by S. W. Clarke
He stood with me. “Clementine. Give me the book.”
I picked up my satchel. “I’m done with this lesson.” But as I started to leave, he stepped in my way. I stopped. “Are you serious, Aiden?”
He held out his hand, his face gravely serious.
I made to move around him, one hand on the strap of my satchel, but he caught my arm in his grip. I struggled, but with more strength than I’d expected, he flipped the flap of my satchel up and slid the book out.
As soon as it left my side, it felt like a phantasmic part of me was being sucked away; I could almost see the iridescent shape of it moving through the air, leaving me.
And in its wake, I felt hungover. Overstimulated. Exhausted.
“How dare you,” I whispered.
“Your loan’s over,” he said, turning. “And now I’m going to return it to the place it came from.” Out came the special key from his robes, which he inserted into the sealed door leading into the Room of the Ancients.
I followed him, arguing the whole way, but when I hit the seal at the entrance, he passed through—and I ran right into a wall.
An invisible wall, but a wall nonetheless.
And so I watched him replace the book on its shelf, unable to do anything but argue with him from the outside.
He came back out, closed the door with an enormous thud. Aiden turned to me, studying my face. Waiting for my reaction.
And even though some part of me still wanted to yell at him, it was a diminishing part. And where before I’d seen maliciousness and cruelty in his features, now I only saw…concern.
Something had changed in me.
I dropped into the nearest chair, leaning my forehead on my hand. “I feel awful.”
He came to a crouch in front of me. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I asked without looking up.
“For giving you something you weren’t ready to handle. I don’t even think I could have handled that book myself.”
Part of me wanted to object, and another part of me felt grateful. A lightness had begun to seep into me that I hadn’t known had been missing for the past few months.
I finally lowered my hand. “Aiden, who was that woman—Raven Murkwood?”
He shook his head. “Everything about her is contained in that book. I haven’t found any other mention of her name.”
My eyes lifted again toward the ceiling, to the wisps. I couldn’t hear their whispers anymore, if I ever had at all. And I knew they weren’t the ones who could help me right now.
I could finally think straight again. And I realized I’d been so fixated on the book, I’d wasted most of the time I had to save Noir.
That would change now.
I returned my gaze to Aiden. “I have to tell you something.”
After I’d confessed, Aiden rubbed a hand over his mouth, contemplating what I’d told him. Finally, his hand dropped away, and he stood from where he’d knelt in front of me. “A horse.”
My eyes lifted. “That’s right.”
He began a quick, insistent pacing in front of me. “Every night you’ve been taking this wild horse out of his stall and riding him.”
“Right.”
“Bareback.”
“Bareback.”
He stopped. “How? The horse isn’t broken.”
“Like I said: he isn’t breakable, Aiden. He’s my horse, meant for no one but me. That’s why I can ride him.”
His hands went out. “What do you expect me to do with this information, Clem? I’m supposed to uphold the academy’s rules. And riding one of the horses at night…”
I shrugged. “Hell, Aiden. You gave me Murkwood’s book. It’s only because of that book that I figured out about the horse.”
He sighed. “You have to tell Farrow that you believe he’s your horse before she puts him down. It’s the only thing you can do now.”
“I can’t yet.”
“Why not?”
“She’ll ask me to show her that I have control over him.”
His eyebrows went up. “You don’t have control?”
“I do, but the horse is a troll. He doesn’t always like to do what I want him to.”
He groaned. “Maybe Farrow is right about the horse. This can’t end well.”
I stood from my chair. “Nothing in my life has ended well, Aiden. Nothing. If this ends as badly as everything else, then it wouldn’t be any different.”
Before he could respond, the guardians’ horn echoed outside in a long, melancholic bellow.
Somewhere in the world, it was the witching hour. And somewhere in the world, a young mage was being kidnapped.
Aiden and I stared at one another, and I wondered if he was envisioning what I saw: those twelve guardians rising in the early morning, their minds bent on a single course—to respond to the call, to face whatever they found when they passed through the veil.
And I wondered if he understood what I had already begun to suspect: the guardians weren’t a way to defeat the darkness. They were simply a defense, an attempt to keep the ocean from rolling up onto land.
As the horn went on sounding, I said to Aiden, “You gave me that book because you thought a witch could defeat the darkness.”
He stared back at me; he didn’t say anything.
“And as long as the Shade lives, the darkness won’t stop,” I said. “Is that right?”
“That’s right,” he murmured.
“She’s too powerful for the guardians to take on, isn’t she?”
“She couldn’t be defeated five hundred years ago,” Aiden said. “The best we could do was banish her.”
“To the underworld. Which no mage has ever been able enter.”
He nodded slowly.
“Except for a witch,” I whispered. He closed his eyes, and I stepped forward. “You read the book too, didn’t you? You read what she wrote about witches. We’re the only mortals who can enter the underworld and survive.”
That was why the darkness had wanted me so badly. Why it still wanted me.
I was the last witch. I was the only one who could enter the Shade’s realm.
His eyes opened. I could see the motivations contending inside him. He was one of the smartest human beings I’d encountered, but he hated doing the wrong thing. And he didn’t know whether helping me was the wrong thing or not.
And I realized I couldn’t put this on him. Whatever would happen, Noir was my responsibility.
“I’ll tell Farrow,” I said again, just to placate him. “I’ll tell her everything.”
He stared at me. “When?”
“Soon.”
“Clem…”
“I’ll tell her,” I insisted. “I will.”
He accepted this with a begrudging sigh, sitting back down at the table. After everything that had happened this morning, we agreed it was best to cut our history lesson short. Instead, Aiden conjured up some breakfast for us: a pot of coffee and some biscotti.
And so we sat and chatted about small things as I dipped my biscotti into my coffee and made a special effort to pay attention as he talked about his favorite game: chess; it was easier without Murkwood’s book, too. Easier and harder, since I still wanted it back. But I found I wasn’t as obsessed with it as I had been when it was by my side.
I tried not to think about the horse. I tried my best.
As we came out of the library afterward, a yell sounded across the grounds. Near the trail into the forest, a fae flitted down to the ground, staring at the approaching guardians.
They had returned, but not fully intact.
Of the six fae and six humans, only ten had all their limbs. One lay across a horse’s back, unconscious and bleeding into a makeshift tourniquet.
“Gods,” Aiden said. “His leg’s gone.”
And another fae sat clutching the waist of one of the human guardians as she rode in, only one drooping wing remaining.
Even those who hadn’t been injured had blood on their faces, their
hands, rips in their clothing. The horses looked like they had run through mud. And I sensed in the dreariness of their return that whoever had been taken hadn’t been saved.
“Can fae regrow wings?” I asked.
The fae nurse burst out of the infirmary in a hurry, rushing past gathered students. “Everyone, stand aside!” She flew over to the approaching group, and the guardian dismounted and helped to carry the unconscious, tourniqueted guardian in as the fae student grabbed the reins of the horse he’d left behind.
“Yes,” Aiden said to my question, “but it’s not pleasant.”
I knew the nurse could regrow his leg, but the scene still pierced me like I hadn’t expected. It was easy to forget, here, what happened elsewhere. It was shamefully easy to forget that these abductions happened every day.
I couldn’t do what these people did. Not yet. But I could save one life.
I could save Noir’s.
And as I stared at the horses returning to the stables, I remembered Quartermistress Farrow’s words.
She had once told me that you truly became a rider when you could canter a horse. You had full control. And though I’d mounted Noir bareback and walked and trotted him, I hadn’t cantered on him.
That was it. If I could canter him for her, I could show her I had control.
And it was only because Aiden had taken the book away that I’d realized it.
“Aiden,” I said, “you didn’t make a mistake by giving me Murkwood’s book. And you didn’t make a mistake when you took it away.”
His eyes, previously unfocused, shifted to me. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said, backstepping away. “I’ve just decided something. I’ll see you later, all right?”
And as I left him in the clearing, I felt I’d begun to understand why my life had been full of so much disappointment. That maybe the pain wasn’t for nothing.
I was used to failing. To failing and persisting anyway.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Tonight I needed to canter Noir. I couldn’t wait any longer.
When I came into the stables, he was already restless. Maybe from Farrow shutting him in his stall after what had happened with the first-year from Gaia, or maybe because he understood her sharp words after the fact.
Maybe he understood Farrow’s intentions for him.
I would not—could not—allow her to make the mistake of ending his life. Because inasmuch as he felt like my horse, I also knew he was misunderstood. That he, like me, bore the brunt of a world that didn’t quite have the patience or eyes with which to see who we really were.
That had been true for me before I’d come to this academy. In many ways it was still true.
But I could see this horse properly, and I had the power to change his fate. And I would.
When I came to his stall door, his head surged out toward me as it had done back before he and I had bonded. Back then he would knock me aside or bite at me or let out a whinny.
But our relationship had changed. He didn’t do those things anymore. Still, I resisted flinching; I had to trust that he trusted me.
When his head came over the half-door, he only sniffed close to my hair, eyes gleaming in the moonlight leaking into the aisle.
I reached one hand up, touching his jaw. “Hey. It’s me.”
His nostrils widened, taking in my scent. One hoof stamped, a muffled sound in the shavings on the floor of his stall.
My hand settled on his jaw, sliding underneath to rub at the spot I had learned he liked scratched. “Tonight’s a big one. It’s our last bit of alone-time together before I have to tell Farrow about you and me.” I paused, scratching as his head lifted in contentment. “We have to be able to canter together. Then Farrow will understand.”
Some part of me knew I was only talking to him to reassure him with the sound of my voice, to bond him to me through a pleasant cadence. Another, tiny part of me wondered if, in a magical world with mages and fae, he could understand me.
Or, at least, could sense what lay inside me.
I unlatched the stall door. When I opened it, he came out into the aisle freely, just as he had grown used to doing throughout the winter. We had an understanding: I opened his stall door, he came out and waited for me to mount him. Then, together, we rode into the training ring for our practice.
And ever since I’d mounted him without an aid that first time, I had gotten better and better. Now, I could almost do it on my first try. It was all in the momentum, I’d learned, getting enough of a running start and jumping high enough to hook my leg over his back.
That took strength, coordination, agility. All of which I’d never thought I had much of when it came to horseback riding, but it turns out they were like anything else: skills you could learn.
Tonight I mounted him on my second try, coming up to a seat with my fingers gripping the mane at his withers. He stood still as a statue while I did this, not moving even a foot.
When I was up, I gave him the customary stroke down his neck, patting his shoulder. This elicited a nicker, which was totally unlike the horse Farrow encountered during the daytime.
Now I just had to make her see as much.
With a squeeze of my thighs, I urged him down the aisle toward the paddock.
He fell immediately into a walk, hooves clicking across the stone, head higher than usual. I could still feel the anxiety in his body, the tension that he and I alike carried. He didn’t have the same ease he usually did with me, as though he were expecting the unexpected.
“It’s all right,” I murmured. “Just you and me.”
But I was wrong.
A leaf cracked in the darkness outside the stables—the sound of a nighttime creature, or maybe a person approaching. Whatever it was, it threw Noir into a panic.
As soon as he heard it, the horse threw his head up, snorting. His ears were ramrod straight, on a swivel, and he traced sideways, away from the direction of the noise. We nearly ran into one of the other stall doors before I was able to get him under control.
“Woah, woah,” I kept saying, even as the other horses began shifting in their stalls.
I’d finally gotten him to stop his frenetic motion when a figure appeared in the doorway ahead of us, silhouetted by the moonlight. I could only see his tall frame; the rest of him was hidden in shadow.
“Hey,” a man’s voice called out. “What are you doing?”
And I knew in that moment I was screwed. Not because of the man, but because of the horse.
Noir reared onto his back legs with a terrific, ear-shattering neigh.
And me? I lost my grip on his mane and fell like a sack of grain, hitting the stone walkway so hard my vision went black.
When I woke, I was still on my back in the stables. And somewhere, Noir was whinnying—snorting, neighing, banging against the stall doors. A person knelt above me, their features shrouded by the light around them. Or maybe there were two someones—it was hard to tell.
“Hey—are you all right?” It was the same voice. He was the one who’d startled Noir.
“I’m totally fine.” Even though I couldn’t tell if it was one person or two talking to me, I tried to press up to my elbows. I could still hear Noir making a racket nearby. “The horse. I have to get him back in his stall.”
“Woah, woah. You’re bleeding from the back of the head. Let me take care of the horse.”
When he helped me up, Noir came into view. He was on his side, struggling to rise and falling. Something about the angle of one ankle was off...
The guy helped me stagger over to a chair in the tack room, and I sat there feeling dizzy and nauseous and periodically touching the back of my head as Noir’s hooves clattered in the walkway and whoever it was tried to tend to him.
Something was wrong. Really wrong.
I tried to watch, to tell him to be careful, but just the effort of turning around made me nearly retch. Right—totally fine, I thought as I pulled my fingers away from my skull and found
them coated in bright blood.
You fucked up, Clem. You fucked up.
Footsteps crossed the walkway, and the guy appeared. This time I could actually see his face: a shaved head with a widow’s peak, brown eyes, angular features. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him…
“Wait,” I said, sitting up and immediately regretting it. “I saw you the other night. You’re a guardian, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “Well, looks like you may not be too badly concussed. I’m Jericho.” He knelt in front of me, his eyes darting around my face. Anxiety creased his forehead. “You’re real lucky you’re not dead.”
No thanks to you.
I sighed. “Story of my life.” Then, “I’m Clementine. The last witch.”
I was getting used to introducing myself that way, and even more used to people responding with immediate recognition. But at least Jericho didn’t seem to recoil from me.
“I know who you are.”
Noir’s body crashed again in the walkway, and I tried to lean toward the door to see. Jericho caught me before I tumbled out of the chair and righted me.
I turned wide eyes on him. “What’s happened with Noir?”
“He’s hurt. I’ve called for the quartermistress. Right now, I need to get you to the medical ward,” he said. “Can you walk?”
“Sure I can.” I grabbed both arms of the chair, pressed myself upright. And though I actually did gag a little in my mouth as the world spun around me, I forced myself to stay on my feet. “But I have to help him.”
“Unless you know healing magic, you’re no use to him.” He stood up with me, at least eight inches taller than me and a third wider. He slid an arm around my back and under my opposite armpit, helping me stagger along out of the stables—past Noir, who had managed to get his front hooves under him. But his back legs… Something was wrong with the left back leg.
I protested, but Jericho didn’t let me slow down. He kept me moving toward the infirmary.
“I’m sorry I surprised you and the horse, but what were you doing in there?” he asked when we emerged into the night.