Surviving Magic (School of Magic Survival Book 1)

by Chloe Garner

  “Maybe,” Valerie said, still taken with the crystals. Grant began walking once more, looking around.

  “I have things to tell you that I need to know aren’t going to make it back to Lady Harrington or anyone else at school, and particularly not to anyone on the Council,” he said.

  “Why?” Valerie asked.

  “Because the Council leaks like a sieve, and ever since Lan died, The Pure have been devastatingly thorough in documenting who knows what and who thinks what. If the wrong thoughts reach the Council, those thoughts will immediately go to The Pure, who will know what path they took. Does that make sense? Almost anything I tell you that isn’t common knowledge amongst the resistance could be the thing that gets Gemma killed.”

  “Gemma,” Valerie said. “Why her?”

  “She’s my spy,” Grant said. “My agent. I send her in to them every single day in hopes that we can avoid or prevent the shopping mall incident from yesterday. If we can find out in time, we can get the Council to send the right people, or we can derail it from this side and make it so that it isn’t worth doing it.”

  “What went wrong yesterday?” Valerie asked.

  “I didn’t find out in time,” Grant said. “And I was kind of already en route to come get you, by the time Gemma knew for sure that it was happening. They’re getting faster, these days. They all still think Gemma is loyal, but… we’re having to do three times as much work to figure out how to route information so that it isn’t clear who sent it. There are only so many scapegoats you can use without getting them all slaughtered.”

  Valerie followed him through a narrow gap in the crystal room, like leaving a geode, and into a much more run-of-the-mill wet-walled cave.

  “Anyway, all of that to say that The Pure admire where magic takes root and spreads in a way that validates its primacy. The Dark Garden is a Pure name for that cave. The magic is what’s growing the garden, not the light…”

  He went to a cooler sitting on the ground against a wall and opened it.

  “It isn’t cold, but it’s clean,” he said, getting out a bottle of water. Valerie drained it without having realized she was thirsty.

  “You keep enough food out here for weeks?” Valerie asked.

  “I do,” he said. “For ten or fifteen, depending. This is my refuge. I want it to hold up as long as I need it.”

  Valerie went to sit on the cooler, looking around.

  When he closed his hand and the flame there went out, it was going to be pitch black.

  “This is where I live now,” she murmured.

  “It isn’t that bad,” he said, flicking his hand toward the wall. The orange flame in his palm stretched across the gap, finding a torch there and lighting it, and then leaping again to another torch some way down the wall from there.

  “No, that’s much homier,” Valerie answered. “They’re going to be worried about me.”

  He came to stand in front of her.

  “They aren’t, actually,” he said. “Well, the next couple of weeks are likely going to be very strange for a lot of them, but at the end it’s all going to work out.”

  “What does that mean?” Valerie asked.

  He nodded.

  “I have a gift with time. It’s a tricky magic to master, and that’s why I went after it. You can’t freeze time. It won’t go that far. But if you’re clever, you can make it not go and then go, and you can change how fast it’s going here compared to there, as long as it all catches up in the end.”

  “Okay,” Valerie said.

  “That’s how I got you out,” he said. “And it’s how I’m going to fill in the time you’re gone. When you get back, it’ll all go at once, and you aren’t going to feel like you did all of it, but you’ll remember it, and so will everyone else.”

  “That makes no sense,” Valerie said, and he shook his head.

  “Not intended to. Just informing you that you don’t have to worry about what Lady Harrington or Mr. Benson or anyone else is thinking, right now.”

  Valerie shook her head.

  “What side are you on?” she asked. “I don’t know how to trust you.”

  He narrowed his eyes for a moment, then looked around.

  “As long as you’re here, you’re welcome to take a torch and go exploring. If you get lost, just put the torch out, and I’ll come find you. You can do whatever you want with your spare time. But we’re going to train. Because you are weak and alone, and I won’t stand by for that. You can trust me or not trust me about anything I say. I can see that now, that it’s not going to be possible to just jump in, like that. But what I care about most is that you can defend yourself, and that? You oughtn’t need to trust me for that part.”

  Valerie nodded slowly.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He waved her forward.

  “Then let’s get started.”

  The first couple of days were very much like her self-defense classes as a kid. How did she stand, how did she move, how did she block and defend against various kinds of magic attacks.

  The thing was, her body was made for magic. The more she did, the more she could see how true it was. She could block a fireball with her palms, and if she spoke the right word, it wouldn’t even touch her. Her father could try to rip her apart or blind her or any of a dozen other things to hurt her or disorient her, and she could block each one of them almost without thinking.

  All he had to do was give her the clue to what it was she needed to do, and she could do it.

  This wasn’t like learning the kinds of pall-plants, where she had to work so hard to get the information to stick in her brain.

  No.

  No, all she had to do was think ‘leg drops back, deflect not absorb’ and half of his casts just dropped to the ground, broken or deflected or whatever else it was that happened to magic energy that was cast and never landed.

  He barely had to speak a word to explain the difference between one type of cast and another. They just felt real and easy, like she’d been learning in a foreign language her entire life and now someone was finally speaking her native language.

  They worked for hours at a time, few words, lots of magic, and then he’d let her loose while he rested and made plans.

  He said that casting was always more energy-consuming than defending, and that that was the power of the School of Magic Survival - if you focused on survival, you always put yourself at the advantage.

  Valerie had asked how the advantage of surprise weighed into that, and he’d sent her out on a walk.

  The cave system just went on and on, twisting and splitting and reconverging. She hadn’t gone far, the first time, but each time he gave her a break she wandered further, watching the shapes of the walls and the ceilings and the floors, the path of water through limestone for an era.

  She came back on the afternoon of the second day - it felt like afternoon, though she hadn’t been up to check the sun and neither of them wore a watch - and sat down across from her father.

  “Lady Harrington,” she said. “How can she be my grandmother?”

  “She’s your mom’s mom,” he said, looking up from a pad of paper. “Back when we were in school, she was the headmistress at Survival School, and there was this thing about Susan going to Light school even though Lady Harrington was the headmistress at Survival School, but… You know, people just forget. You stop saying anything about it, stop bringing it up, they stop thinking about it… I know everyone on the council still remembers, but the younger magic users, even the ones who were at school with us… They mostly don’t even know.”

  “Why didn’t she say anything?” Valerie asked.

  “Because she’s Lady Harrington, I expect,” he said. “She didn’t want anyone to think that she was biased, concerning you.”

  Valerie frowned.

  “You don’t like her,” she said.

  “Never much mattered,” he answered.

  Valerie fidgeted for a minute.

  “Tell me a
bout the curse?”

  “What do you think you know?” he asked.

  “That they can’t get into light school because their magic is too dark,” Valerie said.

  He waited.

  “Is that it?”

  She shrugged.

  “I guess.”

  He shook his head.

  “They buried that one good and deep then,” he said.

  “What does it mean?” Valerie asked.

  “In demonic mythology, groups of five have importance. Their powers are amplified by each other, and they have fated significance. The five children of the Council are cursed with dark powers, it’s true, but the cast wasn’t entirely dark. The person who killed Lan mixed their magic into the cast, and those five are also likely to be the only ones who can win the war.”

  “What?” Valerie asked, thinking of the table of kids she’d sat with. “Them?”

  “I don’t know if they even know,” Grant said. “Don’t know what their parents might have been telling them all these years. Maybe just that they’re touched with the darkness and nothing more. But that’s the understanding I had, from way back in the day.”

  “Why aren’t they being trained, then?” Valerie asked.

  “They’re at Survival School,” Grant told her. “What else do you expect them to do?”

  “Tell them that they have to go win the war,” Valerie demanded. “Tell them how important it is, and make sure that they’re actually working hard so that they’ll be able to.”

  He shrugged.

  “Don’t know what to tell you. The Council has never really been marked with wisdom in my book. Just bossiness and a lot of resources.”

  “They’re supposed to win the war with dark magic?” Valerie asked. “That doesn’t seem right.”

  “The world isn’t all light-and-dark in an eternal struggle for domination,” Grant said. “Sometimes dark fights dark and sometimes light fights light. Though, I’ll admit, there isn’t much light magic running around on the Separatist side. A few, but mostly natural magic.”

  “Was Mom the one to kill the old Purist leader?” Valerie asked. He shook his head.

  “No, but I know she was there,” he said. “I don’t actually know who did it. The story about the curse is third-hand at best.”

  She sighed.

  If her mom was going to be an assassin, the least she could be was the one who took out the leader of the genocidal maniacs.

  “There are a lot of things you would be better off knowing,” Grant said after a minute. “But I can’t tell you, because if you let on that you know them, they’ll know that you’ve been talking to someone with Separatist knowledge, and I don’t want to open up that can of worms.”

  “Then why do you keep mentioning it?” Valerie asked.

  “Because it bothers me that you aren’t asking the right questions,” Grant said.

  “All right,” Valerie pressed. “What should I be asking?”

  “Why do they want to kill everyone?” he asked. “And why are they so bad at it?”

  Valerie paused.

  Considered.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, there are people everywhere, and they have to all show up at once to kill them?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’ve fallen for war propaganda,” he said. “You’re willing to see the opposition as stupid, mindless killing machines with various degrees of competency. Some days I’m pretty sure the Council has fallen for their own line. But The Pure aren’t like that. They don’t want to kill civilians.”

  “Okay,” Valerie said slowly. “Are you telling me that the mass casualties are because of collateral damage? That they were all just there at the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, you aren’t thinking,” he said. “Think.”

  She sat down finally, closing her eyes.

  “If I was a psycho killer, what would I be doing it for?” Valerie asked.

  “Why is the right question,” Grant said.

  “I’m really good at killing people. Poisons and neurotoxins and bombs are really easy to make, and then you just… send them out and let them do their thing. Killing lots of people is hard, though, without getting caught. So am I practicing? Trying out different weapons to kill people, looking for the one that I can deploy fast enough to wipe out the entire civilian population? But then why would I want to do that? Because I’m an egocentric jerk who believes that people without magic don’t deserve to live…?”

  “You might have found two people who ascribed to that, during the last war,” Grant said. “But not the hundreds it took to do what they’re doing. Keep going.”

  She opened her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Stop playing with me.”

  “This is part of your training,” he answered. “You have to learn how to think, because casting is all about knowing who your enemy is, what his weaknesses are, and what you want to happen. If you can’t see down the road at least that far, your spells aren’t going to do what you want them to.”

  “So I’m not an egocentric jerk who likes watching people die,” Valerie said. “Why do I kill them?”

  “You must ask this question any time you’re looking at the potential of fighting someone. Why do they want to kill you, and why do you want to kill them? If you don’t have an answer, you’re only fifty-fifty, betting on dumb luck that you’re on the right side.”

  That actually made an awful lot of sense, to Valerie.

  “They don’t deserve to live,” Valerie said. “I kill them because they don’t matter. But why go to such lengths to kill them? Why be so organized about it? Why not just curse people as they go by on the street, and get on with my life? Is it so important that it’s worth a war?”

  “Good,” Grant said. “Now. They don’t mean to kill the people they kill.”

  “How do you know?” Valerie asked.

  “If they did, for one, they’d stick around and finish the job. Instead, they come, they curse, they fight the Council when the Council’s fighters show up to try to stop them or to try to lift the curse, but they don’t double down and make sure people die.”

  “I’m not impressed,” Valerie said. She heard Grant laugh.

  “How about this?” he asked, then. “How about I asked Gemma why they’re doing it.”

  “She’s your sister,” Valerie said. “You might trust her, but I don’t, and not just anyone has access to a sibling who is on the other side.”

  “And as well-positioned as she is,” Grant agreed. “I started trying to convince them, long ago, and that was part of how I figured out that my liaison to the Council was compromised. No one ever heard anything I had to say about it, and they started looking for a mole.”

  “Why does Gemma say they’re doing it?” Valerie asked, opening her eyes. “Killing people at random.”

  He shook his head.

  “This is the big secret, Valerie. If they find out that you know it, Gemma will probably end up dead.”

  “She didn’t really like me very much anyway,” Valerie said, and he gave her an exasperated look. “Fine. Okay, fine. I won’t tell them.”

  “That none of them seem to ask bothers me more than anything,” he said after a moment, then folded his arms across his chest and drew a deep breath. “They aren’t trying to kill anyone. What they’re trying to do is separate people from their native magic ability, so that the magic users who presently exist will truly be the only magic users out there.”

  “And that’s worth going to war over?” Valerie asked, and he shrugged.

  “Depends on how you feel about it. A lot of the Separatists just want to be left alone, but The Pure think that they ought to be choosing who is able to use magic in order to make sure that they aren’t dangerous to the community, and the non-propagationist crowd just wants to stop all new magic.”

  “Why?” Valerie asked. “I mean, how many people are we talking about, who are learning ne
w magic? Is it just the students at the schools?”

  He shook his head.

  “Any person out there in the world is going to have some latent magical ability. It’s inborn, and there isn’t a lot you can do to change your own potential. It’s that very few of them are ever going to find someone with the ability to awaken that potential and teach them how to use it that keeps them from becoming magic users, themselves.”

  “So Hansen could learn magic?” Valerie asked. Grant sighed.

  “Without even knowing who that is, categorically, the answer is yes.”

  “Why do they care?” Valerie asked. “What business is it of theirs?”

  “Magic is dangerous,” Grant said. “Everyone agrees on that. It’s why we have the schools. A long time ago, a group of magic users got together and established places where young people could come and learn their magic from dedicated professionals who have a vested interest in them doing so safely. The world is full of magic users who didn’t graduate from one of our schools, though, and even the ones who do… They become dangerous people, with skills that the average person can’t combat, can’t defend. There’s no Hippocratic Oath to magic. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s between you and your conscience and what the rest of the magic community is prepared to stop.”

  “Okay,” Valerie said. “So why are they killing everyone instead?”

  “There you go,” he said. “Because it turns out that separating a person from their magic ability kills them.”

  Valerie paused.

  “Okay. Then why keep trying?”

  “Because they’ve had limited success on individual cases, where they used highly-targeted magic or did something clever to hide away the ability rather than remove it. But every time they try to weaponize it, instead of getting a silent epidemic, they get a very sudden mass murder.”

  “Why have I never heard about this on the news?” Valerie asked.

  “Magic,” Grant answered. “A lot of work and a lot of magic, trying to keep everything underground. And they stopped for… a long, long time because one of their key scientists accidentally destroyed her own magic and then died about eighteen months later. And the war took away a lot of their resources. But with the Council cracking down and driving more Separatists into the fold, The Pure think they have their window to go for it, and they’ve… Well, they’ve done it.”