by S. W. Clarke
An inkling of understanding seeped into me about why Liara was the way she was. It wasn’t just about me being a fire witch. “Do you have any sisters? Brothers?”
Now she met my eyes. “One little sister.”
“So did I, once upon a time. If she was still around, I would have done anything to protect her. Even if it meant pretending to be a cold-hearted bitch to preserve the family name.”
Her eyes narrowed. I thought she would say something cutting, but she only asked, “What happened to her?”
I faced the cave again. “Disappeared with my mom. It happened so long ago now, sometimes I wonder if they ever existed at all.”
A wind blew into the cave’s mouth, tugging at our hair.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” Liara said. “The boggan only hibernates here in winter.”
My fingers clenched. “Did it ever try to drown you?”
“No”—her lips curled—”but two did try to kill me in a labyrinth.”
Touché.
“Why did it pick this place, though?” I asked.
“Inside there is a place of minor power,” she said. “That’s why the boggan is attracted to it.”
“Tell me we don’t have to come back here more than once.”
She sighed, started forward. “I won’t lie to you. We’ll be back.” She disappeared into the mouth of the cave, and her disembodied voice called, “A light, please?”
Sucking in air, I followed, raising one hand and igniting it. The glow set us both into relief, shadows dancing on the cave wall.
Ahead of me, Liara stared back with eyes like black marbles. “See? Just us.”
We started walking. “Such a comfort to be here alone with you.”
For the first time, she gave a breathy laugh in my presence. “Likewise, fire witch.” As we came to the back of the cave, she said, “I can see why Rathmore had a thing for you.”
I stopped hard. Started walking again. “A what?”
She didn’t notice. “He was into you. It was obvious.”
“How could you possibly tell that? Unless you’re excellent at reading scowls.”
She turned down the passage, her hand going to the wall and trailing along. “He scowled longer and harder at you.”
My first instinct was to press the implications away. I didn’t want Liara hearing my heart thumping against my ribcage. “It’s weird. He’s a professor.”
She came into the main chamber of the cave with the small pool, turned back to me. “In the ancient world, before the fae portal was closed, our kind lived for hundreds of years. A five-year age gap was negligible.”
“I wasn’t referring to the age gap. I was referring to the student-teacher gap.”
“So he never acted on it. And now he’s gone.” She rolled her eyes, taking a few steps back from me. “Don’t pretend like you wouldn’t enjoy the student-teacher thing, anyway.”
I smirked at her. “So Liara Youngblood enjoys speculation and gossip. Color me shocked.”
“Douse your flame, fire witch,” she said. “It’s time for us to train.”
“Douse it?”
“Are you just going to repeat after me now?”
I hesitated, then closed my fingers to a fist. The flame hissed away, enshrouding us in complete darkness. In a flash, I saw the boggan’s face in my mind—the teeth, the eyes, the claws. I saw it pushing me into the pool just a few feet from where I was now standing.
I had hoped to never come back to this place.
“What’s the point of this?”
“To master the likeness deception, you have to master synesthesia. One of the first things we’re taught in Whisper is how to see magic. One of our first-year classes spends the whole year in the dark.”
“How does it help me to see anything if we’re in darkness?”
“Because it makes you desperate to see. Especially a place like this, where I’ve heard you had a very bad time.”
She was right about desperation. Since I’d doused the flame, my fingers had been itching to relight it. My eyes had been darting all over, seeking anything to latch on to.
“And the more desperate you are to see,” she went on, “the more likely you are to see the magic.”
I let out a long breath, trying to slow my heart. It wasn’t working. “I need to master the deception by the end of the year. Can you get me there?”
“Maybe. That depends on your commitment.”
Which meant returning to the place—this cave—where I felt desperate to see, again and again.
“Fine,” I said. “What happens when the boggan returns to hibernate for the winter?”
“That’ll just make you extra desperate, won’t it?”
“There’s no goddamn way I’m coming in here with that thing.”
“How committed are you, Cole?”
“Completely.”
“Really? I’m not so sure about that.”
“Liara—”
She shushed me. “Enough with excuses. Either you follow my lead and master the hex, or you’re screwed. What’ll it be?”
I ground my teeth together. I hated being shushed. “Let’s start already.”
“I’ve already started. The magic is in the air—don’t you see it?”
My eyes tracked the space around me. I saw nothing. “No.”
Footsteps sounded over the stone, approaching me. A second later, a hand fell on my shoulder, jolting me even though I knew it was Liara. “Look harder.” And then she murmured familiar words at me.
The likeness deception. Mealladh coltas.
And her breath was purple. The darkest shade of blue, but I could see it moving in my direction for a split second.
I went rigid under her grip.
“You saw it,” she murmured.
“I saw something.” I paused. “That wasn’t lightning.”
“Congratulations—that’s how it starts.” Her hand fell away. “And the lightning comes from my fingers, genius. What I just did was attempt to hex you. Didn’t work, obviously.”
I didn’t even have a typical comeback. No snark. Just silent, heart-thumping nerves.
When she spoke, I nearly flinched. “This cave really did a number on you, didn’t it?”
I took a long breath. “You don’t know the half of it.”
We returned to the cave the next day, and the day after that. Liara was painfully diligent about making sure I mastered the synesthesia before we moved on to anything else.
Days turned into weeks, and Liara managed to get her ban at the library overturned. Now she could return to the restricted room and study the art of hexes herself. She’d promised Eva to do so; the fae had, after all, invoked the Youngblood name.
Meanwhile, life went on at the academy in a strange, frenetic stasis. Mornings I met up with Aidan in the library. Grabbed food at the dining hall. Then I attended my classes—Mounted Combat, Fire Magic, Hexes, and the first-year class I taught—with perfect regularity, never late, never missing. In the evenings, Liara and I trained in the cave. Grabbed dinner. Then Aidan and I dueled by the pond.
It was exhausting. It was the only way I knew to distract myself.
Because as the leaves turned, things got strange.
The guardians had expected to embark on a rescue once a week. That was how it had been the previous year. But Mishka’s arms had long since healed, and still no horn, no rescue.
No missions.
By mid-October, we hadn’t had a mission in over a month. It was an odd quietude, a held-breath sort of existence, and it made me uncomfortable in a way I’d never known.
I began to desperately wish the horn would sound just so I could have the satisfaction of breathing out.
During weekly guardian meetings, we speculated as to why. Maybe the Shade was diminishing in power. Maybe she’d kidnapped enough mages for her army. Or maybe, most terrifying of all, she was planning something big.
“The human saying exists for a reason, after all,” Keene
said during our meeting. “‘The stillness before the storm,’ isn’t it?”
“It’s ‘calm,’” Akelan said, stone-faced. “But stillness feels more appropriate.”
It did feel more appropriate. This wasn’t calm. Not at all.
Fi told us to remain vigilant—as if I could get any more vigilant. I’d already trained with the other chasers: Keene, Liara, Mishka. In fact, I’d trained with all the guardians one on one, just to know their fighting styles.
Elijah and Isaiah were quick on the draw, kept on top of the action. They stuck together.
Keene liked to blink from rooftop to rooftop, appearing and disappearing without using his wings.
Liara was a straight arrow of intensity. Once she’d locked on to her target, she was faster than her lightning.
Circe was a coordinator in the sky. She yelled directions, kept everyone where they needed to be.
Akelan was coolheaded. He kept us well-guarded on the sides.
Mishka waited for her moment, and then she absolutely speared the shit out of things with ice.
Fi was the strategist on the ground. She played the role she needed to—whether guard or chaser.
I studied them all. I practiced with them all.
Because of everything happening, Eva and I had begun Sunday night sleepovers, which really just constituted lots of summoned food in our pajamas. She was the only one I could reveal it all to: my fears, my sadness, my anxiety, my anger.
She took it all in, and she gave me empathy back. And in turn, we commiserated over her training for the trials, her awkwardness with Torsten, the challenges of planning the Winter Solstice Ball.
I came to rely on those Sunday night sleepovers.
Sometimes I brought out the page from Jane Eyre Rathmore had left me, ran my thumb over the symbol he’d drawn in the corner like a talisman. If I were superstitious, I would have imagined it brought me good luck. Not the shape of it—the three interlocked triangles—but the fact that he had drawn it for me. It was the intention.
I thought of him more often when I began to lose my way.
He’d been the first person to learn about the Spitfire. He’d been the first one to accept me for it.
October lapsed into mid-November. By now I could see air magic as well as the leaves on a tree—though Liara’s magic was always varying shades of blue.
Some of her hexes were navy. Some were royal blue. Some were the color of a robin’s egg.
They depended on the ferocity with which she spoke them, the intensity of feeling she inhabited as she sent her magic into the world. She hadn’t been able to properly cast a hex yet—apparently that was wildly harder for a fae than for a witch—but that didn’t make her less of a teacher. She was, to both of our surprise, excellent.
She challenged me, and she knew exactly how to explain concepts and when to move on to the next one. I’d rather have her as my professor over Frostwish.
All the while, I had been keeping track of when the boggan would return. It was soon.
So I told her one night as we stood in the cave. A wisp of her magic swept past me, and I said, “Azure. Also, I won’t be here when it’s here.”
She went still in the dark. “It?”
“The boggan.”
“Oh, Clementine…”
“Listen, we’ve done what we need to do in here. I can see the magic.”
“This class normally lasts a year.”
I shrugged. “Test me. Give me my final exam, Teacher.”
She huffed. With a scrape of her shoe across the stone and my hair whipping around my face, she said, “Identify this.”
The smallest whisper resounded through the cave, and with it, a tiny stream of magic.
“Lapis,” I said at once.
“And this?” She bit the words out this time, dark with her intensity. The plume of her magic grew to encompass the space between us until it filled my vision.
“Denim—with a hint of indigo for spice.”
The vortex slowed to a stop, and her footsteps passed through the cave toward me. “Mr. Rosewort had something right about you, Clementine.”
“That I’m a liar?”
She gave a low laugh. “Two things right, then.”
“Do tell.”
“You’re an air witch.”
That wasn’t at all what I’d expected. “Right, because that information was on my infallible birth certificate.”
“You’re still an air witch. Nobody who doesn’t have a proficiency with air magic learns synesthesia in two months. Nobody.”
I crossed my arms in a protective way, fully expecting the boggan to appear. “Does that mean I’ve graduated?”
“Yeah.” She stepped past me, toward the passage out. “To the daytime.”
I turned, followed her. “The daytime?”
As we came to the cave’s mouth, she glanced back at me in the moonlight. “You can see the magic in this cave you so desperately want to leave. Seeing it during the day is your next challenge.”
As we walked down the path toward the academy, the gratitude of leaving that place forever sloughed off me. I left it behind, in the cave.
“Liara,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“We haven’t had a mission in two months.”
She blew out a breath. “Yeah.” She paused. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me either.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
December came, and with it, preparations for the Winter Solstice Ball.
I knew all about those, because Eva had become the head of the Winter Solstice Ball committee. It was composed of five women—all volunteers—three of whom were fae, and two of whom were overeager first-years.
Nights I came home to decorations strewn around the dorm. Sparkling pom-poms Eva said would hang from fixtures above the tables. Drawings of centerpieces. Swatches of color placed against one another for the “aesthetic scheme of the thing,” as she called it.
Other times, I found her reading a book on evasive flying for fae. I would spot her practicing with another student in the meadow, dueling until she couldn’t stand properly. This year, she was as serious about the dance as she was about becoming a guardian.
She gained an almost vibrating frequency, as though she were a tight ball of energy. This whole thing made her anxious in a way I couldn’t quite explain, as though if she succeeded at planning the ball it was proof she could succeed at anything.
Some nights she hated the ball. Some nights she loved it.
I’d told her she had weeks. She’d told me she had half as much time as she needed for it to be a proper event.
I pretended not to care about any of it. And I didn’t care about whether I was there or not, whether I danced with anyone. I didn’t have anyone in particular I wanted to dance with; we’d only danced once, but Rathmore had ruined me for all that.
Amidst everything else, coming home to Eva’s holiday cheer, to the sparkling things and the color and the charming disarray, heartened and distracted me. In a funny way, it made me feel the world was warmer, less chaotic than I imagined. The perfectly square swatches, the round poms, the elegant drawings of flowers.
Meanwhile, I began to see the colors of air magic in the daytime. Slowly, very slowly. But I was making progress.
December slid by in this way—daily preparations for the ball, classes, practice, and no rescues. Eventually the guardians met with Umbra in our meeting room, which was supposed to be a highly uncommon event.
This time, it wasn’t Fi standing before us. It was our headmistress.
She leaned her staff against the table, surveyed all ten of us (if you included Loki). “I’ve come here today to speak to you about the two-and-a-half month interlude after that last disastrous mission.”
I folded my arms tight to my body, didn’t meet Mishka’s eyes. Not long after she’d been released from the infirmary, I had spotted her in the dining hall and taken a furtive glance at her
arms.
They’d looked exactly the same as before. They picked up a knife and fork with ease. She laughed as she chatted with another student, cut a piece of meat and set it in her mouth in the same way she would have before she’d lost her arms.
But I knew it wasn’t the same.
The experience would never, never leave her.
I had apologized to her a few days afterward. She’d been strong, pretended I had nothing to apologize for except my absence. Still, things between me and Mishka would never be the same. I knew in a small, irrational way, she would always blame me for missing that rescue. Sometimes life went that way.
“This is strange,” Umbra said. “I’ll admit it now—it is odd. The last time this long a space elapsed between attacks was over a decade ago.”
“So you’re not feeling disturbances in the magic?” Fi asked.
Umbra shook her head. “No. Not a one. And I’ve looked into whether the issue stems with my magical awareness. It doesn’t.”
“So they’ve just stopped,” I said.
“No.” Umbra cut a hand through the air. “No, the Shade never stops. She may pause for a time, but until she extricates herself from the underworld or dies, she will never give in.”
“Then what?” Circe said. “What’s she up to?”
“I would most certainly tell you if I knew,” Umbra said. “Her actions have always been unreadable for me.”
Keene’s wings trembled. “I can’t stay in this holding pattern. I’m losing my hair.”
Akelan snorted as the fae pulled at his hair to demonstrate. “That may not be due to stress.”
Keene turned wide eyes on him. “Fae do not go bald.”
“Guardians,” Umbra said, “I recognize the immense amount of stress this places you under. That’s why I’ve made a decision I intend to implement at this meeting.”
All eyes shifted to her.
“Until things normalize, I will place you on shifts.” She raised her fingers. “Five on, four off. There must always be at least one guard, one watcher, and one chaser among those five. The groups should be evenly balanced for the greatest possibility of success.”
Fi sat up straight. “But that seems a dereliction…”
“Of your duties?” Umbra gestured to Keene. “I recognize your dedication, Ms. Waters. But I also would like to note the first case of fae balding, no doubt by consequence of the situation you’re in.”