I sat down and opened the book in silence. The inside title page read A Scrier’s Instruction. Intrigued, I turned the next page and began to read the preface.
A scrier is a sorcerer with the natural ability to perceive past or present events without bearing physical witness. Most scriers discover their abilities in childhood through experimentation, but this book has been designed for those sorcerers who, for many reasons, have not naturally progressed to the level of skill others have achieved.
Scrying is a beautiful and precise art and should NOT be confused with the lesser art of Seeing, which, on its most basic level, relates to the deciphering of the metaphorical and symbolic language of the subconscious. Seeing is an interpretation, while scrying allows the sorcerer to actually witness a situation in its entirety.
Unlike the other five classes, a scrier never takes a capital letter for himself. Telepaths, Seers, Healers, Crafters and Displacers are always referred to, both visibly in print and inferred in speech, as capitalised proper nouns, whereas scriers recognise their class as only one facet of themselves and historically use only lower-case. The one exception is the White Elm’s Scrier, whose honourable title is capitalised out of respect for his position. Some say this habit is derived from the famous scrier pride, and their pride in the White Elm Scrier; others insist this is only another representation of the infamous scrier stubbornness and unwillingness to conform.
There are three forms of scrying, all of which are explained in detail in the first chapter of this book – Conscious, Passive, and Haunting. Each can be highly effective, and each scrier will likely find one form more useful than the others. Conscious Scrying is by far the easiest form to achieve, and many non-scriers are able to develop this skill – however, Passive Scrying and Haunting are skills which require the natural predisposition of a born scrier. The latter has never been achieved by any non-scrier.
I had never realised before now that even in my mind, Qasim was Scrier with a big capital S. How strange that ours was the odd class out, even grammatically.
I skipped the rest of the preface and went straight into chapter one. I had Haunted, though obviously not deliberately. Only true scriers could do it. It was undeniable proof to me, beyond the insistence of Sophia Prescott and beyond Qasim’s mentioning of giftedness. I was a scrier.
I flew through the first two thirds of the chapter, deliberately skipping the section on Haunting. The second chapter talked about the dangers of scrying, including perceiving things that the mind or heart was not ready to know. It talked of scriers in history who had scried things they thought they wanted to know – Who murdered my son? Where is my husband tonight? – only to bear witness to the horrific truth, destroying happiness and sanity. Be careful what you wish for.
I stared at the wall, my imagination taking over. What kinds of things would I see when I learnt to scry properly? Sophia had alluded to there being good reasons for the mind blocking the ability to scry. Would I scry into the past and witness events that I should never have known? Other than the deaths in my family, my past was relatively happy. And no one could have stopped that storm – what had happened was an accident. Probably the worst I’d see, looking back into my childhood, was Aidan hiding my toys, or Angela blaming me for something she’d done. Right?
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Renatus said without looking up from his paperwork. ‘The problem with digging into the past is that we see things as they are, rather than as we thought they were.’
Again, he’d picked up exactly what I was thinking and responded to it. How did he do it? A little unsettled, I put the book down with my hand between the pages so I wouldn’t lose my place.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
Renatus paused for a very long moment. His eyes were still cast down onto his work. ‘Sometimes it just isn’t worth taking a second glance at the past.’
I really didn’t know what to say to that, and I was spared having to think of something by Renatus opening a drawer and withdrawing an ancient pocket watch.
‘We’re all finished here,’ he said, breaking the quiet. ‘You can take the book with you, if you’d like to read it over the weekend.’
I hadn’t realised it had been an hour already. I was about halfway through the book, having skipped the sections on Haunting. It was to-the-point and engaging, so I nodded appreciatively.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. I stood.
‘I’ll see you again, this time on Monday,’ Renatus said. He gave me a nod of farewell and waved a hand delicately; the door opened.
‘Good night,’ I said, turning to leave.
‘Speaking of which,’ he added, ‘how has the pendant worked?’
I stopped and turned back. I had worn his pendant, as he’d suggested. From the second I’d slipped it over my neck and laid down to sleep, I’d known that I never wanted to Haunt again – especially if it meant I’d be issued this thing again. The pendant’s energy felt like a lead blanket strewn across my body, holding me down, holding back my power. I’d been overwhelmingly relieved to wake up and remove it, knowing I hadn’t done any magic (illegal or otherwise) during my sleep.
‘It works,’ I agreed, wondering if my reaction to it was normal.
‘I know it isn’t nice to wear,’ Renatus said, ‘but a few more nights will be necessary before your mind has had a proper chance to close itself back up. Let’s give it one week, and then see how you are after that without it.’
‘Alright,’ I said, pleased with the notion of giving the awful thing back and never seeing it again. ‘I’ll see you on Monday.’
‘Monday,’ Renatus agreed, and I left.
I went back to my dorm and took my key from around my neck to unlock the door. I held the book underneath my arm while I turned the key, then stepped inside.
‘Tell me everything!’
I slowly pressed the door shut before even looking at Sterling. She was grinning fervently.
‘Well?’ she pressed. I smiled thinly at her and looked around. Xanthe and Hiroko were sitting at their desks, doing homework. I had no escape.
‘Nothing. I read a book for an hour,’ I said.
‘And what did he do?’ Sterling asked, jumping backwards to sit on her bed. I shrugged disinterestedly.
‘The headmaster sat at his desk and got some of his paperwork done,’ I said, opening my drawer and placing A Scrier’s Instruction inside with the pendant. ‘Just like I said he would. I told you – he’s completely dull.’
Not entirely true, but an entirely forgivable lie in the circumstances. If I could convince Sterling that Renatus was boring and lame, perhaps she’d lay off this stalker routine.
‘And,’ Sterling encouraged, ‘what did he say?’
‘Practically nothing,’ I said. I collected my pyjamas and headed for mine and Hiroko’s bathroom.
‘Aristea,’ Sterling pleaded. I turned back to her.
‘Really, that was pretty much it,’ I insisted. ‘I went to the office; he told me to sit down and gave me a book to read so I’d be quiet. After the hour, he said I could go. I came back here.’
Sterling nodded, but she looked intensely disappointed. What had she expected me to say? What had she expected me to have seen or heard in a detention? Sophia’s parting words replayed in my mind, and I had to turn away so she wouldn’t see my smirk.
The weekend passed much too quickly for me. I finished A Scrier’s Instruction on Saturday morning and spent my alone time flicking back through its suggested exercises to practise. I played cards with the girls, and explored the library with Hiroko. Each night I braved the daunting pendant and awoke from dreamless sleeps, glad to remove the thing but also glad that I hadn’t left my body unattended again. I got a letter from my aunt and wrote back. I ate my meals with my friends, trying to ignore the intense flirting that was escalating daily between Kendra and Addison. Afterwards I would laugh as Sophia teased her sister. Then it was Sunday night, and the weekend was over.
On Monday I had a scrying lesson first thing in the morning. It had been slinking around the back of my mind all weekend, inevitable, speeding up time. I apprehensively followed Xanthe to our classroom, wondering what Qasim would say, if he had anything to say to me at all.
Our classmates quickly arrived, sparing me curious glances. Obviously they could remember the introduction of the last lesson and wanted for me to explain exactly why I’d been dragged so aggressively from the class by the instructor, but by now Sterling’s version must have spread far enough that I needn’t bother myself.
Qasim opened the door from the inside and ushered us in without sparing me a glance. I sat down with Xanthe, as usual, and he taught his lesson just as usual, except that he treated me as though I were not present. He did not look at me; he did not address me, verbally or telepathically. I tried not to feel offended – it was probably the best treatment I could have hoped for, coming from Qasim.
Walking out of that classroom after two hours was like taking a breath of fresh air. I was delighted to have survived it, really, and to know that I would be allowed back again in future lessons.
So began another week at the White Elm’s Academy of Sorcery. Although the content of Qasim’s lessons was my favourite, the treatment I got from the other councillors was definitely preferable. Emmanuelle, though she’d become very subdued, was very pleased to see that I was already so adept at her subject – it was the only other field in which I was placed into the top class. We were learning about long-term wards, the kind you cast around yourself and keep there to protect you from mental attack or from being scried. I loved Emmanuelle’s classes because I was good at producing wards; at the conclusion of each lesson, I could happily say that I’d achieved something. As well, Emmanuelle was always on speaking terms with me and my peers and she never held back a compliment or encouraging comment.
Lady Miranda was an excellent teacher of healing; Jadon’s subject was still in its dull stage but he did what he could to make it worth our while; Anouk taught history so passionately that attending her lessons was almost like listening to a highly entertaining play. Now that we’d covered the theory, Elijah began teaching my class the basics of displacement. He was possibly the most patient man alive, because lesson after lesson, nobody in my class showed any signs of progress whatsoever. Obviously, I’d been placed in the lowest group – I’d suspected I would be, having never tried it before, but it was a little depressing that all of my friends had been placed in the other two classes. Hiroko was in the top class, and the rest of them were together in Level 2.
‘Try again,’ Elijah encouraged after my thousandth failed attempt. ‘You’ve nearly got it.’
‘I just can’t do it,’ I argued, frustrated. He laughed lightly, and I looked away. Nearby, the British sorceress Willow had her eyes shut tight in concentration, leaning forwards unconsciously. As I watched, she lost her balance and fell over onto the wet grass.
‘Of course you can do it,’ Elijah said to me as he went to help Willow up. ‘Give it another go.’
Displacement always left me feeling rubbishy. It always finished without any success, and the only person who was still optimistic at the end of each lesson was Elijah.
To counter these failures, it seemed, I began to make progress in Glen’s class. By Wednesday’s afternoon lesson, I found that I was able to alter my perception enough that I could see auras for more than half a second, and as more than simply a small, coloured haze.
‘Try again,’ Hiroko said, more to herself than to me, after we’d been squinting at each other for about six minutes. She closed her eyes tightly and shook her head, apparently to relax herself and clear away unnecessary thoughts.
I took a deep breath and prepared myself, also, to try once more. I looked directly at Hiroko and willed myself to see the energy I could innately sense around her. I could feel it – I knew it was there, because when I reached out to her with my own energetic fingers, I could touch it. I did exactly that even as I thought it, allowing my senses to brush over her aura. I picked up on her mood, her concerns, her frustration at this exercise, her ambition to perform well at everything she attempted, her reds and pinks and greens…
And something switched over in my mind and I could see her.
‘It’s worked!’ I told her enthusiastically. The Hiroko I knew was the nucleus of a swirling egg of coloured energy. The colours were intense, and sometimes obscured her. I didn’t know much about colour symbolism, but that didn’t matter, because seeing the aura and feeling it told me everything I needed to know. The reds, I sensed, were symbolic of Hiroko’s ambitious and loyal nature, and also her frustration with this task. The pink and green swirls throughout her energetic field were indicative of her compassion, self-acceptance and her desire to help others. There was white, and there was purple – spiritual, magical colours…
I looked around as I felt my concentration starting to slip, as it so often did. The twins beside us glowed with auras so unalike that I had difficulty believing that I had managed any success at all in the first lesson, in which I’d deduced that their auras were single-coloured and only shades apart.
Had I only picked up on some basic energetic level that day? Perhaps a base colour or something? Kendra was a bright mix of creative orange, dynamic reds, outgoing blues, psychic purples and loved-up pink, while her sister’s energy was softer, with various shades of compassionate pink and the greens of a healer. Kendra’s aura also seemed to be swirling and changing rapidly. Sophia’s and Hiroko’s were less lively, more consistent.
Another instant and the colours were gone, but I’d done it, and when I concentrated, I was able to do it again.
‘I did it last week,’ Hiroko said. She sounded a little glum. ‘This week, I am not so clever.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Kendra assured her. ‘I can’t see it either. Aristea just doesn’t have an aura.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I insisted, feeling a little defensive. Sophia had suggested the same thing in our first lesson, and after what Glen had said, I had almost completely forgotten about it, because it hadn’t really bothered me. Now, however, Kendra and Hiroko were unable to see it, either. What was wrong with me?
Surprisingly, but without a doubt, the most interesting part of each day was the hour-long fraction that was spent sitting in silence in Renatus’s office. Every evening, after prying myself from Sterling’s annoyingness, I arrived at his door, which would open immediately for me. Each night he had a new book for me to read – how-to books and White Elm history books, mostly, though they were many times more riveting than anything I’d found in his library. So, night after night, I devoured this new knowledge, and if I didn’t finish a book within the hour, Renatus allowed me to take it with me, and I would return it the following day. After each detention I would return to my room and be accosted by Sterling, for whom I would have no information except the contents of the latest book.
‘It’s just not fair,’ Sterling complained often.
The detentions continued like this until the second Monday. Today’s book (this one about telepathy) was considerably shorter than those I’d read in the previous week, and I finished it before the hour was up. I closed the book and laid it on my little desk, and I began wondering whether I was capable of sitting in absolute silence for however long with nothing to do. Renatus, surrounded by a higher concentration of paperwork than usual, looked up at me.
‘Pull up a chair,’ Renatus suggested, nodding at one of the cushy seats behind me. I got up and approached, curious. He indicated a growing pile of crisp envelopes. ‘Can you seal those, and stamp them with this?’ He handed me a rubber stamp with the White Elm’s seal and an ink pad.
I nodded and sat, and set about my task. The envelopes turned out to be of the kind that needs to be licked in order to be sealed, so I sat opposite my headmaster in his office, licking envelopes.
I had silently licked about thirty envelopes before either
of us spoke again. I glanced at the addressee of one letter and wondered what Renatus was writing to them. What did people write to him in the first place? He responded so casually that I might have wondered aloud.
‘It’s hate mail, mostly,’ Renatus explained. ‘People seem to think we’re not interested in their wellbeing. Others want us to adopt medieval policies on the non-magical population. It’s mostly drivel like this. Have a read.’
So, I did. The letter’s author was apparently not a fan of White Elm, or of correct English. A fan of both, I was positioned against him from the start. I had to read the opening line of the second paragraph three times to understand that the author wanted the White Elm to amalgamate with “Lisondo” (after all, emellgamit is not a word).
‘Why do you even reply to this?’ I asked, mildly disgusted with the content and very annoyed with the effort expended on trying to make sense of the letter itself.
‘It used to be Glen’s job,’ Renatus said, ‘but I took it on when he started teaching classes. He thinks that sending a personal, handwritten reply will make the sender feel appreciated and will enhance their sense of our “humanity”. He thinks they’ll be more understanding if they think we care what they have to say.’
I gathered from his tone that he did not.
Apparently I had been deemed trustworthy, because I was allowed to lick envelopes the next day, and the following day I was allowed to write out addresses.
‘Is that all he does, all day?’ Sterling asked one night as we got ready for bed. ‘Write letters, replying to complaints?’
I shrugged and shifted Cedric over so I could get under my sheets.
‘There’s heaps of other stuff on his desk besides letters,’ I recalled. ‘He must do that work at a different time of day.’ Because Sterling was waiting with an avid expression for any scrap of information I was willing to part with, I added, ‘He’s really organised – it wouldn’t surprise me if he allocates tasks to certain times of day.’
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