The campus had been talking about nothing else for three days.
A foreign prince, attending on diplomatic enrollment, had beaten six students in the practice arena — two of them from significant noble houses — while attempting to intimidate a farmer's daughter who had refused his dinner invitation. The farmer's daughter had then stood up from the ground where she had been beaten and, in her defense, removed both of his hands with a single motion of her academy-issue blade. The hands could not be reattached. The prince was in the medical wing receiving increasingly frustrated attempts from the best healers available, all of whom were finding that the stumps were perfectly healed and entirely uninterested in accepting their original components back.
The official account, as filed by the panel, was clear: the prince had cast first, struck first, and injured multiple students before Clara Voss had intervened. The panel's finding had been no violation. The unofficial account, which was what everyone was actually discussing, was considerably more detailed and varied by who was telling it.
Clara had heard approximately forty versions of her own story in three days.
She found most of them entertaining.
◆ ◆ ◆
Arthur had been monitoring the prince's situation through the spider on the medical wing's curtain rail since the morning after the arena incident.
The hands were being kept in a preservation device — a good one, professionally maintained, the magical environment inside it slowing degradation to near zero. Every healer who examined the prince's arms reached the same conclusion: structurally sound, completely closed, functioning normally as complete limbs. The problem was that the body they were trying to reattach them to had also reached a conclusion about its own completeness, and the two conclusions did not agree.
The healers were baffled. Arthur was not baffled. The working Clara had used was one he had designed specifically for situations where permanent was the desired outcome and reversibility was not. He had not told her to use it. She had made that decision herself, which he had thought about for a day and then filed under: Clara's judgment, Clara's call.
On the third day a healer from outside the capital arrived — older, significant reputation, clearly brought in at considerable expense. She examined the prince's arms for two hours. She examined the preserved hands for another hour. She sat down and looked at her notes for a long time.
Then she said, to the room of other healers watching her: 'I don't know what was used. I have not seen this working before. Wherever she learned it, it is not a traditional healing spell.'
Arthur, through the spider, listened to this and noted it.
He would need to have a conversation with Clara about being careful whenever she used any custom of the Voss family's custom spells.
◆ ◆ ◆
The assassin arrived on the fourth night.
Arthur had been watching for it since the second day, when the spider on the prince's medical room wall had picked up a conversation between the prince and a visitor who had the bearing and the specific vocabulary of someone operating in a professional capacity. The conversation had been brief. The price had been agreed. The target had been named.
He had connected to Clara through the spider immediately.
'There's an assassin coming for you,' he said. 'Probably in the next two days. I need you to make it a loud and dramatic event. Draw in as many people. This will be your chance to permanently remove that annoying prince.'
Clara had been lying in her dormitory bed looking at the ceiling. 'How loud.'
'Loud enough that fifty witnesses see it happen and it cannot be resolved quietly,' he said. 'This needs to land on the prince, not disappear.'
She was quiet for a moment. 'You want me to let them try.'
'I want you to be completely safe while making it appear that you are not, yes.'
Another pause. 'That's quite fun, actually.'
'Don't enjoy it too much,' he said. 'And leave the window open.'
◆ ◆ ◆
The assassin was good. Arthur tracked the approach through the spider network — the movement through the academy grounds at two in the morning with the specific controlled patience of someone who had done this before and had not survived this long by being careless. Through the dormitory exterior, up the wall, the window Clara had left open exactly the right amount.
The figure paused at the window. Read the room. Saw the sleeping girl under the covers. Moved to the bedside.
The knife went to Clara's throat.
What happened next was the loudest thing that had occurred at the academy in living memory.
The scream came first — Clara had a remarkable set of lungs under normal circumstances and had apparently decided that if the task was volume, she was going to commit. It woke the dormitory up instantly. Then the window exploded outward with a sonic concussion from a force spell that rattled glass in buildings across the courtyard. Girls in their dormitory rooms throughout the building sat bolt upright in beds that were suddenly vibrating.
The assassin had found a solid surface where a throat should have been and was currently discovering that the stealthy exit through the window was no longer available because something was holding him in place with the specific iron quality of telekinetic restraint applied by someone who had been practicing it for years.
Clara's voice, amplified through a whisper-to-shout spell, filled the courtyard: 'Help! Someone please help me! There's a man in my room!'
Her door opened itself. The hallway flooded with dormitory residents in various states of undress who found, upon arriving in Clara's doorway, a tableau that was going to be described for the rest of the academic year: a masked figure in full assassin's black, knife at the throat of a beautiful blonde girl in her bed, suspended in place by no visible force.
The screaming from the hallway was immediate and comprehensive.
Teachers arrived in under four minutes. Guards in under six. The assassin, held in place and unable to move, looked at the assembled witnesses with the expression of someone who had understood that this assignment had not gone as planned. From the witnesses point of view, it looked like a man had mounted a beautiful blonde girl, held a knife to her throat and was trying to kill her while the young girl struggled to prevent the assailant's knife from reaching her skin. The teachers just assumed that they had arrived just in time to save Clara's life and that the assassin was oddly dedicated to his mission since he chose to stay put until the bitter end rather than escape.
The spider on the assassin's shoulder administered the antidote spell the moment the poison vial appeared. The guards subdued the figure before they had finished swallowing and found, to their significant relief, that the target was alive.
◆ ◆ ◆