Page 24 of The Villains of Winter

These new students grimace, they retch, they hesitate, and they attempt to escape. Seven of mine fled for the gates, did you hear?

A bit of blood. A bit of flesh. They couldn’t execute any of it. You should’ve seen how they wept with regret.

You never once recoil. Never. You never blanch from what needs to be committed. No matter who pleads to you. No matter how they grovel and beg for help. You are without mercy. You are extraordinary, my dear. No one can replicate your craft with the utensils. You delight me.

Now, Professor Ilaria shouted at the technical students eavesdropping in the hall. “House Manager Three! Stagehand Fourteen! Return to your dormitories at once!” In her eyes, these were not tragedians and technicians, these were vital gears and levers in the finest machinery ever invented in human history–the arts.

Despite the blatant Hellenistic influences in her plays, she frequently exclaimed in Latin, or incorporated Roman history, if only to demonstrate she intimately knew both languages and cultures. After all, even language was art. Culture was art.

Séverine Ilaria had written The War of Alexandrius in honor of James. For he was her art.

Professor Ilaria returned to James with a twinge of tears in her hysteric, treacly eyes. “My dearest Apollōn, you were destined for the role, you understand the dramaturgical elements in its purest form. You must perform. I implore you to behave until I can convince Provost Tytheridge that this asinine matter was mere roughhousing among men, yes?”

James lied straight through his teeth. “Yes. I’ll behave.”

She kissed both sides of his palms, then kissed each side of his cheek, as if he truly were a glorious myth.

With a flourish, her periwinkle robes draped the grounds as she headed for the administration property. “This is simply a test from the fates and the furies, my sweet! The Erinyes will not interfere with your destiny, my love!”

​​ CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE PHILOSOPHY CORRIDOR OF THE residence hall was thick with gossip and hushed voices. Meanwhile, Elliott watched James stare up at the luxuriant oil paintings of ancient Icarus on the ceiling of James’s dormitory. One of the art scholars had painted it for him in his first year. The Descent of Íkaros.

James’s room was torpedoed with hundreds of ethics essays, photographs of dead philosophers, published Malcolm X. speeches, John F. Kennedy notes, and Robert F. Kennedy tapes. There were tangles of his abandoned clothes everywhere–dark briefs, loose ties, woven short-sleeved shirts cast to the richly carpeted floor. Right then, James slid his captivating eyes towards Elliott. “Would you still love me, if I were expelled? We would be apart.”

Would you still love me?

Elliott’s cheeks flushed with heat as if the groundskeeper had thrust hot coal from the hearth onto his face. James loved endlessly to tease him for his sentimentality.

Elliott was être fleur bleue by nature; in the end, James was pâle sang bleu by nature.

Elliott didn’t even need to think about it, of course he’d love his best friend. Yet Elliott didn’t want to sound pathetic and breathless, therefore he forced himself to wait exactly eleven seconds before responding. The seconds dripped by in anguish. On the surface, Elliott pretended as if he needed to think about it even a second longer. “You’re my best friend. I would love you, yes.”

“You would love me if I were a fleeting bird that fluttered away?”

“I think I would love you even as a bird itself, yes.” Elliott kept the end of his dark tie in his mouth, an old habit. He bit the fabric within his teeth, ruminative.

“What kind of bird?”

“Any bird.” Kingfisher. Harrier. Fox sparrow. It didn’t matter.

Elliott knew, in the depths of his soul, he would love James Wilde if he was the silt of a mudslide, or nothing but air itself. If James was Sirius above their heads at night, impossibly out of his reach, yet immeasurable in its importance to him, Elliott would love his dearest friend still. He’d never had a best friend before James.

A sound caught Elliott’s ears. His foolish, loose mouth had slipped out words without his permission. Elliott asked in return, “Would you love me if we were apart?”

Elliott swallowed involuntarily. He cursed himself, and his mouth fought itself to retrieve the question, the question too deeply meaningful to him to air out recklessly. His stomach plummeted, already knowing the answer.

James tried to spare him of pain for a few seconds, behaving as if he didn’t hear him at first. Then, he blew a breath and delivered the blow.

Elliott wasn’t the only one who often lost control of his mouth. James responded with hardly any pause, “I would not love you, Elliott. I wouldn’t love you if you were a bird, either.”

James sounded regretful. However, he needed Elliott to hear him. James could not love Elliott, or anyone, except his late mother. Elliott understood his agony.

His mother had raised him on her own while his father ascended in his diplomatic career. On the night James met the recruiters, the pharmaceutical assistants recalled her high-dosage prescriptions for her seizures due to a clerical error. James had gotten the call, and he’d planned to pick up the epilepsy medications early.

Except, his hand went through the windshield.

He was found with alcohol in his system. Therefore, he was detained. He’d forgotten to call his father, bleary with glass and injuries from the incident. That night, his father found her unconscious from a severe seizure after an intracerebral hemorrhage, and it was too late. James felt like he’d killed her.