Dinner was the same as it always was. Fish, soup, bread. The holy trinity, eternal and unchanging.
Hermes sat with his dormmates as had become his custom — uninvited, ignored, an island in the middle of a table that had collectively decided he didn't exist. He ate mechanically, not tasting anything, turning the day over in his mind.
The divination class sat heavily on him. Abano's face when she looked at those runes. The way she had stopped arguing and simply stared. The Cassandra parallel that he couldn't stop thinking about no matter how hard he tried.
He put his spoon down.
Around him the dining hall hummed with the noise of several hundred students eating and talking and existing with the uncomplicated ease of people who didn't know what was coming. The younger students at the far tables. The older ones closer to the exit. Prefects moving along the walls with the practiced authority of people who had been given a small amount of power and intended to use all of it.
He looked at his soup.
He looked at the room.
They did actually live once, he thought. And they died.
Something shifted in him that he couldn't quite name.
He stood up.
He stepped onto the bench.
He stepped onto the table.
Several people at his table stopped talking. Then the people at the next table. The silence spread outward in a slow radius of confusion as students turned to look at the small figure standing on a dining table in the middle of the hall.
Hermes took a deep breath.
"MONSTERS WILL ATTACK CHALDERA TOMORROW NIGHT!"
The dining hall exploded.
Not with fear — with noise. Laughter first, sharp and immediate, from the tables closest to him. Then shouting. Then the particular chaos of several hundred people all reacting differently simultaneously — some craning their necks to see, some laughing harder, some looking genuinely startled before their faces settled back into skepticism, some just trying to continue eating and finding it impossible.
"GET DOWN FROM THERE!"
"Who is that?!"
"Isn't that Abano's seer boy?"
"Oh brilliant, the fraud and her little prophet!"
"MONSTERS!" someone mimicked from the back of the hall in a high pitched voice, to widespread laughter.
"The Gaemond boy has lost his mind!"
Hermes stood on the table and waited for the noise to die down. It didn't particularly die down. He waited anyway.
"I SAW IT IN A VISION!" he continued, raising his voice above the chaos. "THE GRAY FOG THAT PROTECTS THIS CASTLE WILL BE BROKEN! THIRTY THREE MONSTERS WILL ATTACK! THE SKELETAL FIGURE WHO LEADS THEM IS—"
"GAEMOND."
The voice cut through the dining hall like a blade through cloth. Sharp, flat, carrying the particular authority of someone who had never once needed to raise their voice to be heard and wasn't raising it now.
Every head turned.
The prefect was already moving toward him.
He was tall, older, with the same sharp jaw as his friend groups leader and the expression of someone who had been waiting for an excuse.
Of course, Hermes thought, looking down at him. The brother.
"Get down," the prefect said quietly. "Now."
Hermes stepped down from the table with what he hoped was dignity.
The dining hall had not gone quiet. If anything the noise had increased — laughter, commentary, the gleeful energy of people who had just witnessed something they were going to be talking about for weeks. Someone at the back of the hall was still doing the high pitched monster impression. Someone else had started a slow clap that didn't catch on.
The prefect looked at Hermes with an expression of profound satisfaction.
"Disrupting the dining hall," he said, ticking it off on his fingers. "Standing on school property. Causing a scene." He paused. "You'll be cleaning the lavatories tonight. All of them. Starting immediately after dinner."
"Understood," Hermes said.
The prefect blinked. He had clearly been expecting an argument.
"I said all of them."
"I heard you," Hermes said pleasantly. "I'll get started right away."
The prefect stared at him for a moment longer with the look of someone who suspected he was being mocked but couldn't identify exactly how. Then he turned and walked away with his dignity mostly intact.
Hermes sat back down.
His dormmates were staring at him.
"What," said the leader flatly, "is wrong with you."
Everything, Hermes thought. Absolutely everything.
He wasn't being kind. He couldn't afford kindness — he was leaving tonight regardless of what happened after.
This was selfishness dressed up as something nobler. A way to quiet the heavy feeling that had been clawing at his chest all through dinner, to look these people in the eye one last time and say he had tried.
Now it was gone.
He picked up his spoon and finished his soup.
The lavatories were exactly as unpleasant as lavatories tended to be.
Hermes worked through them methodically, bucket and brush, telling himself it didn't matter because he was leaving as soon as he was done. The castle was quiet at this hour. The distant sounds of students being herded toward dormitories filtered down from the upper floors, growing fainter as the night settled in. By the time he finished the last one the corridors outside were silent.
He set the bucket down.
He looked at the corridor stretching ahead of him in both directions.
Right, he thought. Escape.
He picked a direction and walked.
The castle at night was a different creature entirely from the castle during the day. The torches burned lower, casting long shadows that turned familiar staircases into something slightly threatening. Corridors that had seemed straightforward in daylight revealed unexpected branches and turns. Twice he found himself back where he started without understanding how. Once he went down a staircase that ended in a wall.
I have no idea where I am, he acknowledged, after the third wrong turn.
He kept walking anyway. There had to be an exterior wall somewhere. There had to be a gate. Every castle had a gate. He just needed to find—
"Hello there."