Ruthless Magic

by Megan Crewe

  I was at least sensible enough to heed her urgency. I dropped onto the foamlike ground and squeezed my eyes shut. My awareness shrank to the hammering of my heart and the rustles of my six dorm-mates following suit.

  Whatever the impending danger entailed, it must be the ’chantment Rocío had cast on her scarf. She wouldn’t have recognized anyone else’s well enough to be that scared.

  Hers was the talent I least wanted to be going up against. I’d rather battle a dozen of Callum’s blunt cudgels or—

  The air stiffened around me, as if a vast sheet of cellophane had snapped tight across my skin. I flinched, and the cellophane turned to steel, slamming my elbow against my side with a lance of pain. When I sucked in a breath, my lip stung against a rigidly rough texture that must have echoed the fibers of the scarf. A drop of blood hit my tongue.

  The ’chantment squeezed like a vise against my chest. I exhaled as quickly as I dared. Then I took a slow, shallow sip of air.

  The vise eased off a fraction of an inch, and the sharp metallic flavor of blood seeped through my mouth.

  Somewhere nearby, Judith cried out. Her voice cut off with a whimper. My eyelids twitched with the urge to see what was happening.

  No. I held them shut, stifling a wince at the faint burn even that tiny movement provoked.

  O gods, this was vicious. If Rocío had built a failsafe into the ’chantment, she clearly hadn’t been able to activate it. The magic’s effect would dissipate over time, but how much? Lying there motionless was already excruciating.

  The spicy scent of the air tickled my nose. Hades take me, I could not afford to sneeze. As I willed the itch away, my bladder pinched. Yes, naturally I’d have to contend with that too.

  Even in the midst of my distress, a picture popped into my head of the examiners watching us from afar, snickering at the sight of Eminent Lockwood’s grandnephew discovering precisely how deep a pile of excrement he’d stepped into by declaring.

  I had to prove I could take it. Still the mind and body. Think clearly. All those meditation exercises could be of some use.

  Rocío knew how she’d constructed the ’chantment, so she must know a way to counteract it. Of course, she’d need to find a way to cast against it while keeping this still.

  My mind tripped back to last night, to the conversation that had flowed smoothly enough until I’d made that idiotic comment to her. To the moment after Prisha had related the hash I’d made of my temporary romantic infatuation—suggest to your best friend who’s just come out of the closet to you that perhaps you could kiss her straight, just brilliant, Finn—and the way I’d atoned for it by ’chanting my mouth away.

  Rocío’s wary voice carried through my memory: How did you ’chant it back if you didn’t have a mouth to speak the magic? She hadn’t relied on nonverbal techniques often enough for the idea to have been obvious.

  Would it be wrong to simply reach out to her? I didn’t think she’d fault me for that even if the strategy had already occurred to her.

  I drew in a little more air than before, and the pressure on my chest hardened. I focused on the direction where I’d last seen Rocío and drew up a mental image of her. The first one that surfaced wasn’t the frightened face I’d glimpsed when she shouted her warning but her little smile yesterday after I’d helped Judith—the smile that had made me feel we were part of something together.

  I summoned the rhythm of a Roman poem about searching for lost companions. The whisper of magic trembled in the air around me. I hummed into it, low in my throat. As I sent the vibrations spinning off, I stretched out my awareness through them.

  There. Mezzo talent though I might be, I could recognize the pulse of another person’s energy. Rocío’s flickered with anguish and frustration.

  Her distress echoed into me, throwing my own pulse out of kilter again. I’d be worse than useless if I let her feel my panic and amplified her emotions.

  I swallowed hard. My mouth was dry, my lips still parted, but I wasn’t keen to discover what would result if I tried to close them. The taste of blood was still fresh on my tongue.

  I couldn’t mute my discomfort, but I could bury it under a more vivid image.

  I pictured myself as I imagined I’d looked when I’d ’chanted my mouth away for Prisha but with my hand held high in a thumbs-up. Shifting the cadence of my hum, I pulled more magic through me, shaped it around the image, and channeled it toward Rocío.

  Sweat beaded on my forehead despite the chill in the air. Sustaining a casting without being able to move was exhausting.

  A tentative touch reached out to me: a shiver of nerves and a tickle of gratitude. She’d absorbed the magic and the message I’d sent with it. I released my hum. The headache Prisha had helped numb yesterday scrabbled back up my temples.

  A faint sound reached my ears. Rocío was humming now. The melody faded in and out. I lay still, listening, narrowing all my attention to the wavering tune to avoid the physical sensations plaguing me.

  With a snap, the vise fell away, and someone gasped. My eyelids leapt open of their own accord, but no brutal force seared across them.

  As I shoved myself upright, my left arm wobbled and a fresh spear of pain shot up it. My lips prickled when I closed my mouth. I touched them with my other hand, and my fingers came away smeared with scarlet.

  The square of light Desmond had conjured beamed over the seven of us in the rough semicircle we’d fallen into between the dorm room and that foggy gray space. Prisha appeared unharmed, though she was flexing her wrist as if testing it. Judith had curled up on her side, one hand over her face, her other arm twisted against her side at an unnatural angle. A muffled sob slipped past her palm.

  “I’m sorry,” Rocío said, scrambling to her feet. “I’m so, so sorry. Is everyone— Judith, your arm—”

  Judith lowered her hand. It wasn’t merely her arm she’d injured. Blood flecked the olive skin around her tightly closed eyes, droplets clinging to her lashes. She must have opened them when the ’chantment hit. Cuts blazed across her mouth from when she’d cried out: three of them.

  Desmond knelt beside her. “I’m ace at basic healing,” he said. “I’ll do what I can. Okay?”

  She nodded, a small jerk of her chin. Desmond started muttering under his breath.

  The rest of us swayed to our feet. At least my arm felt as if it was merely battered, not broken. Rocío looked physically well, though guilt-stricken. If Desmond had been hurt, he was disguising it. Mark was examining one of his hands, but he tucked it close to his chest when he noticed me looking at him.

  Lacey backed to the edge of the light. She moved awkwardly, favoring her left ankle. She was clutching the skirt of her dress, the fabric bunched in front of her waifish figure. As she balled it tighter, I realized why. A dark splotch stood out against the pastel fabric. She’d wet herself, in shock or in fear.

  Prisha glanced at her, and Lacey’s face flushed red.

  “Hey,” I said quickly, walking over. “I’ll take a look at your ankle.” I might not have any particular talent for healing, but I’d taken the same magimedical classes as everyone else in the Academy. Who knew what sort of instruction they received in the tutorials in Saska-wherever-she-was-from?

  “I—” Lacey’s shoulders hunched.

  I lowered my voice. “Don’t worry about it. It could have been any of us.” My own bladder was still heavy. “At this rate, it’s likely to be and worse by the time they’re finished with us.”

  She stared at me. A broken chuckle worked its way out of her throat. “Well,” she said, “I’m still here.” She sank down on the ground with the skirt of her dress collected on her lap and extended her bad leg for me to inspect.

  With a few singsong words, I determined that none of the bones were broken. I hadn’t a clue how to fix a sprain, but I could make it a tad easier for her to cope. I dredged up a verse for numbing from our lessons in first aid.

  The magic oscillated through my nerves as I cast the ’cha
ntment, and my headache sliced across my forehead. I hadn’t recovered from yesterday’s overexertion yet. I’d have to be sparing in my use of magic after this, but at least I’d contributed in some small way.

  “You’ll still want to keep your weight off it whenever possible,” I said.

  Lacey nodded. “Thanks,” she mumbled. Her gaze darted to the walls that remained around our dorm room. She scrambled up and limped toward the bathroom doorway, to wash her dress, I supposed.

  I heaved myself back to my feet, attempting to hold my head steady to avoid provoking the headache. Desmond was ripping a pillowcase—to make a sling? Judith sat on the ground next to him, her mouth pursed and her cheeks shiny from tears. He’d managed to seal her cuts, though angry pink streaks still marked her lips and eyelids. It’d take a fully trained magimedic to knit bones.

  Rocío paced nearby, her hands clenched at her sides. I stepped toward her, and she paused.

  “Do you need—” She gestured to my face. “Your mouth.”

  I tested my split lip. The blood there had gone tacky. It stung only a little now.

  I didn’t have the energy to take even a rough stab at mending it and didn’t see why she should waste hers.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “At least you skipped the dragon this time. I’ll take a few cuts and bruises over being burned to a crisp any day.”

  I’d hoped to shake her guilt enough to draw out a smile, but I didn’t get one. Her eyes remained serious. “Thank you,” she said. “For before—the reminder. I got... off track. You helped me focus.”

  She looked so disconcerted I had to ask, “Are you all right?”

  Her gaze dropped. That felt like a no she wasn’t willing to explain, at least not to me. Then she inhaled sharply. “When I cast that ’chantment, I drew on my feelings to make it as powerful as possible—how I’ve felt here in the Exam, and outside too. All the walls, all the restrictions and rules... It wasn’t enjoyable experiencing that constriction in condensed form.”

  She hadn’t attended the Academy because, for all intents and purposes, the Confed had shut her out. I didn’t even know how much the tuition was—I’d just taken it for granted that my parents would cover it, and so had all my classmates. What else of life beyond the boundaries of the Upper East Side had I failed to consider?

  Rocío raised her head. “It won’t happen again,” she said, her expression so fiercely determined that her eyes seemed to spark with light. Something in my chest lit up in response. Had I really looked at that face less than twenty-four hours ago and thought it scarcely pretty? Right then, she might as well have been Helen of Troy.

  I might have kept looking at her for longer than was strictly polite, except Judith let out another cry. Standing at the edge of our former room, she flung her good arm toward the open space where the hallway had once been.

  “All our things,” she said. “They made us leave everything out here in the cubbies, and now they’re gone.”

  “Right,” Mark said, tossing his hand in the air. “We were all almost eviscerated, including you, but what’s really important is getting your pretty purse.” His mohawk was drooping, giving him a peculiarly tilted demeanor.

  Judith whirled with more grace than I’d have expected her new sling to allow. “It’s not just a purse,” she snapped. “It’s the last present my mom ever gave me before she left. Not that you’d care, but I can’t just go buy a new one of that.”

  “Fine,” Mark said. “I’m sorry for your loss. Now can we focus on what’s in front of us?”

  Rocío frowned. “What’s in front of us.” She glanced up at me. “We all cast ’chantments. We have to get ready for what’s coming next before it’s here.”

  I recalled all the wrenching energy I’d put into my own ’chantment, and a chill washed over me. She was right.

  “Hey,” I said. “We’re all freaked out, but Rocío’s right. The examiners must be planning to throw more of our ’chantments at us. If we all share what we cast and any information that might be useful in defending ourselves, we can make it through the rest.”

  “I agree with Finn,” Prisha said immediately, and I shot her a grateful glance.

  Desmond rubbed his square chin as Lacey crossed the room to rejoin us. “Mine’s more of a mental thing,” he said. “I was aiming for distraction. It’ll give you the sense that there’s something really important that you have to take care of, but you can’t find it. Ah, it’s sound based. I guess if you make constant noise that should sort of... drown out the effect.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “I built a specific safeguard into mine. If the ’chantment works properly, it will make people paranoid and aggressive, but there’s a visual—a square with a heart inside it—that will nullify the magic. We should mark that symbol on ourselves, somewhere it’ll be easy for us to see. The back of our hands, maybe? Has anyone seen anything we could draw with?”

  The others shook their heads. I scuffed my shoe against the spongy surface we were standing on, but it was made out of some sort of smooth artificial substance, no dirt we could smear.

  “We could use magic to form the symbol,” Judith said, her voice still wavering a little.

  “We’re going to be racing around disabling other ’chantments for Fates know how long,” I said. “It’d be too easy for us to accidentally erase the safeguard mark and not realize until it’s too late. Something concrete would be better.”

  As I scanned the area, Lacey brushed her lank hair from her face and said cautiously, “My ’chantment is shadow creatures. Like wolves. They can attack people, but if you try to physically stop them, your hands will go right through them. A magic shield might work.” She began talking faster. “They’re quick, though, and sneaky, and the ’chantment is— There was a bag of marbles—”

  “We’ll manage.” Prisha turned to Mark, who’d edged farther back while we’d talked. Why had she cut Lacey off? I raised my hand to catch her attention and paused at the smear of blood on my fingertips.

  Oh. That was better than nothing. I touched the tacky spot on my lower lip with my baby finger and quickly sketch the lines of the symbol across the back of my left hand. The ache as I bent my elbow distracted me from the profound grossness of what I was doing.

  I looked up, about to suggest the same strategy to the others, and frowned.

  Prisha had taken another step toward Mark. Her stance looked oddly aggressive.

  “So?” she said. “Aren’t you going to tell us yours?”

  Mark’s gaze darted around the group. His jaw twitched with what was seeming like a habitual tic. “I’ve got a better idea than this big sharing session,” he said, backing away. “I don’t like the sound of any of the crazy stuff you all thought up, so I’m just going to jet, and the only ’chantment I’ll have to deal with is mine. If I’m far enough away from you, they can’t use the same ’chanted object on all of us. I’d rather skip yours and take my chances with the one I know.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Rocío said.

  My gut had twisted. “Yeah. They arranged us into groups for a reason. If you get into a tight spot on your own—”

  “Maybe they put us all together to make it easier for them to hurt us,” Mark retorted.

  Lacey stepped backward, as if she were considering abandoning the group too.

  “You don’t know what the range of any of the ’chantments is,” I said with a sweep of my arm. I could feel in my bones that his strategy was unsound—and not simply because the last thing I wanted was to navigate this nightmarish place on my own. “And you don’t know how big this place is. Maybe you can’t get far enough away. What do you think would have happened if any of us hadn’t been near enough to hear Rocío’s warning?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Mark said.

  I started toward him, and he raised his hand as if he meant to hit me. “As if you have any idea what it takes to deal with a real threat. You worry about saving your own skin, academy boy.�
�� A sneer had crept into his rising voice. “I’m here for someone way more important than any of you, and I’m not letting you hold me back.”

  The sneering was what finally twigged me: something was off. Mark had been standoffish before but not openly hostile. My thumb swiveled over my fingers and drew a dissonant vibration out of the air that felt unnaturally fraught. Another ’chantment was acting on us.

  As I strained my senses, a faint hissing reached my ears. Almost like… radio static?

  My body stiffened. My ’chantment was acting on us. Had it built up in Mark fastest because he’d already had suspicious inclinations?

  “Everyone!” I said. “Put that symbol—a heart in a box—somewhere you can see it. Now!”

  Mark shook his head and marched off. I glanced at the blood-smear image on my hand—how often did I need to see it to avoid becoming affected by the ’chantment? I hadn’t thought to cast my protection in quite that much detail. I hadn’t thought I’d need to know.

  Rocío murmured something to her thumb. The skin there parted with a beading of blood. In a few quick swipes, she’d copied my strategy. “I’ll go after him,” she said, starting toward Mark, whose form was fading into the mist beyond a branchless tree. “If I can’t convince him, I’ll—I’ll come right back.”

  “No!” Prisha said sharply, slicing her hand through the air. O gods, my ’chantment was acting on her too. “All of you just—”

  Before she could complete her sentence, a shadowy wolf that could have rivaled Cerberus in monstrousness sprang from the fog behind her.

  Chapter Eight

  Rocío

  The beast knocked Prisha onto the ground. Her scream split the air, and my body froze.

  Lacey’s shadow creature. What had she said about them?

  Prisha’s arm whipped right through the darkly translucent wolf. It sank its flickering teeth into her shoulder, and she cried out again. The blood, red against the violet fabric of her blouse, jolted me into action.