The Quad

by Todd Fahnestock

  Brom’s heart sank as he contemplated those who would be in his Quad. What was The Collector thinking? He’d said he would form Quads based on how easily it would be for them to bond. But this group would never bond. A Fendiran rebel and the Keltovari princess? They’d kill each other on the first day! And the urchin looked like she’d knife them all in the night. He couldn’t see even one possible path that led this group to bonding.

  When the Fendiran realized who their fourth was, he pointed at the urchin. “No. Not her. She stabbed me.”

  “Yes,” The Collector said. “We know.”

  Without another word, The Collector swept through the door. The princess was the first to follow, head high like she couldn’t abide the stench of this room any longer. Vale hissed at Royal—actually hissed at him—then followed. The big man narrowed his blue eyes, then he followed, blood still trickling down the back of his calf.

  Brom hesitated so long that the door began to close. Setting his mouth in a firm line, he rushed forward slipped through just in time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Brom

  Master Saewyne’s high, smooth voice dipped and rose animatedly as she neared the end of her lecture in Magic Mechanics. Class time had been a wonder to Brom in the first half of the year. He’d absorbed the information rapidly, readying himself for the day when the magic would begin to come to him, the day when his Quad would bond and they’d begin progressing down their individual paths.

  But after the first six months, there had been nothing. No breakthroughs. Winter had set in. Snows covered the flat fields and bare forests, and Brom felt as bleak as the landscape. Quad after Quad had bonded before them, and each delighted as their group discovered which paths they fit and began using their magic, but Brom’s Quad did not.

  Brom’s Quad, such that it was, excelled at the theory of magic. They’d learned how to see and divide their Soulblocks into four parts faster than the other students. But unlock them? Use the magic within? No.

  Early on, Brom had taken heart from that one victory. Soulblocks were the foundation of magic use. They were what gave a Quadron the ability to work magic. Every living person had a soul, and magic could be cultivated from that soul like water diverted from a lake. The problem was that diverting magic from it could cause a leak that would drain you down to nothing. And without a soul, you died.

  But because of The Four’s discoveries a hundred years ago and their subsequent founding of the Champion’s Academy, the soul could be divided. Instead of one reservoir for the entire soul, the soul could be compartmentalized into four Soulblocks, three of which could be emptied and used to make magic. The fourth, of course, must be kept closed and never touched. Like an undivided soul, to open the fourth Soulblock was certain death.

  There were stories about those who attempted magic without the training of the Champion’s Academy, without first splitting their soul into Soulblocks. The endings of those stories were alway grisly.

  Of course, first-year students were restricted to using only the first of their Soulblocks, and the thick tomes they studied taught that Quadrons rarely ever used more than the first two. The more of their soul a Quadron used, the greater the toll it took upon them. Using the first Soulblock required an hour’s rest to recover. Using the second Soulblock required an entire night’s rest after. But to use the third Soulblock, well, it put a person down for a week or more.

  Though Brom’s Quad created their Soulblocks faster than anyone else, the victory had turned sour when their progress creaked to a stop shortly afterward.

  His Quad had not progressed at all since then, and Brom himself had progressed only a little.

  Now Springdawn had come and gone. Springmarch had marched past, and they were at the beginning of Springwatch, staring down the road to the end of the year. Barely three months from now, they’d all be expelled. It was practically a certainty. The Collector had promised that only half of them would continue on to become second students. The rest would become the Forgotten, sent home as “normals,” unable to ever use magic again.

  When the first day of Summermarch arrived three months from now and the Tests of Passage—where Quads showed what they had learned in head-to-head competition against other Quads—were taken, only the top half would be given their writs of passage. Only sixteen Quads out of thirty-two would continue on to become second-year students.

  Master Saewyne tapped on the slate board with her chalk. She had written the names of the four paths of magic, and below them the four aspects of each: internal, external, constructive, and destructive.

  First-years were tasked with mastering the internal first. Second- and third-years were expected to master the external and sometimes bits of the constructive aspect. Only fourth-year students were allowed to delve into the destructive aspects of magic.

  Brom watched Master Saewyne for a moment and found himself smiling without meaning to. She was like that: a collection of mysteries wrapped up in a soft grin, and you always found yourself grinning with her, even if you didn’t actually want to. She wore a stylish dress, only slightly more sedate than the gem-studded courtly dresses Oriana wore. All of Master Saewyne’s dresses were, of course, in shades of red, the color of a Motus. They were always long and proper...and yet they hugged her form as though she was trying to catch young eyes. She was by far the nicest of the masters at the academy, but Brom had an uneasy feeling about her, like her wide smile, her spellbinding voice and her “this-tempting-dress-isn’t-supposed-to-tempt-you” attire were tools she used to pull you in just to see if she could do it. He always left her classes feeling emotionally confused.

  Master Saewyne tapped the chalk on the board three times in emphasis. This always crushed the tip against the slate, sending little shards tinkling to the ground like snow. She did it every lesson, and always near the end. Brom imagined that she liked the feeling of chalk cracking beneath her fingers. Again, he felt confused, like it was a bit of violence pent up within her, a small flash of her true personality. And the only way a student could ever know to be wary of her was by noting the cruel death of the chalk stick.

  “Remember that there are many levels to each aspect of each path,” Master Saewyne said. “Some Quadrons strive to utilize all aspects. Some Quadrons delve deeply into only one, specializing. It can take a lifetime to truly master an aspect. And if you make it to your fourth year, you will get to choose for yourself which suits you best.”

  An excited murmur went through the class.

  Master Saewyne gave a beatific smile, and the whole class smiled back at her. Brom found himself smiling, too, though he didn’t really want to.

  “Dismissed,” she said, and the students all stood up, feet shuffling, desks squeaking against the floor.

  Brom gave a quick look over his shoulder for his so-called Quad mates. Oriana, as usual, sat in the first row all the way to the left. Royal was always in the second or third row in the very middle, like some mountain anchoring the center of the class. And Vale always skulked in the back. His Quad mates stayed as far away from each other as they could get.

  Brom sighed, got up, and left the class with the mass of other students, not waiting for the three that were supposed to be his “best friends.”

  He tried to put down his disappointment, but he just couldn’t. Not anymore. It was a weight that hung around his neck from the moment he woke to the moment he went to sleep. His dreams had become hopeless nightmares where he chased his Quad mates down long, dark hallways but could never catch them.

  Brom had come to the Champion’s Academy with a dream, and it lay in ruins around him. He’d wanted to be a Quadron more than anything. He’d left his parents behind, left Myan behind, left the only home he’d ever known before coming to join this colossal disappointment. He’d come prepared to do anything he could. He had intended to work hard, study hard, to do more than anyone else in the entire school. But fate was cruel, because it had ensured his destiny was failure. Brom’s future lay in the hands of
three angry idiots who refused to bond. Oriana, Royal, and Vale were barely capable of being civil to one another. How were they going to lean on each other long enough to work magic?

  After a year of gut-clenching training, the result for Brom’s Quad was a disaster. They were so far behind every other Quad at this point that, even if they could bond today, this very day, they’d never catch up.

  Brom walked solemnly up the wide hallway of Westfall Dormitory toward the door of the practice room reserved for their Quad. The vaulted ceilings rose three stories over his head, ringing by balconies on the second and third floors that overlooked the foyer. The first-year practice rooms filled the ground floor, in addition to some first-year classrooms and the eating hall, called the Floating Room. The second and third stories above were all dormitory rooms.

  He could practically feel the leaden footsteps of his three Quad mates a hundred feet behind him. The entire northern hall on the ground floor of the dormitory held practice rooms for all the first-years. Brom had often seen other Quads exiting their practice room at the end of the day clapping each other on the back and laughing after some new accomplishment. That never happened for Brom’s Quad.

  They’d done this every day and only met with failure. He had no hope that today was going to be different.

  Royal, with his long strides, passed Brom up before he reached the door. Royal had continued to bulk out as the months had passed, and he put his huge mitt on the door and opened it. He went through, left it wide open for the others. That was about as much courtesy as any of them showed each other.

  Brom entered the room for another disappointing day of attempting skills they could not master.

  The practice room was a marble square with high ceilings and four stations to help a student hone their Quadron skills. Near one wall sat a giant pyramid of steel with a ring welded to it. Near another, four people sat unmoving. Draped in gray robes and wearing masks that shielded even their eyes, they were called The Invisible Ones, and their sole purpose was to be living practice puppets for Motus and Mentis students.

  An elaborate mechanism of gears, spars, blades, and suspended buckets of poison loomed against the third wall. The last wall, across from the door and the Invisible Ones, had eight pedestals with objects whose purpose Brom didn’t understand: A cask spilling over with jewels. An empty glass pitcher. A large clay pot with a small tree growing out of it. A small pool of water. A lump of mud that never seemed to dry out. A dagger carved from Lyanwood. A live goat in a pen. And a beautifully made, but unadorned, steel sword.

  Oriana’s aloof gaze passed over the room and her Quad mates, no doubt trying to decide at what she’d like to fail today. In the beginning, she had flung out orders out at them, suggestions about how they might bond. At first, they’d ignored her. Then, as Brom had become desperate, he’d tried some of her suggestions. Even Vale had joined in for a time, though Royal refused to take orders from the princess of Keltovar. But when Oriana’s mandates hadn’t worked, Brom had gone back to ignoring her. And when Oriana had realized they were all studiously ignoring her, she’d stopped telling them what to do. She had stopped speaking to them entirely about two months ago.

  Royal was the same, though he didn’t benefit from Oriana’s inscrutable mask. His frustration and anger glowed around him like a nimbus of fire.

  He grunted a desultory greeting to Brom every morning as if he were checking it off a list of required politeness. Brom gave a half-nod and a little wave. Royal gave a greeting to Vale, though she never answered him back, only stared at him like she was going to put another dagger in him. For his part, Royal never let her get too close—none of them did. They all treated her like a rabid dog that might bite at any moment.

  Royal never gave a good morning to Oriana, only glared at her. He did that every chance he got, which was essentially a thousand times a day. On that first day, they’d all learned that Oriana was none other than King Leventius’s daughter and the heir to the Keltovari throne. From that moment forward, Royal had embarked on a mission to exude as much hate toward her as he could. And as time slipped painfully forward day by day, their failures as a Quad only seemed to affirm for Royal that Oriana was the cause of everything wrong in his life, at the academy, and in the two kingdoms at large.

  Vale hated everyone equally, it seemed. Her eyes constantly flicked from person to person, keeping track of who was within striking distance, he supposed.

  Brom was heartsick. This was supposed to be his new family. The more time Brom spent at the academy, the more he felt his soul dying. His dreams were right in front of him, held close enough that he could touch them with his fingertips, but never fully grasp them.

  In the beginning, he had made a few attempts to bring the Quad together. Now he just stayed away from them as much as he could. The terrible irony was that, when it came to the study of magic theory, every one of Brom’s Quad excelled. In the classroom, even Vale thrived, and he suspected she hadn’t even known how to read when she’d arrived. They all understood the basic principles of magic, but none of them could put it to use in the practice room.

  None except Brom. During these past few months, he’d had some limited success with his own magic, without any help from the Quad. It was a pitiful wisp of the great power he could feel within him, but better than nothing. Somehow, he’d been able to access some of his first Soulblock, a mere trickle, he was sure, compared to what he might gain with a fully functioning Quad.

  A few weeks ago, Brom had actually discovered his path to magic. He was the Anima. While practicing on his own, far away from the pall of hate in the practice room, he’d suddenly picked up the wisps of a person’s soul.

  It hadn’t come in words. It had flowed to him in pictures, like memories in his mind that weren’t his own, memories of pivotal moments. Sometimes it came as colors, or even rarely as scents. Mostly, though, it was just an...understanding, like feeling the wind on his face, feeling its desire to push, to blow. It enabled Brom to instinctively know what a person wanted, which direction they were inclined to go and, in two rare cases so far, what a person might do in the next few moments.

  Strangely, Brom couldn’t use this power on his Quad mates. He’d tried. While he could read the souls of other students he had passed on the paths or the lawns—or sometimes even the masters—Vale, Royal, and Oriana remained locked to him.

  He hadn’t told his Quad mates about his breakthrough. He thought maybe he should, but then he’d see how horrible they were to each other. He didn’t want to share this fledgling power with them. Just looking at them made him clench his teeth.

  So he didn’t practice here. He practiced anywhere except with these people in this room of failure.

  Brom watched his Quad mates as they flailed at the various stations in the practice room. He watched Vale move over to The Invisible Ones to try her hand at manipulating their emotions.

  Royal moved to the pyramid of steel and put his huge hands around the ring, obviously attempting to lift it again. It was pretty obvious that, of all of them, Royal was likely their Impetu. And based on what Brom had read this year, Royal should have been able to lift that pyramid six months ago. But he was going to fail. Again. This Quad wasn’t going anywhere. Brom was on his own.

  He felt the power of his Soulblocks, crackling like lightning in a box, longing to be used.

  He got up and left the room. He wasn’t supposed to do that. The masters had told him that the Quad was to attend classes together and practice together until they made their bond.

  Ha.

  Not one of them looked up when he left, though he was sure all of them saw. He’d been doing it every day for a week. Nobody called out. Nobody tried to stop him. Nobody cared.

  He emerged into the hallway, exited Westfall Dormitory and headed for Quadron Garden, where students not actively practicing went to gather, mostly second-, third- and fourth-years who weren’t required to spend their afternoons in the practice rooms. Brom was pretty sure some stud
ents, like him, used their powers on unsuspecting others. It was against the rules, of course, but Brom’s Quad was already on the path to expulsion. The masters didn’t care about his success, so he didn’t care about their rules.

  He opened his first Soulblock and let the magic crackle through him.

  Quadron Garden was full of a couple dozen students. Most were just relaxing, lying on the grass looking at the sky, or sitting against trees. A few were playing the sports introduced to keep students fit. Some sat at the tables, reading from or writing in their journals. Library books weren’t allowed out of doors, of course, but students could jot down notes from any and all things they read. Everyone carried a personal journal of class notes, experiences and snippets from textbooks.

  Brom cleared his mind and began to push the lightning in his body into a tunnel of focus. He closed his eyes and let his body take over the task of walking as he neared the group of students. Slowly, little glowing impressions appeared in his mind. Brom couldn’t see the trees, rocks, benches or tables with his eyes closed, but every single person in the garden became a multicolored, glowing figure, like embers in a fire. He didn’t quite see them, but the impressions of their souls translated to light, and each had its own combination of colors.

  He caught a brief image of a female student having a fantasy about a boy she liked. Her desires were fierce and red with edges of pink. Brom smiled. The next student was a blast of purple, his soul large because he was running, and he loved athletics. The next was blue and green, mixing together like multicolored flames in a fire and...

  Brom stopped walking as he saw an image of himself within the soul of the girl right in front of him. She was thinking about him! And she was...looking at his soul...

  He felt her intentions, similar to his own. She liked people, was curious what they looked like on the inside. And she loved the rush of breaking rules, doing what the masters had forbidden, wondering if she would get caught.