Chapter 137: It’s Royal Ink

The mustache did not come off.

Daemus scrubbed at it with soap. Then with dish soap. Then with a bristly brush Clarice used for cleaning pots. By the time he came to the lunch table, his upper lip was bright red and raw, and the curly little mustache was still there, fainter but perfectly visible. So was the beard.

He sat down and glared across the table.

Killian was eating a salad. He did not look up.

"What is this stuff?" Daemus demanded.

"Royal ink," Killian said. "It is used to sign official decrees. It does not smudge, fade, or wash away." He speared a cherry tomato. "It should wear off in three to five days."

"Days?"

"Perhaps a week."

Daemus made a strangled noise. Blair looked down at her sandwich and bit the inside of her cheek very, very hard.

It was a long, quiet lunch.

Halfway through it, Killian set down his fork and patted the front pocket of his shirt. Then his other pocket. Then he looked at the spot beside his plate where he had set his silver pen.

It was gone.

His purple eyes lifted slowly to Daemus.

Daemus was chewing. Innocently.

"Return it," Killian said.

"Return what?"

"My pen."

"What pen?" Daemus took another enormous bite of his sandwich. The tip of something silver was poking out of his sweatpants pocket.

Killian’s eye twitched. "That pen was a gift from my grandmother."

"Wow. Sounds like it’s really important to you," Daemus said around his food. "Hope you find it."

"Wolf."

"Mustache."

"That doesn’t even make sense."

"It makes sense to me."

Blair wanted very badly to disappear into her sandwich. She had never seen two princes behave like this. She was fairly sure no one had.

Then Clarice swept into the dining room holding her phone out at arm’s length, beaming.

"Prince Killian," she said sweetly. "Luna wanted to say hello."

Daemus choked on his sandwich.

Before anyone could stop her, Clarice turned the screen toward Killian. A girl’s face filled it. She had Daemus’s dark blue hair and his silver eyes, and her mouth was hanging wide open.

There was a pause.

Then the phone let out a scream so high-pitched that Blair’s ears rang.

"OH MY GODDESS. OH MY GODDESS, MOM, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME, I’M NOT WEARING ANY MAKEUP..."

Killian stared at the screen.

"Hello," he said.

The screaming stopped. Luna’s eyes rolled back in her head, and the screen tilted wildly as the phone fell out of her hand. There was a loud thud, followed by a view of a ceiling.

The call ended.

Clarice lowered the phone. "She’s shy," she explained serenely. "She’s very shy."

**

The afternoon session began with a laptop.

Killian pulled it out of his bag, sleek and black, and set it on the table. "Beast Law has an online practice examination," he said. "It is timed. You will take it now."

Then he picked up his chair, carried it around the table, and set it down right next to Blair’s.

Blair stopped breathing.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Daemus shot upright. "Why are you sitting there?"

"There is one screen." Killian sat down. "Unless you are hiding a larger one in your pocket, next to my pen."

Daemus’s hand went protectively to his sweatpants pocket. "There’s no pen in here."

"Then there is nothing to discuss."

Daemus opened his mouth, closed it, and sat back down, looking like a dog who had just been outsmarted by a cat.

Killian was close. Too close. His shoulder was barely an inch from hers, and she could feel the cool air coming off of him. He didn’t give off heat the way Daemus did. It was like sitting next to a marble statue that had decided to move.

Blair shrank into the far side of her chair. It didn’t help. Her chair was not very big.

Killian opened the laptop. The academy’s blue crest glowed on the login screen, over two empty boxes.

Username. Password.

He began to type. He didn’t bother hiding the screen. Why would he? She was a lesser. What could she possibly do with it?

Blair wasn’t trying to look. She really wasn’t. But the screen was right in front of her, and her eyes followed the letters automatically, the same way they followed every string of numbers she had ever seen.

LXRK309

Four letters. Three numbers.

A student ID.

Blair’s pen stopped moving.

She knew that string. She had seen it before, written in her own handwriting. Line forty-three. The password on Jack’s folder was one of the combinations on that list.

And one of the combinations on that list was the Crown Prince’s student ID.

Killian hit Enter. The practice exam loaded with a cheerful chime, and a timer began counting down in the corner of the screen.

"Sixty minutes," he said. "Begin."

Blair didn’t move.

"Human." Killian turned his head. "Is something wrong?"

She could feel his eyes on the side of her face. If she looked at him, he would see it. Everything she was thinking was probably written all over her face.

So she didn’t look. She stared at the first question on the screen as hard as she had ever stared at anything, and she made her face as blank as possible.

"N-no," Blair whispered. "Nothing’s wrong."

She began to type.

She answered the first question. And the second. And the third. Her fingers moved, and her brain produced answers, and she did not look at the Crown Prince sitting beside her even once.

The questions got harder.

Border disputes between the feline factions. Inheritance law for mixed-faction pups. The rights of a noble house to seize land from a lesser house in debt. Blair answered them all, one after another, her fingers moving steadily across the keys.

Then question thirty-one appeared on the screen.

Under royal law, what marks a lesser as the registered property of a noble house?

Blair’s fingers slowed.

She knew the answer and felt sick to her stomach. She typed the answer as fast as she could.

The house crest, worn at the throat.

She hit Enter and moved on without looking back.

At the head of the table, Daemus had given up pretending not to watch. He was leaning so far forward on his elbows that his chair was balanced on its two front legs.

"How’s she doing?" he asked.

"Be quiet," Killian said.

"That means she’s doing good."

Killian didn’t answer.

Blair answered question forty. Question forty-five. Question fifty. When she clicked the final answer and the screen went quiet, the timer in the corner read 34:12.

She had finished with more than half the time left.

The results page loaded with another cheerful chime.

100%

Daemus’s chair slammed back down onto all four legs. "A HUNDRED?" He punched the air. "That’s my girl!"

Killian stared at the screen.

He reached over, his cool fingers brushing against the back of her hand on the trackpad. Blair jerked away so fast her elbow hit the table. He didn’t seem to notice. He scrolled slowly through her answers, all fifty of them, like he was searching for a mistake that had to be hiding somewhere.

There wasn’t one.

"Hey, Kill," Daemus said, grinning. "What’d you get on this thing your first time?"

Killian’s jaw tightened. "Irrelevant."

"So not a hundred."

"Irrelevant."

"Ninety-something? Eighties?" Daemus’s grin grew even wider. "Wow. Beaten by a lesser. Crown Prince."

Killian closed the results page with a sharp click and opened a new exam. The title at the top read Advanced.

"Again," he said.

Blair looked down at the new timer counting down in the corner. She put her fingers on the keys.

She answered the first question. And the second.

But all she could think about was the possibility. What if his ID number was the password?