by Chloe Garner
“We have to stop them,” she said softly. “No one else is.”
“What are you saying?” Ethan asked.
She shook her head.
“I don’t know. I don’t… I don’t know. We’ll see what they say. I wish I could talk to my mom again.”
The table nodded in a generally wistful agreement, then Sasha sat up. Valerie turned in her seat to see Lady Harrington coming in with Merck Trent.
He wasn’t with Mrs. MacMillan, Shack’s mom. Valerie had thought the two of them were inseparable.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Lady Harrington said, her hands clasped together in front of her in her crisp, demanding way. “We will not be answering any questions, but we all know that information of this nature would eventually make its way into even a closed campus, and we wanted you to hear it directly from the Council rather than from your friends and family on the outside. Please be attentive and polite and respect that Mr. Trent is here as a service, not as a servant. He does not owe you answers or explanations.”
Valerie glanced at Ethan.
She loved it when offers of information came with so many caveats upfront.
He shook his head, corner of his mouth planted deep in his cheek.
He was skeptical this was going to have value at all.
“Thank you, Lady Harrington,” Mr. Trent said, stepping forward. “I know that there are already rumors going through the community that will be seeping in here about the scope of battles we are engaging with the Superiors. They are committed and determined to kill civilians for being a lesser breed of human, and we show up every time we are able, every time we have the intelligence ahead of time, to try to stop them and prevent more damage than they may have already done.
“The problem we face, today, is that the scope and frequency of their attacks is increasing, and we aren’t able to get people to them before they have cast their curses and fled. They are working on smaller groups of civilians, and our reports at this time indicate that they are working globally rather than regionally, and as hard as we work to chase after them, we are behind more often than we are ahead.
“They have also evolved their tactics dramatically from our previous experiences with them. They are much more willing to cause casualties among the magic community to prevent us from saving the civilians, at least in part because they have committed to a strategy that assumes that if we are unable to field healers and guardians, their curses will find more success.”
Valerie looked at Ethan again as he sat forward against the back of Shack’s chair, listening hard.
“What I’ve come here tonight to tell you is that we continue to fight. We continue to field the best of the best, and we continue to back the best of the best with the strongest spellwork and the most intentional strategy there is. This war is not about us. We are the ones defending all of humanity. It is our current belief that the Superiors are experimenting with contagious cursework that would, at its most extreme, exterminate significant fractions of the human race. There is no middle ground. There is no retreat. There is no space to appease nor parlay at all. We fight for the future, and we are relying on everyone to do their part in the effort to turn back this attempt at genocide. There will be more information in coming weeks, as the new strategies are identified and agreed upon within the Council, and it may be that some of you are going to be more involved. It is a drastic step we have long avoided, but when it comes to winning this war, we cannot afford to keep back resources. We will send our best, and we must win.”
Ethan wasn’t blinking.
Something in the words… they were bad, but they weren’t anything actually informative. Something in the words that he was hearing that Valerie wasn’t.
“I’ve been to the School of Light Magic already today, and I will make my rounds to the rest of the schools yet today. That’s why I can’t stay to discuss or answer questions. This is the largest mobilization of people and magic the world may have ever seen, and it’s going to happen fast. Take some time to think about how you want to be involved. Not if.”
He looked around the room with dramatic, sharp eyes then gave them a quick nod and shook hands with Lady Harrington, turning on his heel to leave.
“Wait,” someone called. “What? You’re going to send us to war?”
Valerie looked at Ethan, who picked up his tray slowly without looking at it.
“Outside,” he hissed. “Three minutes. The woods down by the visitor cabins. Before they put up the warding to keep track of where all of us are. Three minutes.”
He went to dump his dinner into a trash can and left. Shack stood and followed him casually, and Valerie turned to look at Shack and Hanson.
“What just happened?” Hanson asked, and Valerie shook her head.
Sasha had tears rolling down her face, and Hanson squeezed her shoulders.
“What’s going on?” he asked her.
“It’s happening,” Sasha whispered. “I thought it might be years yet, before it really happened, but it’s happening now, and… we’re not ready. People are going to die because we aren’t ready.”
Valerie frowned then stood, taking Sasha’s tray and her own, motioning to Hanson.
“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” she asked in a casual tone. “Maybe getting some fresh air will calm her down.”
Hanson helped Sasha up then, looking back at Valerie once, he led Sasha out of the cafeteria.
Valerie dumped the two trays then went back for Hanson’s, throwing that out and going to the doors of the cafeteria, watching for teachers.
An announcement like that, the teachers had to be stirred by it, and maybe she could figure out what side they were on, from what they did.
Mr. Tannis went past at a fast walk, casting a quick look at her on his way by and frowning, but pushing open the door to go upstairs. A moment later, Mrs. Reynolds went past through the same door, and Dr. Finn.
“You should go to bed, Valerie,” Dr. Finn said. “This won’t resolve itself tonight.”
“It’s early,” Valerie said. “I’ve got a lot of time before bed.”
The man frowned, then shook his head and went upstairs.
They were coming in from their cottages and going up to the staff room, Valerie guessed.
She waited another moment, but the three minutes were a lot faster than she would give them credit for, and she needed to move now, if she was going to make it out before that.
She jogged down the front hallway, looking in at the office. Lady Harrington was leaning against a desk in the main room of the office, fingers against her cheek. She frowned at Valerie, but she didn’t otherwise move, and Valerie turned, going on out the doors and into the deepening dusk.
Choosing Sides
Ethan already had the fire going by the time Valerie got there. Hanson and Sasha looked like they’d come straight; Shack was another minute or two.
“What does it mean?” Shack asked, sitting. “I want to hear what you heard first.”
Ethan nodded.
“They’re setting the stage for a draft. Probably just upper school, because they called them in special and because the underclassmen aren’t ready to go up against a straw man, not to mention a member of the Pure who’s prepared to kill them just for being there.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too,” Shack said. “Rah-rah cry for support.”
Ethan shook his head, staring moodily at the flames.
“They’re ramping up too fast. Either the Pure have really already got the upper hand or they think they’re losing support for the war and they need to create a really good bad guy to keep people invested. Have to balance out casualties against the cause. We start losing too many people, the community is going to decide that it’s pointless, that there’s no hope for us to win and that we should stop sending ourselves up against it. We don’t lose anyone, they decide that there really isn’t any risk, that the Superiors aren’t that big a deal and that the people the Council already has are sufficient. The
tone of it…” He shook his head. “What game is he playing, Shack? Talk about losing people in the same breath that he talks about how important it is?”
“Yeah,” Shack said. “I think it’s for the timeline. You can’t accelerate a war unless it’s important and you’re losing it. It’s a dangerous game, making it out that we’re that far behind, because you can push it too far and people start to bail, but I bet they’re trying to balance the two against the time.”
“But why?” Ethan asked. “They’re undisputed…” He paused. “Coup?”
Shack frowned.
“Could be. Amassing power by putting the war into disequillibrium. That’s something I could see my mom pulling…”
“You guys don’t think he was telling the truth?” Sasha asked.
Ethan looked over at her, then frowned, playing his fingers one over the other for a moment, then nodding.
“Anything you say about a war is true, somewhere. They’re too big for someone to come at you and say that you’re wrong. Just that you’re incomplete. You say you’re winning, because you won that skirmish or this one, that you’ve made advances on one front or another. You say you’re losing because people died or because something caught you by surprise. You say you’re the hero, because you only have noble ambitions within the war. You say you’re the villain because you killed people who didn’t deserve it or you didn’t show up where innocent people were dying.”
“Not to mention that they might not have been innocent,” Shack muttered, and Ethan nodded.
“No one is simple,” Ethan said. “And nothing is simple. My dad said it to me over and over again, growing up. You take the piece of the story that suits your ambition and you play that part of it and ignore the rest. It’s politics. Simple, brutal politics.”
“But how is the war going?” Sasha asked. “Are we really losing?”
Ethan shrugged.
“That’s like asking what color trees are. They’re brown and green and tan and sometimes they’re red and yellow and black. Neither side wins and neither side loses. Not anymore.”
“The war ended,” Valerie said. “My mom wouldn’t have run away if it hadn’t.”
Ethan shook his head.
“Misconception. The leader died. The fighters came to the conclusion they weren’t going to make gains anymore so they quit fighting. But the war never stopped. The war is ideas, not people. And ideas don’t die.”
“Not easily,” Shack said moodily. Ethan nodded again.
“Right. Killing ideas takes… other tactics. We aren’t hunting ideas. We’re just hunting people and the people… They aren’t about the war. They’re about the power.”
Valerie threw her hands up.
“Then why say anything, if nothing he said anything meant anything? How do you win a war if a war is unwinnable? What’s the point of any of this?”
Ethan looked at her across the transparent burgundy flames, drawing a breath and nodding. She’d ended up with Sasha and Hanson instead of next to him, but she liked being able to see his face head-on like this. He nodded again.
“War is about power,” he said.
“My mom won’t stop saying that,” Shack said.
“That’s…” Ethan said then frowned. “They say, the people who were out in the middle of it, the ones I always trusted to care more about the outcome of the war than the outcome of the Council… They say that the politics just about lost us the war three or four times, and it was only the devotion of a few very devoted fighters - they always talk about your mom and dad, Valerie - that kept it from turning on us. That the Pure - the Superiors - are unified in their cause and that they aren’t going to give up until it’s done, and while we should be the ones who all believe in what we’re doing, the ones who should believe that what we’re doing must be done, we waver. We blink. People run away and hide and refuse to come back because they don’t have faith in the Council to make the right decisions. They expect, the ones out there who are doing the real fighting, not the front line who just show up where they’re told, but the real fighters… like your parents… they expect the Council to do what’s going to have the most benefit to them and their political alignments.”
He paused, just for a moment.
“And they’re right.”
Shack shifted, but he didn’t disagree.
“So we’re fighting a war on our own,” Valerie said, and Ethan nodded.
“We knew that.”
“But they’re moving up the timeline,” Shack said. “They’re going to start sending more people out there. They need more conflicts to sop them up.”
“It couldn’t be overwhelming force?” Hanson asked, and Ethan glanced at him.
“Ideas don’t die,” he said. “We aren’t fighting over land. We’re fighting over ideas. All the Council can do is hold what is. Kill the Pure wherever they find them, but the moment the Pure stop showing up, we’re out of work.”
“The separationist school,” Valerie said, thinking about it.
“Von Lauv,” Sasha said, looking over at her. “What about it?”
Valerie stared at Sasha, putting together the pieces.
“If you needed a bigger war than you had - assuming that might actually be what’s going on, and not that the Pure are attacking more and more and more and we really do need more boots on the ground - what if you expanded the definition of your enemies. If the Pure can melt away and you can’t find them anymore, if you blame the strategy of just letting them go, at the end of the last war, how do you make sure that you get everyone who might sympathize?”
Sasha shook her head, not getting it.
It was just like lighting a fire and doubling back.
Just another tactic.
Just Susan Blake’s voice in Valerie’s ear, watching a movie.
“You define anyone who isn’t one of us to be one of them. They hide with the rest of the separationists. So the separationists are all Pure. You go empty out the school, scatter the kids, take them away from their parents? Teach them yourself?”
“Do what they wanted to do to you,” Ethan said evenly, nodding.
“No,” Sasha said, suddenly on her feet. “No. They can’t go after Von Lauv.”
Ethan, Shack, and Hanson looked shocked, but Valerie wasn’t. The passion Sasha had felt about the school had been held deep, but it was powerful. She loved Survival School, but Valerie’s roommate had been moved by Von Lauv and their style of teaching.
“I know,” Sasha said, staring at the ground with her fists balled. “I know that they put all of the kids into the same school so that they could control the curriculum and try to sway them, rather than letting parents and students pick what kind of things they wanted to study, but most of it… Most of it is beautiful. The magic they’re teaching…”
Valerie nodded.
“We’re backwoods,” she said. “I think everyone here can agree about that. And not because the teachers don’t know their stuff.”
There were nods all around from the guys. The things Sasha had - unmentored - been able to figure out and re-teach… It was a profound difference, the underlying philosophy of magic. Valerie couldn’t see how that philosophy was so earth-shaking, but Sasha could, and it was enough for Sasha to get the thread of it to pull it all apart and re-explain it in such a way that suddenly everything made sense.
Even for Valerie.
Even for Hanson.
Even for Hanson.
The way Sasha was teaching magic, sitting in the library two hours once a week, was moving Hanson ahead in his classes in such a way that Valerie was hearing the teachers whisper about it.
Valerie looked over at Ethan again, as he hung his head, his elbows levered on the insides of his knees.
“What are you thinking, Ethan?” she asked, and he bobbed his head.
Looked up at her without changing his posture.
“I think we’re well and truly alone,” he said. “I think that my dad is willing to risk losing the war i
n order to make sure the other members of the Council can’t get an upper hand. That he’s angling for perception rather than tactics. He knows the war matters…” He put his head back down again. “He isn’t evil. He’s just sure that he ought to be the head of the Council, and a threat to him is a threat to all of us.”
“My parents are out in the middle of this,” Valerie said. “And whoever is left from the old Shadows. And we’re sitting here at school playing tag.”
“This is where your mom wanted you,” Shack said. “I thought we’d have more time. That they’d keep at the stalemate game, the Pure doing their thing, us showing up and saving some and losing some… Could have gone on like that for years.”
“And you’re okay with that?” Valerie asked, tempted to stand. “Just letting people out there die for no good reason but that a bunch of zealots have an opinion about what they should and shouldn’t be allowed to do?”
He looked at her, his face placid, as if she hadn’t just insulted his integrity.
“I’m not strong enough,” he said simply. “You might be. I don’t know. I don’t think you do, either. But Sasha isn’t strong enough and Hanson isn’t strong enough and Ethan…” He shook his head. “You didn’t grow up with us, so I don’t think you get it, but you need Ethan to be as strong as he’s going to get. Me, I’m useful. Hanson is gonna be hella useful. Sasha might keep the rest of us alive, someday. But Ethan? I’m gonna follow him anywhere until the day I die, and I can put my hand to my heart and say that I trust him to get me out when it’s all done.”
There was a long silence.
A long, long silence.
Valerie settled lower onto her seat again and nodded.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Good thing you care,” he said. “Don’t have to take that back.”
“Thanks, man,” Ethan said, and Shack nodded, not hiding his face but not looking at Ethan, either.