Miss Mabel's School for Girls: The first book in the Network Series

by Katie Cross

  There was one thing it could be. One thing Grandmother warned me about years ago when a man came into the shop looking for a specific solution.

  The Vibrio is a terrible thing, she had told me in her shaky voice.

  It hides in many places. Never drink a clear potion if you don’t know exactly what it is. It could be the Vibrio. It has no taste, no color, and no smell. Nearly undetectable, if it didn’t make you so sick.

  It’s a terrible experience to survive.

  Surely the pain made me batty. The Central Network didn’t allow Vibrio. The High Priestess banned it when she took power forty years ago. The previous High Priestess, Evelyn, had used it on innocent witches to force false confessions from them.

  Scrambling through the book, I skimmed its pages until I came to a collection of potions at the back. At the herb table, Elana stuffed a few dark green leaves into her mouth, mewling as she chewed. Priscilla sorted through the jars, then fell to her knees with a shriek, her eyes screwed shut.

  I found the entry.

  The Vibrio potion was originally intended to cure stomach ailments, but over time evolved into many different forms. Mild concoctions are used to treat stomach cramps, while stronger forms may induce extreme spasms and pain immediately upon consumption.

  Vibrio has no treatment. Using herbs or potions to alleviate the symptoms may prolong the effects.

  It took me three attempts to comprehend, and by then, I wasn’t sure I read it right.

  This was a bloody nightmare. One I wouldn’t survive. I doubled over from a new wave of pain, my stomach churning and grinding. Dying from this curse would be a welcome reprieve. I embraced the thought.

  “You can do it, Bianca!”

  Camille’s voice broke through my glazed mind. She dropped to her knees so I could see her, calling so frantically over all the other voices that she sounded like a bleating sheep.

  “You can do it! You’ll survive this. You’ll survive!”

  I started to shake my head. No. They couldn’t understand this pain, this cramping horror. No education was equal to this misery. But then Leda fell to her knees next to Camille. She just stared at me.

  “It’s worth it,” Leda said. “It’s worth it.”

  “You can do it,” Camille said again. Underneath the pain bloomed a new determination, the only thing I understood. They believed it was worth it. It must be. Grimacing through the agony, I straightened, trusting their judgment when my own felt so skewed and twisted. Camille smiled.

  “Yes!” she cried. “Yes, you can do it!”

  A strangled sound came from the herb table, drawing my weak attention.

  “Stop,” I called to Elana, my voice coming out in a weak gasp. The waves turned into a constant, uncontrollable burn, like pouring a bowl of cinders into my abdomen. “Elana, Priscilla, don’t–”

  They continued to sort through jars in desperation.

  “Elana!” I yelled. It came out strangled at best. Using my elbows, I crawled over to the table.

  “Stop! Stop! It’s Vibrio!”

  Someone behind must have understood my garbled cry because students began repeating me in whispers.

  “Vibrio?”

  “She said it’s Vibrio!”

  “No!”

  The crash of glass broke through my thoughts. Priscilla fell over again, taking several jars with her. Miss Celia called all the glass shards to her hand before Priscilla fell into them.

  Elana grabbed another jar with a wild look in her eye, stuffing whatever she could find into her mouth.

  “Stop!” I yelled, with all my strength. “Elana!”

  It didn’t matter. A wave of sweet blackness came as the pain ballooned, crushing me.

  I fell into it and knew no more.

  12

  Are You Scared?

  The silence woke me.

  For a moment, I thought I was home, with my mother bustling in the background as she boiled water for raspberry leaf tea. Grandmother sat at the table, tying the new crop of basil in little white packets while humming under her breath. Expecting to see the sun streaming through the windows, I opened my eyes. The darkness dissipated enough to reveal Miss Bernadette at my side.

  No tea, no basil leaves, and no sunlight. Just the shadows cast by my new life and remnants of my old one.

  “Bianca,” Miss Bernadette said, her melodic voice wavering like the ripples on water. The blackness ebbed away, escorting me into reality by the sore throb of my stomach.

  “Are you okay?”

  She hovered over me with the concerned touch of a mother, brushing my hair out of my face. I wanted to fall into her warm hand and disappear.

  “I think so,” I whispered, sounding petulant.

  “Tough match,” she said.

  I wanted to laugh, but the muscles in my stomach refused.

  “Do you remember anything?” she asked.

  “The Vibrio potion.” My eyes adjusted enough to the candlelight that I could see her features. “I think–”

  “You passed out during the second match.”

  I placed my hand on my stomach to quell the memory of the pain. The sound of shattering glass and the feel of the fire ripping through my body came to me again.

  “Did I make it?”

  Miss Bernadette leaned back in her chair. As she moved, her flowery perfume washed over me, and my stomach revolted.

  “You didn’t lose,” she said with a sharp intake of breath. “There are no winners in a match like that.”

  Her jaw tightened, and I saw her hand ball into a fist. But she soon relaxed when she saw me observing her.

  “You and Priscilla are advancing to the final match. Elana lost. She kept taking herbs to try and fix it. Unfortunately, according to Miss Amelia, she’s still in a great deal of pain.”

  My queasy stomach didn’t burn anymore. The miserable cramping and twisting was finished. I couldn’t imagine how Elana dealt with it still. With an exhale, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the pillow. The completion of the second match meant I only had one left.

  Relief came slow and didn’t taste as sweet as I imagined it would.

  “So it was the Vibrio,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s going on midnight. You slept for several hours.”

  My muscles felt weak and wrung out. I wanted to go back to sleep. When I opened my eyes again, Miss Bernadette stared out my window, her hands folded in her lap. She had a lovely jaw line, accented by her elegant neck.

  “Are you sure you still want to do this?” she asked when she turned her attention back to me.

  “The Competition, you mean?”

  “Yes. You still have one match left, and it’s the hardest.”

  I put my hands below me and pushed myself into a sitting position, my nostrils flaring in a poor attempt to conceal the pain.

  “I’m not going to quit now.”

  I recalled the moment in the match when I would have given up if I could have. The moment when Leda and Camille came to my rescue. A sense of shame rushed through me. Had I really been willing to give up? I’ve dedicated most of my life to seeing this through, and one potion could have stopped it. Too soon, I reassured myself. It’s too soon to analyze how you acted under extreme circumstances.

  I forced the thoughts away to consider later. Or never.

  Miss Bernadette picked up my feather quill from the desk and ran her fingers along the silky strands.

  “Are you afraid of the last match?”

  “A little,” I admitted.

  “Good. You probably should be. I’ve been here for several years, and these are the hardest challenges I’ve seen so far.”

  “The first one wasn’t so bad,” I said, hoping to dispel some of the tension in the air, but I only made it worse.

  “Maybe not,” she said, setting the feather aside and meeting my eyes. “But it was very dangerous. You were lucky to come away with little more than a sc
ratch on your cheek, and Elana was lucky you came by and helped her with her injured ankle.”

  “She told you?” I asked.

  “No, she told Miss Amelia, and Miss Amelia told me. That was a very kind thing of you to do.”

  I brushed off her praise. “Would the animal, or creature, or whatever, have hurt us?”

  “No,” she said, but couldn’t hide the momentary hesitation. “Isadora wouldn’t allow any student to be hurt on school grounds. She is probably the reason the animal eventually turned away.”

  Isadora. How had I forgotten? No matter how much she tried, Miss Bernadette couldn’t hide her reticence, or her worry, when the Competition came up. I thought about her for a second, wondering how such a lovely person found herself at Miss Mabel’s.

  “Did you compete?” I asked.

  “Heavens no,” she laughed under her breath. “I’m not from around here. This is the only Network school that still runs the Competition. Not even the Boys School will do it now. Miss Amelia, however, competed and won. She went to school here years ago.”

  The deep chime of a grandfather clock announced midnight, and I yawned. Taking my cue, Miss Bernadette stood and pulled her white jacket over her slender shoulders.

  “It’s late, and you need sleep. Can I get you anything?”

  “No. Thank you, Miss Bernadette, for staying with me.”

  “Then get some rest. Enjoy the chance to recover all day tomorrow.”

  She squeezed my hand, then slipped into the hallway.

  I stared at the ceiling once she was gone to watch the candle light dance. When the movement of the shadows started to give me a headache, I extinguished the candle and stared at the darkness.

  The next morning I ignored Camille’s quiet knocks on my door and let them go to breakfast without me. My stomach still smarted and I had no desire to eat. Besides, I had someone I needed to talk to.

  The sound of Miss Celia muttering to herself in the kitchen drifted up the back stairs and echoed down the empty second-year corridor. It felt odd being on this level. The decorations were a marked improvement. A gilded gold mirror reflected my pale face and gray eyes as I passed, trying to ignore how tired I looked. My feet didn’t make a sound when I walked past an elaborate painting of a ship and an arrangement of nearly dead winterflowers a student had brought in the day before.

  When I found the right door, I rapped with a single knuckle and held my breath.

  “Who is it?”

  “Bianca,” I replied.

  A long pause.

  “Come in.”

  Elana looked up when I entered.

  “I’m sorry if I’m bothering you,” I said. “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

  She sat on her bed with one shoe on. Her hair hung down her back in a neat braid. She motioned to her desk chair with a pale, drawn face.

  “No, you’re not bothering me. You just took me by surprise. Have a seat.”

  A dark velvet dress hung off her shoulders, falling in buttery waves to the floor, testament to her wealthy family background. The demarcation between students’ backgrounds was never so apparent as on the weekend, the one day a week we could wear our own clothes. I wanted to touch the fabric, but kept my hands at my side. Her eyes flickered over my outfit, though she said nothing. I suppressed the urge to look over my plain black dress, with its elbow-length sleeves and high neckline.

  “I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I said, breaking the silence.

  The door clicked shut behind me. A little larger than mine, her room had braids of dried yellow wildflowers and willow tree swatches ringing the window and headboard. A painting of two people that must have been her parents sat on the desk. Elana looked just like her mother, but had her father’s dark hair. Like Elana, the neat room had a tidy, quiet appearance.

  She studied me when I lowered myself to her wooden chair, as if searching for signs of insincerity. She turned away a few moments later, one hand pressed to her stomach. I knew how she felt.

  “I’m better now, but it was a rough night.”

  Unsure of what to say next, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

  “I tried to tell you. Honestly, I did. But I hadn’t figured it out until–”

  “It’s all right,” she stopped me. “I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway. It’s like I lost my head. I just started grabbing herbs as fast as I could, hoping for some relief.”

  We stared at each other, both recalling the bitter memory of the hot stabbing pains.

  “Besides,” she looked down at her hands in her lap, “I’m not sure I would have been good for the position. I began to question the idea after the first match, but this one confirmed it. I don’t want to work for a woman who is willing to use Vibrio as a test for teenagers, no matter what my parents think.”

  Neither did I.

  “I’m sure they’ll understand,” I said. A poor attempt at comfort, and I felt like curling into myself after the words came out.

  Elana let out a bitter laugh. “I wish. Too bad I didn’t just step away from the challenge at the beginning and spare myself the pain, huh?”

  “Pain finds us all,” I said, glancing at the circlus on my wrist. “Eventually.”

  When the silence stretched too long, I looked up to find her staring at me with a queer look on her face.

  “You’re kind of odd, Bianca.”

  I laughed. And a raving lunatic, and a bit mad.

  “You’re simple, aren’t you?” She didn’t wait for an answer, and I sensed she already had it. “Do you always go barefoot in the winter?”

  I looked down to my chilly toes.

  “If I can,” I answered with a rare honesty I felt she deserved but didn’t know why. “It feels better, like I’m not so restricted. It makes me feel like I can go anywhere.”

  “But you can’t,” she countered immediately. “You have to be responsible. You have to be here. You can’t go and do whatever you want.”

  “Not yet,” I said in a quiet voice. “But it reminds me that one day I will.”

  Elana took that in, with a subtle glint in her eyes that looked like tears. She turned away and blinked several times.

  “I don’t know why you’re competing,” she said, “and I don’t really want to know. But now that we’re not against each other, I can say that you’ll be better against Priscilla than I would be. I hope you beat her.”

  The conviction in her words made it difficult to know what to say.

  “Thanks, Elana.”

  Elana motioned to the door with a soft jerk of her head. “You better get down for breakfast. Miss Celia hates it when people are late.”

  It was the kindest dismissal I could have expected. While I knew her disappointment over losing the Competition meant we wouldn’t be friends, at least we weren’t enemies.

  She stopped me at the door. “Bianca?”

  “Yes?”

  “Good luck.”

  I tried to smile but couldn’t muster the strength.

  “Thanks.”

  Her hunched shoulders and exhausted eyes haunted me as I headed back to my room to put on a pair of shoes. Miss Mabel had used a forbidden potion on a group of teenagers who didn’t know better. And, if she was anything like I imagined, she enjoyed seeing the results. The prospect of being her Assistant curled my lips like a tart candy.

  A letter on the floor of my bedroom stopped me mid-stride. I stared at it with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Part of me wanted to win the Competition just to show Miss Mabel I wasn’t afraid.

  But I was.

  Terror had me in her awful grip. I was nothing more than a big ball of nerves and fear. No amount of confidence or acting calm would take a curse away from a terrified sixteen-year-old in far over her head. I hid behind my own determination and confidence, pretending to be brave, pretending it would change reality, when fate wouldn’t allow us to change anything. Would she?

  I stared at the envelope.

  You should ne
ver be afraid of anything, Papa said in the echoing chambers of my heart.

  Yes. Of course. There must be a way. No more of this fear, this stress and worrying.

  Confidence, I said, bolstering myself. Hiding my insecurities back in that little pocket in my mind, tucking the fear away to grow bigger and stronger until I dealt with it on a later day. Confidence, Bianca.

  I picked up the letter. Three purple flowers, twine, and a thick envelope. The same handwriting on the front, the same quivering sensation in my body. Unlike Elana, I had no choice. And now it was down to me and Priscilla, the smartest, most talented girl in school.

  This time the envelope didn’t shake.

  Dearest Bianca,

  Congratulations on your advancement. If you win, I have great plans for you. I know your grandmother, Hazel, must be very proud, despite her recent illness.

  In the past, I have enclosed start times and directions pertaining to the match. This time, I give you none. The third match may begin at any time, at any place. My only advice to you is to watch what you do, or say, wherever you are.

  This is redundant but allow me to remind you again: Nothing is ever what it seems.

  Always,

  Miss Mabel

  13

  Inheritance Curse

  “Girls! Come over here, please!”

  Miss Bernadette called to the first-year students strung along the yard the next morning, two days after the second challenge. An angelic blue sky mocked our frozen fingers and noses, starting the day with a bitter cold.

  “Is everyone paired off?” she asked. “I want you all in groups. No one should ever go into Letum Wood alone.”

  Especially not at night, with no light and no sense of direction.

  Miss Bernadette’s eyes met briefly with mine, thinking, no doubt, of my awful encounter with a creature of the woods.

  The breakfast of hot cinnamon buns and warm milk sat as a sweet memory in our bellies, preparing us for the cold forage ahead. The risen sun shone bright, but the ground still glittered from the night’s frost. I moved to the back of the crowd and found Leda a few feet away. We edged next to each other without a word.