Edmund attempts to meditate.<\/p>\n
Hunger seethes in him like a stormy sea.<\/p>\n
He touches it. He tastes it. He wraps himself around it and he hunts in svart-space, in the ethereal realm of concepts, for the weak point in the cord that holds the wolf.<\/p>\n
He is making progress.<\/p>\n
Thoughts are constellating themselves in his mind. Patterns are forming. Intentions, structures \u2014<\/p>\n
He twitches.<\/p>\n
It occurs to him that possibly there is a group of students in yellow hats standing around him in a creepy circle, staring at him. He dismisses the notion. He has heard nothing, after all. His eyes are closed. There is no reason to think something like that might be there.<\/p>\n
He tries to go back to meditation.<\/p>\n
He is distracted further by knowing that he could check. He could just open his eyes, and look, and then close his eyes again, and then he would know that they\u2019re not<\/em> there, and he could stop worrying about it. Or they might actually be there, and then he\u2019d know that too.<\/p>\n He opens his eyes. They are, of course, not there.<\/p>\n The very notion is ridiculous!<\/p>\n His doors are locked!<\/p>\n He closes his eyes again. He tries to get back to his meditation. It takes him forever to find the same detached state of mind he\u2019d been in before. He realizes that he\u2019d been lying to himself when he\u2019d pretended that it would be so simple; that all he\u2019d have to do is open his eyes, and close them again, and everything would be fine.<\/p>\n He realizes that that thought wasn\u2019t reason or knowledge, just a part of his mind that had wanted to check so very badly that it had lied to the rest of his thoughts.<\/p>\n Still, he is almost \u2014<\/p>\n He twitches.<\/p>\n He denies it. They were not there the last time so they must not be here this time. He has not seen them. He has not heard them. They are not there.<\/p>\n He smells something. It is probably just someone in the halls.<\/p>\n He has almost seen the structure of Fenris\u2019 chains \u2014<\/p>\n Has almost seen them twining there together in the nothingness: the footfalls of his cat, Inedible; the slowly drying spittle of some bird; the arms of a four-armed ape, most likely Eugenie\u2019s; the torment of the willing, that he suspects is Sid\u2019s; \u201cthe bearing witness to the wrongness,\u201d on which he has not yet found a way to focus, quite; and how they all wind together around the gaping red-rimmed absence where once he dreamed of seeing the perseverance of hope \u2014<\/p>\n \u201cGod damn <\/em>it,\u201d he says, losing the thread.<\/p>\n He opens his eyes.<\/p>\n They are standing there. They are standing around him in a creepy circle, in utter silence: Fred, Emily, Veronica, all the students of the Keepers\u2019 House. They are staring at him with their owlish, yellow eyes.<\/p>\n \u201cGlargh!\u201d he yelps. He tries to recoil but his legs are in the lotus position so he just falls over.<\/p>\n Then he straightens up.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you mind?\u201d<\/em> he asks.<\/p>\n \u201cRun away!\u201d Emily says. Only, it\u2019s in her inside voice. Her quiet voice. The others hear her, but Edmund does not.<\/p>\n Run away!<\/em><\/p>\n The Keepers\u2019 House disperses.<\/p>\n His mind is a blank. He can\u2019t even remember what he was doing.<\/p>\n He is on his feet. He is stalking Emily. That \u2014 must be what he is doing. That must have been what he was doing. He can feel the overextension of his limbs; he can feel a feral wildness in him; he is confused, in a haze of white.<\/p>\n He can taste a bit of her thoughts, wild on the wind: fear.<\/em><\/p>\n But she is quiet as he catches up to her.<\/p>\n She is silent. She doesn\u2019t speak.<\/p>\n She just stares at him with her golden Keepers\u2019 eyes.<\/p>\n He rubs at the back of his head.<\/p>\n She is standing by a plant. There are stones in the bed of the plant. Below that there is a waste receptacle. The floor is polished. Her eyes are great and golden; they are like twin suns. They burn him. They confuse him in his mind.<\/p>\n Her hand is doing something behind her. He squints. He tries to focus on it.<\/p>\n She is pounding, over and over again, on the button for the lift.<\/p>\n Her eyes flick off of him for a moment. He moves forward like the wind, but even Edmund isn\u2019t faster than Emily can flick her eyes.<\/p>\n He thinks that she was looking at the window.<\/p>\n The windows used to be ordinary glass. They used to be pretty breakable. After that incident where Peter fell out of a window, got hit by lightning three times, and became a saint, the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth invested in more durable windows. They\u2019re double-layered plexiglass now.<\/p>\n She\u2019s not jumping through that<\/em> window to safety!<\/p>\n He pulls himself back, slowly, to his feet.<\/p>\n If it were her nature to cry out, she could do so. There is doubtless someone on the floor who could be at least a momentary trouble to the Edmund-beast. But she does not cry out. She does not speak.<\/p>\n He puts his hand hard against the wall between the lifts and she stops pounding on the button.<\/p>\n She is very quiet, and her voice is staticked \u2014 like she\u2019s forcing it up through a strainer.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is it, Edmund?\u201d she asks him.<\/p>\n Fenris.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cMy wolf,\u201d he tries to explain. The cord had fit the wolf fourteen hundred years ago, but it was tight, and the wolf had grown. \u201cMy wolf has wounds.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t,\u201d she says. \u201cI mean \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n She loses the rest of the words. She doesn\u2019t speak them. If he could hear her inside voice then he would hear her stammering: \u201cI am not wounding your wolf or<\/em> is that a sexual innuendo because God <\/em>Edmund that would be totally inappropriate please stay away from me you are scaring me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMy wolf has wounds,\u201d it says again, and it tilts its head, and its gapes its jaw, and it looks at her. \u201cAnd I am so very hungry. And you stand around me. You distract me. You keep . . . getting . . . in my way.\u201d<\/p>\n The elevator opens.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a janitor inside.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m inedible,\u201d Emily is protesting.<\/p>\n This confuses Edmund because Inedible is the name of his family\u2019s cat. It wouldn\u2019t normally be enough to confuse him but oh<\/em>, in the face of those eyes!<\/p>\n To stand before a Keeper in the full flourish of her power is like trying to listen past a jet engine; trying to see something backlit by seven suns; trying to think when you haven\u2019t slept or eaten in ages \u2014 he keeps getting so very confused<\/em>.<\/p>\n The janitor pushes his cart forward.<\/p>\n The janitor. Edmund tries to think. The janitor. The cleaning man.<\/em> He is springing backwards. He is snarling. Emily is slipping into the elevator. The cleaning man is rolling his cart out. Edmund pushes himself back to the wall. The beast in him is snarling. He is in a full panic, his skin stretched tight.<\/p>\n The cleaning man broke Tom.<\/em><\/p>\n But the doors are closed now. Emily\u2019s eyes are gone now. And the Edmund-beast slowly recognizes the usual janitor for the dorm.<\/p>\n He is angry. He is hungry. The janitor\u2019s edible.<\/p>\n He tries so very hard to stop.<\/p>\n His heart\u2019s in a box, so he probably does.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Edmund attempts to meditate. Hunger seethes in him like a stormy sea. He touches it. He tastes it. He wraps himself around it and he hunts in svart-space, in the ethereal realm of concepts, for the weak point in the cord that holds the wolf. He is making progress. Thoughts are constellating themselves in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"series":[50],"class_list":["post-5605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vidars-boot-chapter-4","series-vidars-boot"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Hat_2_noBG.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5605"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6065,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5605\/revisions\/6065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5605"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}