Chapter 22 – Cycle Three

Mirian awoke with that raw scream still on her lips, and stopped.

Someone groaned. Selesia, she thought. She’s wounded, but we can still—but no. It was Lily, saying, “Gods above, Mirian. You’ve got a real set of lungs. That must have been some nightmare.”

Mirian sat on the bed and clutched her head in her hands. “I need—give me a moment.”

“You okay?”

Mirian burst into tears, which hopefully answered the question. A drop of water hit her on the head, which made her burst out laughing. Of course. The hole was back.

Lily came over and put her arm around Mirian, which made her start crying again. She hugged her roommate back. It took a few minutes for her to stop trembling, and to find her voice.

“You don’t remember, do you? Or we’d be having a very different conversation.”

“Mirian, what is going on?”

She forced a smile. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. I just… I need some time.” Another drop of water splatted on her hair, dripping down her face. She sighed. “And I need to shut off the water heater above us.”

Lily looked at her like she’d grown a third leg out of her head, but Mirian just pointed up, then rose to grab the storage tin and her spellbook.

“What is… how did that happen?” Lily said, staring up at the perfectly clean hole running through all three stories of the dormitory.

“No clue,” Mirian called as she shut the door behind her. Mirian used her lift object spell to get the third floor door open again, slapped the tin down over the hole so it would at least catch the rain coming through—it wouldn’t be much, she knew the next few days would just be a light drizzle—then found the hidden panel with the switch to the water heater and turned it off. The water stopped hissing from the pipe shortly after. Everyone’s showers would be ruined. Good, she thought. They could all suffer together. Someone else could go bother maintenance.

When she got back to the room, she dressed and grabbed her things in silence. She spent a moment looking for her spellrod, then belatedly remembered she hadn’t made it yet. It was back to the minimalist clay cube. Lily was staring at her, but she just couldn’t handle it right now. She needed time to process what had happened. Time to think. “We’ll talk after classes today, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Lily said, still looking concerned.

Mirian scarfed down breakfast in the kitchen. She was absolutely ravenous; the last food she’d had was—Gods, it had been that damned prison food, hadn’t it? Absolutely disgusting. And that was coming from someone who made porridge every day to save money. Well, that can at least come to an end, she thought, throwing her cloak on. She could take out a loan from the Tower’s Trust bank any time she wanted. The debt would subsequently be canceled by artillery bombardment.

As she walked across the path between the dormitories and the Academy, she considered what to do. There’d been no statue of Yiaverunan nearby this time. Was it even the Gods that had saved her? She had to believe it was, but the massacre of the Torrviol exodus had shaken her faith. Why would they let all this happen? Why would they let it all happen again?

There was something bigger at play. Viridian had talked about buried secrets beneath the Academy. It had to have something to do with that big stone door beneath the Bainrose library. Then, there was the attack. Torrviol didn’t make sense as a target. If the Akanans could overwhelm the Fort Aegrimere garrison so easily, why didn’t they just take Cairnmouth itself?

Her first year at the Academy, she had taken the mandatory History of Torrviol course. Torrviol was older than even the capitols of Baracuel; layers of ruins lay beneath the modern town, which had once been a great city that stretched from the hills that the dormitories were all the way to Lake Torrviol. Rumor was that old passages led to the Labyrinth, though those had no doubt been closed up. Maybe something big had been discovered down there.

She needed to find a way to spy on the spies. Whatever they were up to, it wasn’t just preparation for the invasion. One spy had been on top of Bainrose on the day of the attack. It was the guard in front of Bainrose who knew the spy. Somehow, the library was the key.

The guards couldn’t be trusted. It seemed they were loyal to the captain, and the captain of the guard was undoubtedly a traitor of some kind. Some random student wasn’t going to change their minds any more than it had before.

What could she use? Predicting tests would just get people thinking she cheated. Predicting the weather could be dismissed as a guess, and not even a particularly lucky one. Oh, it’s going to rain in Torrviol? Damn, how did you know that? The day after it gets cold, it snows instead? The Prophets have come again, she could hear someone replying. And predicting Platus’s death would just get her charged with murder.