Chapter Seven

Shock didn't even begin to express how I felt. When it began to wear off—which took all but less than a minute—I suddenly remembered a piece memory from my childhood before I was ever brought into the academy. I had seen this man before. Amy was right—I'd always had a guardian. I just didn't want to have one, and the wish kind of got buried along with every single memory I didn't want to remember.

My guardian-slash-uncle or whoever he was, didn't even spare me another glance after that announcement. "Can we do this as quickly as possible?" he asked Principal Edgerton. "I have somewhere else to be."

"I," I said slowly, "am staying at the academy."

"Miss Williams—"

It wasn't me who interrupted the principal, but Lord Ellison. "Never use that name in front of me again. That is not her name."

I had to say this thing for Principal Edgerton: she stood on her ground and planted a deceptively innocent face as he said, "But, why, you have never bothered to name her before, Lord Ellison. Riley Williams is the name she grew up with."

"No sister of mine would ever have named her daughter," he said that word with a particular disgust that chilled me to the bone, "something as abhorrent as that."

"Look, you can name me anything if you just let me stay here. I'm not going anywhere else."

Finally, my guardian-slash-uncle turned to look at me. "Your misdemeanors have robbed you right at speaking."

"And you lost the right to control my life when you dropped me off to rot in an orphanage where people think I'm a freak!" I yelled.

Sobbing, I ran out of the office without a clear destination to go. Corridors and lights blurred around me as tears flooded my eyes. It didn't matter if people called him Head Council now or a lord, or my uncle. To me, he was still the man who found me in the site where my parents died. The memory stayed down most of the time, but now it came back full on with the details. I remembered crying. I cried a lot because I was confused. They lay on the floor and stared up at the ceiling, seeing nothing. Blood had been everywhere—out of their eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair. There was a pool of it where I sat.

And then he came. My three year-old self felt so small compared to his looming shadow from the door. It had been raining heavily outside. He called someone, and picked me up to his car. I never really learned what had happened to my parents after that. Every time I thought about them, I only remembered their empty eyes and blood. I couldn't recount anything from before that.

The man drove while I cried all the way. He didn't have an umbrella with him, but when he stepped off the car and pulled me out, none of our clothes were soaked by rainwater. And then he had told me the words I still hated to this day, "Be good."

I remembered watching him drive away and I stood there for hours, crying until I realized didn't know where I was, or who I was.

That was my earliest memory. That was one of the events in my life I wanted to pretend had never happened.

My eyes had dried when I found the backyard pond and sat on the bank. The principal must have had it cleaned after my drowning incident, because the water looked so clear now that I could almost see the bottom. Not wanting to ruin the water, I took off my shoes and blazer before I sank my legs in. After I tested the water, I went deeper under until I was neck-deep. The bottom wasn't that far my toe. I took in one last deep breath and pushed myself completely under.

It was different without earplugs, but at this shallow depth I wasn't really bothered by their absence. Being under the surface was familiar—I was trained to relax underwater, after all, despite the drowning incident. My facial muscles calmed and I let my eyelids drift half-open. At contests, my official record was twenty-seven minutes, but I usually did better in practices. Once, I even got to thirty-one minutes. Contests made me nervous because I always wished to come out as the best. It was like deep inside me, I had always known my life would mean nothing if I didn't give myself some meaning to it.

I didn't want to feel worthless because I was abandoned.

I wanted to feel worthy because I set my own worth, not someone else.

Suddenly, the surface rippled above me and broke. A head full of dark hair penetrated the water, gliding inside until he was level with me, standing at the bottom. He had to bend his knees down a little, of course, to even have his head under the surface, since he was much taller than me. I didn't know what the hell he was doing here, or how he even knew I was here. Facing me, he closed his eyes and stood still there, like he had always done in the contests.

It occurred to me then that he was staying underwater here, in the Lake of Nullification, where magic wasn't supposed to work. It meant that he really had never used spells to stay under for as long as he did. It was his talent all along that made him win. I had been bratty and jealous, judging him childishly because I couldn't have what I wanted.

And not for the first time, it also occurred to me how beautiful he was underwater. Experimentally, I moved closer to him and touched his floating hair. They were as soft as I imagined in the water. His eyes opened and looked right at me, just as trained as I was to squint through the liquid. They were green and luminous, more so because of the blueness of the water. His hand rose then and closed around my wrist, the one that still had fingers in his hair. He led my hand to his other one and inserted his fingers through mine, clasping it.

Lost in the moment, I leaned in closer and brushed my closed lips against his, careful not to let any water in. His eyelids closed and he opened his mouth, drawing my lips back to his, locking it and tasting me until I opened mine, too. Only then did I realize water had rushed into my lungs. I broke free from him and rose up to the surface, coughing.

I swam to the edge and rolled myself onto the bank, drenched because I still couldn't do any spells. A moment later, he appeared, too, and sat down beside my prone form. I didn't dare to look at him and fixed my gaze to the blue sky, wondering if there was any spell that could make the sky blue forever.

"That didn't happen," I told him in barely a whisper. I didn't think I had enough strength to speak aloud without breaking my voice.

In response, Luke reached out to tuck my damp hair behind my ear. The gesture was so gentle, I felt like I was physically pierced by something painful. "Sure it didn't," he whispered. His fingers left my hair and I heard a rustle as he stood. I made sure to keep my gaze on the blue sky as I heard him walk away.

I was still drenched when I went back to my room. Amy was there, and she jumped when she saw me. "Why are you all wet? How did it go with Edgerton? And why is your face all blotchy and puffy? Oh my—have you been crying?"

Almost unconsciously, I reached up to touch my face. I didn't know what my crying face looked like. I probably looked like a zombie, if I had to guess. "I'm being transferred."

"You're what?" She held up a finger before I began speaking. "I'm calling Dee up here so that you don't have to tell the story twice."

While we waited for Dee to come up, I made myself some hot chocolate. An hour ago, it had felt like my life was over. Now I just felt numb. If Lord Ellison really decided to transfer me, there would be no one powerful enough to tell him no. I had heard of Elysium Academy. It was one of the schools Mr. Ortiz said where they taught you to use your magic as a weapon. I didn't want any of that. I only wanted to learn what I could and couldn't do, and I wanted to be with my friends while I did all that.

After I told Amy and Dee everything, I asked them if they would come with me to Elysium.

"You know I would," Amy said, "but my parents won't be able to afford the tuition. It's extremely expensive there."

"Sorry, Riley," Dee said, "but I like it here. Not all the time, but it's still much better than what I've heard of Elysium. It's like a military academy there. Archery and Duels here are elective sports, but there, they're compulsory classes. My cousin goes there now. He always gets a broken bone every semester."

Horrified, I asked her, "Are you sure you're not joking?"

She shook her head. "It's an intensive school for powerful people who wanted their children to be just as powerful. For that matter—I still can't believe you are not joking about your uncle being Lord Ellison. Why didn't you say something this afternoon?"

"Riley has a traumatizing childhood," Amy explained. "Hence, missing memory gaps."

"Actually," I contradicted, "he's not part of what I forgot. He's part of what I wanted to forget. So I did. For a time. Besides, I never really knew his name. I'm sure I would remember if someone asked me to call him a lord some time in my life."

"Well, I heard Lord Ellison did have a sibling who lived among normal humans because she denied her ancestral legacy. I never heard of her dying or leaving an orphaned kid behind, though."

Miserable, I hugged my pillow. "I really don't care about my family tree right now. I just want to stay at Asphodel. I don't want to be sent to some military camp to be some perfect soldier."

Suddenly, Amy brightened and said, "I think I have an idea."

The next day I walked around the classes on a limping leg. Everyone in the hallway gave me strange looks, probably because for once they didn't know what happened to me before they saw me. By second period, rumors had begun to circulate around that I fell from the boys' dorm window while sneaking out of Jack Clyde's bedroom—whom I still hadn't met until now. Other rumors said that I fell from a broomstick trying to imagine myself as Harry Potter. My personal favorite was the one about me faking a limp to get sympathy from the underwater fans—right, as if I needed that.

The one that struck closest to the truth was about me getting cursed by a witch who hated my guts. Except that the witch who cursed me was my own best friend, and she was a badass Illusion speller. To everyone else, even the nurse in the infirmary, I would have looked like I had this horribly bent broken leg. The spell wouldn't wear off for days, at least. Amy was just that good.

I met Carter in front of PE class before lunch. He took one look at my leg and asked me, "Who did this to you?"

I didn't know if he actually meant, "I KNOW YOU'RE USING ILLUSION SPELL. TELL ME THE WITCH RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS STUNT AND I WILL REPORT TO YOUR UNCLE STRAIGHT AWAY!!!" Or if he just meant, "Who pushed you off the window?"

So I said, "I dropped my toothbrush in the closet and tripped when I tried to retrieve it."

His gaze met me knowingly. "Legs don't break that easily unless you're eighty or have vitamin D deficiency."

"Fine. I fell from Dee's window when I tried to sneak out of the dorm past curfew."

"No guards reported in about that last night."

I rolled my eyes for the effect. "Of course they didn't. Amy used an illusion spell on me to make me invisible. None of my friends even knew I had broken my leg until they heard my pitiful moaning sound." Okay, that was overdoing it.

It seemed like Carter bought it, though. "You should have gone to the infirmary."

"And get another detention for trying to sneak out past curfew? Hey, by the way you're not going to rat out on me, are you?" Please do, please do, I thought. It would make our plan so much more convincing.

"You know I have to." He looked at me with a troubled gaze. "Any students getting hurt under our surveillance is a failure on our part."

Great. Now I felt bad. But if it meant not getting sent off to Elysium aka the GI Jane war zone, I would have done worse things than lying to a mage guard.

Right on cue, I was called to the principal's office at lunchtime. Dee was convinced the plan wouldn't work, but Amy wished me luck all the same. When I arrived in front of the office door, I winced for effect before I let myself in. "I can't go to Elysium anymore," I cried. "They won't accept imperfect, physically disabled person like me! I'm so very sorry—"

"Miss Williams, you can cut out the act," Principal Edgerton said dryly. "You reek of illusion spell. Miss Amy Lee's, if I'm not mistaken?"

Lord Ellison wrinkled his nose in disgust. I thought he'd have left by now after all that I'm-a-busy-person-with-more-important-places-to-be thing he had going on yesterday. "I told you she's mingling with bad influence here."

"Miss Williams," the principal said, pointedly ignoring the Head Council, "your guardian has decided to let you stay in Asphodel Academy for several conditions."

Immediately, my world looked so much brighter. Anything, I wanted to say. And then I realized everything that was too good to be true probably was. My good mood transformed swiftly into wariness. "What are they?"

"Here is the contract," Principal Edgerton replied, pushing a legal-sized paper to me.

She had meant a contract in the literal sense. The contract basically said that I had to do all of the following things as long as I wanted to stay in Asphodel Academy as a student:

1. Having my name changed into Clarisse Adeline Ellison.

2. Taking the Duels class and giving up Swimming.

3. Coming to live with my uncle for two months in the summer break and one week in the winter break.

4. Dyeing my 'outrageous' red hair back to its original white-blond color.

I could barely continue reading after that without singing the paper with raw magic.

"This is not fair," I said.

"It's perfectly fair," Lord Ellison countered. "It will discipline you into the young woman you're supposed to be instead of the wild child you are now."

"My hair hasn't been blond since I was thirteen and not taking Swimming means I can't participate in the contests—"

"Which is all the better. To drown yourself for half an hour and call it a sport—what an atrocious thing to celebrate."

I took a deep breath. "No. My name stays Riley. You want to add the Ellison at the back, or some other name in the middle, I don't care. First name stays Rile. And I'll take Duels but I won't give up Swimming. My hair is none of your business. The end."

"Fine," the Head Council said, to my surprise. He drew an empty paper from the desk and murmured something low. The words from the contract appeared in the empty paper, with altered conditions the way I had demanded. I knew that kind of spell existed! When he handed it back to me, I read it several times over. He'd changed my name to Riley Clarisse Adeline Ellison. A handful, but I'd take it. The point about hair, he kept the same way.

I guessed it was the best I was going to get, so I signed it.