The Protection of Ren Crown (45 page)

A person walked up next to my chair and my gaze rose to meet eyes exactly that remembered shade of ultramarine.

I jerked, tearing off the nail.

“May I sit here?” He indicated the seat next to me.

“Uh...” I automatically looked at the prime combat table on the first tier. Half of the hungover mages there were staring directly at me. And at my table, Mike's fork had stopped halfway to his mouth and Will looked blank. “Sure?” I said.

Dare sat easily and leaned back in the chair with his hands tucked loosely in his pockets, the picture of casual ease. He looked at Mike and Will, cataloged both, then looked back to me.

“Er, so, how are things?” I asked, abandoning my plate of food, having no clue how to deal with this new situation. It was one thing to speak at the party, or while patrolling campus. But to talk or spend time together in the cafeteria was completely new and weird. “Not too exhausted from yesterday?”

The day after the competition in which he had obliterated the school's best fighters in mass combat...and he looked as if he was in the prime of health, flush with healthy color.

“Combat mages live for battle. It becomes invigorating instead of exhausting, didn't you know?” There was that same hint of shared amusement in his eyes that there had been at the party.

“Feeling vigorous are you?” The words emerged in a far more embarrassing fashion than intended. “Ugh. Too much sleep.”

His smile was easy, his eyes amused. Wow, it was warm in here. I heard a clatter at a table in his line of sight behind me, and at least one more clatter a few tables over.

“Your schedule today is oddly full for a Saturday,” he said.

The Troop would arrive Monday and I could read between the lines. I took a sip from my water glass, my gaze not leaving his. “You are going to make my life hell today and tomorrow, aren't you?”

“Yes, I am,” he said with relish. He tipped his head back, along with his chair. He was still smiling. “But there are a few conspicuous black holes in your weekend schedule labeled with interesting nonsense. What are you plotting?”

“Oh, you know, nonsense.” I nervously grabbed my pencil at the side of my plate and twirled it on the tray while trying not to think of Constantine, Will, and the leash we would be working on during a lot of those black holes in my calendar. I was wishing, not for the first time, that I hadn't given Dare access to my personal calendar. He had had my class schedule from the beginning, but had run roughshod over my private appointments until I'd given him access to my planner.

Thank God, that like most of my personal documents, my appointments were completely “written” in doodles. Every person had a symbol and each project did as well. It provided an unintentional code that served me quite well in the magic world where information was shared so easily between mages.

Will and Mike had ribbed me mercilessly that the doodles only made sense to me—but it would be a mistake to forget how quickly Dare absorbed and analyzed information then converted it to his advantage.

While I tended to gravitate to people with brilliant minds, Dare's was brilliantly
dangerous.
There were a hundred different things combat mages had to take into account when fighting, and while I found watching their fluid and dynamic strategies fascinating, I tended to forget that I, too, was prey.

He let my “nonsense” response go, but continued the small talk, as if this sort of happening occurred every day—his sitting casually with me, answering insubstantial questions about his day, and asking me about the events of my day in return.

Finally, I couldn't take the deliberate informality any longer. “Why are you actually here?” I asked.

Dare didn't even pretend to misunderstand. “Without looking, tell me what is happening on Tier Three.”

My gaze slid to Tier Three automatically and only a firm thump of his booted foot against mine made me refocus on him instead.

I pushed my tray to the middle of the table, opened my sketch pad and drew a quick, jerky sketch of the room. Flexing my fingers, I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and focused on the threads of magic in the room. The muse-controlled tables were emitting their naturally high beams of calming and focusing energies, but a high concentration from each was extending downward.
Toward whatever was happening on Tier Three?

I closed my eyes and followed the magic, letting my pencil line the page.

Shouts interrupted my trance and my eyes opened.

I stared at the picture I had drawn. It was crude, but clearly showed a food fight in progress. I looked, automatically, down at the actual disturbance and saw the first pie as it was thrown. A lemon meringue pie that was already drawn on my page.

“Magic gives warnings and yields intentions.” He tapped the side of his head. “You just have to listen.”

Insight bloomed like a greedy flower finally exposed to sunlight. “That is why you sit with your back to the room,” I whispered.

And why he hadn't even looked up during Freespar.

He smiled and unfolded himself from the chair. “Draw what we are doing at the combat table in five minutes. If you look, I'll make you run combat drills for two hours.”

Wide-eyed, I stared. “
What?
” He would too. Contract magic put me under his authority when we entered any session deemed “training.”

His smile edged toward a smirk. “I'll know if you cheat. Don't disappoint.” He walked up the steps nearest us, his stride casual.

I cast a glance around me and saw a number of people who normally never looked at our table twice, staring at me keenly. Widening my gaze…
Everyone
I looked at was staring back.

Even Mike and Will were staring at me. Awe mixed with alarm in their expressions.

“You were born during an unlucky storm.” Mike shook his head, finally returning to eating. “I have yet to figure out how to stop the thunder and save you from it.”

Olivia's tray clinked next to me. “Okay. We need to make quick work of this. What spell did you accidentally cast last night at the party?” She had her notepad out and was flipping pages before her butt hit the chair. “It is going to take me all day to work out a defense.”

“I didn't cast a spell.”

Olivia's gaze dissected me. “You were working with him or talking to him. You happened to find something interesting and thought about hanging out, and—”

“No! I...” I sort of had thought something along those lines last night, but there had been no magic involved, of that I was certain. “No, that isn't—”

But Olivia was already nodding and making a note, as if I'd confirmed her accusation.

“Olivia! He is
quizzing
me. Assignment-related. I didn't do anything,” I said, looking around me. People were still staring. “Why is everyone
staring
?”

“Because Axer Dare never sits anywhere else in the cafeteria,” she said calmly. “Even for thirty seconds of time.”

“Never?” I asked incredulously.

“Never.”

“That's...” The word “stupid” hung on my lips. But then I thought about Freespar and sitting with his back to the room. I looked at the combat table, and the relation of it to everything else in the room. If he sat in the same position each day...and the general population sat in similar areas, and whatever magics the officials pumped through the system came from the same sources, Dare would have a general blueprint to know what was happening everywhere fairly easily. He'd only have to work out small differences, breaking the knowledge into smaller chunks each time, honing the entire process each time he did it.

Like a musician or conductor in the midst of an orchestra, instantly able to identify each of the individual instruments playing around him because he already knew their relative locations. “That's
brilliant
.”

I looked down at my sketch pad, checked the time, and turned to a blank page. I had one minute. Less than a minute now. I took a deep breath, bringing the streams into focus.

“Are you paying attention to me?” Olivia demanded.

“
Shhh,”
I whispered.

Olivia responded in an outraged tone to that and I could hear Will and Mike responding in my defense, but I didn't pay attention to the words. I allowed the streams to permeate.

The muse tables were steady beams of bright eucalyptus. The gamers with Saf and Trick were a competing mix of jasper and jonquil. The scientists were a strong cerulean. An unidentified table between us produced a dark, steady claret. The rest of the tables produced muted, muddied colors, less distinguishable and not as strong—the members weren’t working together toward any one goal.

The combat table was swirling opal, crystal, and jet.

I picked each shade apart in my mind, referencing my memorized warding books, the wards I had connected to in the vault, and the ward gallery in the Library of Alexandria. I unfurled the senses of each, and as I did, I let my pencil interpret and deliver. Olivia, Will, and Mike were furiously speaking around me, but I remained steady, thinking of the hues and the shading and how they flickered or beat.

Olivia elbowed me. “Your
partner
is trying to get your attention,” she said.

Dare was motioning that my time was up.

I looked down at my drawing. Sketched figures all had their fingers on the table, bridging magic into an object in the center. The feel of the magic had made me draw the object as round.
A protection piece of some kind?
No, the magic hadn't felt protective.
Draining
. There in the swirls at the edges of their hands—the magic was flowing out of the object and toward them, not in.

I looked at the rest of the sketch. The shadows were strangely long. I looked around me, but the shadows were the normal size for the time of day. I had drawn them longer in the sketch.
Symbolism?

“What is it?” Olivia asked, looking at the drawing. She still had her pen poised above her pad, but the label at the top of the sheet no longer read as “Ren's Defense.” Instead it said “Security Measures.”

“I...don't know.”

Dare was waiting for me outside the cafeteria when I left. I tried to ignore all of the gazes watching me while I handed him the drawing, then asked the same question Olivia had asked me. “What is it?” I pointed to the object that was the main subject of the drawing.

“That would be telling.” He carefully put the sketch in his bag, looking darkly satisfied.

“Why don't you tell me then?” I asked more patiently than I felt.

“Because telling you is not the same as having you work it out on your own.” He looked at me calmly. “You solve problems and incorporate information better when you work it out on your own, thereby making it a keen subconscious process.”

“I...” I stared at him. That was absolutely true. “How...?”

“We are connected, isn't that what you said weeks ago?” His smile was suddenly edged. I could take any manner of guesses on what he was hinting at and risk being horribly wrong. So I said nothing and followed him past the flagpoles that ringed Top Circle.

Gazes, some old, many new, followed us from every direction for most of the afternoon as we traversed campus. The sun dropped from the sky as Dare flattened me repeatedly in the simulation rooms.

And I still didn't know what the drawing meant.

~*~

That evening in his workroom, Constantine stared at me with a particularly dissecting expression as he, Will, and I worked for an hour on the leech.

When only the chemical base remained on the night's list of tasks, Will left. Ten minutes passed with Constantine practically
burning
to say something as I stirred the ingredients that would eventually form the base of our design.

Finally, I mentally projected a “what?” question in Constantine's direction, too tired to ask it aloud.

“I heard you had lunch with Alexander Dare.”

I put my free hand to my forehead. “Not you too.” I had heard it nonstop at dinner. “We are working together to secure campus. He's a completely crazy person about it. That's it.”

Constantine's expression was unreadable as he wrapped his black ribbon around a finger. “You sound stressed rather than joyful.”

“That's because I don't want to disappoint him.”

His ribbon started wrapping faster. “You care so much what he thinks?”

“It's...complicated.”

“Uncomplicate it.”

“He saved me once.”

A sneer pulled the corners of his mouth. “He saves everyone. Nothing special in that.”

“I know. But the circumstances were...abnormal.” I didn't know why I was telling Constantine this, but the words kept coming. “And I can never thank him enough,” I whispered.

“You saved him. You died in his place.” His eyes pinched. “Your slate should be so clean it squeaks.”

I wasn't surprised Constantine would know about what had happened the second time I'd died. He was as likely to have been standing there drinking a martini and watching everyone burn as to have heard it from someone afterward.

But my slate would never be clean, and I couldn't explain that to Constantine. The explanation wouldn't change his opinion. Constantine dealt with a series of debts in a ledger in his mind. One wiped out another evenly, and personal feelings rarely entered in.

“It wasn't the same. The debts don't even out,” I said.

Constantine said nothing, he just kept wrapping the ribbon. He finally uncurled from his position and took the rod from me, stirring the concoction with a firm hand until it started to boil. “You make it entirely too easy to take advantage of you, Crown.”

“Yeah, yeah. What is the next step?”

“Binding you as a slave?”

“Very funny.”

“Add the currant.” He pointed at a jar of crushed red flakes. “Ten milliliters should do it. Focus on caged power that pops.” He popped his fingers in an upward direction.

“You sure you don't want to add the magic instead?”

“No. My magic is far more sly. It wouldn't be quite as show-stopping for this. You are a starburst.”

“You say the sweetest things.” I focused on magic contained inside a ten-milliliter pyramid, caged and pushing. I abruptly forced it out and into the mixture.