by Chloe Garner
“I would like to be there, if I may,” Mr. Jamison said, glancing at Valerie. “Her mother was a dear friend, and I owe it to her to watch over Valerie if I can.”
“Can you spare the time?” Mr. Benson asked, and Mr. Jamison stretched his mouth to one side and nodded quickly.
“I’ll make the time,” he said. “I’ll figure it out.”
Mr. Benson nodded and motioned to the door.
“In the meantime, you all have classes waiting for you.”
Including the potions class out in the hallway, just now.
The potions teacher came to look at the pile of things Valerie had and he nodded.
“I would have very much liked to have seen what you would do with those,” he said. “I am Mr. Tannis, and I’d like to review your schedule to have you moved into my class next semester. You are dangerous, right now, and you need to learn… everything here. Most students wouldn’t have touched any of these things without a written spell, but you worked with them more confidently than magic users who have been doing it for decades longer than you. You need to be taught, but without curtailing that ability. Do you understand?”
Valerie shook her head.
“Not really.”
“Good,” he said. “Ignorance isn’t something to be praised, but truth is. We will see what the rest of the faculty agree to, but expect to be in my class this year.”
Mr. Jamison was standing in the doorway, waiting for her, and Valerie went to go through to the hallway, watching as the older students filed back into the class.
Mr. Jamison was watching her carefully.
“She didn’t teach you anything?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“No.”
He drew a slow breath and sighed.
“With any luck, your penchant for creating weapons is something we can curb toward defense a bit more consistently,” he said. “This is the School of Magic Survival, after all.” He chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment, then nodded, looking over at where Mrs. Reynolds was waiting for her.
“We both have classes waiting for us, Mr. Jamison,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “We’ll discuss it privately and come up with a plan.”
Mr. Jamison nodded again and Valerie slowly followed Mrs. Reynolds down the hallway and down the stairs toward the herbs and botanicals room again.
“Did I do something wrong?” Valerie finally asked.
“No,” Mrs. Reynolds answered. “You’re just going to be very challenging to teach. You have immense skill and no knowledge. It’s the kind of combination that kills someone if you don’t get it right.”
Valerie’s mouth went dry. Somehow, the woman putting it just like that had made it feel very real.
She could kill people.
On accident or on purpose.
She shuddered and shook her head.
“I don’t want to kill anyone,” she said.
“No,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “That’s why you’re going to work so much harder than the rest of the students to make sure that you have the knowledge to choose what you want to make. If you can’t get on top of it, we may never be able to let you use magic ingredients, and if you are just as skilled with the other magics… I can’t imagine what we’ll do.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Valerie said as Mrs. Reynolds put her hand on the door knob.
“No,” the woman said, firmly but kindly. “No, you didn’t choose any of this, but this is where you are and it’s what you are, and now you have to do the best you can.”
“I just want to go home,” Valerie said quietly and Mrs. Reynolds drew a breath that made her chest rise.
“That is behind. You need to focus on ahead. Is that clear?”
“If someone else had said it, it might have sounded cruel, but the way she spoke, it was bracing.
Encouraging.
Valerie nodded.
“Yes,” she said, and Mrs. Reynolds gave her a tight smile.
“Let’s go have some fun,” she said.
Sasha sat with her at lunch.
The rest of the kids kept their distance, staring and whispering.
Valerie was a bit preoccupied with what the teachers were talking about just then, and not really invested enough to take it personally, but Sasha seemed uncomfortable.
“If you want to sit somewhere else, you can,” Valerie said as Sasha hunched over her tray.
“They’re saying that they cleared out the upper class potions room for you,” Sasha said, the first she’d spoken to Valerie. “But no one knows what happened.”
Valerie frowned.
“So?” she asked.
“You’re Susan and Grant Blake’s daughter,” Sasha said, her voice still low. “They think that you’re a master magic user, that you’re just here for show, or that they’re going to move you up to the upper classes because you’re that advanced.”
Valerie pursed her lips.
“Did you really split a gavon root?” Sasha asked after another moment.
“I don’t know,” Valerie said. “I don’t remember which one that was.”
“Sort of a green… tube, like a tulip stem?”
“Oh,” Valerie said. “The viney thing. Well, yeah. Isn’t it just asking for it?”
“You use it to wrap around things, and it keeps them thermally stable,” Sasha said.
“Oh,” Valerie said. “Okay.”
“What did happen, when you went in the potions room?” Sasha asked. Valerie shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Stuff.”
“You made me stand in the hallway,” someone said, a tray clapping down on the table next to her and a guy a couple years older than Valerie sitting down next to her with an easy smile. “The least you can do is tell me why.”
“Um,” she said, glancing at Sasha. The girl had gone wooden.
“I’m Elvis Trent,” the guy said. “And you are?”
“Valerie Blake,” Valerie said. “Thought that had already gone around, though.”
“Blake,” he said. “Everyone’s guessing, but it’s not that uncommon a last name.”
“Yes, my mom and dad are kind of famous,” Valerie said.
“Your mom is Susan Blake?” he asked, and she nodded. “Then what are you doing, slumming it down here at Survival School? Shouldn’t you be at Light School?”
Valerie shrugged.
“This is where my mom wanted me to go.”
He grinned again, shifting to cross his legs and picking up his fork.
“You didn’t get a say?” he asked, and Valerie snorted.
“Not really, just then,” she said. He frowned, about to ask something, but a pair of guys came over and clapped him on the back.
“Hey man,” he said, greeting them. They started talking about where they were all living this year, and Valerie turned her attention back to Sasha.
Elvis? she mouthed.
Trent, Sasha mouthed back. Valerie gave Sasha an exaggerated shrug and Sasha shook her head quickly. Don’t do that.
Valerie looked at Elvis once more. He had a nice build to him, maybe a bit slighter than her taste ran. Hanson would have plowed through him at just about any sport that allowed that sort of thing.
She smiled at the thought of Hanson, then turned forward to look at her tray again, blinking sudden tears.
Elvis put his hand on her back and she slid sideways, grabbing his wrist. His eyebrows went up and Valerie very briefly considered whether she owed him an apology.
Not likely.
“Don’t like to be touched unexpectedly by strangers,” she said. “Mom put me in classes starting when I was little.”
He held his fingers up. Surrender.
“Sorry,” he said, taking his wrist back and waving off his friends. “So what’s your story? No one knows you.”
“Mom and I kind of kept to ourselves,” Valerie answered, feeling more defensive of her secret, here. Here where everyone whispered.
“Still,” he said.
“You know Sasha. And we know Sasha. How do you two know each other?”
They knew Sasha? How? Was there like, pre-school or something? Sasha had talked about her normal school, her friends there.
“Our moms were friends, back during the war,” Sasha said. “So when Valerie was going to come here, her mom said we should room together.”
“Why did they clear out the potions room?” Elvis asked. Valerie shook her head.
“Because they didn’t want you to be there,” she said. “They didn’t ask me.”
“You in trouble?” he asked, and Valerie shook her head.
“Don’t know. I guess I’ll find out later.”
He grinned.
“Big trouble for the first day of school, have Lady Harrington and Mr. Benson both turn up for it.”
She shrugged, and he shook his head.
“No. We’re all betting that you showed up and they didn’t know how to deal with how good you were. That they’re looking at skipping you up to upperclass. You thought about it at all yet?”
Valerie shook her head.
“Just trying to get through my first day at a new school,” she said, looking around the room.
“Well,” he said. “If they do and you’re looking for what cottage you want to move out into, I’ve got some friends who have space for another roommate.”
“I’m not moving out,” Valerie said. “Thanks.”
He raised his hand to clap her on the back once more, then thought better of it.
He stood and walked back over to a group of guys at another table, and Valerie looked at Sasha, who shook her head and returned to her meal.
No one else spoke to them during lunch, but after lunch, Valerie got a significantly cooler reaction from her classmates. She made it to the end of the day without breaking, and Mr. Benson was waiting outside of her classroom. The students ahead of her skittered away and those behind stayed in the room as Mr. Benson stood from where he’d been leaning against the wall and motioned to Valerie.
“I need you to come with me, Miss Blake,” he said. She dipped her head and adjusted her backpack, following him down the hallway and into the main office once more.
They got a larger conference room this time, where Valerie found all of her teachers, plus Mr. Jamison and Lady Harrington waiting for her.
Mr. Benson sat down at one end of the table and indicated at the other end, for her.
Valerie sat, looking around with acute discomfort. She couldn’t even recite all of their names, at this point.
“Miss Blake,” Lady Harrington began. “None of us were quite prepared for your arrival, given it came in such proximity to the start of school, but Mr. Benson and I agreed that it was necessary that we take you on, regardless of your merit as a student, because of the service that your parents had done for the magical community, and how your mother was going to be pressed back into service again, putting you at risk.”
She shifted, folding her hands in front of her and looking down at the table for a moment, then looking up at Valerie again.
“We find ourselves in a difficult position, because you are not only the least-qualified student the School of Magic Survival has ever accepted, but you may be the most talented. You are going to remain here for as long as you need to, in order to ensure your safety, but Miss Blake, if you want to learn from us, I cannot begin to express how hard you are going to have to work, not only to catch up, but to contain your latent talent until you are actually able to control it. Do you understand?”
Valerie swallowed.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You have a decision to make,” Mr. Benson said. “We have discussed it at length, and the teachers represented here are willing to start you at the very bottom and work their way up, because we are all eager to see what you are capable of, properly trained, but you are going to have two, three, perhaps four times as much work as any other Freshman, and that workload is likely to persist through to your Senior year, in order to get you ready to graduate. Most of our students have been studying magic since they could speak. A few of the parents don’t introduce magical instruction until the pre-teen years, ten or eleven years of age, because they don’t want their children playing with magic. But if you don’t start instructing magic until the properly teenage years, thirteen, fourteen years old? You aren’t going to be able to be ready for one of the Schools by the year of the seventeenth birthday. The freshmen in class with you have all been studying for at least four or five years.
“You are going to start from absolutely nothing, not even observational knowledge, and that’s going to take time to overcome. If you choose to do it. If you decide that it isn’t for you, we will find a way to get you access to correspondence lessons through a regular school, and you may yet be able to graduate from a civilian high school as you remain here on campus for your own safety. But you have to choose one or the other, and you need to choose quickly. Mr. Tannis has offered to be your faculty advisor - two years early, I’ll point out - because he was most impressed with your performance today. I need an answer from you by the end of the day, what you would like to do.”
She looked up and down the table at the curious expressions of the adults there, then Valerie looked at her hands, considering.
“I want to talk to Sasha,” she said, and Mr. Benson nodded.
“You should take your time making your decision,” he said. “But it must be today.”
“You are safe and welcome here,” Lady Harrington said. “We just don’t know how to help you best.”
Valerie looked at the woman and nodded, making eye contact with Mr. Jamison after a moment.
“I wish I could talk to my mom about it,” she said, and he gave her a glum but understanding look.
“It is my understanding that she is already out of communication,” Lady Harrington said. “The Council met with her the day that you came to us, and she was sent out with orders. They don’t expect to hear back from her until they’re completed.”
Valerie’s attention snapped to the woman, and Lady Harrington nodded.
“I keep up with what’s going on in the lives of my students,” the woman said. “I know that it’s important to you, and I wish there was more I could tell you.”
Valerie stood, unsteady, looking at Mrs. Reynolds. She was so stern sometimes, but her expression was so encouraging.
“You think I should do it?” Valerie asked her, and Mrs. Reynolds smiled.
“I think I would be delighted to see how far we can launch you, my dear,” she said. Valerie nodded, then looked around the table again.
“I’ll… Okay,” she said. “I’ll decide soon.”
Mr. Benson stood and walked her to the door, opening it for her and closing it behind her to the beginnings of conversations among the teachers in the room.
Valerie looked at the closed door for a moment, then bolted out of the office, going straight back to her dorm room.
Where she found Sasha sitting outside.
“I couldn’t get in,” Sasha explained cheerfully. “The lock was too strong. Can you let me in?”
“Oh, my gosh,” Valerie said, horrified. “I’m so sorry.”
Sasha shrugged, standing as Valerie went to try the doorknob. Whatever she’d been expecting, the door opened easily and Sasha breezed past as though she’d known it would be that simple.
“They were saying that Mr. Benson pulled you aside after Diction,” Sasha said. “What happened?”
Valerie closed the door, considering the charred handprints there for a moment before going to sit on her bed. She dropped her backpack on the floor, then scooted across the bed to sit with her back to the wall.
“They said that they’re going to keep me here,” Valerie said. “That I’m not safe anywhere else. And that they’re willing to teach me, but that it would be really hard. Like, I would have to work harder than anyone else, just to catch up, and I don’t know if they’d let me do any magic for a long time.”
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br /> “Why?” Sasha asked. “What happened today?”
Valerie shook her head, looking away.
“Well, first I made a poison and then I made a bomb, apparently.”
There was a long silence, and Valerie turned her head to see Sasha creeping closer.
“How?” she asked. Valerie shook her head.
“I don’t know. I didn’t even know I was doing anything. I mean, Mrs. Reynolds said that I made the antidote, too, so I’ve at least got that going for me, but Mr. Tannis said that it was a bomb, and…” Valerie couldn’t help but smile, just for a moment. “Well, he seemed like he was really impressed, actually, but still, they put me in a room with a bunch of ingredients and I just start putting them together. I don’t even know what I’m doing.”
“Like sleepwalking?” Sasha asked, and Valerie shook her head.
“No, more like doodling. Only I look down and I’ve drawn the Mona Lisa upside down or something. I’m doing nothing, but then they all freak out because I built a bomb by accident.”
Sasha blinked.
“That’s awesome,” she said.
“No it isn’t,” Valerie said, unable to contain the grin at Sasha’s glee. “I just want to go back to school, who thought I would ever say that?, and hang out with Hanson and see my mom. I don’t want to learn the wild world of magic and have everybody constantly on edge that I’m going to kill them by mistake.”
“Okay,” Sasha said. “But that’s not an option, is it? I mean, is it?”
Valerie shook her head.
“No. Someone tried to kill me, and… No. I just hope that they don’t go after Hanson after all of that…” She paused. How had she not thought of that before? In the middle of everything, it had never occurred to her that Hanson might be in danger. “I need to talk to him.”
“Okay,” Sasha said. “So… Okay. Can you do anything to help him?”
“No, but they could bring him here to keep him safe,” Valerie said.
Sasha twisted her mouth to the side.