Page 102 of Gemini Kings
Misery is too familiar a state for me to fear it.
What I truly want is to ask if it hurt him when his father sent his lover away.
I have wondered, sometimes, if it was love between him and that sailor, or only passion. In truth, I have wondered more about Vasili and that sailor in the intervening years than I care to confess.
So, once again, I avoid these questions.
It is true that I must learn from him, if I can. The Dean has made clear that I will only be allowed to remain if my grades merit my place.
“If you are asking what I wish to study, I do not wish to study Genetics,” I say, because all those letters and proteins and codons made my eyes ache, and also because Mistress Agrippina has advised that I learn that subject from Neo.
“Well, that makes two of us,” Vasili murmurs. “It’s a frightfully tedious subject. Is there anything youdowish to learn?”
I dig into my backpack and produce a heavy tome that I thunk down on the table between us. “I wish to learn this.”
“Foundations of Witching World Law.”He eyes the volume with a glimmer of interest. “Why that subject, in particular?”
“We will need this knowledge when Zara ascends.” This is my tacit admission that we may both be at her side when that happens. He will be hard to kill, this enemy of mine.
And I… I did not always wish to kill him.
That summer on the Romanov yacht, I wanted anything but that. He was three years my senior, and I admired him. He wasn’t the warlock then that he is now, but still, he was a force of nature. I admired his confidence, his wit, his fashionable sophistication, his utter lack of scruples, his terrifying skill with a blade. I envied him his father, and I wanted to be his brother, in a way I could never claim true kinship with those hateful worms who crawled from my mother’s revolting nest. I wanted to be his friend.
And, in absolute truth, I even wanted—
“I am aware of no current plan to add you to our harem,” he huffs, with a little flash of spite. “Despite your histrionics in the pool.” So she did tell him. At least, she has told him some of it. “However…”
I eye him warily. Truly, he is capable of anything.
He gives my wary face a playful pout. “Well, darling, I did promise Lucius I’d teach you. I suppose this subject is as good as any.”
Sly humor gleams in his ice-blue eyes. He would look at me this way sometimes that long-ago summer. He did it just often enough, between bouts of mockery and days of avoidance, to keep my wistful hopes of friendship with him alive.
I know he cannot read my mind, he is Mogadon and I am shifter, and we are not mated (of course). Yet I find I must lower my gaze to the textbook to avoid meeting his. I do not wish him ever to guess how much he hurt me that summer.
In silence, I nudge the book toward him.
“Hmmmm.” His narrowed gaze probes my face, but I keep my eyes on my notebook and inscribe the date in my careful script. At last, he says, “Shall we start with the body of law that governs the royal succession?”
His choice of topic pleases me, but I merely grunt.
I always knew he was clever, but I never knew how much. He begins to speak, without notes, without preparation, without even glancing at the text. Quickly the truth becomes apparent. His intellect is sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel or an assassin’s blade. He explains to me what I barely understood before today, about Messalina the weak Aquarius queen and her dead bitch daughter Cybelle and how now there is no Aquarius heir, because Messalina is barren and aging. (Possibly he is wrong about that, about the current lack of an Aquarius heir, but I will choose my moment to tell him, when Zara too can hear.) He speaks of Zara’s brother Damien, Cybelle’s intended mate, who terrorized this school to the point of tyranny, until the late queen killer struck and murdered the poisonous couple.
And he speaks of Zara, who never sought to take anyone’s place.
When Cybelle died, Lucius and Ronin kidnapped Zara to bring her here. She wished only for her freedom. Yet now she must give up that freedom she craves like oxygen to become the Gemini queen.
He is a gripping storyteller, this enemy of mine, although I will never pamper his colossal ego by telling him.
Still, I am riveted.
I am riveted by his words.
And I am riveted by him.
I am taking notes to begin, when he briskly outlines the Byzantine clauses in the matrilineal law of succession that govern how the throne passes to the eldest scion of the next-most-purebred witching house if the line of the dominant witch dies out. This has happened before, since Aquarius queens did not always rule. The Aquarius clan replaced the ruling Cancer clan, whose purebred line has long been extinct.
But my pencil soon slows.
