The next day, Tristan enjoyed school as he never had before. Every time Damian or Zeke shot a confused, accusatory look his way, he smiled. It felt wonderful to hold this secret over their heads.
On the way up the stairs to Gracewright’s class, Zeke grabbed Leila by the collar of her coat and shoved her against the wall. “Where did everyone go last night, huh?” he demanded.
Leila must have been expecting this—digging her nails into Zeke’s hand, she wrenched her coat from his grasp.
Tristan shoved red-haired Cassidy aside and rounded on Zeke. “Get away from her.” He didn’t want to start another fight; he had enough hours to work off already.
Leila jammed her fist into Zeke’s jaw and ducked under his arm. Rusty dove toward Zeke, but Tristan grabbed his shoulders just in time.
“Snap out of it.” Tristan yanked Rusty around to face him.
Breathing hard, Rusty lowered his fist and ran a hand through his messy brown hair. “Sorry.”
Thankfully, Gracewright was waiting for them in the snowy meadow, forestalling any retribution on Zeke’s part. As the students followed her to the longhouse garden, Tristan wondered about Rusty’s aggression as he had leapt to Leila’s defense these past few days. He had always come across as overly nice—a pushover—but was that just an act?
Gracewright rubbed her hands gleefully together as she shepherded the students into the longhouse garden. She wore a colorful wool hat and a thick scarf; shivering, Tristan wished he had remembered his warm layers.
“We just received a shipment of Prasidimums,” Gracewright said, pulling the door shut behind her.
The Prasidimums were not immediately obvious; eventually Tristan spotted a pile of what looked like dried tulip bulbs.
“What the hell’s a Prasidimum?” Damian asked, scowling at the bulbs.
“They’re magical plants. Very rare, and very potent.” Gracewright brushed the crumbling skin off the largest bulb.
Finley Glenn raised his hand. “Where are the shipments coming from?” He shoved his glasses up his nose. “I thought everyone who wasn’t a professor worked on collecting magic from disasters. Or are there other magic schools out there?”
“An astute remark,” Gracewright said. “There are no other academies of magic—as far as we are aware—but one of our former students specializes in hunting down rare magical plants around the world.”
Dropping the bulb, Gracewright clasped her hands. “Back to the Prasidimums. Once fully grown, these plants morph into a protective barrier, a very special barrier that only allows certain people through. We will be growing the Prasidimums without magic—unless allowed to flower properly, they become an impenetrable wall.”
“Wouldn’t that be useful,” Zeke said, smirking.
Gracewright smiled patiently at Zeke. “We’ll tend to the Prasidimums at the start of class each day. It takes about twenty days for them to flower, at which point we’ll replant them around the school.” She began passing around bulbs and clay pots.
Tristan took a seat on the grass and eyed the shriveled bulb. When Leila joined him, he whispered, “I bet they’re thinking about the attack on the greenhouse. They mentioned looking into new security measures.”
“You’re probably right.” Leila watched Gracewright as she continued around the room, evidently lost in thought.
“Hey, Leila,” Zeke called softly, leaning forward. “You know what this bulb looks like?” He held it up and squinted in her direction.
Leila threw her bulb at Zeke’s head.
By the end of the lesson, Tristan, Leila, Rusty, Zeke, and Damian were covered in dirt, most of which had been thrown by Zeke or Leila. Gracewright let them out early to change for their next lesson—she hadn’t minded the dirt fight, since the Prasidimums had ended up in pots regardless.
When he buttoned up his coat and turned to leave, he noticed Evvie hanging back, eyebrows drawn together in worry. He lingered, pretending to search through his textbooks in hopes of overhearing whatever she asked about, but Leila grabbed his elbow and dragged him into the snowy meadow.
“Hey,” Tristan said, hunching forward against the cold wind as he waded through the snow. “I wanted to hear what she was up to. Maybe she was asking Gracewright to help take care of the children.”
Leila snorted. “You were being super obvious. She wouldn’t have said anything with you there.”
After class, instead of working on homework, the nine students who had relocated to the Subroom began tracking down furniture. Chairs were first to appear in the secret bedroom—Evvie brought a serviceable wood chair, while Eli hauled down a squashy maroon armchair, which he sat in until dinnertime just to lord it over the others.
Tristan, Leila, and Rusty decided to ask for additional furnishings while they worked off punishment—Rusty went down to the deepest floor to help Delair, Leila made for the kitchens, and Tristan stopped at Alldusk’s classroom.
The heavy stone door was ajar when Tristan approached, a crack of light spilling onto the marble tiling.
Tristan eased the door halfway open. “Professor?”
Hearing no response, he slipped into the classroom.
Then he froze.
Alldusk had his arms around someone, and it was a split second before Tristan recognized her as Merridy. Her hair was unbound for once, cascading halfway down her back, and her glasses lay abandoned on a desk.
Tristan stumbled back a step. Were they a couple? He supposed it was not that strange, but it was jarring to see his professors in such an intimate context; his face grew hot with embarrassment.
When Alldusk saw Tristan, he released Merridy at once. She yelped and stumbled into a table, her glasses clattering to the floor.
“Tristan!” Alldusk said wildly. He fidgeted with his hands for a moment before shoving them into the pockets of his black trench coat.
Cheeks flushed crimson, Merridy fumbled for her glasses. When she found them, she jammed them on and hurried from the room, head down. She slammed the door on her way out—for a moment there was no sound but the dull reverberations of the crash.
Tristan swallowed. “I’m really sorry. I’ll just go now.” Alldusk was his favorite teacher; Tristan felt awful for embarrassing him like this. “I won’t say anything, I promise, I—”
Alldusk shook his head. “Don’t worry.” After a moment he took his hands out of his pockets and straightened one of the chairs. “Were you hoping to work off your punishment?”
“Yes. And—” Tristan cleared his throat. “How old are you and Merridy?” The question slipped out before he could stop himself.
Alldusk’s mouth twitched. “Darla and I are thirty. New students are selected every fifteen years, though Professor Drakewell is the only one remaining from his year.”
“Why?”
Alldusk laughed quietly. “No one knows. And I wouldn’t go asking questions, if I were you.”
Tristan frowned, his mind racing.
“The headmaster keeps his job for a reason,” Alldusk said, “but even the older teachers won’t say why.”
For the next two hours, Tristan and Alldusk worked side by side, separating and labeling and grinding ingredients. Neither spoke.
By dinnertime, Alldusk’s mood seemed to have improved considerably. As they cleaned up their workspace, sweeping plant dust into a metal trashcan and wiping the table with lemon-scented rags, Tristan remembered why he had come here to begin with.
“Um, Professor—do you have any spare furniture we could use for that new bedroom we’ve moved to?”
Alldusk smiled. “I have a few spare shelves, if you want to collect them after dinner. And I’ll keep an eye out for anything else that turns up.”
When Tristan returned to the Subroom after dinner, he and Leila each carrying one of the shelves Alldusk had donated, he was surprised to find the space cluttered with furniture.
“Where’d all this come from?” he asked, setting down his shelf.
Leila deposited the second shelf beside the maroon armchair and wiped her sweaty hair from her forehead. “Gerry didn’t even let me help in the kitchen, so I’ve been moving things all afternoon. That storage cupboard I’ve been sleeping in is packed with old junk.”
Rusty joined them a moment later with a sack full of magic lamps and nails. Leila was better at hammering them into the wall than Tristan or Rusty, so they handed her nails and held the metal plates in place.
Eventually all sixteen lamps were fixed to the wall and glowing merrily. The room was completely transformed, as bright and cheerful as the ballroom upstairs.
Just then, footsteps in the tunnel signaled the arrival of Eli and Trey.
“Hey,” Eli said, grinning. “This looks nice.” He spun in a circle, eyeing the walls and furniture. “The lights are crooked, though.”
“It’s Leila who put them up, not me,” Rusty said.
Leila glared at them both.
As the others began to arrive, Tristan and Leila set to work clearing a space along the far wall, where they spread the nine mattresses side-by-side, leaving enough room for a book bag and a pile of clothes between each. Since the wall was curved, the mattresses ended up in something of an arc.
Rusty and Eli were supposed to be arranging furniture, but instead they dug through the drawers, scattering bits of paper and other debris across the floor. In what looked like an attempt be helpful, Trey knelt beside the pile of litter and sorted through it, occasionally flattening a crumpled sheet to see what was written on it. Tristan struggled to keep a straight face—the Subroom was such a wonderful secret, as though the earth had folded its rich, cold layers around this one bright heart.
According to the small clock perched atop a burnished copper vase, it was past eleven by the time Hayley and Cailyn joined them.
“We should play cards,” Rusty said, beaming at the girls.
Tristan had been shoving a heavy desk against the back wall—he straightened, rubbing his bruised arm. “Sure.”
Leila glanced up from the stack of books she was organizing. “Gerry has an enchanted fireplace we can bring down tomorrow, Triss,” she said vaguely.
“Great. Do you want to play cards?”
There weren’t nearly enough seats for the eight of them, so Hayley and Cailyn shared a wooden chair; Eli reclaimed his squashy armchair, with Trey perched on the arm; and Tristan, Leila, Rusty, and Evvie sat on pillows around the short coffee table Leila had scavenged with help from Quinsley.
“We’ll play poker,” Eli said, whipping his usual deck of cards from his back pocket. “There’s plenty of junk here—we can bet with pens or something.”
As Eli dealt the cards, Leila described her plan for the room.
“We should put the fireplace across from the door. Once we get more chairs, we can group them around the fire.” She pointed to the space, which was currently empty aside from an overflowing trashcan. “If we can find a larger table, we’ll turn it into a study space.”
Pushing her cards to the side, Leila started writing up a list, ignoring Eli’s scowl.
“What else do we need? I’ve got more chairs, a larger table, that fireplace…”
“We’ll need a broom,” Hayley said. “And a bunch of rags for dusting, if we can find them.”
Leila nodded and added to her list. “Anything else?”
Tristan looked up, struck by a sudden inspiration. “We need one of those Prasidimums. Didn’t Gracewright say they only let certain people through? If we planted one in the doorway, none of Zeke’s gang would be able to get in here.”
“That’s brilliant!” Leila said. “I’d never have to worry about Zeke again. And it’d keep the teachers away, too, if they tried to kick us out.”
“Are we going to play poker or not?” Eli asked.
“Sorry,” Leila said.
“What do you get for winning?” Evvie asked, frowning at her cards.
Rusty grinned. “Maybe Leila can bake you something.”
“No way,” Leila said. “If you win, you can clean up these pens.”
Amber wandered into the Subroom just after midnight. Giving Tristan a distant smile, she chose a book from Leila’s pile and settled down on one of the mattresses to read.
“We should get to bed soon,” Tristan said, stifling a yawn.
“You’re only saying that because you’re losing,” Eli said. More than half of the pens were stacked by his elbow.
Hayley got to her feet. “We still need to put the sheets back on the mattresses.” She had lost her entire pile of pens on the second round; for the past hour, she’d been watching and trying to help Cailyn. “No, you keep playing,” she told Cailyn. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”
Now that she had the chair to herself, Cailyn curled her feet beneath her and propped her chin on her hands, watching with a sleepy, contented smile as Eli dealt the next round.
When at last the game was finished—Eli won, to no one’s surprise—Evvie stopped Tristan on his way up to brush his teeth. In the shadowed tunnel, he didn’t recognize her for a moment, and his heart raced as he squinted at her face.
“Tristan?” Evvie’s voice was thin and nervous.
Tristan tried to steady his breathing. Neither carried a lantern, so the shadows lengthened as the others turned a corner. “What is it?”
“Can you come with me? I—uh—need your help with something.” She sounded reluctant to be asking, or perhaps frightened.
“Sure.” Maybe then Evvie would believe he was more than just a criminal.
She led the way back down the tunnel, deeper into the earth. The open door to the Subroom spilled light as they passed, but it quickly faded to an all-consuming darkness. Tristan trailed his hand on the rough stone wall as they walked, blindly shuffling his feet along the uneven floor; if not for her soft breathing, he might have feared Evvie had abandoned him. The air grew staler and heavier as they walked, the cold settling on Tristan’s skin.
At long last, Evvie stopped and said, “Here. No one will overhear us now.”
“What is it? Is it about those kids?”
Evvie was silent for a long moment. Then she sighed. “Yes.”
“I thought you were going to find a way to move them somewhere safer.”
Evvie scuffed one foot against the floor. “I asked a professor for help, and they said there’s no way to relocate them without Drakewell finding out. Not until the end of the school year, anyway.”
“So—what, they’re just going to hide down here for months? In the cold and the dark? They’ll go insane!”
Tristan wished he could see Evvie’s face. “We’ll make sure they’re looked after properly. But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.” She sounded annoyed. “You know how Gracewright told us about those Prasidimums this morning?”
“Yeah?”
“I asked her after class, and the way the plants recognize who to let through their barriers is with a drop of fresh blood. It has to be fed directly from the person to the plant—we can’t just collect it and then give it to the plants later.”
With a dawning horror, Tristan realized what she was talking about. “So if we don’t get the children up to the meadow to give their blood to the plants, they’ll be trapped down here forever.”
“Right,” Evvie said in a small voice.
“And Gracewright isn’t the teacher you told about them?”
“No. She supports Drakewell.”
Tristan’s mind raced. “What if we told Quinsley? Maybe he could fly them somewhere in secret.”
“The professor I talked to doesn’t trust Quinsley—or anyone else here. I think this school is doing something bad, Tristan. There’s a reason they’ve recruited criminals, not ordinary people.”
Tristan closed his eyes and leaned back against the rough, cold wall. He did not want to contemplate this—if he had to choose between supporting something evil or returning to Juvie, he did not know what he would do. Returning to Juvie would break him; he was sure of that.
Letting out his breath, Tristan opened his eyes, though the darkness was as impenetrable as ever. “What do you want me to do?”
“I need a diversion,” Evvie said softly. “We’ll get the children up to Gracewright’s longhouse beforehand, and I need you to do something that will make everyone move away from the greenhouse long enough for us to sneak the kids in and out.”
“Right,” Tristan said heavily. “I’ll see what I can do.” He couldn’t think of anything off the top of his head; whatever he came up with was likely to get him in the exact sort of trouble he was trying to avoid.
“Promise?” Evvie whispered.
Tristan sighed. “I promise.”