Good Witches Don't Lie (Academy of Shadowed Magic Book 1)

by S. W. Clarke

  “Muck-dweller?” I rubbed a hand over my mouth to brush away the dirt from my fall. “You’re living in a cave.”

  The boggan tittered from the darkness. “I should know, then.”

  He was completely unoffended, which was bad for me. I was hoping I’d be able to taunt him into rushing me, but he wasn’t going for it. When his laughing died away, I was left in silence again.

  Nothing moved except for the flickering flame, the rippling water, the breeze through my hair.

  My eyes flicked to the small flame. To the pool and its rippling water. To the ground under me.

  This was supposed to be my sorting into a house, a test of instinct. Earth, air, fire, and water were all represented here. That wasn’t by coincidence.

  But which one should I reach for?

  Trust myself, Umbra had told me. But nothing inside me reached out toward any of the elements. Eva had felt certain I would be sorted into Whisper. Witches typically relied on air magic, she’d said.

  So air it would be.

  I stood ready, fists clenched, feeling the breeze through my hair. This time he wouldn’t ambush me—nobody got me twice in the same way.

  And that was true…sort of.

  A screech sounded from above me. I raised my eyes just in time to spot the boggan drop from above. It landed bodily atop me, tackling me straight to the ground, my arms sprawling out and slapping the stone. I just barely managed to keep my head from slamming into the ground.

  With a hiss, the boggan’s nails sliced across my chest, ripping through my jacket and piercing skin. It happened that fast, and I didn’t feel it in the half-second that followed.

  Then, surging past the adrenaline, real pain gripped me. Staggering, iron-hot pain.

  I already knew I was bleeding.

  A scream tore out of my throat, and I felt myself bucking under the boggan’s weight. My fists went out, knuckles searching for anything. Instead, they found only emptiness.

  So much for air magic.

  But I kept throwing punches anyway—anything to avoid those daggers he called fingernails.

  A moment later, the boggan’s weight disappeared. I was left alone on my back, pain ricocheting around my body. My back hurt, my legs, my chest, but most of all, my confidence was gone.

  I knew I’d chosen wrong.

  “The witch has wasted her second chance,” it said in an exhale. “Disappointing indeed.”

  I had gone feral during that second ambush. I’d done exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t do.

  But the thing had dropped from the ceiling. I hadn’t expected that. And not the wound it had given me, either.

  My hand went to my chest, feeling at the ripped jacket and shirt. Beneath, wetness. Warm blood.

  My blood.

  And Umbra hadn’t come to stop it. She hadn’t intervened.

  I lay there, staring up into the darkness, breathing fast. An icy recognition seeped through me: what if killing me hadn’t been an empty threat? What if the boggan had meant it?

  And what if I had to rely completely on myself?

  You’ve done it in the past, Clem, a small voice said. Remember?

  I had done it in the past. With the boy who had swung Loki by his tail. With the one who’d pulled my hair. With Maury, my former boss.

  Every time, I’d let the Spitfire have her way.

  I turned my face toward the fire, the only light source in the room. And there, deep in the white center of it, I saw myself reflected back.

  I saw my face exactly as it must appear when the Spitfire consumed me.

  Angry. Vengeful. Ferocious.

  And that should have scared me. But it only captivated me. Here was my best chance at surviving.

  Yes, a small voice said inside my head. It has always been fire.

  My fingers unclenched, my arm sliding across the stone, seeking out my own reflection.

  As soon as I came close, the boggan let out a tremendous hiss. “A witch claims the flame.” It came bursting from the darkness, face crazed like it had never been before. “A witch claims it. It claims the flame.”

  The boggan ran straight at me. It wasn’t playing games. It wasn’t trying to sort me into a house.

  It was running at me to kill me where I lay.

  This wasn’t part of the fight.

  This was something else entirely.

  My lips curled into a snarl, and I rolled over, swinging my legs around to bring me to a crouch. My arm swung out, fingers passing through the flame in the same moment the boggan crashed atop me, sending us both straight into the pool.

  Arctic water hit me with the same suddenness as the boggan itself, enclosing me in a second.

  I screamed, but nothing came out but air bubbles as the thing thrashed above me, pressing me toward the unknown bottom of the pool.

  And yet, and yet—

  I caught a glimpse of my own right hand. It was lit with flame. Somehow the flame hadn’t been snuffed by the water.

  Trust myself, Umbra had said. Well, this was the only moment I had.

  And so I gripped the boggan with both arms, driving my right hand and the flames into its arm. Even in the chaos I felt my fingers piercing skin, muscle, sinew, burning right through the thing’s haggard limb.

  But we kept sinking. It kept pushing, pushing me down, refusing to be beaten even with a hole in its arm.

  I’d screamed away all my air, and I began to lose my sense of the world. The flame had gone out, and I wasn’t sure if that was because we had sunk so far, or because I was losing consciousness. I only knew we were enclosed in darkness.

  Until, in a flash of luminescent brilliance, a light appeared above the water. And in the center of it stood Maeve Umbra.

  A surge of air bubbled into the pool, buoying the water around me. The air bubbles encircled me, pressing both boggan and human toward the surface. Hard as the creature tried to thrust me back down, the pockets of air rose with unstoppable urgency, bringing us up with them.

  We breached the water in a violent surge, the boggan screeching as we separated and were thrown to the cave floor.

  I landed gasping, half on my stomach and soaking. My head lifted without my realizing, and I only knew I was coughing up water in a distant sort of way. Mostly my ears were filled with the sound of the boggan’s hissing.

  “The witch claimed the flame,” it cried again and again, nails scrabbling over the stone on the other side of the cavern.

  Something gripped my arm. I lifted my face to find Umbra staring down at me, her face unreadable. “Get up. Quickly.”

  She half-pulled me up as my boots slid across the rock, trying to find purchase. Finally I staggered upright and found Umbra’s staff pointed across the room as she guided me out. The lit end of it illuminated the boggan, who seemed plastered to one wall of the cavern, buffeted back and screaming all the while.

  I glimpsed his arm, the blackened and cauterized wound. I had done that.

  My hand lifted as Umbra backed me down the tunnel, keeping herself between me and the boggan. The staff pointed back the way we’d come, a talisman against his assault.

  The fire was gone from the fingers of my right hand. And the light in the cave wasn’t good, but I sensed my fingers didn’t have single mark on them. They didn’t even hurt.

  She kept backing us up amidst the boggan’s screaming, one hand out to keep me behind her, the other holding the staff before her. Soon sunlight met with Umbra’s light, and I turned to find we were nearly at the cave’s entrance.

  We came into the half-light of the forest, and though the canopy was as thick as ever, it felt like we stood under the direct sun. I finally allowed myself to breathe, staring into the open world.

  I knew that cave would inhabit my dreams—the ones I remembered, and the ones I didn’t remember.

  It was a nightmare in the making.

  A powerful wind kicked up, and I turned back toward the cave’s mouth to find Umbra standing before it, her gray hair whipping arou
nd her head as her arms rose, staff in one hand.

  A wind tunnel had formed around us, as though the cave itself was drawing in a vortex of air. It drowned out the boggan, the sounds of nature, even my own thoughts.

  In the center of it, Umbra turned toward me. She stared at me, nodding once. “We must leave the boggan be. Lead, child.”

  For once, I didn’t have a response except to face the way we’d come by, my boots squelching as I took the lead back toward the campus. The wind blew my hair straight back from my head as we walked, rushing back toward the cave in a heavy current.

  I walked in a blur of shock, and I knew it. My brain didn’t—or maybe couldn’t—process what had happened. Not yet. I only knew I felt oddly fine, even tired. That was the adrenaline wearing off.

  A sad truth: I had been in enough fights to know these things.

  The farther we got, the more Umbra’s wind died down, until finally, nearing the academy grounds, she came up alongside me. Her staff no longer glowed, and she pegged it into the dirt with every step, a regular walking staff again.

  “Clementine,” she began.

  I kept my mouth shut, my pace regular, my eyes ahead. It was on her to explain.

  “I know that must have been very difficult for you.”

  I half-turned my face, eyebrow rising. “Difficult?”

  “Harrowing,” she offered. “The boggan should not have reacted so.”

  One hand came up to my shredded jacket and shirt. I glanced down at my bloody chest, now just a mass of red. “It tried to kill me.”

  “You shall go straight to the infirmary. The fae nurses are powerful healers.”

  I felt almost offended. After everything, I felt as though Umbra and I had watched two different scenes play out. In my scene, I’d been attacked and nearly drowned. In hers, I’d taken a wound and needed to go to the infirmary.

  She drew in a deep breath. “Tonight, you will join House Spark.”

  Now I stopped. All I wanted was for those fae nurses to magic away my pain, but in a strange way, this hurt worse. “I need to know why the boggan reacted the way it did. I need to know what the hell just happened.”

  Umbra stopped, slowly turned. She gazed at me with a strange mixture of grimness and…was that trepidation? “The boggan has sorted our students into their houses since the academy was formed. It is a creature as ancient as time, and I know you will be reluctant to believe this, but it has been a staunch ally in our fight against the darkness.”

  I set my jaw, waiting. The implications of what she was saying floated to mind, but I needed to hear more. She owed me this.

  And Umbra wasn’t oblivious. She knew what I wanted. “In the past, witches were almost universally sorted into House Whisper. Air is their element, the source of their power. Very, very few have chosen the flame.”

  I kept my face severe, waiting for the blow I sensed she was building up to. My hand tingled with the memory of the fire.

  Even now, I wanted it.

  “And?” I said.

  Umbra’s lips opened, and her violet eyes—once bright and lovely, I imagined, in her youth—fixed on me with a kind of devastating sadness. “No witch who ever joined House Spark was able to resist the power of flame. It corrupted them, one and all.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Umbra and I stood staring at one another. When she didn’t make a move to speak, or to do anything at all, I realized she was waiting for me.

  “What does this mean, then?” I said.

  “It means you will join House Spark.”

  I cast my eyes around the forest, taking in the very real scene around us. Trees, bushes, grass—all as they had been before, and yet everything was different.

  I had reached for the flame.

  When my eyes fell on her, I felt vulnerable in a way I never had. “If every witch who joins Spark is corrupted, then…”

  “Historically,” Umbra said. “But you aren’t yet part of history, are you, Clementine?”

  I rubbed the fingers of my right hand against the palm, the memory of the fire tickling my skin. “You made it sound like an inevitability.”

  “Nothing is inevitable.” Umbra’s head tilted a degree. “But some things bear a higher likelihood.”

  A particular anger I hadn’t realized had been building inside me now brushed up against my insides, asking to be voiced. “You think I’m like the others.”

  “No,” she whispered. “I have no reason to.”

  “You have every reason to. The night you found me, I’d beaten up my boss and quit my job.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Is that so? Why would you do such a thing?”

  The memory made my skin itch with anxiety. “He tried to touch me.”

  Her eyes softened on me; she understood immediately. She stepped forward. “I don’t condone violence, but I also don’t think less of you for turning to it in that situation, child.”

  I stared at her with hard eyes. I knew—I knew—she believed I’d turn out like the other witches.

  “You must be in pain,” she said, eyes flicking to the wound on my chest. “Walk with me.”

  I was. But not just the physical kind.

  Except I remained rooted to the spot, a concoction of shame and anger swirling inside me. I couldn’t justify or explain away my quickness to fight, to lash out. No—not now that I was to be a witch of House Spark.

  When I didn’t move, Umbra slowly raised one hand, the fingers separated in a peacemaking way. She brought it down with gingerness as though testing a feral cat, her palm settling on my shoulder.

  “Clementine,” she said, staring into my eyes. “If I had believed you were destined to fall to darkness, I would not have allowed you to leave that cave. I would have let you sink.”

  I swallowed, forcing myself to keep my eyes on hers.

  “But I do not believe that,” she went on. “Your life is in your hands. Your choices lie with you. You reached for the flame, and it responded. No one can fault you for that.”

  I wanted her hand off me, and I wanted it to stay.

  I wanted her to leave, and I wanted her to say more.

  I didn’t know what I wanted.

  And so I did what I was best at: I stepped aside and around her. “I know how to get to the infirmary.”

  She began walking after me. “I would expect no less. Aiden North is a fine guide.”

  I half-glanced over my shoulder as we came onto the school grounds, where it was still only midday. Other students had spotted us. “I’d prefer to go alone.”

  “And you shall,” she said. “If I set one foot in the infirmary, the fae nurses will insist again on my wisdom teeth being removed, and I see no reason why I should have more teeth extracted when old age takes them from you anyway.”

  So that was it. Just as I made to leave her behind, Umbra called out my name.

  I turned.

  She stood with the eminent grace of a powerful wizard, a headmistress. “Please come to the dining hall tomorrow evening. Induction into your house is one of the hallmarks of study at the academy.”

  I managed a forced smile back at her, but I didn’t answer in words. Instead, I turned back around and walked in a straight, determined line away.

  Screw that.

  It’s the moments you’re angriest with yourself that you set your anger on anyone—everyone—else’s shoulders. Umbra had brought me to the boggan. She must have suspected all along I would reach for the flame, but she hadn’t warned me. She had nearly let me drown.

  And yet Umbra had no control over how I felt; only I did. I knew as much, but it felt good.

  It felt good to walk away from her.

  Right then, I was convinced she deserved it.

  When I came into the infirmary, I pushed the door a little (okay, a lot) too hard; it slammed against the oaken wall. One of the fae nurses in attendance fluttered a foot into the air, letting out a small cry.

  “Gods,” she said when she saw me. “What’s happened to you
?”

  I closed my eyes, slowly sighing. “I was sorted into my house.”

  “The boggan’s done that?” Her perfect face became a mask of confusion. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. Come, come.”

  And it felt good to let her lead me over to one of four beds inside the infirmary. I allowed her to sit me down and do whatever she liked.

  “Oh,” she said, eyeing the wound on my chest. “This isn’t terribly deep. The pain must be quite intense, though.”

  She said other things, instructing me to do this and that, move here and there.

  I just nodded. And nodded. And nodded.

  Umbra hadn’t been lying: that fae nurse had me fixed up almost as soon as she’d gotten my shirt off, no stitches or sutures involved.

  Instead, she had me lay down and set her palm to the wound. What felt like the carbonate in a soda began fizzing under my skin, and after a few minutes, her cherubic face smiled down at me.

  “All done. When you’re up to it, you should head back to your dorm for some rest.”

  I blinked up at her. “That’s it?”

  “Oh!” She shook her head. “Of course, of course.” She left and returned with a clinking cup of tea on a small platter. It was complemented with a single cookie. “Forgive my lack of manners. This will help you regain your energy.”

  I opened the door of my dorm room to find Eva seated at her desk, facing away from me. One hand strayed over her face in an unconscious way.

  When the door open, she spun with wide eyes. I knew I’d caught her in the middle of something she didn’t want to be seen doing.

  Truth was, I didn’t even care to pry. She could keep her secrets.

  She pushed her chair back, stood up. “Clem?”

  “The one and only.” I slung my satchel on the floor by my bed and started pulling off wet clothes. I needed to wash my body off—stat.

  Loki rose from my bed, stretching his spine in a high curve. “You look terrible.”

  “Thanks for letting me know.” I kicked off my shoes, yanked off my sodden socks, and grabbed my towel. At least my chest wound was gone, but my body was left aching in a bone-deep way.