“What a devilish game she’s created!”

Max stared blankly at Claude.

“What exactly do you think that Maria is hiding?”

“I don’t know, not exactly, but I can tell that she’s a bad ‘un from a mile away. My family has a nose for this sort of thing, my Dad, my Mum, and me.”

“I can’t argue with that. You were right that there was something wrong with Maria.”

“Why are you still trying to trick me with that crap?”

Max groaned, “I’m not trying to trick you! I’m giving you credit for being correct about one of your hunches! We’ve already explained this to you a million times over. Maria walked up to you and told you the whole story!”

“You’ve spent the past decade pouring cold water over all of my theories. Sorry for finding this whole deal a little suspicious, especially when I don’t recall the incident you all keep referring to. Don’t you think I’d remember that if it really happened?”

Max was not here to argue with Claude again about that. The fact of the matter was that Claude refused to accept that the book had wiped a partial segment of his memory because of his decision to write about Maria on the back pages. It was a very Claude thing to do, now that he thought about it.

“Whatever. I’m not asking her to shoot someone in front of you just to prove it.”

Claude ignored Max’s dry wit and placed his well-worn notebook on the table, flipping through dozens and dozens of pages of detailed notes and random stray thoughts that Claude felt were worth recording. Max understood that this was the universal signal for him to launch into a bizarre tirade about a recent going-on, passed through his ‘unique’ lens of it all being suspect for some reason or another.

“What are you flipping through your notes for?”

Claude stopped on the latest page and flashed a toothy grin, “I’ve been looking into this Dalia and Wendy matter for the past few days. I heard from one of the other girls that Maria was involved.”

“Maria does not get involved in arguments like that. I don’t know much about her, but that is the one thing I know for certain.”

“That might be how it appears to a uniformed outsider – but the truth of the matter goes much deeper than that!”

“Uh-huh.”

“You see according to the people I spoke with; Dalia and Wendy only became acquainted recently, and that they were somewhat close. Dalia has quite the reputation for taking less-popular girls under her proverbial wing.”

Max nodded and played along. There was no point pushing back on him now.

“Recently, Dalia has been making moves to try and land a relationship with Louis Germain. You’ve heard of him before, I assume.”

“Yeah. His family owns the biggest medical company in Walser, or close to it.”

The Germain family had gone from a minor noble house in the North to a complete powerhouse within two decades. They ruthlessly expanded into manufacturing modern medicine and vaccinations using new industrial processes that outstripped their competition. Suddenly, they were one of the big families to watch after spending hundreds of years languishing in relative obscurity.

The second he stepped through the gates he was beset upon from all sides by a pack of vultures looking to get into his good graces. He was only the fourth son of the family, but even the faintest chance of getting a taste of that same success was enough motivation for everyone to aim for him. Max could relate. His family’s huge sway over the international trade on the east coast of Walser attracted a similar kind of opportunistic interest.

He recalled one girl who approached him during his first week and inquired about several personal subjects, before abruptly needling him for information about his share of the inheritance - due upon his Father’s death - and how it could be leveraged with her own family’s sugar business to promote increased efficiency and vertical integration.

And who said romance was dead?

“Dalia said that she was friends with Maria to try and impress him – because according to them, Louis has an admiration for the manner in which she carries herself.”

Max laughed. Maria had so many different faces that there was no way to know which was the real one. There was the polite, doll-like, respectful, speaking with a peer face. The ice-cold, annoyed, being harassed by a chatterbox while she was trying to eat face. There was the malicious face that she brought out when it was time to lash someone with insults.

The last face was a recent addition, though it stuck out clearly in Max’s mind as the most distinct. The sheer delirium that he saw during her fistfight at the fort. Wide-eyed, teeth bared, laughing with what little breath she had. There was none of the same focus or intent – just the eyes of someone swimming in a pool of pure adrenaline.

Maria’s features were sculpted in such a way that all of these differing emotions and attitudes could be expressed and projected to others. The reason Maria was so good at scaring people straight was because of the way her eyes sharpened when she started to get cross with them.

“Everyone wants to be friends with Maria, and the ones who don’t are looking to arrange a marriage with her instead.”

Claude shook his head, “Why would they want to do that?”

“What do you mean? She’s attractive and rich, and her manners are impeccable. The whole reason a lot of students even attend this academy is so that they can rub elbows with nobles like her and try to romance them.”

Max could sympathise. There were a lot of girls from smaller families who wanted to marry him because of the same reasons. Maria had a lot less patience for that kind of naked influence seeking though. Her rejections stung like the blade of a knife, and she did not waste her time trying to spare their feelings. Max couldn’t make himself do the same, he was simply too diplomatic.

“I don’t see it,” Claude replied.

Max wasn’t romantically interested in Maria – but he could easily see her appeal. She was, in both his and others’ words, one of the most beautiful girls in the academy. Claude’s expressed ignorance to that fact made Max question how observant he was being around other people.

“We’re getting off track here! As I was saying, Dalia said that she was actually real close with Maria – but then Wendy went behind her back and told Louis that it was a load of bullcrap. That’s why they started fighting, at least, that’s the ‘public’ version of the story.”

“Here we go,” Max muttered. He’d heard this before.

“But how do we know that Maria didn’t tell Dalia that she was fine with that boast? What if Maria was the one who planned this from the start to make Wendy and Dalia fall out and start fighting?”

Max asked the obvious question; “Why would Maria do that, exactly?”

Claude raised a finger into the air, “That is what we need to find out.”

“I’m pretty sure that Maria had nothing to do with it. Does she strike you as the type of girl to rely on social engineering to get her way? She’d tell Dalia to go away - in not-so-kind words.”

Maria might have concealed her secret from them, but engaging in the chess-like game of pushing people in different directions for her reputation was not her modus operandi. Maria didn’t care one bit about that. Max had only ever seen her rebuke the other students when they tried to make her take a side.

“This is my hunch, Max. My hunches have never led me wrong before. I can smell foul play in the air like a bloodhound.”

“I can smell something foul right now, and it’s not foul play...”

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this. We can’t let Maria get away with tearing apart the social fabric of our academy.”

“There’s no way that either of those girls are going to talk to you. Just leave it alone for goodness sake.”

“I can’t sit still when injustice is afoot!”

Claude jumped up from his seat and took the notebook with him. It was filled to the brim with new writings about trying to solve this case. Max made no motion to stop him. He sat there and watched him charge through the door to parts unknown.

This was supposed to be their day off.

---

“Roderro! You’ve got a visitor.”

Cathdra was sitting on the edge of his bed when the guard came by with a shocking piece of news. He had a visitor. Cathdra had been locked up in a low-security prison for months, and not since the first week had he seen anyone from the outside. The time was so short that he only found the space to tell Adrian about the importance of the family’s long passed-down watch.

“Do you know who it is?” he inquired, climbing to his feet and approaching the bars.

“Young lad. Your son, isn’t he?”

Cathdra exhaled through his nose and slipped both hands through an open gap in the door, allowing the guard to cuff them together. The door was then unlocked and slid open. Cathdra followed the guard down the steps onto the ground floor of the wing he now called home and towards the visitation centre.

That initial meeting was done through a set of bars – but good behaviour earned him the right to sit at a table with Adrian instead of being watched like a hawk. The other prisoners did not make for good company, so any time he could spend with Adrian was valuable to him.

Through the dreary grey hallways and into the meeting room, Cathdra spied Adrian sitting in the back corner. He kept his head low and moved towards him with a thousand questions on his mind. Some of those same questions were answered by the troubled look on Adrian’s face. The lines that grew beneath his eyes were fracture marks in what was once a solid front.

That made him feel nervous.

He sat down across from Adrian and steepled his chained hands on the table. The sound of clinking metal finally caught his attention. Adrian’s head shot back up as if he was sleeping with his eyes wide open.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Adrian. I didn’t expect you to visit again so soon.”

Adrian frowned, “I know that you’re lying. I haven’t had time to come and visit lately. As you might guess, I’ve been very busy spinning plates, putting out fires, the usual.”

Cathdra remained impassive; “Did my lessons get through to you? Or are you struggling?”

“No number of lessons could make this easy. I find myself wondering why you built a machine this monstrous and cumbersome. It’s a beast with fifteen serpentine heads and no end of venom to throw my way.”

Cathdra had a frank assessment of the problem, one which Adrian was not willing to listen to. He had intentionally set the business up so that Adrian didn’t have to worry about the day-to-day operations. Either the people he put in place were less competent than he hoped, or Adrian had rejected their help out of some misplaced stubbornness.

“You should rely on the managers and building operators,” he said, “They know how to keep the factories and shops running without us having to give them marching orders.”

Adrian scowled, “No. A lot of them quit after you were arrested. I had to replace a large number of them, and those new managers didn’t know what to do. They all come to me for direction and confirmation.”

Cathdra grumbled under his breath. That was the kind of loyalty he got for promoting those people? He made them, and now they were returning that faith by spitting it back in his face when they were most needed! The only explanation was that they found the idea of working for his son morally unacceptable, or that another employer was poaching them with that issue in mind.

“I’m not here to talk about the business. There’s nothing you can offer me about that now. I don’t have time for it either. Visiting hours are nearly over and they’ll want you back in that cell as soon as possible, so just listen to me.”

Cathdra nodded, “Very well.”

“I hoped that your being behind bars would be the end of all of the violence that seemed to spontaneously happen around me. I was mistaken. Dead wrong. In the last two months, I’ve had my life threatened on multiple occasions, and someone broke into the academy and stole the watch from me.”

“They stole the watch?” Cathdra gasped.

“Yeah. Some masked idiot snuck into the dorms and made away with it. By the time I got it back from the police, someone else had used it to travel back to Goddess knows when. The charge is dead.”

Stolen, robbed of magical energy – they were the same problem. That heirloom had personally ensured the continued survival of their family for generations. Assassination plots, infighting, accidental death and more, they were all circumnavigated by the power of the watch. Without it, Adrian was at a much higher risk of being killed and for the family’s power to fall into the hands of his brother.

“Then, a month later – a group of Scuncath broke onto our estate and kidnapped me.”

Cathdra’s mouth hung open. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing.

“I was mercifully unharmed, but the man who was in charge there said something interesting to me. He tried to make me switch over to supporting his cause, and according to him, Cedric was the one who told them where I was at the time.”

“And you believed him?”

Adrian scoffed, “Of course not. But it made me think. The watch, that was a security feature that only our family should know about. The Scuncath broke onto our estate knowing that I would be there. If Cedric were leaking information to try and... remove me, then that would line up. I want you to tell me if you believe it.”

Cathdra moved back in his chair and considered his next words carefully.

“This is a troublesome path you walk, Adrian. Even the smell of doubt can make the situation worse than it is now. You’ll start seeing patterns where there aren’t any, all based on the word of someone who was trying to control you.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Do you think that Cedric would be willing to go that far?”

Cathdra couldn’t hide his real answer. The pained expression that he sported was plain to see. Yes. Cedric was exactly the type of man to use underhanded tricks like those, potentially putting his nephew in danger, entirely for the purpose of cementing his control over the family’s fortune.

“Cedric? I never trusted him. I understand how silly it sounds coming from me, but his ambition is the most dangerous mixture of hubris and will. He isn’t above destroying what he wants, so long as his enemies don’t get to keep it for themselves. He is already a wealthy man – but I don’t doubt his desire to absorb what you now own.”

Adrian looked down at the table and closed his eyes as he processed his Father’s opinion on the matter. For a young man, learning that his own family member was willing to go so far was a sobering discovery. Did their relation mean so little to him that the influence and money he could earn outweighed it? Was he willing to kill someone indirectly to get what he wanted?

No – that was stupid. The revelation of Maria’s involvement in recent events shifted his entire perspective of violence as a phenomenon. Maria was the girl that every other girl at the academy wanted to be like. She was graceful, strong, beautiful and held an immense amount of sway.

She was also a cold-blooded killer.

That didn’t make sense. Maria had no reason to be that way, and if someone like Maria were capable of unleashing that kind of brutal violence, why wasn’t Cedric? He had all the more reason to use violent means to get what he wanted. Unlike Maria, he was doing it to enrich himself and money was the ultimate motivator. Judging a book by its cover was going to get him killed. With Cedric, it was safer to assume that he was trying to kill him.

Adrian was always hot-headed and quick to jump to conclusions, but for something this serious it gave him pause. He needed evidence to confirm that Cedric was the one plotting to oust him from the head position. If it were under different circumstances he would have gladly passed it off, but Cedric was taking matters into a dangerous direction. Adrian hated being in charge.

“I think I can guess what he’s going to do next.”

“You do?” Adrian asked.

“If there is a lot of scrutiny around as a result of the attack you mentioned, he’ll pull away and resort to a safer strategy. Cedric is not one to put all of his eggs into one basket – and he is very averse to outright risk. If he wants to become the head of the family, he only has to take control of the source of our wealth. Wealth forms influence, and influence is what cements a family head.”

“How can he take them from me?”

“He can’t ‘take’ them from you. They’re legally yours. The only way he can take them from you now is to purchase your stake in them. He must know about how stressful you find the day-to-day, he’ll make you a terrible offer to take the businesses out of your hands. If it were a good offer I’d even suggest considering it, but it won’t be.”

Adrian grumbled, “Yeah. Why pay more when you can lowball me?”

“Say no. He’ll have to raise his offer or give up.”

“I don’t care about the money. I want to make sure that he can’t try anything stupid. I need leverage, or to grab a cricket bat and beat him until he’s black and blue.”

Adrian wanted to go out guns blazing and make sure that Cedric understood where he was in the pecking order, but pushing him too far would make him feel that drastic action was the only way to stay out of jail. Thinking back to Maria, he considered how she would handle it. She never gave away all of the details. She expertly earned trust from the people around her while keeping a lot of vital information to herself.

The dismissiveness, the scathing insults, the competitive attitude – that was all theatre designed to lure Adrian and the rest into seeing her in a very particular way. Adrian couldn’t find the words to describe the uneasy sensation in his chest, but it had to do with her. He no longer viewed Maria Walston-Carter in the same way. They’d been fighting for years, but did he even really know who she was?

The guard cut through the background noise with a loud declaration; “Three minutes!”

Cathdra refocused on giving Adrian advice, “I understand that you probably won’t listen to me given what I’ve done – but you should tread carefully no matter what you choose. If Cedric was involved with those incidents then he won’t expect you to be aware of that. That’s an important advantage to preserve. Appearing ignorant can lure your foes into a false sense of security. He doesn’t respect anyone, least of all people like you.”

“Like me?”

“Who he considers young and coddled. I bet he’s laughing about how ignorant you are as we speak. He’d do that to everyone, always thinking that he was two steps ahead of them. Failure never humbles him.”

Adrian looked past his father to the guard standing by the door, and then to the grey walls that surrounded them, and to the metal bars that blocked the windows. This prison was built to break the spirit through repetition. There was no beauty, no individuality, nothing to distract the mind.

“Are you humbled?”

Cathdra paused. Adrian spoke the question with hesitation, his voice dying down to a low whisper on the final note. What was there to say about a question like that? It was almost enough to make him break out into laughter.

“Humbled isn’t the right word, Adrian. I held my hands close to the fire and only have myself to blame for getting burned. I looked to my success and I decided that it wasn’t enough.”

Adrian abruptly stood from the table with a furious scowl, “Don’t sell me that bullshit.”

Even he didn’t know why Cathdra’s words enraged him so. It was a gut reaction, like someone punching him across the cheek. It revolted him. He felt his temperature pick up and his hearing pound with the beat of a heavy drum. There was an element to his ‘apology’ that he was missing.

Cathdra closed his eyes, “I wanted what was best for you. I still do. You’ll have the same feeling one day when you have a family of your own. You’ll move mountains for someone else’s sake.”

“No. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to be like you or Cedric.”

The guard, who was watching their argument closely, called time on their meeting.

“Time’s up!”

Adrian and Cathdra said nothing else. Adrian walked past him and back through the guest entrance. Cathdra stared at his back – and kept his eyes locked onto the exit even after he was out of sight. The guard approached the table and motioned for him to stand. Cathdra shook his head and did as the guard instructed. He was patted down and checked for contraband before being led back to his cell.

Cathdra sat back on the edge of his bed and replayed the conversation in his mind, again and again. The longer he did, the less pleased he was with the direction it took. Removed from the visitation room he suddenly thought of a million and one better things he could have said to Adrian. It was too late to use them now.

Their time was too short. He wanted to ask about the Scuncath, but Adrian had only arrived at the prison at the last minute. There was no space for him to elaborate on that or the supposed involvement of Cedric in their schemes. Cathdra was forced to reckon with the reality that a lot of events were occurring beyond the prison’s walls.

The world kept moving without him.