by Chloe Garner
“You aren’t who you were before you came here. I’m not either. We were a couple of Council brat flunkies here to have a good time and cut up because they couldn’t get rid of us.” Shack looked over at Ethan, now. “We got purpose, now, you and me. Didn’t really think I ever would.”
Ethan cleared his throat and looked at Valerie.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Don’t know what we should do. I’m not ready to fight. I’m not training to fight. You seem to have that come naturally to you, but none of the rest of us are going that direction.”
“We don’t know who the enemy combatants are or where to find them,” Shack said. “We have no means to engage.”
“I have a name,” Valerie said. It was the first time she’d spoken of it since they’d come back from the beach. “Maybe she knows.”
Ethan shook his head.
“Are we ready?”
“Daphne was worried that going to her was going to get you killed,” Sasha said. “We should wait.”
“I’ll do whatever you want, Val,” Hanson said. “But you don’t have a plan. You don’t even have a direction. We can’t just go rushing off because we need to do something. There’s no point to it.”
Valerie looked over at him, calming further and nodding.
“How?” she asked. “How do we get from here to there?”
“We keep going to class,” Sasha said. “We keep decoding the classes into the three-branch scheme. You keep practicing whatever it is you do with Dr. Finn. I bet if you asked, he could teach you other things, too, not just the survival games.”
“And we just wait?” Valerie asked. “Let the Council start drafting our friends and sending them off to die?”
“You’re working with Mr. Tannis to keep them safer,” Shack said. “Until we can do something that’s actually useful, I think you’re probably doing more than most people, already.”
Valerie slumped over her knees, watching the deep-maroon flames flicker like silken mesh in front of her, putting off enough heat to keep the chill wind at bay, enough light to see each other by and no more.
“I can’t help you yet,” Ethan said. “I wish we had ten years to get really good at this, like your parents did, but we don’t, I don’t think. Not from the sound of what my dad said tonight. We’re going to have to be fast, and… I don’t know how to be any faster.”
“With three-branch magic theory,” Sasha said as though it was obvious. “The things I can do that I never even imagined. Guys. Everything they’re teaching us is completely handicapped. Straighten it out, and… Give me a year. You know? I can do… It’s like someone just reached up and brought the sky in reach.”
“I don’t know if I can wait a year,” Valerie said.
“What did she say?” Ethan asked. “Did she say that you were important? Or just that you had magic that…”
Valerie tried to remember, but the specific words had faded into just what she’d understood Daphne to say.
“Valerie is important,” Hanson said. “It’s that she could die. They can kill her and…”
“She didn’t hand me the crystal key to deliver to the lonely mountain,” Valerie said. “She gave me the name of an ally. I don’t even know what I would ask for, if I went to her. I don’t know enough to ask for help. All she said was that she was powerful and she would care.” Valerie paused. “If it was just asking for her to step in and do something, Daphne would have done it. But Daphne doesn’t have magic anymore, and I do. Magic that can… I don’t know. Do something important. But I need help from the Angelsword lady, and I don’t know what to ask her.”
She wanted her mom to come tell her what to do.
The only person she trusted, right now, to tell her what to do, because these four people here with her didn’t know.
She put her face into her hands, just resting like that for a moment.
“We wait,” she said. “Right? We have to. Get stronger, watch for… anything that says that we know what we have to do, and then, when we know what we have to do, we go hard. Right?”
Ethan nodded.
“I need to figure out how to get better information about what’s going on out there in to us here. Let me write some letters and see if anyone is willing to keep us up to date.”
Valerie nodded, then looked up at the school.
“We’re going to get in trouble, if they catch us coming back in,” she said.
“I think Lady Harrington will let it slide,” Shack said. “I saw her on the way out.”
“I did, too,” Valerie answered. “She didn’t look happy.”
Ethan shook his head.
“She’s seen all of this before. She remembers.”
“I just need to talk to my mom,” Valerie said softly, then shook her head and stood. “We stay. We work hard. We listen hard. We get ready.”
“I’m going to be a healer,” Sasha said, standing. “They’re going to learn how to defend magic. And you need to figure out how to lead an attack.”
The words.
The word.
Attack.
Valerie didn’t want to do that.
She’d broken all of the casts at the beach with defensive magic. Overwhelmingly strong defensive magic, but defensive magic.
She didn’t like the casts she was doing for Mr. Tannis.
Learning more of them? Actually casting them with the hope that they landed?
That wasn’t who she was, and it wasn’t who she wanted to be.
Her mom had killed a hallway full of men and women.
Yes, they’d been there to kill Susan, but…
Valerie shook her head, trying to clear the thoughts away.
“We should go in,” she said. “I have homework.”
“And an essay to write for Mr. Marve about running around out in the woods,” Shack said. “How’s that for magic school?”
Valerie shook her head.
“None of this is like I would have expected.”
Ethan rose, quashing the fire with a downward motion with his palm, then he stepped across the spot to put his arm around Valerie. There was very little moon, so the walk back out to the grass wasn’t trivial by any stretch of the imagination, but there in the dark, he kissed her neck below her ear and rested the length of his nose against her hair.
“I wish it were different,” he whispered, and she nodded.
“Me, too.”
“Mr. Tannis?” Valerie asked the next afternoon as she sat with her piles of ingredients, trying to match the next cast behavior.
“Yes, Valerie,” he said, looking up from a stack of papers on his desk.
“Could we do a… physical fighting class, do you think?”
He frowned, letting the papers sit back down on the wood and folded his fingers under his chin.
“Why would you imagine you would need that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Valerie said, letting her eyes drift down again to supervise what her hands were doing. She still didn’t know what a lot of it was, but it wasn’t like her hands were supernatural creatures unto themselves that worked magic while she wasn’t looking. “It’s that… Like, our job is to survive, right?”
“Yes,” he said, as though trying to prompt her to think faster.
“So, sometimes the point of defending yourself is to do the thing that works best. And I think that, sometimes, the best thing is to punch the guy in the mouth.”
She heard him chuckle, and she glanced up again.
He picked up his papers again.
“If you want to learn physical self-defense, you can do it over the summer. We are a magic school, and we teach magic defense.”
“No, I know self-defense,” Valerie said. “My mom had me in classes from the time I started school, basically. I know how to hit a guy. It’s that the others don’t. And… well, I wouldn’t mind practicing. It’s a good set of skills to have.”
“Is it?” he asked, looking up once more. “You think so?”
“I do,” she said. “I keep beating all of the other freshmen when they make me the quarry in Mr. Marve’s class. It’s not because I’m better at magic than they are. It’s because… I’ve taken self-defense classes and talked about fighting and stuff my whole life.”
Mr. Tannis took off his glasses to look at her for a moment.
“Perhaps your mother didn’t fail entirely at preparing you, after all, then,” he said. “Is that what you’re suggesting?”
Valerie wasn’t certain why he had jumped to her mother so quickly but…
“Yes.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “You think that learning physical lessons reinforces metaphorical ideas.”
“Maybe,” Valerie said. “In this case, yes.”
She didn’t like the tone of his voice, like he was going to jump out something she hadn’t thought of and use it as leverage to make her do something.
“We are magic users,” he said. “The brutish style of war that you’re talking about is for civilians. We use magic. That is as far as the discussion goes.”
Valerie sighed, watching him for a moment longer as he took his glasses off and put them on his desk, returning to the papers, then reached for the spectacles again to put them back on.
Valerie frowned, then returned to her work.
“Out of curiosity,” he said. “Is there something specific that made you think of it?”
She glanced up once more, but the spellwork she was doing was at a critical stage. She was working faster and with more precision, and Mr. Tannis noticed, coming around his desk to watch like he always did as she got to the critical portion of the cast.
The prep work, he didn’t have to watch to know what she’d done - in most cases. The actual hard cast, though, had details that were lost once she’d done them, and he liked to be aware of what they were.
He leaned against the lab desk in front of her, not offering commentary as she worked through the rest of the cast. It took about fifteen minutes, and it was ready.
“And you think that this is going to block my recent memory and paralyze me,” he said.
Valerie chewed on her lips.
“That’s the goal, yeah,” she said. Looked up at him again. “I don’t like doing this. What if I get better and your wards stop working?”
“That’s not how it works,” he answered. “The wards are broad and well-established.”
“But… I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing. What if I get it wrong and erase all of your memory? The Council needs you.”
“We have this conversation for each and every one of your casts,” Mr. Tannis said. “And they all work exactly as specified, and I eventually beat each and every one of them, don’t I?”
It wasn’t a trouncing victory. It was working out a puzzle based on information she gave him freely, and they both knew that. He wasn’t beating her. He was beating the cast.
“Yes. I just don’t like the risks.”
“War is risk,” Mr. Tannis said. “This is my risk to take. Please initiate your cast.”
She nodded, putting her hand over the magic and feeling the power building as the ingredients distilled. She took the wand from the side of the desk where she’d left it halfway through the cast and she ran the length of twiggy wood down the back of her arm, then let the flat palm slide away behind her back and she held the energy of the cast in the wand like a lightning rod.
Oh, how she loved that wand.
She looked at him, letting the energy build and build until it was as likely to hit her on accident as it was to do anything else, and she flicked the wand at him, using words she only knew in passing from Mr. Jamison. Mr. Tannis blinked.
“Are you going to tell me what made you think of it?” he asked.
“What?” Valerie asked.
“This idea of yours that you should learn to hit your enemies.”
Valerie twisted her mouth to the side.
“You can’t walk, can you?” she asked.
He looked down.
“How interesting,” he said. She shook her head, sitting down in her chair and putting her wand away.
“You’re going to have a hard time beating this one if you can’t remember it,” she said.
He closed his eyes and focused for a moment, and there was a sensation of breaking glass, the high-pitched ringing right before, and then the crash almost like violent rain, soundless in Valerie’s head, and he stepped forward.
“How very interesting,” he said. “For the next time you’re here, I need you to write down the exact process you used to create your cast. How much time did I lose?”
“I don’t know. Maybe twenty minutes? A little more?”
He nodded.
“We’ll time it, next time. It needs to be all of thirty.”
“How do you know there isn’t variation from person to person?” Valerie asked. “They could be stronger than me.”
He nodded.
“Or I could be stronger than the targets,” he said, looking down at the remains of the cast. “Additional homework. After you’ve described the steps that you took in the cast, I want a theoretical listing of features about the cast, the castor, and the target that could create variation, either longer or shorter for duration.”
Valerie gave him a glum look and he answered with a dry smile.
“Do you know how many students at this school would love to have this internship?” he asked.
“You ask me that a lot,” Valerie answered. “It doesn’t seem to be convincing me as well as you think it should.”
“That will be all for tonight,” Mr. Tannis said. “I have other work to do.”
Valerie wanted to ask him what kind of work it was, but she kept her tongue, knowing that he was probably less likely than anyone to tell her whether he was doing class work or Council work - and that was even given how much he trusted her with the spellwork he assigned her. He kept secrets better than anyone she’d ever known - and her mother had managed to keep magic a secret from her her entire life.
She disassembled the cast and disposed of it in the various containers around the room designated for that, then she packed up her stuff and left. Mr. Tannis didn’t look up again.
Mr. Jamison was in his classroom with the door open as Valerie went past.
“Valerie,” he called, and she turned, giving him a tight smile.
“Mr. Jamison,” she said. “Hi. You… You looked busy.”
“So do you,” he said. “If you’ve got work you need to be doing, don’t let me interrupt you, but if you want to sit with me and talk for a few minutes, it’s been a while.”
Valerie hesitated - she really did have a lot of work to do - but it had been a while since any of the teachers had sat to talk to her, and she was feeling like the world - resting on her shoulders - was only under the counsel of four teenagers and herself.
She went and sat at one of the desks in front of his and put her backpack on the floor. He took a moment, going through his papers and sorting them, then he put his pencil down and nodded.
“All right. So. How are… things? How are you? How is everything?”
She shook her head, not sure where to start, not sure what she even intended to tell him.
“They caught the guy trying to get me killed,” she said. “So that was nice.”
“Elvis,” he said. “He was a promising student. Light School really did train him well.”
“I’m a little biased because of him helping demons put a bomb in the hallway, but if you say so,” Valerie said. Mr. Jamison gave her a small but honest smile and nodded.
“I prefer to see the good in people, where I can. I’m very disappointed that he made the choices he did and I of course agree with anything the Council chooses to do to him as punishment, but I still just look at him and see a young man with a deep well of potential.”
“He was a lot of a jerk,” Valerie said. “And then, yeah, the trying to get me killed part… Just can’t g
et past that.”
Mr. Jamison laughed quietly and nodded.
“I see your point. How about classes? How are your studies with Dr. Finn?”
“My mom said he was really weird when he was a kid,” Valerie said.
Mr. Jamison gave her a strange smile, like he was seeing through her baiting him, though that hadn’t been her intent at all, and he nodded.
“I didn’t know him, back then. I don’t really know him now. Is he doing the job they need him to do?”
Valerie shrugged, then nodded.
“Okay, yeah, he’s really good, and I’m learning more from him than all of my other teachers combined, including Mr. Tannis.”
“Good,” Mr. Jamison said. “I’m glad to hear it. I wouldn’t have any idea how to train you.”
“Apparently you just read me a dictionary or something,” Valerie said, and he raised an eyebrow.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just used a bunch of words I didn’t even know what they meant on a spell for Mr. Tannis, and the only reason I even knew them was I heard you use them once.”
“What were they?” Mr. Jamison asked, and she shrugged.
“I couldn’t tell you, even if I remembered them. I promise, I’d butcher them so bad you wouldn’t recognize them.”
“You have excellent diction,” Mr. Jamison said. “I’ve seen you cast.”
“Yeah, while I’m casting,” Valerie said. “After that, I sound like my entire mouth is numb with anesthetic.”
“How interesting,” Mr. Jamison said. “Do you… Do you want more words? More language?”
Valerie considered this, then nodded.
“I’ve read a lot of words in books and stuff, especially back when I wasn’t allowed to do magic, but I don’t think they click or whatever until I’ve heard them.”
He frowned.
“We could do that. I…” He looked at the papers on his desk, then shook his head dismissively. “I’m sure I could find a little bit of time, if it’s just a matter of exposing you to a diversity of language.”
Valerie looked at the papers and frowned.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what they’ve got you working on, or how important it is, or how important it might be for me… I just don’t know.”