“I don’t control the Breaking.” I tossed a look between the masters in the room. “I can control a class of students, and that’s about it.”
Danai forked a few pancakes on to her plate. “No one here is sure what the Breaking will bring. We have only prepared as much as we can. We don’t know what will come. None of us. But we are ancient, and we are far more acquainted with the people and our island.”
“What we aren’t sure of,” Dorian said, “is who these people are. They have managed to stay in the underground, away from our prying eyes. So, in addition to saving your ass last night, I was hoping we would find out more.”
Most of my life, I had joked about how safe S’Kir was and how anything going even slightly off-kilter was utter dissension toward the plan.
I never thought some people spent their lives going against the will of the temple and its masters. It never made any sense. S’Kir was as close to a utopia as we could get, with happiness and health, long life and lifelong learning and friends.
Only accidents marred us. I knew those well.
I pushed some of the breakfast around on my plate while considering what he’d said. Dorian made excellent points. They were the oldest and the closest to the Lost God.
Why would anyone ever go against such a clear-cut plan designed to preserve things as they were? Our society was fun, free, intelligent, and loving. That was the way the Lost God wanted it and how the masters had set it up.
Had the masters known the Lost God?
I pushed the thought away. I still had questions about last night. “So you weren’t helping Elex?”
Dorian eye’s narrowed as he trained them on me. “Everything I do has more than just you or Elex at the heart of it. My reason for saving you, for helping your male, was many-fold. Your life was one. My information was another.”
I hated this man. He couldn’t seem to just have an honest, singular motive. “Did my imperiled life help you gain your information?”
Elex rested his hand on my arm, trying to calm me.
I was not in a mood to be calm—or calmed.
“It did, yes. Thank you.”
Danai’s head whipped up and around to find Dorian’s eyes. “Wow, Dorian. That was perhaps the most dickish thing you have ever said. To anyone.”
A casual flip of his hand dismissed her. “She asked.”
“I asked to prove you are on your own mission and not actually acting nobly to help my male rescue my kidnapped person.” It had been a very long time since I harbored this much anger toward anyone. “And you have clearly provided the evidence.”
“Do you want me to lie?” His anger came close to matching my own.
“I want you to very carefully examine your duplicity in every damn thing you do!”
“Kimber, please.” Elex’s voice was laced with worry.
“I am angry, Elex. He didn’t want to help us—he was once again helping himself. The self-serving Master of the Temple.”
“You’ve known me as nothing more than a distant master for under two months, you insolent child. You have no idea what I am or what I can do. You have no idea what my motives are or why I chose to help your male rescue you.”
“You’re right. I don’t. And I don’t ever want to.”
With an angry move, I shoved the chair back and out from under me. It flipped over, crashing onto the wooden floor, but I didn’t care.
Snapping around, I marched out of the room, through the rotunda, and out the door of the temple.
I had so much anger that I could scarcely believe it. I had to walk almost violently through the massive gardens around the temple.
Where was this coming from? I taught children, I didn’t have a mean bone in my body—at all. I didn’t want to be angry. It took too much energy to be angry.
Dorian had been noble in helping Elex save me from the carriage. What purpose did it serve to diminish that with his own agenda? I was honestly grateful for his efforts until he turned it into a ‘Dorian Festival.’
The man had a past, he had an agenda, but to dismiss my thanks as he would dismiss a servant really chapped my ass. To turn my danger into his gain?
“Kimber, wait.”
Danai was trying to catch up to me on the path. I realized how fast I had been walking and brought my pace down from ‘very pissed off’ to ‘I simply need fresh air.’
She was able to catch up in a moment. “My dear girl, you are just showing me that I need to get back into my fitness routines.” She panted for a moment, and my tension was broken with that comment.
“I am sorry, Danai. He just makes me so angry. He’s unfair and mean, and then does something noble, and squashes it in the next moment.”
Matching pace with me, she sighed heavily. “But, Kimber, that’s him. That’s who he is. He’s a brilliant man, a powerful magic master, and a complete asshole to everyone around him. You’re not an exception to his rule.”
“Why, though?”
“Because he’s thousands of years old, my dear. Thousands. He has machinations that have machinations that have plots with plans peppered with more machinations. He sees…well… We see patterns in everything. I am not young, and I see the wheels and cogs of patterns in our society. I am not yet cynical about it.
“Be warned, my dear. Many of us do have secret agendas we do not share with one another. We have lived and served under the same roof for more than a thousand years and some of us much longer. Our lives would be boring without our own agendas. If we did not keep secrets, we would be horrible people. Horrible. Worse than anything Dorian has shown you.”
I listened to the gravel crunching under our feet as we kept pace with each other. “I don’t wish to be a pawn in these games.”
Danai nodded. “I understand that. It’s noble.”
“I won’t be.”
Her hand landed on my arm. “But, my dear, you already are.”
Dia de los Muertos.
Day of the Dead.
The name was deliciously appropriate.
The Spanish sounded so romantic as it rolled off my tongue.
“The overlords moved the Blood Rite to coincide with the festival nearly a century ago.” Adelie fussed in my closet searching for something. “Everyone agreed it was just too marvelous a festival to not take advantage of. Mostly, it’s celebrated in Mexico, but there are a lot of people all over the world who love it, so we use it.”
I folded my arms. “They just up and moved the Blood Rite?”
She peered at me through the clothes. “Please. Is anything in our world done that simply?” She ducked back down. “Of course it wasn’t just up and moved. It took years of petitions, and causes and revisions, and arguments and proofs… It’s like, come on, you ancient assholes. Just realize this is a good thing. This is just another way to hide. If our Blood Rite were at the same time as the humans held Dia de los Muertos and Halloween, it was just another level of protection.”
“Halloween. Hmm. That’s the Christian usurpation of Samhain, right?”
“It is. The human witches still observe it, but most human children in the New World dress up for Halloween. It’s just so much fun that we can go freak people out during Blood Rite and not be feared.”