Page 34 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)
Chapter thirty-four
The Weak
The evening before the second assignment, Fern returned to the Mage Tower. She intended to stay up late to polish her notes and practise her incantation, and since the assignment would be quite demanding, she would need to be well-rested and well-fed.
Outside, an autumnal storm was breaking out, the violent wind tearing through the trees, rattling the windows and wailing through the chimneys. The ocean rose in colossal waves to slam into the cliffs below Carthane with such force that it shook the building. Rain slashed endlessly down from dark, distended clouds.
But the dining room, when Fern arrived there, was quiet, its blues and silvers dimmed and subdued. The cheer of the party a mere week ago had long faded.
Edmund Ferrow was filling his sister’s plate with food, cutting her meat for her and handing her his cup of wine so that she could take reluctant little sips. Emmeline, normally so indolent and careless, seemed withdrawn and sullen; her brother’s concern was palpable, infecting the rest of the room .
Dr Essouadi, in plain white robes with her hair loose on her shoulders, was sitting in conversation with Ravi Srivastav, their backs to the door, piles of books between them. They were working hard on this assignment, and Fern could not even look in their direction without her heart sinking to think of all their aggregated knowledge and talent.
Vasili Drei, Vittoria Orsini and Baudet were all absent, but Lautric sat spooning food into his mouth with the joyless energy of steam-powered machinery.
His eyes rose to meet Fern’s when she entered, and their gaze met for a second. His hair was pushed hastily back from his forehead, his sleeves were rolled up, and ink stained his long fingers. The bruising on his face was nothing more than a greenish smear around his eyes now, and the cut on his mouth was raised and pink, as though a thread of satin had been stitched across his lips.
Lautric said nothing. He dropped his gaze and resumed eating, and Fern’s stomach twisted. Part of her was glad that he made no attempt to draw her into conversation. But he was clearly avoiding her, and a heavy melancholy washed over her, the sensation that she was losing something she did not realise she had in the first place.
She swallowed the emotion back, filled her plate and sat down as far from Lautric as possible to eat as fast as she could. The food, if nothing else, was good, and Fern helped herself to generous helpings of gravy and buttered bread with her meal.
Her appetite was not shared by all at the table.
“You’ll never manage our spell if you don’t eat,” Edmund was murmuring to his sister .
“You do it, then,” Emmeline said with the acrimony of a spoiled adolescent. “I don’t care for spells. I’m an alchemist, not some circus conjurer. What art is there in reciting lines from old books to make pretty things appear then disappear?”
“The tower didn’t send us here for the fulfilment of our souls,” Edmund said.
Emmeline gave a dry laugh. “Everybody knows Santa Velia alchemists don’t have souls.”
Fern cringed in her seat. How could the twins speak thus in the company of others? Often, it seemed as though Edmund and Emmeline were in a tower of their own, not Santa Velia, but an invisible tower they carried everywhere with them. Anyone who wasn’t them was on the other side of the wall, as insignificant as a dog barking outside their battlements.
Edmund’s reaction to his sister’s words was to draw her to him by her shoulders, kissing her pallid forehead and speaking with his lips pressed to her skin.
“You have a soul, Emmy. It just lives within me.”
She laughed, soft and conceding, almost a sigh.
“You’re ridiculous. Don’t make me laugh.”
But as soon as he pulled away from her, she reached for her plate, picked at a small piece of meat with her fork and popped it in her mouth with a flourish.
“There, Teddy, anything for your happiness, anything at all.”
“ You are my happiness,“ Edmund said without a trace of insincerity, and handed her his wine.
The door to the dining room slammed open before Emmeline could reply. Rapha?l Baudet entered as though a storm had blown him in like debris. His golden hair was in disarray, a heavy flush bleeding into his cheeks. The top buttons of his shirt were open, his Abyssal cross gleaming over his chest like a stab wound bleeding gold.
“Vittoria,” he said, her name like a prayer searing off his tongue. His wild eyes searched the room, blue like sea holly, powdery and almost purple. “Ah, have you—have you seen Vittoria?”
He asked the question to no one at all, and perhaps everyone.
Fern, already startled, sat up in her chair, and her eyes, almost of their own volition, sought Lautric. He, too, had straightened in his chair, and his eyes met Fern’s. Their shared thought, the memory of the scream they’d heard, flashed between them like electricity.
“When was the last time you saw her?” Fern asked.
“Perhaps she’s resting,” said Dr Essouadi, her gravelly voice a calm influence on the tension that had suddenly descended upon the dining room. “I told her she would need more time to recover from her injury. Poison isn’t something one can simply shrug off.”
Emmeline and Edmund shared a look that seemed to suggest bleak amusement, but Fern’s eyes were drawn back to Baudet as he spoke.
“She seemed worried, anxious,” he said, his voice a tremor of worry. “She’s not been sleeping well since the attack. The abomination left its mark on her in more ways than one, I think, and she… She told me she wanted to leave—she told me she wanted to leave, but I told her she must stay.”
His eyes were wide in the horror of his own words. Fern had never seen the young man more undone, more distraught. And in his horror, she saw her own almost reflected, thinking of the night Josefa had spent in her bed, her fears murmured like confessions, Fern’s reassurance, which had been, ultimately, hollow and pointless.
“If she did not wish to stay, then why not let her go?” Edmund said. The gaze he lay upon Baudet was cool and unconcerned, a shocking contrast to the concern and affection he had shown his sister a mere moment ago. “We cannot all succeed. Let those of us who cannot withstand Carthane leave it.”
The muscles in Baudet’s jaw twitched, and his fists clenched at his sides when he turned to throw a look of pure hatred towards Edmund.
“Would you say the same thing, were it your sister who couldn’t withstand Carthane?”
Emmeline did not flutter so much as an eyelash at his words. She picked at a bowl of cherries and sipped her brother’s wine, undisturbed. As for Edmund, he reclined against his chair, waving a dismissive hand.
“My sister has withstood far worse things than this accursed library.”
“I wonder how your sister would withstand being cut apart by a Sumbral abomination,” Baudet ground out, “and how flippant you’d remain, Edmund, should you lose her.”
The bile in his tone suggested a threat rather than a supposition.
“It would take an extraordinary foe indeed, to rip my sister from me,” Edmund said, voice dripping arrogance.
The tension was mounting with every word the two men exchanged, and none of it was helping. Fern, who had promised herself she would not make the mistake of entangling herself with the other candidates, could not shake off the desperate wail she had heard in the Arboretum. It clung to her like a snake wrapping itself around her throat, until she could barely breathe.
She stood so brusquely her chair fell back, startling everyone in the room.
“We need to look for her,” she said. She did not need to raise her voice for everyone to hear her. The iron of command was in her tone, and everyone listened to her speak. “Josefa disappeared, and now she’s gone. We have no idea what’s happened to her—we cannot let the same thing happen to Vittoria. We need to search for her.”
The others nodded. All except Edmund, who shrugged.
“They probably both withdrew their candidacy,” he said. “They were the weakest of us all. We all knew it.”
“Edmund,” Lautric said softly, a warning.
“I know, Lautric, I know—courtesy is cheap and all that—but I’m only stating aloud what we all thought anyhow. Neither of them came here for the right reasons. The schoolteacher came here to beg for her father’s love. Orsini came here to escape her family’s control. Those were not good enough reasons. The Grand Archivists know it now and are embarrassed by their error of judgement, I should be too, were I them. So Vittoria and Josefa were ushered away, and now they’re gone, and we should all be working all the harder for it because every last one of us remaining wants this.”
Fern’s blood ran cold. The truth of Edmund’s words, heartless as they were, resonated within her. Carthane was the sum of every part of her life. It was the destination, the result, the answer.
Nothing would compel her to turn back, to give up.
Edmund stood as he spoke. He had shaken off the mantle of his artificial indolence, his easy, lazy arrogance. His green eyes blazed now, blazed like Santa Velia poison. His sister watched him as though she were beholding a young god casting free his disguise, her eyes wide with naked veneration.
“Your Vittoria,” Edmund said to Baudet, “wanted to escape an arranged marriage. That’s all. But Dr Essouadi?” The doctor watched him without expression, her hand still on the book she’d been discussing with Srivastav. “The tumour inside her grows with every minute we waste discussing this matter. She’s not come here to fail; she’s come here to live . Lautric?” He waved a hand in the direction of the tired young man, who was watching the scene unfold with utter sadness in his eyes. “His family has spent almost a century trying to pry open the doors to this place. Your nemesis, the self-worshipper? The Bloodspire is not known for having a gentle hand to those who fail its commands. The General? His Emperor ended a fifty-eight-year-old war to send him here. Do you think failure is a choice any of them will be allowed to make? And our quiet little librarian here?”
Fern, still reeling from the shock of learning about Dr Essouadi’s condition, almost did not realise he was referring to her until his eyes fell on her, the green flame of burning copper.
“She is the only Sumbra scholar amongst us: every last one of the Grand Archivists has read her work. Do you think she’s spent years studying cosmic abominations to settle for anything less than Carthane? As for my sister and I.” Edmund straightened himself. “One of you would have to kill us to dispose of us, because death itself will be preferable to what awaits us in Santa Velia should we fail here. So by all means”—he swept the candidates with a mocking gaze—“send out a search party for the heiress. Search the entirety of Carthane if you would. But my sister and I will do what we came here to do: secure our positions.”
He extended his hand to his sister without even looking, knowing she would take it, which she did. Emmeline rose, graceful as a conjured angel, and the two departed, leaving a silence hanging over the room as heavy and sharp as the poised, gleaming blade of a guillotine.