Page 107 of The Tribes of Magic
“Mmm-hmm.”
I was glad my mouth was full, so I didn’t have to say more. I didn’t mind lying to protect Kato and Conner, but I preferred not to lie to my brother. I had to in this case and in this place, of course. Secrets weren’t safe when too many people knew about them. And there were a lot of ears listening right now. It was neither the time nor the place to tell anyone about the traitors in the Government.
“You left.”
I looked at Dutch, who was frowning at me. “Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.”
“The White Knight called, and you had to answer?”
I shrugged, smiling. “Something like that.”
“When you disappeared, that left just two of us against six in the other team,” Bronte said.
“Of those six, only Ansel was an actual threat. He single-handedly won the Quest for his whole team.”
Dutch had a voice that carried, so it wasn’t surprising that Ansel heard him. He shot Dutch a grin and a big thumbs up from his spot further down the table. Ansel was really enjoying his victory, and so he should. Dutch and his Victory friends hadn’t been the nicest to him.
With his piece said, Dutch fell quiet and went back to eating.
Bronte wasn’t so easily appeased. “I know for a fact you gave Nevada one of the answers when Altair was quizzing us, Savannah. You know the material. You could have helped us. We could have won this. If only you had stayed.”
Bronte sighed, then pulled out a book and sulked over it for the rest of dinner. The book included running and fitness tips, which reminded me: tomorrow we had Metamorph training with Team Victory.
One problem at a time. One problem at a time.
I turned to Nevada. “So, did Altair end up poisoning anyone today?”
“No. Ansel mixed up a general antidote and gave it to both teams. After Altair heard about Ansel’s antidote, he said he’d decided there was no reason to poison anyone anymore. But better safe than sorry, right? Altair was a little annoyed that you left, Savannah. Here’s your dose.”
She slipped a vial of green-brown liquid into my hand. Mmm, appetizing. I plugged my nose and chugged it down. Then I helped myself to some ice cream. I’d earned it.
As I ate it, Dante shared the latest Castle gossip with Nevada. “Did you hear about the Watchers?”
“What about them?”
“A whole team of them came to the Castle earlier today to ‘investigate suspicious activity’, whatever that means.”
“It means whatever they want it to mean, as always.”
Or it could mean Conner and I had set off some alarms earlier when we’d visited the Castle, and the Watchers came to investigate. I kept quiet and waited to hear the rest of the story.
“When was this?” Nevada asked.
“Sometime in the afternoon.”
SoafterConner and I had already left the Castle. Which meant the Watchers hadn’t come here for us.
“The Watchers did a locker check,” Dante said. “A very thorough one too. They opened upallof the storage lockers and looked inside. They even checked one of the lockers like four or five times, like they were afraid they’d missed something.”
“Which locker was that?”
“106.”
I was about to grab some cherry pie, but Dante’s words shocked me so much that I forgot all about that. 106. That was the locker I’d put the Paragons’ spellbook in this morning after breakfast. But how could the Watchers possibly know about that?
And then it hit me. The spy. The General’s spy. The one who was watching my every move and reporting it back to him. They must have told the General about the book and where I’d put it. Intrigued and possibly outraged by the idea of a seemingly blank book that I could obviously read, he’d sent the Watchers to retrieve it.
If I hadn’t come back here to get the book for my Quest with Conner, it would have been in that locker when the Watchers searched it. They would have taken it and given it to the General.
