[Oxrun Station] The Bloodwind Read Online Free PDF Page A

spruce, and used by the high school when Hawksted's  teams   were visiting. There was also a mammoth gym nasium, cold and generally damp, an unspoken reminder   of where the school's sympathies lay.
    Pat hesitated as the road finally came to an end.   Immediately to her left was a large circular parking lot   already  jammed.  There was another alongside Fine Arts,   but to use it would deny her a walk across campus. She   thought of the dent and the jibes it would produce from   those who'd seen her drinking, and spent the next ten   minutes creeping between rows before she found a proper   space.
    A moment, then, to pat the dashboard for luck, and   she was out and walking briskly, up a dozen stone steps   to the quad's inner sidewalk.
    A pause.   She turned and looked back toward the   woodland, caught the wink of a windshield far down on   Chancellor Avenue.  Frowned.  Rubbed the back of her   neck absently and turned back to face the quad.
    And smiled as if she'd just returned from an extended   vacation, tucking her handbag against her chest and   hugging herself warmly.   It was quiet here, but of a far   different degree than she felt in her home. A few win dows were open and she could hear radios muttering; students were on the Walk, laughing, talking, scooping   snow from the buried lawn and pelting it at friends.  From the chapel she could hear the carillon in one of its morning concerts, the melody almost solemn, the bells sounding medieval.  A quiet.   A peace.   A pleasant jolt to  the nerves and a goading of the mind without opening a   book or taking a lecture.
    In more ways than she found it comfortable to admit   it was the perfect hideaway; a liberal arts school and one   of the last where knowledge could be pursued for the pure sake of that knowledge, where the outside world   was admitted only by invitation. With less than nine   hundred students living in or commuting, it had devel oped a fierce pride in its independence that reached far   beyond graduation. The faculty, too, was loyal, though neither blind nor hidebound, and the few individuals in   both camps who found the intensity stifling seldom  lasted longer than their first winter term.
    Suddenly she heard a voice above her shout "Fire!"   She continued walking, though a blush reached her  cheeks and her chin ducked toward her chest. It was a   young man's shout, and a signal that a woman was on   the Long Walk, a woman much older than the women who attended. Then another voice grumbled, "Hell, it's  only a  prof ," and Pat lifted her head to laugh at the pricking of her ego.
    A beautiful day, she thought, in spite of the begin ning, and with a mocking backward wave she passed   under the archway in the far right corner.
    Stopped in her tracks when the Fine Arts building   caught her.
    The Student Union was two stories and unadorned;   Fine Arts, however, was a triplet of English and Sci ence: dark brick with marble trim, a turret at each high   corner, its most distinctive feature a white stone mar quee curved around the front and supported by squared   pillars. A series of double glass doors opened onto a   crescent lobby done in soft reds and  golds , centered by   a chandelier now unlighted and teardrop. Directly across   the black-and-white-checkered floor was the college's auditorium, giving Pat a constant impression of a squat,   fat cylinder rammed down the building's throat. It was   the home of film festivals, meetings of every  descrip tion college   and village, the school's vaunted amateur   theater, and Ford Danvers' drama classes that seemed to   her more often than not to be somewhat clumsy exer cises in primal group therapy.
    To the left and right of the bulging wine wall were staircases that wound to the second and third floors; and   against the far left wall a warren of postboxes behind   narrow glass eyes. She checked her own apprehensively, released a quick-held