I kept a close eye on the bruising after that. Some ice in a towel was enough to combat the inflammation, and I could go easier on the foundation once it started to change to a lighter colour. The best part was being able to move my facial muscles without wincing on instinct.

There was one problem that I couldn’t wrap my head around.

Claude swore on his life that I was not the person responsible for the shootings, at the academy, at the party, at the theatre, and at the fort. There were huge black spots in his memory of those events that essentially retconned me from them. He recalled me showing up and helping them out – but not any of the specific actions that hinted towards me being a trained killer.

Claude internalized this absence of memory as evidence against the admission. It didn’t matter who said it; Adrian, Max, Samantha or even me. He was convinced with full certainty that he’d remember me if that was the case. He blew us off no less than three times with a wave of the hand and a dismissive comment about us trying to pull a prank on him.

It was mind-bending and infuriating in equal parts.

This moron had spent the last few months insisting that I was the person responsible for all of the issues going on at the school. He was right! Now that the evidence was staring him right in the face, he refused to accept it because of the book erasing his memories of the day. Even that explanation earned incredulity from him.

Samantha sighed, “Claude really is a special kinda’ bloke – isn’t he?”

“I was debating whether it was worth telling him again or not. I suppose it was a waste of time to worry.”

Adrian and Samantha jumped the gun before I could make that decision. I got pulled along with them in the end and joined in, partly out of frustration at him denying the plain facts being handed to him. Adrian and Max weren’t so interested in justifications as they were the frank admissions of what I’d done. We hadn’t gotten together and had a proper discussion about my motivations.

Not that I believed it would help. The natural reaction from any outsider was going to be concern. It wasn’t every day that you learned one of your school classmates was partly responsible for the crazy shit that was happening around you, killing people and sending the police on wild goose chases. I was waiting for the penny to drop. There would come a time when their having that information would cut against me.

But true to form – the truth had a bad habit of getting out whether you wanted it to or not. There was nothing I could do about it now. The only alternative would have been to leave them for dead, kill them myself, or let Gwyneth get away with the book and potentially give the military access to a lot of scary-ass demons. Meeting only two of them was enough for one lifetime.

I was a lot of things - but a child killer I was not. Trying to compensate for my failings or secure my comfort by killing a thirteen-year-old was unconscionable. It was a red line that I firmly avoided crossing. There were few moral standards that a professional killer could subscribe to, and I never expected to get credit from others for doing so, but that was the way I liked to work.

My judgement was the only one being appeased by this rule. I’d killed Prier in seemingly cold blood. I wasn’t earning brownie points with the police by avoiding killing children. I couldn’t cash in my tokens to let that one slip beneath their notice.

Even separated from that – there was another matter to concern myself with when it came to Samantha and the other main characters. It was a matter of course that they would all be important to future events in some capacity. Meddling with them, killing them, harming them or alienating them stood to make life more difficult. Who else would save the world from evil than the main characters?

Or me – as Durandia was so eager to imply. This world really was doomed if I was the best option to fix it up...

“I don’t understand. He was the one person who was the closest to the truth, yet now he refuses to accept the credit for being correct.”

“His confidence in his memorisation abilities is stronger than his willingness to listen to anyone else. That’s the problem. He thinks that there’s no way he could ever forget seeing you shoot a man dead.”

“I figured as such. Perhaps this is a blessing in disguise. Claude is incapable of keeping a secret.”

Samantha and I were sitting in the interior garden of the main building. I enjoyed this space more than the other areas. I could sit back and listen to people conversing about their lessons or studies, while also enjoying the fresh air and carefully cultivated vegetation. The ornate architecture that surrounded us on all sides was the cherry on top.

The quality of the space was somewhat hampered by my fanclub. Most of them were socially conscious enough not to defy my wishes and invade my personal space, though some of the pushier members of the cohort didn’t see an issue with randomly approaching me and acting like we were close friends. Being seen with Samantha worsened the problem dramatically, with those problematic girls taking it as a personal insult.

“You would rather be seen with this commoner than the likes of me?”

That particular line was a favourite that they loved to deploy when they confronted me about it. I would handily dismiss them with a retort about exercising grace even when associating with someone from a poorer family. Who was left after that? The very worst that the fanclub had to offer. A pair of girls who seemed to believe that I was being blackmailed or manipulated by Samantha. They couldn’t conceive of any other reason as to why I’d spend time around her.

Two such pains in my posterior were lurking around the edge of the garden. The first was a girl named Dalia, and the second was her friend slash clinger-on Wendy. These two were ardent members of the Walston-Carter Appreciation Society. They appreciated me so much that they wouldn’t take no for an answer while trying to harass me into spending time with them.

I always thought that Adrian was competitive - but Dalia was so much worse. She viewed everything she did as a competition to be won. She was the first one in the lecture room and oftentimes the last one out. She studied religiously on every bit of material thrown our way and openly bragged on the rare occasion that she topped the tables. During physical lessons, she would randomly start trying to ‘beat’ people in whatever low-intensity sport we were engaged in.

Wendy was a wallflower at heart and Dalia brought out the worst in her. Unlike Dalia, it was difficult to demerit Wendy for her behaviour in class or around the campus. She was quiet, and studious, yet still possessed a burgeoning pride. She was the perfect today for a bossy nightmare.

“Are those two going to cause trouble?” Samantha inquired.

“I’m afraid so.”

Samantha’s acknowledgement of their presence was their cue to approach our bench. Dalia led the way with her typical sense of misplaced confidence - with Wendy hiding behind her like a piece of soft cover. I tried to put on my most disinterested expression, but if that worked on Dalia I wouldn’t have had to worry about her.

“It’s so nice to see that you’ve healed from those grisly injuries, Lady Maria. The academy was aesthetically deprived without your full radiant presence!”

From anyone else, that type of statement would have been sarcastic.

“If I were in charge, the brutes responsible would suffer the worst kind of punishment for daring to touch you. Drawn and quartered, and their tarnished corpses put on display to discourage the rest of them!”

Wendy went green in the face at the violent proposal. Dalia didn’t notice or simply didn’t care. She finished her bold declaration by clasping her hands together and deferring the topic of discussion to me.

“Can I help you, Dalia?”

Her eyes widened, “Oh! No, no. I’m not here to request your assistance. That would be far too presumptuous of me. You and I already stand at the apex of every mock exam. I simply wish to extend my condolences for the attack on your home.”

I kept it civil; “Thank you. I appreciate the thought. My Father was extremely upset by what happened. They killed men and women who had worked at the manor since before I was born. I suppose we should take some small solace in the fact that the culprits have been brought to justice.”

Dalia was so, so close to walking headfirst into the brick wall I erected by mentioning the servants. I knew that she did not think much of the people who made her life comfortable. That was normal. Most of the nobles at the academy were entitled dirtbags who didn’t spare a single thought for the people who kept them in clean clothes.

Somehow, she resisted the urge. I foolishly believed that she was making progress. With that line of inquiry firmly closed by my response, she turned her ire towards Samantha. Normally her height and strength kept the nobles from insulting her directly, and my own reputation meant that the more socially engaged students refrained from so much as mentioning her with an ill word.

To Dalia – Samantha was a leech sitting in her rightful place by my side. She was not interested in hiding this from me or her. In her mind, direct confrontation was the only way the situation would turn in her favour.

“Is this farmgirl bothering you, Lady Maria?”

Goodness – she made that sound like a four-letter word.

“Honestly, what happened to your manners? Were you not taught to treat your peers with respect regardless of your personal feelings?”

Dalia glared daggers at Sam, “She is not my peer. She has a very long way to go before making a bold claim like that.”

“She is not the one saying it. I am.”

Wendy winced out of Dalia’s sight, but she was too much of a doormat to warn Dalia that she was walking down a dangerous path with this conversation.

“Why do you endure the company of her? Surely, she must make for dull conversation. A girl like this is only good for cleaning up an animal’s mess. She knows nothing about art, music or dance.”

Samantha remained steadfast in her place. She was perfectly content to let me have this verbal sparring match to myself. She was good at tuning out people like Dalia, and she knew that anything she could say in response would only be half as hurtful as what I could unleash with my forked tongue. It was extra upsetting coming from a source that they respected.

“If you’ll simply offer me the opportunity, I’m sure that I can show you that Wendy and I are preferable to this boring country girl. In fact, I might be able to teach you a thing or two. Chess, dance, piano – whatever you desire.”

“No. No. No,” I replied firmly.

She crossed her arms and scowled, “Are you afraid of my abilities?”

“What makes you so confident that I desire to waste my time competing with you in anything at all? You march here and demand that I entertain your company, yet the first and most essential element to earn that right is not spoken.”

“And that would be?”

“I find you intolerable. Surely a socially erudite noblewoman like yourself understands well that the most important part of keeping another’s company is respecting their wishes and refraining from irritating them with needless annoyances. I came here to relax – not to have a debate with you.”

Dalia recoiled at my sharp tone. I did not leave any room for ambiguity this time. She annoyed me – and I intended to communicate that clearly. I watched her face slowly progress from pale, to pink, to an irate shade of red. Half-formed words and retorts dropped from her lips but none of them were articulated in any real sense.

Instead, she stomped her foot, harrumphed, stuck her nose in the air, and marched away with Wendy left to chase after her like a lost chick. The argument lasted only around a minute and I’d firmly burnt at least one bridge during it.

Samantha sighed, “I haven’t seen you dress someone down like that for a while.”

“Most of them have learned their lesson already.”

“That part is weird to me. Why do they all still love you so much when you put on that combative persona?”

“When I came to the academy I made a severe miscalculation. I believed that giving the socialites the cold shoulder would keep them away. It seems to have had the opposite effect. They now view me as some kind of prize to win. The ultimate reward for persistence and good breeding.”

“Makes me glad to be a country girl...”

“You should be! I assume you’ve never suffered the humiliation of a debut party.”

“I’ve heard of those, but I don’t get them.”

I groaned. Imagine the culture shock of being brought into high society, in a new body, as the opposite gender, and then within months being asked to rub elbows with a collection of total strangers at a fancy party for the sole purpose of potentially forging future marriages with other families. It completely dominated the first months of my second life.

“It was mortifying. A damnable obligation that none truly enjoy, yet we persist in subjecting one another to it regardless as a form of non-violent vengeance. My Father spent more money than a small nation on the party, and on the most lavish dress he could find. I could barely move in its confines.”

“Is that when you learned to dance?”

“The dancing was not the hard part. The focus of those parties is to make connections and potentially arrange a marriage. I was forced to stand there and greet every single guest and their child, whom they wished to dispose of by marrying into our family. Finding a single kind word to say to that parade of glad-handing morons was more than I could manage.”

I couldn’t even put into words how much I resented them. They were all the same. Preening boys and teenagers, wearing overly ornate suits and trying to look the best amongst the flock. The incentive to marry into the Walston-Carter family was clear. I was Damian’s only daughter, and the one in line to inherit the entire family fortune and business upon his death.

Damian would insist on a matrilineal marriage. He wasn’t going to let the family name die out or leave it in the hands of my uncle – who didn’t seem so interested in having kids of his own. Matrilineal or not, my prospective husband would still accumulate a huge amount of wealth and influence by marrying me. They didn’t need to have full control of the estate.

Unlike in my old world, there was no widespread resistance to having a woman lead the family. If they were the eldest and in the direct line of succession, it was seen as the natural course of action. This world was more equal than one might have thought given the time period it was inspired by.

However, there was still a reluctance to rely on matrilineal marriages. Some considered it ‘unfair’ to utilise that kind of guarantee like what happened with Felipe and Beatrice. It advantaged those with children who had no firm place in the family hierarchy.

The families liked having their names stick around. You would never see the only son of a family in a matrilineal arrangement unless they were truly running out of living members and wanted to merge into another. All of the boys at my debut party were second, third or higher in line.

What made the issue more complex was Walser’s legal code. Families were at liberty to dispense their assets in any way they pleased via a legally binding will. While the head position was an informal outcome, this was how that right was exercised and controlled. Some families would always hand the controlling share to the oldest son, others were gender agnostic, and a rare few split everything evenly to foster a sense of competition.

Those cultural factors were the ultimate decider on who the next family head would be. Girls could still be pigeonholed into domestic roles and insulated from the family business. This was considered bad practice – as at least one major family, the Woodburns, suffered a rapid and stunning fall from grace when the last living member was left to control a business empire she was woefully unprepared for.

The point is; none of them were tolerable company, the entire party was an awkward exercise at best, and I walked away firm in my belief that Damian having another child was probably for the best so I didn’t have to deal with it. No way that was happening with Gwyneth doing her secret police stuff on the side.

“All I had to do was stand there and listen to them while looking pretty. You can guess what the more difficult task of the two was. I couldn’t bear it. It was awful.”

Samantha hummed, “It isn’t all that different from the harvest festivals we have in Channery. A lot of families see that as their first big chance to make an impression. It’s a coming-of-age ceremony.”

“But a harvest festival is much more fun without the irritating constraints of noble trends looming over your head. It’s all about etiquette.”

“You know, I’ve always wondered, but you don’t seem particularly attached to those types of things. Is there any reason why?”

I chuckled, “I’m being honest with myself. Nobles don’t do these silly things because they personally enjoy them. They’re simply afraid to break rank and be truthful. The overriding priority is to separate themselves from the unwashed masses by ritualistically subjecting themselves to confounding tradition.”

“I wouldn’t say that all of our traditions are positive. It’s also tradition for every adult to drink a worrying amount of alcohol until they can’t see straight – which is normally followed by a bunch of fights breaking out.”

“Oh. Nobles love doing that too.”

Samantha shook her head, “Surely not.”

“Yes, they do,” I asserted, “When there’s money and pride on the table, and many of them spend their days lounging around their estates with nothing to do, matters can often descend into frank violence when you introduce alcohol to the mix. I’ve been attending these parties for three years, and I’ve seen no less than ten drunken scuffles and four bare-knuckle boxing matches.”

“Is that where you learned to fight?”

“No.”

Samantha frowned, “That was a joke.”

---

“Even though you’ve been spending so much time with her, you had no idea?”

Max leaned against the wall in Adrian’s dorm room and stared out of the window. It was unusual for Adrian to speak with anyone unless he was trying to antagonize them. Max couldn’t recall the last time they had a normal conversation.

“I’m not really Maria’s friend. That’s Samantha’s job.”

“Doesn’t she hover around you regardless?”

“More than she used to. I never saw anything from her that gave me a big reason to be suspicious.”

Adrian pinched the bridge of his nose, “Prier, the party – even what happened at parliament. She must have been the one who did all of that. She’s part of the reason that my old man is in jail right now.”

“Do you have an issue with that?”

“Not at all. I’m thankful that she put a stop to his idiocy before he killed someone for my sake. But I would be lying if I said it isn’t a complicated feeling. I didn’t know she was interested in helping people.”

“What about Prier? How was she helping out when she killed him?”

Adrian thought back to the first term and reconsidered what happened. It was a stretch in his eyes, but it was entirely possible that it had something to do with his Father’s plan to kill Felipe Escobarus. Around that time all of the staff were being quiet about an incident on campus, only for it to all come spilling out into the press once his body was found. The exact reason was never reported. What was reported were some of the facts of the murder case that was launched afterwards.

For example, Prier’s fingerprints were all over the gun that killed him. It was supposedly buried inside of a wooden box, concealed within the soil of the greenhouse. Prier was the teacher who spent the most time in there, and the one who kept the other key. It was his gun. It went without saying that he shouldn’t have had one on campus. It was a media sensation. They were moving huge numbers of papers by dripping tantalizing details and unsolved mysteries into the public consciousness.

“I don’t get it. Samantha doesn’t see a problem with being around her. She knew about this the whole time. What the hell was she so worried about for the past few weeks if it wasn’t that?”

Adrian sighed, “Her electives?”

“I highly doubt that her elective subjects are more of an anxiety-worthy issue than her friend being a murderer.”

“Murderer? Whether I like it or not – she saved our lives back there.”

“I can’t believe that you’re the one giving her the benefit of the doubt.”

Adrian was firm in his position, “I’ve known her for longer than any of you, even if I never took an interest in becoming friends with her. I think it would be better for us to ask directly and get an answer from the horses’ mouth.”

Max was worried. This was a huge secret they were holding. Maria, from his perspective, was a ruthless and mean-spirited girl. Her burgeoning friendship with Samantha was endlessly confusing to him. She was her opposite in every conceivable way. He briefly flirted with Claude’s old theory about her blackmailing people to follow her orders, but Samantha wouldn’t fall for a trick like that. She would have said so to him and Claude.

“I can’t trust Maria – but Samantha is as good a judge of character as you’ll find at this academy,” Max opined, “I’d rather speak to her first and get her opinion on the whole ordeal. I’m still shocked that you’re taking a diplomatic approach to this. I would have thought that you’d go running to the nearest journalist to tell the whole story.”

“Why would you think that?”

“You’ve been at her throat since the first day we got here. Remember all the times you claimed you’d beat her at magic, and shooting, and whatever else you came up with? The only occasions you spoke were those declarations of war.”

Adrian stared at Max for almost a minute without saying a word in response. That all felt like ancient history to him. A lot had happened since their first week at the academy. He went from a prodigal son to one of the biggest pariahs in the upper class. His carefree days of learning on his Father’s dime were well and truly over.

“It’s difficult to find the energy anymore,” he said frankly.

It was more telling than he wanted it to be. Max’s face dropped like a rock when he heard him speak in that depressed tone of voice. Too honest, too forthright. Adrian quickly turned his head back to the desk, where a half-written letter lay beneath his quill.

“No. I have bigger issues to worry about than beating Maria in sport. Hoffman claimed that my Uncle was the one who sold me out, both about the watch and where I was when the Scuncath launched their attack.”

“You shouldn’t believe that bastard. He was playing games with us.”

“But it makes sense. He’s the only one who knows about the watch. At the very least I cannot sit here and hold my tongue, and allow him to have a third go at taking my life!”

He screwed up the letter and tossed it into the trash.

“This isn’t the best way to do it. I cannot pry the truth from him with a vexatious letter.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there. The police won’t lift a finger based on an empty allegation either.”

“Aye. It seems that I have my project for the coming term.”

These were exciting times indeed.