by S. W. Clarke
He’s a fire mage but he hasn’t offered to help me. Why?
Eva shook her head. “Clem, really. Give it time. Wait until next semester to worry about being behind, at least.”
Next semester. Just a couple weeks ago I’d had a different life completely. Who knew what would happen in three months? If there was one thing my mother and sister’s disappearance had taught me, it was that you only have now.
After dinner, Eva, Aiden, and I made our way out of the dining hall and meandered toward the empty amphitheater. Loki had started off walking with us, but at some point he spotted a mouse and took off after it, disappearing into the trees.
Well, I guess even a witch’s cat is still a cat.
“All I want to know,” I began, “is what you’ve got to do to qualify for the qualifiers.”
Eva and Aiden exchanged a glance as we came under the enormous awning of the amphitheater. No matter how many times they told me the qualifiers were months off, I kept questioning them. “A lot,” Eva said.
“It’s not easy,” Aiden added.
I sighed as we descended the steps past rows of seats. “Okay, that tells me nothing. At least give me something.”
We approached the raised wooden platform at the center of the amphitheater, where I’d been inducted into my house. I climbed up onto it, letting my feet hang over the edges. “Come on, you two.”
Eva flew up next to me and sat by my side. “First you have to keep from getting caught in a race around the meadow. Those who can fly do so, and the rest ride horses.”
“Which means,” Aiden said as he pulled himself up onto the stage on my other side, “you’d ride your broom.”
I glanced between them. “Are either of you two doing this in the spring?”
Eva nodded. “I am.”
“Seems like you’d have an advantage over anyone on a horse. I’ve seen how fast you can fly.”
He shrugged. “It’s not just about how fast you can go, Cole. It’s also about being evasive and smart.”
I thought back to Professor Fernwhirl chasing the fae through the meadow during my first flight class. “What do you evade?”
“Everything,” Eva said. “Every professor tries to catch you. And the other students will try to throw you off, too.”
“Woah, woah.” I raised my hands. “The students race dirty?”
“Yep.” Eva sighed. “It’s really hard.”
I stared out across the empty amphitheater; when I blinked, I could see the entire place filled up as it had been with students and professors on the night of my induction. “What about sportsmanship? All those rules about goodness and light?”
Aiden exhaled. “Out there—in the world, versus darkness—it’s a different thing, Cole. The fights aren’t fair. They teach us to do good, to choose the right thing, but when it comes to honing our skills, they teach us to fight in the dark. And that means no holds barred.”
Fight in the dark. Fight dirty.
Well, I could do that.
“What else?” I asked. “After the race.”
Eva swung her legs. “Four rounds of one-on-one combat with guardians. One from each house.”
“Let me guess—to test my mettle against their different styles of fighting?”
Aiden nodded. “House Whisper specializes in evasion. Crest will slowly drown you. Gaia overwhelms you with brute power. And Spark strikes with fire and lightning. Anyway,” he said, preparing to get up, “let’s go—”
“Wait.” I held his shoulder. “What comes after you fight the guardians?”
The two of them seemed surprised I was still asking questions, especially since they’d made it clear how vastly underqualified I was to even be thinking about this right now.
“Well,” Aiden said, “you go to Headmistress Umbra’s office.”
“And what happens there?”
“Nobody knows,” Eva said. “But once I saw a girl come out crying. Only about half of the people who make it that far even become guardians.”
Another test, I thought. Umbra loved her tests. And her secrets.
Aiden hopped down to the ground, turned back toward me. “Why are you so eager, anyway?”
Wasn’t it obvious? “Isn’t that the whole point of why we’re here?” I said. “To become guardians?”
“Yes.” Aiden paused, his eyes searching mine like he could find something if he looked hard enough. “But being a guardian is hard. It’s savage, even. We lost one earlier this year on a mission. Many students are afraid to qualify.”
When I glanced over at Eva, she was staring down at her lap.
Is Eva afraid, too?
She was; I could see it in the way her hands balled in her lap. She’d destroyed me again and again in the meadow, but she was afraid. In that moment, she reminded me of Annabelle, my friend from DC. They were alike in their sincerity, their earnestness.
I liked people like that, even if I couldn’t be one of them.
And sensing her fear filled me with resolve. I didn’t want to see a creature like Eva, sweet and soft as she was, hauled off the way I had been that night I’d been kidnapped.
Leave that to people like me—people who had been put down enough times they had skin so thick you couldn’t lodge a pin in it.
People who were used to the hard edge of life.
If anyone was meant to be a guardian, it was me.
“I’m more afraid of what will happen if I don’t do anything,” I said. “I may be an outcast here, but I have friends back home. People I wouldn’t want to see dead. Believe it or not, I care about humanity.”
Aiden’s expression changed so subtly I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking at him dead-on. “Good to know.”
Hard footsteps sounded across the amphitheater platform. “I didn’t know fire witches could leave Hell outside the witching hour.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
We turned to find Liara the fae crossing the stage toward us. She was flanked by two other fae I recognized from the library, though I didn’t have classes with either of them.
They were all female, all faces I recognized from House Whisper, though Liara’s two pals weren’t quite as striking as her. It seemed they knew it, too; they approached like backup singers, hanging behind.
I raised my eyebrows. Ahh, a little bullying. She had no idea who she was dealing with. “Come on, Liara—you see me in class five days a week. You can do better than ‘the witching hour.’”
Liara’s eyes flickered with lightning—or maybe that was just the light reflection off her eyes. “You shouldn’t be at this academy.”
Aiden stood up. “Let’s keep it friendly, okay? You’re in the same house now.”
Liara’s gaze fixed on him. “Witches slaughtered humans by the thousands. You’re okay with that?”
Thousands? I hadn’t known that.
He pointed to me. “This witch didn’t slaughter anyone.”
I stood up, the perfect words crystalizing in my head. “I may end up slaughtering a few fae, though.”
Eva’s gaze shot up to me, her eyes wide with concern. She’s got a soft heart, I thought. She didn’t want to see us fighting.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered down to her. “It’s just smack talk.”
A lightning bolt hit the stage between me and Eva, scorching the spot right next to her foot. She jumped back. “Holy hell,” I said. “Watch where you’re aiming those things, L.”
Liara laughed, and her fae posse did, too. Her pointed finger rose to point right at my chest. “I could stop your heart with one good shot.”
“Listen, I know your mom and dad got killed by a witch. And that’s really a shame.” Her eyes narrowed, and I realized how bad I was at expressing sympathy. But I barreled on, anger flushing my cheeks. “But don’t mess with Eva. She’s actually decent.”
Aiden stepped between us, his hands out. “All right, that’s enough. Let’s head back, Clem.”
I could see what was happening before Aiden
did. “Hey, watch it—” I began, but one of the fae—a short one with a green pixie cut—had already conjured up a small vortex of wind and shot it right at him.
It was just a tiny tornado, but it was more powerful than I’d expected. It threw Aiden off the stage, and it knocked me off my feet.
Liara folded her arms, glancing between me and Aiden as we both stood up. Meanwhile, Eva was regaining herself, flitting up into the air with a mixture of shock and ire on her face.
“Well?” Liara said. “No more comebacks? No fire magic? Gods, you must be the dullest fire witch in history.”
“You want a fight?” I rubbed one aching wrist with the opposite hand, meeting eyes with Aiden. An unspoken message was exchanged in that one glance: This is on. “A real fight?”
Liara turned to me. “What do you want me to do, singe your eyebrows off again? Then you’d be—”
Before she could finish, a textbook smacked Liara right in the back of her pretty head.
My eyes traced back to where it had come from.
Eva.
She had grabbed it out of her satchel and beaned the fae with it.
“How dare you use your magic against your fellow students,” Eva said with narrowed eyes. “It’s shameful.”
Hot damn. Liara had brought the fight out of her.
Before Liara could recover, I dashed forward, reaching down to scoop up my satchel strap. I swung it around, clocking the green-haired fae and sending her sprawling.
The thing about fae from Whisper, it seemed, was that they were glass cannons. They were good at evasion and catching you unaware, but if you caught them off guard…
The other backup fae was casting some sort of magic; her hands were swimming in circles through the air, and I thought I saw the beginnings of another vortex.
Now I was learning a thing or two about combat with mages.
Aiden climbed up onto the stage in one swift motion, moving faster than I’d thought he was capable of. He ran forward, tackling the fae to the ground. It looked like a clean takedown, but the fae blinked away just before she hit the floor, and Aiden fell with a thud.
“Do your...your thing!” I called over to him as I spun on Liara. I still didn’t know how Aiden used his magic, but now was the time to do it.
Meanwhile, Liara was recovering from the textbook to the head, that long finger getting ready to fry someone else from the tip of her perfectly manicured nail.
“I’m not allowed,” Aiden groaned back, his face muffled against the floor.
Not allowed? That was new. But I couldn’t worry about it right now—not with Liara preparing to make ash with her pointer finger.
Then I’ll have to take care of her myself. Just keep the finger pointed elsewhere. That’s all I have to do.
I swung my satchel at Liara. She was turning as I did, and she managed to jump aside in time to evade the full brunt of it. I let the satchel go at the end of its arc, and it slid across the stage behind me.
Which left me free to throw myself at the fae who seemed determined to have it out with me. The one nice thing about fighting a fae with beautiful, silky, long hair: that hair would get in her face at just the wrong moment.
Like right now.
You asked for it, I thought. You’re gonna get every bit of the fire witch.
With a roar, I leapt at Liara, who was half-blinded by her own hair. One hand raised in a placating way, and she shrieked as I landed atop her.
We hit the platform together, and I felt the breath go out of her.
I grinned, giving her a swift slap on the cheek. And I had to admit: it felt good to get a hit in on someone. “Gotcha.”
But the shock on her face shifted to narrow-eyed shrewdness. I realized she hadn’t put her hand out in a placating way at all.
She’d put her hand up not to stop me, but as a shield.
I yelped as she zapped my chest. I fell back, my blazer scorched and burning from the lightning off her hand. I patted it out. “That’s dirty—real dirty. This is my only uniform, and it already got shredded once by a boggan.”
At the very least, Aiden had wrangled the green-haired pixie to the ground. Meanwhile, Eva had had a standoff with the third member of Liara’s posse, and had used her wind magic to blow the fae all the way to the back of the amphitheater.
Liara still couldn’t catch her breath. She struggled to her elbows, glaring at me. One shaking hand rose, her finger pointing at me for another shot.
Pointing right at the center of my chest.
I could stop your heart, she’d said, with one shot.
And I could see in her eyes she wanted to. In one instant, this had gone from schoolyard bullying to real malice.
“Hey, Liara.” I moved back. “You don’t have to do that. You win.”
I could see her fingertip glowing, a white fire growing at the end of it.
And then a miracle happened.
Or, I should say, a blue light happened.
From out of nowhere, the blue lights from Headmistress Umbra’s office swarmed into the amphitheater. A dozen of them poured in under the awning and swooped at Liara.
As they encircled her, she found her voice again. She screamed murder, backing up on her elbows, her feet scraping across the platform as the blue lights enveloped her.
I just stared. So did Eva and Aiden and the other two fae. Their faces bore shock, and something else…
Horror?
I pushed to my feet as the blue lights began tugging at Liara’s hair, each one of them grabbing up a purple tendril and yanking. She cried out as, with an awful ripping sound, one of them pulled a clump of her hair straight from the scalp.
“Help her!” Aiden yelled from behind me.
I spun, found him racing across the amphitheater’s platform toward Liara. The others were doing the same.
“The wisps are attacking her,” Eva cried. “Hurry.”
Wisps? Was that what the lights were called? They’d seemed perfectly innocuous in Headmistress Umbra’s antechamber, floating high up near the ceiling. Not just innocuous, but benevolent. I still thought maybe one had whispered something to me.
As the others neared the panicking Liara, from whose head another tendril of hair had just been yanked, the tip of a staff slammed the floorboards, shaking them.
Behind me, a voice boomed through the amphitheater, stilling everything and everyone as though a blanket had been thrown over all of us. Even my thoughts were cut off. “Students, cease at once. Get away from here.”
I turned. Headmistress Umbra knelt on one knee, one hand gripping the staff, the other reaching out toward Liara and the wisps. She wore pure concentration on her face, her white hair fanning out around her head as though lifted by a breeze.
Together, the wisps hissed. Slowly, unwillingly, they were pulled toward the headmistress’s outstretched hand. They crossed in front of me, and my eyesight was seared by their brightness as they floated past me.
So beautiful and eerie. I sensed an ancient power in them, secrets in their depths. I was reminded again of the words I had heard—or maybe imagined I’d heard.
Shadowend. You return to the ancient place.
Liara wept as the wisps approached Headmistress Umbra’s hand, finally coming to swirl around her fingers as though she held a gorgeous ball of shifting light.
With careful and laborious effort, the headmistress pushed herself from one knee to her feet, staring down at her glowing hand. She turned, descended the steps off the side of the platform, and left the amphitheater, disappearing from sight.
Liara’s friends began to console her as I stared after the headmistress. I gave a backward glance—God, the poor fae was surrounded by a pile of her own gleaming hair, her scalp bare and bloody in several spots—before I struck off across the platform in the direction the headmistress had gone.
“Clem?” Eva called after me. “Where are you going?”
I didn’t answer. I raced up the steps, breathless by the time I emerged out onto
the clearing. I turned, searching for the headmistress…
And spotted her, just barely. The only thing I could see was the shrinking blue glow in the darkness.
I sprinted after her. Somehow, even though I was going at full speed and she just walking, it seemed like I wasn’t catching up to her at all. She had already gotten to her office and opened the enormous double doors, disappearing inside before I had even gotten twenty steps.
When I finally got to the doors, I didn’t hesitate before I opened them. This was a question that already burned inside me, and I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission.
When I came into the enormous antechamber, Headmistress Umbra stood at the center of it. She raised her hand, releasing the wisps toward the ceiling. They rose like water in reverse, swirling up and up and resuming their original place.
I stared. It was like nothing at all had happened.
The headmistress lowered her hand, gave a great sigh, and turned. “Oh.” Her hand went to her chest on seeing me. “Could have warned me, child.”
That was a strange reaction. I mean, after everything, she was startled to see me?
I stepped forward. “What the hell just happened?”
She lowered her chin toward me. “I don’t take well to being sworn at.”
My swearing seemed like the least worrying thing in the world—or even at the academy. After all, I’d just witnessed half a head of hair pulled straight from a fae’s scalp.
I took another step forward. “Sorry. What the fuck just happened?”
The headmistress straightened, regarding me for a time in the soft blue light. “You have quite a temper, don’t you?”
“Sometimes I do, yeah.”
“So I saw in your records. Lots of fighting as a child.”
“My records? From the foster system?” My eyes narrowed. “How would you have gotten hold of those?”
Her hand went up. “Let’s not faff around with logistics. I’m the headmistress of a magical academy—I’m thorough in obtaining my students’ records, Clementine.”
I snorted. Well, she knew how to cut past the chatter. But so did I. I pointed up at the ceiling. “Those ‘wisps’ spoke to me.”