by S. W. Clarke
I could tell he was annoyed by my flippancy. He didn’t understand.
I shrugged. “I don’t meet with you until tomorrow. I’ve got time.” Then, because Eva was distracted, I leaned forward, “Listen, Aiden. I’m potentially being hunted by a demon. Cut me some slack.”
He sat back a bit, exhaling. “It’s probably not a demon.”
I leaned back, dug into my chocolate mousse. “They can’t get into the academy though, right?”
“No,” Aiden said. “The academy is impenetrable.”
So we thought about the fae solstice market, I thought but didn’t say.
I hadn’t been lying about taking this seriously. The next day when Rescue class resumed with Professor Milonakis, I was keyed in. Especially when she began explaining the nuances of parting the veil.
“Every mage may part the veil,” Milonakis explained, pacing at the front of the room with chalk in hand. “Though the distance you may travel depends on the power of the place you’re parting through, and your own power.” She pointed the chalk at her chest. “So if I were to attempt to part the veil at a weak point of power, say a high hill, I could travel much farther than a first-year could if they were standing on that same hill. This is because I’ve had more time and practice with tapping into air magic.”
I thought back to the first time I’d traveled through the veil with Umbra. She had called the Anacostia River weak, but said it would do for her purposes. It must have taken a great deal of power for her to take us from one continent to another through a weak point of power.
Milonakis drew a straight line down the center of the chalkboard. “When you first begin parting the veil for rescues, it’s best to draw a straight line. A simple up-and-down is the easiest cut, using your hand like a knife with the power concentrated in your fingertips. Watch me now.”
She turned toward us, her hand vertical, and drew it slowly down through the air.
“It’s that simple,” she said. “And incredibly difficult. Some of you may have been taught by your parents, but it takes many tries and concentrated effort to do it right in the heat of the moment. Only in your second year will you begin the practice of perfect veil cutting.”
Eva had taken us to Vienna on two occasions, cutting the veil both times. She hadn’t seemed to try at all, and I realized now she must have had extensive training from two powerful mages: her parents.
Which meant I had my own personal veil-cutting teacher.
Chapter Thirty-Three
My back hit the ground, and snow went flying up around me. Eva came to stand over me, her face blocking the winter sun. “But you can’t cut the veil. Not yet, at least.”
I pushed myself up to sitting, brushing snow off my back. “Maybe we should have this conversation when we’re not sparring.”
She shrugged, inspecting one mitten. “You brought it up.”
“I did. And I regret that.” I stood up, glancing back at my imprint in the snow. Behind me lay an imprint of looked a person hitting the snow with arms akimbo—and that was exactly what had happened.
I could count on one mitten the number of times I’d gotten the best of Eva since she’d become my personal combat trainer last semester.
I shook snow out of my hair. “Anyway, the point is, I need to have the technique down when I do need to cut the veil.”
Eva glanced up. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it right now.”
“I’m full of contradictions, okay?” I got into a fighting stance—the one she’d taught me for uncertain ground like out here in the meadow, where a foot of snow lay from edge to edge. “I’m ready.”
Eva studied my stance. “If I come at you, you’re going to slip.”
I looked down, then back up at her. “I’m solid.”
“You’re not.”
I gestured her on. “Try me.”
She came at me in a burst of wings, one boot surging forward. I caught a glimpse of snow-covered tread before I managed to get my hands in front of my chest.
I did catch her boot and manage to deflect her. But I also lost my footing.
When I hit the snow this time, I groaned. That fall had reverberated all the way up my spine. “I’m going to feel that one tomorrow.”
“Next time stand wider.” Eva came to stand over me again, reaching one mitten out. She helped me up. “Let’s practice some veil cutting.”
I brushed snow off my shoulders. “Good. You wouldn’t have wanted to see what I had planned for my next attack.”
She laughed as she turned away and pulled her mitten off, revealing delicate porcelain fingers. She used her exposed hand to demonstrate the precise position and angle for cutting, and I spent the next hour imitating her in the otherwise empty, silent meadow.
At the end of our training, my fingers were mostly numb. And my ears. And my nose.
She replaced her mitten. “I think you’ve about got the hang of it.”
I put my own back on. “Except for the part where I have no magic to cut with.”
She sighed with atypical exasperation. “You’ll get it, Clem. I promise you.”
“My self-deprecation doesn’t usually bug you. Or at least, you don’t show it.” I tilted my head. “What is it?”
Surprise came into her eyes. I didn’t usually probe her. “Nothing. Just tired.”
“You never get tired. Not after your morning meditation.”
She took a deep breath, tracing the toe of her boot in the snow. “Remember the resolution I made on New Year’s?”
“Sure. To pass the qualifiers.”
She stared down at her snow-tracing. “I’m terrified I won’t do it.”
“Terrified? Why?”
“It’s a resolution, Clementine.” She gave me a serious look. “I can’t break my resolution.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever kept a New Year’s resolution. Is it really that bad a thing to break?”
She looked shocked. “You’ve broken them all?”
“Sure. I can’t remember what most of them were, to be honest.”
She turned away as though ready to leave. “Must be nice.”
She and I started following our footprints through the snow, out of the meadow. We walked slowly.
As we went, a thought occurred to me.
“Both your parents are guardians,” I said. “That must be a bit of pressure.”
I sensed I’d touched on something when her head jerked up. “Pressure?”
“To follow in their footsteps.”
“Oh gods, it’s the worst.” She threw her hands out. “They were both amazing students, top of their class. My mom was a guardian in her second year, just absolutely a prodigy. And I…”
“And you?” I prompted.
“I’m not.”
I threw my thumb over my shoulder. “Was I not just fighting the world’s most competent fae in the meadow?”
“Oh, that’s different. There was no magic.” I side-eyed her, and she caught wind of her foible. “Not that you aren’t a very competent fighter even without magic.”
“And magic is the key to passing qualifiers?”
“Absolutely it is,” she said. “It’s the key to being a good guardian. There are other important elements, too, of course, but my air magic just isn’t like my mom’s connection to it, or my dad’s.”
“And you can’t get better at using air magic?” I asked.
She seemed confused. “What do you mean?”
“Can’t you just study and practice and get better?”
She shook her head. “But…they were just so naturally good at it. I feel like I’ll never catch up.”
I glanced up into the trees as we entered the forest line. “That, my friend, is what you’d call a fixed mindset.”
“A fixed mindset?”
I reached a hand out, tapping a branch above us. Snow came fluttering down. “Yeah. It means you think you’ve either got it or you don’t. Like a quirk of nature.”
“As opposed to
what?”
I threw a hand out toward the academy. “A growth mindset. Learning through hard work, practice, diligence.” I paused. When had I turned into this person? “Why else do you think I let you knock me on my backside for an hour a day in the meadow?”
A soft smile crossed her face. “Where did you learn about that idea—a growth mindset?”
My eyes unfocused as we walked. “My mom.”
That was the first time I’d ever mentioned her to Eva.
I’d only ever told the fae I was a bad student in school. I had never told her who I’d been before my mom disappeared.
We walked in silence for a time; Eva seemed to recognize the importance of what I’d just said. She stared ahead as we walked, biting her lip.
When we came to the academy grounds, she stopped. “Thanks, Clem.”
I stopped with her. “For what?”
“I realized some things.” She set a hand on my shoulder. “One of which is, I won’t have time to be your personal combat instructor this semester.”
“What?” I exclaimed.
She tapped the side of her head, an apology written on her face. “Growth mindset. I have to work harder than I ever have if I’m going to pass the qualifiers.”
Well, I could hardly blame her; I’d done this to myself.
“But don’t worry,” she said. “You’re a good fighter.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“You are,” she insisted. “You just need to believe in yourself. That’s all you’re missing.”
And with that, my former personal combat instructor left me to the semi-impossible task of believing I could make fire. And for a witch who couldn’t fly on her broom and who had yet to feel even a flicker of flame, that was a tall order.
The next day in flight class, I sat in the snowy meadow with my broom laid out in front of me. Professor Fernwhirl had forgotten about me, since I never had flown; she simply focused on the other fae in our class.
For my part, I’d long ago stopped trying to make the broom carry me. It wasn’t a matter of despair—it was simply that I knew the broom and I were never going to happen.
I just wasn’t sure why.
Witches rode brooms. I was a witch. Before me lay a magic broom.
And yet logic didn’t cohere with my reality.
I was missing something. A vital piece of the puzzle.
Loki had come out to sit on my lap in the snow, a rarity for him. In the winter he’d only been leaving our dorm to make his way to the dining hall twice a day. Apparently he and Chef Vickery had their own personal relationship that had nothing to do with me.
All I knew was Loki got fed well; he had a tummy to prove it.
Together, he and I stared on at the fae in the snow-covered meadow, their wings gorgeous and glittering under the pale sun as Fernwhirl chased them through the trees.
Every once in a while a tree’s branches shook as a fae landed, snow raining down from the canopy. They were practicing silent landings in unexpected spots, which in this case meant snow-covered tree branches. I supposed that wasn’t easy even if you were born with wings.
Especially if you were being chased by Fernwhirl. I’d long since learned she was ruthless when playing tag.
Still, I was glad for Eva. She wanted to be a guardian, and she was the fastest in our class. Fernwhirl almost never caught her.
Sometimes I whooped from the sidelines when Eva escaped the professor, which made Fernwhirl point at me with a silent glare. Meanwhile, Eva just looked mortified.
Good. That was what friends were for, after all.
“You know,” Loki said at one point, ending our silence, “you should take up meditation.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because you spend a lot of time sitting during this class.”
Sometimes I wondered if anyone would ever burn me harder than my own cat. And I wondered for the thousandth time if I would ever fly.
The following morning while breaking the ice on the horses’ water trough at the stables, a commotion sounded from inside. I came in to find Quartermistress Farrow closing Noir’s stall door and latching it hard. She had alfalfa in her hair, and her ponytail was uncommonly mussed.
“What happened?” I asked.
“That horse,” Farrow said without hesitation, her eyes flicking to me and then to the horse in question, whose black head had appeared from inside his stall. “I swear he hates to be fed.”
I came forward. “I’ll feed him.”
Farrow pulled a strand of alfalfa out of her hair. “I’m not sure we shouldn’t just throw his food in and be done with it.”
“I think he likes it a certain way.” I went to the hay, separated out a flake of alfalfa and brought it over to his stall. “He hasn’t tried to bite when I feed him like this.”
As Farrow watched, I passed the alfalfa over his stall door, my hand under it. The horse lowered his head, sniffing it. Then, in a single yank, he took the whole flake and turned with it.
Farrow’s eyes narrowed as she considered my approach. “You’re presenting it to him.”
“That’s right.” She was perceptive about horses, which shouldn’t have surprised me.
Now her eyes shifted onto me. “All right, you can feed him. But don’t get yourself alone in a stall with that one. Or stick your hand in too far. Or even stand too long at his stall door.”
All of these things I agreed to. Gladly.
And so it fell to me to feed Noir in the mornings. Little did Farrow know I’d already been offering him a handful of oats every day, a gesture on the sly. It’d been exactly ten days since he’d tried to bite me.
That was progress.
And after I’d given him his alfalfa and got to mucking the stall across from his, Noir’s head returned to gaze out over the stables’ center aisle.
But when I glanced up, I found he wasn’t looking just anywhere. He was staring at me.
I straightened with a heap of manure on the prongs. “What’re you looking at?”
His head jerked as though acknowledging me, a widening of the nostrils. I could have sworn he was teasing me about my dirty work.
I smirked. “Troll.”
And yet I found, of all the horses, he was the most curious. The most attentive to my comings and goings every morning. My tongue clicking almost always got his attention nowadays.
As I resumed my shoveling, I found myself falling into what Loki would have described as a meditative state. Dig pitchfork into manure, lift, swing over wheelbarrow, flip pitchfork, swing pitchfork back to manure.
It reminded me of my time at Corner Mart Grocery, the same repetitive stocking of groceries I did with a strange sort of half-aware contentedness. I liked the mindless work, the easy jobs that let my mind travel elsewhere.
And then I remembered.
A passage in Raven Murkwood’s witching book came to mind—something about horses.
I hadn’t read the section closely enough; I’d made the mistake of thinking it didn’t apply to me. And yet, standing here in the stables, I realized that maybe I’d been wrong.
I stopped shoveling, straightened once more with the pitchfork driven into the manure. I had a feeling before I turned my head what I would find.
And sure enough, when I looked right, Noir was still staring at me.
He didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even blink. He just stared.
Creepy? Sure. But more uncanny than anything else.
Since being at the academy, I’d learned to trust when I had feelings about things. That was part of belief in myself, right?
I gazed at the horse. Maybe I wasn’t meant to fly on a broom at all.
Chapter Thirty-Four
When I got back to my dorm that night, I sat down next to Loki, who’d been asleep in my bed. He sat up as I flipped Murkwood’s book open on the bed and began paging through.
“Hello,” he said without emotion. “That’s what people say to one another on arrival, typi
cally.”
“Hi,” I said, never lifting my eyes, still flipping pages. Finally, I found the section I’d been looking for.
Travel.
I started reading, my eyes scanning down the page. Brooms. She talked about brooms a lot. But I had been an utter failure every time I’d gone to the meadow. “Loki, what if I’m not meant to ride a broom?”
His tail flicked, and he rolled onto his back to start licking his belly. “It’s possible.”
I kept reading, finger trailing along the lines.
And then I found it.
According to Murkwood, a witch and her means of travel—whether a broom, the wind, or a horse—would be naturally drawn to one another. It would be an innate feeling.
And, to top it off, there was a test. An easy test to tell if you belonged together. This felt like it was straight out of Seventeen magazine. But hey, I wasn’t above stuff like that right now.
I jerked suddenly upright, stabbing the page, and Loki nearly leapt a foot off the bed. “This is it.”
“Holy hell,” he said. “Have pity on the cat taking a bath.”
“Sorry.” I got up, grabbed my cloak off the chair’s back. I picked up an apple that I’d taken with me from the dining hall. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Don’t be home too late,” he called after me in that sing-song way a mother would.
“I won’t be.” I pulled the door shut behind me. A chill fell over me as I descended the staircase around the tree and headed through the empty clearing toward the stables.
I had a feeling—a strong feeling—about this.
When I approached the stables, they were cast in darkness. I pulled the latch, and in the darkness I heard one of the horses thump against a stall door.
“Hey guys,” I said, flicking the switch to turn on the walkway light.
The place came illuminated, a few horse heads poking out over the stall doors. Siren nickered in recognition, and I walked over to stroke her head and scratch her exactly where she liked it.
It was nice, by now, to have the horses know me. Here, nobody turned away. Nobody shunned me.