The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 1) (27 page)

“I am of two minds on the subject of marriage.” She dipped her grilled cheese sandwich into her soup, something she was not allowed to do at home. “I am sure love is wonderful—though I’ve never been in love. But, strange as it seems, love matches often aren’t any more successful than arranged ones. Look how often they end in divorce. In an arranged marriage, at least the families are benefited, and often the couples do come to love each other.”

“Precisely,” Nastasia gave Rachel a grateful look.

Rachel smiled back, aware of how small their oasis of respect for traditions was in the vast desert of modern sentiment.

Joy, Zoë, and Valerie gawked at them as if they had sprouted new noses.

“Nastasia.” Zoë lazily tipped her chair back and swung her bright blue braid around in a circle. The feather fluttered with a
thwp-thwp
. “Not to poke a sore spot, but…isn’t your father the one who has the cheek to put emus on Olympic teams and uses pink monopoly money with kangaroos on it that no other country will accept for your national currency? Aren’t you afraid, if you leave your choice of future husband to him, he’ll marry you to a mop?”

“There is a danger of that,” Nastasia acknowledged with a sigh. “Luckily, my mother, the Queen, is quite a serious person. She has made Father promise that he will not engage any of us to a wallaby or an emu.” Her face remained solemn, but her eyes crinkled merrily. “As my sister Alexis pointed out, though, roos and dingoes are still an option.”

Lunch was followed by Music and a long Science lab. After class, Rachel ran to the gym to help with broom practice. Thursdays were for intermediate students who wanted to learn tricks. Here, Rachel was a great help to Mr. Chanson, since she could demonstrate everything he wished to teach.

When the flying class ended, she headed back to her dorm, floating low to the ground on her broom, with her feet resting on the handlebars. Halfway across campus, she heard unpleasant giggling. Cydney Graves and her friends swooped around her on their long Flycycles.

“Look, it’s the baby on her training broom,” Cydney mocked, bumping Vroomie. A beginner would have fallen off. Rachel was not even discomforted.

“Steeplechaser,” Rachel replied coldly. She stroked Vroomie’s polished walnut handle, as if to soothe the broom’s hurt feelings. “I mentioned that before. Some people learn slowly.”

“Speaking of learning. Aren’t you too young for Roanoke?” Cydney looked her over cynically. “How old are you? Ten? Go home, Preschooler.”

“You should thank me. I gave you half a figure,” Lola Spong laughed. Rachel was again struck by how much the girl looked like a toad. Perhaps the Spong family was descended from trolls. Some families were. “I don’t think they make bras like that, though—big on one side? Would you like me to do the other side, too, so you can have a matching pair?”

“How’s your balance now?” Belladonna Marley purred with false sympathy, flying so close that her tail fan knocked against Vroomie. “Listing a little too much to the right?”

The memory of the humiliation, of stumbling across campus with her enlarged nose, shoulder, and chest, rushed back. Rachel’s cheeks heated up until they felt as if they had been left too long on the skillet. She considered putting on a burst of speed and racing ahead. If she wove through the trees, she could lose them. They would discover first hand how much better she and Vroomie were.

That smacked of showing off, however, a low to which she did not care to descend. Also, much as they irritated her, if any of them tried to follow her and got hurt when their clunky, awkward travelers smashed into a tree, it would be her fault.

Ahead of her, Princess Nastasia of Magical Australia came walking up the path from Dare Hall. “There you are, Miss Griffin,” she spoke cheerfully, her gaze resting only on Rachel. She did not so much as glance at the girls from Drake. “It is a pleasant afternoon, isn’t it?”

“Nastasia.” Rachel was certain her cheeks were glowing red hot, but she managed a cheerful smile.

“Ooo.” Lola cried eagerly. “It’s the princess of No Place Anyone Has Ever Heard Of!”

The princess came forward with extreme nobility, gliding toward them with the grace of a swan. Reaching Rachel, she pivoted and slipped her arm through Rachel’s. Knowing how much the princess disliked familiarity, Rachel’s heart beat with astonished gratitude. She flew a little lower, so that they could move forward side by side.

“How did your class go?” the princess asked, as if no one else were present. “Mr. Chanson seems like an upstanding gentleman. Is he a good instructor?”

“Yes. Very!” Rachel’s eyes sparkled at the opportunity to discuss her favorite instructor. Before she could say more, she was interrupted.

“Why does she have a job? She’s a freshman,” Charybdis asked the other girls.

“Obviously, she needs the money to buy a new porcupine to comb her hair,” drawled Cydney. “Look what a bad job the old one is doing.”

Rachel resisted her desire to smooth her fly-away locks.

Lola snickered, “Maybe she should lend some of her salary to her friend, so the ‘princess’ can buy a map and pick a real country to be royalty of.”

Rachel turned on Lola and started to retort, but Nastasia lay a soothing hand on her arm.

“Pay no heed to the howling of the wind,” the princess instructed with calm fortitude.

“Hey, everybody! Let’s touch the princess,” Charybdis shouted, excited. “Maybe she will faint.”

“Leave her alone,” Rachel cried, moving her broom between Nastasia and Charybdis.

“Do you hear the caterwauling of felines?” The princess cupped her free hand around her ear, her manner as gentle and ladylike as ever. “Their yowling means nothing.”

“She called us catty!” Charybdis cried. “She did, didn’t she?”

“Well, you are,” Rachel replied tartly. She was impressed that Charybdis had caught that. Charybdis struck her as a bit dim.

“Cats are never worth shouting at. Just pay them no heed.” Nastasia covered her mouth with her hand and leaned toward Rachel. From behind her palm, she whispered conspiratorially. “They hate that.”

Rachel began to giggle. The princess launched into a discussion of their classes so far. Catching on, Rachel followed her lead, ignoring the other girls.

Cydney scowled. “This is getting boring. Let’s go do something else.”

“Let’s go follow boys around!” Charybdis exclaimed, pointing. “There’s a cute one!” The girls from Drake turned their brooms and sped off toward the commons.

“Thank you,” Rachel said gratefully. To her embarrassment, her voice shook slightly.

“Think nothing of it,” replied the princess, mirth dancing in her eyes. “It was a pleasure.”

“It wasn’t nothing to me,” Rachel replied under her breath.

The princess heard her. Squeezing Rachel’s hand, Nastasia gave her a very kind smile. “Then, you are welcome.”

Arm in arm—one walking, one flying, they continued down the path to Dare Hall.

At the dorm, they found Zoë sprawled on the front steps, playing with her tiger quoll. She was reading their True History assignment and throwing pieces of beef jerky to her familiar. It caught them out of the air.

“Hey, Ladies,” Zoë gave them a lazy half-smile. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Indeed,” Nastasia inclined her head, a little smile playing over her lips. “Overhead, the clouds stream by. Yet, below, we find ourselves untroubled by the breeze.”

“Quite poetic.” Zoë threw another piece of beef jerky to the quoll. “Even more poetic than my second cousin, the award winning poet. But then, a princess should be poetic, while a second cousin, not so much. Don’t you think so, Griffin?”

Before Rachel could answer, there was a
whoosh
behind them, followed by unpleasantly familiar laughter. Rachel spun around to find Cydney Graves and her friends hovering over the gravel path at the bottom of the stairs. All four grinned victoriously.

“So, you have visions, do you, Princess Nastasia?” Cydney asked snidely. “Are they real? Or are you just crazy as a June bug?”

Rachel recoiled as if struck. The princess’s expression never changed, but she laid a steadying hand on Rachel’s shoulder.

“Bug off, debutantes.” Zoë made a flicking gesture, as if flicking away a fly. “Don’t you nasty rich girls have better things to do than pester innocent princesses?”

“And you!” Belladonna turned on Zoë, narrowing her eyes menacingly. “We know all about your sandals and your dream walking! You come into our dorm again, it will be the last mistake you ever make.”

The princess invited Rachel to study with her and Joy, but Rachel did not need to study. She remembered what the tutor said the first time, so she never reviewed, and she had already read ahead for all her classes. She sat with the other girls for a few minutes. They chatted about classes and boys, but she could barely pay attention. Her mind was too caught up in worrying about how Cydney and her friends found out about the princess’s visions and Zoë’s sandals.

Taking her leave, she headed outside, her broom in her hand. Who could have told them? Whom had they spoken to in the short time between when they left and when they returned? Charybdis had said she was leading them off to go talk to a cute boy.

A shiver of terror jolted her body as powerfully as if she had brushed against a live wire.
Please
, she begged silently,
please, let it not have been Gaius
.

She had not told Gaius about Zoë, but he could have told about the princess. Either way, someone she liked had betrayed them. If it was not he, it was one of her other friends. But who could be the snitch? Could she really trust any of them? She realized with dismay that she had allowed herself to feel secure, and now somebody had betrayed them.

Who could she trust for certain?

Best to work backwards—to figure out first who it could not have been. It was not Zoë or Nastasia. They had both looked shocked when they discovered their secrets had been spilled. It was not Siggy. Of that she was certain. He might be clueless, a complete flake, and unintentionally dangerous to his friends, but, for all his boasting and lying, she had never met anyone more sincere or more devoted to those he had determined to be his comrades. Valerie struck her as the type who kept things quiet, though she was good friends with Salome. Had Salome told her dorm-mates to keep from being a suspect in the matter of the hair? Did any of Rachel’s friends have siblings or friends in Drake?

The whole matter distressed her tremendously. Zoë’s ability to walk through dreams had given them an enormous advantage. If the world itself was truly in danger, they needed every advantage! It galled her that others now knew. Someone might tell the tutors, and the adults might make Zoë stop.

Rachel had always trusted adults implicitly. Since she arrived at school, however, they had been letting her down. First the tutors did not believe her about Mylene and the wraith, and then her father…Her bottom lip quivered.

Life at Roanoke was not what she had expected.

“Are you going to study?” Rachel asked Sigfried, whom she found romping with Lucky in the ferns behind Dare Hall.

“Study? What’s that?” Sigfried snorted. “Certainly not. I’m going exploring.”

“Oh! Me, too!” Rachel cried, delighted. She pulled a Cadbury’s bar from her pocket and split it in half. “Chocolate?”

Sigfried’s eyes became very round. “Ace! I had one of these once. One of the other boys nicked some from a corner shop. Boy, was it good.” He shoved the entire half of the chocolate bar into his mouth, except for a small piece that he broke off and tossed to Lucky. He tried to keep talking, but Rachel could not make out what he was saying.

She giggled. “Do you want to explore on foot or by broom?”

“Whets go wy woom.”

Rachel and Sigfried climbed on Vroomie, and the two of them were off, with Lucky following close behind. They swooped over walled gardens and glided above the sun-speckled ferns that grew beneath the paper birches. Then they sped across the commons and beyond, to the hemlocks. Soaring upward, they burst above the branches into the brilliant fall sky. Small birds flocked together, calling to one another as they gathered to head south. Rachel watched their freedom with a sense of joy. Recalling the statue of the young woman with the bird wings, she wondered what it would be like, to fly as they did—probably a great deal like flying on a broom only more wonderful.

The first orange leaf of autumn drifted down to land in the creek. Lucky dived in and snaked through the water, a red and gold flicker beneath the surface.

Looking down at his friend, Sigfried asked suddenly, “Hey, when do we learn to run so fast we leave a sonic boom?”

Rachel laughed. “No one can do that.”

“Mr. Chanson, the gym teacher, can.”

“That’s impossible. People have tried such things, but they get ripped apart. You’d have to be invulnerable.”

“Chanson can do it. I want to do it, too.”

“No, he can’t!”

“Yes, he can. Lucky saw him. I watched through Lucky’s eyes. Chanson crossed the campus so quickly, he looked like a blur.”

“That’s…impossible.” Rachel frowned. She sighed blissfully at the thought of the handsome physical education teacher. Then, her eyes widened. “Unless…Hey! I bet you he’s from Outside!”

“You mean he was born in the woods?”

“No.—Like Lucky. Lucky has magic from outside that turns off near the raven. I bet you Mr. Chanson is from another world, too. We should ask the princess to shake his hand.”

“A Metaplutonian! You may be right!” Siggy’s face fell, and he scowled. “But that would mean that I couldn’t learn to do it, wouldn’t it? And the princess says it’s impossible to turn into a dragon. Life is so unfair!”

They flew up the river, through the hemlocks, to where it emerged from underground on the inner side of the wall of trees that marked the wards of the school. Circling back, they flew toward Roanoke Hall from the back side.

Leaning forward, Sigfried pointed at the central belfry. “Hey, can we stop there?”

“Sure.” Rachel flew to the spot Sigfried had indicated. Part-way up the belfry, buttresses arched out from around a central cylindrical core. There was just enough room for them to land. Siggy peered in the window at the spiral staircase within. Then, laying on his stomach, he pulled some grubby sandwiches from his pocket and stuffed them into the gargoyle-tipped drain pipes.