Chapter Twenty-Four: The King’s Message | Part 1
Thirtyx pulled the blanket more tightly around him and snuggled into the mattress. He wasn’t sure he’d ever slept so well, and he wasn’t quite ready for it to end.
Distant voices.
He scrunched his face against the noise. He wanted to sleep. The sleeping felt nice. He’d been feeling really nice, and some sliver of his half-conscious mind told him it would end soon. He needed to savor it while it lasted. He burrowed his face into his pillow.
But it wasn’t his pillow. This wasn’t his bed. He hadn’t fallen asleep in his room.
The ghertaynsage. The portal. Thirtyx groaned into the pillow that wasn’t his. His mind still felt sluggish, and his nerves buzzed with a latent pleasantness, but he was far more lucid than earlier. So, where was he?
Against his better judgment, he opened his eyes.
The room was dark, illuminated only by the frosted window set into a door at the other end of the room, through which light entered from the hallway. Beds stretched to his left and right. The infirmary. At Wydewood.
His spirits sank. So, he hadn’t made it to Vursanne. They’d sent him back to school despite realizing he hadn’t intentionally drugged himself. All that money Rhea and Benn and even King Grimmary had put up for this trip, and he never got a toe off Lamiakk soil.
He must have still been loopy from the ghertaynsage because he could almost hear Grimmary lecturing in the distance. The king sounded angry—hopefully not at him.
“You drugged him, Laera! I’m not letting you anywhere near him!”
Thirtyx wrinkled his brow in concentration. Two silhouettes moved in front of the infirmary door. Both had horns.
One had massive wings.
He rubbed his eyes and blinked at the window. He had to be imagining this, because otherwise, Grimmary was here. Right on the other side of the door.
The slighter silhouette stiffened. “I did not drug anyone. Cerre and Terrezzia gave him that potion—a potion he drank despite it containing a substance known to intoxicate him.”
“Because a child never trained in magic should know the potion’s ingredients and effects better than your own potions head?” Grimmary snarled. “I’d accuse you of gross negligence if we didn’t both know the truth.”
“The truth?” Azirenne scoffed. “The truth is that we haven’t had a Verith student since Terrezzia was in diapers. It was an understandable oversight that hardly constitutes—”
A heavy thud against the wall made Thirtyx jump. “You call me across the continent for an emergency board meeting on half a day’s notice, and you have the audacity to insult my intelligence like this?”
Emergency board meeting? Thirtyx’s stomach dropped. The expulsion trial. The part of him floating in the carefree abyss of the drug wanted very much to fall back asleep and ignore all of this for a while longer, but the sober part of him cared far more about what the king had to say.
Azirenne exhaled a breath so deep Thirtyx saw her chest deflate. “Your Majesty,” she said with an air of barely contained rage. “I am well within my rights to petition for Venmagalion’s expulsion. When I heard he was being returned to campus for using recreational drugs, I thought it prudent to move the timeline forward.”
“Except you didn’t wait until you heard about Mr. Venmagalion’s supposed misconduct to summon us.”
Azirenne bristled. “Excuse me?”
“If you had waited for Professor Lessel’s message, you would have known she sedated him and asked us to come tomorrow. There would have been no last-minute cancelation of this last-minute meeting—a cancelation I elected to ignore after my Legionnaire filled me in. No, if you waited for him to get all the way to the portal and for the ghertaynsage to kick in, there was a chance it would wear off before the board convened.”
The spindly silhouette of Azirenne’s tail gave an indignant flick before going spindle straight. “I’m not sure what you’re implying, but—”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m stating that you knew exactly what you were doing with this feral portal business. Terrezzia Lessel may be too young to know its effects on Veriths, but you’re certainly not.”
