Free Antebellum Awakening by Katie Cross Page B

right wrist called my attention. I gazed down on the circlus, a ring containing the three marks that I’d earned at Miss Mabel’s School for Girls. It represented three areas of magical expertise: the Esbat—an advanced course in leadership and ancient languages—Advanced Curses and Hexes, and Advanced Defensive Magic.
    Staring at the circlus reminded me of the night I earned the last two marks, when Miss Mabel killed Mama. A rush of fury stirred my heart to even greater passion. What did it matter if Miss Mabel caught me? I was going to get that binding. What did I have to lose?
    I only had a few months left to live anyway.
    •••
    “Merry meet, Bianca. What did Merrick make you do for today’s lesson?” Michelle asked me when I walked up to her table the next morning. She sat in front of a plate of biscuits, gravy, sausage, and toast. The servants’ dining room moved around us, the one area of Chatham Castle that never seemed to sleep. It bustled with harried servants and dissonant Guardians, and was the main battleground for the eternal war between Mrs. L and Fina, the head cook.
    Tables of varying size had been scrunched into every available spot in the broad dining room, which was almost as big as the ballroom, and made movement chaotic and difficult. There was no intimate space here, and it never emptied. Different shifts of workers kept it in constant flow. A table half the width of the room stood near the eight foot tall fireplace. Four kitchen workers kept the massive table constantly full of fare. The dining room made it easy to disappear into the melee but still keep track of everything going on. This morning I’d wandered there in search of Leda.
    “Push-ups,” I said, sitting across from Michelle and recalling that morning’s training with a grimace. A careful attempt to shift my already sore shoulders only resulted in greater pain, so I stopped moving. “Lots of them. And footwork. I had to repeat the same movements at least five hundred times.”
    Michelle’s nose scrunched. “Sounds miserable.”
    “Thanks,” I said, buoyed by her empathy. “Where’s Camille?”
    Michelle motioned behind her with a jerk of her head. In a moment I spotted Camille’s bushy blonde hair, pulled away from her face with a glittering headband. The broad shoulders of the Guardians clustered around her dwarfed her short, but increasingly slender frame. Her chubby teenage cheeks had begun to lose some of their girlish roundness since she’d moved to the castle. All the attention from the Guardians left her in a happy glow most days. When she tilted her head back and laughed at something one of her admirers said, I smiled to myself.
    “They are all so in love with her,” Michelle said, following my gaze. “Except for Brecken, I think. She mentioned something about him ignoring her yesterday when she tried to get him to take her on a walk in the gardens.”
    Sure enough, Brecken sat at the far end of the table, oblivious to Camille’s presence. He wasn’t lost on her, however. I noticed her eyes dart his direction every now and then, especially after she let out a witty comment that earned guffaws from the rest of the Guardians.
    "It’s good to see that someone is immune to her girlish charms," I said. My mind turned back to my original purpose. “Have you seen Leda?”
    “No,” Michelle said, her forehead scrunching together. “She was gone by the time I came down here this morning.”
    My mind churned. Where would Leda have gone so early? Michelle woke up before the sunrise to get working on the fresh loaves of bread, a time of day when no one stirred. The librarians would have opened the library just fifteen minutes before I came to the dining room. What was Leda up to?
    “Oh,” I murmured. “Interesting.”
    Michelle lapsed into her familiar silence and I was glad. She only spoke when she had something pertinent to say and I loved that she held little expectation for conversing. Sitting with