A Settling of Scores
Title: A Settling of Scores
Description: Before they scatter to the ends of the earth, he needs the answer to the question that keeps him awake at night.
A/N: Originally written for the 2014 Ficathon (entry 2 of 2), minimally revised.
A Settling of Scores
Ordinarily, they glide past one another like schooners on the open seas - majestically apart yet unerringly tracking the other’s progress, and endowed with enough firepower to blow each other out of the water. But their five years together at the Facultas are about to come to a close, and he refuses to let things stand as they are. He needs to have the answer to the question that keeps him awake at night before they scatter to the ends of the earth.
He searches for her in all the likely places, checking each of the five elemental libraries, the experimental laboratory, and the planetarium in turn. Having exhausted all the indoor possibilities, he is on his way to the ancient stand of willows that ring the north end of the lake when he spots her.
The other students congregate in pairs or larger groups, making the most of their remaining time together to cement friendships or to forge instrumental alliances, but she is alone. She sits cross-legged in the grass at the side of the path, just beyond the scorched depression where a rosebush that produced magnificent scarlet blooms once stood. It is one of the more spectacular and lasting testaments of magical “accidents” that routinely occur at the school. She is studying the blackened remains of the rosebush with a critical expression, but she notices his approach almost immediately.
He can tell because of the way her spine straightens and her chin lifts, even as she returns her attention to the gouged earth. He pauses in the middle of the path and lets the other passersby flow around him, which they do without complaint.
Post-graduation, he will enter the service of the Third Prince. It is a prime placement, and he knows he looks magnificent in his new uniform with the gold thread glittering at the sleeves and collar and the prince’s coat of arms over the left breast. The many admiring glances that light on him refresh his courage.
“Meet me tomorrow night, the East Tower. Two chimes past moonrise.” His lips barely move as a subtle wafting of warm air carries his words, uttered too quietly for anyone walking by to overhear, to her ears alone.
“Why should I?” Her voice is as calm as the tranquil surface of the lake, and she doesn’t look at him when she speaks.
“Don’t you want to finish what we started in the Library of Fire? Second year, just the two of us, late at night?”
The color rises in her pale cheeks, but she still refuses to meet his eyes. “No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“I have no idea what you could be speaking of. All my ideas are excellent,” he says loftily.
She risks a quick, withering glance at him.
“Unless, of course, you’re scared.”
This time she doesn’t rise to the bait, at least not verbally. The buzzing of the lantern cicadas fills the thrumming silence, but he walks on, confident that she will be there. They both know she won’t be able to stay away.
***** For the first time in five years, he’s early. She pauses on the topmost step of the winding staircase, just below the landing that opens up onto the topmost room of the East Tower. Another step, and she will be bathed in the soft golden light spilling out from the beneath the closed door.
It’s not too late, she tells herself. She can still walk away from this.
But somehow her fingers are already on the iron doorknob, and the handle turns so easily in her grasp. She has spent the past day and a half preparing for this meeting, even though there are so many other things that need to be taken care of before she begins her three-year apprenticeship at Her Majesty’s flagship undersea laboratory.
She walks in, her chin lifted and her steps light but certain.
He is reflected dozens of times over in the long stretch of mirror-studded walls, and she knows that this image of him, out of countless others, will be the one she carries away with her. He’s wearing a plain white shirt over gray trousers instead of the new service uniform he’s been flaunting for the past week, but everything about him, from the insolent curl of his ruddy hair down to the toes of his overshined boots, oozes confidence. A perceptible aura of power crackles around him, sparking in his emerald irises and down the rope of cherry blossoms twined around chest, down across his left hip, and ending at his right calf.
Her magus field is more subtle, but no less potent. He watches her approach, his catlike eyes openly appraising the heavy, watered silk cloak she wears. The fabric ripples with her measured steps, turquoise and bronze, deep sea green and palest azure, silver and midnight blue chasing each other around and around, and concealing her slim form as she moves deliberately into the chamber.
“Are you ready?”
“I’ve been ready for this since the day we met.”
***** A boy and a girl stand beneath a gray stone archway. They have arrived at the portal that serves as the entrance to the continent’s finest school of magic at the same time. Both new students, they are uncertain how to proceed, but unwilling to demonstrate their ignorance in front of each other.
He’s had to travel a long way to reach the Facultas and has long since wiped the dust of the fields from his worn boots. When the coach neared the capital, picking up more urbane passengers, he studied the intonations and inflections of their speech patterns, their mannerisms, and their style of dress. He has completely shed his regional accent. The more tangible accoutrements he will adopt when he has the means, and he resolves that it will be soon.
But one look at this girl with her milk-white skin and serious blue eyes, not a hair out of place and toting a knapsack full of books, and he feels like a country bumpkin all over again. Any moment now, he’ll reach up and be able to pull the straw from his hair.
***** “Then let’s begin.”
From the inner pockets of her cloak, she withdraws the three talismans she has prepared. She sets each one a precise hand’s width apart, and they hang in midair with no apparent means of support: a skein of gray yarn, a whorled moon snail shell, and a small vial whose contents throw off radiant rays of glittering white light.
He retrieves his own talismans and suspends them opposite hers but in purposeful disarray. A long and narrow fir cone, the strand of fragrant cherry blossoms, and a geode lined with emerald crystals bob up and down in cheeky motion before him.
Together, they cast the incantation that will initiate the duel and constitutes their agreement to abide by the formal rules of dueling. The moment the incantation is completed, golden bubbles wink into existence to enclose the six talismans. After a single chime sounds, the first two objects are released.
She watches as dense tendrils of smoky gray fog, which she harvested from the final spring storm, fill the room. They close around her opponent, hiding him from her sight. A rattling sound warns her that his own magic has also taken effect.
A moment later, she finds herself in a narrow labyrinth of umber-toned walls. They appear dry and brittle to the naked eye, but she cannot break them with either brute force or magical touch. She flinches when a cyclone of air rushes past her, sending the edges of her cloak flapping wildly.
She grits her teeth. Getting out of the maze will be challenging enough, but he has cleverly laced it with wind traps. The desiccated cone is the perfect vehicle for such spells. Plucked from a line of firs that have stood proudly atop a mountain ridge for ages, the cone effortlessly carries in its core the memory of wind.
She begins the arduous task of making her way through the twisting lanes, seeding the walls at various points with shards of ice and doing her best to avoid the wind traps. They are among her least favorite spells, and he is all too gifted with their casting.
***** He stands very still, reaching outward with his magic to scan his surroundings instead of using his physical senses. Blinded by her fog, he could easily take a wrong step straight into a tricky abyss spell.
The air is thick and clammy in the spell’s embrace. His forehead wrinkles in concentration as he examines the working. The fog spells are perfectly layered atop each other, and it is difficult to tell where the ends meet. Her work, as always, is superlative. It will take him a long, long time to unravel them, and the first round is all about speed. He cannot afford to let her escape his labyrinth before him and win the first stage of their duel.
He turns the braided leather circlet around his wrist thoughtfully, touching each of the interspersed stones in turn. Finally, he settles on the pumice round. He arranges it carefully around the loosest knot of spells he can find, trying to pass as many of the slippery threads through the pores in the yellow stone. When he is ready, he gives the stone a hard yank, hoping to disrupt her spells enough that the entire thing will fall apart.
He smiles when the fog begins to thin out. In the next moment, however, his smile disappears when the threads caught in the pumice start vibrating wildly. They split open, gushing a thick spray of bubbles that work quickly to regenerate the fog and break apart the pumice. It falls uselessly to the ground in pieces. When he returns his attention to the piece of spell he had separated, he finds it woven back in place and the fog as impervious as ever.
Ruefully, he reaches for the pouch of seeds in his pocket, searching for the most invasive vine species he carries. It is time, he decides, to do things the hard way.
*****Her ice spells are beginning to weaken the structure of her cage, but she isn’t moving fast enough. The wind traps are particularly devious, and she has nearly been caught several times over. She glares at the spot where she needs to place her last spell. A small cyclone is already anchored there, and it spins gleefully. Untripped, wind traps are time-consuming to diffuse; it’s best to set them off and destroy them from within. Their dangers are not physical, but emotional.
It’s easy to trigger a wind trap. Already, she can feel the cyclone grasping greedily for her. She simply closes her eyes and lets the memories spin out against the darkness of her eyelids.
*****She can’t remember the last time her mother looked at her and really saw her, but she thinks it might have been the day her father left. The day after, actually. He hadn’t come home the previous night, but they thought he’d spent the night collapsed in one of the local taverns, sleeping off his latest bout of artistic inspiration. Then the news had come that the wainwright’s lovely young wife was missing, too.
She knows all these things, even though her mother tries to hide them from her. So she learns that she, too, should hide her mistakes and frailties from the world. But perhaps if she learns to do all the other things perfectly, she will shine bright enough to relight the spark in her mother’s eyes.
She learns to braid her hair by herself, each plait so neat and straight that not a single hair escapes them. She reads everything she can get her hands on and can recite most of it from memory. She becomes the top student every year, even better than nearly all of the upper year students, and her teachers finally know her as someone else besides the poor girl whose ne’er-do-well father ran off with the wainwright’s wife. She is never really sure if the same is true of her mother.
*****“Enough!”
She thrusts her hands wide, shredding the wind trap and placing the last ice spell, which shatters the labyrinth in the space of a few breaths.
The walls disappear, revealing the familiar confines of the East Tower room. She swallows hard when she sees him smiling triumphantly at her, lounging against the window ledge. A small pile of dry sepia scales is all that remains of the fir cone. Of the treacherous wind traps, there is no sign. He has taken the skein of gray yarn she used to store the fog and tied it in an intricate bow around his wrist.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?”
***** “Immeasurably. Allow me to congratulate you.” Her teeth are clenched so tightly he wonders how the words can escape to reach his ear.
He watches as she jerks the cloak from her shoulders and folds it in quick, angry movements. Underneath, she’s wearing a loose white shift belted at the waist with a dark mulberry cord.
Usually, her anger is cold and still, like a gargoyle crouched beneath a load of heavy snow. This is only the second time she has allowed her temper to surface in front of him.
All through the years, they have been neither friends nor foes, but rivals. It is a relationship both so much simpler yet somehow more complex than those other ties. He once thought it an association entirely free of emotion, until he realized how much of his pride and self-worth depended on how they performed in relation to one another.
He considers pressing his advantage, filled with adrenaline from his first win. The second round is based on precision, and her present state of distraction should hamper her performance. Already, however, the opportunity has passed. She appears entirely composed again.
Double chimes sound, signaling the beginning of the second stage, and the next two talismans are released. The shell flies into her hand while he wields the chain of cherry blossoms like a lariat, sending it lashing and cracking through the space between them.
She dodges forwards, backwards, and diagonally, sending out her magic as needed in directed pulses to deflect the deceptively harmless-looking flowers. If they touch her skin, they will numb her spellcasting abilities.
Just as the fragrant loop catches around her bare ankle, she snaps her wrist and sends the shell spinning across the polished marble floor tiles. It lands directly in front of his right boot, and he looks down in dismay. His fingers begin working hurriedly to produce a counterenchament to contain her spell. Equally feverishly, she tries to sever the rope of pink flowers from her leg before it is too late.
Unleased from its fragile holding case, the tidal wave rushes towards him, intent on devouring everything in its path. He laughs as it crashes down, holding his arms out wide to meet its hungry embrace before he disappears from view entirely.
*****Magic is everything he has ever wanted. No, that’s not really true. But it is the path to escape, to freedom, and then everything he has ever dreamed of - respect, riches, renown. Over the years, his studies have been as backbreaking as his labor during the worst years on the farm, when the rains and the crops failed, but they have been infinitely more fulfilling. He has always found it ironic that half his magical strength lies in plants, but he is better able to appreciate them when they are put to uses other than food or cash.
He was the middle child of a family of eight children, five of which were sons, and resources and affection were scarce in his early life. By the time the summons from the Facultas came, two of his brothers had already been apprenticed. One had gone to sea, the other to a blacksmith. Without magic, he would have been destined for a similar path. That was the rule among those who worked the land - they didn’t like to divide the inheritance, otherwise the farm would quickly dwindle to nothing within a generation.
Still, coming from a large family had endowed him with more than determination to prove himself. He had plenty of experience in dealing with children across a wide range of ages. From the moment he arrived at the school, he knew how to get along with the other students, from the bullies and the snobs to the shy and homesick ones.
Homesickness is an ailment he has never suffered from, mostly because he has yet to find a place that feels like home to him. The Facultas, for all its fine qualities, has been for him an arena, a stage, and a proving-grounds.
*****The room is pitch dark, and the world seems entirely still. After a moment, the wax tapers set in the brass sconces between the mirrors reignite to throw their forms into harsh relief. She stands upright before the fireplace mantel; he lies where he was flung against the hard stone wall in the far corner.
“We seem to be at a draw,” she states. The first round went to him, but the second is hers.
“We could stop here,” he says, sitting up and sluicing the stinging saltwater out of his eyes and off his face.
She blinks as she dislodges the last of the clinging cherry blossoms from her hair, bruising the tender petals. Of all the words she expected to come from his mouth, she would never have guessed it would be those. Part of her is tired and tempted to give in. They’ve both been hit with the inevitable backlash from casting such powerful spells, and if they are caught, no one will be pleased.
But all that’s left is the third round, the deciding round. Once they know, there will be no erasing the knowledge. There will be no coming back from the precipice. Will they draw back from it now, or fling themselves off it willingly?
She meets his eyes, and her lips curve as his eyebrow arches challengingly. “I want to know-”
“Which of us is better?” they finish together, the words resounding weightily through the circular room.
“So be it,” he says, “the final round.”
“The round of power,” she confirms.
Three chimes sound, and the last pair of golden spheres fade into nothingness.
She gestures swiftly, and the cap flies off the coruscating vial. A veritable blizzard of snowflakes surges forth, and even more snowflakes rise from the puddles of water left over from the previous round.
Green crystals erupt from the geode, nearly spearing her, but she is unfazed. Her uplifted arms call forth smothering blankets of deep snow, buckets of sleet, and thick sheets of ice. At last, she stands still. Two columns of ice flank her, their hearts a deep and dazzling glacier blue within their alabaster depths, and she waits for him from this position of strength.
He expected as much, their years together having given him great familiarity with her mostly defensive dueling style. By now, his geode has transfigured into dozens of crystal pillars that break up the wintry landscape in irregular bursts. From the outgrowth nearest him, he skillfully forges twin crystal blades, fitting them comfortably to his grip. He sweeps them through the air, and everywhere they meet her magic, the sharp-edged flakes sizzle against the curved, translucent surfaces.
Now, he is ready to do battle. He zigzags around the closest ice column, cursing as his boots slip on the slushy rime that has accumulated on the floor tiles. With a gesture of the left sword, he sends two circular crystal cross-sections whipping through the air towards her, but they shatter harmlessly against a newly-formed web of rotating ice shields.
Grimly, he focuses his efforts on forcing her out of her protections. His blades move so quickly they blur together, swiftly cutting through and collapsing her columns while he grows yet more crystal pillars. They erupt from the ground in dizzying succession, piercing her web’s vulnerable points faster than she can replace it.
At the last moment, a raised crust of ice gives his leap added momentum, and he crashes into her headlong. They fall heavily to the floor, narrowly missing being impaled by one of his crystal spikes. He has her mostly pinned to the ground, but their legs are tangled. He manages to lever himself back on his knees before her knee, now encased in green crystal, can find its target.
He has dropped one of his swords; when he reaches for it, she freezes his arm up to the elbow.
His other sword rests against her neck, but he feels the bitterly cold prick of her weapon against his ribs. Their panting breaths form twin sets of misty clouds in the freezing air, and her eyes are impenetrable as she gazes up at him.
*****They pass the last warm autumn afternoon sitting by the lakeside. Her skirt is tucked demurely around her legs, but the flush in her cheeks and the marks on his neck tell a revealing story.
He lies back with his head in her lap, watching a handful of red and yellow leaves fall slowly to the ground. He pays a nominal amount of attention to his fair companion’s words until a familiar sight catches his eye - a dark-haired girl walking towards the willows, her arms piled high with books.
She sends a bland look their way and the barest nod of polite acknowledgment, and he chuckles to himself as he stirs himself to give her a lazy, one-handed wave. If it were any other girl in the school, he would think she was jealous, but not her - no, she is thinking that he should be studying instead of frittering his precious free hours away.
He knows that it rankles her how he appears to expend so little effort on his studies but still manages to show her up in their classes half the time. The other half of the time, not so much. The other students regard their competition as a source of continuing amusement and sometimes, when they’re in a betting mood, income. No matter what they think, to him, it’s much more than a game.
His companion can tell that she has lost his attention. Glancing over to see where his moody gaze is directed, she reaches over and pulls on an unruly red-gold curl in a fit of pique.
“Hey!” he protests, putting his hand up protectively. “What are you doing?”
“Making sure you’re still awake,” she answers sweetly before she releases her grip on his hair.
He rolls his eyes, rubbing the sore spot as he sits up.
“Are you thinking of asking her to the ball?”
“Who?”
She tilts her head accusingly in the direction of the willows.
He looks, then turns back to her, his mouth agape. “Where would you get a ridiculous idea like that?”
She levels a hard stare at him. “You always want the best. She’s the best - besides you, of course, and you can hardly dance with yourself.”
She would hardly believe it, but the thought has never occurred to him. He has never considered the girl in question in such a light before.
She is the gold standard. The authority. The measuring rod. Their unending rivalry is the touchstone of his schooling. She seems as much a part of the Facultas as its tangled grounds and graceful towers, and twice as remote.
Before he can even begin trying to express such a sentiment, yellow and green gingko leaves start showering gently down on them. His companion laughs in delight, holding her hands out to catch the whirling, fan-shaped leaves.
He looks across the lake to the opposite shore, the source of the gingko leaves spiraling all across the lawn. He is well aware of the message, whether she consciously means it or not. Plants may be his especial domain, but he had better watch out lest they become hers as well.
“She makes such beautiful things,” his companion says wistfully.
He looks down at her. “Not nearly as beautiful as you,” he lies easily. They get to their feet and continue their flirtation on the way back to the school. After he walks her to her dormitory, he seeks out his secret hideaway in the West Tower, invigorated by the challenge to create something better. And in all the days that pass, he never gives a second thought to the rest of that conversation. Mostly.
***** Slowly, he lowers his hand. He makes a fist, and the crystal blade crushes harmlessly into powdery dust. Spidery networks of cracks appear on the crystals scattered throughout the room until they collapse on themselves. The merest breeze is enough to scatter the shining piles of insubstantial particles to the wind.
A sick feeling spreads through the numbness, and he hardly notices as all the ice and snow disperses, first melting into liquid and then disappearing entirely. He cannot do it, and she has won. She has bested him.
He’s not sure how much time passes before he becomes aware of a quiet sniffling noise, and he can’t believe he cares. He should just get up and walk away with the last shred of his pride.
“Why are you crying?” he demands harshly.
“We created such beautiful things, but we used them to try to destroy one another.”
He can’t bear the sorrow in her voice, even though no tears drop from her shining eyes. He can’t think what to do until her bared shoulders began to shake, either from repressed sobs or the cold. With a sigh, he grabs her wrists and pulls her upright until she leans against him.
“Don’t cry,” he murmurs in her ear.
“I’m not crying,” she says instantly.
He smiles, the movement causing his lips to brush against her hair. “For such a practical person, you’re surprisingly contrary. Don’t be sad, or I’ll think you regret not eliminating me.
She makes a quiet noise, either sniffling or scoffing.
“You’ll go on to make wondrous discoveries beneath the sea where I’m sure all the men are ugly old graybeards. I, on the other hand, will have a glorious career surrounded by the most beautiful and charming women of the Prince’s court. One day, we’ll have a rematch and I’ll win. Then I’ll demonstrate to you the proper behavior of the victor - gloating is in order, not crying. Or whatever it is you’re not doing.”
Her soft laugh sends a tingling sensation down his earlobe and neck. As she tilts her head to look at him, the dark strands of her hair, having fallen entirely out of her braid, whisper against the bare skin of his forearm.
Suddenly, they realize that they have never been this close to each other before. They are jolted into acute awareness of everywhere they are pressed against each other, and everywhere they aren’t.
In the space of a heartbeat, she has leapt to her feet; in another, she is halfway across the room.
“I wish you well,” she tells him and disappears down the tower steps before he can say the same. Or perhaps something else.
*****He barely manages an hour of sleep, but his yearmates drag him out of bed in time to dress for the procession. They join the teeming mass of students heading for the outdoor amphitheater where the ceremony will be held. As the graduates file down the well-trodden path of multicolored flagstones, an unfamiliar sight catches his eye while a frisson of familiar magic fills his senses, and he stops short. His friend Lenic walks into his back and curses loudly, disrupting the dignity of the proceedings, but he ignores him.
Where a deep crater once stood, there is now only a shallow bowl of fresh earth. All signs of charring have disappeared. A single thorny shoot grows up from the center of the hollow, and the delicate petals just hidden within the bud are touched with palest blue.
Fin
Description: Before they scatter to the ends of the earth, he needs the answer to the question that keeps him awake at night.
A/N: Originally written for the 2014 Ficathon (entry 2 of 2), minimally revised.
A Settling of Scores
Ordinarily, they glide past one another like schooners on the open seas - majestically apart yet unerringly tracking the other’s progress, and endowed with enough firepower to blow each other out of the water. But their five years together at the Facultas are about to come to a close, and he refuses to let things stand as they are. He needs to have the answer to the question that keeps him awake at night before they scatter to the ends of the earth.
He searches for her in all the likely places, checking each of the five elemental libraries, the experimental laboratory, and the planetarium in turn. Having exhausted all the indoor possibilities, he is on his way to the ancient stand of willows that ring the north end of the lake when he spots her.
The other students congregate in pairs or larger groups, making the most of their remaining time together to cement friendships or to forge instrumental alliances, but she is alone. She sits cross-legged in the grass at the side of the path, just beyond the scorched depression where a rosebush that produced magnificent scarlet blooms once stood. It is one of the more spectacular and lasting testaments of magical “accidents” that routinely occur at the school. She is studying the blackened remains of the rosebush with a critical expression, but she notices his approach almost immediately.
He can tell because of the way her spine straightens and her chin lifts, even as she returns her attention to the gouged earth. He pauses in the middle of the path and lets the other passersby flow around him, which they do without complaint.
Post-graduation, he will enter the service of the Third Prince. It is a prime placement, and he knows he looks magnificent in his new uniform with the gold thread glittering at the sleeves and collar and the prince’s coat of arms over the left breast. The many admiring glances that light on him refresh his courage.
“Meet me tomorrow night, the East Tower. Two chimes past moonrise.” His lips barely move as a subtle wafting of warm air carries his words, uttered too quietly for anyone walking by to overhear, to her ears alone.
“Why should I?” Her voice is as calm as the tranquil surface of the lake, and she doesn’t look at him when she speaks.
“Don’t you want to finish what we started in the Library of Fire? Second year, just the two of us, late at night?”
The color rises in her pale cheeks, but she still refuses to meet his eyes. “No.”
“Don’t lie.”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“I have no idea what you could be speaking of. All my ideas are excellent,” he says loftily.
She risks a quick, withering glance at him.
“Unless, of course, you’re scared.”
This time she doesn’t rise to the bait, at least not verbally. The buzzing of the lantern cicadas fills the thrumming silence, but he walks on, confident that she will be there. They both know she won’t be able to stay away.
***** For the first time in five years, he’s early. She pauses on the topmost step of the winding staircase, just below the landing that opens up onto the topmost room of the East Tower. Another step, and she will be bathed in the soft golden light spilling out from the beneath the closed door.
It’s not too late, she tells herself. She can still walk away from this.
But somehow her fingers are already on the iron doorknob, and the handle turns so easily in her grasp. She has spent the past day and a half preparing for this meeting, even though there are so many other things that need to be taken care of before she begins her three-year apprenticeship at Her Majesty’s flagship undersea laboratory.
She walks in, her chin lifted and her steps light but certain.
He is reflected dozens of times over in the long stretch of mirror-studded walls, and she knows that this image of him, out of countless others, will be the one she carries away with her. He’s wearing a plain white shirt over gray trousers instead of the new service uniform he’s been flaunting for the past week, but everything about him, from the insolent curl of his ruddy hair down to the toes of his overshined boots, oozes confidence. A perceptible aura of power crackles around him, sparking in his emerald irises and down the rope of cherry blossoms twined around chest, down across his left hip, and ending at his right calf.
Her magus field is more subtle, but no less potent. He watches her approach, his catlike eyes openly appraising the heavy, watered silk cloak she wears. The fabric ripples with her measured steps, turquoise and bronze, deep sea green and palest azure, silver and midnight blue chasing each other around and around, and concealing her slim form as she moves deliberately into the chamber.
“Are you ready?”
“I’ve been ready for this since the day we met.”
***** A boy and a girl stand beneath a gray stone archway. They have arrived at the portal that serves as the entrance to the continent’s finest school of magic at the same time. Both new students, they are uncertain how to proceed, but unwilling to demonstrate their ignorance in front of each other.
He’s had to travel a long way to reach the Facultas and has long since wiped the dust of the fields from his worn boots. When the coach neared the capital, picking up more urbane passengers, he studied the intonations and inflections of their speech patterns, their mannerisms, and their style of dress. He has completely shed his regional accent. The more tangible accoutrements he will adopt when he has the means, and he resolves that it will be soon.
But one look at this girl with her milk-white skin and serious blue eyes, not a hair out of place and toting a knapsack full of books, and he feels like a country bumpkin all over again. Any moment now, he’ll reach up and be able to pull the straw from his hair.
***** “Then let’s begin.”
From the inner pockets of her cloak, she withdraws the three talismans she has prepared. She sets each one a precise hand’s width apart, and they hang in midair with no apparent means of support: a skein of gray yarn, a whorled moon snail shell, and a small vial whose contents throw off radiant rays of glittering white light.
He retrieves his own talismans and suspends them opposite hers but in purposeful disarray. A long and narrow fir cone, the strand of fragrant cherry blossoms, and a geode lined with emerald crystals bob up and down in cheeky motion before him.
Together, they cast the incantation that will initiate the duel and constitutes their agreement to abide by the formal rules of dueling. The moment the incantation is completed, golden bubbles wink into existence to enclose the six talismans. After a single chime sounds, the first two objects are released.
She watches as dense tendrils of smoky gray fog, which she harvested from the final spring storm, fill the room. They close around her opponent, hiding him from her sight. A rattling sound warns her that his own magic has also taken effect.
A moment later, she finds herself in a narrow labyrinth of umber-toned walls. They appear dry and brittle to the naked eye, but she cannot break them with either brute force or magical touch. She flinches when a cyclone of air rushes past her, sending the edges of her cloak flapping wildly.
She grits her teeth. Getting out of the maze will be challenging enough, but he has cleverly laced it with wind traps. The desiccated cone is the perfect vehicle for such spells. Plucked from a line of firs that have stood proudly atop a mountain ridge for ages, the cone effortlessly carries in its core the memory of wind.
She begins the arduous task of making her way through the twisting lanes, seeding the walls at various points with shards of ice and doing her best to avoid the wind traps. They are among her least favorite spells, and he is all too gifted with their casting.
***** He stands very still, reaching outward with his magic to scan his surroundings instead of using his physical senses. Blinded by her fog, he could easily take a wrong step straight into a tricky abyss spell.
The air is thick and clammy in the spell’s embrace. His forehead wrinkles in concentration as he examines the working. The fog spells are perfectly layered atop each other, and it is difficult to tell where the ends meet. Her work, as always, is superlative. It will take him a long, long time to unravel them, and the first round is all about speed. He cannot afford to let her escape his labyrinth before him and win the first stage of their duel.
He turns the braided leather circlet around his wrist thoughtfully, touching each of the interspersed stones in turn. Finally, he settles on the pumice round. He arranges it carefully around the loosest knot of spells he can find, trying to pass as many of the slippery threads through the pores in the yellow stone. When he is ready, he gives the stone a hard yank, hoping to disrupt her spells enough that the entire thing will fall apart.
He smiles when the fog begins to thin out. In the next moment, however, his smile disappears when the threads caught in the pumice start vibrating wildly. They split open, gushing a thick spray of bubbles that work quickly to regenerate the fog and break apart the pumice. It falls uselessly to the ground in pieces. When he returns his attention to the piece of spell he had separated, he finds it woven back in place and the fog as impervious as ever.
Ruefully, he reaches for the pouch of seeds in his pocket, searching for the most invasive vine species he carries. It is time, he decides, to do things the hard way.
*****Her ice spells are beginning to weaken the structure of her cage, but she isn’t moving fast enough. The wind traps are particularly devious, and she has nearly been caught several times over. She glares at the spot where she needs to place her last spell. A small cyclone is already anchored there, and it spins gleefully. Untripped, wind traps are time-consuming to diffuse; it’s best to set them off and destroy them from within. Their dangers are not physical, but emotional.
It’s easy to trigger a wind trap. Already, she can feel the cyclone grasping greedily for her. She simply closes her eyes and lets the memories spin out against the darkness of her eyelids.
*****She can’t remember the last time her mother looked at her and really saw her, but she thinks it might have been the day her father left. The day after, actually. He hadn’t come home the previous night, but they thought he’d spent the night collapsed in one of the local taverns, sleeping off his latest bout of artistic inspiration. Then the news had come that the wainwright’s lovely young wife was missing, too.
She knows all these things, even though her mother tries to hide them from her. So she learns that she, too, should hide her mistakes and frailties from the world. But perhaps if she learns to do all the other things perfectly, she will shine bright enough to relight the spark in her mother’s eyes.
She learns to braid her hair by herself, each plait so neat and straight that not a single hair escapes them. She reads everything she can get her hands on and can recite most of it from memory. She becomes the top student every year, even better than nearly all of the upper year students, and her teachers finally know her as someone else besides the poor girl whose ne’er-do-well father ran off with the wainwright’s wife. She is never really sure if the same is true of her mother.
*****“Enough!”
She thrusts her hands wide, shredding the wind trap and placing the last ice spell, which shatters the labyrinth in the space of a few breaths.
The walls disappear, revealing the familiar confines of the East Tower room. She swallows hard when she sees him smiling triumphantly at her, lounging against the window ledge. A small pile of dry sepia scales is all that remains of the fir cone. Of the treacherous wind traps, there is no sign. He has taken the skein of gray yarn she used to store the fog and tied it in an intricate bow around his wrist.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?”
***** “Immeasurably. Allow me to congratulate you.” Her teeth are clenched so tightly he wonders how the words can escape to reach his ear.
He watches as she jerks the cloak from her shoulders and folds it in quick, angry movements. Underneath, she’s wearing a loose white shift belted at the waist with a dark mulberry cord.
Usually, her anger is cold and still, like a gargoyle crouched beneath a load of heavy snow. This is only the second time she has allowed her temper to surface in front of him.
All through the years, they have been neither friends nor foes, but rivals. It is a relationship both so much simpler yet somehow more complex than those other ties. He once thought it an association entirely free of emotion, until he realized how much of his pride and self-worth depended on how they performed in relation to one another.
He considers pressing his advantage, filled with adrenaline from his first win. The second round is based on precision, and her present state of distraction should hamper her performance. Already, however, the opportunity has passed. She appears entirely composed again.
Double chimes sound, signaling the beginning of the second stage, and the next two talismans are released. The shell flies into her hand while he wields the chain of cherry blossoms like a lariat, sending it lashing and cracking through the space between them.
She dodges forwards, backwards, and diagonally, sending out her magic as needed in directed pulses to deflect the deceptively harmless-looking flowers. If they touch her skin, they will numb her spellcasting abilities.
Just as the fragrant loop catches around her bare ankle, she snaps her wrist and sends the shell spinning across the polished marble floor tiles. It lands directly in front of his right boot, and he looks down in dismay. His fingers begin working hurriedly to produce a counterenchament to contain her spell. Equally feverishly, she tries to sever the rope of pink flowers from her leg before it is too late.
Unleased from its fragile holding case, the tidal wave rushes towards him, intent on devouring everything in its path. He laughs as it crashes down, holding his arms out wide to meet its hungry embrace before he disappears from view entirely.
*****Magic is everything he has ever wanted. No, that’s not really true. But it is the path to escape, to freedom, and then everything he has ever dreamed of - respect, riches, renown. Over the years, his studies have been as backbreaking as his labor during the worst years on the farm, when the rains and the crops failed, but they have been infinitely more fulfilling. He has always found it ironic that half his magical strength lies in plants, but he is better able to appreciate them when they are put to uses other than food or cash.
He was the middle child of a family of eight children, five of which were sons, and resources and affection were scarce in his early life. By the time the summons from the Facultas came, two of his brothers had already been apprenticed. One had gone to sea, the other to a blacksmith. Without magic, he would have been destined for a similar path. That was the rule among those who worked the land - they didn’t like to divide the inheritance, otherwise the farm would quickly dwindle to nothing within a generation.
Still, coming from a large family had endowed him with more than determination to prove himself. He had plenty of experience in dealing with children across a wide range of ages. From the moment he arrived at the school, he knew how to get along with the other students, from the bullies and the snobs to the shy and homesick ones.
Homesickness is an ailment he has never suffered from, mostly because he has yet to find a place that feels like home to him. The Facultas, for all its fine qualities, has been for him an arena, a stage, and a proving-grounds.
*****The room is pitch dark, and the world seems entirely still. After a moment, the wax tapers set in the brass sconces between the mirrors reignite to throw their forms into harsh relief. She stands upright before the fireplace mantel; he lies where he was flung against the hard stone wall in the far corner.
“We seem to be at a draw,” she states. The first round went to him, but the second is hers.
“We could stop here,” he says, sitting up and sluicing the stinging saltwater out of his eyes and off his face.
She blinks as she dislodges the last of the clinging cherry blossoms from her hair, bruising the tender petals. Of all the words she expected to come from his mouth, she would never have guessed it would be those. Part of her is tired and tempted to give in. They’ve both been hit with the inevitable backlash from casting such powerful spells, and if they are caught, no one will be pleased.
But all that’s left is the third round, the deciding round. Once they know, there will be no erasing the knowledge. There will be no coming back from the precipice. Will they draw back from it now, or fling themselves off it willingly?
She meets his eyes, and her lips curve as his eyebrow arches challengingly. “I want to know-”
“Which of us is better?” they finish together, the words resounding weightily through the circular room.
“So be it,” he says, “the final round.”
“The round of power,” she confirms.
Three chimes sound, and the last pair of golden spheres fade into nothingness.
She gestures swiftly, and the cap flies off the coruscating vial. A veritable blizzard of snowflakes surges forth, and even more snowflakes rise from the puddles of water left over from the previous round.
Green crystals erupt from the geode, nearly spearing her, but she is unfazed. Her uplifted arms call forth smothering blankets of deep snow, buckets of sleet, and thick sheets of ice. At last, she stands still. Two columns of ice flank her, their hearts a deep and dazzling glacier blue within their alabaster depths, and she waits for him from this position of strength.
He expected as much, their years together having given him great familiarity with her mostly defensive dueling style. By now, his geode has transfigured into dozens of crystal pillars that break up the wintry landscape in irregular bursts. From the outgrowth nearest him, he skillfully forges twin crystal blades, fitting them comfortably to his grip. He sweeps them through the air, and everywhere they meet her magic, the sharp-edged flakes sizzle against the curved, translucent surfaces.
Now, he is ready to do battle. He zigzags around the closest ice column, cursing as his boots slip on the slushy rime that has accumulated on the floor tiles. With a gesture of the left sword, he sends two circular crystal cross-sections whipping through the air towards her, but they shatter harmlessly against a newly-formed web of rotating ice shields.
Grimly, he focuses his efforts on forcing her out of her protections. His blades move so quickly they blur together, swiftly cutting through and collapsing her columns while he grows yet more crystal pillars. They erupt from the ground in dizzying succession, piercing her web’s vulnerable points faster than she can replace it.
At the last moment, a raised crust of ice gives his leap added momentum, and he crashes into her headlong. They fall heavily to the floor, narrowly missing being impaled by one of his crystal spikes. He has her mostly pinned to the ground, but their legs are tangled. He manages to lever himself back on his knees before her knee, now encased in green crystal, can find its target.
He has dropped one of his swords; when he reaches for it, she freezes his arm up to the elbow.
His other sword rests against her neck, but he feels the bitterly cold prick of her weapon against his ribs. Their panting breaths form twin sets of misty clouds in the freezing air, and her eyes are impenetrable as she gazes up at him.
*****They pass the last warm autumn afternoon sitting by the lakeside. Her skirt is tucked demurely around her legs, but the flush in her cheeks and the marks on his neck tell a revealing story.
He lies back with his head in her lap, watching a handful of red and yellow leaves fall slowly to the ground. He pays a nominal amount of attention to his fair companion’s words until a familiar sight catches his eye - a dark-haired girl walking towards the willows, her arms piled high with books.
She sends a bland look their way and the barest nod of polite acknowledgment, and he chuckles to himself as he stirs himself to give her a lazy, one-handed wave. If it were any other girl in the school, he would think she was jealous, but not her - no, she is thinking that he should be studying instead of frittering his precious free hours away.
He knows that it rankles her how he appears to expend so little effort on his studies but still manages to show her up in their classes half the time. The other half of the time, not so much. The other students regard their competition as a source of continuing amusement and sometimes, when they’re in a betting mood, income. No matter what they think, to him, it’s much more than a game.
His companion can tell that she has lost his attention. Glancing over to see where his moody gaze is directed, she reaches over and pulls on an unruly red-gold curl in a fit of pique.
“Hey!” he protests, putting his hand up protectively. “What are you doing?”
“Making sure you’re still awake,” she answers sweetly before she releases her grip on his hair.
He rolls his eyes, rubbing the sore spot as he sits up.
“Are you thinking of asking her to the ball?”
“Who?”
She tilts her head accusingly in the direction of the willows.
He looks, then turns back to her, his mouth agape. “Where would you get a ridiculous idea like that?”
She levels a hard stare at him. “You always want the best. She’s the best - besides you, of course, and you can hardly dance with yourself.”
She would hardly believe it, but the thought has never occurred to him. He has never considered the girl in question in such a light before.
She is the gold standard. The authority. The measuring rod. Their unending rivalry is the touchstone of his schooling. She seems as much a part of the Facultas as its tangled grounds and graceful towers, and twice as remote.
Before he can even begin trying to express such a sentiment, yellow and green gingko leaves start showering gently down on them. His companion laughs in delight, holding her hands out to catch the whirling, fan-shaped leaves.
He looks across the lake to the opposite shore, the source of the gingko leaves spiraling all across the lawn. He is well aware of the message, whether she consciously means it or not. Plants may be his especial domain, but he had better watch out lest they become hers as well.
“She makes such beautiful things,” his companion says wistfully.
He looks down at her. “Not nearly as beautiful as you,” he lies easily. They get to their feet and continue their flirtation on the way back to the school. After he walks her to her dormitory, he seeks out his secret hideaway in the West Tower, invigorated by the challenge to create something better. And in all the days that pass, he never gives a second thought to the rest of that conversation. Mostly.
***** Slowly, he lowers his hand. He makes a fist, and the crystal blade crushes harmlessly into powdery dust. Spidery networks of cracks appear on the crystals scattered throughout the room until they collapse on themselves. The merest breeze is enough to scatter the shining piles of insubstantial particles to the wind.
A sick feeling spreads through the numbness, and he hardly notices as all the ice and snow disperses, first melting into liquid and then disappearing entirely. He cannot do it, and she has won. She has bested him.
He’s not sure how much time passes before he becomes aware of a quiet sniffling noise, and he can’t believe he cares. He should just get up and walk away with the last shred of his pride.
“Why are you crying?” he demands harshly.
“We created such beautiful things, but we used them to try to destroy one another.”
He can’t bear the sorrow in her voice, even though no tears drop from her shining eyes. He can’t think what to do until her bared shoulders began to shake, either from repressed sobs or the cold. With a sigh, he grabs her wrists and pulls her upright until she leans against him.
“Don’t cry,” he murmurs in her ear.
“I’m not crying,” she says instantly.
He smiles, the movement causing his lips to brush against her hair. “For such a practical person, you’re surprisingly contrary. Don’t be sad, or I’ll think you regret not eliminating me.
She makes a quiet noise, either sniffling or scoffing.
“You’ll go on to make wondrous discoveries beneath the sea where I’m sure all the men are ugly old graybeards. I, on the other hand, will have a glorious career surrounded by the most beautiful and charming women of the Prince’s court. One day, we’ll have a rematch and I’ll win. Then I’ll demonstrate to you the proper behavior of the victor - gloating is in order, not crying. Or whatever it is you’re not doing.”
Her soft laugh sends a tingling sensation down his earlobe and neck. As she tilts her head to look at him, the dark strands of her hair, having fallen entirely out of her braid, whisper against the bare skin of his forearm.
Suddenly, they realize that they have never been this close to each other before. They are jolted into acute awareness of everywhere they are pressed against each other, and everywhere they aren’t.
In the space of a heartbeat, she has leapt to her feet; in another, she is halfway across the room.
“I wish you well,” she tells him and disappears down the tower steps before he can say the same. Or perhaps something else.
*****He barely manages an hour of sleep, but his yearmates drag him out of bed in time to dress for the procession. They join the teeming mass of students heading for the outdoor amphitheater where the ceremony will be held. As the graduates file down the well-trodden path of multicolored flagstones, an unfamiliar sight catches his eye while a frisson of familiar magic fills his senses, and he stops short. His friend Lenic walks into his back and curses loudly, disrupting the dignity of the proceedings, but he ignores him.
Where a deep crater once stood, there is now only a shallow bowl of fresh earth. All signs of charring have disappeared. A single thorny shoot grows up from the center of the hollow, and the delicate petals just hidden within the bud are touched with palest blue.
Fin