A Pride of Gryphons

by Kristen S. Walker

  The duke nodded to all of them, smiling his ridiculous grin as if he were pleased at how he’d handled his little performance, and swept out of the room again. Thais fell into step with the rest of his retinue, not casting so much as a backward glance at her former colleagues.

  Servants appeared from the sides to lead the exiles to their guest rooms in the palace, and Pelagia followed. It was less than what she’d hoped for, but it wasn’t a total loss. She would earn a new home in Sympaia and the respect of the local Merchants Guild, building up her power again until the time was right. Sooner or later, she would have her revenge on Galenos and Korinna for what they’d done to her.

  She glanced toward the priests as they left the room, but Xeros refused to look in her direction. He would go with the others to find a place at the shrine, refusing to accept any help that she offered him. Stubbornness was another trait he’d inherited from her. She would have to settle for donating to the Servants of Varula when she had money again. A mother’s duty was never finished.

  Aristia I

  Aristia switched her heavy book bag from her left side to her right so the thick strap would dig into her other shoulder for a while. “Hurry up, no dawdling,” she called to her younger brother.

  Krymeios ran back and forth across the street, swinging at shadows with a stick he’d found. “I’m a warrior!” he crowed. “I’m going to fight off all the monsters, just wait and see!”

  Aristia rolled her eyes but she couldn’t bring herself to stop his fun. A year ago, they hadn’t had the time to play at all, with all of their energy gone to looking for scraps of food to feed their family. Now he could run and jump like the other children without worrying about where his next meal was coming from. It was hard not to feel his joy.

  But although she was only a year older than him, she couldn’t afford to waste time on silly children’s games. She wanted to get home quickly so she could finish all of her work and have time for studying. The extra books in her bag weren’t just for weight—they were lent to her special by the priest who taught their class so she could catch up with the other students her age.

  The duke and duchess had insisted that she and Krymeios go back to the common school to catch up on their education. Once, they’d all gone to primary school together, but in three years of living on the street and constantly hunting for food, there’d been no time for practicing their letters and numbers. She found herself struggling to remember even the basics. And since most children graduated the primary school at twelve so they could move on to apprenticeships or more advanced secondary schools like the healer and mage academies, that left her only a year to memorize what most children learned in six.

  Her older brother and sister were happy with their positions in the duke’s household, but Aristia didn’t want to be the duchess’s handmaid for the rest of her life. She wanted more than security—she wanted to know how to fight back against the wyld. If she could convince Korinna to give her a recommendation, she’d be accepted as a student at the academy of magic, and then she’d learn how to defend herself from the monsters that had almost taken her life.

  Krymeios threw his stick aside at last and darted ahead. “C’mon, let’s go home! I’m hungry!”

  Aristia sighed. He was always “hungry” these days, begging for snacks in between meals. Not that she could blame him. She pulled a roll out of her pocket and held it out to him. “Slow down! You need to stay with me.” It wasn’t a long walk home from the neighborhood shrine where they took their lessons, but Mother insisted that they stay together.

  He darted back to snatch the roll out of her hand, but he quickly outpaced her again. “I need more than stale bread that’s been in your pocket all day. I want some meat! I’m a growing boy, you know.”

  “Growing around the middle, maybe,” she said with a pointed glance at his stomach. “I’m going as fast as I can. Unless you want to carry my books for me, you can wait a little longer.”

  He scowled at her book bag. “I dunno what you need so many books for. They aren’t gonna tell you how to clean the house better or sew a fancy dress. Ma says you’d better spend your time practicing your needlework.”

  Her grip tightened on the book bag. “That’s the point. There’s more than one way to fight monsters. You want a sword, but I want knowledge.”

  He rolled his eyes. “What’s a bunch of words gonna do against a monster?” He mimed drawing a bow. “One shot, right between the eyes, and they all go down. Pow! Just like the duke and duchess did.”

  She cupped her hand self-consciously over her ear. “Some monsters are too small to fight, but they still kill people.”

  He looked down at the ground, kicking a loose stone across the street, but he didn’t say anything else after that.

  She felt a twinge of guilt for bringing it up, but she didn’t apologize. Mother had told her not to scare her siblings with too many details of what had happened to her last year, but they knew enough to understand that she would have died if a mage hadn’t cured her of the mysterious choreomania. She’d also confessed what the mage had told her: that the choreomania was caused by a little monster called a crystalbell bug which crawled into her ear and caused the dancing madness. Krymeios wanted to be a warrior to protect her, but she knew he couldn’t fight off everything.

  What she didn’t understand was why she’d lost her hearing in the infested ear. Everyone else who had been cured by the mage seemed to have no lasting effects from the encounter, but the physician said she was completely deaf on the left side. If she went to the academy of magic, maybe someone would be able to help her get her hearing back, or at least help her understand what had happened.

  But the secret that she hadn’t told anyone? She wasn’t completely deaf in her left ear. Sometimes she heard things in her left ear that her “normal” right ear never heard. Mostly, she tried to ignore those strange sounds because they were distracting. Part of her wanted to know more, but she was afraid to ask anyone, especially if it turned out that some of the madness still lingered in her. Maybe the cure hadn’t worked on her completely.

  She could hear something now as they got closer to the house. There was a humming sound that was just like the duchess’s voice, calling out across the city toward the marewing paddock, and she could hear Sungold answering back. Even though the pair were more than a mile apart, there was a connection between them, and it was as loud to her as if Aristia was standing next to them. Korinna was summoning her marewing.

  Krymeios tugged on her arm. “Hey, you’re doing it again. No blanking out until we’re home, alright? We’re almost there!”

  Aristia came back to herself with a start. She’d stopped in the middle of the street, oblivious to the traffic around them, when she heard the call. She forced her feet to move. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m just a little… tired.”

  Her brother said nothing more when she was walking again, but she could feel him glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. She didn’t know how to explain her “blank spells” to her family when she got distracted by the strange things she heard. She tried to excuse it away, but she knew Mother in particular worried about any changes in behavior since her brush with death. She wouldn’t be able to hide her strange ability forever.

  And then what would happen to her? People feared anything related to wyld magic, and she had a sneaking suspicion it was no coincidence for her to hear monsters after having one live inside her ear. She could be sent to the temples to be cleansed or maybe just banished from the city, like the evil priests. Either way, she didn’t want to find out.

  Aristia forced a light-hearted smile on her face as she walked in the front door of the duke’s house. She just had to study hard and keep up a mask for another year, and then see if she could make it into one of the mage academies. Then she could get some answers to the questions she was afraid to ask. She prayed to all of the gods that she could hold out that long.

  Ameyron I

  Ameyron had many skill
s he’d developed as a mage, but accounting wasn’t one of them. He was used to spending money as it came to him, usually on books and other research materials, and when he went without work for too long or didn’t track his book purchases close enough, he had sometimes found himself without enough left over to buy food. He’d been delighted to find out that the Jirou Kolisa Academy of Mages in Sacrimas, while small, was self-sustaining and grew its own food on the lower half of the campus, away from the academic buildings and houses on the upper campus. The whole thing was built up on a mountain above the fishing town of Sacrimas, far away from any real civilization and isolated by more mountains on three sides plus the ocean to the west. It was easier to grow their own food or get what they could from the town instead of shipping it by boat up the coast or donkey train over the mountain range, and that meant he no longer had to worry about where his next meal would come from.

  So when Omalia showed him the amount of money approved by Duke Galenos and the Council of Kyratia for the academy’s first year budget, his first calculation told him they’d be able to buy quite a lot of books.

  “We could start a second library with that, twice the size of the one they have here,” he said with wide eyes. He’d been very disappointed to see the academy’s library was barely larger than his own personal collection, and most of it was horribly outdated. “I didn’t expect them to send so much money.”

  Omalia scowled and threw down the letter. “No, it’s not a lot of money, not considering our needs.” She stood up and threw open the curtain to the window which overlooked a small common square of administrative buildings. “Look at this place, it’s in shambles. There’s barely enough intact buildings to house the current faculty and students, let alone the new students and teachers that we’ve already accepted for the start of the year. The research facilities are a joke, except for that useless observatory, and there are almost no classrooms. I told them how much work we have to do here, but this sum they’ve offered us is the minimum we need just for essentials—nothing to cover the innovations I proposed.”

  Ameyron blinked several times, then remembered that they’d had a number of meetings about the school’s needs. He fumbled in his robe and found the notes he’d written down for the budget proposal. True to Omalia’s word, he realized that the sum in the letter was much smaller than what they’d suggested to the Council. “Oh. Well, hm.” He tried to picture how they could make the school bigger. “Maybe we don’t need their money for everything. We have lots of trees here, don’t we?” The Academy was nestled in a forest of enormous coastal redwoods, so close that in many places they couldn’t see one building from the next. “We could cut down a few and use the wood to build dormitories. And the classes could meet outside. It’s quite lovely here.”

  She rolled her eyes as if he’d just spoken nonsense. “It’s nice outside right now, but in half a year, it’s going to start raining again. Are you willing to give a lecture outside during a downpour?” She pointed outside at the forest. “For that matter, do you know how to chop down a tree and build anything? Because the raw materials don’t help us without skilled workers to transform them, and we don’t have the budget to hire anyone.”

  The word ‘transform’ sparked a memory in the back of his mind. “A transformation spell!” He snapped his fingers together. “I think I read one somewhere in a book of military defenses that was used to construct earthworks around a town to protect them from invading soldiers. If I could adapt that to use trees instead of dirt, perhaps the teachers and students could build their own shelters using magic.” He stroked his beard, which was neatly trimmed now that he had an assistant who reminded him about things like personal hygiene and regular mealtimes. “Now, which book did I read that in?”

  Omalia stared at him. “You’d just take a spell and change it around to do something completely different? There are so many ways that could go horribly wrong.”

  “Not if you do it systematically using the principles developed by Isadora in her opus, Grammanteya’s Influences on the Other Artes Magicae.”

  “Isadora is a fraud,” Omalia said with a sour grimace. “One of the other scholars in Petropouli wrote a scathing review of her work.”

  Ameyron shook his head. “That was only because Isadora comes from a rival school. If you ignored the politics and tested her theories for yourself, you would see that most of her ideas were quite functional.” When she shrugged, he frowned at her. “Did you really never bother to read the book for yourself?”

  She held up her hands defensively. “It didn’t seem like it would apply to my area of study, so I didn’t make it a priority.”

  He pounded the table emphatically. “That’s just the problem with magic today,” he said with a sigh. “Everyone stays within their own discipline and only reads the books from the schools they like. You can’t sort the truth out from the overlapping and contradictory theories. Of course, haematomanteya has the most to offer for our own research, but there are valuable insights to gain from the other six magical arts as well. For example, the problem of building a house.” He began counting disciplines on his fingers. “First of all, you’d think that haematomanteya might apply, since a tree is alive, but since you’re using the tree as a dead material, you wouldn’t get very far after the tree is cut down. Alchemeya deals more with transformation, and that could help with the process, but you’re actually more on a level with elemental magic. Geomanteya would be best for the foundation of a spell, especially if you want stone foundations under your house.” He laughed at his own joke.

  Omalia looked more and more confused as his explanation went on, and finally she just shook her head. “If it makes sense to you, then I suppose you can try, but I have to look for other solutions.” She shuffled a few papers on the table. “The idea that our faculty and student body could provide unskilled labor, at least, has merit. We could hire a few carpenters who know what they’re doing and have them direct the rest of us to raise a few simple houses. They wouldn’t look pretty, but they would put a roof over our head until we had the funds for better.”

  Ameyron got to his feet. “I’ll have to see if I can find the spell for earthworks.” He leaned eagerly toward Omalia. “If I can rewrite the spell to create a house, and demonstrate that it works, could I train some of the other mages to cast it?”

  She waved him away. “I’ll let you test it out on your own, but if you can prove that it works, I’ll give you all the mages you can use. The new students won’t be able to do anything, of course, but we could call it a test for the fourth-years.”

  He grinned with excitement and gathered up all of his notes off the table. He couldn’t wait to get started on his first real project since he’d come to the academy, but he had to make sure that he didn’t leave anything important behind. “You won’t be disappointed,” he promised.

  “Take your time,” Omalia said with a sigh. “I’ll probably get more of this administrative work done without you in the way.”

  He heard the note of disappointment in her voice, and he paused at the door, feeling guilty. He knew that she was a researcher like him and would rather be reading books or testing out spells instead of wrestling with the problems of the school. They were supposed to be sharing the unpleasant duties together, but she was right that he wasn’t much help, since he had trouble focusing on mundane details and remembering that there were human needs they had to consider for the school, not just how many books they had in their library or research facilities for the professors.

  “Good luck,” Ameyron called, looking back with a sympathetic smile. Then he hurried off, his mind already going back to the spell he would create. He could almost picture the book he needed, but he wasn’t sure which crate it had ended up in when he moved his things to the academy. There hadn’t been enough time to put up bookshelves and organize his collection. There was a long day of sorting through heavy tomes ahead of him—so much more enjoyable than balancing a budget!

  ***

&
nbsp; Ameyron rubbed his hands together, feeling his own skin tingling with power. He hadn’t directly called on any magic yet, but he often found that even the anticipation of spell casting often caused a few sparks to rise as if the magic was just as eager to work as he was. Although he’d been a mage for years, this heightened sense of the world around him was still a rush as his vision shifted to see the magic coursing all around him, through every thing living or not. Magic bound them all together and there was nothing he couldn’t do if he could just find the right way to direct that energy.

  He was trying to focus on what he was about to do, but he was still aware of the crowd surrounding him, and it was hard not to feel nervous with such a large audience. The demonstration was supposed to be only for Omalia, to prove that his weeks of spell development and testing had been worth it, but word had spread throughout the academy. Now almost all of the faculty and a good portion of the student body were assembled in a huge crowd to watch his spell casting.

  Most of them thought he would fail. Only some of them had been bold enough to tell him their doubts to his face, but even he was not so oblivious that he didn’t hear the whispers of derision among the rest. He supposed that to another mage who hadn’t read all of the same books he had, his idea might seem insane. But if he could pull this off, he would show them all that interdisciplinary studies were a viable way to develop new magical techniques, and maybe they’d start to listen to some of his other theories.

  He looked over at Omalia, who nodded permission for him to start, and then he emptied his mind of all other concerns, blocking out the murmurs of his audience and everything else except the trees in front of him. Spells had to be cast in exacting detail to work and he needed total focus.