“I knew that boy was going to be trouble when his family threw a fit when he was caught cheating last year. They honestly thought that since his father is a Count, and his victim came from a family of landless nobles, it didn’t matter if Matthias copied the girl’s project,” Augustus said, looking down at the scrap of paper Professor Beeswick had dug out of the thick and extremely disorganized stack of paperwork left behind by the previous chancellor.
Shaking his head, he pushed the paper back to the Dragon and said, “I never should have let Lord Findlay handle it, even if I was busy trying to make sense of all of my new responsibilities. There’s even a suggestion here that Gillian – the student whose project he copied – may have been threatened with reciprocal action, since she couldn’t prove she hadn’t copied from the boy. Several of her study partners swore they’d reviewed her work with her, but because they were her friends, their claims were dismissed.”
Professor Beeswick pinched the paper between two sharp talons and picked it up as if it was covered in dog vomit. “At least they weren’t able to turn it back on the girl,” the Dragon said. “Since you were involved, Matthias had to take a low grade, though he didn’t get a zero, as he should have.”
They were sitting around the little table on the third floor of the library. Or rather, Augustus and Beeswick sat at opposite sides of the table, while bunny-Pandy sat on top of it, conserving Shifting Faces for later. It was Thursday, so Eurydice had lunch duty, and there was no getting out of it.
After a few weeks at her new job, Pandy didn’t even mind sitting on the dais in front of the dining hall anymore, other than the fact that Augustus took far too much pleasure in making goo-goo eyes at her just when she was trying to drink her tea. Most of the other teachers seemed to think the whole thing was hilarious, though some almost seemed to feel sorry for Eurydice, who they apparently viewed as an older woman being thirst-trapped by a handsome younger man. Pandy, in turn, found this idea extremely funny, and every now and then she would just stare longingly at Augustus’s backside, then look away as soon as he turned around. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t yet figured out why everyone giggled whenever he pulled his coat down.
The plan had been going fairly well. Thaniel was doing a good job of looking broody and scurrying away whenever anyone other than Geraldine, Abbington, or Suzanne tried to talk to him. He’d made a few – maybe more than a few – mistakes when playing Eurydice in the afternoons and evenings, but so far, no one seemed to have noticed that his hands actually passed right through doors when he tried to open them, and when he went up or down stairs things got distinctly hinky.
Pandy had been sneaking Thaniel up to Augustus’s rooms after chores each night, then went and got him in the morning. Even with Shield of Darkness, they’d almost been caught a few times, but the important thing was that Pandy was the one ‘sleeping’ in Thaniel’s bedroom and sometimes wandering around the school at night. It was a good thing, too, because Matthias had come down to chat a few times before lights-out, always making sure ‘Thaniel’ knew exactly how fortunate he should feel that such a high-ranking person was making overtures of friendship.
With a shake of his head, Professor Beeswick closed the tattered manila folder, drawing Pandy’s attention back to the here and now. “I’ll have to get this organized and bound. Lord Findlay never allowed me to keep the school records in the library, as most of his predecessors did, so I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. These aren’t even alphabetized.”
The Dragon sounded so scandalized that if Pandy hadn’t been a rabbit, she might have let out an involuntary giggle. As it was, she laid a paw over her nose, whiskers quivering, and Professor Beeswick turned a narrowed gaze on her.
“And how are things going at Avington House, Pandora?” he asked, and Pandy perked up. She still made sure to drop by Avington House every night after lights-out at Falconet. She couldn’t stay for long, much less spend a whole night working on the house and grinding her skills in the Secret Lab, but she was able to check in on Isidor, Eleanor, and Glory, as well as the various elementals and the horse she was increasingly convinced was also an elemental of some kind, because he was far too intelligent to be the same kind of beast as Eleanor’s sweet but simple-minded pony, Misty.
Opening her inventory, Pandy removed the Slightly Burned Green Onion Cookies. Sometime over the last hundred years or so, Nyssa had either lost some of her cooking skill to disuse, or she’d never been as talented as she believed, but the princess and her Dragon friend were now turning out nearly-nibbleworthy nosh. Some of their flavor combinations were questionable at best, since they insisted upon using the plants they were growing in the atrium to season their baked goods, but honestly, that wasn’t Nyssa’s fault.
The cookies were wrapped neatly in a handkerchief, which appeared beneath Pandy’s paw on the table. With a nudge of her nose, Pandy pushed the ‘treats’ toward the Dragon. He picked it up and gave the makeshift bag an experimental sniff. His nose wrinkled, but as any good parent would, he dutifully opened it and took a nibble. These cookies were somehow pink, and smelled strongly of their main ingredient, as well as something earthy that Pandy couldn’t quite place.
“Is that beetroot?” Augustus asked, sniffing as he leaned in to examine the bits of stems and leaves that protruded from the cookies. Pandy was pretty sure there were some roots, too, which might be the source of the earthy taste, especially if they hadn’t been washed very well, though beets were a reasonable guess based on the color.
“I… have no idea,” Professor Beeswick said, lowering the cookie from his lips and giving it a bemused look. He didn’t really seem to care about the taste one way or the other, possibly because he wasn’t actually human, no matter how much he looked like one. Sometimes.
The bell rang, and Augustus looked up as he sighed, then turned to Pandy. “Would you care to join me for lunch, Lady Eurydice?”
Pandy rolled her eyes. He enjoyed using her new title far more than she was comfortable with, especially since most of the teachers weren’t members of the nobility, and she didn’t want Eurydice to seem snobbish.
Hopping off the table, Pandy thought, <Cast Shifting Faces. Wellington.> Then, out of a newly formed habit, she added on a Minor Heal for Augustus.
Shifting Faces successful.
04:26:18 remaining today.
Minor Heal successful.
Healed Augustus for 1 HP.
Two hundred and three uses remaining to level 28.
Pandy barely managed to hold back a sigh as she preceded Augustus down the stairs. Leveling Minor Heal took so long at this point. She managed to get in about a hundred uses each school day, thanks to the constant small injuries children were prone to, but she still probably wouldn’t reach the next level before this weekend, and then it would take even longer to get to levels twenty-nine and thirty. She only hoped the constant grind ended up being worth it.
She was so preoccupied with thinking about leveling up that Pandy almost stumbled over the panting girl at the bottom of the steps. It turned out that no one could go up those steps without Professor Beeswick’s permission, so finding a student waiting for them at the bottom wasn’t all that unusual, though the state of this particular one was a bit out of the ordinary.
Pandy hadn’t seen Matilda or Suzanne much recently. She knew Thaniel and friends still hung out with the two third-year girls, but Pandy was almost always busy when the children spent time together. The last few times Suzanne ate with the younger students, Matilda hadn’t been there, and Pandy had overheard Suzanne and Geraldine talking about how Matilda hadn’t stayed at school over the weekend for a while, either.
This Matilda was noticeably thinner than the one Pandy had first met. Her uniform didn’t exactly hang off of her, but it did look like it had been tailored for someone half a size larger. Her hair was pulled up in a curly ponytail, not the smooth corkscrews that used to frame her face. Her cheeks were flushed, and she looked exhausted.
The girl gave Pandy an almost terrified look, then shifted to move slightly behind Augustus, using his body to conceal herself from anyone else who might be in the library. Not that there should be anyone, since the lunch bell had rung. Matilda must have run from her classroom in order to get here so quickly and so out-of-breath.
“Mr. Blackwood, may I speak to you?” she asked. “About that… that assignment you gave me?”
“Of course, Matilda,” Augustus said, immediately settling into his chancellor persona. He flicked Pandy a glance. “I’ll meet you at lunch, Miss Haupe.”
Pandy nodded and walked briskly toward the library door, though she almost immediately slipped between two bookshelves and shifted back to her rabbit shape. There was no way she was missing this conversation, and it wasn’t like the gossips could talk about her more if she and Augustus both showed up late to lunch. As she hopped in the direction Augustus and Matilda had gone, she noticed that Professor Beeswick had stopped halfway down the stairs, and was watching the chancellor and student with the eyes of a predator who’d just caught a peek at a particularly portly partridge.
“...don’t know what to do!” Matilda’s voice reached Pandy’s ears as she entered the back stacks of the library, where all the largest and most boring non-fiction books were shelved.
“It’s all right,” Augustus soothed. “So your father is pressuring you to ask Suzanne and Thaniel to your house?”
“Yes,” Matilda almost wailed. “But there’ve been even more of those strange people over lately, and I’m certain he introduced one of them to me as Samuel, but now he’s calling him James, and Mother doesn’t even come out of her room any more, and-” She broke off with a hiccup, then hiccuped again as the sound of gentle patting reached Pandy.
Wiggling through a gap between two books that had to weigh half a Thaniel, Pandy was finally able to see the two. No part of the library was dim, but there were more shadows here, surrounded as they were by tall shelves. The first-years were strongly discouraged from coming back here, and Pandy somehow doubted the second-years spent much time in this section, either. This was the borderland of the library, the place that lay between entertaining stories of love and derring-do and thick tomes about soil erosion and the difference between Brown Marmorated Stinkbugs versus Spined Shoulder Bugs. Soldier bugs? In any case, these were books that no one wanted to be forced to read, and which should be allowed to lie in wait for those poor fools who were fascinated by agriculture and predatory insects.
Matilda was leaning back against a wall of texts that probably hadn’t been opened since they were placed on the shelves, her hands over her face and her shoulders shaking as she hiccupped over and over again. Augustus stood beside her, ineffectually patting her shoulder with a rare expression of uncertainty on his face. Pandy briefly considered flinging herself toward them in an attempt to frighten the hiccups out of the girl, but remained still as Augustus began to speak.
“It may not be safe to have Suzanne over, but I think Thaniel would enjoy sharing a meal with your family,” the chancellor said, and Matilda’s spasms stopped as her face lifted so she could stare at Augustus in horror.
“I can’t-”
“You can,” Augustus said, and Pandy could tell that he was liking the idea more and more as he thought about it. The Plan called for them to wait for their enemies to creep out of the shadows. This change wouldn’t reveal who at Falconet was a traitor or a Bound, but whoever was after Thaniel had proven more patient than expected, given the fact that always before they had instantly leaped at any chance to take him. Pandy-Thaniel had wandered around alone outside Falconet several times now with no results, and while five or six days wasn’t very long to remain undercover, she was already finding it far more frustrating than she’d expected.
Gently clasping Matilda’s upper arms, Augustus crouched down until his face was at her level so he could gaze into her eyes. Solemnly, he said, “I promise you that Thaniel will be safe, but if you do this, we may be able to stop some bad people from hurting anyone else.”
Matilda stared at him for a breathless moment, her eyes overflowing with tears. She hiccupped once more, then said, “Is my father a bad person?”
Augustus stared at her, and while his face remained calm, Pandy knew him well enough by now to see the tension in his body. Finally, he sighed softly and straightened, releasing the girl. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “What I do know is that our parents do not define us. Part of growing up is realizing that only you get to decide who you are. Even if it turns out that your father isn’t a good person, that doesn’t make you bad, and Suzanne, Thaniel, and your other true friends will never doubt you.”
Matilda wrapped her arms around herself, but nodded. “They are my friends. Really my friends. I know that now.” She gave a shaky but bright smile. “All right. I’ll ask him tonight.”
Augustus hesitated, glancing down toward Pandy, who had thought she was well-hidden by the books bracketing her. Apparently he’d developed a Pandy-radar over the last few months. That or being really good at knowing when he was being watched was a finely honed skill that had kept him alive for the last several years of being a Secret Super Cop. Whichever.
“After dinner,” the chancellor told Matilda. “Work on something in the dining hall, and wait for him.”
The girl frowned. No doubt she’d noticed that Thaniel and the others had become more reclusive over the last few days – mainly because Pandy was a terrible actress, and Suzanne and Matilda and honestly anyone else who had spoken to Thaniel for more than ten minutes would definitely notice something was wrong with their friend. She nodded though, then slipped back toward the front of the library.
“I told Suzanne I left my stationary set in here,” Matilda said, taking a pretty yellow box from her schoolbag and holding it up. “I should…” She looked down to put the box away, then back up at Augustus. “You’re sure Thaniel will be all right?”
Augustus nodded. “Certain.”
Matilda nodded back, then ran from the library.
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