"The Academy: 2" by Emilie Aurora Finn

FOUR

“I’ll miss you, you know.”

The words surprised both girls as they left Veronica’s lips. Then Tessa laughed. “You mean you will miss me nearly as much as you would a toothache,” she chuckled, giving her violet overdress a last tug and sweeping her traveling cloak from her bed. “You and your friends don’t associate with nobles, and never have. Look at the way you dropped Harry Reynold as soon as you learned who he was. And now you will have this room all to yourself.”

“Harry lied to us!” Veronica protested, stung. “And I certainly don’t see any nobles falling over themselves to associate with us!”

“Well, I suppose that’s for true,” Tessa admitted. “Though I think you are well-bred and sophisticated enough to have stood a chance, if it had not been for your choice of company. Not that I think your choice was wrong, mind,” the Young Lady continued hastily, as Veronica glared at her, “but it has had the effect of putting most of your peers and superiors off.”

Veronica nodded, mollified. “Yes, I know that,” she said. “And I am thankful that you were never ashamed to be associated with me. And I will miss you,” she added. “This room is too large for a single, lonely person.”

Tessa laughed again, and surveyed the bright, warm room with a fond expression. “Well, I cannot deny that I will miss this old place,” she said. “I did want to stay and graduate with the rest of you. Mother says there is danger for me here, with all the unrest among the peasants. I told her that I never leave the Castle Grounds, but I do not think she believed me.”

Veronica snorted lightly. “She should have asked any one of the Professors or your fellow students. You’ve a reputation for following regulations.”

“I know. I wish she had. And frankly, I cannot see that the danger to me here is so much greater than the danger facing our lands at home. After all, if—the Godde forbid—the Eastern Woods were ever to fall, our lands and Reynold’s are very next in line. If war were to come to us, I should think Mother would like to know that her heir was safe in the Capitol.”

Veronica shook her head. “Sometimes mothers simply aren’t rational,” she returned with a sigh.

Tessa rolled her eyes in obvious agreement, but before she could reply, a young manservant approached her. “Young Milady, we must hasten,” he told her.

“Yes, of course.” Tessa plucked her gloves from the empty dresser. The servant shouldered her last remaining trunk and waited, sagging under its weight, for her to precede him out the door.

“Good bye,” Veronica said.

“Good bye.” And with a swirl of scarlet wool, Young Lady Tessa of Kait left the room.

*          *           *

Later, Veronica stood in the dormitory entry hall, shivering as she mentally ticked off rooms in her head. North Hall, East Hall… Yes, she had checked them all, and everyone was in bed with their lights out. She wouldn’t have to report any curfew violations this night, thank the Godde. She shivered again in the chill air and turned to go back to her own room where a fire burned bright and warm, but the moonlight shining through the hall window caught her eye and she stepped to the door and slipped outside instead.

It was very quiet. Fresh snow blanketed the Ceremonial Lawn before her and muffled even the sound of the wind that brushed through the bare branches of the trees, and whistled softly around the dormitory chimney. A full moon shimmered like a jewel in the velvet black sky, and the snow its light fell on glittered with breathtaking beauty. Veronica sighed as she drank in the lovely view, and the warm air issued from her mouth in a cloud of steam.

A single, dim yellow light still shone in a window on the top story of the dormitory building, and Veronica found herself staring up at it, her eyes stinging, either from the cold or something else. Her friends were still awake. Perhaps Karen hadn’t finished her inspection yet.

Veronica smiled a bit sadly. Karen was spending nearly all her free time now trying to cram enough geometry into Veronica’s head for her friend to pass her final examination with the high marks necessary for admission to the Medical Division of the University. They still communicated ideas to one another without words and finished each other’s sentences. There had been no awkwardness after that day by the lake, only a tacit agreement not to refer to it again by word or action. And yet, there was a distance between them that Veronica had never felt before, even in the very beginning, when Karen had been frightened of the students of a higher social class and suspicious of Veronica’s intentions in trying to be her friend. It was as if Karen was retreating deliberately into some place inside herself that Veronica couldn’t even see, much less follow her to, and it grieved her to think that her impulsive action may have spoiled their friendship.

The soft scrunch of footfalls sounded in the snow somewhere behind her and to her left, and Veronica turned quickly. It would be unfortunate, to say the least, to be caught abusing her position as Hall Monitor during her last month at the Academy. The figure in the middle of the lawn seemed not to see her, however. Though it looked upwards, there was a droop to its shoulders that spoke of a profound weariness, and it moved towards her aimlessly, as if deep in thought. Then, as the figure came nearer, the moonlight fell, first on the scarlet cloak, and then on the face. Even half-shadowed by the hood, Veronica recognized the straight, patrician nose and the clean line of the jaw.

“Hello, friend,” she called softly, and the figure started. She smiled wryly. She should have known from the first. They had been gazing up at the same window.

“Veronica?” As he reached her side, Harry pushed the hood back from his face to look questioningly into her eyes. “I thought you weren’t speaking to me.”

Veronica smiled faintly. “So did I.”

“What are you doing out here? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I could ask you the same question. You look worn out.”

He snorted. “Council meeting. We’ve a fifteen minute break and then I have to be back in the Castle parroting Father’s stupid, wishy-washy opinions to a bunch of royalists who aren’t listening anyway.”

Veronica laughed. “You haven’t changed a bit!”

“You expected me to?” The question was defensive.

“No,” Veronica said quickly, resting a placating hand on his wool-covered arm. “No, of course not.”

“How is Lori?” he asked, breaking a moment’s awkward silence. “And Karen?”

“They’re all right,” she shivered as a bitterly cold gust of wind swept around them and reconsidered her answer. “Actually, no—I don’t really know.”

He took off his cloak and laid it over her shoulders. The simple gesture nearly made her cry.

“I’m worried about them,” she continued, pulling the cloak around her more tightly and looking up into his clear, grey eyes. “We’re just as much friends as ever, but even so they both seem to be withdrawing from everyone and everything around them. Even me. It’s as if I can be as close to them as before and yet never really touch them. I wish I knew what is wrong.”

Harry sighed. “I wish I could help.”

“So do I.”

The light on the seventh floor winked out, and they stood silently for a little while, staring at the black space where it had been. Then Harry turned to her and spoke again.

“Listen, I must go, but since I’ve run into you, I had better give you this.” He reached into his tunic pocket and drew out a brass key. “It’s the one Lori pinched from Madam Helen’s room just after Meladrin. You had better tell her to put it back. The Godde forgive us if there were ever a real fire and Madam Helen couldn’t get to the tower to sound the alarm.”

Veronica nodded and started to take the key, but then suddenly stopped and pushed it back into his hand. “No, I’ll tell you what let’s do,” she said quickly, closing his fingers around it. “When is your next Council meeting?”

“Next week,” he answered, giving her a puzzled glance.

“Do you always get breaks?”

“Unless there’s an emergency.”

“Then here’s what I suggest you do…”

*            *             *

Kari, if anything goes awry tonight, proceed as formally instructed. Whatever you do, do not use common sense. Better not show this to Lori, or she’ll eat me alive later. Roni.

“What in destruction—”

Karen tucked the hand holding the note under her pillow as Lori glanced over at her. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I thought I saw another of those spiders, but it was just a shadow. Ready for lights out?”

Lori nodded. “If you are.”

Karen blew out the candle and tucked her thin blanket up around her chin. She lay for a long time in the dark, staring up at the square patch of light thrown onto the ceiling by the moon shining in the window. Long enough for Lori’s breathing to even out and deepen, and for the light to move from the edge of the ceiling near the wall, out over the middle of the floor. But when the alarm rang, she was startled out of sleep like everyone else.

“Oh my Godde, Kari, a real fire!” Lori’s face was ghostly pale in the darkness of their room. Karen fumbled with the fire-striker and finally succeeded in lighting her candle despite her trembling fingers. “Do you suppose we can at least get our floor down the back staircase? We’ll never get out the front!”

“No! Wait!” Karen leaped up and grabbed her, stopping her short in her mad dash to the door. “It can’t be a real fire! Harry has the key to the alarm tower!” With that, she rushed past her gaping friend into the halls. Students were scurrying every which way, crying out and tripping over one another in their confusion. Karen held her candle as far above her head as she could and yelled, “This way! Down the main stairs! Follow me!”

It was a disaster. As soon as they heard the words ‘main stairs,’ the panicked students stampeded towards them. Karen tripped as the wave of fear-maddened bodies hit her, and fell to the floor, vainly shielding her head against the onslaught of feet. Her candle bounced once or twice on the wooden floor and then thankfully went out before it could start a real fire, throwing them into utter darkness.

When Karen finally limped after them to the main staircase, feeling her way along the wall and following the sound of a hundred and fifty girls screaming at the tops of their lungs, she found it blocked almost to the top. Below her people were yelling and shoving each other as they tried to force their way out of side corridors onto the crammed stairs.

Lori stood at the top of the staircase, staring down at the melee, her face a mask of terror. “Kari, we have to stop this!” she yelled urgently over the hubbub. “Someone’s going to get hurt!”

Karen’s eyes widened as she suddenly saw what Lori was seeing. They had started a riot.

“Go get your trumpet!” she hollered back.

“What? What for?”

“Just do it already! Go!”

Lori went. Screams of terror were already turning to yells of rage, and Karen leaned against the wall, shaking violently.

“Now what?” Lori’s voice was at her elbow.

“Blow the loudest note you can for as long as you can. Get their attention!”

The blast of sound almost physically drove Karen back, and she slammed into the wall on the opposite side of the staircase. When Lori’s breath gave out, silence fell.

“All right!” Karen shouted with all her might into the sudden quiet. “Everyone above the third floor turn around and come back up the stairs. There’s another way down. Follow me, but slowly! What use escaping the fire, wherever it is, if we kill each other?”

“I don’t smell smoke,” one frightened voice behind her said as Karen turned and walked hurriedly down the East Hall toward the back staircase.

“Maybe it’s a false alarm,” Lori suggested, her voice shaking. “Let’s not panic about it, okay? Let’s concentrate on getting out of here in one piece.”

*            *            *

“That,” said Veronica in a deeply shaken voice, “was a really, really bad idea.”

“But this,” Lori gestured with her trumpet, and nodded shakily at Karen, “was a really, really good idea.”

Karen nodded carefully, as if her head hurt. A purple ring was beginning to form under her right eye, and she held a piece of cloth ripped off of Veronica’s nightgown to her bleeding nose. “It worked, anyway,” she said thickly.

The three friends stood clustered tightly together in a corner of the Lawn near Harkin’s Fountain. The other girls stood nearby in equally tight clusters, shivering, as a fire brigade from the City searched through the dormitory. Twenty yards to their right, a red-faced Madam Helen was explaining to Headmaster Whitson at the top of her voice that no, she had not rung the alarm bell, and no, she had no idea how long the key had been missing, or who had taken it. Two students with broken ribs, and one with a broken arm, had been carried out of the building by their friends and roommates and taken to the City Hospital for treatment.

“But all four of us,” Karen continued, searching vainly for a dry spot on her piece of flannel, “are as much idiots as we ever accused Professor Patterson of being.”

No one, not even Lori, disagreed with her.

FIVE

In retrospect, the special project wasn’t quite the disaster it had seemed that night, though the three injured girls might have disagreed with that assessment. Caroline, the one with the broken arm, had lost the use of her writing hand and had to dictate her entire final examination to a scribe from the City guild in the privacy of a deserted classroom. The other two girls sat their final examinations together in the Academy Infirmary, nursing their broken ribs. Karen sported a black eye for the remainder of the term, and Lori hobbled around for a few weeks with a sprained ankle, but these injuries hardly seemed to them worth mentioning.

The culprits remained uncaught by the school administration, and even their fellow students, though they enjoyed speculating about the mysterious prankster, never stumbled on the truth. Karen overheard Headmaster Whitson confirming to a representative of the Royal Council that the only student reported out past curfew that night was Young Lord Reynold, and he had been attending a Council meeting himself, and could scarcely have had any part in the prank.

Karen and Lori were both given Special Awards for their presence of mind during the crisis. Neither felt they particularly deserved them, given the full set of circumstances, and they hid the awards away in their trunks as soon as the ceremony was over.

Their real triumph came when Harry reported through Veronica that Headmaster Whitson had submitted to Queen and Council a proposal for a revised emergency procedure which he had found on his desk the morning following the crisis. The handwriting had been checked against samples of each student’s, he had told the Council, and had matched none of them. (Lori grinned at this. She was ambidextrous, and the neat, right-handed printing with which she had copied Karen and Veronica’s document was nothing like the left-handed scrawl her teachers had on file.)

The Council had very quickly seen the merits of the revised procedure and after very little deliberation they had unanimously adopted it. However, at the end of their discussion, the Queen had remarked somewhat irritably that if whichever student had seen the need for this had exercised the same forethought in planning the prank that she or he had in drafting the procedure, she would feel much more confident about the future of the country.  Harry had resisted the urge to hang his head guiltily and forced himself to chuckle along with the rest of the Council. (Veronica, in reporting this to the others, said she hoped he hadn’t blushed and given himself away. Lori had smiled in spite of herself.) New copies of the procedure were distributed to the Floor Monitors the next day, effective immediately.

Thus it was against this background feeling of accomplishment, though not complete satisfaction, that Karen and Veronica approached the last day of their final year at the Academy. They had both passed their examinations with flying colors. Karen headed the class, as expected, and Veronica’s marks were a good deal higher than they needed to be to request entrance to the Medical Division, even in geometry.

The day before graduation was a school holiday that most students spent with their parents. Karen’s parents, of course, could not leave their farm during spring planting, and Veronica said her parents would not arrive in the City until the next morning, though she offered no explanation for this lapse on the part of parents who were by all accounts caring, considerate people who adored their youngest daughter.

Faced with an unexpected—though not unhoped-for—free day, the girls did something they had often longed to do, and attended a showing of Sir Robert Lloyd’s newest play at the Royal Theatre. Karen had saved every cent she could towards such a treat, and had reluctantly allowed Veronica to make up what she did not have so that both girls could sit on the main floor, rather than in the standing room section at the back of the upper balcony. Veronica had not had enough money to treat Lori, who could not have saved money herself if her life were at stake, so, with many misgivings, the girls left their friend behind at the school, sitting rather sullenly on her bed sniffing about the ridiculousness of Karen’s paying her hard-earned money into the Queen’s over-full coffers.

The play was everything they had wished it to be, and Karen drank in the color and vitality of each scene with rapture. Veronica had seen such spectacles before, in the Manor City of the Western Woods that was her home, and though this was a particularly good play, she found herself more often staring at the transfigured face of her friend than at the stage before them.

“Did you have a good time?” she asked quietly as they shrugged into their cloaks in the lobby afterwards.

Karen’s eyes sparkled as if they still reflected the brilliance of the stage. “Yes,” she said. “It was breathtaking. Thank you, Roni. Standing up in the back wouldn’t have been the same.”

Veronica shook her head. “No, it wouldn’t, but don’t thank me, because seeing it up front without you would have been worse.”

Karen laughed, heartily and without restraint for the first time in months, and Veronica reveled in the sound. Then both girls gasped and pulled their cloaks tighter as they followed another party out the door into the wind and freezing spring rain.

Veronica peered up at the Castle Tower and yelped a little. “We must hurry! It’s nearly midnight!”

They were both running before the entire sentence left Veronica’s lips. With a curfew extended by two full hours, they had been sure they would arrive back in plenty of time, but the play must have been longer than it had seemed. If they didn’t hurry, they would be locked out of the dormitory on their last night at the Academy.

*             *              *

“Oh, Godde, we’re soaked!” Karen’s words were nearly drowned out by laughter as she caught Veronica’s hand to prevent her slipping in the mud that was all that seemed to be left of the path to the dormitory door.

“And filthy, and I am exhausted!” Veronica agreed, giggling uncontrollably and resting her chin on Karen’s shoulder. Their hurry to get back before curfew had turned into a race that had led them finally, laughing and shivering, to the shelter of the door stoop outside the Academy dormitory.

“Can we get in?” Veronica asked, her breath warm on Karen’s cold, damp cheek. “We’ll freeze if we have to stay outside all night, not to mention getting expelled two days before graduation.”

“It shouldn’t be after curfew. After all that running, it had better blasted well not be—well, there’s only one way to find out.” Karen stood straighter, so that Veronica’s chin slipped off her shoulder. Veronica stepped a little away as Karen grasped the door handle firmly and pulled. It swung open easily.

“Oh thank the Godde,” Veronica murmured. “Come on, let’s go get something dry and warm on.”

“Come on?” Karen raised one eyebrow in question. “My room is up there, yours is over there.”

Veronica gifted her best friend with a level stare. “And you do not have anything dry and warm to put on, and you know it. Now we can stand here arguing for fifteen minutes and then you can come with me and let me lend you something, or you can come now.”

Karen let out a sigh that was half protest, half resigned acceptance. “Veronica…”

“By all means, let’s stand here waiting for a professor to come along and send us to bed, then,” Veronica said impatiently around her chattering teeth. “Karen, we are both really, really cold, and I am not sending you up to that ice house of a seventh floor room so you can catch your death. Come dry off and warm up. Now.”

Aware that her teeth, too, were beginning to chatter, Karen reluctantly allowed herself to be taken firmly by the wrist and led down the hall to Veronica’s warm, first-floor bedroom. The rational, logical part of Karen’s mind knew that it would cost her friend nothing to lend her a nightdress, and that part of the reason she wanted Karen to come to her room was simply for her company. It was the unacknowledged, raw place deep inside her that protested when her friend tried to do her favors. The tiny cubby of a room away up on the seventh floor always reminded Karen that she was a peasant, and though Veronica had always treated her absolutely as an equal, others had not been, and would not be, so kind. She hated being reminded that it was kindness on Veronica’s part that made their friendship possible—that the two young women would never, ever truly be equals.

 “Karen?” Karen started out of her self-pity to find Veronica standing in front of her, holding out a nightgown. “What is it?”

Karen shook her head, impatient with herself for letting these stupid thoughts intrude on the rapidly dwindling time she had left with her best friend. “Nothing,” she said quickly, taking the nightgown from Veronica’s outstretched hand and turning away as she began to undo the lacings of her soaked and recalcitrant outer tunic. She missed seeing Veronica’s skeptical look.

The girls stripped quickly and struggled into the dry nightgowns, then curled up on the large, four-poster bed, sitting side-by-side with their backs against the headboard. Veronica pulled her down comforter around their still shaking shoulders and up to their chins.

“I hope we don’t catch cold for graduation,” she said, scooting closer to Karen.

Karen shuddered involuntarily. In Lanoth, ‘catching cold’ frequently resulted in pneumonia and death. She knew the danger of that was practically nonexistent here in Veronica’s warm room in the City, with an infirmary down the hall and a hospital two streets over, but the fear instilled in her in her earliest childhood lingered.

“Karen, are you okay?” Veronica’s voice was anxious. Karen looked at her quickly. Her friend’s keen brown eyes, two inches from her face, stared at her intently. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Won’t you talk to me?”

Karen lowered her gaze and rested her forehead against her knees, which she had clasped to her chest. She shook her head, and tried to force the word, “Nothing,” from her constricted throat, but no sound came out. “I—” she tried again, but stopped, horrified to find that she was crying.

“Kari—” Veronica’s warm voice was almost scared, and the arm she wrapped around Karen’s shoulders was hesitant. “Kari, don’t. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not you!” Karen said raggedly, forgetting about trying to hide her tears in her anxiety to remove the self-reproach from Veronica’s voice. “You—you’re wonderful. You’re my best friend in the world, I just—” She stopped, uncertain how to continue, or how much to say.

Veronica’s only response was to wrap both arms around her and hug her tightly, as if to squeeze the last bit of cold from her body. “Most of the time I know that,” she said quietly, “but sometimes you’re so withdrawn I can’t be sure.”

Some of the tension that knotted Karen’s shoulders seemed to ease away along with the cold and she leaned her head against Veronica’s shoulder and concentrated on subduing her tears enough to free her voice. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, in a small voice that still shook slightly. “It’s not—easy for me to talk, Roni. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to. I just—Words come so easily to you and Lori and Harry. I—I can’t ever seem to find the right ones when I want them—or when I think I do they don’t mean what I meant to say—or I realize that I don’t  mean what I thought I meant—and no one wants to listen to someone all upset stammering like this. It’s painful.”

“The only thing about it that I find painful is the agony you seem to feel,” Veronica’s lips formed the words against the top of Karen’s head, muffled by her hair. “But it’s less painful for me when you share it, even when you stammer. Will you try?”

Karen choked on another sob, but nodded her head.

“You won’t ever let me give you things. Why is that?” It felt as if a barrier had broken between them, allowing them to voice things that had been tacitly avoided throughout their entire friendship.

“I—” Karen’s throat seized up. She struggled to force words through it anyway. It was important, suddenly, that Veronica not think she was trying to avoid answering.

Something in Veronica’s body shifted slightly, and the new gentleness in her embrace nearly took Karen’s breath away. “Slowly,” she whispered reassuringly. “I’ve not got any urgent appointments.”

Karen nodded again, and took a deep, shaky breath. “Life is—not easy—for us,” she said at last, very quietly, so that Veronica had to strain to hear, close as she was. “Even here. Lori—Lori deals with it by being angry. By making those funny, malicious comments about the nobility. By all her plots and schemes to amuse us at their expense. By throwing her every thought out there for anyone to see. She—covers up her pain that way.” The words were flowing more easily now, though she still struggled to find the right ones, aware of Veronica’s tentative sympathy, but also acutely aware of her puzzlement at the direction of the conversation.

“I can’t—do that. I can be angry at certain people—Lady Kaitlin, for instance—but I cannot blame the nobility as a class for my fortune in life, however undesirable.” Now she sounded like a stuffy textbook. Making an effort to speak more naturally, she continued, “After all—after all, like Harry said to me that while ago, they didn’t chose to be born noble any more than I chose to be born a—peasant.”

“But you are not a peasant,” Veronica said hesitantly. “Not anymore, I mean. Now you’ve an education, you’re a lower professional, are you not?”

Karen snorted in gentle derision. “But at such a price, Veronica. I’ve given away the rest of my life for one small taste of a freedom I will never again be free to enjoy. I sold my future to pay for this education.”

“You mean, because you have to go back and teach? But I thought you wanted to.” Veronica drew away just enough to try to look into Karen’s face, and Karen obliged by lifting her head to meet her friend’s eyes. “You’ve always said that being the village teacher has been your one life’s dream since you were five.”

Karen felt an utter weariness engulf her. Lori had been right. None of them could truly understand. “I do want to,” she said lifelessly. “I do want to teach.”

“Then—I don’t understand.”

Karen looked away from Veronica’s completely baffled countenance. “I know,” she said tiredly.

A long silence stretched between them. When she broke it, Veronica’s voice was as small and uncertain as Karen’s had been minutes earlier. “Please don’t shut me out again. Isn’t there any way you can make me understand? You were able to cram geometry into my head when no one else could.”

Karen chuckled in spite of herself at that. “All right. Let me see if I can. It’s about having a choice, Roni. It’s about waking up in the morning and being able to think, ‘Hm, I wonder what I’ll do today.’ It’s—destruction, I went to my first day of primary school knowing with every fiber of my soul that becoming the next village teacher was my only way—my only way—of doing or seeing or knowing or even caring about anything outside of Lanoth. I wanted to teach, because it was the only way I was ever going to get to learn—”

Her voice broke, but she plowed on. “And it’s not that I don’t want to give the next generation what Teacher Harlan gave to me. I do want to! But I’d like to do it because I want to, and not be—trapped…” Tears momentarily submerged her voice, and she stopped, afraid to look into Veronica’s eyes and see that blank incomprehension there still. “I want to be able to decide where I’m going to teach, and how long I’ll be there. And more than anything, I want to be able to look at my students and know that they have the same choice.

“That will be the worst, I think. To stand there day after day staring into the eyes of the children of my friends and siblings and know that only one of them will ever know even the brief freedom I’ve known here. That the rest of them are utterly trapped in a life just as grey and joyless as mine is—” she broke down then, and could not go on.

“Oh Karen…” Veronica’s arms were around her again, and the dawning understanding in her voice made Karen’s heart give a small throb of joy, despite her tears.

They sat there for a long time. Karen’s sobs eventually quieted, and she sniffled and freed an arm from Veronica’s embrace to wipe her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, again laying her cheek against the soft cotton of Veronica’s nightgown.

“Don’t be,” Veronica answered, equally softly. “Don’t be.”

“It’s not a matter for despair,” Karen said, still quietly, after a moment’s pause. “I can do this. And I do want to. And I will try to do it well.”

Veronica’s arms tightened around her. “You are amazing,” she whispered into the top of Karen’s head. “I would be feeling frantic. Like a bird about to be caged.”

Karen nodded. “Like Lori. I’ve been preparing for this since I was five. I don’t think Lori ever let herself think past the academy. She doesn’t want to teach. She never has. But she’s brilliantly intelligent, so she never had much choice.”

Veronica shivered slightly. “How horrid. I hadn’t—I hadn’t really thought about that, I suppose. All these years. I wish I had been more understanding. I am sorry.”

Karen let out a small breath that might have been a chuckle. “How could you understand, when Lori only makes jokes and sweeping generalizations, and I only give sensible, matter of fact answers whenever you ask me about it, and get as prickly as a burr when you press me?”

“I might have exercised my imagination a little more.”

Karen shook her head. “No, no, how could you have known the necessity of it? And it could have marred our friendship, if you had pitied me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I—One of the things that made our friendship possible for me was that you did not pity me,” Karen answered slowly. “I think because I have always known that you liked me because you liked me. You never did anything for me because you felt sorry for me, or because you felt like you ought to because you had more than I.”

“I wanted to,” Veronica said softly. “And not because I pitied you or felt obligated to, but because I care about you. But I always felt that you would not take anything I offered.”

“I wouldn’t have,” Karen acknowledged. “Or if I had I would have felt demeaned by the necessity of it, and humiliated because I had nothing to offer you in return.”

“Oh, Kari, what kind of an insane world is this? Why cannot friends just give to one another because they want to, without caring who has more?”

“It’s not the world,” Karen whispered, shamed. “It’s me, and my silly pride.”

“And the world that taught you to feel humiliated because you had less than another,” Veronica finished for her gently. “Don’t blame yourself.”

“You’re so much kinder than I am.”

“Well, you are braver and smarter than I, so perhaps we come out somewhere near even.” There was gentle laughter in Veronica’s voice.

Karen found herself smiling in spite of herself, and raised her eyes to her friend’s. “Thank you,” she said.

Veronica raised a hand to brush wisps of hair away from Karen’s face. The skin she touched prickled strangely, and Karen felt a small shiver down her spine that had nothing to do with cold. She found herself staring at Veronica’s lips, and blushed and averted her eyes hastily.

Veronica withdrew her hand. “Am I making you uncomfortable?” she asked quietly.

Karen shook her head and forced herself to meet Veronica’s eyes as candidly as she could. There was fear in Veronica’s expression—anticipation of hurt, as if she expected rejection and braced herself for it. “I—I should tell you something else,” Karen found herself saying.

Veronica clasped her knees to her chest and waited silently. Her eyes never left Karen’s face.

“Last—when—after—” Karen forced herself to stop stuttering and took a deep breath. “I wasn’t honest—on—when you—” she stopped again, at a loss for words. She truly didn’t know how to carry this forward. How blunt was it okay to be? “I let you think I didn’t—feel anything for you—” she blundered on, encouraged by the gentleness in the eyes resting on her face, “which—wasn’t true.”

The eyes widened slightly. “Why?” There was no condemnation in the question, only open puzzlement.

“Because all I—you’re already my dearest friend—the dearest person to me in all the world, and all I could think about was that in two months we would part and probably never see each other again. It seemed—I was scared—too scared to begin something I might not have had the courage to give up. I must go back to Lanoth, and you must go on here.”

Veronica let out a slow breath. “I can understand that, I think. I wasn’t— Like Lori, I wasn’t thinking past graduation.”

Karen giggled nervously, but couldn’t resist pointing out, “From what I remember, at that particular moment, you weren’t exactly thinking at all.”

Veronica’s eyes widened. She smiled too, but then sobered. “No, I wasn’t. I was feeling.”

“Are you feeling now, too?” Karen bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to ask that. Not at all. Why was her mouth running away with her tonight?

Carefully, Veronica nodded again. “Yes,” she said. It was little more than an exhalation that caressed Karen’s cheek.

“Me too.”

“Even though you are leaving tomorrow?” Even as she asked the question, Veronica lifted her hand to trace the pattern of Karen’s lips and jaw line.

“I think,” Karen managed, as she lifted her own hand to trace a similar pattern on Veronica’s face, “that I would rather love you, and give you up, than never love you at all.”

Veronica’s answering smile held both pain and happiness as she bent nearer to Karen’s upturned face.

“I’m only sorry it took me till now to figure that out,” Karen ended in a whisper as their trembling lips met.

SIX

When Karen awoke, the first, grey light of false dawn had filtered into the room, rendering every familiar object the same, strange chrome color. A glance at the window told her that true dawn was not far off, so Karen reluctantly disentangled herself from the warmth of Veronica’s arms and slid out of bed. It wouldn’t do for Veronica’s floor mates to see her come out of Veronica’s room when the morning bell rang. Especially since a few of them might have noticed that their Floor Monitor had neglected to make her mandatory inspection the night before.

Veronica stirred and murmured in her sleep, protesting the loss of Karen’s warm body, and Karen gently tucked the comforter more closely around Veronica’s chin before moving across the room to the dying fire and retrieving her blessedly dry tunic and trousers.

On her way out of the room she stood for a long moment in the doorway, looking at the quiet, lovely face framed on the pillow by her shining brown hair. Then Karen let the door close softly behind her, sternly refusing to attach any symbolism at all to the soft snick as the lock caught, shutting her out. They would see each other in a few hours at breakfast, after all.

Karen slipped quietly into her own cold room to find it deserted. She wasn’t terribly surprised. Lori’s curfew violations had ceased since her estrangement from Harry, but she had taken to waking up in the small hours long before the morning bell rang and sneaking out to take long walks in the damp, chill outdoors. Karen worried for her, and wished violently to have the old, careless Lori back, even at the price of the ethical dilemma of her curfew violations. Karen had the grace to snort at herself as she bent to pick a stray sheet of parchment up off the bare floor. She was hardly one, now, who could prate about curfew violations anyway.

The scarlet seal on the page she held caught the first ray of morning sun from the uncurtained window and reflected the blinding light into her eyes. Karen blinked and set the paper on the desk, steeling herself as she did so for a wash in cold water from the pitcher on her wash table. After she broke the ice on the top of it, of course. She was looking absently around for a bit of pencil or something else with which to chip the ice, when her brain suddenly grasped the significance of a raised scarlet seal stamped with the Reynold crest. She turned violently and snatched the parchment off the desk with shaking hands.

*           *          *

Veronica woke to loud pounding on the door to her room. Her first anxious thought was that they had overslept, and her family had arrived before they’d had time to make ready. She sat up and glanced hurriedly at Karen—

Only to find Karen’s side of the bed empty. The pounding continued. No one in her family, even her brothers, would make that kind of a racket, especially so early. She glanced out the window. Why, the sun was barely up!

Veronica scrambled out of bed and hurriedly donned a shirt and trousers. She opened the door to find Karen standing in the hall, white faced, holding a piece of parchment in one trembling hand. Several other doors had opened as well, their occupants peering from behind them in sleepy curiosity. Veronica reached out to grab Karen’s wrist, pulled her inside, and shut the door firmly. “What is it?” she asked anxiously.

“Lori’s gone.”

“Gone? How do you mean, gone?”

“Just—gone. As in— Here, read it yourself.”

Veronica took the parchment from Karen’s weak grasp and scanned it quickly. Then she swallowed and returned to the beginning to read it again:

Dearest Lori,

How can I ever say to you what is in my heart? Especially without your beautiful, piercing eyes staring into mine the whole time. No. Better that your eyes are far away, at this moment. Your gaze is beautiful as a good blade is beautiful, my love. Bright and shining and honest, and sharp as a razor’s edge. I must trust for inspiration to my memory of a time when your eyes looked on me with love, for I fear that to look into  them now would be my death.

I begin to realize that even with the memory of your eyes before me in my mind, I cannot put into words what is in my heart. Were I to try, I would merely cover this page, too, with the useless platitudes of a man trying to describe an emotion that is by its nature indescribable. It is this attempt, I feel sure, that has been the inspiration for the weak, frivolous fairy tales and romances you despise so heartily.

I can only cry out, with an anguish I hope you can recognize is real, even through the stilted words which are the only language I have ever learned to speak. I love you, Lori. This is not the game of a Young Lord with too much time on his hands. It began so, when I left my father’s lands to come to the Academy. But when I met you, even though we were both so young, the game turned to reality within the space of a moment and left me reeling. Would with all my heart that I were the son of a wool merchant, or a Doctor, or even a peasant. But I am not. I am the heir to the Reynold Province. And still I say that I love you with all my heart.

Will you come away with me? It would be a defiance of the duty we both know we face. Mine to bend to my father’s will, marry as he has chosen for me, and, when the Godde takes him, to govern my lands under a Queen I neither trust nor respect in the face of sure defeat at the hands of a country superior to ours in every way that is of any account. Yours to obey the same Queen and return to your life in Haydren to serve your poor, oppressed people in a profession you hate. And yet, I find myself looking, not at my duty, or yours, but into your eyes, and I cannot see anything else.

Will you come? We can be married this night if you will meet me at Harkin’s Fountain just before curfew. I love you.         

Harry Reynolds

A tear splashed onto the parchment from Veronica’s eyes, and she looked up quickly to find Karen watching her intently. “He loves her so very much,” she whispered brokenly.

“Her things are gone,” Karen returned. It did not seem an answer, but Veronica knew it was. Karen’s voice was ragged and strained.

The two girls stared at one another. “What happens now?”

*           *          *

Karen shifted uneasily on her feet and looked carefully around the ornate Council Chamber, trying desperately not to be overwhelmed by the stares of the nobles seated around the Council table. Veronica stood nearby, sandwiched between her anxious parents.

“You did not, then, know that this girl—er—your friend—was gone until you awoke this morning?”

“Her name is Lori, sir,” Karen answered, “and no, I did not.”

Headmaster Whitson nodded, satisfied. “They must have left long after curfew then, Your Majesty. After the girl’s roommate was asleep.”

At the head of the table, the Queen nodded, but a man several seats below spoke up with a frown. “I find that hard to believe, given the fact that two students were seen keeping a tryst at Harkin’s Fountain last night just at curfew. I find it much easier to believe that this girl was complicit in their plan. The peasant wench was her friend, after all. Can we be certain she is not lying to save herself?”

“She is not lying to save herself.” Veronica’s quiet, steady voice interrupted the murmurs that greeted the man’s suggestion. Everyone turned to face her. “She is lying to protect me.” Her father and mother on either side of her stiffened, looking alarmed, but Veronica she did not look at either of them. Instead she turned to the Queen. “The truth is, Your Majesty, that Karen was not in her room last night,” she said, sounding self-possessed and calm. Only Karen could see her hands clenched tightly together behind her back. “We arrived back late from attending a play at the Royal Theatre, and we were so cold I feared for her life should she return to her frigid room. Young Lady Tessa was recently called home, as I am certain you know, and so I let Karen stay the night in my room on the first floor. She would not have known who on her floor was out after curfew, and neither would I, since we both neglected to perform our room inspections.”

“Is this true?” For the first time, the Queen looked directly at Karen. Her eyes were deep blue, and seemed to see directly into Karen’s pounding heart.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Karen’s voice came out as little more than a whisper, and she wondered how Veronica could speak so calmly looking into that intense gaze.

The Queen turned to the Headmaster then, much to Karen’s relief. “Is this possible?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. These two girls are Floor Monitors responsible for seeing that every student is in her room at curfew. No one would have reported Karen’s absence. It is,” he frowned, “a flaw in our system.”

The Queen frowned as well, and both girls shrank back a little. She turned to Veronica and Karen saw Veronica’s fingers spasm behind her back as if with sudden fear. The words the Queen spoke, however, were entirely unexpected. “What do you mean that you feared for your friend’s life should she return to her room? I trust you were not engaging in meaningless hyperbole?”

Veronica started in surprise and risked a quick glance at Karen before returning her eyes to the Queen’s. “No—not all that much, Your Majesty,” she said quickly. “Karen is at the Academy on scholarship from the village of Lanoth. Her room is up on the seventh floor, and barely any heat reaches it. This morning she had to chip a layer of ice off the top of her water pitcher before she could wash. Her only clothes were wet from the freezing rain we walked back in, and her only blanket is thin and worn out.”

The Queen turned to the Headmaster. “Is this true?”

He cleared his throat. “I—I have never been to the seventh floor of the girls’ dormitory myself, Your Majesty,” he said.

The Queen’s frown deepened. “See that you remedy that immense oversight on your part as soon as possible. In point of fact, take my aide, Master Colin, with you. He will give me a full report on the conditions of the rooms.”

It was Headmaster Whitson’s turn to pale. “Yes, my Queen.”

The Queen turned back to Karen, for a moment meeting her eyes so candidly that Karen could almost forget she was in the presence of the Monarch of the Land. “I cannot be everywhere,” she said softly, for Karen alone. “Would that I could. Forgive me.”

Karen nodded, stunned.

The Queen’s eyes had snapped to the faces of Veronica’s mother and father. “Your child is in no way in trouble, Master and Mrs. Miller, and neither is her friend. We simply called them here this morning because they are by all accounts the closest friends of the two students we are attempting to locate. I know you have a graduation ceremony to attend, so we will leave this here. I have no further questions for these girls.”

Veronica heaved a relieved sigh as the councilors turned back to one another and a babble of voices rose in the formerly still air of the Council Chamber. For a moment Karen thought her friend was going to turn and speak to her, but then her parents took her arms firmly and led her from the room.

Quelling her disappointment sternly, Karen reflected that it was probably just as well. Within the day, Karen would be gone anyway, and Roni would return home for the summer. In the fall she would begin classes at the University, and she would make new friends there; friends of her own wealth and social standing. Eventually, she would forget Karen. Or at least, she wouldn’t think of her often, and when she did it would only be with a faint sense of regret for the lost love of her youth. Karen knew this. It was only natural. Travel to Lanoth was difficult at the best of times. The only road to the small village was a mud pit half the year and a disaster area of pot holes and ruts the other half. And Veronica would be too frantically busy to visit even so. Karen herself had scarcely been home half a dozen times during her tenure at the Academy. She wondered if her little sister Macy would even remember her when she got back.

Karen sighed inaudibly as she followed Veronica and her parents out of the Castle and walked back to the Academy alone.

EPILOGUE

The same fourteen studious young men and women stood at the front of the assembly, faces blank, hands at their sides. There was a difference, however. It was spring, not fall, and this time all fourteen wore the brown graduation robes of the Capitol Teaching Academy. They listened this time to a shorter and rather more interesting address given by Headmaster Whitson. And this time Veronica had deliberately moved herself out of the order Lord Professor Patterson had placed them in and slipped to Karen’s side. Caroline, the left sleeve of her robe cut off at the elbow to accommodate her broken arm, looked at them rather askance, but she made room for Veronica in the line. Karen’s expression was grave, and she did not look up to meet Veronica’s eyes.

“You are going back.” Veronica’s whispered words were not a question, merely a restatement of fact.

“What else would you have me do?”

There was a pause. The words Headmaster Whitson spoke hung in the air like the droning of insects on a summer day, and indeed they carried no more meaning than that for the two girls.

“She loved him very much.” Veronica’s whisper was barely audible.

Karen glanced at her very, very briefly. “More than she loved her Queen and country.” The irony in her voice was not lost on her friend.

“I could come with you.”

Karen turned to stare at her then, the stunned amazement in her face turning slowly to a tremulous tenderness, which in turn faded to a wry sort of humor. She looked down at their feet. “What would you do in Lanoth?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Anything?”

“You’d be a disaster in the fields, and your health wouldn’t hold under that sort of work. There’s no need for academics in a small farming community. Your intelligence and clarity of thought, and your compassion, would be lost on us completely. One village teacher is enough of a drain on a small village’s resources. You’d be a double liability.”

“You don’t want me?” Veronica was startled at the quaver in her voice; startled, too, to realize that this was something she had never considered.

Karen slipped her hand into Veronica’s and squeezed gently. “I don’t mean to hurt you,” she said softly. “Of course I want you. But no one else would. They would shun you and resent us both, and we would be very unhappy.”

Veronica nodded, and concentrated for a moment on blinking away the tears in her eyes before they spilled down her cheeks.

“Your parents love you, Roni, and you’ll be an incredible physician.”

Veronica’s lips trembled uncontrollably, so that she had difficulty forming her next words. “Maybe someday…when I have graduated…when I have learned all I need to know…they might need a physician?”

“Maybe.” Karen’s hand tightened on hers. “Don’t tie yourself to me and my tiny little corner of the land. Believe me when I say you’re too young to do that. I know.” Her voice trembled, and Veronica squeezed her hand. “Go to school,” Karen whispered. “Be a physician. See the world for both of us. Then, if you still want to, come to Lanoth and see.”

“I love you,” Veronica said softly. “Whatever happens, you must always remember that.”

Karen smiled. “I will,” she answered. “Just as I will always know that I love you.”