Redeemed by Heather Fledderus (best novel books to read .txt) 📕

Candace forced the lump down her throat. “You don’t remember?” she asked tentatively.

Sylvia shook her head, suddenly uncertain and exhausted. She slumped, aiming for the bench beside her but missing it and collapsing into a sitting position on the grass. Candace knelt beside her, heartbroken. “I-I think I remember being in the tunnels. We were looking for th- it,” she stressed after glancing pointedly at the others. “And then there was this bright flash of white light and then I woke up in the infirmary. The Seraph was singing.”

“Oh great, sis, your friend’s crazy.”

“Shut up or leave, snot,” Candace snapped over her shoulder.

“Candace?” Sylvia ventured.

Candace knelt beside her friend in the grass. “Sylvia… Fitz and Jason- they didn’t make it.”

Sylvia stared at the ground. She started shaking. “No. No, they can’t- they can’t be.” She looked up at Candace, her expression mirroring Candace’s own feelings. “Oh my god,” she said, grabbing her friend and clinging to her as the sobs started to come. “Oh my god.”

Tears started to trickle down Candace’s cheeks. The two lung to each other as they mourned their loss, oblivious to the rest of the world, not caring that Grimwore hunted negative emotions. Jamie sat on the other side of Sylvia, wrapping an arm around the girl’s shoulders. August sat beside Candace and took hold of her sister’s hand, rubbing the back of it. Zen remained standing and turned her back on the group, drawing her sword as she stood guard for the mourners. The five of them stayed in that clearing for a long time.

Lunch was being served by the time they got back to the school, entering via the Immortal Witch hallway. Sylvia leaned heavily on Candace and Jamie, what frugal energy she had started out with spent in the woods. Since most students were in the Great Hall, they hardly saw anyone. Those that they did come across gaped at the sight- Sylvia being supported by Candace and Jamie, with August leading the way and Zen, minus a blazer that she had had that morning, taking up the rear. Students’ heads poked out of classrooms where they had holed up to study- third year potions class was having their first test that afternoon- to watch the procession.

They crossed the main entrance foyer, the maze inactivated for the time as they stepped on both brown and white tiles at will. They made it to the infirmary before they finally came across a teacher. “I don’t want to go in there,” Sylvia whispered weakly.

Candace patted her hand reassuringly. “I’m not going to leave you alone. You’ll be fine.”

Sylvia was settled back into bed when Headmaster Hilroy finally burst into the room. Spying the five of them, relief washed over his face before being replaced with annoyance. He crossed the room in long strides. “Where were you?” he demanded in a soft tone.

Sylvia managed a cocky little smile at him. “Sup boss? How’s the school these days. Must have been pretty boring without me around.”

Hilroy’s gaze flicked from her to Candace as he raised an eyebrow. She looked away. “Candace, a word please?”

Sylvia clung to Candace’s hand. Candace hesitated. “Don’t bother,” Zen said, “I’ll go. He’s gonna want to talk to me next anyways.”

She followed Hilroy out into the hall, out of sight of the others. Students who had been creeping close to see if the rumors were true were scared away by his seething glare. Note to self, Zen thought, don’t push him too far or he’ll go right over the cliff.

“I asked for Candace,” he said quietly.

Zen leaned casually against the wall, her left hand gripping the edge of her sleeve. “Yeah, well, Sylvia’s been through a lot, so has Candace. They need to be together right now. I’m sure if you have any questions, I’ll be able to provide the answers to them.”

“Alright then, where was she?”

She shrugged. “Can’t tell you. Try another one.”

“We know she wasn’t outside. We have staff watching the doors.”

“As if no one’s ever used a window to escape or sneak back in before.”

“So she was outside?”

“Didn’t say that, did I? I was simply pointing out that you guys had a one in twenty chance of catching her if you were only watching the doors. That’s about the ratio of first floor windows to doors leading outside, I’m guessing.”

“Does she know about her friends?”

“Yeah. Candace told her. Sylvia was devastated. Might I suggest letting Candace skip classes for the day?”

“Are you asking me for permission for the four of you skipping classes when you’ve already missed most of them?”

Zen raised a hand defensively. “Hey, it was for a good cause. Candace worried is so not the Candace that you want on your hands, trust me.”

“Alright, maybe you can provide an answer to a question that has plagued me since the five of you are here.”

“If you’re asking me about what happened to my new blazer, it was seriously not my fault. There’s a perfectly logical explanation for it.“

“That’s not was I was going to ask, although now you’ve piqued my interest. We’ll get back to that one. Let me finish. Before Madame Kirena left at midnight, the groundskeeper saw someone flee the infirmary at around eleven. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

Zen shook her head. “Nawp, but I don’t blame whoever it was for trying to escape Madame Kirena’s concoctions. Candace said that she was almost fed hemlock last night.”

“It’s only mildly toxic in low doses.”

Zen raised an eyebrow at him. “You know, there’s gonna be a time when a parent is going to walk by without you knowing it. And they are so not going to want to hear you talking about how hemlock is a common enough ingredient in medicines. You know that hemlock kills people, right?”

“What exactly did happen to your blazer?”

“We got attacked by another Reaver.”

“inside the school?”

“I never said we found Sylvia inside the school. She was out in the Forest, wandering around, completely confused. It was sheer luck we found her before a Grimwore did. Anyways, I tried harder this time not to get any of the damn blood on my clothes- I even took off my blazer and hung it on a tree branch, but wouldn’t you know it? That Reaver just simply had to go and knock it over during our encounter and fall right on top of it. Suffice it to say that it disappeared even faster than the last one. I get it if the school can’t spring for a new one. More’s the pity though, I was actually getting used to it.”

“Oh good, then you can get used to the idea that any clothes that you manage to somehow destroy will be replaced with articles located in the lost and found. I expect you to have another blazer by dinner.”

“Lovely. I always consider used things to be much easier to deal with. They don’t get all stiff and starchy on you. Let me tell you, this place is not at all like home.”

“And how is that?” he asked mildly.

She opened her mouth, about to answer, but thought about it and grinned. “Nice try. I know the Ministry has you watching me and that you’re supposed to report back to them. Sorry, but I’m not going to make it that easy for you. There are rules, even to banishment.”

“So you were banished then? The records weren’t clear.”

“In a manner of speaking, yeah. I have no clan to return to now. I’m a first generation Clanless.” She rubbed her left arm as she said it, jutting her chin out stubbornly. “And I think Sylvia’s in a similar boat, so why don’t you just back off for now and give her some room, alright? She doesn’t remember anything about what happened, or why they were down there in the first place. Heck, I’ll bet that she doesn’t remember anything at all that’s related to why they were there.”

She turned to go back into the infirmary. “Oh, and one more thing,” she said over her shoulder. She turned around to face him. “If you want a Repeller to try to fix something, don’t go and hire the loser who couldn’t repel a jinx to save his life. Aranean incantations deserve a little more respect than that.”

Hilroy sat in his study, fingering his medallion thoughtfully as the Sight overcame him. Whirls, he saw, whirls upon whirls upon circles. That’s what he saw when he thought of Zen. The next closest person who compared to her aura was Griswold.

The door closed and half the lamps in his study flickered out. “Griswold,” he said to the darkness. “You’re up early.”

“Never really went to bed, to be frank,” the old man replied as he sat down and produced the ever faithful flask from his coat. “No luck catching one of them Grimwores, but the traps are set. Now I’m just playing the waiting game. So the girl woke up, eh?”

“Yes, and I believe she had help on that score.”

“Your Repeller student,” he declared. Hilroy nodded. “Told yer she’d be useful.”

“She said something interesting to me today…” Hilroy trailed off

“Aranea be saved,” Griswold swore after waiting several seconds, “You gonna spit it out?”

“Why do you always say that?”

“Because you always take your sweet time talking and I’m normally running on fumes.” He shook the flask. “Haven’t been able to top up yet, and that tends to get me in a sulky mood.”

“No, I meant, why do you always say Aranea be saved?”

“Oh, that,” Griswold said, turning pensive. He sighed heavily. “Well, you know about my condition and all that, right?” Hilroy nodded. “Well, way back when, Aranea used to be a kingdom of sorts, ruled by a higher class. Don’t ask me what class. The person who told me this story got real mad when I asked. You’d think I had asked her if she was a faker Wanderer. You know what a Wanderer is, right?”

“They were a sect of people who traveled from town to town before the Guild Wars, gathering the history of places before a universal language developed.”

“Yeah, and they get respect mostly everywhere they go. Anyways, Aranea was protected by a magical spell called the Barrier, kept