UnTwisted

by Elise Allen

  Then Flissa walked in with the tall girl with wavy brown hair down past her shoulders, bright green eyes, and a simple leather jerkin that somehow looked more elegant on her than any ball gown had ever looked on anyone. Every student in the room looked up at her and stared, but the girl didn’t seem to notice. She said something to Flissa that Sara couldn’t hear, and they laughed together.

  “Flissa?” Sara said.

  Only then did Flissa see her. She looked surprised, like she’d forgotten they even had a class together.

  “Sara, hi!” She turned immediately to include the tall girl. “I want you to meet my friend Zinka.”

  “Hey,” Zinka replied, but before she could say anything more, the whole room echoed with the same voice they’d heard outside in the courtyard this morning.

  “Welcome!”

  A red satin pillow lowered from a spot so high on the ceiling, Sara hadn’t even seen it the entire time she’d waited in the room. Everyone looked up, amazed, as it floated down and came to a stop, hovering just above head-height over the patch of orange grass. Without being told, every student in the room moved into an awed circle and stared at the woman who sat cross-legged on the pillow, which turned slowly in midair.

  “Amala,” Flissa said softly.

  Sara knew Amala was ancient, but she looked young enough to be in her completion year. Her skin was ashen-gray from the generations spent in magical hibernation, but it was smooth and without a single blemish. Similarly, her hair was snowy white, but it was thick and luxurious, flowing like a waterfall until it pooled beautifully around her knees. She wore a simple white shift, with her green head-of-school robe over it.

  “This is Magic Lab,” she said, her voice as smooth as silk, “a class for Mages only. You heard me say this morning that we are all one Kaloon, both Genpo and Mage. That is true, but the fact remains that as Mages, you are special. You have unique skills, unlike any other creatures, and right here is where you’ll learn to understand your powers…and your potential.”

  Sara flicked her eyes to Flissa. Was she hearing the same thing Sara was? Because it certainly sounded to Sara like Amala hadn’t left her Genpos-are-inferior ideas behind.

  If Flissa had noticed, she didn’t show it. She stared at Amala, bright-eyed.

  Maybe Sara was overreacting.

  “When I was young,” Amala continued, “magic was a skill in which we took great pride. Mages were respected for their powers and trained from an early age. At last, the time has come again for Mages to take their rightful places of honor in Kaloon, but first you must learn the depths of your magic and how to control it. We’ll start with a question: What does everyone know about magic? Please raise your hands.”

  Flissa raised her hand high.

  “Princess Flissa,” Amala said. “What can you tell us?”

  Flissa stood taller. “Every Mage has their own distinct magical signature, as unique to that Mage as a fingerprint.”

  “That is correct,” Amala said. “You’ll note that as I float above you, the room smells like oranges, yes?”

  Everyone took deep breaths and murmured their agreement.

  “That orange scent is my unique magical signature, but magical signatures aren’t limited to scents. Some are visual, like colored lights or mists or shapes; while others are sounds, like a gong or a chirp. And while some magical signatures can be similar, it’s true that no two are exactly alike. Now who else can tell me something about magic?”

  Sara raised her hand high, but Amala called on a girl across the circle from her. The girl’s dark hair hung in endless plaits. She wore a simple dove-gray dress and had deep brown eyes, and as she gestured Sara saw she had a sixth finger on her right hand.

  “Mages can combine magic to make their powers stronger,” the girl said. “Right?”

  “I was gonna say that,” Sara whispered to Flissa. Zinka, on Flissa’s other side, gave her a raised-eyebrow glare, like Sara had committed a sin by whispering during Amala’s class. Sara blushed and turned back to the teacher.

  “Correct, Harper,” Amala said. “And when magic combines, magical signatures combine. At least where they can. My orange scent can’t exactly mesh with a trumpet blast, but one Mage’s red signature and another Mage’s white signature would combine to make a much more power-ful pink.”

  She rotated toward Sara and Flissa as she said this and gave them a knowing nod. Sara couldn’t help but smile; it felt good to know this powerful Shadow was singling out Flissa and Sara, and using their combined magic as an example.

  “One more before we start working,” Amala said. “Anyone else have a fact about magic?”

  “I do,” Zinka said without raising her hand.

  Amala didn’t seem to mind. “Yes?”

  “There were gems in the Twists,” Zinka said. “Blinzer stones. They were magical. Mages back there would’ve done anything—to anyone—to get them.”

  Her voice was dull, and Sara didn’t dare wonder what had been done to her in the name of getting the magical stones.

  “I mined for them,” said a short girl with bright red hair cut into a bob. She wore torn black leggings and a red doublet that poufed like a tutu at the bottom. When she spoke, the silver stud in her tongue clanked against her teeth. “Not my choice, but…you know. I never found them, though.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Amala said. “For those who don’t know,” she added as she turned slowly to address the whole room, “blinzer stones have the power to magnify magic, and even radiate a charm or a curse across other-wise impossible distances. They were an unintentional byproduct of the magic used to form the Twists, which is the only place they were ever found.”

  “If they were ever found,” muttered a boy with ice-blue eyes and a scar down one cheek. “I heard they aren’t even real.”

  “Oh, they’re real,” Amala said. “Just very rare. I myself have only seen one, but that was a long time ago, shortly after the Twists were first created…not long after I was imprisoned there.”

  Everyone went silent. Nobody talked about what it was like in the early days of the Twists. Nobody was alive from that time except for Amala and the other Shadows. They had experienced the terrible moments that had changed Kaloon’s history forever, but Sara knew from her parents that none of them liked to talk about it. Sara could feel the anticipation in the room as the whole class waited for Amala to continue.

  When she didn’t, Zinka spoke up, her voice soft and solemn. “Did you use it?”

  “The blinzer stone?” Amala asked. “I considered it. I thought it might have given us a chance to stop Grosselor—maybe escape the Twists and fight back. The problem with blinzer stones is they’re not precise instruments. You can’t control how little or how much the stones will magnify your powers. Even a Mage with good intentions could accidentally do more harm than good. So I chose not to use it. And when we tried to escape and fight back, we failed. Maybe if I’d used the stone things would have been different…or maybe I’d have destroyed us all. Impossible to say.”

  Amala’s eyes drifted to the warped stained-glass image of her husband, Maldevon, but Sara didn’t think that’s what she saw at all. She seemed far away, and suddenly looked almost as old as her years.

  No one said anything for a long time, then Sara gently cleared her throat. She didn’t want to upset Amala by asking a question, but she was too curious to swallow it.

  Amala snapped back to life and turned in her direction. She looked like herself again, and to Sara’s relief she didn’t seem angry. “Yes, Sara?”

  “The blinzer stone,” Sara asked, “if you didn’t use it, what did you do with it?”

  “I tried to destroy it,” Amala said, “but blinzer stones are almost impossible to destroy. I encased it in magic instead and buried it deep underground—even deeper than we Shadows when we went into hibernation. Unless someone discovered it, and we have no reason to believe anyone did, it’s now sealed away on another plane, along with all the other blinzer
stones and the rest of the Twists.”

  “Excuse me,” Flissa said, raising her hand as she spoke, “but would all the blinzer stones be sealed away with the Twists? Because other things from the Twists escaped—like orange grass, and things like the ring tree. Couldn’t blinzer stones be in Kaloon now too?”

  “That’s an excellent point, Flissa,” Amala said, “and it’s something we Shadows have been investigating, since you can imagine how dangerous the stones would be if they fell into the wrong hands. It does seem unlikely, given how rare they were in the Twists, but it’s far from impossible. Magic is unpredictable, and large bursts of combined powerful magic even more so. There could be blinzer stones in Kaloon; they could be out in the open, high in a tree, or deep underground. Or they could all remain in the Twists. Only time will tell.”

  Sara jumped as Amala smacked her palms down on her thighs. “Enough about magical theory,” the Shadow said. “Now I want to see where you are with your skills.” She waved a hand and the orange scent in the room intensified. A moment later, a small, round platform with a gray square of clay at its center appeared in front of each student.

  “Yes!” Sara exclaimed delightedly. “I love sculpting!”

  She knelt down to grab the clay, but her face bonked into a dome that appeared over it with a fresh blast of orange scent. Everyone in the room laughed.

  “Any Genpo can mold clay with her hands, Princess Sara,” Amala said as Sara stood back up, rubbing her throbbing nose. “I want you to sculpt with magic.”

  The dome over Sara’s clay disappeared, and Amala turned to include the rest of the class. “Anything will do. There is no wrong way to approach the assignment. If you can only make a dent, make a dent. If you can make a ball, make a ball. If you can build a scale model of Maldevon Academy complete with every unique bend and arc…well, then you should be up here teaching and not me.”

  Amala kept rotating in the air, watching the students as they all concentrated on their clay slabs. A cacophony rose up from those with aural magical signatures, an array of lights, mists, and sparkles danced over some clay blocks, and Sara’s nose was bombarded by different aromas, all of which thankfully blended together in a non-retchworthy way.

  Sara knew this would be a simple assignment. She’d recolored her dress and created stairs out of thin air this morning; she could certainly create something out of clay. The question was what to create. She wanted something that would impress Amala and let her know that Sara would clearly be the top student in her class. The scale model of Maldevon Academy would have been amazing, but she certainly didn’t have the skills to pull it off, and a bad attempt would be worse than nothing at all.

  Sara noticed Amala had rotated away from her, so she looked around the room to see what everyone else was doing. Flissa’s mouth was screwed tight, and sweat beaded her upper lip as cream-colored mist danced over her clay block. Sara could see it slowly folding in on itself, molding into the clumsy rectangles of an uneven, lopsided staircase. Across the room, the girl with the red bob faced the clay like it was a foe in a standoff, her legs wide, hands twitching at her sides. She squinted as the top of the slab melted into a gloopy, candlewaxy mess. As for Harper, she held her tiny finger to her mouth as she concentrated. Mist that looked like rainbow confetti covered her clay slab, and as Sara watched, the back of the slab started to mold itself into plaits that resembled the girl’s own. The rest of the slab was still featureless, but Sara thought the braids were impressive. The boy with ice-blue eyes seemed to be melting his clay inward so it looked like a volcano, while strobing lights danced around the clay of a girl with stringy black hair as it rolled itself out into a long worm. A stocky boy with his tongue between his teeth made his clay mold itself into a blarnage fruit that looked good enough for Gus to gobble down.

  A single, clear chime suddenly echoed through the room, and it made Sara stand taller. She recognized it right away—she’d heard it right before the stink spell went off in the courtyard this morning. She turned and heard it again…just as Zinka’s clay morphed and molded. Sara watched, stunned, as Zinka concentrated on the clay, and that same chime went off each time the slab made a drastic change.

  She grabbed her sister’s arm and pulled her close. “Flissa,” she whispered in her ear. “It was Zinka. The stink spell; I heard her magical signature before it started.”

  “What?” Flissa’s eyes were unfocused. It was the same look she got when Sara pulled her away from a book she’d been reading. “What do you mean? There was no magical signature before it started. I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “I did, though! And it was that same—”

  “Aaaaand, time!” Amala said from her perch in the air. Everyone in the room relaxed and all the dings, buzzes, chimes, and other magical signature sounds gave way to relieved sighs. Sara vaguely heard Flissa complain under her breath, “Sara! You didn’t let me finish!” but she was far too horrified by her own clay to pay her sister any attention.

  It was untouched. She’d been so busy checking out everyone else’s work that she hadn’t even started.

  Amala must have known. She specifically turned until she was inspecting the sculpture directly to Sara’s right, then rotated away from Sara, just so Sara would have plenty of time to sweat before Amala got to hers.

  “Oh no,” Flissa whispered.

  Sara was sure Flissa’s eyes would be filled with sympathy, but she didn’t want to look. She had to think of a way to fix this. She could magically sculpt her clay now, while Amala was facing the other way, but she was standing in a circle with all the other students. Everyone would see, and someone would tell Amala, assuming the Shadow didn’t sense it on her own. Sara didn’t think getting caught cheating was what her parents had in mind when they asked her to set a good example at school.

  All she could do was wait and listen to her heart thump until Amala got to her.

  “Very good work indeed…” she said as she rotated past Harper. Her clay slab had rounded out into a head shape since the last time Sara looked. The braids were incredible, though the face was completely featureless.

  Amala kept rotating, “Good start…Yes, very nice…I like that detail, good…Excellent effort…”

  She stopped when she reached Zinka’s piece. “Now that is impressive. Very nice work, Zinka. Everyone, I want you to look at Zinka’s sculpture.”

  Sara obeyed. Zinka had turned the slab of clay into an incredibly lifelike sculpture of a cat. It was midstride, its long tail curved up with a slight bend at the tip. The detail was impeccable. Sara could see the nap of its fur, the individual toes and claws…Zinka had even made long, thin whiskers—so long and thin that the clay shouldn’t have been able to stay upright until it was fired in a kiln, but Zinka’s magic was strong enough to make them defy gravity. Sara wasn’t sure what impressed her more: Zinka’s skill as a Mage or as an artist. Yet even as she admired the sculpture, she couldn’t get that magical signature out of her head. It was absolutely the one she’d heard before the stink spell went off. Zinka had to be the one who’d cast it.

  Amala finally moved on from Zinka’s cat sculpture to Flissa’s stairs. “Not bad,” she said. “Not terribly imaginative, perhaps, and a little rough around the edges, but not bad at all.”

  Then she turned to Sara’s clay and frowned.

  “Interesting,” she said, staring at Sara’s untouched slab of clay. “And here I’d been told you were a Mage. Perhaps you belong in a Genpo class instead.”

  Sara knew “Genpo” wasn’t an insult, but Amala made it sound like one. “I’m not a Genpo,” she said tightly. “I was watching everyone else and I got distracted. I’m sorry.”

  “I see,” Amala said. “Then let’s give you a chance to show what you can do. Distraction-free. Unless you’d rather that slab stand as your assignment.”

  “No,” Sara said quickly. “I’ll do it.”

  This was the best outcome ever. She knew she could mold clay, and now she got to do it in front of everyo
ne. She could make something seriously impressive while Amala and the whole room watched.

  She looked down at her slab and was about to begin…when an image of the boar sneering at her flashed in front of her eyes—the one who said “princess” like it was a curse. She saw the ponies from class who turned their backs on her, and Krystal’s disgusted face when Sara said she was from the Twists, and the looks her own sister and her friends gave her when she’d tried to do that handshake. She heard the laughter all over again from when she reached for the clay and bapped her nose, and her own voice singsonged in her ears: You’re gonna fail again…you’re gonna fail again…

  Sara shook her head. This was stupid; she was getting in her own way. She needed to relax and let her magic flow. She took a deep breath…than she balled up her hands and scrunched her face.

  You’re gonna fail again…

  Someone across the room snorted and said, “Grunt.” Several other students giggled.

  “Grunt” was what some Mages called Genpos, because Genpos had to struggle and sweat to do what Mages could do with ease.

  It wasn’t a nice term.

  Sweat dripped down the back of Sara’s neck.

  “I see,” said Amala.

  “No!” Sara blurted. “You don’t. I’m good at this. I am. Wait.”

  She bent her knees a little and balled her hands at her side. She squeezed every muscle in her body.

  Now the red mist appeared. Only wisps, but they floated around the block of clay and smoothed its corners.

  “I think that’s enough,” Amala said.

  Why was this happening? “It’s not,” Sara said. She heard the tears in her voice and hated them. “I can do more.”

  But she couldn’t. Not now. It wasn’t working. When she needed it most, her magic wasn’t working. It was trapped behind all her bad thoughts and she couldn’t clear them away. Why was this happening to her?

  Then Flissa grabbed her hand. Instantly, electric heat coursed through Sara. It hummed between her ears, blasting everything else away. She was clear now; she could feel the magic coursing through her body and streaming out to the clay, which was quickly coated in a bright pink mist. It was her own and Flissa’s magic combined, but Sara felt in control, as if for once she was the athlete and Flissa was bolstering her and cheering her on. Without even thinking about it, Sara magically folded and molded the clay into a round head with two perfectly chiseled faces: Sara’s on one side, Flissa’s on the other. Two sisters, back-to-back, with only the hair over their foreheads to tell them apart.