hector

Samantha

Northpoint, from what she could see, was a largish building of granite, grained halfway between brick and raw stone. There were polished stairs of a similar rock leading up to double doors. They reminded Samantha of Reimond’s dais.

Hector Whiteclaw was all too accommodating to the kidnapping.

“Anisa!” he proclaimed, walking down the steps of his manor. “How many years has it been?”

“Different daughter,” she loudly muttered.

“Ah! Well, I only just learned a princess was arriving a few hours ago. The details were sparse.”

“I’m sure,” said Samantha, agreeably. She was doubtful. He was trying to strike her ego, or Northpoint was disorganized. Regardless, no respect was deserved. “Was Anisa tied up like this when she arrived?”

He opened the side of the wagon. Bound legs and upper arms.

“Oh! Ha! No, no she wasn’t.”

And that was that.

She decided, first piece of scratch vellum she got, she’d list everyone who’d wronged her, and to what degree, and maybe a fitting punishment. Probably not in Saxle, though, she’d need to invent some kind of code so no one would learn about it. Something that wasn’t ‘easily invertible’. Regardless, with his jarring cavalierity, Magister Whiteclaw was quickly topping the list.

A thought occurred. Why didn’t she just put everyone else who could inherit the throne on the list. That would only be what, twenty, zero, forty people, and she was apathetic to most of them.

“I see you’re already getting started with your education!” he said, eyeing the physics book she had forgotten she was gripping (despite her (loose) binds), half-open. “Should expect nothing less from the Days! So brilliant, and so driven!”

“Sure. Uh, yes, thank you.”

“All those books should be for our library. I wouldn’t expect someone just entering our college to fully understand, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t understand some of it!”

Maybe if she’d burned the books, they’d have turned around. Oh, but the thought of doing so made her sad.

“I assume she can be untied?” he asked to the driver, who simply shrugged.

“Of course she can,” said Samantha, daintily folding the book with half-tied arms. “What’s she going to do? Run into the snow and die?” It had apparently started lightly snowing at some point in the last 6 days and 250 kilometers. Such is the wont of the world.

“For the more adventurous types, we like to do some conditioning first.”

She paused, frowned, then failed to catch her tongue. “I understand you’re attempting to be open-ended, with the intent that I think of the worst possible thing ‘conditioning’ could be, but in doing so, you necessarily reveal that the process isn’t as bad as that. Please be specific, so I can have an appropriate level of terror.”

He simply stared. She turned the book over, admiring its construction, avoiding his eyes.

How had that just tumbled out, that was at least two coherent thoughts, in service of making her life worse, to the man who could do so. Maybe all the reading and bread made her so smart her mouth generated a brain separate from her own. Maybe it had always been there, and was growing bigger.

“Who’s your mom, princess?”

“Carline Mallow.” If she were him, Samantha-Hector would’ve discarded any respect at that.

But he wasn’t. “Ah, yes.”

“I find I take more after my father, though.”

“Oh really?”

And then she managed to snare it. “Perhaps we could discuss this inside. I’d like to warm up, and remove the pins from my legs.”

She was untied, considered dashing into the snow, considered running for maybe a month back to Felkner, and followed Hector up the steps, as Roe followed her.

According to an absurdly shiny bronze plaque in the granite, Nikolai North founded the college in 3804 and bar bar bar. This conflicted with her understanding that Godquiet Holstram had founded it. She would’ve cared if she respected it but she didn’t so she didn’t.

Granite and wood. Granite had to be quarried and shipped, wood had to be chopped and shipped. The entrance room was grand, above her was a dome of curved, triangular stone, meeting at a point at the top and center, all outlined by wood.

Her architectural plans had focused purely on staticism, nondynamism, and non-leak-in-or-out-ism. This, this was an attempt at art. It could stand to have some variation in materials, maybe some of that plaquebronze, or perhaps an actual painting scrawled, traced on. To be noted on vellum.