Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  He left. She frowned at where he’d been standing. That’s it, she thought ungratefully. Go post some mini-letters or whatever.

  She unwove a couple of the big spells, the bulwark enchantments, and thought some more, and then, as the afternoon wore on into early evening, she rewove them. By the time he came back, bringing her a cold supper of lamb and brussels sprouts from the dining hall, the room was a foot bigger on all sides. She was a proud person, but not so proud that she couldn’t thank him. In a funny way he was a little bit of a father figure to her, she realized. A father-in-art.

  “Mind if I go in?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  He stooped and began awkwardly insinuating his lanky frame into the box.

  “It helps if you go in backward,” she said.

  She sat down heavily on the old industrial-looking office chair that came with the workshop and creaked its springy back as far back as it went. All of a sudden she was exhausted. It was late afternoon, and the thickening golden sunlight was full of dancey motes, and she thought about all the sunlight she’d missed out on this spring, and all the motes, how instead her whole spring had gone into this box that would probably be tagged and put in a basement somewhere afterward if it even won the prize at all.

  Professor Coldwater was still in the box. You could see into it; she’d thought at first she might see a tiny scaled-down Coldwater walking around in it, but actually what she saw was a segment of full-sized Coldwater, thigh-to-chest, as if the opening of the box were a window into a much larger cabin.

  She wondered what he was up to.

  “Coming in,” she called. Then she crawled in and stood up too.

  It was like being in a giant ice cube. Or really it was like nothing so much as being in a big glass box. She’d expected Coldwater to be taking careful measurements and kicking the tires and generally doing a big technical inspect.

  Instead he was just standing there grinning like an absolute loon and looking at his fancy silver pocket watch, which was ticking away loudly and happily.

  The Prize Committee viewing took place in a small auditorium; graduation was the next day after that. A small audience had gathered to watch, as it usually did: well-wishers, ill-wishers, humorous commentators, wet First Years who were actually interested in the academic part of it. They were joined by the seven sweaty-palmed students who had actually done the senior projects, sitting in the front row. There was some good-natured mutual sizing-up, but Plum and Wharton were the only two seriously tipped as prizewinners.

  Still, everybody had his or her moment on the modest wooden stage. Rosie Ray-Mermin, still in braces, with a coin that alternated heads and tails, heads and tails, every time. Ilya Fan, with a flame that burned bubblingly in a tank of clear water (which, you know, technically, sodium and lithium and cesium and something else burn in water, non-magically, though granted they don’t burn as prettily). Aryanna Palomides displayed a mouse, peeking out of her cupped hands, which—she swore on a stack of necronomicons—turned into a rat with the full moon. Kate Schlossberg demonstrated a seed that grew into a sunflower and then withered and died and dried, all in the space of a half-hour. Plum liked that one and kind of wished she’d done it, even though the actual magic was brazenly derivative. She would have given it a twist. Something like, it’s a different flower every time.

  Then Plum’s box was brought out and placed on the stage. The committee—six in all, including two outside examiners, one of them a woman in a hijab—stood and walked in slow circles around it, and then, one by one, rather creakily, stooped and entered, as if they were visiting royalty reluctantly accepting the hospitality of an Inuit. Plum hadn’t counted on them wanting to go in, but they seemed to feel obligated. It took ages. Edinburgh was a tiny dot receding into the distance.

  Think, Plum. We need a coup de theatre here. Those withered fucks were ruining it, with their genteel fucking skepticism.

  The last examiner, a corpulent man with a flamboyant waistcoat, was inside and knocking the walls dubiously with a cane. Plum walked over to the box, confidently, as if she’d planned it all along, and picked it up with the examiner inside. She turned it upside down. The auditorium went silent. It was no heavier than it was when it was empty—the extra mass was somewhere else, as she’d thought it would be—and the gravity inside kept its own independent orientation, as she was fairly sure it would. The fat guy peered out at his colleagues, upside down but in no way inconvenienced. He hadn’t felt a thing.

  Applause. Plum curtsied and turned the box right-way up, then went back to her seat in the audience flushed with triumph. That’s how we do it.

  Last of all, it was Wharton’s turn. Plum would have been reluctant to follow an act like the one she’d just put on, but on he came, wearing the charmingly self-deprecating smile of somebody who had never been pricked by the tiniest shard of self-doubt. He wheeled a squeaky cart on which sat a bin of shiny steel balls, each about a centimeter in diameter; it looked as though he’d made markings on them, though it was hard to be sure from the audience. The examiners smiled expectantly.

  Wharton closed his eyes and began muttering under his breath, like someone saying grace. Then he opened his eyes and took a steel ball, whispered something to it confidentially, and tossed it into the air, where it commenced a complicated orbit.

  He kept whispering and tossing, and the orbits got more and more complexly interwoven the more balls got up there. There were exactly 101; for some reason it was important that the number be prime. When he was done the balls formed a loose sphere about 10 feet on a side, constantly in motion, never touching—you would have heard the click. It was like watching a busy aquarium full of tireless little silver fish. It was hypnotic.

  It was also a relief. That was it? That was what she was so worried about? Oh my stars and garters. She’d thought the balls were going to create some complex electro-magnetic lightning effect, or form the face of some extra-dimensional being that would talk to them, or at least melt and merge into a giant molten bowling ball. It was just a kinetic spell! There was no mystery. It was just a big, elaborate, very labor-intensive kinetic spell. There wasn’t so much as a syllable of new magic in it.

  She was home free. She was running downhill. Plum would have laughed out loud, except it would have been unseemly. Instead she just sat back in her chair, pulled up her knees and hugged them, and waited for what she knew would come.

  Everybody said it would hurt, and itch, but usually when people say that about something you get all ready and then you’re almost disappointed at how little it actually does hurt and itch. But this son of a bitch really did hurt. And itch too.

  She’s ditched her parents to go change after the graduation ceremony, but now she stopped, arrested by the sight. Plum studied it in the mirror: Brakebills mirrors would show you your back, if you asked them nicely. The tattoo really was beautiful. She’d never thought of it as her kind of thing at all, but now that she had it she loved it. It had become her kind of thing, or maybe she had become its. Everybody’s was slightly different; Plum’s was black with just a few of the letters and symbols in red and orange, a lot of runes and Greek letters and less easily identifiable symbols, arranged in overlapping wheels, and a big Greek cross off-center within the star.

  There was a demon in there, somewhere. She tried to feel it, curled up and dreaming, or maybe pacing the floor of its cell and ranting. But she felt nothing.

  Except the pain. She welcomed it. Also the pain in her skull, and the dryness in her mouth and nausea in her stomach. Bring it on, world. Come on, stomp all over me, you fucker, prove to me that I was right about you all along. You think I can’t take it? You already took your best shot. Plum was still a little drunk.

  Goddammit, she thought, and she sighed. Kate fucking Schlossberg. You never see it coming. She would never look a sunflower in the eye again in her life.

  Well, graduation had been a suitably final blowout, anyway. She’d done some self-medicating. She may have
medicated a few other people too along the way, it was hard to recall a lot of specifics. She definitely knew she made out with Wharton, after all that. Christ. She would submit all the goings-on to a personal ethical self-review at some point, and the appropriate parties would be duly chastened. But not yet. All in good time.

  Someone knocked on her door. Plum froze and pretended not to be home. After a minute whoever it was went away.

  The pain of the tattoo was already turning less like the tiny bites of a million fire ants and more like a dull ache. Like she’d been beaten with a sack of oranges. They’d put some kind of icy ointment on it after the procedure, to accelerate the healing. The whole thing had been a trippy, horror-movie sequence. The descent, the candles, the deep peace of the underground chamber, but also the fear of being buried alive, outside the defensive cordon.

  One kid wouldn’t do it, sat down outside the circle of candles just watching them and swigging whiskey till he threw up and passed out. They had a near worst-case scenario when one of the cacodemons got loose in the middle of it. Fogg, who was maybe getting a bit too old to perform the operation, and definitely a bit too drunk, lost his grip with the tongs when it was halfway into Chelsea’s back. The damned (literally) thing pushed off with a clawed foot, taking skin with it, and took off running, keeping low, skittering through people’s legs and bowling over the brazier so that hot coals spilled everywhere. Guys bellowed, girls screamed. Plum, to her lasting pride, had been one of three or four Fifth Years who hadn’t completely lost their shit and instead hammered the thing with kinetic spells till it was pinned and wriggling flat against a wall.

  At which point Fogg strolled over and tonged it up off the ground like it was no big deal.

  “Right,” he said. “I guess this one’s free-range!”

  But you could see he was rattled.

  Chelsea, nursing a nasty scrape, was so freaked out that she didn’t want it anymore; plus, candidly, she thought it might be a little shopworn now. So Plum adopted it, and Fogg put it in her back instead. It seemed like a scrapper.

  She felt too bad to go back to bed, but she didn’t want to hide in her room. She didn’t want to be anywhere or see anyone. She resolved to find a private spot in the Maze. Bylaws being what they were, she wasn’t allowed to wear her Brakebills uniform anymore, so she got into street clothes instead. They felt strange, comfortable but cool and alien—it made her think of changing back into regular clothes after a long day spent at the beach.

  Her head wasn’t so much painful now as just missing, like she’d erased it, and not well—it had smeared and smudged, the paper ripped. She could see from here graduates picnicking with their families on the Sea. Her parents would be out there too. She should be with them. She would find them soon.

  But not quite yet. She set off into the Maze. It would be good to sit by a cool fountain for a while. She realized she was crying.

  She had no plans, not one. She’d pretended to herself that she was afraid of Wharton, that the fellowship was a longshot, but deep down she’d been so sure they would give her the prize. Without quite admitting to herself that she was doing it, she’d let all the rest of it slide.

  Where would she go? She suppressed a soft wail. Oh, she would manage. She had friends from the years above, good enough friends that she could go crash with them. She could go to Portland or Vancouver. There was a clutch of ex-Illusionists three years older than her who’d set up an invisible floating island in the Caribbean. She had a standing invitation. There was so much to do out there, so many problems you could use magic to solve, so much magic to learn, so many weird and interesting places to go.

  But not for her, she thought. Not for Plum. Plum was marked out. A painted bird. She didn’t belong out there. The universities were the safest places, the most carefully hidden and heavily fortified. There must be a graduate program somewhere that could take her this late.

  Plum sat on the rim of the fountain; the black water looked brackish and unrefreshing; it seemed to be giving off heat rather than absorb it. A topiary gazelle was near-frozen in the act of leaping across a gap in the hedge, nearly closing it off. Plum didn’t know when she had ever felt so alone. She would pull herself together soon—ten minutes at most. But first she was going to let herself fall apart.

  She didn’t even look around when she heard somebody thrashing their way past the rogue gazelle into her private cell of misery.

  “Plum.” It was Professor Coldwater.

  Oh God. She hadn’t spoken to him since the debacle of the Prize Committee. She’d hoped to get out of here without talking to him again at all. Plum didn’t need to be told that you can’t win’em all, that she’d tried her best, to keep her chin up, she’d go far. She knew those things. If one could win them all, then she would have. She’d rather hoped Coldwater knew her well enough to understand that it was not necessary to impart that information to her. She’d given him more credit than that.

  But it was obvious that she’d been crying, and guys only knew one way to react to that. Well, there were worse fates. As she well knew.

  Plum didn’t get up.

  “Too bad about the prize,” he said.

  “Too bad,” she agreed.

  Maybe if she facilitated, they could get this over with faster.

  “The sunflower really wasn’t that impressive,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been my call.”

  “It was warmed over, dressed-up, boiler-plate magic!” she snapped. She’d thought she could help herself, but it turned out she couldn’t.

  Professor Coldwater—Quentin, she supposed she should call him now that she’d graduated—put one foot up on the rim of the fountain and looked up at the statue, which was of the nymph Daphne caught midway through her transformation into a laurel tree. He was still dressed in his academic robes from the ceremony.

  “Listen. Plum. What are you doing this summer?”

  She shrugged.

  “Damned if I know. Why?”

  “Because I’ve got a project I’m working on, and I could use an assistant. How would you like a job?”

  MARK LAWRENCE

  THIS IS A TALE FROM THE RED QUEEN’S WAR TRILOGY, BOOKS WHICH sit in the same world and time as the Broken Empire trilogy. This story focuses on Snorri and Tuttugu, both (eventually) staunch companions of Jalan Kendeth, from whose point of view the Red Queen’s War trilogy (starting with Prince of Fools) unfolds. The emotional core of those books comes from Snorri’s backstory, and I have often wanted to explore it further. So I have.

  The story dates to Snorri and Tuttugu’s youth, before Tuttugu earned his nickname by eating twenty chickens in one sitting. On the face of it, it’s an adventure with trolls. The main focus, however, as in many of my stories, is really character development. In this case how fatherhood begins to work its changes on young Snorri to deliver the man we meet in the books.

  Mark Lawrence

  A Thousand Years

  Mark Lawrence

  Trolls are seven kinds of bad news. A troll will rip off a man’s head and suck out the eyes as easy as a child picks and plucks a flower. The thing with its foot on Snorri’s chest was not a troll. It was something much worse.

  Three days earlier, the priest Ingolf Magnorson had arrived at Eight Quays with the setting sun at his back and a challenge before him. His faering, rowed by two blind old men and hung about with the skulls of lesser wolves, bumped against the mooring post.

  “Jarl Torsteff has charged me with finding warriors worthy of a place at the high table in Valhalla. Odin has blessed this venture with blood and with fire. Glory awaits the men who bring our jarl the heart of the Iron Troll.” Ingolf offered this challenge to the crowd gathered at the long quay. The priest wore a vast stinking bear hide and had one eye covered with a leather patch, though Snorri had heard that there was nothing wrong with the eye beneath. On Ingolf’s right shoulder perched an elderly raven. It seldom left, judging by the white trails of bird shit that reached down front and back. The pri
ests from Einhaur often kept ravens in tribute to Huginn and Muninn, who sat on the shoulders of Odin One-Eye.

  Olaf snorted, coming to stand at Snorri’s elbow. “Has he forgotten to bring Muninn?” He stood on tiptoes to see, lacking Snorri’s great height, fat where his friend was thick with muscle. “Forgotten Muninn. Get it? Muninn is named for memory!”

  “I got it,” Snorri muttered from the side of his mouth. “Do you have any funny ones?”

  Olaf scowled. “All my jokes are funny. Some just require more beer to appreciate than others.”

  “Perhaps,” said Snorri, “he only thought to bring Huginn?” He paused. “Huginn is named for thought, so he thought to bring—”

  “You stick to killing people with an axe. I’ll do the jokes.”

  “The Iron Troll!” Ingolf raised his voice as new arrivals made it down the steep slopes from the village. “Jarl Torsteff has offered a bag of gold and a place in his mead hall to the man who kills it.”

  Olaf snorted again. “Stories are as close as I want to get to a troll. And even then I need a bellyful of ale first.” He kept his voice low as the men closest to the water asked their questions. “They say this one wears armour! Imagine that! The damn things are murder on legs in just their skins.”

  Some of the older men were already turning away, returning to their boats or the terraced land where they coaxed a living from what dirt could be found between the stones. Others, who had more recently returned from raiding with Jarl Torsteff, began to boast, telling troll tales, though none save Ulf Greyheart had ever fought one.

  The crowd built to around forty, the bulk of the men and women of Eight Quays with a fringe of snot-nosed children. Most of the youngsters were blond, though a scattering had dark hair too, some as black as Snorri’s own. Even little Karl was there, Snorri’s boy, two summers to Snorri’s sixteen, his hair white as new snow. His mother’s had been the same, too white, as if it weren’t something real but stolen from a dream. Mhaeri had died the day she first saw her child. Maybe the gods had decided there was only room for one of them in the world.