Matte Black

It took a whole two days for Fairburrow to finally reappear.

A giant crowd had gathered around the steps of Durland Hall, with a bit of excited chatter filling the air, though it was pretty obvious that nobody quite knew what was going on.

“Are you sure Fairburrow’s planning to appear?” I nudged Mary, who looked like she was seconds away from passing out in the crowd.

“N-Not really… I overheard some of the maids say they heard a rumor.”

“So we're going off an overheard rumor? Fun.” Val scanned the crowd. “Though that has to be one hell of a rumor for this many people to have shown up.”

“Gives some truth to it.” It wasn’t close to the numbers from when Isaac’s body was found, but just getting to the front took a good bit of fighting. “But what kind of trap involves spreading rumors about reappearing after a week-long absence?”

“Something tells me we’re about to find out.” Val narrowed her eyes. “Look.”

From Durland, two figures dressed in identical white robes walked onto the marble entranceway. More Church robes.

The extravagant red stripes running down the sides of those robes made it pretty clear how highly they stood within the Church as well.

“You know much about those, Arthur?”

Arthur stood at the back, having not said a word so far. “They’re both bishops at least, the second one’s closer to a…” He froze as their faces came into view. “Father?”

The first one was Fairburrow for sure, with his lax features and those eyes that usually looked so kind.

It was the second that made me tilt my head. His expression was a bit sharper, with a balding head and dull brown eyes. Golden flowers ran down beside his red stripes—real gold.

“You’re saying that’s your dad?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Arthur looked troubled as he replied. “I don’t have a clue what would bring him here…”

“Hello, hello!” There was something almost hypnotic about the way that Fairburrow spoke. The crowd went from a mix of loud chatter to dead silence in a second. Crowds around here wouldn’t shut up if given an hour, typically. “I’m so glad to see such a wondrous crowd for my arrival.”

“Get to the point, Fairburrow.” I scowled. Arthur’s father has to be connected to Fairburrow’s trap somehow. Did he know Isaac? If Fairburrow thought to bring him… What am I missing?

I’d never seen Arthur’s dad in my life, and surely Fairburrow hadn’t already figured out about Arthur changing sides.

“I wish I could tell you more about my disappearance, but I got called by the Church to help investigate a very important issue.” His tone turned somber. “As I am sure everyone knows, a beloved student of ours, Isaac Vertana, was recently discovered to have been murdered in cold blood.”

Boos rang out from the crowd. It felt gross, watching the same man who killed Isaac get boatloads of sympathy for pretending to investigate his murder.

Do you not feel a bit of shame, Fairburrow? But I kept my mouth shut as Fairburrow continued to spin his story.

“The Church had a specific lead, and they needed a trusted professor from the academy to aid them in their work. It was a sacrifice, dropping everything on a whim to go help in the case, but to help solve the murder of one of my students, I would do anything.”

“Could his ego get any bigger?” Val scoffed. “At least try when pretending to be humble.”

“I wonder who he’s going to blame? I said.

“Some random noble?” Val shrugged. “Some enemy of the Church, I’m sure. What works better as an excuse than the murder of a prince?”

“I-I don’t know…” Mary muttered. “I think he’d choose someone a lot closer than that…”

“And that’s why I reappear before you today!” I turned back into Fairburrow’s speech. “After following the Church’s lead, we have found objective evidence about the identity of the killer, and I hate to admit that one of our own is responsible.”

“One of our own…” I got a bad feeling from those words.

“I don’t have a motive yet, but we have our killer! With the help of the Church, we spread a rumor of my reappearance, hoping to lure her into a trap. And I am very happy to say that she has walked right into our cage, just as we hoped.”

Fairburrow’s face turned straight toward me, and a chill ran down my spine. “Why did you murder Isaac, Ruby Everbit?”

The crowd gasped. I could feel every eye near Durland turn toward me at once.

“So that’s your game, Fairburrow?” I barked back. Gods, I should have known. Here we were, assuming he’d accuse some random noble when his prime target was standing ten feet away.

I glanced back toward Mary, who was shaking like a tree in the wind. “I got this.”

Mary didn’t exactly look convinced.

“My game? I simply desire for Isaac’s family to have the answers they seek, murderer.”

“How original.” I rolled my eyes. This isn’t my kind of game, but I can’t exactly go on stage and attack Fairburrow. Not here, not yet anyway. “You knew we planned to confront you about Isaac’s murder, so you decided to flip our accusation on its head! You killed Isaac, Fairburrow, we both know the truth.”

The crowd gasped again.

“Your best move is to throw my accusation back toward me, a teacher? I see Everbit’s education system needs some work.”

Don’t take the bait, Ruby. I slowly steadied my breathing.

“Why would I bother to kill my own student? I’m a teacher! My job is to protect and nurture the youth of Vertana. I gain nothing by doing so!”

“Because—” I bit my tongue. Suddenly showing Isaac was a Prisma wouldn’t do me any favors.

“No answer? Well, everyone, I can give you a reason for his murder! Everbit is a small, impoverished country, with its princess a known troublemaker. When we made the generous offer to invite her to Vertana, she pretended to be happy. But what lay beneath was jealousy.”

“Jealousy?” I would have laughed if it wasn’t so absurd. “You’ve never set foot in Everbit.”

“Why would I? Do you often go prancing around in the slums?”

I actually did back in Everbit. If nobody else was gonna volunteer to work in the food pantries, I typically would pick up some of the slack.

But Fairburrow didn’t bother to give me any time to respond. “Isaac took pity on you, and you became jealous. It’s well known that you two spent some time together. I have no proof of what the breaking point was—a romantic confession turned sour, some request denied, or maybe he just denied hanging out with you for a day. Doesn’t matter. But you snapped and decided to murder Isaac in cold blood.”

“Gods, stop with your fanfiction.” The whole thing was completely absurd. Obsessed with Isaac? I wasn’t the one who went to his room in the dead of night to talk about liberating Prismas.

“But we have evidence, Princess.” As he spoke, I noticed from the corners of my eye that Church guards had completely surrounded the crowd, all armed with long halberds.

“Evidence?”

“Yes, Princess. You left a sloppy trail, I hate to say it. It was this trail that the Church originally caught onto.” Fairburrow gestured to the balding man next to him. “This is Archbishop Orion, the father of Isaac’s roommate, and the man who first discovered Ruby Everbit’s scheme.”

“Arthur…” I glanced back, where his expression was murky at best. “What did you tell your father?”

“Not much, I swear!” He hesitated. “Maybe a bit, but I never mentioned you once.”

Unfortunately, his words sounded like the truth. Arthur wasn’t exactly a convincing liar.

“I would listen in your shoes, Princess.” Fairburrow’s voice honestly didn’t sound that particularly different compared to his normal self. That just put me even more on edge.

“Hello, hello.” The first thing that struck me about Arthur’s dad was how uncharismatic he was. Nails on a chalkboard sounded better than his voice. “Thank you, everyone. I’m here as an official representative of the Church to verify the claims of your professor.”

He cleared his throat. “We first caught onto Ruby Everbit after getting a report about a break-in inside my son’s dorm room. Sources saw her jumping from Isaac’s dorm room.

They did? I wanted to blast myself with a fireball.

“I can also confirm that it was impossible for Fairburrow to commit said crime, as during the timeframe of the prince’s murder, Fairburrow was at a social event hosted by myself.

“Bullshit.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you had the ability to curse, Arthur.”

“I do, and my father hasn’t hosted a social event in years.”

“Sounds about right.” But we can’t exactly go blaring that out loud.

“Let me tell you what happened.” Fairburrow took the stage back. “Ruby Everbit was jealous. Right before his murder, Isaac visited Ruby in secret, two hours after his supposed disappearance. Here, he rejected her, and she got lost in an act of passion. But she assumed that he would have evidence. So, she secretly broke into Isaac’s dorm room to destroy what evidence there was!”

I scowled. Fairburrow had played me like a fool, hooked me up on strings like a puppet, and let me dance along to his tune.

“You’re a fool, Fairburrow. You don’t have evidence for half that!” Can’t have evidence for something that never happened.

That didn't change the fact that we had spent so much time preparing for a fight. Fairburrow never planned for a fight.

The punishment for killing a noble was death.

“Guards!” Headmistress Alaxa’s shrill voice came from somewhere behind me. “Arrest the princess!”

“Ruby, I—”

“Let it go, Val.” I wanted so badly to blast Fairburrow straight in the face with a bolt of lightning. “There are too many innocent people around.”

“Princess…”

“It’ll be ok, Mary. Wait in my dorm room for now.”

“But—” Mary’s voice cut off as the Church guards tackled me to the ground, wrapping a giant pair of wooden cuffs around my hands.

I can get out of this in seconds.

But I couldn’t. Not yet.

My eyes met the Headmistress. There were two ways I could think of to get out of this, and for both of them, I’d have to find a way to successfully plead my case.

“Take her to my office. An interrogation is in order.”

At the Headmistress’s command, the guards shoved me up and walked me along campus.

Here we go, Ruby. It’s now or never.