdalene’s eyes lit up at the mention of Sigfried. Rachel made a note of this. She tried to be aware of the least hint of who
liked
whom. Her father used to tease her that she sensed these matters with her “mystic girl powers.”

Rachel looked at herself again and shuddered. “Do you know if they really went to get the nurse? If so, I can hide in a corner and wait. I wonder if there’s a tarp or a blanket in the cellar somewhere.”

“I was following them, but I stopped to help you. I don’t know if they went or not. I…wouldn’t bet on it. Maybe if you just cross your arms?” Magdalene patted Rachel’s good shoulder sadly, adding, “It’s pretty late. I doubt you’d run into anyone on the way there. Or, at least, only a few people…”

Rachel slipped her arms under her robe and crossed them in front of her, thus hiding the distortion to her chest; however, her enormous shoulder still protruded upward in an obvious fashion. Quietly vowing to herself that she would find a way to protect Magdalene from whomever was abusing her, she ran for the infirmary.

Rachel ran out of Roanoke Hall, over the bridge that spanned the reflecting lake, and eastward toward the forest. Once among the trees that surrounded Drake, Raleigh, and Dee Halls, she darted south toward the infirmary, which was just north of the gymnasium. In the dark, she had trouble seeing the path. She nearly lost her balance, lurching dangerously due to her lopsidedness.

It was hard to see because her hair kept blowing in her eyes. She could not brush it aside, because her arms were under her robe. She paused to get her bearings. Above her, she heard a soft an ominous sound, like the beating of the wings of death. An eerie shiver ran down her spine, as if the feathers of those wings had brushed her.

She turned and looked, but there was nothing there.

Rachel stood still and thought back. In her mind’s eye, the great Raven with its scarlet eyes flew through the night sky toward Roanoke Hall. She gasped. The Raven turned its head and looked at her. The obscuration hiding it broke, and Rachel found herself eye to eye with the real Raven. She met its gaze. A horripilation of dread passed across her entire body. She tried to swallow but could not. Then the Raven was gone.

But it had seen her.

It had seen her watching it.

Ahead, she heard cruel girlish laughter. Cydney Graves and her friends stood in front of the infirmary. Rachel froze. The idea of walking out in front of them, deliberately exposing herself to mockery, was too horrible.

She hesitated.

Hiding in the shadows, she plotted the doom of those who had humiliated her. Vivid pictures of Siggy’s delight as Lucky breathed on the three girls, and they erupted into geysers of flame played through her imagination. She smiled with spiteful glee.

Two of them moved in her direction. Rachel bolted. She ran the other way, smack into someone coming down the path. Looking up, she found herself staring into the cheerful face of a tall young man of Spanish descent. He looked to be in his early twenties. He was dressed in a black turtleneck and trousers. A black and white magpie sat on his shoulder. It was the proctor, Mr. Fuentes.

“Whoa! Whoa! Careful, Miss. Oh, my! What happened to you?” Fuentes squinted at her in the dark. He made a gesture and said a word. The air lit up around them, glowing softly. Rachel still had her arms crossed in front of her, so he could not see the travesty that was her right breast. Her enormous shoulder and nose were obvious to the eye.