Page 23 of The Villains of Winter

Kitty bent over with guilt. “The electors will select James for the hibernal. He’d be lucky if he’s only expelled.”

Elliott couldn’t bear either one, James’s death or his expulsion.

It felt like the night that Elliott witnessed his father enter emergency care. On Christmas morning, he’d suffered a seizure at only thirty-five. He was found in the snow outside, heading out before dawn to his second job as a paramedic, while his mother screamed in the driveway. By night time, he was dead. He was the third fireman to die that year.

His mother collapsed at the medical desk on her second shift barely four months later. The former Black Panther Party members collected enough money to pay for their funerals; his grandparents had belonged to the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party when it was established. Women gathered Elliott in their arms with potlucks of homemade collard greens, honey roasted ham, corn bread, and sweet potato pie. The men delivered panegyrics on their behalf as the Marxist-Leninist eulogists set them to rest.

By Orthodox Easter, Elliott’s life was packed inside a single backpack, hauled onto a dirt-encrusted intrastate bus, and taken to the orphanage in Banebury.

Elliott lived his life to protect Kitty above all else. That was the way of things since he met her. Kitty would always be a small, vulnerable child to Elliott.

Elliott stood by what James had done. Elliott should’ve done worse.

No matter how adamantly Katherine protested her maturity, all Elliott could remember was holding her young hand when she arrived at the Ledgerman Home for Orphaned and Abandoned Children.

Elliott remembered when Kitty would cling to the older girls’ skirts, or hide underneath his covers, afraid of the monsters in the wardrobe.

He endured beating after beating, wasting the candle wax to keep its dim light on for her when she voraciously read past her bedtime. They couldn’t afford consistent electricity month after month. The groceries were rare. Yet despite the adversity, she was top 99th-percentile of her class, a perfect student, and a precocious child. She read psychology textbooks in elementary school. Elliott wanted her to read as much as she could. He didn’t want her to end up like him.

After his traumatic experience at Northmen Academy, his 91st-percentile grades never recovered. His grades plummeted.

He’d blockade the bottom of the door with pillows to trap the light inside and keep Mrs. Ledgerman from realizing he had the candles on at night. With a cane, Mrs. Ledgerman would crack open his skin until he learned the price of wax in the Connecticut economy.

Kitty never forgave herself for the severe batterings, as if she was the one who splintered his skin with wood. Elliott loved her and he’d do anything to keep her from living in fear as he lived.

Kitty was named after Katherine Johnson, the African-American NASA mathematician who worked on Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight program of the United States. Elliott dreamed of outer space in their cramped, crowded foster home. It was as if they were meant to find each other. As though he were born to be her protector.

He swore he would keep her from trouble, and thus, he never acted against the provost. Never.

Until now.

​​ CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“OH! MY DEAREST JAMES! MY CLAUDIUS!” The theater professor, Professor Ilaria, cried out. She was a dramatic, overly-maudlin woman. She grasped James’s heated, roseate cheeks in her eccentric hands. She halted him in the opulent halls of the arts annex with her chest braced against his chest. “May the vile tongues of thine enemies be pierced out! I heard ghastly rumors of a stabbing of a fellow student. Nobiscum Deus!”

James was still flushed with fury. “It doesn’t matter.”

Professor Ilaria balked. “Have you forgotten the solstice play this year–The Paean of the Villains of Winter?” She smoothed her dry thumbs over the blood splattered on his eyes. “How are you to perform if you are expelled, my sweet-inflected protégé?”

He would’ve hurt Kitty, James brooded darkly. Expulsion didn’t matter. James never should’ve relented.

The rest of the College still believed the reciters were performing The War of Alexandrius when instead it was The Paean of the Villains of Winter.

A paean was a song of praise or victory. Paean in Mycenaean Greek was the alternative name and epithet of Apollōn. Paiêôn. There were several names and epithets of Apollo, and James was exhausted by every last one.

He was not the mighty Apollōn.

He was a heathen.

“My powerful Apollōn, my perfect Claudius,” Professor Ilaria lamented, rarely ever referring to her students by their actual names, only their roles or titles. She cared little that the ancient philosophy department was vile. Barbaric. “Surely, I can speak with Provost Tytheridge. He will be forgiving given your history, your mother’s passing, and the pressure of the dramatical production.”

James’s head lifted at the invocation of his mother. “No, it’s fine.”

She whispered, “Professor Hexley witnessed his brother sacrificed at the hibernal. Strung up by his neck with his wrists twined behind his back…poor thing. I remember like it was yesterday how he thrashed and writhed before he went still. The noose was inclined high on the platform as it more of a lynching back then, when everyone brought their dinner to attend…strange fruit indeed. Anyway, this time of year is always difficult for Professor Hexley. Perhaps he will advocate for you. The Paean of the Villains of Winter is a perfect opportunity to lighten his spirits!”

“It’s not necessary,” James started, before Professor Ilaria could usher him into her antechamber of lit sage bundles, labyrinthine pothos, blooming foliage, and healing crystals to purge him of envious spirits. She was certain one of the understudies was responsible for this, perhaps they uncovered the true nature of the ancient philosophy department. They were fragile milksops in her eyes.

Sensitive sensibilities, these new students, she’d muttered the night before. She swirled a glass of sanguine claret between her slender fingers. You are never sensitive to the grisly matters at hand, James. I adore that of you. You never flinch from the necessary inflictions. I’ve always admired your resilience.