Page 21 of Malcroix Bones Academy (Bones and Shadow #1)

Inside The Iron Gates

We didn’t need a map to find the academy.

The idea was laughable once I understood the basic geography of the hidden city and the university at its center.

Malcroix Bones Academy took up the exact center of Bonescastle, as well as the valley where it lived.

All we had to do was walk roughly four blocks in any direction, and the school dominated our view, at least if we were looking in the right direction.

Walk five blocks away from the school from the square where we landed, and I could see the high walls looming over the buildings. Walk closer to the valley’s center from that same square, and we ran into those walls within four blocks.

The school grounds were vast, walled, magically shielded, and nestled in a relatively flat basin surrounded by low and high hills, which is where most of the city of Bonescastle lived.

Walking away from the academy in any direction meant the walls, and eventually the buildings inside those walls, grew visible due to the higher elevation.

Walk far enough, and one had a view of the entire city, with the walled campus forming a city-within-a-city at its center.

Malcroix Bones Academy was that center.

I wandered in and out of stores with Luc, Miranda, and Draken for hours after we left the tea shop.

We didn’t have to be at Eustacia Morwormer Hall, (which everyone called “Worm Hall” for short, according to Miranda, who read aloud from the orientation guidebook she received but I somehow didn’t), until seven o’clock that evening.

We needed to arrive on campus in time to find our assigned rooms and don uniforms and robes for the formal supper that accompanied the first assembly, but that left us around four hours to kill.

We’d all gotten house and room assignments with our last letters, along with preliminary schedules, which, in my case, had everything on it I’d requested, to my enormous relief.

Those last bundles also included magical maps that showed the location of every building, every classroom, every professor’s office, the library, every common area and dining service, every study center, lab, greenhouse, coffee shop, lecture hall, bridge, field, temple, garden, and magical experimentation area.

Better yet, the maps were spelled to belong to each of us personally, and updated according to wherever we needed to be on a given day.

The maps even came with alarms, and the ability to set timed warnings.

I quickly discovered I could also add things verbally to the map’s schedule, using a keyword I alone controlled, which meant the maps doubled as calendars.

Now, on my map, only Worm Hall glowed with color, along with my assigned room.

Both remained a cool blue until around five o’clock, when they turned a slightly less laid-back yellow.

According to the key, at six o’clock, they’d turn orange, then red at roughly twenty to seven, depending on how close the owner of the map might be to Worm Hall.

After this first evening, Miranda said, we’d primarily eat at our assigned college dining rooms, not at Worm Hall.

The school had seven colleges in total, but my letter hadn’t said how they were assigned.

Since I had no idea how many students attended Malcroix Bones, I also had no idea how large each college might be.

I’d been thrilled to discover I’d be living in the same building as Miranda, Luc, and Draken. Miranda and I were even on the same floor.

“They must house all the first years together,” Luc pointed out reasonably.

I frowned at my map. “But there are seven colleges, aren’t there? I would have thought it would be six, given that.”

“Apprenticeships, masters, doctorates… they probably make up the seventh,” Luc said.

“I imagine the classes get a bit smaller every year,” he added.

“Especially after the fourth. Our college likely changes every year we progress through the program. I was told academic clubs do more to sort students by areas of study than the colleges where we live.”

I nodded, and felt that excitement grip me again.

I’d lost it somewhere, in that odd encounter with the mage with the white-blond hair. The fact of seeing him there, existing in my current reality, unbalanced me for at least a few hours.

His realness completely threw me.

Him being an actual person, and a classmate, not purely a product of my distorted memories and nightmares, threw me.

Over the years, I’d often wondered if I’d made him up, maybe as a coping mechanism for the trauma of my childhood.

I’d wondered if he was the thing I remembered most clearly because I’d created him myself.

But he existed.

He was a real, bones and blood person.

Which meant he’d been there, the day my parents died. He’d been on the street, in the mouth of that Underground station, in Overworld.

I wondered what that could possibly mean.

I also wondered what that venom-tongued, spoiled and emotionally-stunted bigot would say if I told him he’d featured prominently in my dreams and nightmares for almost a decade.

That, in some ways, I felt like I knew him, because I was so intimately familiar with his face, his metallic eyes, and that deep-black flame and crystal that hovered over his head.

Had he really seen my parents die?

What had he been doing in Overworld at that age?

Did he recognize me?

He couldn’t have been there alone, not truly alone, could he?

He’d been young, maybe only a year or two older than me, which tracked with how he looked now.

Had his mother or father been one of the praecuri who killed my mum and dad?

Had the beings who killed my parents been praecuri at all, or was that just the story they’d used to cover up the real reason they’d been killed?

Even just thinking about it made my head hurt.

Trauma, I told myself. It’s trauma. Maybe even P.T.S.D. You’re having a minor panic attack from seeing him again… especially like that, so up close and personal, and, well… so utterly nasty in reality, compared to your dreams.

In my dreams, he’d never felt hostile.

In my dreams, he felt like an ally, even something like a friend. I’d never once thought he might have anything to do with my parents’ death.

Now that assumption felt painfully naive.

The authorities in Magique didn’t let Magicals just randomly visit Overworld, and likely wouldn’t allow children there at all.

I’d looked it up. You had to have a special permit, a visitation schedule filed, not to mention an official appointment, there and back, with a mirror that traveled to that world.

Apart from praecuri or an emergency situation that required a specific Magical’s presence, that meant advance notice, usually a few weeks.

It also meant a praecurus as escort.

I’d promised myself that in coming here, to Magique, I would find out what really happened to my parents.

I mean, I was realistic about it. I hadn’t thought I’d get anywhere with it until well after I graduated school.

The reality that someone was here, now, in the same academy as me, who might actually know what happened that day, stunned me.

How in the gods would I ever convince him to talk to me, though?

I couldn’t imagine him telling me anything willingly.

I’d have to find a way to bargain with him, or trade maybe. I couldn’t be stupid about it. I’d need to know infinitely more about him before I even thought about an approach.

Miranda said he was a good student, so he clearly wasn’t dumb (and more’s the pity, it would’ve been exponentially easier if he was).

He was rich. He was terrifyingly good at magical combat.

He was also an intensely racist, entitled, expensively-dressed pig, and clearly hated my guts.

Not to mention all of those bizarre sexual comments, which suggested he didn’t think much of women, or witches, in general.

He was disturbingly handsome.

I hated to admit that part, but it was true.

He’d scarcely looked real, he was so beautiful, which I wanted badly to say didn’t affect me, but I knew it absolutely had.

Usually a terrible personality erased any attraction I might feel for a pretty face, or a body that was positively distracting.

The fact that it hadn’t in his case made me uneasy.

It also made me wonder if my brain was broken.

Of course, that might have something to do with his magic.

He definitely had a lot of… well, something to him.

I might’ve known who he was for that reason alone, even if I hadn’t seen the dark flame and crystal hovering over his head. I remembered that vibration, that oddly charged, high-intensity feeling, even from all those years ago.

It came back to me in dreams.

Honestly, if anything, it had been more muted back then.

Maybe I’d been more muted?

Or was that the P.T.S.D. talking, too?

“Hey,” a gentle voice probed. “You alright?”

I looked up.

I’d totally forgotten I wasn’t walking down the street alone.

Draken strode by my side, and now he studied my face carefully, concern in his dark eyes.

Miranda was chatting to Luc on Draken’s other side, something about a book she’d found on binding spells and whether he thought those types of spells would work on inanimate objects.

She seemed almost obsessively concerned about keeping her new roommate from stealing her clothes.

Apparently, that had been a big problem at their boarding school in Zurich.

I focused on Draken.

I considered his question, considered lying, then chose to sidestep.

“You can call me Leda, you know,” I said, smiling faintly. “…Joran.”

“Didn’t want to presume anything… Leda.”