Good Witches Don't Cheat (Academy of Shadowed Magic Book 2)
Page 34
I didn’t deserve it. She was mistaken.
“But the formalists,” I said. “If I leave the academy…”
She lowered her chin. “You shall never travel to Edinburgh. The formalists squirm like maggots over that city. But mages in need of your protection don’t just live in Edinburgh, Clementine. They live on every continent in the world, and you can help them.”
I didn’t know what to say. My teeth found the edge of my lip, worried it until the nerve sang.
Her eyes traveled between mine. “Did you discover the boggans’ secret, Clementine?”
I went stiff. “I’m not sure.”
“The thing they guard. Surely you must have felt it, for as close as you came to the labyrinth’s center.”
I just stared at her. If I spoke, I would incriminate myself. But it seemed she already knew—she must know.
Finally, I shook my head.
“Given your feat today, I will tell you,” she whispered. “One of the most powerful leylines in the world runs through the labyrinth, and it comes closest to the surface right at the center. That is what the boggans are drawn to. That is why the labyrinth itself was constructed.”
A leyline. That was what they guarded.
And I had seen it. Used it to pass through to the edge of the labyrinth.
She doesn’t know about the rod, the small voice inside me crooned.
“Oh,” I said.
With a nod, she turned away, began parting the veil. “I’ll take you to where the others await. Then let’s get you to Nurse Neverwink straightaway. No doubt she’ll be dismayed as per usual by the wounds you manage to sustain, child.”
When we came through the veil to the path outside the academy, the other four students—and one cat—stood on the other side, wide-eyed on me.
Loki, who’d been at Liara’s feet, sprinted toward me, leapt onto my cloak and clawed his way up the front and onto my shoulder. “You dolt,” he declared from his perch. “Halfwit. Imbecile.”
Fresh pain lanced through me as he landed on my shoulder, but I managed through teary eyes, “Thanks, buddy. Did I finally manage to impress you?”
He groan-sighed. “Immensely.”
“Clementine has also passed the trial,” Umbra said to the group. “Through great heroism and fortitude, she has earned the right to guard the magical world. Please congratulate her.”
The other four did so, though I hardly saw or heard them in my daze.
Liara came up to me last of all, her hair unusually large and askew around her head. She had a long smear of blood on her cheek, but I couldn’t tell if it was hers.
“Congratulations,” she murmured, her face unreadable and serious.
“Did you pass?” I asked.
Her eyes lifted to Loki. “I did.”
“It was all me,” Loki murmured into my ear.
Liara’s eyes lowered to me, soft again as they had been in that last moment inside the cloak. “I suppose this means we’ll be the only two guardians from our year.”
I hadn’t even considered the future. Not past the next few hours. “I suppose it does.”
She began backing away. Before she turned, she said, “All right then.”
That was all. And then Liara Youngblood was on her way back to the grounds.
I walked back alone, with Loki on my shoulder. “Does this mean she won’t try to kill me?”
“I’d give it fifty-fifty.”
“Better odds than before.”
He nestled in beside my neck. “Did you get it, Clem?”
I knew exactly what he meant. Already, I could see Eva flying toward me, and Aidan run-walking across the clearing.
“Yes,” I murmured to him, “I got it.”
They reached me in a flurry of words and exclamations, Eva hugging me and aggravating my wounds all over again, Aidan asking me a hundred different questions about the trials themselves.
Meanwhile, the deceiver’s rod lay nestled invisibly inside my cloak. Neither could have known unless I told them.
And that, I was realizing, was exactly the point.
I had chosen as the Shade would, and it had earned me the first half of her weapon.
Epilogue
Later that night, we sat in the secret room one last time before summer recess—Eva, Aidan, Loki, and me. The core of our group.
In the center of the table lay the deceiver’s rod, immobile and gleaming under the lantern light. Of course I had told them about it. They were among the select few I trusted enough to know.
Eva leaned forward. “I want to touch it.”
“Then touch it,” I said. “Surely you’ve handled long rods before.”
Her eyes widened on me, scandalized. Then she reached out, set one finger on the metal edge. Trailed her fingertip along it, straight to the center, where the key still sat slotted. “It’s smooth, perfectly shaped. May I?”
I nodded.
Loki sat at the table’s edge, his tail swinging off the side like a clockwork cat as he watched.
She lifted it, balanced the rod on her finger. “Well proportioned, too.”
Aidan sat with folded arms, watching. “Why do you suppose the key fits in the center?”
I half-shrugged. “I haven’t got the slightest—”
With a small tug, Eva yanked the rod apart into two halves. They clanked to a hold, the key the flexible join at the center. “Oh,” she said. “Nunchucks.”
I leaned forward across the table, and Aidan sat up.
“Well,” I said, “now we know.”
“What a marvelous design.” Eva handed the weapon off to Aidan. “How do you suppose it’s used?”
“Bludgeon them, then bludgeon them again,” Loki offered.
Aidan inspected it at length, turning it over, testing its bend and swing. “Nunchucks have a long chain. The key is only three inches long.”
I folded my arms atop the table as I watched Aidan mess with the weapon. “Well, we have all summer to figure it out.”
He glanced up. “We do?”
“You invited me to your family home. I assume that’s a standing offer.”
“Sure it is.”
“Unless your family wouldn’t want a fire witch around.”
He shook his head. “No—trust me, after having a kid with the gift of everflame, they’re used to weird.” He paused. “But, two winters ago…”
He was referring to the fae market in Vienna, where I’d been followed. We still didn’t know who had followed me, or how they had gotten into the market. But nothing like that had happened since Umbra had renewed the enchantment on my moonstone.
“Was two winters ago,” I finished. “And I think it’s high time Loki and I visited London. Properly.”
Aidan glanced at Eva. “Do you want to come, too?”
A small smile spread over her face. “I’ll be in Iceland, with Torsten’s family. They have ponies.”
I slapped the table. “Girl, what are you still doing here? Get thee to Iceland.”
And so it was decided. Aidan and Loki and I would go to London, Eva to Iceland. I would spend a single summer as Clementine, regular student, before everything changed. Umbra had promised a formal induction into the guardians when the new school year commenced. That was fine by me—I wasn’t exactly the trumpets-and-poppers type.
The deceiver’s rod was smuggled away into my cloak, along with all my other clothes and belongings, and we had a final parting in the empty clearing. We were the last three students left.
After Eva and I hugged, she reached into her backpack. “Oh, I almost forgot.” When she extended a card to me, I stared.
“It’s for me?”
“It’s got your name on it.”
On the front, only my name had been written. Nothing else. This wasn’t Eva’s handwriting. “Who’s it from?”
“No clue,” she said, flitting into the air and landing some twelve feet away. She waved. “It was left on the landing in front of our dorm.”
&
nbsp; Then it was just Aiden, Loki, and me.
As we walked toward the leyline, I opened the envelope. Inside, someone had torn out a page from Jane Eyre, underlined two sentences:
I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die. I will be myself.
Now I recognized the handwriting I spotted in the margin. Remember yourself, he had written.
He knew I’d picked his book up off the couch that night. He knew I’d paged through it. Somehow, he knew.
As I set the page back in the envelope, I spotted something indecipherable scribbled into the corner. I stared at it, unable to make it out in the quarter-light under the canopy.
“Who was it from?” Aidan asked, jerking me out of my scrutiny.
I tucked the envelope into my cloak. “A friend.”
Loki’s tail feathered against my leg. “And what did they say?”
I stared ahead as we passed into the darkening night. “He just wanted me to know he’s looking out for me.”
Clementine’s story continues in GOOD WITCHES DON’T CURSE, NOW ON PREORDER—
They made me a guardian of the magical world. That was a mistake.
My third year is kicking off with a twist: I'm part of an elite group of students known as guardians. I had to pass three trials to get here, but none of them know my secret.
I cheated to get here.
Sure, I've got excuses: reassembling an ancient weapon to defeat the world's most evil witch—AKA the Shade—and fulfilling an ancient prophecy. But the truth is, things are getting dark for your girl.
Sometimes I wonder if it's all true, what they say about fire witches going bad.
The only way to find out what's on the other side is through.
PREORDER NOW
Afterword
Hi friend,
I write to you from pandemic times, nine months in and nearing the shortest day of the year. If you’re reading this, I’m glad to know you’re still kicking during this monumentally trying time.
I like to think Clem would be getting by, too. This series is about survival, after all—physically, of course, but emotionally, too.
On that note, I have three thoughts on survival:
1. Friendship is the greatest balm. Everyone should have an Evanora Whitewillow in their lives, in the good times and the worst. Especially the worst.
2. Forgive yourself for simply surviving. I spent a good four months creatively paralyzed after the pandemic began, and punishing myself for it. In retrospect, giving myself some goddamn grace would have been much more productive.
3. Joy and survival aren’t mutually exclusive. Good god, there’s so much to be grateful for even when things are objectively awful. I’m grateful for this book, and the moments it allowed me to inhabit two worlds.
As promised, here’s the soundtrack to Good Witches Don’t Cheat: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1T2cTYDCZT9hOVUFEjWcL0?si=vMo4Guy_SxydHkHTeDtzRA.
Until next time—
Shavonne
About the Author
S.W. Clarke lives in Houston, Texas with her partner and two identical—unrelated—cats. (Yes, they judge her every day.) She writes to inhabit the lives of the smartest, bravest women her brain can conjure.
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