A week or so after my delightful little sojourn into the mausoleum, I woke up to find a crisp white envelope under my pillow, and I was reasonably sure it had not been there the night before. Briefly, I wondered if one of those animated gloves that worked in the cafeteria had snuck in during the middle of the night to slip it under my pillow.
Not the most pleasant of thoughts.
I opened it and discovered it was a letter from Lord Woodman. How he delivered it to me, let alone shoved it underneath my pillow without waking me up, was anyone's guess, but it probably involved some bit of sorcery I wasn't privy to.
The letter was, well, long, rambling, and vaguely condescending. It asked all sorts of questions about how school was going, "if I was making any friends," and how my alleged childhood nanny missed her "Wee little Teddy".
I didn't have to look at it twice to know he had coded it, and probably with the first task he wanted me to take on here at Angitia. Joy of joys.
I spent the better part of an hour trying to decode the blasted thing until I had to leave for breakfast. Lord Woodman was fond of incredibly elaborate ciphers that were nigh impossible for either his enemies, and often his allies, I thought, to decode properly.
I'd have to give it another go during my free period. Or maybe I'd give it a go during French class. It wasn't like I'd actually learn anything, anyway.
I slipped the letter into my bag and left for the cafeteria.
Sylas sat with a bunch of Lion Hall kids. He'd been doing it for a week or so, getting up to refill their drinks or fetch them more food from the cafeteria queue. Every single lunch and dinner since he kissed a corpse to impress those two Lion Hallers.
Sylas wasn't the only one either. A good chunk of freshmen had made a point to swing by the Lion Hall table to run the odd errands. It even extended beyond the cafeteria. You could hardly turn a corner without seeing a freshman carrying a lazy upperclassman's books. It seemed to be limited to Lion Hall, based on my observation. Kids from the other halls shot them glares when they didn't think anyone was looking, but no one seemed to care enough to actually say or do anything.
Almost in the same way no one seemed to notice a freshman had failed to return from the mausoleum. I was probably the only person who knew the church grim had eaten a boy. All because he had wanted to pre-rush Lion Hall.
The whole "pre-rush" thing was not allowed, but Lion Hall appeared to be a not-so-subtle exception to the rule. I supposed that it may have had something to do with that "turning coal into diamonds" rhetoric everyone was so fond of saying at Angitia. That adversity and danger would force us to grow into better, more powerful wizards, and what better adversity could there be than clear favoritism of one of the Halls over the rest?
I couldn't help but wonder if there was a way to turn it to my advantage somehow. Maybe I could get Sylas to slip me a few secrets about what pre-rush at Lion Hall entailed and I could trade them to some disgruntled Snake or Deer Haller in exchange for some tutoring.
The thought was not an unappealing one, but I wasn't sure if I could actually squeeze any juicy tidbits out of Sylas. I'd still been avoiding him like a plague-ridden mutt, and he appeared to have caught on to my coldness. Sylas hadn't spoken more than a few words to me in days.
I should have been happy about that—the more distance between us, the better—but I couldn't find it in me to feel anything toward my roommate aside from annoyance.
"Theo! Theo over here!"
I looked over at Mason waving to me across the cafeteria excitedly from a table he was sitting at alongside Iroha and Rosamund. I repressed a sigh. I hadn't figured out how to ditch those three yet, and it was looking increasingly like I wouldn't be able to.
I walked over to the table occupied by my… study group. I wouldn't think of them as possible friends. Couldn't think of them as friends of any sort. They were like any other mages, despite whatever friendly airs Mason was putting on. A gaggle of backstabbing social climbing nobles who would probably throw me to the wolves the first chance they got if it presented any sort of benefit to them.
It was, admittedly, hard to hold on to that assumption as Mason vibrated like an excited puppy as I sat down next to him, Iroha gave me a terse good morning, and Rosamund grunted as she nursed a cup of over-sugared black tea.
"Did you hear that in alchemy today we'll be dissecting fur-bearing trout?" Mason was positively vibrating. "I've never actually seen one up close. Can you imagine a fish with fur? But I hear there's a pond nearby where an old alumnus breeds them!"
"No," I said, eyeing my cup of tea with distaste. For some reason, it had turned a dull grey after I had added milk to it. "I hadn't heard."
"Oh well, it's simply marvelous, isn't it? Now I don't know what one does with a furred-trout exactly though," I could almost hear Mason cocking his head in thought. "Or why we'd need to learn how to take them apart in alchemy? You'd think they'd save that sort of thing for a beast keeping elective—"
"You can distill certain parts of them down into alchemical ingredients," Rosamund said dully as she buttered a slice of toast. She let out a long yawn, barely covering it with a milk white hand.
Mason seemed to realize for the first time how exhausted the rest of us were and sheepishly turned his attention to his plate of eggs and bacon and started shoveling it down earnestly.
I eyed his plate of breakfast meat enviously. I'd gone for a bowl of porridge, the only thing I'd seen on the cafeteria line I knew for certain didn't have any meat in it, myself. Last thing I needed in the morning was the shock of firsthand experiencing a pig's death at the hand of some three fingered null butcher. I'd nearly vomited on Iroha a few days back after trying my luck with a sausage, and she still refused to sit next to me.
God, I missed eating meat. The smell of bacon alone was enough to start my mouth watering with desire. The effort I made shoveling the porridge down my throat did little to ease my yearning for bacon, and the sensation didn't leave me until well into my alchemy lab where Mason and I stared down at a furred-trout laying before us on a metal sheet.
Frankly, I think "furred-trout" may be a bit of a misnomer, or just deliberately misleading. The creature before us reminded me much more of a giant white caterpillar covered in snowy bristling hair, with a series of appendages that gave the vague suggestion of fins. A single glassy eye stared up at us, and I briefly wondered if I'd know exactly when the creature had died if I was brave enough to touch it with my bare hands.
"Ghastly," Mason said. "It reminds me a bit of my uncle Lars."
"Really?" I asked, hesitantly poking at the dead creature with one of the metal utensils we were expected to cut into it with.
"Uncle Lars tried to turn himself into a seal once, but he only turned halfway back. Papa always says that it's because Uncle Lars drinks too much, but Mama is convinced there is some sort of elaborate conspiracy against the poor fellow involving a girl he was courting."
"Fascinating."
I wasn't sure how to slice into the dead fish thing. Professor Curtis had given us a pamphlet on what to do, but I found some of the words confusing.
"Which part of this thing is the ventral region?" I asked.
"You know I'm not sure." Mason flipped through his own copy of the pamphlet. "I believe it's by the gills?"
Okay, I knew what gills on a fish looked like. I'd had to clean a decent number of fish for Mum back when we could fish in the ponds that dotted the sheep pastures.
I inspected the furred-trout, peeling back layers of fur to discover the telltale flaps that signaled the creature's gills by pulling back fish's hair around where I thought the neck would be. The hair on the trout didn't really feel like the sort of fur I'd expect on a dog or a cat or even sheep's wool. It was much more like the firm bristles you'd find on a hog and it felt odd to find them all so closely together. It didn't help when, during my search for the gills, I suddenly felt a surge of necromantic power and knew the fish died roughly a week prior after being fished out of a pond, the bait used had been a wiggling worm, and that the null worker who caught the thing had packed it in an icebox to suffocate.
The furred-trout had died, its eyes popping out of its skull as it desperately gasped for the last breath of air, felt the slapping of tails as its fellows were tossed in beside it, and finally a great cold enveloped its flesh and forced it to finally lay still.
The sensation wasn't nearly as annoying as the realization I couldn't find the gills on the wretched creature.
"Damnation," I muttered.
"What?" Mason asked as he peered over to see what I was doing, and I cursed myself for the slip of my tongue.
"I can't seem to find the gills," I said, trying to muster my most relaxed voice and most Lord Woodman-like impression. "Do you know where they might be?"
Mason frowned. "Have you checked the neck yet?" He paused. "Wait, do you still call it a neck when it's a fish? I bet my cousin Astrid would know. She's been courting a merman for the past year or so, bit of a scandal really. Grandmama is absolutely livid about it, though Papa says it's only because Grandmama's mad Astrid isn't courting Mr. Chernov, who's the son of one of Grandpapa's business associates."
"Yes," I grated out. "I looked at where the neck is."
Mason peered down at the fish and poked at it with an outstretched finger. "Perhaps we should just start hacking our way into it and see what happens?" Mason suggested cheerfully. "It's like Mama always says, 'When you're in doubt, it's always best to just push on ahead and hope that no one dies.' "
"Your mother always says that?" I asked, my voice dripping with sarcasm before I could stop myself because, despite my best efforts, I wasn't actually a noble and I had limits to keeping my tongue in check.
Mason beamed at me. "You know, I think that's the first honest reaction I've heard out of you!"
"What?" I froze, shivers running through me.
"Yes," Mason said, nodding enthusiastically. "You always have this, well it's a sort of constipated look on your face, I suppose? Like my great-aunt Francine. You never seem willing to tell people what you actually think."
"I do," I blurted, and my blood pumped in my temples. "I am always honest about how I feel, Mason."
He frowned at me and looked like he wanted to say something else, possibly calling me out on more of the facade I play for the mages around me, but at that point I had successfully located the gills on the furred-trout. They were on its stomach, because of course they bloody were.
I sliced into the fish's stomach with a scalpel and looked at Mason until he helped me pull the creator's skin back to expose the organs we were expected to harvest and neatly label.
"Look," Mason said finally after we'd removed the fish's orange heart and deposited it in a glass jar for use in a lab assignment the following day. "All I'm saying is that you don't have to hide your feelings from the rest of us. I, for one, like it better when people are honest about how they really feel. If you bottle that all up, it'll come out in odd ways, like my cousin Astrid."
"The one who's courting a merman?" I asked, before I had the sense to stop myself.
"Most of us see that as a bit of a cry for help," Mason said. "You'd know why if you ever saw the bloke. His face is basically the same as a catfish."
I wasn't sure how to respond to that, both because I was feeling overwhelmed by Mason's seemingly endless stories about his relations and that I didn't think my own true feelings would do me much good at Angitia. Instinctively, I felt like I had to put on the best possible display of deference to any mage I encountered. It was how I was raised and how I survived two years as Lord Woodman's personal project. Intellectually, it was drilled into me by the various tutors Lord Woodman hired to teach me how to vaguely pass myself off as a noble, that there was a certain degree of politeness and respectability I had to bring into every interaction I had with other people.
How I actually felt about the ridiculous situation I'd found myself in, how I'd be hard pressed to pull Lord Woodman out of a burning building, and why I couldn't afford to fail that blaggard were all things I'd pushed to the side, neatly tied in a box, and done my utter best to forget about.
So I couldn't help but stare at Mason while he did his own part of our lab, namely writing and labelling everything I'd extracted from the furred-trout in neat black ink. There was a small part of me that wanted to throttle him, because I wondered if all the long meandering family stories he made me listen to were in fact part of some larger scheme to coax out my true personality Mason somehow sensed the first time we met.
Mason looked up from the worksheet and frowned at me. "Do you need something, Theo? You've been staring at me for a good minute, old boy."
"I'm fine," I said in the calmest voice I could muster, which still sounded like grating glass.
Mason frowned at me, and I got the distinct impression he didn't believe me. He might even believe I was hiding some deeply hidden secret that bothered me enough to hide who I really was inside, and how right he'd be on that front.
I used a pair of metal tweezers to remove a squelching, fleshy blob from inside the dead fish-caterpillar thing, place it off to the side, and tried to figure out what I could conceivable say to Mason that would sound both believable and a good reason I'd be tapping down on some feelings of mine.
"I've been having some issues with my roommate, I suppose?" I hedged. It was true enough. I mean I would certainly classify my deep-seated fear that Sylas would discover my status as an Irregular as something of an issue between us.
There must have been something in my voice that rang true, because the crease in Mason's brow lessened immediately, and he nodded sagely. "Oh, I can understand that. My roommate William is a real piece of work," Mason said. "He spends all hours hunched over his desk reading from a book in Latin. I don't think I've ever seen him outside the room once."
"Well, count your blessings," I said absently as I read over the next instructions in the pamphlet, slicing into something called the swim bladder. "My roommate keeps the oddest hours. I swear he sneaks out every night and wakes me up every time he comes back to the room at the crack of dawn, stumbling around like a bull in a china shop."
That had actually been happening a fair bit since Sylas joined up with the Lion Hallers. More than once, I'd wished I knew a spell that could make me temporarily deaf while I was sleeping.
"Oh, that's wretched," Mason said, while he located the organ I'd been hunting around the fish's entrails for and subsequently deposited it in a glass jar filled with clear fluid the consistency of pudding. "I can't even think straight unless I've had a solid nine hours of sleep myself."
"Me neither," I said. "It's actually better when Sylas isn't there, though. Bastard snores worse than my old dog used to."
"Ugh," Mason shuddered. "I simply detest snoring. I always think it sounds like a prelude to someone dying in their sleep."
It was unexpectedly rather pleasant to talk to Mason and actually be honest about something. Even if that something was just a list of petty reasons I disliked Sylas Thorne.
So, of course, the moment was quickly ruined.
"I'm actually a bit worried that my roommate might be trying to learn Necromancy," Mason said off-handedly as he flipped through the last section of our assignment. "Old boy smells like he's rotting a bit. I think he may poke around the forest for animal carcasses to stitch back together or something."
"Really," I said.
"Yes, well, you know how that sort is," Mason mused as he packed away the instruments we had finished using. "But I suppose it's better he's just mucking about in the woods rather than robbing graves for bones to use as conduits. That would be beyond the pale in distastefulness."
Well, I suppose I couldn't argue with that.
***
French class had improved little.
Professor Dumont was a teacher who seemed to believe rather intensely in memorization above everything else. It didn't help that there was just something about the man that put my teeth on edge. Dumont reminded me more and more of a marble statue brought to life with his strong jawline and high cheekbones. It was like he was more of an artist's perfected idea of a man rather than a real human being. Even the way he moved was eerie. The man almost seemed to glide through rooms like a giant white moth, never making so much as a sound until he was right on top of you.
It didn't help that the lessons he taught were also ungodly boring.
Each day he'd spend our hour of class briefly drilling vocabulary before launching into a lecture about the subtle nuances of French grammar, which took up the rest of our class time.
While I had improved in my other classes, courtesy of both the study group I joined and the conduit I pilfered from the mausoleum, I found it utterly impossible to actually care enough about French to put in the enormous effort to pay attention to Dumont's lessons.
So, instead of listening to another review of the nuances of irregular French verbs, I spent my time attempting to decode Lord Woodman's letter to me.
One of the early lessons Lord Woodman taught me was the importance of information. Many a conspiracy had failed because of intercepted letters, so it was better to code your letters. However, many more conspiracies had failed because the ciphers they used were cracked or proved insufficient in an entirely different way.
For example, they might be so elaborate the person you were trying to send a message to would have an impossible time actually cracking whatever code you are using.
Like the one I'd been fussing over in this letter.
I'd been banging my head up against the code for what seemed like an eternity, and the only thing I knew for sure was that Lord Woodman expected for me to steal something. Where exactly he expected me to burgle, or perhaps more pressingly, what I'm expected to thieve weren't forthcoming.
I ground my teeth together and held my pen in a white-knuckle grip tight enough to almost snap it in two.
"Mr. Crowley, what are you working on?"
I almost jumped out of my skin when Professor Dumont asked the question. I looked up and find the man has turned the full force of his too-perfect face on me, fixing me with a slightly too-perfect frown.
"Nothing sir," I said quickly, neatly tucking the spare scrap of paper I'd been working on between two stray sheets in my notebook alongside the letter. "Just taking notes."
"Just taking notes, you say?"
The man moved toward me languidly in his moth-like glide, and I continued to smile at him with my most polite and innocuous expression. Inwardly, I cursed at myself. I should have known better than to decipher the letter in the middle of class. Should have just done it in my room late at night when Sylas was off doing god knew what for the Lion Hallers. If Dumont found the letter and my notes, I was fucked.
Professor Dumont leaned over my desk, close enough for me to smell the faintest whiff of maple on him. Probably some sort of fancy perfume he rubbed behind his ears. I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to smell like a stack of pancakes, though.
Professor Dumont made a tsking noise, and he leaned over to examine the notes I'd copied from the chalkboard behind him. "Your handwriting is atrocious," he informed me, and a few of my classmates fought back giggles.
My ears heated, but I kept that innocent, vaguely dopey look on my face.
"And you appear to have absolutely no grasp of the language," Dumont tittered, and he was close enough for me to observe that not a single one of the man's hairs seemed to move. "Did you learn nothing from your tutors before coming here? Honestly, I'm surprised you even passed your entrance exam, if these notes are any indication of your skill with French."
I looked at the floor, hoping that was the response the man was looking for. Last thing I wanted was another "hands on" lesson like the one Professor Ogg gave me during my first day of classes. Well, no, the last thing I wanted was for Dumont to keep flipping through my notes and finding the coded letter I'd been trying to make sense of, but either way, I wanted the entire interaction to be as unremarkable as possible.
Dumont stared at me for a long moment, his lineless face hovering above me with an unemotional look that reminded me all the more of an insect. Dumont finally and unceremoniously dropped my notebook back onto my desk and returned to the front of the class to resume his lecture.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding and made a point to not even think about Lord Woodman's letter until well after classes had ended for the day.
***
I slipped back into my dorm that night, waited until Sylas left, then spent three hours working on cracking the code. When I finally managed it, I felt more tired than proud.
Lord Woodman's first set of instructions to me were:
Go to the library at night. Breach the restricted section. Retrieve the book titled Le Journal De La Voisin. Report back when successful.
Also listed were the book's shelf and row number.
I massaged my eyes.
I'd received my first marching orders from Lord Woodman.