Reign of Shadows - Deborah Chester [22]
Crossing the courtyard with his escort, Caelan could feel the eyes of the assembly burning into his back. He felt their curiosity and shock flooding over him in a collective mass of emotion that nearly made him stagger. Somehow, he managed to hold it off. This was no time for sevaisin to grip him.
The wind was bitterly cold, flicking sharp little snowflakes into his face. His breath steamed about his face, and he fought not to shiver. He intended to show no weakness. If the masters expected remorse or doubt from him, they would not get it.
All he felt now was impatience to get this over with. It would have been easier on everyone if the proctors had just handed him his cloak bag and put him through the gate. No fuss, no assembly, no scaring the first-termers.
But, no, they had to make a huge ordeal of this, make it bigger than it was. They’d even had to seize one final chance to frighten him by making him think they were going to purify him against his will.
But soon their games would be over, as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t wait.
Reaching the dais, Caelan halted. The proctors parted from around him. Looking straight up into the stony eyes of Elder Sobna, Caelan felt defiance fill him like heat. He smiled.
Twin spots of color blazed in the Elder’s pale cheeks. The Elder’s gaze burned into his; then the mask of severance returned like the slam of a door.
Caelan looked away, indifferent as the Elder lifted his arms and began to speak.
Much of it was in the old tongue, no longer used by edict of the emperor. Caelan understood none of it, and even when the Elder switched back to Lingua, Caelan barely listened.
With his money taken by the soldiers, he had no chance of heading out on his own. He would have to go home. There would be plenty of time on the journey to think of an explanation for his father.
His whole life suddenly spread before him, radiant with limitless possibilities.
“Caelan E’non,” the Elder said loudly, startling him, “what is your answer?”
A hush lay over the assembly as though everyone had held their breath to hear. Even the bell stopped tolling. Caelan had no clue as to what the Elder had asked him.
It was worse than being caught daydreaming in class.
Embarrassment flooded him. He almost started to stammer something; then he caught himself short. This wasn’t class. He was no longer obliged to do anything these men wanted.
Defiant again, he looked up at the Elder and said clearly, “I have no answer to make.”
A gasp ran behind him, and even some of the masters looked disconcerted, but the Elder’s expression did not change. With a nod he stepped aside and gestured at the masters.
One by one, they approached Caelan and touched him briefly on his left shoulder.
“I concur,” each one said.
Master Mygar came last. Old and stooped, he limped forward, his white robes stained and smelly. His palsied lips made him appear to be mumbling to himself, but his rheumy eyes glittered as malevolently as ever when they met Caelan’s.
He did not brush Caelan’s shoulder with his fingertips as had the others, but instead gripped him hard.
“Casna,” he whispered.
It was the word in the old tongue for “devil.”
“You will break the world,” the old man whispered, his eyes rolling back in his head. “You are destruction incarnate.”
Blackness poured into Caelan through the old master’s touch, burning him, defiling him. Such hatred, such decay ... an evil rottenness like a stench in the soul.
Caelan jerked free of the old man’s grasp. Shocked, he stood shuddering and blinking. A clammy sweat broke out across him, and for a moment he thought he would be sick.
He stared at Master Mygar. As the black worm of Mygar’s emotions continued to twist through Caelan’s veins, he saw the old man’s flesh melt away. A bleached white skull stared back at him, and darkness—a living, horrible darkness— writhed and pulsed within the plates of bone, flickering at the edges of the eye sockets.
Appalled by what his inadvertent sevaisin had brought him, Caelan sought desperately inside himself for the patterns