Noble Fae Academy: Year Two Read online

  Noble Fae Academy: Year Two

  (Noble Fae Academy, Book II)

  by

  Addison Creek

  Copyright © 2020 by Addison Creek

  Cover Design © ReGina Welling from Gotcha Covered

  This novel is a work of fiction in which names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is completely coincidental.

  License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

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  Chapter One

  At the end of the summer, I returned to Noble Fae Academy early. There was a particular hike I wanted to undertake before the semester started, and I had also worn out my welcome at Londa’s family court. Or at least it had gotten to the point where if I stayed any longer, I was going to get into trouble.

  Londa didn’t mind trouble. She was so fed up with her family’s court that she was ready to leave with me. The only problem was that her mother refused to allow her to go. She insisted that Londa stay for one end-of-summer ball.

  I had nobody to insist that I do anything, so if I wanted to take off, I could. And did.

  As soon as I got back to the academy, I left my pack at the castle and headed out. There was someone I needed to talk to, and the conversation couldn’t wait.

  Partway up the mountain, I rubbed some of the sweat off my face and turned my chin upward. Even though I had only been gone a few months I had forgotten how beautiful it was.

  After the briefest of breaks, I kept climbing. I had a goal in mind, but I also needed to be back for dinner. If you missed a mealtime at the academy, it wasn’t as if you could grab a snack later. Students who missed meals were just supposed to go hungry. I wasn’t sure I could accomplish my goal and get back by dinnertime, but I was going to try.

  I pushed on even harder.

  The scraggly bushes and huge boulders in the highest mountains were familiar to me from a climb I had made the previous year, when I had run into the riders who lived in the hills, who were, to put it mildly, not fans of the powerful fae at the academy. They had warned me not to come up there again, but I had something I wanted to talk to them about, so I’d decided to risk it.

  I was relying in part on the fact that the murderer who had terrorized the academy for two years was gone, so the riders could no longer be suspected of having committed those crimes.

  I confess, I was also hoping that relations between the clan and the academy might improve. I liked the riders and I liked the mountains, and I wanted to be able to climb the peaks without risking their wrath.

  When I reached the level that Kayka had hit at the beginning of last year, I paused. As the mysterious Shadow, Kayka had spent two years terrorizing Noble Fae. After many murders, she had finally been stopped in her tracks last year.

  Unfortunately, her death had led to yet more trouble. She was the sharp point of a jagged and dangerous spear that was aimed squarely at Whessellond. Her death might have stopped the killings at Noble Fae, but it had left a void that the rest of the spear behind her was going to fill with more attacks. The battle had only just begun.

  As I walked up the mountain, I saw no sign of the riders I sought.

  I tried to make a lot of noise as I climbed, to make it obvious that I was coming, and maybe to bring the riders out of the woodwork to confront my presence in their territory. But I climbed a long way without seeing any sign of them.

  After a momentary breather I started climbing again, thinking about the summer as I went. Londa’s court had been fine, with lots of pretty clothes and fake smiles. It wasn’t on the border, so her family was relatively untouched by the dangers besieging the kingdom.

  But I didn’t get much time to process what we had done there; I was brought back to be present in a hurry by the sight of something winking a little way ahead, and moving away from me. I started to follow it, but even as my eyes tracked it, my thoughts turned back to my time with Londa.

  Londa had several older siblings. As the youngest child in the family, she was mostly ignored. I had the impression that she was entirely fine with that.

  As she had told me, it meant that she could get away with anything, and often did.

  My eyes registered the wink again, so I increased my pace, telling myself that the tiny sparkle in the distance had to be riders. I was a talented climber, so I didn’t doubt my ability to track anyone I wanted to catch up with in the mountains.

  I was also more in control of the wellspring of power inside me than I had ever been before, and the magic allowed me to move even faster.

  I was careful, however, not to do anything that I thought would make my wings appear. Throughout all the gaiety and laughter of the summer, I had noticed that many of the fae at court made their wings appear for what seemed to me to be utterly frivolous reasons. They threw parties and danced. They used their wings to fly up to second story rooms instead of simply walking. Their lives revolved around amusement and laughter.

  It seemed foolish to me, all the more so because it left them – and us? – even more unprepared for the war that was coming. Hadn’t any of these fae attended the academy? Hadn’t they trained in battle? It appeared that they had not.

  Londa noticed my judgment but mistook took it for something else. “You should have a little fun from time to time,” she’d told me.

  “But you aren’t like them yourself,” I noted. Londa was all about battle and viciousness and the unending conquering of enemies.

  I didn’t say any more. No part of me wanted to insult my hosts, who had generously offered me a home when I had none. I wasn’t sure what sort of sad story Londa had told them about me, but I figured it had something to do with murder, and with being a bastard and a prisoner.

  I was just glad I hadn’t been there to hear it.

  Now, up here in the high mountains, away from anyone else’s assumptions or expectations, I looked back at the castle of white stone, at the academy far below, and felt free. I spread my arms wide, relish
ing the wind on my face, for one precious moment forgetting where I was and what I was there for. I raised my arms up high as if I were waving, then I dropped them and just stood there, contemplating the beauty of the place.

  “You look like an idiot,” said a voice from somewhere behind me.

  Despite having talked to him only once, and that very briefly, I recognized the voice. He was the young man who had been with the riding party last year when they caught me climbing up here the first time.

  I turned around, unafraid.

  “What’s your name again?” I asked him.

  “Rocklin,” he said.

  I introduced myself.

  “You were told to stay away from here. You were warned about what would happen if you were to come back. I thought you would listen. You didn’t strike me as the stupid type,” he said.

  Behind him there were several other riders; I reminded myself that they probably never rode alone, kind of like how we had been required to travel the halls of the academy in groups while a crazed murderer was on the loose. The fact that I hadn’t heeded those rules didn’t mean they hadn’t been sensible, on the whole.

  Part of me wondered if Rocklin sometimes ignored the rules himself, but I didn’t suppose I was about to find out. He placed his hand on the front of his saddle and eyed me dubiously.

  “We heard about what happened last year. We even saw some of the chaos at the end of the year. We heard you jumped over the waterfall,” he said, with a note of awe in his voice.

  “That wasn’t exactly a choice,” I told him.

  “It may not have been, but you still did it. That’s probably what everyone is going to remember. That’s probably the most important legacy of your first year. Apparently some students graduate from that academy never having done it, and most of them don’t manage it until their third year,” he said.

  “Most do it in their final year, that’s true. I decided to speed things up a bit. I spent a long time in prison, so I don’t have any time to waste,” I explained. “Like now. I don’t have time to waste.”

  He smiled.

  Chapter Two

  Wind scraped around us and dust swirled around my ankles.

  “What exactly do you want?” he demanded.

  “I want to speak with someone who has more power than you,” I said.

  Several of the other riders shifted nervously in their saddles, obviously not used to hearing him spoken to like that. Well, too bad. My classes started the next day and I didn’t have time to wait around and coddle him.

  “Any day now,” I said encouragingly when he didn’t reply.

  “I’ve already been told to bring you in,” Rocklin said.

  “I thought you might have been. Maybe you aren’t as dangerous as you’d like everybody to believe,” I said.

  Rocklin shook his head but said nothing more.

  I walked over to him, but he still didn’t move. “What?” I demanded.

  He pointed downward, so I cast my eyes in the direction he was indicating.

  At the base of the mountain, which sloped gently into the field I had just walked through, was a pile of rubble. It was old and overgrown, but it had clearly been made by an avalanche. Beyond the field was the castle, twinkling in the distance. Either the light was especially bright that day or the castle had been washed clean over the summer.

  “Do you see the pile of rubble?” Rocklin asked.

  I nodded. “I see it.”

  “That’s what happened to the last person who defied the orders of one of our riding parties,” he said.

  With that he turned his steed and started to move away from me. The other riders didn’t so much as glance at me as they turned to follow him. For a few moments I stared down at the pile, then smiled and followed the riders.

  I didn’t expect them to lead me to their camp, and in fact they didn’t. As we walked, the horses moving slowly so that I could keep up, I pelted Rocklin with questions. He ignored me. I thought about slapping his steed on the rump to get his attention, but decided it was silly to risk so much just for a gesture.

  Rocklin, I reminded myself, was merely a go-between, someone who was supposed to take me somewhere. There was no reason to annoy him, however desperately I wanted to, so eventually I stopped badgering him and just walked quietly amongst the riders.

  Just as I was wondering how much longer we were going to keep going, a ring of riders appeared around us and escorted us into a relatively hidden dell where I was surprised to see a circle of tents.

  In the center of the open space in front of the encampment, a familiar face from last year glared at me. “I thought I told you not to come back here,” barked the leader of the riders.

  “You may have,” I told him. “But times have changed.”

  His eyes narrowed on me. “Times don’t change,” he said.

  “And yet they have,” I said.

  “You caught the Shadow. Am I supposed to be impressed by that?” he demanded.

  “I don’t really care if you’re impressed or not,” I said.

  “After the events of last year, we need to come together,” he agreed at last.

  I squinted at him, surprised by the sudden turnabout.

  He smiled thinly. “We do appreciate no longer being suspects. The idea that any of us were the Shadow was absurd,” he said.

  “They knew you didn’t do it. You couldn’t possibly have gotten into some of the places she got into,” I said.

  “I knew that all along,” he said. “It was your fae who didn’t. But what I would like is for you to explain what you’re doing here. I ordered you not come back, and yet here you are. You may have heard what happens to those who don’t comply with our demands. Can you give me any reason why we shouldn’t follow our custom in your case?”

  The riders, as scraggly as ever but also just as ominous, moved toward me slowly.

  “I came here for a reason. I wanted to ask for your help,” I said.

  The leader stared. He stared for so long that I thought he might not have heard what I said. Then he threw back his head and laughed. Not just once, but a great booming sound. He looked around, encouraging those around him to get in on the joke, and to mock and belittle me by implication.

  “Really? That’s what you think? That we’re going to help you? How could you possibly be so foolish?” he said.

  “We’re all in this together,” I shot back, giving no ground. “The hallmark of the riders is survival at any cost. No price too high, isn’t that right?”

  His eyes narrowed on me. “How did you hear that? The riders don’t divulge their secrets to anyone but their own.”

  “I want your help fighting the rebel network that’s attacking Whessellond. There isn’t enough magic being used at the border, and once those Greenleaf forces cross into the kingdom, we’re all going to be in trouble. If the kingdom falls, do you think you’ll be able to sit here quietly in the mountains? No, you have to make some kind of alliance to survive, or else be conquered with the rest of us.”

  I paused, but no one said anything, so I went on.

  “I want your help to preserve Whessellond. I want to know if there are any enemies in the hills around the academy. Just because Kayka is dead doesn’t mean that the network she was part of is going to give up. I’m asking that if you see attackers coming up on the academy, you will notify me. I think there’s a good chance that the academy will be attacked before the end of the year. Now that the heir to the throne has been named, he must be protected even more effectively than he was before,” I said.

  The man’s face broke into a smile. “You think the heir has to be protected? That’s why you’re here? Do you work for him?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to say anything about my confusing relationship with Colly. Of course I didn’t work for Colly, even though I would have liked nothing more than to be part of his protection detail, to stay close to him at all times. I hated the idea that he was ever in danger. I further hated the idea that
anyone else could protect him better than I could, because I didn’t think that was the case.

  Sad to say, I hadn’t heard from him all summer. He had been off at the Crown Court while I had been withering away at parties, among fae who thought of nothing but having fun.

  “I don’t officially work for him,” I said at last. “But we’re friends. I also have my own interest in this. I’ve spent enough of my life running and enough of it as a prisoner. I don’t intend to go back to those things.”

  The leader exchanged glances with some of the other riders, then he did something surprising. He threw back his head and laughed yet again.

  I frowned. “I don’t think any of this is funny,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “It kind of is. You don’t have all the information you would need to evaluate the situation, and yet you defied my order to come up here and ask for favors.”

  “What do you want?”

  He barred his teeth. “You have nothing to offer me. Yet. But as the wheels of power turn, I imagine you might.”

  “I’m never going to hold a powerful positions,” I warned him. Might as well be honest about it, so he wasn’t expecting too much.

  His lips thinned. “We shall see about that, Rider Seeker.”

  Just then the flap of one of the dark tents behind him moved, and several more individuals came out.

  I gasped in shock, because I knew two of them. Standing in the middle of the riders’ encampment was Colly, with Batham at his side.

  I had thought about my friends all summer, Colly most of all, because he was now crown prince of Whessellond. Thoughts of what it would be like to see them had flitted through my mind countless times, but none of my imaginings had involved running into them at the top of the mountain. Both men had slight tans, and they both looked a bit bigger than they’d been last spring.

  My heart did a little flip flop.

  Batham had his usual rakish grin on his face. Colly, also as usual, looked serious.

  Silence rang around us.