by Maria Amor
“Speaking from my experience with humans,” Mistral said quietly, “it’s better to have the ability to resist and not need it, than to not have it and end up on the other end of someone’s ability to compel you.” Dylan had to accept that she was right about that; he’d seen something pass between Julia and Ruth when they’d come home from the party and his friend had confronted her grandmother—but he hadn’t quite known what it was. Things were developing too quickly with Julia.
“Okay, so I guess we start,” Dylan said, still doubtful of the whole situation.
“This is purely a defensive thing,” Ruth said. “Especially as Julia starts to gain more and more control over her abilities, and as she reaches her peak in power, you’re going to need to defend yourself—don’t think I’ve missed the way that you end up scrambling to protect her and work with her at the same time.” Dylan smiled ruefully.
“I promised you I would do my best, and I have,” he said. “If you’re not satisfied with my ability to protect her…”
“I’m satisfied,” Ruth said. “If you were anyone else—other than maybe another air-aligned Guardian—I would be teaching you this.” She paused. “Fire-aligned elementals have a limited ability to avoid it, but even they fall prey to the ability. It’s one of the strongest manifestations of air-aligned energy there is, at least in people.” She looked at Mistral, who nodded.
“When Ruth told my aunt that she thought Julia had begun showing the possibility of that ability, Claudine was happy to help. We need more strong representation of our elemental alignment in the council.” Dylan raised an eyebrow at that.
“That gets into politics that Dylan is probably better off not knowing for a while,” Ruth told the fae.
“Very well,” Mistral said. She finished off her tea and rose to her feet. “Shall we begin?”
“We should get going,” Ruth agreed. She turned her attention onto Dylan. “Air-aligned creatures all have a natural charm, an ability to convince and persuade. The compulsion ability takes that to the next level; it’s essentially the air-aligned person or creature pushing their will through you.” Dylan nodded.
“So how do I resist?”
“As with most things, you call upon your native energies,” Ruth said. “In this setting, Mistral is just going to compel you to do things that are merely silly—until you learn to recognize the feeling and let it pass through you. Basically, what you want to do is dissolve the force, dispel it through your energies.” Dylan frowned at that; he both understood and didn’t understand what Ruth meant.
“Why don’t I use the ability on Dylan, so that he knows what it feels like, and then you can help him to use his energies to spread the influence?” Mistral looked at him and Dylan suddenly felt like a lamb being circled by wolves.
“I think that makes sense,” Ruth said. Dylan stood and tried not to fidget as he watched Mistral shift slightly, looking at him. “Keep it simple, to start with.”
“Jump on one foot,” Mistral said, and Dylan felt the compulsion grip him; it wasn’t as if he even had the idea to do the act on his own, or as if he had made a choice. Instead, it felt as if he were simply jumping up and down on one foot for no actual reason, without the ability to even question it. “Stop.” Dylan put his other foot down and stopped jumping, looking from one woman to the other.
“Did you feel that?” Dylan nodded.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said, frowning slightly in confusion as he tried to come up with the words.
“Basically, the ability overrides your will—temporarily,” Ruth explained. “It’s a force that, for a moment, obliterates whatever was on your mind, and replaces it with the compulsion.”
“That sounds like an incredibly dangerous ability for anyone to have.” Mistral nodded.
“It’s dangerous especially for humans,” she said. “Humans are particularly responsive to it—even other Guardians.”
“Okay,” Dylan said, looking at Ruth. “How do I fight it? What you said before doesn’t make any sense.”
“When the command comes, feel the energy and let it trickle through you instead of hitting you,” Ruth said. “Air cannot penetrate water. Water engulfs air, lets it pass without disturbance.” Dylan pressed his lips together. “Here, let me show you.” Ruth held out her hands and Dylan hesitantly took them, closing his eyes.
He felt the older woman’s energy flowing through him, stronger than he would have thought possible. Ruth murmured something in the soft, liquid language that all water-aligned Guardians knew, and Dylan could feel himself learning the phrase, could feel it implanting in his mind. “You remember the way I taught you to manipulate emotional states in others?”
Dylan nodded, not opening his eyes. “Basically, this is the inverse of that. Let the influence pass through you, through the energy that makes up your abilities, passing and leaving behind your essential peace intact.” Dylan nodded again, beginning to understand what Ruth meant; but how he could put it to work, how he could use it to resist Julia’s ability—once she ever used it on him—was beyond him.
Ruth’s hands slid out of his and Dylan felt briefly bereft at the contact. The older woman’s energy was intense, but so tightly controlled that he knew she could have absolutely overwhelmed him with it if she had wanted to. She could have inundated him, making him feel anything—sadness, grief, pain, happiness—and he wouldn’t have been able to resist her.
If Julia were following in her grandmother’s footsteps, but with a different element, Dylan was glad that he was not on the radar for her mate; he couldn’t imagine the amount of support that she would need, the sheer exhaustion that would come with managing her energies so intimately.
“Let’s try again,” Mistral said. Dylan steeled himself, and the fae turned her luminous-looking eyes on him. “Clap your hands.” This time, he felt the command hit him, instead of just automatically giving into it. He remembered the phrase that Ruth had whispered, and resisted for a few moments, letting the command pass through his energies—but then all at once, found himself clapping without knowing why.
“Better,” Ruth said, not quite smiling.
“Stop,” Mistral told him, and Dylan didn’t resist the compulsion. He sighed.
“This is harder than you said it would be,” he told the older—he thought—of the two women.
“I didn’t say it would be easy in the slightest,” Ruth countered. “But you’re doing well. Let’s try it again.”
Dylan went through the exercise two more times before he needed a break; he, Mistral, and Ruth sat for a while, drinking tea, not really speaking very much, and he mulled over what he was learning and the significance of it all.
He could sympathize with Julia on the subject of her grandmother; Ruth seemed to be a law almost unto herself, which he supposed was par for the course considering that she was—for all intents and purposes—a queen. There weren’t very many people on the planet who could reasonably contend with her, apart from the other elemental rulers.
“Are you ready to start again, Dylan?” Dylan shook himself out of his thoughts to finish off the cup of tea in his hands. He thought he’d much rather have had coffee instead; but he could feel the herbs that Ruth had added to the mixture bolstering his abilities, strengthening him.
“I think so,” he said, setting the cup aside to rise to his feet.
“If it makes you feel better, you’re doing very well,” Mistral said. “Most humans who attempt to learn how to repel a compulsion take several sessions to master it even as far as you have.”
“It will be easier too, since Julia won’t know she can even do it for a while to come,” Ruth reminded him. “This is mostly to protect you from her inadvertently compelling you until she realizes what she’s capable of.” Ruth rose to her feet and so did Mistral; Dylan took a deep breath and did the same, wondering how much longer they would be at it. Surely Julia would be home soon?
“I think we’ll only do one more round,” Mistral said, glancing at Ru
th for confirmation. “If you get it well enough, you can practice on your own. Otherwise, I’m happy to come back and test you again.” Dylan wasn’t sure he was a match for Mistral’s enthusiasm.
“We’ll see how you do with this second round of testing,” Ruth said. Dylan nodded and cleared his mind, focusing on the energy he could feel returning to him, the watery essence of his being. He was determined that he wouldn’t give either woman a reason to have to repeat the lesson if he could help it.
“Let’s start,” he suggested. Dylan looked at the two older women and thought that in spite of Ruth’s desire to keep Julia in the dark, he was morally obligated to tell his friend what was going on—but at the same time, he didn’t know if there would be an opportunity. For that matter, how do you tell someone that her own grandmother is worried that she’s becoming a dangerously powerful superhuman? He shook the question out of his mind and focused on the lesson at hand. There would be plenty of time in the weeks before the school year started again to have a heart-to-heart with Julia.
*
Julia looked at her suitcase, sighing at the clothes inside it. The council had finally made its decision regarding who they would hire to be dean of the School of Sandrine, and had apparently taken some part of what she and Dylan had had to say about the issue into consideration; the new dean, Audra Guthrie, had also managed to fill the empty posts for different teachers who’d been involved in the thefts masterminded by the previous dean, Terron Dimitrios.
It seemed to Julia as if the summer had ended entirely too soon, and the neatly folded uniforms and pajamas and two sets of “street clothes” in her suitcase—along with a few pairs of shoes and underwear—only seemed to underscore the fact that her birthday was only a few months away. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a less relaxing summer,” she muttered, throwing herself down onto her bed. In the last two weeks, she’d had over a dozen power surges, even with the potions that her grandmother had concocted for her.
The e surges had at least put a temporary hold on her constant schedule of parties, balls, and events; but she’d had to spend most of her time indoors, in bed, or at least curled up on the couch reading instead of doing what she much rather would have: going shopping, meeting with friends, visiting museums and parks and all the things that Manhattan had to offer for a sixteen-year-old girl with a generous allowance.
She and Dylan had only arrived back in Manhattan by lunchtime, and they would be going on to Sandrine the next morning; there was barely enough time to have a quick meal at their favorite Thai hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and for her parents and Dylan’s to plan dinner at a steakhouse blocks away from the apartment. Julia resented the fact that she’d even had to do her shopping for new pajamas and underwear online—she hadn’t been “well enough,” according to her grandmother, to go shopping with her mother, the way she had every year previously since she’d started at Sandrine.
“You all packed?” Julia turned her head to see Dylan standing in her doorway, looking into her bedroom. She shrugged and sat up.
“All the clothes and things at least,” she said. “I was going to do the books and school supplies next, but then got all up in my own feelings about how depressing this summer has been.”
“It’s been kind of a bummer,” Dylan conceded, coming into her bedroom and sitting down at her desk. “At least you got to meet a bunch of people our age who don’t go to Sandrine.”
“Yeah, but all of them are so…” she shook her head. The rumor that she and Dylan were eventually going to pair off, and become mates had followed her all summer, no matter how hard she worked to dispel it; she’d known that Dylan was right about just ignoring it, but she hadn’t been able to help herself whenever someone brought it up.
She was no closer to finding the source of the rumor, and as the weeks had worn on, Julia had almost concluded that it didn’t actually matter who had started it. It’s got a life of its own by now. “I can’t imagine myself even just going on a normal date with any of them, much less bonding.”
“Yeah, well, no one in your family really went on any normal dates either, remember?” Julia laughed in spite of her frustration at that reminder; her parents had hoped to take some of the pressure off of her, and to make her understand that they got where she was coming from, by telling her about how they’d met. It hadn’t been arranged, the way that high-ranking Guardians often found mates; instead, they’d both worked on a project for the council, and ended up bonding over that. But still, the message was clear, Julia thought: they expected that she’d either meet someone at Sandrine, or through the parties that Ruth sent her to, and therefore find a mate and settle down.
“What if I want to be single until I’m twenty-five?” she stretched against the tension she could feel in her shoulders after about an hour of working on her packing. “What about that?”
“Then you’re going to have to deal with this for probably at least about five years,” Dylan replied. “And then maybe when you’re twenty-two they’ll give up for a year, and you’ll get the pressure again when you’re twenty-three.” Julia rolled her eyes.
“No one is doing this to you,” Julia pointed out.
“Well, first of all: I’m a guy, and they just figure that most guys aren’t interested in settling down unless they say so.” Julia scowled at him.
“You would think that a group of—basically—superhumans would be a bit more highly evolved,” she said.
“Second: I’m not the most powerful Guardian of my elemental alignment to appear on the scene in at least ten, maybe twenty years,” Dylan continued.
“I don’t even know that that’s going to be the case,” Julia protested. “I mean—yeah. I’m apparently pretty strong in my alignment. But that’s not something I have any control over, and it’s not like they even know what I’m going to do with it.”
“Third,” Dylan continued, “my grandmother isn’t the ruler of an element.”
“Another thing I don’t have any control over,” Julia countered. She sighed and scrubbed at her face with her fingertips. “So basically, I’m in this mess because of a bunch of things I can’t control and I’m either going to have to keep dealing with it until I find someone I actually want to be with or…” she shook her head. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
“What do you have against settling down young?” Julia glanced at Dylan; he had his hands folded at his waist, his elbows propped up on the arms of her chair. He’d neglected to brush his hair all day, and Julia was torn between amusement, disgust, and admiration at how tangled and messy it was.
“You really need to wash your hair tonight.”
“Why?” Dylan frowned and touched the tips of his long, blond hair. “And you’re not going to get out of the question that easily. What do you have against it?”
“It just seems so limiting,” Julia said, shaking her head and turning her attention back onto her suitcase. “I’m not even seventeen, and everyone wants my life to be just…” she shrugged. “A certain way. They want me to want certain things, and not want other things, and no one has ever really asked me what I want to do or be.”
“Deep thoughts,” Dylan said. Julia rolled her eyes at him.
“I just hate it, because I want to be able to control my own life,” Julia told him. “It isn’t fair.”
“I don’t even get to control my own life,” Dylan countered. “And I’m not as powerful or well-connected as you are. I mean, you have to look at it like you’re the granddaughter of a queen—because pretty much, you are. Even if normal human politics has no clue. Do you think Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughters get to do whatever they want?”
“I didn’t even know she was some kind of queen until last year,” Julia protested. “And it’s not like there’s anything to it. I’m not going to inherit her title or anything.”
“You could eventually become the Regina Sylphaea,” Dylan pointed out. “That’s a possibility.” Julia closed her suitcase, deciding that if she meditated on it
any longer she was just going to pack things she didn’t need for the first week of school.
“I don’t want to,” she said, knowing she sounded sulky and petulant and not caring. “I don’t even care about finding out what it entails, I don’t want it.”
“What do you want?” Julia looked at Dylan, expecting to see a mocking look on his face; but as far as she could tell, he was earnest.
“I don’t actually know,” Julia admitted. “But I don’t want to be the queen of the element of air. I don’t want to get settled down to some guy I barely know when I’m eighteen. I don’t want to be involved in Guardian politics.”
“So then, maybe spend this year figuring out what you do want,” Dylan suggested. “Take the SATs and the ACT, and figure out if you want to go to college. Nobody could get mad at you for that. Or figure out a way to get a book published, or something.” Julia considered that for a few moments; she knew that Dylan was right.
She needed to have something viable to counter the arguments that—after all—she wasn’t doing anything better about planning her adult life than the people around her were. If she had a college to go to, if she had a future planned, even barely, it would be something she could use against her grandmother, against the council, even against her parents.
“Julia!” Julia frowned at her open door and stood, walking across her bedroom to peer into the hallway. Her mother was at the end of the hall, where it met the living room.
“What’s up?”
“The dean is here,” her mother called back. “She wants to speak with you and Dylan.” Julia frowned again, looking at her friend.
“What the heck?” Dylan shrugged his confusion. Julia gestured for him to come with her and the two of them left her bedroom together, and headed down the hall.
Dean Audra Guthrie already had what Julia was sure would become her own version of the school uniform on: a tailored pantsuit in the school colors, with accents at her lapel indicating that she was fire-aligned, along with the red leather belt and the red socks she wore with her black shoes. She was maybe forty or forty-five, Julia thought, with dark hair starting to go gray and a face that still looked youthful, in spite of a few lines around her eyes and mouth.
