by S. W. Clarke
She said what I’d felt from the moment I’d started posting: how easy it felt, how instinctual to rise when the horse’s steps would have jarred her spine against me.
Too easy. Too natural.
I’d never ridden before, but it felt like I had. The mare’s breathing filled my ears, the clopping of her hooves on the dirt, the swish of her tail against the fenceline and her own legs.
When the fifteen minutes were up, the quartermistress clicked her tongue, and Siren fell into a walk toward the center of the paddock, the leadline going slack.
She set one hand to the horse’s face, rubbing there. “You did well,” she said up to me.
I managed a small smile back. “I’m sure you say that to everyone on their first day.”
The quartermistress squinted up at me. “No. Not at all.”
We brought Siren back, and I dismounted in her stall just as the other students began filtering into the barn. All humans, since the fae didn’t need to ride.
And every one of them eyed me like I smelled. Which I did, but I knew it wasn’t because I smelled like manure and horse.
It was because I was the witch.
What else could I do? I ignored them.
The quartermistress was quickly occupied as each student took their horse and began leading them one at a time out into the larger training ring.
Which left me alone in the barn with the black stallion.
Noir.
I was about to leave when he rumbled in his stall.
I stopped, turned. His head appeared, swinging over the half-door. Those black eyes regarded me with the same curiosity as the first time we’d met.
When I grabbed up the bag of oats and approached him, I knew I shouldn’t. I also knew I shouldn’t click my tongue at him as the quartermistress had done to Siren.
But I did. And when I did, Noir’s ears perked toward me. His nostrils flared.
“Hey”—I reached into the bag of oats—“you want a snack?”
He swung his head up and down, up and down. No better indicator of yes.
“The deal is,” I said as I stepped closer, “you don’t try to eat my hand with the oats.”
And that was how I ended up pressing my flat palm to Noir’s mouth. His lips tickled my hand as he ate the oats off, and a small, unspoken belief delivered itself into my subconscious.
Even wild creatures could still form bonds.
I should know—I had been one in the past.
When I left the stables, I didn’t have time to shower or change. I had to meet with Eva in the meadow for our one-on-one combat training.
She had promised me, and last night I’d held her to it.
For some reason, as I came into the meadow and found her standing there waving back at me, I decided not to tell her about the black horse. I’d always been private, and this was something I wanted to keep to myself. For now, at least.
But there was something else about it, too. Something deeper.
It felt like something she would disapprove of. That the quartermistress would disapprove of. And I didn’t need more disapproval from anyone at the academy.
I high-stepped through the tall grass up to Eva. “I know, I know—I’m late. I have a good reason.”
She raised one purple eyebrow. “Do you, though?”
Man, she already had me pegged. “Sort of.”
“All right, tell me.”
She was being a lot harsher than she had been yesterday. “Is it that big a deal why I’m late? I was at the stables.”
As I reached her, one of her fingers stabbed out, pressed into the lapel of my blazer. “It’s a weakness, you know.”
A thread of annoyance filtered through me as I stepped back from her touch. “What is?”
“The act. It’s a weakness.”
“What act?”
She lowered her chin, her wide eyes fixing on mine with severity I hadn’t known she possessed. “I’m Clementine Cole, the witch. I’ve got a chip on my shoulder the size of a small house.”
My anger flickered to life. “Seriously? I—”
She pitched forward, her wings flicking hard to send her straight into me. She landed atop me in the grass, both legs straddling my middle. “Seriously.”
I coughed, the wind very nearly pushed out of me. “What the hell, Eva?” And here I’d thought she shat rainbows and dreamt of unicorns.
She stood up, one fine-boned hand reaching out. “Your ego’s in the way of your senses.”
I took her hand, and she pulled me to my feet with surprising strength. The anger broiled in my chest now—an effect of her words, and of the physical ache the fall had brought on. “I didn’t know we had started yet.”
She backed up a few steps. “We started the moment you entered the meadow. You’ve got to have your head on all the time, Clementine. Not just when you’re ready.”
I was still reeling from the takedown I’d just received at the hands of a five-foot fae called Evanora Whitewillow. “Where’s my roommate? What did you do with her?”
She grinned. “She’s me. But when you’re fighting for your life, you’ve got to set aside your vulnerability.”
“All right, so first I overdo the tough-girl act, and now I’ve got to set aside my vulnerability?”
She began pacing to my left, and I turned with her, keeping a keen eye on her movements. “There’s a middle ground, Clementine, between your vulnerable side and your overinflated ego.”
All my muscles had gone taut; I sensed she was preparing to come at me again. “And what’s that?”
She stopped. “It’s being present. Here, right now, where you aren’t beholden to your emotions—they serve you.”
I stopped with her, and for a moment, the meadow was cast in portrait, the two of us as still as a painting. Only the grass moved around our calves, the trees announcing the late-fall wind, a cloud offering a soft shadow over the sun.
When she moved, she was just as quick as the first time. But I also saw her movement as it happened—first the twitch of her hand, and then the bend of her leg.
I leapt to the left as she came at me, and though she still caught me by the arm and swung me around to the ground with a thud—“Goddamn, Eva,” I groaned as I landed on my shoulder—it wasn’t a perfect takedown.
“Better,” she said above me.
I coughed, raising a small plume of dirt. I could smell earth and dead grass. “Not for me.”
When she helped me up this time, I rubbed my shoulder. “For someone who doesn’t even weigh a hundred pounds, you land like a hippo.”
She smirked. “Thanks, I think.”
“It’s a compliment. Really.”
Her face went serious. “Ready?”
I held up a hand. “Just give me a minute, okay?”
She gave me exactly what I’d asked for: one minute. And then she walloped me again—this time after she’d taken to the air and caught me from behind, pulling me down to the ground with her arm around my neck.
There in the meadow, I learned another important thing about fae: never make assumptions. Because yesterday, if you’d told me I’d end up tapping out in the grass because my roommate’s armbar was cutting off my airflow, I would have laughed my ass off.
When an hour had mercifully passed, we sat down in the meadow. Actually, I lay down, sprawling out as far as my arms would go. Eva sat gracefully next to me, her knees pulled up as she gazed into the sky.
“Clementine?” she said.
I swallowed, coughed again. “Yeah?”
“You did good.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sure.”
“No—you did. That wasn’t a white lie, either.”
“Sure,” I said again.
She looked down at me. “Clementine?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t think witches are bad. Not you, at least.”
I squinted up at her. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve met bad people. They aren’t like you.”
>
What are they like? I thought but didn’t ask.
“I know it’s on your mind,” she went on. “After last night.”
I turned my face away. “I’m not worried about it.”
“Even so,” came her voice from behind me, “I wanted you to know.”
I kept my face turned away, staring hard at the canopy. “All right.”
“And Clementine?”
“Yeah?”
“I may have given Loki too many treats.” She paused. “And he may have thrown up in your bed.”
I snorted, closed my eyes. “Thanks for letting me know.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
That day in combat class, I was ready to face Liara. But I wasn’t matched up against her.
When my time came, I was put up against Keene the fae, which imbued me with a little more confidence after my time in the meadow with Eva. I knew his magical move: blinking from one end of the room to the other. Easy, right?
Wrong.
As soon as Keene and I faced off at either side of the mat, he blinked out of sight. I’d expected him to appear right next to me, or behind me, so the moment his long, gangly body disappeared, I dropped and rolled.
When I got up on one knee and looked back, he wasn’t there. He hadn’t appeared behind me or next to me at all.
That was when the others started snickering, their eyes lifting.
I looked up in time to see him drop down on me from the ceiling. And though I wrestled like a hellcat against what I’d previously taken for weak fae limbs, he still had a lot more testosterone than me and quickly overcame my efforts.
Actually, he just about had me pinned. I was on my stomach, two of my limbs caught in his grasp.
Torsten knelt low enough for us to make eye contact. “Feel the magic, Clementine. It’s the only thing that will get you out of this situation.”
Feel the magic. Great—what did I need to do? Meditate?
When it came to fights, I wasn’t a meditator. I wasn’t even a deliberator.
I was a girl who took action, for better or worse. I was impulsive, sometimes furious, and never gave up until I’d won or been so badly beaten I couldn’t get back up again.
I didn’t have time to feel the magic.
But I tried.
I struggled against the fae, gritting my teeth. Feel the magic, Clem. Feel it.
The voice in my head sounded like the lyrics to a bad 80s song.
As the fae’s knee came down on my arm, pressing it into the mat, I let out an angry snarl. “I don’t feel anything!”
“It’s inside you, just as it was in your fight with the boggan,” Torsten said, as calm as ever. “You have to find it.”
Oh, a journey into myself. Perfect. Nobody wanted to journey into Clementine Cole’s head and heart, especially not me. What resided there, even I didn’t want to tackle.
No matter how I struggled, I couldn’t get out from the fae’s grasp. Ten seconds later, he had me tapping the mat.
Keene leaned down from where he straddled me. “Do you concede?”
I screwed up my mouth, refused to answer. I hope you fly head-first into a tree. I hope you blink yourself into the middle of a concrete wall. Breathing was getting harder, but I wouldn’t let those words come out of my mouth. It was enough that I’d had to slap the mat. What the hell else did he want? My dignity on a platter?
He leaned closer, his weight pressing down on my lungs. “I didn’t hear you.”
Cold heat filtered through my veins. “Let me up.”
He shook his head, his pretty hair tickling my ear. “I’m sure you know the rules by now: the fight’s not over until you concede.”
I could hardly speak anymore; my lungs wouldn’t expand. And so I glared up at him in my periphery. My cat’s breath smells better than yours.
I wasn’t conceding.
Finally, when it became clear that I would rather suffocate than say the words, Torsten stood. “Let her go.”
“But it’s against the rules,” the fae whined.
Torsten swept a hand through the air. “Let her go, I said.”
And with a huff, the fae got off me.
Air flooded into my lungs in one gasp, and I rolled onto my back, breathing like I’d had the wind knocked out of me.
I’d never realized how much I loved oxygen.
Torsten came into my view, his arms folded. One hand extended to help me up. “Come on, Clementine. We’ve got to get onto the next fight.”
I took his hand. When I was upright, I could see in the other students’ gazes what wasn’t being said.
Especially in Liara’s gaze.
How disappointing. The last witch in the world is a disappointment.
The rest of the class went by in a blur. I couldn’t really focus on the fights, except when they nearly collided into me. You always had to be a little on guard in combat class, I was realizing, or else you might take collateral damage.
Otherwise, a debate raged in my head. The thing was, these students—first-years in an introductory course to combat—were the best fighters I’d ever seen. They weren’t even the créme de la créme of the academy, either.
They were just novices.
But all of them had magic. And they had developed enough physical ability to pair with that magic that they could get by in a fight.
Me, on the other hand? I only had anger and my fists.
And that wasn’t going to work anymore. I needed magic.
I spent the rest of the class debating how I was going to “feel” my magic. On the first night we’d met, the headmistress had told me I wouldn’t tap into it until I truly believed in it.
And even then, she’d said, it would come slowly. In fits and starts.
The thing was, I could be patient when I knew how to get to my goal. If there were certain steps, I could follow them every day. I could work toward my goals harder than anyone I knew.
But I didn’t know what steps to take. I didn’t even know the first step to using magic.
When the class had finished and the other students filed out, I waited until they were all gone to approach Torsten.
I cleared my throat as I crossed to where he stood against the wall by the door. “Hey, teacher.”
He folded his arms. “What can I do for you, Clementine?”
I sighed. How to begin? “I need to learn how to use magic, and I can’t ‘feel it.’ I need to learn witchy stuff.”
His eyebrows drew together. “Witchy stuff?”
“Yeah. I know there are no more witches, but I thought…”
He waited.
“I thought someone might know about a witch’s magic in combat,” I said. “How it works.”
Real sympathy came to Torsten’s eyes. “Witches are one thing. Fire witches are another.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re a breed nobody has seen at the academy in decades.”
“So what you’re saying is, you have no idea.”
His hands went out. “Have you asked the headmistress?” By which I could tell he meant: No, Clementine. I haven’t got the faintest clue.
This was going to be a problem.
By the end of that week, I was noticing a trend.
People still avoided me.
I understood the whole “all witches turn evil” thing. And while I’d always been a bit of an outlier with my red hair and really good approximation of a bitch face, the whole don’t-look-at-her-or-she’ll-turn-you-into-a-frog thing was starting to wear on me.
I felt like I couldn’t set a foot out of line. Not even in the dining hall, where I set a napkin in my lap and used a fork and knife to cut my fish. I chewed carefully, with a closed mouth.
I even tried not to swear. That was hard, though. Really hard.
So between being magic-less and most people shunning me, the bleakness was settling in. Even Loki, who lay under the table by my feet, was doing his best approximation of a real cat who didn’t talk.
Which was why I brightened considerably when Eva dropped her satchel on the table across from me and sat down with a plate of what I’d begun to think of as “fae food.”
Basically, it was all finger food. Fae—or at least, this fae—just didn’t eat much.
“Hello,” she sang, sitting down with her wings fluttering. Here was the Eva I knew—a softer, sweeter creature than the backbiter I’d encountered in the meadow. “Am I ever glad to see you. Your eyebrows are looking much healthier, by the by.”
“My eyebrows?” I touched them. “Oh, you mean after I got blasted in the mug by Liara’s lightning.”
She smiled. “Yes, in the mug.”
Someone dropped into the seat next to me. “Liara got you in the mug?”
Aiden North.
I turned slowly on him, glancing from his face to his dinner plate. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s old news, North.”
Aiden half-smirked. “The student ambassador has to be informed of all the goings on at the academy. It’s the rules, Clem.”
“Oh, the rules.” I speared a piece of fish onto my fork, pointed it at his face. “And you follow all the rules, don’t you?”
He raised one eyebrow. “Good witches don’t point sharp objects at their friends, Cole.”
Friends. We were friends. I had a friend. The word swirled at the fore of my mind until I felt uncomfortable by the sensation that had arisen and something snarky poured out of my mouth. “I guess I’m not a good witch then, am I?” I stuck the fish into my mouth and chewed, never breaking eye contact.
Aiden’s eyes veered to another table, where I caught a glimpse of some other students looking over their shoulders at us. As soon as I made eye contact with them, they turned away.
“It was a joke,” I said to them. “I really am a good witch.”
They didn’t turn back around.
I glanced back at Aiden and Eva. “I wonder what they would do if I set my napkin on fire one of these placeholder candles.”
Eva snorted. “I’d like to find out.”
I pushed the remainder of my fish around my plate. “I wish I knew something about witchery. Anything.”
Aiden didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was listening closely. I could sense it in the way he remained still as I spoke, not even eating.