by Cecilia Tan
Kyle sighed and lay back on the bench in the shade of the building. It wasn’t even properly a bench—it was more like the plinth of some long, low statue that had gotten up and walked away, and was high enough that he had to hoist himself up onto it. The doorway of the building was guarded by friezes of gryphons on either side, set into the walls. Maybe there used to be a big one here, Kyle thought. Until it flew away.
“Daydreaming again, Wadsworth?”
He closed his eyes with a sigh of resigned recognition, then dragged himself upright. “Hello, Frost.” The figure approaching looked as pale as ever. He’s not a vampire. I’ve seen him in the sun, Kyle thought, then made a mental note to ask someone whether vampires were real or not.
“I don’t know what your layabout friend has told you, but it really won’t do to wait until fifteen minutes before class to do your homework.” Frost came to a stop a few feet away, his backpack held in one hand by a strap instead of slung over his shoulder. “Master Brandish really won’t stand for slacking in Gladius House.”
Kyle ran his hand through his hair, ignoring the dig at Alex. “I’m not slacking. I’ve been staring at this poem for...for days. But I just don’t know what to say.”
A tiny smile curled Frost’s lip. “But I thought that was your knack, isn’t it? For saying the right thing? Always knowing what to say?”
Kyle stared at him in shock. “Oh God, you’re right. That’s...that’s usually true...”
Frost shook his head very slowly, as if saddened by this revelation and expressing deep sympathy and regret, except for the smirk. “Not much of an aptitude, if you ask me.” He took two steps closer, coming almost all the way up to the plinth so he could lower his voice to say what came next. “Are you sure you’re magical? What if you’re one of those mundanes who just happens to be Sighted?”
“There are Sighted mundanes?” Kyle felt a cold trickle spiral down his spine.
“Of course. Most of them are harmless, or easily misdirected. But, hmm. You’ve seen an awful lot. Not sure you’d be allowed to keep your memories...”
“No!” Kyle jumped down, fists clenched. The book of poems fell with a thud. He could live without being magical, but he couldn’t live without Jess. And he’d forget her if they put him under the Geas.
Frost waved a hand. “Don’t be so dramatic. Pull your grades up and no one will even blink if you don’t demonstrate an aptitude until you absolutely have to declare a major. You can buy yourself two years that way, you know. Now come on, it’s nearly time for class.”
Kyle stood there a moment longer as Frost drifted into the building. He shook himself and picked up the book. One minute he got the feeling Frost hated him and couldn’t wait to see him given the boot; the next like it was just part of some game Frost played.
Just add Frost to the list of baffling things I don’t understand in the magical world.
He went into the classroom. It was a small room with a large wooden table, and blue plastic chairs around it.
Professor Bengle was already there, writing some words on the board. Frost took the seat next to the head of the table, while Kyle took the one closest to the door, the furthest he could get from him. The others filed in as he opened the book to the poem and then his notebook, the page in front of him conspicuously blank. The professor turned to the group and took his seat. He had a graying mane of hair, which really did not fit the clothes he wore, Kyle thought. Today he was wearing a leather jacket and black jeans that looked like they belonged on someone in his twenties, not his...fifties? Kyle could only guess.
A few more students came in and took their seats. Kyle’s stomach roiled. Each one of them had been given a different poem to interpret and present to the class last Thursday. He breathed a small sigh of relief as the professor did as predicted and started the presentations with Frost, then things would just go around the table. Each one them would give their interpretation and then the group would discuss the interpretation, picking it apart, some for, some against. That gave Kyle the space of five people’s presentations to come up with something. He wasn’t out of this game yet, wasn’t on the path to expulsion and the Geas yet.
He stared at the words in front of him and they seemed to almost swim and hover above the page after a while. He wasn’t listening to or absorbing any of the words being spoken at all. It was like being in a trance.
Quite suddenly, the student next to him, an Irish girl named Ciara, poked him in the ribs. “Your turn.”
“Oh.” Kyle looked up. Professor Bengle was smiling at him down the table with a benign and expectant look.
“Well,” Kyle began. “This poem was written by Eliot while he was a student at Veritas, and it was never printed in his other books or anything, even his supposedly ‘complete’ poems. It was published in the literary magazine for Harvard, and he was an editor there, too.” All of this, the other students in the class could have found in the notes in the back of the book, but a few of them were giving him, “oh, how interesting” looks, so he soldiered on.
He looked back at the poem. “Let me recite it.” He cleared his throat and recited the lines, then found himself savoring the moments of silence at the end while the words sank into everyone’s brains. His eyes locked with Frost’s for a moment.
“This poem is about someone who is losing her magic,” Kyle said suddenly.
Surprised looks around the table, and a bushy gray eyebrow raised in interest on Professor Bengle’s face.
“We are constantly using the metaphor of the flower to represent magical power,” Kyle went on. “Like with expressions like ‘late bloomer.’ The almost unspeakable sadness imbued in this poem is entwined with the helplessness of the poet or narrator. There’s nothing he can do. It’s only the very beginning of the waning, but he already foresees the disaster coming. I believe there’s more to this poem, and that only the first two stanzas were put into the mundane magazine, but that probably somewhere in his papers, or maybe only in his head, there was more to this. Perhaps he only printed the first two stanzas because they easily lend themselves to mundane interpretation, and the following stanzas would have been too revealing. Or perhaps he excised them later, as this poignant moment of realization is the best expression of all that is to come.”
The table burst into argument. “You can’t mean that Eliot was referencing the Avestan Prophecy?”
“That’s not the only prophecy that has that kind of thing in it, you know...”
“Magic loss is a common anxiety age after age, and surely Eliot could have drawn on this...”
And on and on. Kyle found he didn’t have to say or defend anything. His eyes met Professor Bengle’s down the table and he was gratified to see an approving nod before the professor argued a point with another student.
When class was over, Kyle wondered what Frost was going to have to say. But Frost just packed up his books and marched out quickly at the end, as if he didn’t even see Kyle standing there by the door.
The professor, however, did. “Well, Kyle, that was a bold stroke today. Nicely done. Have you read much of Eliot’s other poems?”
Kyle had to think. “Um, the Prufrock one, in English class last year. That was before I knew he was magical, though.”
The professor nodded. “You might want to read The Wasteland, as well. Perhaps I’ll assign it to you at the end of the semester for your final paper? Have a look at it anyway, and perhaps it’ll resonate with you as this one did.” He pulled on his leather jacket, then took a pair of dark sunglasses from the pocket. He slipped them on as the class exited the building and walked away without saying another word to Kyle.
Kyle wondered what the hell had just happened, exactly. But even if his sudden insight into the poem had seemed, well, sort of miraculous, he was afraid Frost was right. The ability to interpret a poem probably didn’t stand up to being able to foretell the future. Or even conjure flowers.
* * * *
Kyle dragged himself up the stairs of Gladi
us House, wondering why his bag now seemed to weigh twice as much as usual. He hadn’t slept very well the night before, but being sleepy and feeling like he could barely get his legs up the steps to the front door was something else entirely.
He pulled open the door into the vestibule, and it closed behind him as he was pulling open the inner door. The two doors created some kind of a vacuum and he couldn’t get the inner door to open until the outer door had shut completely. That’s backwards, he thought. It should be the other way around, right? He realized he didn’t know enough about the science of air pressure and buildings to determine if it was that, or if some kind of magic was at work.
He finally pulled the door open enough to get through. The Gladius House doors opened directly into their common room, a high-ceilinged space with a fireplace on either side, tall windows, several bookshelves and chairs and couches scattered around. Above one of the fireplaces was a painting of a ship at sea, being tossed by a dark storm. Kyle had no idea if it was supposed to be a good painting, or if some alumnus of Gladius House had painted it and given a donation large enough for it to be hung.
He sat down by the fire, contemplating the climb up to his room. He was all the way up in what they called the “tower,” though really it was just the cramped, rarely assigned room under the slant of the roof. The disadvantage of barely being able to stand up straight right at the center of the room was outweighed by the fact that he had the room to himself. Just think, you could have been stuck rooming with Frost.
Right now, though, climbing four flights of stairs seemed out of the question. Maybe he was sleepy? Maybe he should just close his eyes for a few moments and nap.
“Wadsworth.”
He started. Callendra Brandish, the master of Gladius House, was standing in front of him, her arms crossed, a piece of her long brown hair loose from her ponytail and hanging down one side of her face.
Had he really fallen asleep? He hadn’t heard her approach. She was dressed as if she were on her way to the faculty club for dinner—a nice dress and pearls—but somehow her raincoat over it all gave her the look of someone in priest’s robes.
“Um, yes, Master Brandish?” His brain did a little flip at calling a woman “master,” as it always did, even if she was as tall as most men. He supposed he would get used to it eventually.
“You don’t look well,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if she were examining a lab specimen.
“Oh, just tired,” Kyle said and got to his feet, as if to prove he could. “I was just...taking a little nap before dinner.”
She looked at her watch. “I think you need to eat as soon as possible. The dining hall doesn’t open for another hour.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s...”
“I know that sounded like a suggestion, Wadsworth, but it wasn’t.” She huffed impatiently, then dug in her purse for something. “Here. Eat this. Now.”
Kyle took what she offered. A protein bar in shiny mylar, one he could get from any convenience store. “Um, thanks, but...”
“That is an order, Wadsworth. I don’t know what kind of hijinks you were up to today, but your energy is badly drained and if you don’t replenish it quickly, the consequences can be quite serious.” She glared until he tore the package open, then seemed to relax some. “If you’re prone to this kind of energy drop, you may want to start carrying some of those bars yourself. They sell them at the drugstore in the Square.”
He took a bite. It was crisped rice with a chocolate coating. The rest of it seemed to be something sort of like wall plaster, but it was surprisingly edible. “Um, thank you. Really. I feel better already.”
Her look said: No, you don’t, but I’m polite enough that I won’t call you on lying to me. This time.“Give it a few minutes, and make sure you don’t skip dinner either.”
“Master, are you also, um, prone to energy drops?”
“No, I just have a tendency to get wrapped up in my work and forget to eat. Then I get cranky. And nobody likes me when I’m cranky.”
“Er, no, of course not. Well, thank you again.”
She nodded to him this time and walked out, the door to the vestibule making a gentle whooshing sound as she pushed it.
Kyle sat back down and finished the rest of the bar. He’d never been much prone to his blood sugar crashing before, but maybe he just hadn’t really paid attention. Maybe he was going through a growth spurt. He hoped not. Having to replace all his pants again would be an expense he couldn’t afford.
He took out his phone and text-messaged his Camella list. “Dinner at Scip in an hour? Starved. Meet me there.”
Then he went upstairs to put his books away.
* * * *
An hour later he had already devoured a bourbon glazed pork loin, made a trip to the salad bar, and was just eyeing the make-your-own ice cream sundae stand when Alex and Jess strolled in together. They waved and got trays, getting food first before making their way over to him.
Jess kissed him on the cheek before settling down next to him. “Howdy, stranger,” she said. “I haven’t seen you all day.”
“Nice to see you, too,” he said. It wasn’t at all unusual for them to go a day or even two without seeing anything of each other. They lived in different houses, they had no classes in common, and Kyle had been admonished already that he was expected to at least eat half his meals in his own dining hall.
What Kyle could not quite figure out was how often Jess expected to see him, or wanted to. She hadn’t come out and said anything, but the way things had gone, they only went on a “date” on Fridays or Saturdays, and they only fooled around if they had had a date. He supposed it made sense; if they didn’t limit themselves somehow, he could see how he could easily be convinced to just stay in bed all the time and only leave to go to class and meals.
When Alex had sat down, too, Kyle let out a long breath. “I need you guys to tell me everything about...about getting expelled or failed or whatever, and the Geas. I still don’t understand what the Geas is.”
Alex and Jess shared a look. Alex spoke first. “Why? I mean, sure, we’ll tell you, but are you worried about something? You look worried, Kyle.”
“Just something Frost said,” he answered, his jaw clenching.
Alex made a dismissive noise. “You know better than to listen to him.”
Jess put a hand on Kyle’s forearm, although she kept eating her salad with the other hand. “The Geas is serious stuff. I mean, getting banished from the magical world, that’s...that’s pretty serious, but you have to take it seriously, too. There was a guy who was banished last year.”
“There was?” Kyle felt a chill go through him.
“Yeah, we didn’t know much about him. He was in Nummus, a grad student, wasn’t he?” Alex frowned as he tried to remember. “Bah. We’re even forgetting him already ourselves. It wasn’t for academic failure, though. He’d breached secrecy somehow, right?”
Jess thought for a moment. “Something like that. Kyle, the thing is, the Geas is a really powerful spell that not only causes the person to forget all about us, but we start to forget them. It’s really like they stop existing. Someone with the power to Judge, that’s what they do. They change the fabric of our reality in some way. The only reason we remember anything at all about him is that we weren’t really involved with him. The closer your connections to the person, the more quickly the forgetting reaches you. Only the Judges themselves remember.”
Kyle wished he had gotten some more food before they had sat down. He settled for stealing cherry tomatoes out of Jess’s salad. “So how does it work? I mean, is there a trial or something? And then they, what, wave a wand over you?”
Alex gave Jess a look, deferring to her. “It only takes one Judge to do it, but usually they get three together before making a decision,” she said. “It’s not like a normal court, though. The whole jury idea becomes useless when they can tell magically whether you are lying or not. It’s not done in public, either. Just the accused,
the accuser if there is one, and one to three judges.”
Kyle shivered. “Do people know who the Judges are? Or is that a secret, too?”
Alex rolled his eyes. “If people didn’t know who the Judges were, they couldn’t accuse, could they? The main Judge for Veritas, of course is dean of the college, Dunster himself.”
Jess snorted. “If he’d even deign to come down out of his ivory tower.”
Kyle interrupted them. “You mean Quilian Bell isn’t the dean?”
“Assistant dean,” Alex said, his voice sharp with derision. “He runs everything because Dunster is supposedly in meditation most of the time. Handy that Bell’s a Judge, too, so Dunster really never has to dirty his hands.”
“Yeah. People see him maybe twice a year. Convocation and Commencement.” She giggled. “Maybe he’s a zombie.”
Kyle’s eyes were wide. “Are zombies real?”
Alex snorted. “No, they’re not. Someone here’s been watching too many bad movies lately.”
“Sorry,” Jess said with a last laugh behind her hand. “But seriously, how old is Dunster? Who was dean before him?”
Alex shrugged. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“But I do.” Kyle pushed his tray back. “About the Geas, I mean. So seriously all it would take is for some pissant like Frost to go to Bell and say ‘Wadsworth’s worthless and broke secrecy’ and Bell could just zap me, like that?”
“Hey, hey, that’s not what we said,” Alex said, at the same time Jess said, “Oh, Kyle, it’s not like that.”
She continued. “You forget, the Judge wouldn’t just be taking Frost’s or whoever’s word for it. They’d be able to test if he was lying. And bringing false accusation is nearly as bad a crime as breaking secrecy.”
Alex stabbed at his pork loin. “Did Frost accuse you of something?”