And after everything that had happened that morning, I was more determined than ever to leave Royersford as soon as the snows melted so that I could try to find a way home.
“You can come with us,” I told Appius anyhow, earning a pair of strange looks from Leander and Darius.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Mara asked. She had the look of someone who was about to reveal a treasonous plot to kill her uncle and put herself on the throne.
“Please,” Appius begged her. “Please let me come. I don’t want to be alone.”
“Don’t you have housemates?” Leander asked.
I didn’t like the way the conversation was keeping us in the courtyard, especially since Magister Marcellus seemed to be looking for students to help him dispose of the bodies.
“Let him come,” I said, grasping Appius’s hand and marching on toward the main building, which would take us back to the dormitories. “He needs friends. We need to look out for each other.”
The rest of the students seemed to feel the same way. Groups of friends had naturally formed throughout the course, and it was a strange comfort to see clusters of students, like ours, walking together, arms around each other, holding and consoling each other, or muttering at the unfairness of it all.
We got another shock as soon as we made it back to the dormitory houses. They’d been ransacked. It was hard to tell from the outside, but once we stepped through into our own house, it looked like some sort of a whirlwind had crashed through the place. Every drawer and wardrobe had been opened and dumped out, every chest or box upended and its contents strewn all over the common room and the bedrooms. The soldiers had even emptied the chamber pots we hadn’t had time to dump down the drain outside all over the floors.
“Those bastards,” Leander muttered, stepping out of his and Darius’s room with a urine-soaked blanket in his arms. “They dumped the chamber pot right onto the bed.”
“It’s like the soldiers have already decided the healing students are guilty, or at least that we deserve to be fucked around with,” I said, bringing the towel I’d used to mop muck off the floor out through the common room to the porch.
“They’re sending us another message,” Lucius said, worryingly icy. “They’re letting us know we’re not above them, even though the college has been given special status.”
We’d all filtered into the common room by that point and were helping each other to pick up scattered books and papers, or cups and bowls that had been smuggled in from the dining hall. Appius was quietly helping us set the house back to right, even though he didn’t live there.
“I’m surprised you haven’t taken the soldiers’ side,” Darius said, thumping several books he’d retrieved from the floor onto the table. “What with you being one of those snobs who live in a big country house.”
“I beg your pardon?” Lucius snapped at him.
I quickly stepped between the two of them, holding out my arms to stop something before it started. Though Darius had a good point about why someone from Lucius’s lofty background would apparently be taking the side of the revolutionaries. Mara too, for that matter.
“Let’s not fight amongst ourselves, alright?” I glanced to both of them. “All we have is each other right now.”
“And we’re going to need each other in the coming days and weeks,” Mara added, moving to Lucius’s side and putting a hand on his arm like she would pull him back.
The gesture wasn’t lost on me. I remembered how Mara had come out of Lucius’s bedroom that morning. I’d assumed it was a comfort thing, like me and Appius, but now I started to wonder.
Lucius was from a lofty family. Mara was the niece of the king. The two of them actually were suited for each other, as far as marriages of class went. But something told me there was a hitch that I didn’t know about.
Well, aside from the fact that both of them were on the side of the revolutionaries.
“Let’s just focus on putting the house back in order,” I said.
I was surprised at how little pushback I got for that statement. We were all on edge—more than on edge, we’d long since passed the edge—and just wanted to get our house looking and smelling as it usually did.
That meant spending the rest of the morning picking up the things that had been knocked over, making a pile of things that needed to be laundered on the porch, and scrubbing everything from the floors to the walls, simply because we needed something to do.
Halfway through that process, Magister Titus, along with a worker from the kitchens carrying a box of food, came by our house.
“The college is closed until further notice,” Magister Titus announced as the worker set our lunch on the table. “As long as the unrest continues, I’ve given orders that the gates should remain closed, and no patients should be allowed in for healing.”
“Doesn’t that go against the code of healers?” Appius asked as he hovered close to my side.
Magister Titus stared at him for a moment, and I wondered if he was questioning whether Appius should be there or not.
“In ordinary times, yes,” he went on, not saying anything about Appius. “But until we know the king’s mind on the college, and until we have a better idea of the situation in the city and, indeed, throughout the kingdom, my first responsibility is to protect the safety of the young men whose education and lives have been entrusted to me.”
As kind as his words were, they sent a chill down my spine.