Guardian Academy 1: Seeds Of Magic (The Mystery Of The Four Corners)

by Maria Amor

  “You’re the most well-connected witch I think I’ve ever met,” Mrs. Halpern said.

  “It’s been very profitable for me to be,” Juris said with a little grin. “Always looking at the bottom line.”

  “Can we trust him?” Dylan looked from Mrs. Halpern to Julia, finally back to Juris. “No offense, obviously, but…”

  “But you don’t know me,” Juris said. “I get it.”

  “We can trust him,” Mrs. Halpern said. “If I wasn’t absolutely sure of it I never would have invited him to do this.”

  “But can we trust you? Maybe you’re playing Ruth.”

  “This isn’t the time to be paranoid,” Julia said, before the argument could truly start. “We need to get this done, and if it’s going to blow up in our faces, it’ll blow up in our faces.” She took a deep breath. “I think we’d all rather have this over and done with.”

  “Amen to that,” Mrs. Halpern said. “Okay, let’s do it.”

  THE FINAL CHAPTER

  Dylan had never been more on edge in his entire life; not even when he’d had to go before the council a year before, almost to the day, for his own audience. Karine had acted quickly and Dylan wasn’t alone in thinking that Juris’ trick of making the relics disappear had lit a fire under some of the members of the council. They scheduled an audience for him and Julia within days of their “prank.”

  The word around the school was that it had been them who’d stolen the relics; there were differing stories as to why. Some said that they’d stolen the relics to prove that it could be done. Some said that they’d stolen the relics to try and control Julia’s transition into becoming a full Guardian.

  Others said that they’d done it to make a fool of the dean, or because Ruth Arlen in spite of her renown in the world, and her apparent wealth, had somehow gone broke and needed the money. When the disappearances were discovered, the next day after they’d done the magic, he, Julia, and a few other students were pulled from class. Dylan had noticed that almost all of the other students pulled were air-aligned.

  When the courier came, in the middle of the day, to collect Dylan and Julia, Dylan thought he’d be relieved; instead, he’d spent the following three days, at Ruth’s home, steadily becoming more and more anxious. He knew that he was responding to the emotional high that Julia was on, but that didn’t help. The only thing that let him get any sleep at all was another of Ruth’s potions.

  And now that they were on the verge of their meeting, and their audience with the council, Dylan thought he might actually die from the intensity of his uneasiness. He glanced to his left and saw that Julia looked more powerful, more mature, and more unearthly than ever; that gave him a moment of relief, because he knew that she would have to be the one to carry the audience.

  She’d come out of her room at Ruth’s home looking almost bizarre to Dylan’s eyes. It was traditional to wear clothes that confirmed elemental alignment when standing before the council, but what Julia had come up with was so incredibly impressive that he had taken a moment just to appreciate the sight of her and now that they were stuck waiting to go into the council chambers, he did so again. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face in elaborate braids that looped and swirled around her skull; the dress she wore was absolutely stunning. It was blue—sky blue, pure morning with no clouds—and somehow, there was an element to it that made it glow as if the sun was somehow hidden but still actually present. His second look told Dylan that the effect was mostly because she was so suffused with air-energy that her whole body glowed.

  Her eyes looked darker than ever, a hazel that anyone on the street would think was utterly alien. She’d done makeup, but Dylan couldn’t say what specifically it was that she’d done. If he could have imagined a queen of air—a young queen, the very embodiment of the element in the form of a woman—it would have been Julia, as she stood waiting for the chambers to open to them.

  Dylan had been more conservative in his clothing choice, donning a suit the color of deep ocean, an almost purple blue that gleamed green in certain lights underneath. He had pulled his hair back away from his face in a simple ponytail at the base of his skull, and while he’d felt almost comforted by the finery when he’d left his room, next to Julia he might as well have been a servant.

  “You may approach the chamber,” the sylph a few feet away from them said. Julia inclined her head towards the air-aligned creature, and the creature returned the courtesy; Dylan reminded himself to tell his friend the significance of that later, if she didn’t know it already. She may think she can just ignore the rumors, but if the sylphs respect her, then she is going to have to deal with it eventually.

  They approached the big double doors extending up at least two stories, made of solid iron, and they slowly began to open, revealing the chamber, with the members of the council inside of it. They were all seated in their usual positions, and Dylan wondered just how Julia felt about the confrontational atmosphere, about the glowering looks turned down on them. He stayed by her side, shoulders pushed back, looking up at the council in their seats extending up to almost the rafters of the room.

  There were some three hundred members of the council altogether; enough to intimidate anyone. And yet, somehow, Julia almost seemed to glow more brightly, and Dylan, after a quick glance, couldn’t see a single sign of her being afraid.

  “Julia Beval,” the lead councilman said. “Dylan Kelby.” Julia inclined her head towards the old man, and the older woman next to him, as Ruth had told her on the way to the chambers; Dylan did the same. “You stand accused of stealing priceless relics, placed in the trust of the School of Sandrine, meant to be preserved for as long as the school stands.”

  The woman next to him spoke next. “How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty,” Julia said, her voice strong, but absolutely clear. In that moment, Dylan thought, she had made at least two dozen allies—and just as many enemies. “We are not guilty of the thefts; we are only guilty of bringing them to light when other people wanted to keep them a secret.”

  “Explain,” the woman said. Dylan saw Julia take a deep breath, and he heard—even through the thick, stone walls of the building—the wind picking up outside.

  “We discovered that there were oddities at the School of Sandrine, centered on the dean, Terron Dimitrios,” Dylan said.

  “When we found out that no one was investigating the oddities, and when scandal embroiled the school on the part of the air-aligned students, I felt it my moral obligation to find out what I could,” Julia continued.

  “You are a student—not even at the full extent of your powers!” The marker in front of the council member who spoke proclaimed that it was one of the Nolan family, maybe even Cornelius himself. “That’s not a responsibility you should assume.”

  “No one else was doing it,” Julia said dryly. Dylan pressed his lips together to push down a nervous laugh. “And I couldn’t stand to see my fellow students shamed on lies and removed from the school because of a dean acting in ways that should have gotten him fired.”

  “You will keep a respectful tongue in your head, young woman,” one of the other members of the council called out. “That is no way to talk about the dean of your school!”

  “It is when he’s a thief and a liar,” Julia countered. A murmur rippled through the room.

  “Young lady, are you accusing the dean, Terron Dimitrios, of stealing the relics?”

  “He stole them, and he duplicated them to cover the thefts,” Dylan said. “He has been working with a member of this council.”

  “This is absurd!” Dylan thought the protest had come from another member of the fire-aligned group.

  “It is the fact of the case,” Julia said firmly. “Terron Dimitrios was working with Cornelius Nolan.”

  “What proof do you have?”

  “She can’t have any,” the Nolan who’d spoken before said. “It’s a ridiculous claim.”

  “Tell me, people of the council,” Karine sai
d, from almost behind them. “Do any of us believe that two teenagers—no matter how powerful or precocious—would be able to raid the relics chamber at the school? It’s as highly guarded as almost anything on this continent that we own is.” Another murmur greeted that point.

  “Tell us your proof,” the lead councilman said.

  “The relics that appear to be gone are not,” Julia replied. “Magic was used to make them ‘disappear,’ marking them as the stolen ones; but they can be revealed once more, and revealed for the forgeries that they are.” Dylan glanced in the direction of the Nolan relative; the man’s eyes widened for just a moment and then his face changed colors, from red to pale.

  “That does not prove that the dean did this with the help of, or the benefit of, Mr. Nolan,” the old woman pointed out.

  “For that we would ask that you call upon Maryam Ashbel,” Dylan told her. “She was speaking with someone, though we’re not sure who, about Mr. Nolan receiving another relic on the same day that we assisted in the magic to make the relics seem to disappear.”

  “These two upstarts are trying to sully my name—and my family’s name—to cover up for their crimes,” Nolan said. “I demand satisfaction from them.”

  “They’re children!”

  “One of them at least has reached his full abilities, and the other is nearly there.” Dylan looked around the room as the members of the council argued.

  “They are still children; they haven’t faced a challenge before.”

  “Then, don’t make it to the death,” someone said, sounding almost bored.

  “If they’ve never faced a challenge before, then they don’t know how it is done,” someone pointed out.

  “Let them learn their lesson, then.”

  Before a decision could be reached, Nolan leaped out of his seat, launching himself towards the floor of the council chamber; Dylan saw Julia barely start, and reached for her hand, intent on putting himself between her and the fire-aligned Guardian. “No,” she said, looking at him quickly. “Together.” He raised an eyebrow. Julia half-smiled. “Put your energy through me.”

  Nolan called out a harsh, fast chant and almost immediately fire appeared in his hands. Without thinking, Dylan did as Julia had asked: he let his energy flow through her, all of it, in a torrent. Julia’s glow intensified, and he heard her murmur a brief, almost sighing phrase.

  All at once, every bit of air in the room seemed to disappear; the next instant, rain poured down from the ceiling, drenching the floor—and extinguishing Nolan’s fire.

  “I believe that constitutes the results of a challenge,” the lead councilman said drily, after everyone had been silent for a few minutes. Dylan made a mental note to ask Julia what she had done—and how—later, if they got through the next part.

  “Someone take Nolan,” the lead woman said. As two of the guards—gnomes, Dylan thought—grabbed the shocked fire Guardian, almost every member of the council seemed to be murmuring amongst themselves. He could hear the tone of their voices, but not the words; they were impressed, almost frightened. He had to admit that he wasn’t entirely at ease with what Julia had done with his help.

  “You claim that you are able to reveal the relics?” The lead councilman’s voice cut through the din, and after the old man spoke, the room fell silent.

  “I am,” Julia said. “The magic that was done can be undone with nothing more than elemental energies. Another member of the council can certainly do it if you would prefer.”

  “We will take you to the school,” the woman said. “And we will—while we’re there—talk to Professor Ashbel.”

  “You may want to speak with all of the professors that Dimitrios hired,” Dylan suggested, trying to keep his voice respectful. “We aren’t sure how many were involved, but we suspect Professor Paytah as well.”

  “We will interrogate them,” the woman said. “With help from the sylphs, if they will oblige us.”

  “And you will show us that you are being truthful about the magic,” the lead man said. “In the meantime—if the sylphs will oblige us further—a search of Cornelius Nolan’s properties is in order.”

  “Will someone call for a recess of the council?” Dylan looked around the room; more than a few of the members of the council still looked shell-shocked, unable to quite move forward after the spectacle they’d seen.

  “I call for a recess,” someone finally said. After a few more moments, the room began to clear, and Dylan felt relief wash through him. It was, he hoped, all but over.

  *

  “Welcome to the closing,” Julia said as she and Dylan stepped into the convocation hall together. There were only three more days left before the school year ended, and they would be going back to Manhattan.

  “Good lord, what a closing,” Dylan countered. “No dean, half the new professors gone, three of our final exams canceled.”

  “And yet, they managed to keep the tradition,” Julia pointed out. She was glad that the school had gone through with it; after the bizarre year that the students had, it only seemed fair that the annual end-of-year party go on as planned, even if there was no formal dean to oversee it, and even if chaperones were spread thin. She’d gotten to buy a dress in Manhattan two weeks before to wear to the event, and for once, since she’d started marching to her grandmother’s beat almost a year before, she’d actually, truly enjoyed it.

  “They’re going to be hiring all the replacements over the summer,” Dylan observed. Julia shrugged.

  “As long as they don’t make the same mistake they made last year, I don’t really care who it is,” she said.

  “You should, though,” Dylan countered. “You’re already something of a celebrity.” Julia rolled her eyes. She’d had enough of being a celebrity amongst the Guardians and the supernatural world that the school revolved around; she had accepted the gifts and tokens of appreciation that families of air-aligned students had sent her.

  Refusing them would have been rude—but she had tried her best to keep a low profile once the situation had been resolved. The trick that she’d pulled in the council chamber had managed to become common knowledge at Sandrine, which had only added to people’s interest in her—and to the number of invitations that came to her in the school mail and even at her parents’ apartment.

  “I can totally see why you left the supernatural world to become a famous musician,” Julia told Dylan. “And I can see even more why you left the world of being a famous musician to come back here.” Dylan laughed.

  “You could have done things differently, and then people wouldn’t be treating you like you were some American Archangel.”

  “I could have done things differently, and we’d still have Dimitrios stealing artifacts—and eventually blaming air-aligned students when this time of year rolled around and people realized what he’d done.”

  That had been the plan all along, Julia had learned, once the council had completed its investigation: Dimitrios had used the accusations of thefts in the school to try and sow distrust of the air-aligned students with the council, and was planning on using that distrust to pin his crimes on one of the supernatural groups.

  He’d been making good money helping Cornelius Nolan, as it turned out; the fire-aligned Guardian had been more than happy to pay for as many relics as Dimitrios and his friends could get out of the school’s halls.

  They wandered the room, and Julia saw that a few of the students were wary of her; she couldn’t actually blame them—after all, the word that was out about her made her seem like an overpowered comic book hero—but it stung a little nonetheless. “Don’t get upset,” Dylan said, reading her mood as aptly as she read a book. “Give them the summer to get over it, and next year you’ll be the cool, rebellious chick and that’s it.” Julia chuckled.

  “And all summer long, my grandmother will be taking me from one thing to another, introducing me to people.” Julia was not looking forward to that; her grandmother had pointed out that if she had handled the chal
lenge in the council chambers differently, she might not have made herself so attractive.

  It had been the first thing to come to mind when she knew that Nolan was going to attempt to attack them; something that one of the professors had mentioned, in passing, as a quality of air-aligned energies, as a trick that they could do. Air had no substance of its own—it was energy in almost its purest form, at least on the elemental level. That meant that it could take on other energies, pass them through its lens.

  She’d taken in Dylan’s energy after murmuring a spell that she’d learned as a child; as someone in control of the element of air, she could also rid a room of it, not just blow through it.

  Julia knew that she had a long summer ahead of her, and not just because of the interminable events that her grandmother planned that she attend. She was rapidly approaching her seventeenth birthday—and then, she would come into the full extent of her abilities. One of the teachers, Professor Aline, had offered to tutor her over the summer, to help her with the last of the transition, but Julia hadn’t decided yet.

  “Well,” Julia said as Dylan handed her a cup of punch, “we managed to get through this crazy school year, solve a major mystery, and basically—like you said—storm the castle.” Julia sipped the fruity, fizzy punch and raised her glass to the boy who had, finally, become her friend once more. “Personally, I’m going to call this a record year for both of us.” Dylan laughed and clinked his plastic cup against hers.

  “My parents are angling for Ruth to give me a couple of weeks off this summer, since you’ll mostly be at her place,” Dylan said. Julia felt a brief moment of sadness, but shook it off in an instant.

  “That’s fair,” she said. “Maybe she’ll let me have a real break, too—sleep in a few days, maybe take a trip into the city with the potion in me to troll the MoMA and get some decent food.” The food at her grandmother’s house was always good—but Julia, who had spent most of her young life in Manhattan, was used to being able to run out and get pho, or sushi, or Cantonese, or whatever cuisine she wanted—at almost any hour of the day, and most of the night, as long as she had an adult with her.