Page 20 of The Villains of Winter

BANEBURY, CONNECTICUT

AUTUMN

​​ CHAPTER ELEVEN

“THIS IS BULLSHIT.” JAMES SEETHED with fury over the plates of rich, marbled tenderloin served with succulent veal, though Elliott knew what he truly meant was bullshit. James aesthetically retained the charismatic allure of Bruce Wayne, but his voice darkened in hatred. “It’s a violation of humanity. It’s immoral. It’s savagery.”

For the annual Winterfylleþ dinner, Æscwulf undergraduates were sailed in and out of the Rædwine Refectory on carved rowboats. The millpond of swans flowed into the refectory on seas of white lilies beneath their elegant white feathers, inspired by the gothic castles of Styria in honor of Carmilla.

Atmospheric, high candles seemed to reach toward the cantilevers with woodwork built from Austrian craftsmen. Tapestries of Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom, as detailed in Carmilla, were exhibited around the entrancing refectory.

Opulent, white-gloved servers presented the second course that held more sumptuous meat with a tint of northern long-eared bat blood. The animal blood was unsettling, but one must eat, the professors remarked. Fabas indulcet fames. Hunger sweetens the beans. The refectory was crowded, even on Samhain night. The atmosphere felt warm with the body heat of scores of students that exited out of the rowboats. The panoramic windows gave view to the snowscape in the distance.

Yet James’s words were icier than sleet beginning to sheet around the vaulted glass windows.

“You care about ethics?” Kitty asked innocently in the buttressed hall. She’d seen James break every law and rule of the old college.

“When it’s not an act of unspeakable horror,” James hissed, and a vein pulsed in his brow, right beneath a lock of moonlit hair. “These snakes will murder the victim that needs them most. They’re hailed as the future.”

His voice rose over the din of clattering forks and scraping spoons. His outrage mounted over the lines of tired college students.

Snow clung to their Moncler down jackets and Patagonia fleece. There were damp Arc’teryx boots dripping in the lines from the millpond stream.

“These scum save themselves, pampered at night, knowing the only reason that Finch will lose his life is because his lungs are weaker than theirs. He’s their scapegoat.”

A violinist stopped mid-air. The fanged servers paused. The weekend party chatter died a slow miserable death. A sophomore gasped out loud, yet it did not deter James when it should have.

“What if there were several sick students, what would happen then?” James’s ire climbed ever higher over the air of shocked silence. No one was permitted to speak against the hibernal ceremony; Sheriff Sangerfield’s department was only twenty miles away. It was grounds for academic removal and immediate dismissal from the premises. Regardless, James staked his golden eyes of fury into them all. “Will they be forced to fight to death in order to earn the right not to be chosen for execution?”

“Survival of the fittest. Very enticing concept, my dearest James,” a voice said behind him. James glowered at the senior elector, Lucien Montclair. “Why risk the healthy students for a boy soon for death anyway?”

The muscle in James’s jaw quivered in rage, like a deadly arrow nocked in a crossbow. Elliott grasped his hand before it raged towards Lucien’s face. Lucien’s eyes glanced down at Elliott’s palm covering James’s fist in his lap. “Am I interrupting?”

Kitty sputtered with awe. “Are you Lucien Montclair? The rector’s protégé?”

James spat. “He’s a glorified errand boy. Lucien doesn’t even know the difference between the rector’s anus and his heel.”

In the Rædwine Refectory, where students ravaged their five-course meals within the knife-shaped curve of the Marlborough Mountains, James was risking a fiery row with his peers if they heard him insult the rector there. Let alone the provost.

Most of them were not mere students.

They were the daughters of diplomats.

The sons of dignitaries.

The children of ambassadors.

Their expulsion would be headline news and a national disgrace abroad. It would mean the premature end of their political careers, not in the least the termination of their trust funds and the collapse of their political affiliations they’ve spent years forging in the institution.

Former President Nixon sat for dinner with the provost and the rector. Former President Reagan sent letters to the provost through the rector for the State of the Union. Former President H.W. Bush was an outspoken advocate of the ceremonies in his time. The university rector was a vindictive, punitive man drunk on his direct power from the government. The rector was the head of the graduate institution–Æscwulf University.

Rector Braith Rawsthorne was the reason newer television sets never found their way to the town for long. In 1981, he banned the personal computers that connected the other regions of North America together, which kept them isolated. He severed the hospital shipments of the permanent artificial heart in 1982. He stated it was an extraneous cost. The rector would have no hesitation to send a letter to the provost to ban the students from their only chance at a highly-funded political campaign or a free education.

No one would risk their career future–federally blacklisted by Æscwulf College–because of James’s mouth. There were orphans that had to gather their weight for the winter while they could.

The orphans already were treated as a burden to the affluent town, where they were considered a year older than they were in order to make them eligible for the ceremony at twenty-one. Even if they were only twenty.

The Crucian League was benevolent to accept Elliott with the scholarship for all orphans and foster children. None of the students, least of all the foster children, held the societal status to challenge the rector and his electors. None of them could afford a four-year degree elsewhere.