Lies and Prophecy

by Marie Brennan

  Most strong empaths grabbed at the chance for private rooms as soon as they could. Liesel had stayed with me, despite the strain of living in dormitory conditions with another person. I made a special vow to watch my shields this term. Between CM and the less-fraught but more advanced challenge of PK, I was going to be a walking ball of stress, and if I broke, the last thing I wanted to do was take Liesel down with me.

  ~

  Grayson, I imagined, was the sort of woman who would throw a baby into a lake to teach it to swim. Glad as I was to be getting the first major practical out of the way early, it still seemed appallingly abrupt.

  “Your athame is one of the most important pieces of ritual equipment you will ever make,” the professor said in the third week of classes, placing both hands on her desk and leaning forward to pin each of us with her gaze. She was a tall woman, with a profile carved from walnut; despite the solid white of her cropped hair, she was not what anyone would call old. Nobody sat in the front row of her class. “You’ll use it to cast and banish circles, to direct and sever your power, and countless other tasks. If it’s well-keyed, it will become an extension of yourself. If not, everything else you do will suffer.

  “The materials for this class included a black-hilted knife. If you haven’t obtained one by now, do so. Your assignment for the weekend is to cleanse and dedicate the knife as your athame. I’ll inspect them in class on Tuesday.” She scanned the rows of students, mouth set in a forbidding line. “Do this carefully. If you create a shoddy athame, it will set the tone for all your future workings. Class dismissed.”

  Her words left a cold stone in the pit of my stomach. Judgment Day. Couldn’t we have started with something smaller?

  The small assignments were all in the fluff class, the one I’d oh-so-cleverly decided not to take. But if I had to be an idiot, I could at least be smart about it.

  I couldn’t skip the Divination Club meeting that night; it looked bad if one of the co-presidents flaked, and besides, I’d promised Akila, the other co-president, that I would give a talk on tarot for our freshman recruits. But once that was over, I begged off the post-meeting ice cream run. All my classmates would be lined up in the Arboretum come Monday, doing their athames at the last minute, and I didn’t want the distraction of somebody impatiently waiting their turn. Besides, if I botched it tonight, I could ask Julian or Robert to wipe the thing clean so I could start over.

  If my pride would let me.

  “You aren’t going to botch it,” I said to my silent, empty dorm room, and started throwing equipment into my bag.

  I didn’t have to use the Arboretum. There were nice, modern sorcery labs in Adler, with all the amenities I could want. Like lots of people, though, I preferred the natural environment. Welton’s biggest selling point was its world-class faculty, but its location ran a close second: out in the Minnesota countryside, far from the pre-Manifestation steel architecture, which disrupted the magical atmosphere.

  Witchlights marked the path as I entered the forest. The first ritual glade I came to was roped off, but the next was empty. I dumped my bag on the edge and took a deep breath.

  My home in Atlanta backed onto a couple of acres of woodland, with a glade at their heart. It was more a bit of landscaping than anything else—my mother had her own well-stocked workroom on the third floor—but I’d used it for my abortive attempts after manifestation. This was familiar, very familiar.

  The longer I stood thinking about it, the worse my nerves would get. I pounded a stake into the ground at the center of the glade, tied a rope to it, and walked the perimeter of my circle, marking my path with stones taken from a rough pile near the entrance. The knife went in the middle, where the peg had been; candles went at the cardinal points. Then I paced three more circuits, moving outward with each one and scattering salt as I went, muttering a brief invocation under my breath. French was my ritual language; it helped to pick something foreign to you, because of the way it focused the mind.

  I needed focus tonight.

  Third circuit complete, I sent out a flick of energy to light my candles, melting an inch off each one—my precision left something to be desired. Maybe I should’ve taken Small-Scale Control. But it did the job; the energy hummed against my skin, an invisible field. External energy, not like the internal disciplines of the telepathic and telekinetic sciences. Not something I’d played with in years.

  So I had a circle. This much, I could do; anybody with enough sidhe blood for gifts could consecrate a bit of space, banishing foreign influences, though it wouldn’t hold up to stress. Had I done it well enough? Or would something contaminate the dedication of my athame, warping its resonance and crippling all my future efforts?

  Tell yourself the truth, I said inwardly. My mother had taught me not to cheapen a ritual with random chatter. You’re afraid nothing will happen at all. Just like before.

  Power and willpower, Julian had said. I could bring at least one of them to bear tonight. Before I laid one finger on that knife, I had to banish all the emotions that could disrupt my efforts, all my fear and self-doubt and yes, my anger at my mother, who had been so sure her daughter would follow in her footsteps.

  She was a Ring Anchor for the southern United States, doing workings so large most people couldn’t even conceive of them. Welton’s University Ring monitored campus activity, issuing permits for dangerous tasks and cracking down on the dumber segment of the student body, but my mother dealt with regional weather patterns, negativity from the cities, and similar high-level problems. It was dull work in many ways, and she didn’t necessarily want me to end up with her exact job; just something in that vein. Sorcery was a prestigious field, like medicine or law. Not, as she had said many times, that there was anything wrong with divination.

  It just wasn’t what she envisioned for me.

  She also didn’t envision Guardianship. Not after losing Noah to psi-sickness. That was the other reason I hadn’t breathed a word of my dream to anybody, for fear it would get back to my mother. She wanted me to swim in the safe end of the sorcery pool. No sense worrying her if it might all come to nothing.

  Time to find out.

  I opened my eyes, holding hard to the cool focus within. The knife lay before me, and for one instant I thought I could see the energies clinging to it: mine, the store clerk’s, others too faint to identify. Breathing carefully, I began the ritual.

  With each pass of my hand, I gathered up the wisps and tatters of energy, balling them up and then banishing them beyond the circle’s perimeter. Every handful stripped away, though, revealed more beneath, like water seeping out of a sponge. Would I ever get it all clear? I had to. And so I worked my way methodically from one end of the knife to the other, flipping the blade over halfway through—not necessary, but if it helped me visualize, then so be it.

  Except that visualization was the problem. That was the heart of the Yan Path: learning to visualize the magic before it came to you. But once you got good at it, how could you tell your imagination from the reality?

  I had nothing to guide me but my perceptions. So when they told me the knife was clean, I rolled my shoulders to loosen them and re-established my concentration. The copper blade lay before me, cold and inert. This was the key moment. If I’d gotten it perfectly clean, and could imprint it with my own energy, it would be mine.

  If.

  I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and with my breath I poured my power in.

  The metal flared to life. I kept exhaling, kept the power flowing steadily from my outstretched hand. I ran out of air just when the blade was full, shimmering with the energy I’d imparted to it. I inhaled again, then locked the power in place, just as Grayson had taught us.

  Dizziness made me float for a moment, before I came back to myself. Looking at the knife told me nothing; this wasn’t a familiar Yan exercise, and I didn’t know the techniques that would let me evaluate the result. Until the professor checked it for me, I was working blind.

&nb
sp; Or maybe not. I blew out the candles, turning the clearing grey with starlight, and considered my options. If I were smart, I’d go home and get some sleep. I had a PK test tomorrow, and wasn’t remotely prepared.

  Since I wasn’t smart, I took up my athame, breathed deeply, and started in on the last exercise in the Yan book—one I’d walked through in practice, but never tried with my gift, because I bombed everything before it.

  I had to change things. Yan’s method was originally designed for Chinese magic, and later adapted for Western traditions; nothing in his book required an athame. But the prevailing theory was that all of it was a crutch anyway, mental systems to help us do what the sidhe had done naturally. If I wanted to test my blade, all I had to do was rebuild the exercise based on principles. And those, at least, I had a good grasp on.

  So I gathered up icons of the four elements and placed them about my circle: water from the Copper Creek to the east, a fist-sized stone in the north, a stray feather in the south, and a relit candle in the west. With the tip of my athame, I touched each one in turn, and invoked the powers they represented. As Grayson said, the purpose of the tool was to direct power. As I drew the blade back into the center of my circle, I drew the energies with it.

  That left me at the crux of two very different axes of power, holding—or at least envisioning—all four elements in my psychic hand. Somehow they had to be made to work together, forming a solid shield for the circle. Yan advised blending—but these resonances, however much I tried to visualize differently, were about as eager to blend as oil, water, lead, and a rabid weasel. Lines from the book yammered through my head, in my old teacher’s voice: When it is proper to stand, stand; when it is proper to bend, bend. I stopped trying to force, started trying to—what? Channel it through me?

  The instant I thought that, everything I’d been holding in my psychic hand slammed into my skull instead.

  I fell to my knees with a bone-jarring thud, and only by instinct flung the point of my athame skyward. My thought was to keep from falling on it, but the movement sent the energies yowling up my arm and out the blade, flaring briefly in the air before burning out again.

  “Gods and sidhe,” I said, and dropped my athame.

  How stupid was I, trying that before anyone had checked my work? And with an untried circle technique, no less. A badly-keyed blade could have really burned me. Maybe it just had. Or was that the consequence of changing the exercise?

  I was certain of only one thing. Whatever I’d done wrong, I hadn’t imagined that energy. The flare of light was still imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. I’d drawn more power tonight than I’d managed in a year of trying when I was thirteen.

  Drawn it—but not controlled it.

  Exhaustion overwhelmed my ability to decide if that was a victory or not. Sending that mess out my athame—not to mention the creation of the athame itself—had drained me more than I realized. And I had PK tomorrow.

  I hauled myself to my feet, groaning. My blade went into a swatch of blue silk, shielding it from contamination for the time being, before it went into my bag. The rocks went back onto their pile. Then, my flashlight leading the way, I went home, with a head full of unanswered questions.

  Chapter Two

  My PK professor was telling us every rule of thermodynamics was wrong when the beeping finally penetrated my sleep. I rolled over, hit the clock with one numb hand, and discovered my alarm had been going off for forty-five minutes.

  I arrived at Historical Tarot fifteen minutes late and out of breath, and got an unpleasant look from Professor Madison. I sat down and tried to be invisible. Embarrassing myself in front of one of the best diviners on campus: what a great start to my day.

  By the time I got to Hurst for lunch, the flood of adrenaline that propelled me out of bed had long since faded, leaving me sluggish and more than a little worried about the day ahead of me. But I’d made one decision in my sleep. If I’d screwed up my athame, I’d rather find out from friends than from Grayson.

  Robert unwrapped the blue silk, taking care not to touch the metal. I was already embarrassed by asking for the favor; now I spared a little for my choice of knife. Rather than a simple kitchen tool or a wide-bladed hunting knife, I’d picked something for which the closest word was “dagger.” It wasn’t as flashy as a sorcerer’s sword, which some people used for big rituals, but watching Robert examine it, I wished I’d chosen something more mundane.

  Robert would be the last person to twit me for a flamboyant choice, though. He just sat back and looked thoughtful. I bit my lip. Julian came up then with his tray, and Robert gestured for him to inspect my athame. I shifted in my chair.

  Julian bent over the knife, one hand hovering a scant half-inch above it. He remained like that for a long moment, then sat down with a motion so abrupt it made me jump.

  Unable to bear the silence any longer, I asked, “Where did I go wrong?”

  Robert shook his head. “Nowhere. Grayson will send two-thirds of your classmates out to try again, but this one, she will pass.” He spread his hands and gave me a seated half-bow. “Congratulations, my lady.”

  My surprised pleasure didn’t last for long. “But then why—”

  I cut the sentence off, but not fast enough. “Why what?” Robert asked, eyebrow raised.

  Julian was eating roasted potatoes with methodical precision, not looking at me, yet I knew I had his attention, too. “It just felt weird,” I said, covering my lapse as best as I could. “And I thought that meant I’d done something wrong.”

  “External discipline,” Robert said, with a hint of smugness. “You are accustomed to the internals, the telepathic sciences in particular. Of course it feels odd.”

  But Julian laid his fork down and said, “I can check it more closely, if you’d like. It could be something crept in—not a flaw, but a resonance you weren’t expecting. Was the strangeness while you were keying, or after?”

  Had Robert not been there, I might have considered admitting my problem with the circle. Or not; it was like telling a native speaker how you turned a basic greeting from their language into a mortal insult about somebody’s pet hippo. With Robert there, it was out of the question. “No, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Gods know you’ve got enough work of your own, without adding some of mine.”

  “Indeed you do,” Robert agreed, to my surprise. Was he trying to save me from Julian’s curiosity? “You looked like a corpse when I came home last night. And you look not much better today. What have you been doing to yourself?”

  “Combat shielding,” Julian said. “It’s more draining than I anticipated.” A bland enough answer, but a thread laced through it, that in a less restrained person might have been annoyance.

  “And you, being a damn fool, are taking it in the same quarter as two other heavy CM courses. You’re going to bloody kill yourself.”

  I almost cut my thumb on my athame, wrapping it back up. Robert’s tone was still light, but the edge it carried wasn’t. He wasn’t diverting attention from me; he was truly worried, enough to have this conversation in front of me, and screw Julian’s pride.

  And now that I was paying attention, I saw why. Julian did look drained. He was naturally very pale, but there was even less color in his face now, and his eyes, when I risked a glance at them, were faintly bloodshot. This didn’t prevent him from directing a level, unamused expression at Robert. “I’ll be fine. That’s why I’m taking Power Reservoirs in the same term. It’s tiring, but soon I’ll have a source I can draw on. Then things will be all right.”

  “And what will you do until then?”

  “Survive.” Julian drank down half a glass of milk.

  I glanced at his tray and kicked myself for not noticing it before. He was eating amazing quantities, a sure sign of heavy energy use. At least he had the sense to balance his diet to compensate, which was probably the only thing keeping him going. That, and sheer stubbornness.

  But for what purpose? I knew why I was
driving myself: a rabid and not entirely rational desire to face and maybe overcome my weakness with CM. Julian took on a herculean load every quarter. There had to be a reason for it. Hoping to draw him out, I said, “Why not Power Reservoirs first?”

  “Grayson only teaches Combat Shielding once a year.”

  “You have another year left at Welton,” I reminded him.

  Julian shrugged. Him not meeting anybody’s gaze was habitual, but sometimes—like now—it felt evasive, too. “Schedules change. I don’t want to miss my chance. Besides, she’s thinking about offering a seminar on experimental shielding theory next fall, and I stand a better chance of getting in if I take this class now.”

  I narrowly avoided saying “bullshit.” Grayson would take him in a heartbeat, pre-req or no. But it was entirely possible Julian wasn’t sure he’d be at Welton next year.

  I didn’t know of any reason he would leave—but then, I didn’t know why he was here to begin with. For all the press releases freshman year about Welton’s commitment to diversity, political correctness didn’t begin to explain it. Robert’s brick-bat attempts to get an answer had all failed; so had my more subtle ones, and Liesel wouldn’t push for anything he didn’t want to say. But whatever the reason was, maybe it could go away as inexplicably as it came. And Julian was either making the best use he could of the time he had—or trying to convince someone he should stay.

  Hell, even I didn’t know why he should. Wilder training was to a normal college education what military boot camp was to intramural sports. Whatever brought him here, it wasn’t the learning opportunities.

  But I was glad he’d come. I might have had more of a social life if I spent less time with the campus’ only resident wilder, but I wouldn’t trade if I could. Even if being friends with Julian meant swallowing half my questions, out of respect for his privacy.

  Robert had taken advantage of my silence to start an argument over Julian’s stated logic—or to try. Julian, ignoring him, had gone back to eating. And when he finished, he jerked the conversation onto another track without bothering to invent a plausible segue.