Page 72 of The Prince's Mage

He whispered, “I will protect. He cannot harm you. You have done so well. Soon you will have mastered this and I will keep him far away from you.”

Better he think her terror was about Nikias and the tables than the raven she’d seen outside the window and flying through the air while they ate.

Of course, if the truth she was terrified of did come to light, she knew there was really only one place she was going to end up.

The tables had been taken out of the palace. That didn’t mean they weren’t elsewhere in the city.

And from the way Nikias looked at her she knew he was just waiting until he could get her on one and away from his brother and watch a woman who was almost the mirror image of the woman who killed his wife be cut to shreds.

Marcella woke up in the middle of the night to soft caws. She lifted her head off Gavril’s chest to see the silver-backed raven standing on the windowsill, ruffling its wings and cawing at her. She slowly lifted her hand, watching Gavril to make sure he was still sound asleep, and she batted it at the raven and hissed, “Shoo! Shoo! Go away!”

The raven cawed again, and this time Gavril’s head turned toward the raven. If he opened his eyes, he would see it.

Marcella held her breath to see if he woke up.

He did not.

She silently kept waving at it to get lost until it finally took off.

She settled back into the crook of Gavril’s arm, breathing a little easier, but that was only the beginning of it.

The next day, Marcella officially started learning. First she needed to learn the basics of their rune system. According to Gavril, he’d needed to have a solid grasp not just on her language but on the construction of runes, including grammar and sentence structure. Which meant Marcella was starting at a worse place than where Gavril had been.

But she needed to do it even faster than he had.

And she had to do it while Nikias glared at her the whole time.

And pretending to be cold enough that Gavril had the idea that maybe they should shut the windows and stop the breeze from coming in. Marcella had made sure to hide her relieved smile behind the book in front of her.

Gavril had sat down and rested his hand on her shoulders, gently rubbing between her shoulder blades and rustling the cloak and he said, “There. Better?”

No open windows. No ravens.

“Much.”

Nikias narrowed his eyes at her further, but within a second he was hissing and reaching down with his good arm to rub his shin while Aimilia was smiling innocently at him. She said, “Sorry? Was that your leg? My bad. I have this bad habit of kicking at table legs when those two are being sickeningly sweet.”

Marcella was very grateful Aimilia wasn’t her enemy anymore. Well, no more than any Inimicus was.

One reason she had no desire to receive Hypatia’s message was because she knew it was going to include a deadline. Marcella didn’t want to know how little time she had left to accomplish this.

She’d always been terrible at any timed examination.

She who had never once accomplished anything of worth other than looking like Hypatia. It was going to take a miracle. But Marcella was not capable of that. All she could do was pray for one and hope for the first time in her life she was blessed enough to become something more than mediocre at best and a failure at worst.

Marcella spent every day feeling like she was balancing one foot on the edge of a knife as she dodged ravens and tried to wrap her woefully inadequate mind around another language enough to be able to do the impossible. All it was going to take to send her toppling was one mistake. One slip up.

One bird.

Two weeks into this new phase, her brain slowly turning into mush, and her body still more feeble than it should be, she snapped.

The ravens wouldn’t stop appearing out of the corner of her eye.

She walked into her room, cursing herself when she saw it. A raven sitting on her dresser when she walked in.

She screamed.

Gavril was right behind her. “Open the window!”

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