Soulbound (30 page)

If I did that, if I so much as uttered a peep, it was all over. My training, my time with Darius. Everything.

My jawline felt warm and wet. I reached up, feeling the blood on my neck. Trayton had just nicked my ear, but there was no time to examine it. He swung again, this time straight at my head, and I brought up my
katana in a block, my instincts taking over. The sound of metal on metal rang through my ears as our katanas met in the air between us. Our blades still together, he pressed down hard with his sword and I braced my weapon, my shoulders burning, knowing it was just a matter of time before he broke through my defenses. Behind Trayton, I could see Darius. His foot was propped up on a rock, one hand stroking his chin as he watched our interaction. I could read the expression in his eyes.

He looked pleased.

Disgust filled me, coupled with rage. My lungs burned as my breathing came hard and heavy, but I pushed back, and was surprised to find that I could hold Trayton’s advances at bay. He stood a foot over me at least, but here I was, holding him off, keeping him from breaking through. By the look of the tension in Trayton’s body, he was surprised too—even though he was under the impression that he was fighting a Barron, an equal. Not some lowly Healer. Especially not
his
Healer.

As if the thin thread that was holding his patience together had snapped, Trayton pivoted the weight on his weapon, slamming the handle of his katana into my shoulder. Pain rocked through me and I fell back. Regaining my balance, I swept his leg and he went down. With Darius’s smug expression locked in the forefront of my mind, I pulled my weapon through the air in a crosscut with all the strength I could muster. Pulling back at the last second, my blade stopped at Trayton’s neck.

He whipped off his mask, his eyes furious and dark. My heart slowed, sinking some inside my chest. I could have killed him. I could have taken Trayton’s life in a moment of fury against my teacher.

Wordlessly, I slid my katana into its sheath on my back and held out a hand. When he took it, after a moment’s hesitation, I helped him stand. We stood there, catching our breath, until Trayton wiped the blood from his neck. “You’re a hell of a combatant, Barron.”

“That she is.” Darius entered the circle then and excused Trayton with a nod. Trayton picked up his mask and retreated up the hill. Several minutes passed before either of us moved or spoke.

He’d complimented me, yes, but Darius had also done the unforgivable. When I was sure that we were alone, and that Trayton was completely out of earshot, I whipped off my mask and tossed it to the ground. I shoved Darius as hard as I could, fury welling up from within me. “What the fak was that about?”

Darius barely moved from my assault. His words were eerily calm, as if he’d been expecting my reaction. “It was just part of the training.”

I didn’t have to look far to see the lie in his eyes. Snatching my mask from the ground, I shoved it on and ran up the hill toward the gate. If this was what he deemed just an everyday part of training, then he could forget it. No amount of training could be worth exposing me to Trayton and endangering the lives of my
parents. I was done. I was finished. With Darius, with training, with everything.

After my final class of the day, and after a long day spent avoiding Trayton and nursing my shoulder, I walked into my room, shutting the door between Maddox and me, hoping to spend some time alone thinking. I also wanted to rub my injured shoulder with rose oil, and coax the muscles there into a less painful state.

On the small table near the door was a fresh vase of red roses, with a note.

“Meet me at the library tonight after dusk. –Yours, T”

Maybe I should have been happy about the regular appearance of fresh flowers in my room. Any normal girl might have been thrilled about the love notes and attention. But even though I smiled each time I saw them, inside I felt like I was doing so because that was how I was supposed to react. Not that the flowers and notes weren’t perfectly nice, but I wanted more than roses and poetry. I wanted respect.

I bit my bottom lip in contemplation. On one hand, I really wanted to be left alone, really wanted to confront Darius about what he’d done. On the other, I longed to spend some quiet time with Trayton, to be alone and normal and forget about Graplars. My nightmares had all but ceased, and I was really looking forward to some sound rest, but how could I resist an evening at the library with Trayton? I couldn’t. So with a deep breath, I
opened the parlor door and showed Maddox my most charming smile. Instantly, she snorted. “Whatever, Princess. Let’s go.”

Not long after, we were walking up to the library. The entire walk, I thought about my mother and how much I missed her. Maddox was great, but she wasn’t exactly the kind of friend you could cry to. Maddox was a solution-finder, a fixer, not someone who’d let you sob into their shoulder because a boy was mean to you. Every day I waited for a letter from my parents, some sign that they were alive and well. I’d written to them weekly, but there was no guarantee that the school messengers were actually delivering my notes, or that Headmaster Quill had even allowed them to carry my scribblings off Shadow Academy grounds. The very thought made me feel incredibly lonely.

Trayton was waiting for us just outside the library. His smile was earnest—so unlike the one I’d offered Maddox to get her to take me to the library when I should have been studying for a quiz on herbal remedies. His smile spread the closer I got to him. “You’re not an easy girl to run into.”

Trying my best not to let my guilt show at having avoided him all day, I smiled back. “A girl can never be too easy to find. Gives boys ideas about them.”

He opened the door and we moved inside. As we moved up the stairs, I flashed Trayton a questioning glance. What were we doing at the library? We certainly
couldn’t sneak into the secret room he’d shown me. Not with Maddox there—she’d done Trayton enough favors. But Trayton didn’t answer my look with anything but one that said that I should just wait and see what he had planned.

As we reached the top of the stairs, Trayton turned to Maddox. “Twenty minutes.”

Maddox shook her head. “This time’s gonna cost you some trinks, Barron.”

Trayton faked a gasp and dropped three coins in her open palm. “Maddox! I’m shocked. Bribery?”

Maddox shrugged and sank into one of the chairs in the loft. “It’s a living. Twenty minutes. No more.”

As Trayton opened the secret door, I couldn’t help but smirk. “Breaking the rules, Barron? I thought you had to follow Protocol.”

Trayton grinned. “Section three, paragraph twenty-two of the Protocol handbook states that newly Bound Barrons and Healers are allowed up to three hours of private time together in the first year in order to exchange details of one another’s history.”

“Ahh. A loophole.” With a chuckle, I stepped inside and we moved up the stairs together. Trayton’s hand was warm in mine, and I struggled between mixed emotions as we touched. The guilt over not being honest about training. The fear over having faced him in combat. The thrill over holding his hand in a dark, secret place that
was ours to share. We moved into the small attic space. Once we were seated, I looked up at the stars, which were twinkling down at me from the crystalline ceiling. “What was it like,” I wondered aloud, “growing up the way you did.”

He shrugged and put his arm around my shoulders. As I nuzzled into him, he said, “Nothing out of the ordinary, I suppose. My father was always away, fighting in the war, and my mother was always taking trips to the front to be on call in case he needed her. I grew up with a variety of nannies until I turned thirteen—that’s when I came to Shadow Academy to study. What about you?”

I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to grow up without your parents around. With nannies talking care of you until you were old enough to be shipped off to some school. Picturing my parents doing something like that to me was an impossibility. “I grew up on the outskirts of a small Unskilled town. Every day my father hunted or fished, and every night my mother would sew or knit by the fireplace. I read tons of books, played in the brook by our house, and went to school with people my own age.”

Trayton’s attention was on me, as if every word that I’d uttered sounded to him like a fairy tale. “That sounds amazing.”

Sighing, I said, “It was. Until I received a letter from the headmaster, saying I had to come here.”

He tilted his head then, so that we were eye to eye. His words were a whisper. “Has it been so terrible, life at Shadow Academy?”

“I just miss my freedom.” Lifting my face, I found myself almost breathless at Trayton’s close proximity. “But if I’d never come here, I never would have met you.”

Then he leaned in and pressed his lips against mine. Our mouths melted together. Trayton pulled me closer and I winced as pain tore through my shoulder—pain that I’d almost forgotten, pain that he’d unwittingly been the cause of. We parted instantly and he furrowed his brow. “Are you all right?”

Rubbing at the muscles in my shoulder, I said, “I’m fine. Just pulled something while I was working in the rose gardens, I guess.”

The look in his eye said that he believed me. But I had to fight the urge to tell him that he shouldn’t.

T
he gate door opened and in front of me, Barrons filed out. I filed out with them, disguised as one of them and so nervous that I’d be found out that my hands were shaking. Darius had run through their maneuvers with me that morning, but I just knew I was going to step with the wrong foot at the wrong time, or something else so simple that it would give me away. Inside the wall, the Healers waited, along with several Master Healers. Headmaster Quill had decided that these maneuvers were so close to the school that it didn’t make much sense to risk the Healers’ lives by sending them out where Graplars had been spotted. He was probably right, but seeing the Healers left behind made me nervous for so many of the Barrons. It also made me think about how Trayton might be feeling. He hadn’t seen me waiting with the other Healers and had to question where I was. He had to wonder what I was doing that
was more important than waiting here to assist him, if he needed my help. I wondered if he felt afraid at all, or if he simply felt angry that I wasn’t here to see him off. I couldn’t see where he was standing, whether he was in front of me in the group somewhere or behind, but I could spy a flash of silver hair to my right and when I turned my head, Darius nodded at me, his jaw stern, his eyes sparkling, ready for the fight to come. A light breeze moved his hair and I wondered again why he never wore a face mask, or why no one insisted that he did. Whatever his reasons, I was certain that Darius would defend them to the end.

As I crossed through the door, a scent danced on the breeze, a foul odor that could only mean that death was near. Together, the Barrons and I turned and moved to the south, over the crest of a large hill, and then down into the valley on the other side. Their feet were soundless on the forest floor, but mine found every dead leaf, every twig. If any Graplars were in the vicinity, they’d know our location by my tromping. I was trying to keep quiet, but doing so made me fall behind, and the last thing I wanted while on maneuvers was to have a large distance between myself and Darius. He was, as much as I was loathe admitting it, my best defense if I got into any trouble I couldn’t handle.

My katana felt oddly heavy on my back, as if the saya were weighted, or perhaps pulling on me to stay still, to keep as far away from the world outside the wall as I
possibly could. I moved forward, staying close to Darius, and when he broke into a run, I followed, keeping his pace, even though running that fast made my lungs burn and my thighs ache. He moved ahead of me without so much as a change in his breathing, and I was grateful when his steps finally slowed and I could catch up. He and several other Barrons were standing at the apex of a small ridge, looking down on the other side. By the time I reached him, the smell had overwhelmed my senses. Something—or someone—was dead.

I didn’t want to see what or who was lying at the bottom of that ridge, but the Barrons were looking, so I had to look too. Planting the toes of my shoes in the earth, I climbed the ridge. But when I reached Darius’s side, determined to cast my eyes on the scene that had them all so alert, Darius grabbed me by the arm and turned me away from it. As we walked away, back down the hill, he muttered under his breath, “Another Healer. Definitely a Graplar. You don’t have to look at the body in order to convince them you’re a Barron.”

Shaking his hand from my shoulder and glancing around to be certain no one would hear me speak, I said, “What if I wanted to look? What if I wanted to see it?”

Darius looked me over for a long moment. Then he stepped back and looked back at the ridge. He waited, silently, but we both knew that I didn’t want to see the body. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle it, but I knew that once I saw it, I could never unsee it. After a long time,
he turned from the ridge and began moving south again. My shoulders sagging, I followed.

Barrons spread out through the woods around us, but none were ahead of Darius as he moved with certainty around this tree and that. Once we crested another small hill, we were joined by six others. Silently, alertly, we moved deeper and deeper in the forest as a team, and once we worked our way across a small creek, I saw where Darius was leading us. An enormous oak tree stood on the other side of the creek, its trunk marred with large claw marks, some of them fresh. Darius pointed at the tree. “It watches.”

He dropped his arm, gesturing to the creek that we had just crossed. “It drinks.”

The Barron to my left removed his mask, shaking his head. I was surprised to see that it was Trayton. He looked back over his shoulder, in the direction we had come from, and I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was thinking about the body of the Healer that they’d found. Under his breath, he spoke, his voice eerily calm. “It feeds.”