by Anne Zoelle
“Er...defend your honor?”
She shook her head.
“Defend my good name for being your roommate?”
“Ren.”
“Defend my future children's good names?”
“Your future toadlets or tadpoles, you mean?”
I stopped, my mouth hanging open. “Did you just make a joke?”
“No. And you look ridiculous. Close your mouth and come along.”
I hurried to catch up, smiling. “I think you did.” I poked her. “You made a joke. Good job, Olivia.”
“I will make a nice simmer hex under your toes too, if you poke me again.”
“Just let me bask in the wonder for a few more moments.” I tilted my head back toward the sun. “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, awesome.”
She rolled her eyes, but her expression wasn't as tight as usual as we ascended the stairs.
“She's kind of hot when she loosens up,” Christian mused.
“Out, outitty, out, out! I need that soul to suck,” his insane voice said.
I decided I didn't need sleep at all that night.
~*~
I hobbled painfully all the way to Nephthys's room the following day, after a few harried hours of botched experiments. She opened the door, took one look at me, and waved me inside.
Neph didn't say anything, as she patched me up. Again. Like everything about her from her waterfall of hair to her soft brown eyes, her magic was soothing as it dipped and delved and prodded the magic in my body to focus on regrowing my toe.
“You are really good at this.” And that was fortunate for me, because I couldn’t go to Dr. Greyskull. He would totally add two plus two and figure out what I was doing.
My black magic experiments kept demanding more from me.
“My mother is a healer and midwife. I've been helping her with this type of thing for a long time. And it is easy with you.”
I blinked at that. “Does she want you to be a healer too?”
“She is concerned that I will make little money in the arts. Dancing can be a poor field.”
“Yeah. My mom is a chemist. It is pretty obvious she wants me to be an architect rather than a painter.”
Nephthys waved her hand in a graceful arc over my foot, her magic pulling delicately on mine, and the toe stub began to push out slowly. “What do you want?”
“I don't know,” I said quietly. I wanted to raise Christian. I wanted to survive mostly intact. I wanted to be normal. “I really like engineering. Architecture is a good field for me, truly, but it feels a little like giving in to parental pressure.”
She made a little noise, between a sigh and a laugh. “Don't let someone else dictate your life path—by pressuring you or causing you to rebel. It is your choice how you react.”
“Thanks, Confucius.” There was a light pinch on my forming toe. “Hey, hey, hey, sorry, sorry!”
The pressure instantly stopped and she continued the gentle ministrations.
“So, where is your roommate?” I had never met her and Nephthys never said anything about her.
“She has a boyfriend. When we first arrived, we had to sleep here every night for four weeks in order to set the balancing magic. Now that that has passed, she rarely spends time here.”
“Doesn't that mess up the balancing magic?”
“No. As long as she sleeps here once a week, the magic renews.”
That reminded me of something I had been wanting to know. “Do you know how roommates get chosen?”
She nodded. “There is a lottery ball that identifies sympathetic magics between mages. It is available any time for students who want to use it. During the first season, roommates are chosen very specifically based on magic sympathy from the magic that goes into the system. For transfers, it is more based on available slots. It was the same at Sakkara.”
She sounded sad suddenly. I wondered if she felt the loss of her roommate from her original school. I felt a trickle of magic slide through my cuff toward her.
She smiled at me, then gracefully extended her fingers again and pulled my toe stub a bit longer. “If you feel discord in your magic when you first meet your roommate, you can request a change. A settling feeling, like a shield net, indicates at least an adequate level of sympathy.”
Oh. Maybe that was why Olivia hadn't killed me that first day or kicked me out. Based on that first meeting, we were in sympathy.
“Olivia and I are sympathetic then. But she didn't speak to me for weeks.” I'd really had to pull it out of her, being friends.
Neph shook her head. “Your magic can be sympathetic with enemies and incompatible with friends. All it means is that performing magic together is easier and stronger. The dorm rooms and sympathies facilitate a more restful rejuvenation for each mage. That is why we have to live here on campus until our magic is fully matured—to keep everything balanced. I'm sure you've noticed how prone to accident mages can be.”
To her credit she didn't point at my toe, which was actually starting to look like one. Toenail and all.
“Like how the cafeteria works?”
She nodded. “The magic balancing enchantment siphons off too-high energy and soothes too-low energy, tumbling over us as we eat. A small magical recharge shared and balanced over thousands. They like that explanation rather than the one where they are able to keep track of and calm us for a period of the day.”
I blinked.
“There.” She touched my toe and gave me a penetrating look. “Are you planning on losing any more digits?”
“No?”
I was really hoping I wouldn't lose a finger next. I needed those to paint. I was just happy things like this could be regenerated. At least so far.
I looked down, wiggling my toe. Milestone red was tomorrow. The serious rituals were about to begin. I had a gnawing feeling I wasn't going to be able to regrow the backlash from those.
But it would be too late to raise Christian even using black magic if I didn't gain some progress soon.
I straightened my shoulders and gave her a bright smile. “Thanks.”
Neph didn't say anything for a moment, then looked at me with an inscrutable expression. “Will told me that you talked about me being a muse.”
“Yes, though I still am not quite sure what that means. You inspire people?”
“That is part of it.” She tilted her head. “Muses are generally encouraged to join troupes. To inspire on a mass level. It’s a symbiotic relationship that helps the muses too.”
She carefully arranged a few veils—veils were draped over most of the surfaces on her side of the room. “Once we reach maturity, around sixteen or so, we gain access to our inspirational powers, and they can be great. But they come with cost. Anyone who knew you before, will still be able to look upon you. But if you are cast out of your group after sixteen...” She looked down. “It is very hard to be seen. Muses are like wraiths, silently helping those we come across, but not as people in our own right. Muses are very clan-oriented for this reason.”
I looked at the vying expressions on her face. “You left Sakkara.”
“I was no longer welcome at Sakkara,” she corrected. I waited, letting her decide whether to say more. “I have unfortunate family ties that impacted my enrollment and friendships there, and even here within the Muse community.”
That seemed decidedly unfair. “So, being...cast out?...it makes it hard to make friends?”
“Very. The community here had to take me—I'm too valuable—but accepting me isn't the same as embracing me.” She didn't look at me for a moment. “But you noticed me.”
“Well, you did say something to me that night in the library. You helped me.” I was the taker in this relationship. That thought made me anxious. “I'm not forcing you be friends with me, am I?”
“No. It doesn't work like that. I'm not a Jinn.” She smiled. “And back to your comment, a muse exists almost on the subconscious level. I say things to a lot of people, but they don't actively notice.”
I knew what it was like not to be noticed, or to be noticed...poorly. “It took some effort to see you,” I said, apologetically.
She smiled. “Of course it did, but you made the effort. That is what counts.”
“Can't people take, I don't know, Muse Appearance Pills?”
She laughed, and even that was soft and flowing. “Our energy automatically makes people want to look past us, to absorb our energy as their own. Compounding that, it is considered better to have access to many muses. Once you embrace one and force others to see her or him, other muses can't influence you.”
I blinked. “Ok.”
She looked a little uncertain. “It would have been lovely just being friends with you, but once you made the others see me...I'm your only muse now. You can...revoke seeing me, in order to regain mass access.”
“What? No way.”
She gave a bodily sigh, so obvious was her relief.
“Unless it means you are tethered to me? Are you sure I'm not making you be friends with me?”
“No. It doesn't work that way. I can still influence whomever I want. That is why it is more of a burden on you. On the other hand, you made friends with me, not because you wanted to gain energy. That gives you...benefits.”
I shrugged. “I have to tell you, I'm not sure I'm muse-able. I still suck at dancing,” I said frankly.
She laughed again, and this time it was a much deeper sound. “That's not quite how it works either. Dancing is how I power my energy and release it. It doesn't make anyone else into a dancer, unless that is their passion already.”
“Well, I should probably work on making that my passion instead. Dancing is way better for social cred than drawing.”
She touched my wrist and I felt a soothing tendril of magic. “No, you have so much potential. Your magic is like a blinding light sometimes that I cannot focus upon.”
I blinked. I could feel her magic spread. I felt like I was on the right path. I wanted to draw, to paint, to create. Ideas and plans flew through my mind, connecting and threading. “Wow. You really are a muse. I feel like Da Vinci.”
She laughed. “Better not. You might need more muses, if so.”
“Sounds sordid.”
She laughed harder.
The eyes of the watchful students on campus might draw more closely to me. But standing out enough to make friends...was worth it.
“I want you to be happy like this. I want you to stop trying to free me, Ren,” Christian said.
“Pain!” the other voice cried.
Milestone red was tomorrow.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Reality in Death
I had procured a twice-blessed teaspoon through Will, goblin blood through another club connection, magical pomegranate seeds from Delia, and two whale-squished rats through Chen Lifen. Constantine had even infused my mirror shard with a suggestion enchantment and taken legal punishment for it in exchange for a third paper box—one that had taken me three more hours to design with him, bickering together while I drew.
They needed to seriously rethink community service. It put all the pranksters, malcontents, and crazies in thick contact with each other.
And Constantine...I was starting to wonder what he had begun constructing in his lab room. The vortex in his ottoman was one thing, but the whirlpool in the bottle of liquid that looked like magical Drano was weird. At some point he must have decided I was trustworthy, because the last ten times I had visited he had been pretty lax in letting me see his experiments and functioning workspace. His chemistry workshop always contained foaming potions, rotating drawers, and swirling bottles when I was there.
Daddy obviously paid well.
But who the devil was his roommate? I could see a second bed with a pillow and expensive-looking bedspread through the open bedroom door, but no identifying pictures or items existed in the living room. There was nothing personal to indicate a second person lived there at all. There was the other connected door, though, that I had never seen opened.
I was getting much better at distinguishing wards, but the door contained so many magic threads entwined together that it looked like a big, dark blur had been overlaid.
Either his roommate was horribly suspicious of Constantine, or Constantine kept him chained up in there. Both explanations were possible.
Constantine looked seriously elated—and elation was a disturbing expression on him—when I finished the storage paper for his chemical materials.
The design of the paper forced my mind onto other paths, as I'd needed to put wards inside the box space to prevent the chemicals from interacting with each other. And later that night, after leaving him, I had figured out how to magically suppress the judicial detection field from seeing the contents inside one of the storage box drafts by creating a hypercube.
It had taken an additional drop of paint to facilitate the added dimension, but it was worth it. Why hadn't I thought of a tesseract before? Could I do a penteract? I flipped through Mbozi's syllabuses and papers looking for research aid possibilities.
Upon returning to my room, Justice Toad informed me that I had five more hours of community service as punishment—added to my tally—but the paint jar suspended inside the hypercube wasn't taken...until ten minutes later when it had ejected from the sketch and spilled all over my floor.
It had zipped off to the Midlands at that point and Justice Toad had racked me up another five hours.
The suppression field only lasted for a limited amount of time—though I had great hopes for future field trials and tweaks. But for delinquents, ten minutes meant the difference between enrollment and expulsion.
And I still only had a limited amount of time to work off my community service. The added hours each time I was caught were a big deal. But in order to make useful products that I could trade on the club circuit, I needed to test them outside the Midlands in areas where I could be caught by the Justice Squad.
However, if I couldn't get my offenses under control, I was going to be doing community service every hour of every day soon.
Constantine always had the best illegal stuff, though, and he would want one of those detection suppression boxes for sure, which would give me a significant exchange value.
Two hours later, after a festival of blood, seeds, rats, stones, mist, three rituals, two herbal sacrifices, and an enlargement enchantment on the golem—because, hey that four foot zombie was just not going to cut it for my six foot two brother—I was pretty sure something in my right wrist was permanently broken. There was a deadened space there now that my magic wouldn't touch.
Christian babbled apologies over and over in my head, his words barely making sense.
I swallowed the thread of despair and loss. I had other rituals to try. I drew with my left hand. It would be fine.
I trudged out of the Midlands and back across top campus. It was going to be rough using a broken wrist for the hour of community service I had scheduled tonight, but I would have to make do. Pain was a product of my mind that I could suppress with enough will. My end goal was worth it.
A narwhal appeared in the air ten feet away, looked confused for a moment, then flopped bodily onto the grass.
“Narwhal!” Someone yelled, and people scattered.
The narwhal looked completely nonplussed, and blew out a stream of magic water from its tusk and rose into the air, surrounded in a field of magic water. I looked at it and covered a yawn with the inside of my good elbow. With a little over six weeks under my magical belt, I had started to wonder why people yelled so often. Weird things happened everywhere here for no apparent reason at least three times a day. Sometimes that number bumped to twelve. I would think people—mages—would grow used to it.
Without urgency, I retrieved my justice tablet with my good hand. I had branched out from toads, and was now getting the other amphibians—frogs, newts, salamanders, wormy things, and mudpuppies. I briefly contemplated what a salamander with a long pole protruding from its forehead wo
uld look like.
Zap.
The narwhal turned into a tadpole just as it was about to impale someone. A tadpole. Huh. I tucked Justice Toad back into my bag, unscrewed my bottle of water using my armpit and good hand, and scooped the tadpole inside. The tusked tadpole looked pretty irritated, floating there. I could release it down in the river after service. Fresh and saltwater currents ran side-by-side there, so the narwhal would survive in one of the currents as it made its way to icy waters.
Or perhaps flew away in a magic water bubble.
I shrugged, screwed the cap back on using my armpit and good hand, then stuck the bottle of water in the back pocket of my bag.
Cold water. Hmmm... If I used a cold water base, could I keep the blob matter going for a fourth period of thirteen days? Or was I going to need to freeze my golem? If he wasn't Christian-ready, what did I want to freeze him as? If I got to that point without meeting my end goal, should I make him as Christian-y as possible, and hope for the best? I chewed my nails and mulled the issue all the way to the service break room.
My schedule called for another ritual tomorrow. I had given in to my panic a few days back and tried to use the lavender paint on the blob, but as I drew closer, my hand had vibrated fiercely and been forcibly pushed away. It had unnerved me enough to wait for one of my soul rituals to work.
One working ritual. Just one, was all I wanted and needed. Why was I so useless?
I had nicely simulated flesh and features with the blob, but I would need to do some side projects animating statues and dolls, just in case of failure so close to my endpoint.
And still, while the paint made things animate according to my will, producing the real Christian—versus a version my intentions would produce—was still a key philosophical issue I struggled with. I needed a soul ritual to work. I had even drawn up a soul version of a dream-catcher inside of a storage space, hoping that it might call Christian to it eventually.
Tomorrow. I would have to patch myself up enough tonight to hope that I would be punished on the right side of my body again. I was hoping that some of the swell reduction pads, like the ones Neph had, were in the squad's supply closet. I could worry about consequences later.