by Chloe Garner
It would be a breach of trust to go straight to her.
But she had to talk to someone.
Didn’t she?
What about Sasha?
She knew she would inevitably talk to Sasha, though she might leave out the part about her guru being her father - that was still a deep, dark secret - but…
Mr. Jamison would have advice.
She hadn’t been back an hour, and she couldn’t keep her mind straight. It kept switching back and forth which timeline it believed, but it didn’t ever manage to get rid of the idea that the other one was fully true, as well.
It made no sense, and she thought she might scream.
Mr. Jamison.
Her mother had trusted him.
And Valerie had to trust someone.
She found the door with the Staff Living Space marking next to it, and she knocked.
One of the upperclass teachers answered, and Valerie took a step back.
“Is Mr. Jamison here?” she asked.
“Alan?” the man asked, looking off to the side and behind him. “You’ve got a student here looking for you.”
Mr. Jamison appeared, and he frowned.
“Come in,” he said, holding the door as the other teacher went back to whatever he’d been doing.
Mr. Jamison escorted Valerie back to a small table in the far corner of the room, where they had some privacy, and he sat down.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
Valerie opened her mouth, then realized that she had no idea what she was actually going to say.
She swallowed, and Mr. Jamison waited.
Did she tell him about her dad?
No.
She was going to try to tell him what had happened without bringing that specific point up.
“My mom trusted you,” she started, and he nodded.
“I still consider her one of my closest life friends,” he said. “I’d trust her with my life today, if that was what I needed to do.”
Valerie nodded.
“Something happened,” she said. “And I don’t know how to explain it. I have two memories for the time since the attack, and… I don’t know how to do it. It’s… It’s making me feel crazy.”
He lifted his chin to look at her, then nodded.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d tell me,” he said. “If you’d tell anyone.”
She licked her lips and considered.
“You know,” she said, and he nodded.
“I do. I swept the entire hallway for existing magic signatures, trying to make sure that the bloom we all knew about was the only thing that someone from the outside had cast, trying to get in… The magic you did that night to get to the library… I’m very intrigued by it, but I’m not going to ask. You got away with it fair and square. But I did find… your father’s… mark on your door.”
He whispered the part about her father, and she bit her lips between her teeth.
“You know,” she said.
He nodded again.
“Not certain on the particulars, but I remember what an odd skillset he had. And that he was willing to use it out at the edge of safety because he was certain it would never go wrong on him. How do you feel?”
“Crazy,” Valerie said again.
“Physically,” he said. “Any weak muscles, feeling of fever or fatigue, headache, numbness?”
“Those are possible?” Valerie asked.
“They’re symptoms of much more important things having gone wrong,” he affirmed.
Valerie swallowed harder, then did an evaluation of her body.
“I think I feel normal,” she said.
“Where have you been?” Mr. Jamison asked, leaning in so he could speak more softly.
“I don’t even know,” Valerie said truthfully. “I learned a lot, and now I have to figure out how to pretend not to know any of it.”
He gave her a sympathetic half a smile.
“Yes, you do,” he said. She gave him an exasperated look.
“You’re supposed to tell me not to worry about it, that I’m safe here, that my secret is safe at school.”
He shook his head.
“Not even close. Any one of these students could have a parent who sympathizes with the Superiors, and anything that hints that your father isn’t dead? It could be very dangerous.”
“That’s what they kept saying,” Valerie muttered. “I just wanted everything to go back to how it was. At least that was a level of crazy I could deal with.”
“Not possible,” he said, looking around the room for a moment. “The Superiors are making open attacks, now, and the Council is drawing in all of its resources. There are going to be kids finding out that their parents have gotten involved with the war every day for a while, now, and the expectations they’re going to put on the school are going to keep getting higher. They may even have upperclassmen doing work for them, by the time the semester is out.”
“How did they get in, Mr. Jamison? It wasn’t me.”
“I know it wasn’t,” he answered. “Had to have been a student, I think, or a member of the faculty, though that’s hard to imagine. I’ve known everyone here for at least ten years, and a lot of them since I was a teenager.”
“How do I do this?” Valerie asked. He shook his head.
“I can’t help you unless it’s with physical symptoms. You’ve got to figure it out, though. The stakes are too high.”
“But I know things,” she whispered. “I cast on the mark in the girls’ dorm hallway and I shrunk it.”
“You did what?” he asked, standing. “Show me.”
The other teachers looked over, clearly curious what was going on, but Mr. Jamison just walked out of the room, Valerie following.
She walked down to the dorm wing with him, going to stand in front of the black dot against the wall.
“You did that,” he said.
“I did,” she answered.
“With magic you learned in the past couple of weeks,” he said.
“Yes.”
He scratched the top of his head.
“How?”
She repeated the cast to him as carefully as she could - she knew she was probably getting conjugations wrong, and a lot of the enunciation felt flat compared to how it had been the first time, but it was close as she was going to get.
He blinked at her.
“Your father taught you that?” he asked.
“No,” she said slowly. “He just taught me a bunch of words in languages that I might find useful and told me to go nuts.”
“Go nuts,” he said. “That man…”
Valerie looked around quickly.
“He was hiding from Lady Harrington,” she whispered. “Why?”
“Could be a lot of things,” Mr. Jamison said. “Not the least of which that she hated him and mistrusted just about every decision he ever made.”
“Can I tell Sasha?” Valerie asked.
“Up to you,” Mr. Jamison said, scratching the top of his head again as he looked at the spot. “We tried everything on that thing.”
“How do I know who I can trust?” Valerie asked.
“There are three courses in life,” Mr. Jamison said. “The most extreme on both ends, and somewhere in the middle. I think that trusting everyone would be foolish, and I think that trusting no one would kill you inside. So you do something in the middle. If I hear anything that seems relevant, I’ll let you know… Your father came here to save you. Did he think the attack was about you?”
“That’s what he said,” Valerie answered.
Mr. Jamison paused, pinching his mouth tight as he considered that.
“They’re talking about the curse again, aren’t they?” he asked.
“He talked about it a little,” Valerie said. “And Sasha said something before that.”
He nodded.
“Inescapable, with all of them going to school this year…”
He looked at her with a new thought, but shook his hea
d and looked away again.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just… I don’t believe in it, for what it’s worth.”
“What has the curse got to do with me?” Valerie asked.
He gave her a hard look and shook his head.
“I don’t believe in it,” he said. Mrs. Gold came out of her room, down the hallway.
“Alan Jamison, what do you think you’re doing down here, this time of night?” she asked.
“Valerie just told me that the mark here had shrunk,” he said. “I came down to see. That’s all. Mr. Tannis and I will come take a look at it tomorrow.”
The woman came to stand next to Mr. Jamison, scowling down at the mark.
“Good riddance,” she said. “Sooner that door closes, the better.”
She looked at Valerie.
“Should you be in your room, then?”
“Yes, Mrs. Gold,” Valerie said. There wasn’t a curfew on, but it wasn’t ever in Valerie’s best interests to antagonize Mrs. Gold. She glanced at Mr. Jamison, who was still frowning at the mark on the wall.
“Good night, Mr. Jamison,” Mrs. Gold cued, and he nodded.
“Right. Good night, Mrs. Gold.”
He walked past Valerie, his attention somewhere else, and she went into the room, throwing herself on her bed and looking at the ceiling for a long time.
“Everything okay?” Sasha asked.
“Yeah,” Valerie said. “It’s fine.”
Return
“I can’t go with you,” Martha Cox said as she sat on the end of Hansen’s bed while he packed. “Someone there will recognize me.”
“She’s going to ask why you aren’t there,” Hanson told her. “You never miss anything.”
“If she’s going to try to get away with saying that Susan Blake just dropped her at a boarding school on her way out of town, you are going to tell her that I was hopelessly busy, and she’ll believe it.”
“Not how it works, ma,” Hanson said. She gave him a dour look.
“It doesn’t matter how you think it works,” she said. “Just keep your head up and pay attention. I need to know everything that’s going on there. Who her friends are, who she confides in, where her mother actually is. Anything you can do to get her to start telling you the truth is best.”
“She’s going to try to keep me from figuring it out,” Hanson said.
“You’re her best friend in the world,” Martha told him. “Use it.”
He put the last of his clothes into the bag and zipped it.
He didn’t like it.
He didn’t like any of it.
But that hadn’t ever mattered, had it? What he liked and didn’t like.
They had a job to do, and his mother had devoted his entire life to doing it.
He looked down at the bag for a moment, then at his mother again.
“I just…”
She nodded.
“You just want to pretend like none of this ever happened,” she said. “You like your life just fine. I know. I even get it. But this is important. You know that.”
“I know,” he said, glum. “I just hate spying on Valerie.”
“That’s why she trusts you so much,” Martha answered.
Yeah.
He knew.
“Magic is a constant learning process,” Mrs. Reynolds was saying, drawing things on the board and referencing them as though they meant something. “You have an impression that once you graduate from the School of Magic Survival, you’re going to have a handle on things, but you need to understand now that you won’t. We’ll teach you as much as we can in four years - and with your undivided attention, that’s quite a lot - but you’re going to spend the rest of your lives figuring out what all of this meant, and everything else besides.”
“Then why are we even here?” a boy named Geoffrey asked.
“Because you lack so much knowledge,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “And this is the time that the Council and the first headmasters of the schools have chosen and reaffirmed over and over again as the best time for you to build that foundation of knowledge. You come in feeling like you know quite a lot, but how to actually cast, what responsibilities you’re taking on by doing it… Those are things that we are growing in you as fast as we can, here, so that we can get you into the specializations as quickly as possible, where you’ll get your depth of magic. My Seniors are learning the second family of botanic healing magic, this nine weeks, and I can put my hand over my heart and say that at least some of them are going to save lives someday.”
Valerie had been daydreaming, and she’d failed to catch what had set Mrs. Reynolds down this path.
“Valerie, what are you doing?” Mrs. Reynolds asked, and Valerie jerked, not sure what she had been doing.
She looked down at her desk where she’d been running her fingertips along the smooth wood quite aimlessly for as long as she could remember.
There was a blacked mark on the wood. One with a very distinct shape.
“What is that?” Mrs. Reynolds asked, coming to see.
“I don’t know,” Valerie answered.
She’d done it again.
She didn’t even mean to, and yet.
She kept doing it.
“Geoffrey, can you go get Mr. Jamison, please. Tell him that I have a language consult I need from him.”
The boy stood and, casting a curious glance at Valerie that might have been only just this side of hostile, he left.
“Do you know how to purge it?” Mrs. Reynolds asked, and Valerie shook her head.
“I’m sorry.”
She’d been thinking about training with her father. How there had been so few lectures and so much of him just throwing random magic at her and seeing what she would do.
It had been fun, in its antagonistic way.
Mrs. Reynolds cared about her - Valerie believed that - and wanted her to succeed, but Grant Blake had actually made her succeed, whether or not it had felt like care at the time.
She’d been getting better at this stuff. At knowing what she was doing and why, and sometimes even creating casts on purpose to do what she wanted them to do.
That night after she’d come home, when she’d cast on the mark on the wall, that had been the last time she’d intentionally cast magic, and she’d only done it accidentally a few times, since.
Two weeks of solid magic, and then two weeks completely devoid of it.
It was beginning to wear on her, and she thought about drawing another symbol on top of the one she’d already done, because her finger was itching to do it, and because screw them and their rules and their fear. They were stifling her and making everything worse for her, not better.
Mr. Jamison returned with Geoffrey and looked over Valerie’s shoulder at the symbol.
“What language is that?” he asked, and she shook her head.
“Don’t know,” she said. “Didn’t mean to cast it.”
The class whispered.
“What does it do?” Mr. Jamison asked.
Valerie closed her eyes.
She could feel it, actually.
The cast had power in it, power that was sourcing from deep in her chest, and that - that - was something that she did own.
“It’s protection magic,” she said after a minute.
She’d been thinking about her father throwing firebombs at her, and how she had gone through every manner of magic he’d taught her, one after the next, deflecting, absorbing, returning them directly at him.
He’d been proud of her for that one.
“It’s fire,” Ann said from the front row of desks. “She’s using demon magic. I bet it’s dark and that’s why Mr. Jamison doesn’t know about it.”
Valerie wanted to get up and yell at Ann that she would never use dark magic, but the problem was that she didn’t know that for sure.
It was actually possible.
“Protection from what?” Mr. Jamison asked.
Valerie sh
ook her head, trying to force the feeling in her chest to talk.
“Fire,” she said after a moment. “Hard fire. The kind that’s really… hot.”
There was a soft giggle that went around the classroom, and Valerie stared hard at her desk.
Yes, she knew that all fire was hot. It was that this was different.
“I know what you’re talking about,” Mr. Jamison said. “All the same, we had better take the desk to Lady Harrington, and you need to avoid doing that again.”
Valerie stood as Mr. Jamison started to edge the desk into the aisle to carry it away.
“There’s another symbol,” Valerie said quickly, and he looked back at her, then at Mrs. Reynolds.
“Go on,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “But come back quickly. We’re having a quiz yet this morning.”
Valerie nodded, going out into the hallway after Mr. Jamison.
“All right,” he said. “Show me. Carefully and slowly. I don’t want you to arm this thing and set it off.”
“It’s a protection spell,” Valerie argued, and he nodded.
“I believe that’s what you think,” he said. “But I don’t know that symbol, and there’s no telling what it actually does.”
Valerie sat down in the desk, resting her elbow on the peninsula of wood along her side and tracing her finger along the smooth veneer, waiting for the inspiration of the idea to hit her once more.
It wasn’t like the cast she’d done on the mark, recalling something that no longer had power in it.
When she remembered the symbol she’d been wanting to cast, it came to her with clarity that was inescapable, and she drew it over top of the first symbol like they’d been made to fit together like that.
Mr. Jamison watched with hawkish attention as she finished the figure the first time and started going over it a second time. The wood was beginning to char under her fingertip, and he motioned for her to quit after the third time.
“I can see it,” he said, indicating he needed her to get up. “I’ll see if Lady Harrington knows what any of it is. Is that it?”
Valerie ran her thumb over her index finger, as if priming it to keep going if it wanted to, but there was no more desire to doodle.
“That’s it,” she said. He jerked his head toward the classroom.
“Go take your quiz,” he said.
“Mine is harder than everyone else’s,” Valerie told him. “Because they get points for demonstrating that they can do the magic, and I just get more technical questions.”