The Half-Class by Kayvion Lewis
Chapter Twenty
The following hours with Cass were the longest of my life.
I barely felt his kisses or noted his smiles. Every thought lingered on Kat and the others. Something awful must have happened. Why else would no one have returned to update me? I had to get out. I had to leave, to go to the manor. Someone would be there. Someone had to know what was going on.
My entire body wanted to scream. As Cass and I shifted our attention from Taliver to a game of chess, I theorized different ways to send him away early. I could tell him I felt ill, but what if he wanted to stay with me? I couldn’t tell him I had to work the bar; the same result would likely ensue. I’d be stuck tediously minding customers while he lagged around. I sure as hell couldn’t tell him I had somewhere to be. I didn’t need to give him any reason to think I would meet anyone in the rebellion, especially since I would be. All I could do was keep my smile on, keep laughing, and hope he chose to leave soon.
He didn’t.
Cass stayed with me all night. We talked about nothing I could remember. Hours that had passed so freely nights before now dragged.
I ran my hands through Cass’s hair, making some joke about how his hair is thicker than mine and trying not to let my hands shake. When I finally saw Auntie starting to clear out for the night, I realized it was nearly morning, and I had been drifting in a fog.
I yawned. “You should go back to the castle. Before you miss another important meal on my behalf.”
Cass smiled. “Are you kicking me out?”
“You keep me up all night; you come back during the day. When is a girl to sleep?”
He sighed. “Dream of me, Lovely?”
“Promise.”
I kissed Cass one more time, then ushered him out as quickly as possible. Telling him I needed a day to recover, I asked that he definitely not come back during the day. He seemed a bit disappointed, and this probably wasn’t doing our relationship any favors. But it had to be so. I needed time.
As dawn sliced through the city, he set away, and I couldn’t close the barn door fast enough.
“Who was that?” Christa called. She, Sammy, and Auntie Jen were chatting in the little hallway behind the bar.
“Sure as hell wasn’t Luke.” Auntie crossed her arms. I didn’t have time to deal with her. I needed to find Kat.
“Evie,” Sammy started. “Is there something you want to tell—”
“Good heavens, not now!” I ran past them, out of the main floor, and back towards the apartment. Leaving the door open, I sprinted up the stairs. It didn’t take long to find my riding pants and chemise. In seconds I’d ripped off my dress, thrown the new clothes on, and darted back down the stairs.
“Where in the world are you going?” Sammy’s voice echoed through my ears as I tore across the floor.
“Out.”
“It’s daytime!” Auntie called.
I ignored her. I ignored all of them and raced out the barn door.
The morning light didn’t seem to shine as bright as it had yesterday. The air was thick around me as I circled behind the barn and into the trail towards the stable. The layer of dew glistening on the packed earth felt disgusting under my hasty steps, and the mist layering the adjacent forest drenched the day in a foreboding bleakness.
A day. It’d been almost a day since Kat was gone. Did Auntie Jen even care? What if Kat and Luke got caught up in the attack? What if something happened to Jace or Gilow?
A thousand what-ifs ran through me. I sprinted through the forest trail. I couldn’t stop.
My lungs burned when I reached the stables, and I barely fumbled the latch open as I crashed into the stable doors.
“Saddy! I need Butter, now!”
I ran up to Butter’s stall and tugged the door. Locked.
“Saddy!” I hurried back across the hay-strewn floor. Where was she? She was always up before dawn. Long before that. Even during the night, the stable was never left unattended. I ran around the stable at least three times. No one was there. How much trouble could I get in for breaking Butter’s stall door? How would I break it?
I stormed outside, scouring the street around the stable. Saddy and the twins’ apartment was just across the street. Maybe they just needed to be woken up. I made it halfway across the cramped street before stopping abruptly at the sight of her.
Looking paler than usual, Saddy meandered down the center of the street, her short hair was frizzed in the morning midst, making her look quite disheveled. In the distance, there was a bustle of people, the same group I’d seen when leaving the barn. More people were gathering by the looks of it.
“Saddy!” I sprinted up to her. Her dazed eyes searched aimlessly for a moment before they found me, right as I reached her. “I need Butter. Right now.”
She shook her head. “You’re not going to Gilow, are you?”
I grabbed her hand and pulled her to the side of the dirt street. No one was within earshot, but it was still dangerous to mention things like Gilow so openly.
“Yes, where else? I can’t tell you about it now, but something really big happened last night.”
“I know.” Her chest heaved. “Everyone knows now.”
Everyone? We hurried into the stable. “You mean everyone working with Gilow?”
“No.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I mean everyone in Bexbury.”
“Saddy, you’re not making any sense. I need Butter—I have to go.”
“No.” She scrunched both hands in her thin hair. “Don’t go back there. Don’t go back to him. Evie, it’s like the incident all over again.”
My heart skipped a beat. The incident? No.
They found it. They found the haven and must have killed them all.
“I have to check on the boys,” Saddy broke into my horror. “They can’t go back there.”
“My horse.”
“You don’t need it. And you don’t need Gilow anymore. I’m sorry.” So Gilow was alive.
I grabbed her shoulder before she could move away, and she jumped under my grasp. “I don’t know what happened, but I need to go. If you don’t tell me where the keys are, I will break the door and leave nonetheless.”
“I’m warning you—"
“Thank you for the concern, but my faith has always been with Gilow, and there it will stay. Please?”
Saddy blinked away the moisture in her eyes. How dead they looked. How tired. “Back wall, behind the leather saddles. It’s one of the brass ones.” I nodded and turned back from her. “Before you go,” she said. “Go to the square. But be careful, don’t let anyone see you. Just watch from a distance. That will be enough.”
“Why?”
“If after you go there, you still want to work with Gilow, then I can’t stop you. But me and the boys are done.”
She ducked her head and left, leaving me more than confused. The square was completely out of my way and in the dead center of town. Was that where she had come from?
The idea of postponing my trip to the haven was excruciating, but whatever she’d seen there must have been important, and I respected Saddy enough to know I had to go.
I found the key to Butter’s stall and ushered her out. A couple of cloaks hung along the wall near the saddles and keys. I had no idea whose they were, but I yanked a pale brown one from the wall. If I was going to the center of town, and if it was anything akin to the incident, then showing my face wasn’t the best plan.
The cloak was light and a bit too large for my frame. I clasped it closed anyway, grateful for the extra fabric covering me.
With every expectation and none simultaneously, I flicked Butter’s reins and set out into the day.
The heart of Bexbury swelled with people, some intangible force pulling us all towards the city’s center. As I made my way further into the center and nearer to the square, I too became entrapped by its pull. But it was more than that. From the unintelligible murmurs around me to the carriages hastily pulled through the streets at my side, a single feeling hung over the thoroughfare—anticipation. There was something to be seen, and we all were headed for it.
Under cover of my stolen cloak, I felt less revealed than I should have. Whatever the commotion was about, it demanded the attention of all those out today, leaving me safely invisible.
Still, as the opening to the broad square became visible up ahead, a nervousness shot through me. I gripped Butter’s reins and swallowed hard.
Saddy had compared whatever I was about to see to the incident. I wasn’t there that day, at the protest that went horribly wrong. The one my parents, Saddy’s fiancé, Luke’s father, and so many others never came back from. But Gilow recounted the story of that day so vividly, I felt like I had lived through it too. It was the hour that divided all of our lives before with life now. A line in time, drawn in blood.
My stomach quivered, and I urged Butter into the square. Though, even he seemed hesitant to enter. The flow of the crowd slowed as we moved into the uneven cobblestone square. It wasn’t packed to the brim, but it was thick.
Yet sickly still.
I stopped at the edge of the square. For a moment, I wanted to turn around. I felt like I was trotting into a nightmare. No sane person would do that. But whatever was ahead of me was no dream. And I couldn’t turn my back on reality.
The people before us were near motionless. Sickening quiet surrounded me. I forced myself to face what they were, and I stilled too, seeing the horrific sight that had transfixed so many.
The once vivid white fountain standing proud in the middle of the square now overflowed with crimson. Layers of red pooled down from the top tier into the second, then into the large pool below. Something hung limply over the cornice—something big and lumpy. Something dark green. A body. A person. An officer.
It was his blood tainting the fountain. And help us all, he wasn’t alone. I could barely make them out, all the way across the square, but there were more layering the bottom tier. How many? Two, three, four? I couldn’t tell. From a distance, they were nothing more than clumps of green buried in a pool of red. Maybe I didn’t want to make them out. But what I could make out was the smaller, red symbol scrawled across the bottom of the fountain. The circle, slashed through the center, half colored, painted in red across the white of the fountain.
No. Paint wasn’t that thin. It was plastered in blood.
Gilow—my friends. They killed these men.
My stomach lurched, and nausea threatened to take over me.
A storm of hooves raced into the square, snapping me out of my haze. More green-clad men. How long had it been since they left them here? Long enough for more men to be sent. Were they here to recover their compatriot’s bodies or to search for their killers?
I pushed back every dazed and weakened emotion in me. Gilow would explain, he had to. And I still didn’t know where Kat was, or Luke, or anyone. Breathing in the smallest bit of relief, I thanked the stars that at least none of them were amongst the dead here. But I still had to find them. And I had to find out what had happened.
Wrapping Butter’s reins around my hands, I turned us around and trotted away from the square as unnoticeably as I could. There wasn’t room for tears. I bit back everything that wasn’t the fire to move forward.
Forward to my friends and answers.