by B. C. Palmer
“No,” I said, smiling despite myself at the hideous zigzag red and green stripes and the scattered candy canes that cascaded down the front, the sleeves, the back, and around the floppy collar. “No, absolutely not.”
“I vote yes,” Lucas announced.
Isaac raised his hand. “Seconded.”
Hunter grinned at me and held the sweater out. “That’s a third from me. Motion passes.”
“I don’t get a vote?” I asked as I took it from him. It was at least made of something soft. Their grins were infectious and I chewed the inside of my cheeks to stop from smiling and ruining my resistance.
“Not on your own ugly sweater,” Lucas said. “You did get a vote on all of ours. It’s one for all and all for one, isn’t it?”
“Only if I get a sword and musket,” I muttered. But I relented, grinning and rolling my eyes. Fair was fair, after all, and we paid for our sweaters before slipping into the small changing room one at a time to put them on at Lucas’s insistence.
“This is the most ridiculous thing that has ever assaulted my eyes,” I groaned when we finally assembled in front of the window to the shop, our reflections grinning back at us. Lucas had his arm thrown over Isaac’s shoulders, and Hunter looked adorably concerned with his hands shoved into his front pockets. “We’re magicians. This is undignified, I’m absolutely certain. Won’t we be thrown out of Rosewilde or something?”
“No one will ever know,” Isaac whispered. He held an arm out and let me slip mine through it, hooking our elbows. Lucas formed up on the other side of me. “Shall we?”
“Shall we what?” I asked, glancing up and down the street. People were out, and they were watching. Some of them were smiling. They must have thought we were a group of friends and I blushed at the thought of how there was definitely more between the three of us. I didn’t know what we were—I knew absolutely we were friends, even Hunter, and I’d heard about other students pairing up in a relationship but we hadn’t had that talk yet. I was fairly positive Lucas and Isaac weren’t with anyone else; we didn’t have the time with our project, and Serena would have definitely told me if she’d heard any gossip.
“Take a nice winter stroll,” Lucas said. “On display for the locals.”
“We make a picture,” I agreed, tilting my head to look at each of the guys. “Too bad it isn’t snowing. It’d be perfect, wouldn’t it?”
Hunter pursed his lips and glanced up at the cloudy sky, then shuffled to stand with his back to the window in front of us, so that his hands were hidden from onlookers. He moved his hands through a complex series of hand signs, slowly, as if moving through something thick in the air. As he did, he muttered words in old Norse—I didn’t speak it, but I’d heard it before—and then spread his hands, fingers crooked, his fingertips pointed to the sky. He balled them into fists just as he spoke the final word of the spell.
Second later, a snowflake drifted down between us. Then more. In less than a minute everyone on the street had stopped to stare at the sky, hands held out to catch the thick, fluffy snow as it fell.
“It won’t stick in this weather,” Hunter said. “But it makes for a nice picture.”
I smiled up at him and, on impulse, stood up on my toes to press a quick kiss to his cheek. “Yeah. It does.”
We spent the rest of the day there, and it snowed the whole time thanks to Hunter’s spell. And for a little while it was easy to stop remembering what I had lost, and focus on what I had gained.
Amelia
The visit to Waterbury was a pleasant distraction. Once we returned to Rosewilde, it was time to focus.
Winter break was two weeks long. The library was open to students during that time, and we spent a lot of it combing the shelves for anything on the subject of pan-dimensional math. There was very little to be had, but two books on divination yielded references to a book on an obscure school of astrology and a collection of essays from the 1930s discussing the various multi-dimensional consequences of Einstein’s research on splitting hydrogen atoms.
I consumed them as quickly as I could during the days, and attempted to teach the boys the principles I understood so far. During the nights, we huddled together in Hunter’s and my room, under the protection of his wards, attempting to reverse-engineer Nathan’s notes. The notes themselves were coded, but the only way to produce his circle exactly was to draft it first. There 106 versions. Figuring out which one he’d used was a process of gradually narrowing it down.
We started with Lucas and Isaac’s recollections. Some of them we eliminated outright just by them looking over the diagrams and pointing out the ones that were wildly different. Anything that was remotely similar was set into a pile of possibles.
From there, the hard part began.
“If we can identify two lines that won’t harmonize,” I explained, “then we can eliminate that circle. Or at least set it aside—if the lines don’t harmonize usually nothing will happen, according to Sinclaire. Sometimes, depending on which lines they are, instead the summoning just misses its target. It would be a little like firing at the side of a barn and missing, and instead killing a mosquito. But it can happen, so we can’t entirely eliminate them.”
At first, I thought we might be on the wrong track entirely. Either that or my math was bad. The first few circles we analyzed didn’t pan out at all—they didn’t seem to be using the right kind of math to begin with, and I began to doubt that Nathan’s diagrams were meant for summoning circles at all. There were eighty out of the whole collection that Lucas or Isaac thought could be the one he ended up using. I went through twenty of them before I came across the first one that seemed like it matched up.
“Look,” I said, pushing my notebook in front of Hunter excitedly. I tapped the equations and pointed to the lines in the circle that matched up. “They’re not all correct. But there are enough that work out that I think… I mean, the chances that he’d do this by accident are pretty slim, right?”
Lucas and Isaac peered over Hunter’s shoulders.
“He was practicing,” Lucas muttered.
“Not enough,” Hunter responded, tracing his fingers over the lines. “So was this the one he used?”
I shook my head. “I don’t… I mean, I can’t say for sure. I don’t really know enough yet. There are maybe ten lines that are at the wrong angles, which means that if they were corrected, others would be wrong. It’s a whole cascading thing; you have to do it exactly right from the first line or it won’t add up. There’s a lot wrong with this one so I don’t think it would have worked. And Nathan sounds like a perfectionist.”
“Two weeks of prying these things apart,” Hunter grunted. “We barely know more than we did to start with.”
“That’s not really true,” I said. I pointed again to the equations. “These things are heinously complex. This wasn’t an accident. I think it’s safe to say that Nathan was at least attempting some sort of summoning magic. What I can’t figure is where he got the information from if it wasn’t Sinclaire.”
“Which I’m not convinced of at all now,” Isaac said. He picked up the notebook and Nathan’s diagram and began to pace, staring at it. “Can you tell what he would have been trying to summon?”
I put my hands up. “No, not even close. This is still way beyond me. Some of the lines are similar to the circle that Sinclaire’s been having me work on—just hypotheticals, I’m not sure it actually leads to anything or if it’s complete—but I’m only just now learning the formulae. I can’t imagine Sinclaire will have me actually summoning anything for… years, probably.”
“Years,” Hunter echoed. “Damn it.”
“If it takes years, it takes years, Hunter,” Lucas chided. “It’s not Amelia’s fault, and it isn’t like Nathan is—”
“You don’t know that,” Hunter growled.
This argument again. I stepped in before it escalated. “Boys, stop. Let’s not go there, please? Look… just because it might be a few years before he lets me summ
on something doesn’t mean I can’t learn more. I’ll see about taking longer classes with him, drill the equations until I can do them blind, and show him that I can learn more, faster.”
“He’ll want to know why,” Isaac said. “Students progressing faster than they ought is somewhat of a theme among many a tragic tale of apprentices going wrong. Even Disney did it.”
I somehow didn’t think Sinclaire was inclined to worry, as long as I didn’t ask to start summoning things before my feet were even wet. Still, he had a good point. “I’ll tell him math is a favorite subject. I wouldn’t be lying, even. Honestly, this may be stupidly complex but… it is more fun than most of my other classes.”
Lucas gave a soft hmph and a small smile. “It would have to be. Don’t overextend yourself. And if you get a chance to take one of his books, take it. We can use Diekstra’s Fidelity to copy it, and run it through Manx’s Verification.”
Hunter shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. The books will be highly restricted, and you can bet Sinclaire will have them under layers of protections. For this kind of subject, some of them could even be dangerous.”
“Fair point,” Lucas sighed.
Isaac looked up from the notebook. “I… could have a solution for that. Still risky, but we can test it first. It’ll take a few months. But one of Professor Maycomb’s manuals included a reference to an alchemically treated fabric used by, well, by thieves. Part of the Mustafa collection. I remember the book. It’s been returned but I can take down the page when I go into the restricted section next.”
“What will that do?” I asked.
He placed the notebook back on the table. “The fabric is typically made into a bag, or even gloves,” he explained. “It’s meant to keep magical protections from triggering. Protections require parameters to be set so that a magician doesn’t ward a book or treasure and then kill themselves trying to handle it. I’d have to read the recipe myself to figure out the best way to employ it, but I recall from a glance that the list of components wasn’t impossible to acquire.”
“Okay…” I bit my lip and sat on the edge of the bed, suddenly nervous. “So, to be clear, we’re talking about stealing a book from the headmaster’s collection. I assume that’s some kind of punishable offense?”
“Minimum,” Lucas admitted, “expulsion from the school.”
“Worst,” Hunter said, throwing a glare at Lucas, “depending on the book and how it’s scheduled, it could be prison.”
I furrowed my brow, confused. “I thought magicians didn’t bother with law enforcement.”
“Magician’s prison,” Isaac clarified. He looked ashen. “It’s… not like a normal prison.”
“It’s an enchantment,” Hunter said. “One that no one has ever broken. Trying to take a book is too much of a risk, we can find another way—Nathan got his information somewhere, we just have to retrace his steps.”
“And if he got it from Sinclaire?” I pressed. “I’m not saying I want to either be expelled or to be under some kind of prison enchantment thing but… We’ve combed the library. Isaac has been through a lot of the restricted section. Either Nathan was doing some kind of extracurricular research outside the Academy, or he was getting his information from Sinclaire.”
Hunter grunted. “Or he figured it out for himself. It’s not beyond possibility.”
“Then we’ll put that on the table,” I said. “But if Sinclaire has a reason to lie about having taken Nathan as a student, I want to know why, and I want to know what Nathan was trying to do as much—or at least, almost as much—as the three of you do. If there’s something going on there, I don’t want to fall into the same trap. So. Isaac—make the fabric when you have a chance. Lucas, you and I can work out some kind of distraction for Sinclaire. And Hunter can be ready to make the copy. If we’re quick, and smart, and we wait for the right time, we should be able to pull it off.”
“Are you quite sure about this?” Isaac asked. “Amelia, we can’t ask you to risk yourself like that.”
I stood and put a hand on his chest. “I know,” I said softly. “And you’re not. You’ve all three said your piece. What I’m saying now is that I want to do this. And besides—breaking the rules is what we’re supposed to do, right?”
Lucas chuckled and shook his head as he leaned in to kiss me. I savored it but noticed Hunter turned his face away. I wished I could get into his head, find out what was really going on in there, but now wasn’t the time. I promised myself it would be soon though, if at all possible. Hell, figuring out what happened to Nathan seemed more likely than figuring out Hunter right now.
“Look who’s gone native,” Isaac sighed once Lucas pulled away. He kissed me as well, and pressed his forehead against mine. “I’ll see about the fabric. But if we can’t figure out how to make it work flawlessly the first time, then the whole plan is off, agreed?”
“Agreed,” Hunter said adamantly.
Lucas nodded and gave me a look that was almost stern. “Agreed. And that’s three of four.”
I dipped my head and put my hands up in mock exasperation. “Fine. I’m always outvoted, seems like. Agreed. But I don’t think it will come to that. I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
Amelia
“I have a very bad feeling about this,” Isaac said, a grueling month and a half later as he laid out two small reams of white fabric that had a silvery sheen to it. “These are the only two we have. One of them is enough to make a bag, or a pair of gloves—but we need to test it first. And it needs to be… rigorous. Whatever Sinclaire uses to protect his books will not be simple.”
After winter break, it was a whole slate of new classes. Sinclaire had doubled down at my request and ‘headache’ became my new sexual orientation. I picked up the fabric and slid it through my fingers. It was like touching air and silence. It was disconcerting. “So that’s what cat’s breath and thievery feels like.”
“Both of which are very difficult to come by,” Isaac said. “So we’ve really only got the one shot. I made three, but had to give one of them to Maycomb. He doesn’t know I made the others.”
“No time like the present,” Hunter said. He shuffled through his books and chose one that looked ancient. “One of mine. Library books are already enchanted. Lucas?”
Lucas took the book and turned it over a few times, then nodded. “Should be doable. Alexandria’s Sacred Treasure is about the most thorough spell I’ve been able to find, and the most powerful—but it’s dangerous if it goes wrong and the fabric doesn’t work. Not fatal, I think, but it’ll put someone in the clinic.”
“I’ll risk it,” I said.
Hunter glowered at me. “Absolutely not. I’ll be the one to test it.”
“I’m not afraid of getting hurt,” I said, though that wasn’t strictly true. I just didn’t want to put any of them at risk. “If I get injured, you three can still use what I’ve been able to work out to reverse engineer Nathan’s ritual. It just makes sense, Hunter.”
“And if you’re injured,” he countered, “someone will want to know why, and since you’re Sinclaire’s student it will be obvious you’re planning on absconding with a magically protected object of some kind. Alexandria’s Sacred Treasure will leave a mark, and any competent healer will be able to figure it out and then they’ll have questions and make the connections almost immediately. At least if I get hurt it doesn’t get connected to Sinclaire, and you can try something else.”
“He does have a point,” Isaac said.
I rolled my eyes. He did have a point. It didn’t mean I had to like it.
“Furthermore,” Hunter pressed, “we need you learning from Sinclaire. If you’re in the clinic, you’re not getting any more information from him. If we discover that Nathan is still out there—however remote the possibility may be—I don’t want to leave him any longer than we have to. Let me test it.”
“I’ll do it,” Isaac said.
Hunter groaned. “This isn’t up for—�
�
“At this point you and Amelia have the most useful knowledge about Nathan’s work,” Isaac said shortly. “And besides that—I made the cloth. If it fails, I should be the one to feel the sting.”
“He’s got you there,” Lucas said.
Hunter opened his mouth to argue but Isaac stared him down and he swallowed it. “Fine,” he grumbled. He couldn’t very well argue the logic after he’d shot me down with the same line of reasoning.
Lucas pursed his lips as he read over a scrap of paper. “I believe we’ve got everything we need. I just need a broad, flat surface to set it up. Clear the floor.”
We pushed all the moveable furniture out of the middle of the room and rolled up the rug to expose the hardwood beneath. Once that was done, Lucas spent an hour drawing a magic circle big enough to hold the book using charcoal from an acacia tree. Various other implements were placed at key points around the circle itself. The spell was thaumaturgic, and advanced—well beyond Lucas’s education at this point—but he had been confident when he found the spell that he could pull it off. “All thaumaturgy is based on the same principles,” he explained. “Advanced examples are really just about juggling more things.”
Once all was ready, we each took seats around the setup. Strictly speaking, our participation wasn’t required, but it meant Lucas could focus on the core elements of the spell while we handled the less critical parts. Lucas began to speak the incantation, something in late Demotic Egyptian, from the era when the library for which the spell was named still stood. It didn’t protect from fire, apparently, but it was very effective against theft.
Isaac, Hunter, and I began our own part of the spell. I had taken the simplest, a chant of only five words repeated twenty-two times while I made the same three tangled hand signs in different orders. The magic in the circle quickly became intense, humming in the air as if excited. In half an hour, it was almost visible as a faint glimmer—spiderwebs visible only when the light struck them just so.