15 — Beaming Hair, Glasses & Face

However, knowing him as a person, he wouldn't answer my question right away.

"I see. Did you suspect anything? Or someone, maybe?" he asked while holding his chin.

How rhetorical.

My mind was full of nonsense, unable to extrapolate whatever it was in my head—or maybe it was just me being inept.

The truth was, there were no plausible suspects. Not a single one. The ceremony had been sabotaged twice now, both times in the same way, both times at the exact moment I was supposed to perform. That kind of repetition narrowed the field rather than widening it. Either the culprit was someone with intimate knowledge of the ceremony's schedule, or the culprit was someone who could manipulate time itself. Neither option left me with a name.

But I couldn't tell Arthur that. If I admitted I had nothing, he would offer to help, and if he offered to help, he would start poking around, and if he started poking around, he would eventually find out what I had done to Myra. So I bluffed.

"There might be one of them. Why would you ask?"

An odd question, even for someone like Arthur. Wasn't he the one who approved all this? The ceremony, the schedule, the participants—all of it had passed through his hands before it ever reached mine.

"I was forced to approve all of this."

And? That doesn't answer my question!

Dear Goddess, grant me patience and courtesy. Because I was getting sick of his indecision and the way he acted like he was pretending not to know about what happened.

In my head, I was rubbing my chest in front of him to show him my emotions were boiling over, but I felt too self-conscious to actually do that in front of him.

"Okay, you were forced. So? Does that answer my question?"

He smiled and let out a small chuckle.

"Oh, this time you actually said what's on your mind. How interesting," he said, closing his eyes for a moment.

If your goal in doing that was just to make me fall into your arms, my pride is too high for something that cheap.

"Clara, if you want to interrogate someone, next time don't do it so hastily."

What are you even saying? You're not making any sense.

I don't know what's broken in his head, or what kind of delusion he has that he'd dare say something like that.

Maybe he was imagining me blushing like those palace girls with no backbone, then suddenly getting all excited and sobbing when he was about to propose to me.

Sorry, but I'm not like that.

"I don't know what you mean."

I said, rolling my eyes.

"You suspect me, don't you?"

Baseless accusation.

In fact, he's not someone who can be suspected. He's too kind. Too calm. Too naive—even too polite to be the mastermind behind all this. But that doesn't mean he couldn't be.

Wait, what did I just said? Why am I suddenly praising him?

I felt like my body wanted to gag in front of him, imagining what would happen if I actually said that to his face.

"Yeah. So what? Weren't you the one on the stage then? As if you were intervening in how the ceremony went?"

I snapped at him.

Such an obvious lie. I didn't suspect him. I couldn't suspect him. He was the one person in this entire academy who had no reason to sabotage me—if anything, he had every reason to want me to succeed, since my failure reflected badly on his judgment as the one who approved the ceremony in the first place.

But if I told him the truth—that I had no suspects and no leads and no idea what I was doing—he might get ridiculously smug. He might offer to help. He might start asking questions I couldn't answer. Ugh, I hate seeing him act so cringey and narcissistic.

I'd rather die than see him puff out his chest and shout proudly like, "Bahaha, of course! I'm the handsomest guy in the entire kingdom."

Crazy. Disgusting. God forbid.

"Were you just imagining weird things about me, Clara?"

he said. He was still sitting there casually. His blond hair still looked brighter than the sunlight, not to mention his warm, blooming smile behind the oval glasses he wore.

That beaming face didn't have to show up every day. The chance of it appearing should've been once in a century.

"No. Not at all." I brushed it off, wanting to end this pointless small talk.

Suddenly, the door flew open. I didn't know who was there; my eyes were too blurry to see.

"Oh, Lily," Arthur greeted her.

Lily stepped inside, and the temperature of the room dropped by several degrees. She looked at me, then at Arthur, then back at me. Her expression was unreadable, which was always a bad sign.

"Am I interrupting something?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"Yes," Arthur said at the same time.

Lily's eyes narrowed.

"I'll take that as a yes."

She walked over to the desk and set down a stack of papers with more force than was strictly necessary. The sound echoed through the room like a gunshot.

"Arthur, the council wants your signature on the revised ceremony schedule. They're insisting on a third attempt."

Arthur sighed. "Of course they are."

"And Clara," Lily continued, turning to me, "Professor Ren wants to see you. Something about a 'philosophical inquiry' regarding memory magic. He was very insistent."

My blood went cold.

"Did he say why?"

"No. But he had that look. The one he gets when he's about to ask questions nobody wants to answer."

I nodded and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

The moment my feet touched the floor, my left leg buckled.

Not gradually. Not with warning. It simply gave out, the way a rope gives out when it's been frayed past the point of holding. The pain arrived a half-second later, hot and bright, radiating up from the wound in my thigh and spreading through my hip like someone had poured boiling water into my bones.

I caught myself on the edge of the mattress with both hands, barely. The room tilted. The ceiling tiles swam. For one humiliating second, I was a puppet whose strings had been cut, dangling from a bedframe in front of two people who were both watching me fail to stand.

Clara. You absolute idiot.

"You should stay down," Arthur said.

His voice was calm. It was always calm. That was the worst part.

"I'm fine."

"You're not."

"I said I'm fine."

I tried again. I planted my right foot, pushed off the mattress, and made it half a step before my leg gave out a second time. This time I didn't catch myself. This time I went down hard, my knee hitting the stone floor with a crack that echoed through the room, and the pain that followed was white and total and I couldn't breathe through it, couldn't think through it, couldn't do anything except press my forehead against the cold floor and wait for the world to stop spinning.

Then Arthur's hand closed around my wrist.

Not roughly. Not gently either. Just—there. Warm and firm and unyielding, the same grip from before, the one that hadn't let go. He didn't pull me up. He didn't try to carry me back to the bed. He just held on, as if he had decided that whatever happened next, I wasn't going to do it alone.

"Clara." Lily's voice, sharp. She was beside me now, her hand on my shoulder. "Clara, stop. Stop moving."

"I have to—" I gasped. "Ren—"

"Ren can wait."

"He was insistent—"

"He can wait."

"I have to go."

"No," Arthur said quietly. "You don't."

I looked up at him. His face was unreadable, the same mask he always wore, but his grip on my wrist hadn't loosened. If anything, it had tightened. Just slightly. Just enough that I noticed.

"You're bleeding through your bandage," Lily said. "You reopened the wound. You're not going anywhere."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to stand up and walk out of this room and prove that I wasn't the useless, helpless thing my body kept insisting I was. But my leg wasn't listening. My leg had decided, independently of my pride, that it was done for the day.

"I can't," I said. The words came out smaller than I meant them to.

"I know," Arthur said.

And still, he didn't let go.

Lily stood up and walked to the door. "I'll tell Ren to come here. He won't like it, but he'll come. He's not the type to make a wounded student walk across campus."

She paused at the threshold and looked back at us—at me on the floor, at Arthur holding my wrist, at the space between us that had somehow gotten very small.

"Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone," she said.

Then she left.

The door clicked shut.

Arthur and I were alone.

His grip on my wrist was still there. His thumb had shifted, just slightly, resting against my pulse. Could he feel it? Could he feel how fast it was going? Of course he could. He was Arthur. He noticed everything.

"You should let me go," I said.

"I know."

"Then let me go."

"No."

"Why?"

He didn't answer. He just sat there, on the floor beside me, holding my wrist, waiting. For what, I didn't know. For Lily to come back. For Ren to arrive. For me to stop pretending I could stand.

None of those things had happened yet. But somehow, sitting there with him, on the cold stone floor of the infirmary, with his thumb pressed against my pulse and my leg throbbing and the morning light slanting through the window—somehow, it felt like something had already ended.

I just didn't know what.