Legendborn: Chapters 19–25

The Order’s militancy is more than enough reason to keep a low profile on this campus.

"But I must tell you that the...practitioners”—she says the word as if it tastes rancid in her mouth—“who use the word ‘aether’ are not your mother’s people.”

After finishing classes for the day, we’ve been lounging on our respective beds, phones in hand.

The dormer window of our top-floor room is cracked open.

“Knight- errant?” He moves aside and I step through the door, shaking out my umbrella. It started drizzling on my way over.
“Yup,” he says, taking my umbrella and dropping it into the bronze holder in the foyer. “That’s old-timey for a knight who does their own thing and wanders around and stuff.”

He smiles rakishly. “Not anymore.”

“Magic,” he says, and bows with a flourish.

Restored pine floors hold notches and whorls from the original trees, and the heavy brocade fabric lining the walls in between the doors makes the floor feel warm and residential.

Nick takes the umbrella himself, hard steel under his placid tone.

“I value Page Matthews’s abilities,” Nick says, his face impassive, “and your expectations belong to you.”

“Then why are you spending time alone with the Scion of Arthur? Getting a pep talk? Giving him a helping hand?"
I freeze, stunned at his implication.

A light smattering of sparks falls across the bridge of my nose and cheeks.

Greer looks at my hair and then gestures to theirs. Tonight it’s thick double fishtail braids that extend from their crown to the bottom of each shoulder blade. “And cover up these gorgeous coifs? Get outta here with that trash idea, Whitlock.”

The three aspects tested by the Trials are immutable, but the tests themselves change year to year.

The Morgaines are the primary reason the Regents have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using aether outside their purview.

I mull on this. The Line of Morgaine are Merlins gone bad. There’s something else bugging me about Nick’s story, though, something much more immediate.

People think I’m gunning to be your Squire and, I guess, using my feminine wiles to try and convince you to select me.

“There it is. The self-righteous rage of demonkind. Pathetic.”

I can’t even tell if I’m still facing in the right direction. Undaunted, I keep going.

I was half-scared of chopping my own arm off, so I’d chosen the short, heavy wooden staff—what Whitty called a “cudgel”—and strapped it to my back with its leather harness.

The boar’s guttural scream echoes up the ridge, crosses the field, makes my teeth grind.

In two minutes, it’s on all four knees, keening pitifully.

The limbs are too far up to do me any good, but I stop about ten feet up with one arm in a death grip around the trunk, precariously balanced on a burl just wider than my shoe.

Viscous fluid erupts in his face.

The fine strands of his hair are partly matted on one side, partly strewn across the pillow like he’s just been blasted by a gust of wind.

“I heard Sel say to the others that he thinks this attack was planned too. Not a coincidence. That the Shadowborn sent a creature that would be able to subdue you quickly and take you away.”

Then, I feel mortification when I realize that Nick, with his sharp, perceptive eyes, has seen it all.

How does this boy navigate my emotions like a seasoned sailor, finding the clear skies and bringing them closer, when all I seem able to do is hold fast to the storms?

When I was growing up, she and my dad fought a lot. About my future, about my dad’s training regimen. I couldn’t go to regular school; he homeschooled me so he’d have more control over my studies.

“Don’t do that,” he chides.

A dormant Scion has clout, but no real say in the Order.

A dormant Scion has clout, but no real say in the Order.

Patricia waves at me from where she’s sitting against one of the campus’s ubiquitous low stone walls.

It feels like a hidden park, a respite away from the throngs of students bent over their phones on the way to class, professors chatting on the way to the campus coffee shop.

Only a few years after it opened, a student died unexpectedly and was buried on an empty tract of land not far from the then center of the campus.

As the campus expanded, the university marked the perimeter of the cemetery with informational placards and a low rock wall built sometime in the early 1800s to separate it from the rest of the grounds.

“It’s the starting point,” she repeats enigmatically. “The root of root, if you will.”

Mildew-stained obelisks, thinner tombstones with two and three sets of names on them.

I sit cross-legged in front of her as she opens the velvet pouch she’d been carrying and sets out a few stones on the ground between us: a bright green one shaped like a small, gnarled fist; a purple-and-white stone with a few rocky points—amethyst, I think; and a smoky quartz.

I’m filled with a sour sense of betrayal, akin to the feeling I felt looking up at the Order’s Wall.