No wonder Darren had been so cold that first day at the Academy when Ella and I had questioned his place as a student. Doubtless, he had experienced what I was feeling now thousands of times. As a prince he probably got tired of proving himself again and again. Darren’s angry retort that morning had been a culmination of years of false flattery and cruel speculation.
“You will thank me one day for not filling your head with false compliments.” Darren had been doing me a favor after all. If only I had realized it then instead of years after the fact. What I had thought was mocking irony was in truth the advice of an angry young prince who had been tirelessly lied to and talked about whenever he left a room. His entire life.
“Thanks,” I told Ruth aloud, “for stopping me before I said something I’d regret.” Although in truth I wasn’t so sure. Those two knights deserved a piece or two of my mind.
Ruth patted my shoulder awkwardly, unaware of my internal conflict. “It’ll get better, Ry, you’ll see.” She never was one for warm, friendly gestures. “And if it doesn’t, well, you are only with us for a year before you have to return to the capital, isn’t that right?”
That was a bleak prospect. I gave her a weak smile, and Ruth returned to her group of Alchemy mages as I followed behind Ian and Ray, lost in my own self-pity and fury.
****
“Ryiah. Ian. You two are going to go south with Jeffrey’s band. Ray and I will head north with Sir Gavin’s.”
I tried not to let my disappointment show when we reached a fork in the road and Gavin had Lief split us up into two separate parties. Though the bandits’ tracks had been missing for the first two days everyone suspected they had taken the stream north after the general resurgence of prints leading to the south.
As Lief put, “No one spends that much effort trying to hide their presence to suddenly stop trying.” The thieves had clearly run out of magic and taken the stream to hide their route—leaving an abundance of evidence south to lead their pursuers astray. Still, Sir Gavin had to send some of us to investigate both options, and it was no surprise I got assigned to the group least likely to encounter the enemy.
The conversation between the two knights came echoing back: “From what I’ve seen she’s nothing special.” As I parted ways with Ray and Lief I had to keep from lobbing my apple’s core at the lead mage’s back. Do you think I’m nothing special too? I wanted to scream, I am more than capable of handling a couple bandits on my own!
But of course I couldn’t say any of that. Because any fit of temper would confirm the skeptics’ assumption that I was only here because of my relationship to the prince. Because a true war mage would never complain over their duty, no matter how menial or insignificant it might seem.
“You are unusually quiet.” Paige sidled next to me on her mare after two hours of silence. “Is something bothering you, my lady?”
I clenched my teeth. Self-pity would not get me anywhere. “Nothing is bothering me.” I studied the forest in front of us and the moss-covered granite scattered throughout—it would have been beautiful if I hadn’t been so distraught. “Do you really think the bandits would be this obvious?” I was referring to the droppings peeking out between dense patches of grass and ivy.
The knight bit her lip, understanding my real reason for asking. “No, my lady.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Next to me Ian didn’t say a word. I wondered if he was upset to be assigned with the fifty of us clearly headed in the wrong direction. The weaklings. It had to be an insult for Ray to be given the premium assignment even though Ian was a year older and more experienced. Chancing a quick glimpse I saw the boy’s face was a mask.
Since when was that boy unreadable?
We wove in and out of the thick-trunked pines dotted in fuzzy growth, following the obvious indentations of crushed foliage for nearly three hours before the prints finally turned around and backtracked the path they had taken through a nearby hedge.
“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” a soldier grumbled.
I dismounted and Paige followed by habit. The sun had turned a hazy amber peaking out beneath the trees, illuminating our stop with shades of crimson and violet. It wouldn’t be much longer before it was time to set up camp. Some of the knights nearby were debating whether to turn around now to try and catch up to Sir Gavin’s group to the north, or rest for the night. Knowing how sinister the terrain could turn without the sun’s rays to guide us, I was in favor of the latter.
“Mages, would you mind collecting the firewood?”
Now that we were down to fifty, the soldiers needed help with the tasks a hundred usually accomplished without the mages’ and knights’ aid. I didn’t mind. It gave me something to do, and I needed a distraction. I grabbed one of the soldier’s empty sacks and Ian and Paige followed suit, the three of us scouting the west side of the trail while Alchemy and Restoration took the east.