by S. W. Clarke
Her lips folded. “Temporary on both counts, but yes. I could not see one of my own students suffer such things.”
“Aidan said it was ghost madness. Was it ghosts?”
“If you never enter, you’ll never need to know.” She gestured for me to stand. “Excuse me, but I have a meeting.”
Umbra had always made a point of never forbidding me to do anything, and now here she was specifically asking me not to enter the vaults. Which made me wonder: Was she testing me again?
I didn’t move. “And the guardians’ missions?”
“Will go on when classes resume,” Umbra said, returning her glasses to her face. “Be patient in the interim, child, and do your best to live your life as it exists before your nose.”
As I came out of Umbra’s office and stepped into the winter morning, I wondered if she’d lived so long she had lost any sense of urgency she should properly feel. If the Shade returned, it would mean a second Battle of the Ages. It would mean—
“Cole!” An arm fell over my shoulders, pulling me close to a large fae body. Elijah or Isaiah—I couldn’t tell which. “Quit scowling and come with me. Isaiah and I have a bet going on.”
“And that’s got something to do with me?” I asked as he began walking me bodily down the path toward the meadow.
“Absolutely it does. You’re a fire witch.”
“Does this bet involve a stake and burning a particular someone alive?”
He snorted. “Always so cynical.”
“And I’m not just a tiny bit justified? You know, being the last witch and all.”
He flicked a hand like he was swatting a bug away. “Listen, you have to win. I’ve got good money on this.”
“I don’t even know what I—” I stopped as we came into the meadow to laughter, cheers, practically half the student body standing alongside and clapping as three students raced through the knee-deep snow, decimating it as they went along.
One was a fire mage, flame shooting out of both hands ahead of him as he ran. The second was a fae who blew the snow aside with a wall of wind rushing ahead of her. The third was an earth mage who simply tore the earth up in his path, shaking the snow off.
Or, at least, that’s what they would have been doing if they weren’t absolute shit. Mostly they stumbled, fell, climbed back up and shot out magic in bursts.
“That’s the first-years,” Elijah or Isaiah said, laughter breaking into his words. “They really suck, huh?”
“What the hell are they trying to do?”
“Race,” he said. “They’re trying to race, Clementine.”
I rolled my eyes, turned my face up to Elijah. “If you’re about to ask me to take part in this…”
“Too late.” He nodded toward a group of fourth-years near the end of the crowd. “I already signed you up. That’s your competition.”
I punched him in the arm, which he didn’t seem to notice. “Why didn’t you sign yourself up?”
He shrugged, walking me toward the group. “Because, Clementine, nobody would bet money on me.”
“Come on. You’re a fifth-year guardian.”
“And everybody would bet on you,” he went on as though I hadn’t spoken. “Because you’re not just a witch. You’re a fire witch. You’re the last one of all. That makes you spooky and badass.”
I stopped, and he turned to face me, his back to the crowd. “Is this because I’ve stopped eating my meals in the dining hall?”
“It absolutely is,” he said. “And because you wear that scowl like it’s your favorite shirt. And because all I ever see you doing is sitting hunched over a book in the library or practicing with Umbra or staring into space like you’re trying to solve differential math.”
I paused. Then, “I scowl all the time?”
His head tilted. “We have a secret nickname for you. Grimace.”
“Oh god,” I said. “You and your twin?”
“And all of House Whisper.”
“Oh,” I said. “God. It’s so dumb yet effective.”
“Yeah.”
I nodded, began removing my winter gloves one finger at a time. “All right. Step aside, I have a reputation to uphold.”
After the race through the meadow, in which I proved to the academy exactly why witches had been systematically killed throughout history—pure, green-eyed jealousy on everyone else’s part—I began, slowly and then all at once, to unwind.
The twins were right. Umbra was right. Damn, were they right.
For the next month, I put aside the books, the obsessive training, the late nights spent staring at the ceiling in bed. I allowed myself to be. To wake up late, wander to the dining hall for cereal, to accept Red the fae’s not-so-subtle offer to try “the good stuff” in the woods one afternoon.
“Man,” I said, gazing through lidded eyes into the canopy and passing him the blunt, “so that’s why they call it the Contemplator’s Copse.”
He burst into laughter, then coughing. And then I did, too.
Sometimes I tried and failed not to think about the blade, the Rathmores, the Shade. Sometimes I succeeded. It was strange from this vantage to be so single-minded; my whole life from the age of thirteen onward had been a top spinning haphazardly, always threatening to fall off its point. I had never been motivated in school or anything, really.
But since arriving at Shadow’s End, I could see my life and purpose through a space the size of a pinhole. It was that simple and that complex.
“Wow,” Red said, passing me the joint, “that’s one epic analogy, Cole. Why was I so scared of you our first year?”
“You were scared of me?” I glanced over as I took a draw. “But you shared your book with me in Milonakis’s class.”
“Yeah, because I was scared of you.”
“Oh.” I nodded slowly, eyes returning to the canopy. “Are you still scared of me?”
“Nah. Not when you’re like this.”
“Aren’t I always like this?”
“Nah,” he said, and wouldn’t say more on the subject. And because I was so lazy and high, I didn’t push it. But the conversation didn’t leave my brain, either.
And what had been a week of absolute relaxation shifted into something else. I hated my brain.
“Eva,” I said over my bowl of fruity loops in the dining hall the next day, “am I scary?”
She squinted at me. “A little bit, when you stare at me with those bloodshot eyes.”
I made a face. “I’m gazing lovingly. When we’re on missions, am I scary?”
“Clem…”
“You cannot offend me.” I took a bite of cereal and said around it, “But you can betray our immortal friendship bond if you don’t tell me the truth.”
“Sometimes, maybe.”
“Like when?”
“Like when you nearly hurt Maise in Acapulco.”
“Oh.” My eyes lowered to the safe, non-threatening fruity loops floating in their milk. “Any other times?”
“On that lake in Siberia,” she said, her voice lowering. “When you burst into flames.”
My eyebrows rose as my gaze flicked up to her. “Anything else?”
She stopped cutting her omelet. “Why are you asking me this?”
I dragged the spoon along the bottom of the bowl to hear its off-key noise. “I scared myself when I nearly hurt Aidan a few summers ago.” I paused. “And there were times before the academy. Back when I was in the group home.”
Eva tilted her head to meet my eyes. “Your mom and sister disappeared, Clem. You were orphaned. You’ve been hurt.”
But she still thinks I’m scary.
The doors to the dining hall flew open in a burst of flurries, and Torsten and a few other earth mages strutted in, yelling about their New Year’s Eve party. And Eva and I both turned that way, forgot about our conversation. As I did, I pushed back down all the things I was thinking about the Spitfire, about how I scared myself, about who or what I was.
I pushed it down. I l
aughed with Eva and pushed it all down.
If it wasn’t the Shade, the Backbiter, the Rathmores, then it would be Torsten’s party. If it wasn’t Torsten’s party—which I stumbled out of at four in the morning on the first day of the new year—then it was the blackout that would follow. It was the hangover of the next morning, which I nursed all throughout the day.
And it was near the end of winter break, when reality would return, I realized the top had never stopped spinning. I had never stopped. I had always been the spinning top at the academy, too, weaving uncertainly, making large circles, fixating on whatever could distract me from myself.
“I’m the top,” I said to Eva in our dorm the night before classes would start again.
She didn’t look up from her stitching. She had worked on tangibly manipulating her whatever-it-was every day this winter break, and it had the appearance now of a large olive-green blanket. “Are you high again?”
“No. Maybe.” I squinted, trying to recall when I’d last seen Red. “No.”
Her needle and thread kept moving. “So what does that mean, ‘you’re the top?’”
I twirled my finger in the air. “My whole life, I’m the thing that does this.” Twirl-twirl. “And do you know what spun tops eventually do?”
She paused in her stitching, sighed as she met my eyes. “You’re not the top.”
“Eva, when you deny my reality, I don’t feel validated.”
She glared at the psychology book on my desk, then at me. “And how do you know your reality is real when you’re reading psych books while high?”
I set a hand to my chest. “I’m just trying to understand the inner workings of my mind, okay?” Then cringed a little; my voice sounded like fourteen-year-old Clem.
“Maybe you should focus on the inner workings of someone else’s mind for a change.” The needle glinted as she resumed. When I stood, looking more affronted than I felt, and put on my boots and cloak, she said, “Clem.”
“What?” I said as I made for the door.
“You’re not the top.”
I closed the door and stepped into the cold night, staring across the clearing. Down below, someone was leaving the library.
But the library was closed.
And then, with glee, my mind shifted over to the next distraction. Away from the top, away from myself and who or what I was.
I came down the steps, intercepted him before he could escape with his secrets. And when I lit a flame in my hand, I said, “Aidan?” Then my eyes lowered to the stack of books under his arm.
He sighed, stopped. “Hey.”
My head tilted. “How’d you get into the library?”
“Saoirse.”
“Huh. Boyfriend perks.” I stepped closer, examining the books. “Those look old.”
He shifted them away from the light. “That’s because they are.”
I moved unashamedly closer. “Really old. Like Room-of-the-Ancients old.”
“Gods, you are the worst.” He pushed past me, heading toward his dorm. “I’m doing this for you, you know,” he whisper-hissed back at me as he disappeared into the darkness muttering about ingratitude.
I watched him go. Maybe Eva was right: if I’d been focusing on the inner workings of someone else’s mind, I might have figured out what my two friends had been up to since the school year began.
As it was, I still had no idea.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
After winter break, the guardians began running more missions. Lots of them. And I sank back into them like a hot tub on a freezing day. Forget the top, the angst, the two nights I’d locked myself away in our dorm’s bathroom while my chest got tight and I couldn’t get enough air and saw stars until the panic passed.
Forget all that. The fire witch was back, baby.
At one point I asked Umbra why she was allowing me to go on so many missions, given I was a wanted witch. And she told me, in a moment of rare and vulnerable honesty, that the academy’s guardians couldn’t succeed without me. She—they—needed me.
I let that be enough.
In the new year, the Guardians’ Council began working with us. Umbra fed them what information we’d already gathered, and they often coordinated with us when we went to Edinburgh.
I never actually saw one of them after Nissa came to us that winter morning—everything was done through Umbra—but she would give instructions before our missions. Things like: Enter through this door, which will be left open, or, Arrive to this cafe at three o’clock, where you’ll find a council member’s coat hanging on the rack.
Our goal was learning Rathmore’s schedule. His plans. When he’d be most vulnerable, and from there, choosing the right moment to capture him.
It didn’t matter anymore that Liara and I had been seen in Edinburgh; our work mattered more. She wore a good disguise, and I enshrouded myself every time I entered the city. I was there to do my job, but I was also there for another reason: to gather intelligence about the blade. About where I’d find it.
On our missions, we had the winter to our advantage. Jackets, hoods, people’s faces angled down to fend off the wind and cold. As December drew on to Christmas, Umbra began more regularly to siphon us into two teams:
Infiltration, and sabotage.
The fae and I excelled at infiltration. They could find their way to rooftops, stare into windows, keep tabs on people’s movement. And though I couldn’t fly, I could go unseen like I had to enter the Mages’ Council building. And so with their direction, I followed council members and their staff to meetings all over the city.
It was in this way we found out where Rathmore’s spymaster was sending his scouts to look for Maeve Umbra. They had entirely the wrong countries: Austria, Poland, even Russia. And it was in this way we discovered that Rathmore frequently returned to his home in Inverness, at least once a month.
And then there was sabotage. The humans—Maise, Akelan, Mishka, Paxton—were good at that. They’d slip into a crowd of tourists and start a street fight on the same road a councilor’s car was passing down, forcing them to be late or miss their engagements. They once even managed to send the Mages’ Council building into lockdown again, ruining the council’s meeting.
The goal was disarray in all the right places. It was inefficiency. It was slowing down the formalists’ engine where it counted.
As it turned out, Rathmore was rarely vulnerable. And learning his schedule and plans wasn’t nearly as simple as I’d thought. If he didn’t have that veiled bodyguard at his side, then it was another—sometimes two or three.
And so we had to be patient. While we were being patient, we had to be careful. The formalists weren’t idiots; they knew the Guardians’ Council was interfering, and probably the academy, too.
So they increased security. Tightened ranks. Changed up their schedules. And Rathmore began taking more trips to Inverness to get away from the headache. Which was perfect.
Every time Loki and I entered Edinburgh—which must have been at least two dozen occasions by March—we made a little progress in my search for the blade. We entered almost every close on the map Aidan and I had marked off last fall, that hint at top of mind every time: where power and pleasure cross. We didn’t encounter ghosts. We didn’t encounter power. And we definitely didn’t encounter pleasure.
Maybe I was just part of a prophecy, destined to find it. That certainly hadn’t left my mind since Umbra had said it. So could I find it just a little bit faster, please?
The underground closes were creepy, dark, damp. They were tight and sometimes they were completely blocked off, so I had to use a little fire magic to create an entrance both of us could climb through. In three months, I pressed, crawled, and groaned my way into every nook, every room, every alley I could find. More often than not I ended up covered in spiderwebs and dirt and smelling strange, but the weapon never glowed green when I held it out before me. It remained inert, dull.
I began to wonder if maybe I didn’t need the blad
e, if capturing Rathmore was the answer to our Shade problems. I might have been fantasizing, but after so much searching, I could hardly tell the difference.
I just wanted to be done. Nabbing Rathmore felt like less of a task than finding the cross between power and pleasure.
So by the time mid-March came and Eva struck gold by crouching on a window ledge outside the window of Rathmore’s assistant’s flat—the fae was on the phone, talking about his boss being in Inverness for the whole weekend—one thing had become clear:
That weekend in Inverness was our best chance at capturing William Rathmore.
Nissa Whitewillow returned to the academy for the second time on a Friday in late March, and this time she brought her husband, Florian. Eva had never told me as much, but it became clear to me when they told us the Guardians’ Council had assigned the two of them as co-leaders that Nissa and Florian Whitewillow were among the highest-ranking guardians in Europe.
At least, they were the most trusted, and as we all congregated in the guardians’ meeting room, I quickly realized they were probably the most capable, too.
Together, the academy guardians and the Whitewillows planned out our course of action, the two of them nodding as we explained our specialties—infiltration or sabotage—and what each of us were capable of. My enshroudment, Keene’s uncanny abilities with electronics (which was news to me), Liara’s lightning, Loki’s nose. And within an hour, they had drawn up roles, positioning, timing, contingency plans. Florian had scouted the Inverness home, had drawn up a layout for us on the board. He pointed to Rathmore’s bedroom on the second floor. “But this is where he should be.”
I was, once again, a chaser. Well, minus Noir. With my enshroudment, I had free reign to keep tabs on everything and everyone, and I needed to stay close to it all. “We’ll need you,” Nissa said, “to keep us abreast at all times. And to make the call on contingencies.”
“But what if she’s seen?” Mishka said. “What if she drops the enshroudment?”
“I won’t drop the enshroudment,” I said.
“Are you certain?” Nissa asked.