Brightly Burning

would ever dream of making that kind of extortionate demand!'

Lan listened to his mother in a state of shock, numb with incredulity. She still didn't believe him! He had thought that she would cover him with scorn for 'not standing up for himself,' but he had never, ever, thought that she wouldn't believe him!

'The only possible explanation is that they've been making a goose out of you,' she scolded him. 'Since I can't believe that you would try to lie about all of this, that is the only conclusion I can come to. These boys have been pulling an enormous joke on you, and you were too dense to see it!'

A joke? She thinks this was all a joke on me? How could she—how could she even imagine—

She shook her head again, oblivious to his shocked gaze. 'Lavan, you are more trouble than all of your brothers and sisters put together. Why can't you be like the rest of them?'

With that, she rose and left him, leaving him alone with the flickering candles and a feeling of complete despair.

Never had he felt so completely alone.

His last possible refuge had been closed to him; his own mother thought he was exaggerating and being duped. Nothing would be done, and he would have to go back to school knowing that he had no other choice but to endure whatever Tyron decided to deal out to him.

No point in trying to tell his father about this; Nelda would give him her own interpretation, and that would be that. Archer would hear no further appeals from Lan.

As for the velvet... if Tyron didn't forget, the velvet might as well be on the moon. Lan could never get it for him. He had no money to buy it, and his father would never let him have it. As for stealing it—out of the question. Velvet was kept in a locked room at the warehouse, every thumb's length of it measured and accounted for.

Tyron didn't want the velvet. He just wanted another excuse to bully Lan. He'll just flog me, he tried to tell himself. What's a few stripes? He won't kill me.

No, but the pain and the humiliation... and worse than that, the certain knowledge that every student in the school would look down on him the way his mother did now... how could he bear that? And there would be years more of this, of being beaten and humiliated, of being bullied and treated as less than the lowest ragpicker.

What he wanted to do was to howl his anguish like an animal, but what came out of his throat was a strangled whimper.

If only he could just drink enough of the potion to sleep forever....

He lay flat on his back as the candles burned out, one by one, a bleak cloud of depression weighing him down. Slowly, silently, tears ran down his temples, leaving behind cold trails on the skin and soaking into his hair.

Finally the last of his candles guttered in a pool of its own wax, and he reached despondently for his medicine. There wasn't enough left in the bottle to let him sleep forever. If only there was!

Well, if it helped with the pain in his head, perhaps it would help with the pain in his heart.

*

DRUGS only brought an end to the physical pain; they did nothing for his despair. He lost his appetite, but now that he was no longer suspected of having a fever, apparently no one noticed that the trays came down almost as full as when they went up. He took his medicines in apathetic silence, and found a strange refuge in the books he used to despise.

This time it was the Healer who had put a time limit to his retreat; the Healer had said that he should be ready to return to school in three days, so in exactly three days, there was another visit from his mother.

She appeared with the supper tray, and actually gazed on him with a hint of approval.

'Your teachers are extremely pleased with you,' she said, neutrally. 'You're going to be quite ready for school tomorrow.'

He wouldn't look into his mother's eyes. He knew there would be no reprieve.

At breakfast, Nelda handed him a small glass containing some thick, unidentifiable liquid.

'What's... this?' he asked, staring at it dully.

'The medicine that will keep you from having those headaches from now on,' Nelda replied, with a tart edge to her voice. Now that was not what Lan remembered; as he recalled, the Healer had not put things with such certainty. It will help prevent them, was what Lan remembered. But it was obvious that Nelda was determined that the inconvenience of the headaches would no longer be occurring to disrupt the household schedule.

And if they do—obviously it will be because I did something wrong, that I didn't take enough of the medicine, or didn't take it at the right time, he thought bitterly, his throat closing with a painful lump. Or because I'm faking it.

The medicine was nowhere near as bitter as his thoughts, and he swallowed it down without a grimace for the taste. Then he gathered up his books, wrapped himself in his depression as well as his cloak, and trudged off through the bleak half light of a gathering storm to what he could not help but feel was his doom.

He didn't try to hide in a crowd this morning; why bother? Tyron would find him no matter where he was.

Bundled in his cloak, with the hood pulled over his head, perhaps they didn't recognize him. He didn't make his usual sprint, he walked—or, rather, plodded—straight to the door. And no one stopped him, or even interfered with him.

But this did nothing to give him his lost hopes back again. In fact, all it did was increase his feeling of impending doom. With leaden steps he climbed the staircase to his floor.

He's waiting. He's sitting like a spider in the middle of his web. He knows he can have me any