He winked at Ashley, who whispered low and husky, "Do you think he's attractive?"
Pi wasn't fooled. Asking if Alton was attractive was like asking if demons wanted to murder you. But yet, something about their meeting outside bothered Pi.
"He could be a model," she offered eventually.
Professor Augustus lifted a hand while adjusting his glasses with pinched fingers. He was younger than Pi had realized, maybe only in his late twenties.
"Fact. At least one of you will die this year," he said. "Look around at your fellow students. One of you will do something stupid. You'll try to impress your peers with a dazzling display of your magical prowess, pushing the boundaries of sense and magic, and pay the ultimate price for it. And I will applaud you for it."
A low-level chuckle flowed through the room. Pi wasn't sure if it was callousness or bravado. She hoped the latter.
"Limitless!" said the professor, raising his arm straight up like a rocket. "That is the motto of the Coterie of Mages. We do not put limits on ourselves, or our magic. We push. We dare. We do.
"At least one of you will die this year, because you will push yourselves." He tapped on his own chest. "I will push you. But today is not that day," he said with a cocked grin.
Pi found herself laughing along with the others. The whole speech felt a little rehearsed, but she appreciated the effort.
"Today, however, we are not going to kill anyone. At least I hope. To get to know your abilities, and to lay the groundwork for later lessons, we're going to talk about materials," said the professor.
He made a few gestures, and a circular desk rose out of the dais. A variety of objects, including plants, metals, and liquids—most that she recognized—were on the table. Professor Augustus took a circuit around the dais before stopping next to Alton, putting a hand on his shoulder. Pi detected the twitch of annoyance on Alton's face.
"One of the responsibilities of fourth-year students is to teach and mentor first years. Alton Lockwood is one of our best and brightest. You should feel privileged to learn from him," said the professor.
Augustus pointed to Brock DuPont on the opposite side while simultaneously nodding at Alton, who lifted up a leafy sprig with berries on it.
"You, Brock. What is that?" asked the professor.
"Mistletoe," said Brock after a moment.
The professor made an agreeable nod. "What are its properties?"
"Can be used in summonings, antidotes for poison, protections against charms..." said Brock.
"Good enough for the start. But that was an easy one."
Augustus walked over to their table, and to Pi's supreme disappointment, he picked Ashley. Alton held up a hunk of silvery metal that had crystalline features.
Ashley answered right away. "Gallium. It's magically magnetic, so it can be used to set up perpetual levitation fields, like the ones the Japanese use in their Lev Trains. It cures warts, or at least reduces them, if properly attuned can be used for triangulation and locating, and can give the fungus folk a skin rash."
Augustus clapped his hands. "Wonderfully done. Does anyone know the proper ratio used when setting up a levitation field?"
Pi raised her hand, but the professor called on Bree Bishop.
"At the distance of one dragon, the proper ratio of gallium to target object is three to one."
Pi whispered, "Eight to one," right as the professor raised his hand and said, "Almost. It's actually eight to one. Congratulations, you would have immolated yourself in the faez feedback."
Bree looked a little embarrassed. A few disdainful glances were sent in her direction.
The professor pointed at Orson Rutherford. Alton lifted up a jar with a white sticky paste in it. He waved his hand, and a faint minty scent reached Pi's nose.
"Ear wax from the fae," Pi whispered to Ashley, who nodded appreciatively.
Orson drummed his fingers on his desk before answering correctly. Then he added, "It's an alchemical solvent used when making potions involving dragon's blood, it can protect against faez burn, and tastes great on toast."
Everyone laughed, including Pi. The professor continued with the game, pointing at a different student each time. Pi knew every one of them, though she didn't always know the full list of properties.
When Augustus tapped on her desk, a few muffled coughs of "Hickford Pi" went around the room. The professor duly ignored them and nodded to Alton.
Pi caught the hesitation as Alton almost lifted up a beaker of sea salt, which Pi knew intimately well, then reached for a different item. He lifted up a gray flat stone about the size of a child's fist.
She stared intently at the object in his hand. The other initiates chuckled lightly when she didn't answer right away.
The stone was suggestive of a codex rock, or possibly a titan's tear, but she knew it was neither. Pi tried to ignore the room full of eyes on her.
"Miss Silverthorne," said the professor, trying to sound encouraging.
Pi took a glance around the room. They looked ready to break into laughter. Next to her, Ashley was nearly in tears, which was the only thing keeping Pi from running out of the room.
She tried to remind herself that she'd summoned a demon lord not too long ago, but all she could think about was that she didn't know what the item was. She could handle sticking out. She could handle not having the same advantages they had. She could even handle their condescending glances and smug comments. But she couldn't handle not doing well. It was acid on her bones.
"Miss Silverthorne. We're waiting."
She concentrated on the stone as hard as she could, but it was like running into an invisible wall. A few more calls of "Hickford Pi" punctuated the silence.
"I'm sorry, Miss Silverthorne," said the professor eventually. "What was that again, Alton?"
Alton's lip tugged with amusement. "A paperweight."
The room erupted in laughter. Pi felt like she'd been packed in ice. It went on for over a minute. The whole time, Pi stayed perfectly still as if that would keep the shame away.
Eventually, the professor put order to the room. The questions went on, but the damage was done. Before, at least she'd been the girl who'd gotten third place in the Merlins. It was something she'd done better than they had, and it kept her from feeling like she was out of place, like she didn’t belong. Now, she was the girl who didn't even know what a rock was.
Chapter Sixteen
The Golden Willow Clinic for the Sick and Infirm had seen better days. The brick building was in dire need of tuck pointing, and the west wall was overtaken with ivy, but Aurie knew it wasn't the building that mattered, but the doctors and nurses inside.
Aurie stopped at the guard station in the entry area. A heavyset man with a monkish hairline in a Dreadcore Security uniform sat behind a desk. His bushy eyebrows furrowed as she approached.
"You know you are not supposed to be here, Aurelia," said Herman the guard.
Every word was spoken with a distinct slowness in a monotone voice.
"Hi, Hermie," she said.
His face was wracked with confusion. "You are not on my list. Why are you here, Aurelia?"
"Hermie, it's okay. I just wanted to come visit. See how the kids were doing," she said.
"But you are not on the list," he said, rather emphatically.
"I was hoping...," she said, but realized Herman would never be able to understand her request, so she left it unsaid. "I just wanted to stop by. Are the kids okay?"
"I am not on children floor for the irre…irre...irre...," said Herman, who appeared to be in pain trying to say the word.
"It's okay, Hermie. I know the floor," she said. "What about the kids?"
Mention of the kids brightened his face. "Eduardo was sent home last week."
"Great," said Aurie.
Eduardo had picked up a strange fungus from playing in the Potomac River. Dr. Fairlight had suspected industrial waste from the nearby alchemical plant, but there was no way to prove it. The fungus
turned Eduardo's skin to lava when he got worried or excited. The first week on the floor, before they got the fungus under control, he burned up four beds.
She hesitated asking the next question, fearing the answer. "What about Emily?"
"Emily on floor six now," said Herman.
Intensive care was on floor six. Aurie feared it was nearing the end. Even if she'd wanted to see Emily, there was no way to get onto the sixth floor without a badge.
Aurie pulled a clear baggy containing slivers of lichwood out of an inside pocket. "Can you do something really important for me? Give this to Dr. Fairlight."
Herman looked confused, so she borrowed a piece of paper and wrote instructions on it. She'd been doing some research about Emily's condition based on her experience in the trials when she'd used the flight potion to absorb the growth steam. She'd had horrible joint pains after that and had drank some lichwood tea for relief. She hoped it might offer something similar to Emily.
After leaving the note and lichwood with Herman, Aurie went back to the apartment. She was sore from sorting Magic cards at Freeport Games for Hemistad. She'd been working double shifts to pay him back for the loan.
The drug dealers were standing outside of the apartment when she got there. They noticed her as she approached, and moved to intercept.
She poured faez into her fist, until the golden energy dripped from her knuckles.
"Touch me and find out what it feels like to have your bones catch fire inside your skin," she said.
The five guys held their hands up and backed away. "Hey, girl. We just playin'. No need for that business."
Back in her room, she let the faez go and checked her skin for signs of damage. Her arm felt heavy and sore from calling it up and not using it, but the skin had no burst veins or cracking.
"Stupid, Aurie," she muttered to herself, and flopped onto the bed.
The present Pi had given her sat on the desk. She picked it up and rotated it in her hands. She just couldn't open it. Doing so would acknowledge that she'd turned twenty, and would never get into the Hundred Halls.
After a few minutes of sulking, Aurie got up and prepared to inventory her magical books and supplies so she could sell them to help pay Hemistad back. She hated being in debt.
A knock on the door startled her. She peeked out the window to see the drug dealers still hanging around.
Her door didn't have a peephole since it'd been replaced a year ago from water damage, so Aurie put her ear to the wood. The second knock rang her ears.
"Who is it?" she asked suspiciously.
An older voice responded, though it was too muffled for her to understand the words. The only thing she got was an impression of Britishness.
Aurie unhooked the chain and cracked open the door, preparing to slam it shut if she didn't like who she saw.
A tall man with dark skin and graying hair, wearing an impeccable gray suit, stood outside.
"Patron Gray," she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth. "Is something wrong?"
First thoughts went to her sister, but then she remembered that Pi was in Coterie, so Semyon Gray wouldn't be visiting her for that. She had a guess that it had to do with the accident during the Merlins. After the healers had patched her up, they'd said that someone would visit her to learn more about the circumstances of the explosion, but she hadn't expected Patron Semyon Gray.
"May I come in, Miss Aurelia?" he asked.
"Yes, of course," she said, opening the door. "And you can call me Aurie."
As she turned around, she grimaced. Call me Aurie? What am I thinking? He's a patron of the Hundred Halls, one of the most powerful people in the world.
She recovered enough to have a polite smile when she faced him again.
"Can I offer you a seat?" she asked, picking papers off her chair.
"Thank you, Aurie," he said, and sat.
She took the spot on the bed across from him and tried to keep her knees from bouncing.
"Do you know why I'm here?" he asked.
"About the accident at the Merlins," she said.
He raised a single eyebrow and nodded.
"Would it be too much to ask if you would elaborate on the details of that event?" he asked.
Aurie suddenly worried that the reason Semyon had come to investigate her, rather than a lowly administrator, was because they were planning on taking preemptive legal action.
"What do you want to know? How it happened so you can prevent future accidents?" she asked tentatively.
"Of course," he said.
As she gathered her thoughts, she looked at Semyon Gray. While his gray eyes revealed the depths of his experiences, they did not suggest a hard man. Aurie found herself relaxing at this realization, the previous fears evaporating.
She explained the circumstances that had led to the wand explosion. When she started explaining, she was afraid she'd get teary-eyed, but she made it through in a calm voice.
He nodded appreciatively at the end.
"Had you ever been tested before? Standardized tests, I mean," he said.
"No. After my parents...we got moved around to different orphanages. Never stayed in one place for long," she said.
His kind eyes creased with concern. "I knew your parents. They were some of my favorite students."
Aurie wasn't surprised that Patron Gray had remembered her mother. "How did you know my dad? Since he was a healer."
"The halls work together frequently, or at least most of them do. It's one of the things that Invictus wanted of us. Second year is filled with mixed hall competitions," he said, then paused to smile. "Your mother was an extraordinary woman. She used the knowledge she'd gained in Arcanium to help your father find cures for ailments that were thought incurable. They were an amazing team," said Patron Gray.
Aurie knew the generalities of what her parents were working on, but to hear the importance of it from Patron Gray stoked fires of longing in her chest. At various times during her childhood, her mother would leave the country on trips to find artifacts, or scraps of ancient magical tomes, in hopes they could lead to new cures. Aurie always hated when her mother left, especially because her dad was always at the hospital. Even before their parents had died, she and her sister had spent their childhoods alone.
Semyon placed his hand on hers. She'd been squeezing them into fists. His hand was warm and rough with calluses. "I'm sorry, Aurie. I didn't mean to bring up old pains. Would you mind if I did a simple test? I need to understand your access to the faez."
She nodded. He took her hand in both of his.
"Pour as much faez as you can into your hand. Let it flow unbridled," he said.
"Are you sure? I thought we were never supposed to do that. Especially without a patron," she said.
He raised a mocking eyebrow.
"I promise you that I can protect you for this test," he said, a smile in his tone.
"Okay," she said, breathing deeply and preparing.
She kept her eyes open because she wanted to make sure she wasn't hurting him in some way.
Accessing raw faez had always been easy for Aurie. She'd always felt like it was a vast river behind a dam, as wide and deep as the Amazon, and that she just opened it up a little to let it out. She'd always been afraid to let it get away from her, feeling like the dam might break from too much power and wash her away.
After the first few seconds, Patron Gray barely reacted. The winkles around his eyes creased with effort, but he did not seem in pain. He was rechanneling her faez back into the place where it came from. Realizing she wasn't going to hurt him, she let loose like she never had before, and regretted it right away.
There was a brief moment, right when the flow increased, that Aurie thought their hands would be forced apart, and raw magic would spray over the room like a busted water pipe. But Patron Gray clamped down and the moment passed.
When he nodded, she stopped and pulled away, feeling raw from the effort.
Semyon sat quietly
in contemplation before speaking again. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully.
"Miss Silverthorne, you have a considerable amount of power. Much more than the average mage. Much, much more. Which explains why there was an unfortunate explosion. The wand wasn't constructed for the levels of faez you were able to give it, so it failed. Getting knocked out of the trial at that moment was not your fault. You should have passed and been placed in a hall," he said.
The news that she hadn't failed, that it had been the apparatus of the trial itself that had failed, was bittersweet. She felt numb and dizzy.
"It doesn't matter," she said, almost in a trance. "I'm twenty now. It's in the charter that all patrons are bound by, even you. The Hundred Halls can accept no initiates after the age of twenty. I've been twenty for almost a month now."
Semyon nodded along with her words. "Yes. That's true. It's in the charter and is impossible to circumvent."
Despite the seriousness of his gaze, his lips seemed to want to curl into a smile, or at least that's what Aurie thought was going on. Either that, or she was going insane.
"Miss Silverthorne," he said. "Aurie. Can you tell me again about the incident at the trials?"
She put her hand to her lips. Her face was tingly. "I already told you about that."
Semyon couldn't hold his smile back. His teeth were glimmering white.
"Tell me about the trial again," he said, as if there was some message coded in the words.
"I don't under..."
Then it hit her. For a moment, she almost passed out, the emotions came on so strong. But she had to check, had to make sure.
"I'm not supposed to be able to talk about the trial. But if I can it means that the enchantment wasn't placed on me, and if so then the link...oh shit."
She clamped her hand over her mouth as she looked into his eyes for confirmation.
"Yes, Aurelia Silverthorne. I still have the link with you from the trials. Which means that technically, you were a part of Arcanium when you had your twentieth birthday," he said. "Due to your injuries at the time, and because I suspected that it might not have been your fault, I made sure you were not discharged in the normal way."
"But why...?" she asked.
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