Caster

by Elsie Chapman

  The panic turns into a fist. My grasp on the tournament—on answers, saving my family, my promise to Rudy—begins to slip. The two hundred thousand marks feel like they’re drifting even further out of reach.

  But what choice do I have? If I don’t agree, the Guild will kick me out of the tournament anyway.

  “Fine,” I say. “I accept the decision.”

  “Good. And we want to make clear to you, no more second chances. Another rule broken and you will be eliminated from the tournament.”

  His tone doesn’t give away if he cares or not. And I’m not sure why it suddenly matters but it does. Maybe because he and his Guild accept a killer like Finch as their champion, while my saving Wilson has only put me in danger of elimination.

  “You said the Guild voted on us moving on or being eliminated,” I say. “How many members wanted us out?” I imagine them, a group of seven greats, sitting around and weighing Finch’s skill against his cruelty. How many of them might vote in someone like him? How far can Finch go and still be considered?

  “It was close—hence the caveat.” Embry drinks tea. “As the tiebreaker, I had to come up with something to tip the scales.”

  “Thank you.” My resentment that he decided I would be in pain isn’t fair, so I push it away. “Why didn’t you vote the other way?”

  “As I said, the Tournament of Casters has always been a show. I enjoyed your fist spell from the last match, and then the clones tonight.”

  “But … sometimes fighters die. For a show. That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Not as much as you think it should.” His eyes grow sharp. “Leftover magic is for its casters to cast, just as full magic is ours. And while it runs in our veins, death from it does, too, and that is the cost—that is how, whether we like it or not, the world has created us to be now. Those who enter know that death is a possibility, and so we don’t prevent it. But it’s on us to ensure the tournament stays a secret, and that nobody gets caught. That is why you breaking the rules and calling for too much magic has a penalty—while killing does not.”

  I blink and the inside of the temple disappears from around us. Gone are the papered walls and jade brick and dragon-painted windows. Instead of a teapot and cups on a table, dried petals are scattered on the floor at our knees. The scent of jasmine is replaced with ones of smoke and fire, the last traces of a past inferno, of spent magic. We’re back inside the burnt-out shell of the apartment building on Thorn Avenue.

  “Before I forget.” Embry hands over some marks. I count them. There’s five hundred, way more than I’ve ever earned from a job. Way more than a bunch of jobs, even. “You weren’t able to get to the bets counter after the fight tonight to collect your winnings. You should celebrate—that’s a very impressive amount for having only fought twice. You have left an impression.”

  I tuck the marks into my pocket, wishing I wasn’t so pleased that he seems pleased. But more than that, this means I can replace the marks I had to take out of the safe for Jihen. My parents can still keep thinking everything is fine when it comes to the teahouse and Saint Willow.

  “You also missed my announcement of tomorrow night’s location.” Embry hands me a small card as he gets to his feet. There’s an address scrawled on it. “Midnight, as always.”

  5040 Helvetica

  I tuck the card into my starter bag and get up, too. I hurt all over from fighting, and I think of Rudy’s apothecary. More than ever I need to get more healing meds.

  “Thank you for the tea,” I say, “even if you weren’t the one who cast it.”

  “I didn’t cast it because I no longer cast. I fought in five tournaments—they took their toll.”

  Shock has me gaping. “You’re an Ivor?”

  He nods. “Bones of glass. I can’t cast without shattering apart, even with the Guild’s help. The other members cast the magic for the fighting rings, and I am the tournament Speaker. It is the arrangement we came to after I … changed.”

  “But—the playing cards tonight. They were blank and then—”

  “The Guild as a whole.”

  “And tournament magic.”

  “Yes.”

  My thoughts run together, threaten to tangle. How many of us might go Ivor over the years because of this tournament? The amount of magic I did tonight alone could have easily tipped me over, because the Guild’s magic can only do so much, and Embry is proof of that. For so long I’ve pushed to the back of my mind the chances of one day ending up an Ivor. Pushed it back so deep that tonight, I was staring the possibility right in the face and didn’t even realize it.

  I wonder what Embry thinks when he sees a display caster hanging from a lamppost. If he thinks about how it could easily be him up there if not for his damage being hidden, or if he’s so busy thinking about his guild’s tournament that seeing an Ivor doesn’t mean much at all.

  I want to ask him about it, but I don’t because I think he’ll just give me the same answer. The one that somehow disappoints me, even though I don’t think it’s actually wrong. And I don’t have a better one.

  That it’s just the cost of magic.

  Then I nearly tell him I’ll keep his secret about being an Ivor, but I also don’t do this. Because he already knows I’ll keep it. Spilling it would mean having to face the Guild, greats powerful enough to create whole worlds and then take them back apart.

  “My name’s really Aza,” I decide to say instead. An exchange of secrets, I guess. “But I’m Rudy for the tournament.”

  He nods again. His smile is all charm now. “Good luck, then, Aza.”

  Once outside, I begin making my way out of the Flower Sector. I head toward Tobacco, moving as fast as I can despite being sore. If not for Cormac, I’d be going home instead of to Rudy’s. But there’s an upside to his delaying me—now that I know he’s staying near the teahouse instead of staking out the apothecary, I’ll at least be able to break into Rudy’s place in peace.

  Salty air blows in off the Pacifik, drifts through my mask, and lingers. It mixes there with the thickening scent of smoke as I enter the Tobacco Sector and get closer to Rudy’s shop. The neighborhood is mostly quiet, with a bar and a club a block over still open, and of course the breakfast-all-day diner directly across the street.

  There are no new signs or notices posted anywhere outside Shen Apothecary, nothing to let his loyal customers know what happened to him. Rudy would hate that—not only their not knowing, but also that they have to go anywhere else. The blinds remain pulled—briefly I wonder again who discovered Rudy’s body, as I couldn’t ask Cormac, and he never said—and I peer around their edges to look inside.

  The shelves are still full of bottles of tonics and elixirs. Jars and tins fill cabinets. The soaps Rudy was checking are still all over the table, inventory the last thing he did for his shop.

  Heat comes to my eyes. I’m not supposed to miss all those days of coming here and being unpaid help while Rudy gritted out bits of advice, but I do. He kept me at a distance because of Shire and the tournament, but I had something to do with that, too, already half-sure when I went to him for help that he was just another enemy. Like Saint Willow and Jihen were. And now there’s Cormac. And Finch.

  I go around the outside of the shop and get to the back door. I find a rock in my starter bag, brace for the pain, and cast.

  Heat travels from my feet and into my hands, forms in my mind as a ball of red haze. I send it to the lock and untwist it. As soon as it’s done, my skin cools down and I lean back against the door, waiting, half holding my breath. The pain comes in a wave, hammers on the bones of my arms and legs, and I wait it out, gritting my teeth.

  When it finally passes, I stand up again on shaking legs and go inside.

  Smells swirl thickly, medicinal, herbal, one of rosemary most of all. I think of the broken bottle when I found Rudy and try not to gag at the scent.

  Too tired to even consider leftover magic, I slap at the wall with my hand, searching for the light switch i
n the dark, finally finding it and flicking it on.

  Light fills the room. It looks the same as it always does, stuffed full of boxes and supplies and shelves. I glance down at the floor—it’s been cleaned up of Rudy’s blood, of the broken and spilled bottles. Everything is so clean and neat—looking at it, you’d never guess someone like Rudy had died here two days ago, a mess of banished magic, secrets, and lies.

  I head out to the shop floor, using only the light flowing out from the supply room to see by. In the dimness, I move slowly around the room, realizing I will likely never see the apothecary again the way it is. How if I ever do come back, the space likely won’t be Rudy’s anymore—someone else will have moved in, might be selling anything else; all the sights and smells will be different.

  The thought fills me with sadness, like I’m finally saying a proper goodbye to the person who connected me to Shire in ways I wouldn’t have been otherwise. It also fills me with guilt, because hadn’t I kept pushing him for more? To show me the spell Shire had died casting, when such a spell never existed? I try to imagine how he must have felt, keeping that secret, and find that I can’t.

  I keep working, feeling half-numb. I neaten a basket of dried herbs and straighten a shelf of oils. I find a lone twenty-mark coin on the counter but the till is locked so I slip it into my pocket.

  It takes me a bit to find the right healing meds on a shelf, but I eventually do, matching their labels to the one on my empty jar. I debate taking them all, but then I think of how it was bad paperwork that set Cormac toward Rudy—if someone’s going to be checking inventory against what’s actually on the shelf, a whole bunch of missing meds might set off alarm bells, too.

  I take a single bottle, but then duck behind the counter—if I can find Rudy’s inventory binder, it’d be easy enough to doctor it so the shop’s not missing any healing meds at all. I open drawers and peek into skinny cubbyholes. Before I find his binder, though, I find a notebook, one with dog-eared edges that say he used it a lot. Like me, Rudy never carried around a digital planner, because our magic would kill them each time.

  I flip it open. Most of the notebook is a calendar, with some blank pages in the back for notes. The days are filled in with initials and times, which are meaningless to me, so I skip ahead to the back pages. Rudy’s writing is messy, but a lot of the notes seem to be about ideas for the shop, things like new formulas and research ideas.

  I keep flipping, trying not to feel like Rudy would mind. He probably would. But maybe now that I’m in the tournament and know about his plans and what happened to Shire, he wouldn’t mind so much. And if there’s anything in here that could help me at all over the last two rounds—

  Finch’s name leaps up at me from a page.

  My heart trips inside my chest, and I hurriedly turn the page back. My fingers are clumsy and it takes me longer than it should. And it’s dim in here. Maybe I saw wrong.

  But then I find the page.

  Finch—gath. spell possible?

  Oliver?

  That was the cost??

  Now my pulse is racing. My mouth’s gone dry with the shock of what I’ve found.

  Rudy also suspected Finch cheated to beat Shire. That Finch maybe used a gathered spell, just as Kylin mentioned.

  And that Oliver is somehow involved.

  I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. It makes sense that Oliver would be helping his brother hide how he cheated. Just as Piper said, family complicates things, and I of all people know that loyalty sometimes knows no bounds.

  Finch longs so badly to be in the Guild of Now, too. If you need to win in the first place to be able to do that, then what does the cost matter as long as you still win?

  I shut the notebook with trembling fingers, slide it back into its drawer, and turn to leave. All thoughts of doctoring the inventory binder have fled—given the potential of what I’ve just found, a few missing bottles of medicine really won’t matter.

  I return to the supply room and exit through the back door, making sure to turn off the light before casting the lock back. Once more pain comes, a slow wave of it that is a knife through my middle.

  I yank down my mask, dry swallow a pill, yank the mask back up. I try to walk as steadily as I can down the alley. It’s pouring out, the air smelling more of the sea than of smoke, and I’m tired and sore enough to decide to grab a train back to the Tea Sector. I pay for the ticket using the mark I found at Rudy’s, saving me from having to use any of the ones I got from the bets counter.

  The train’s rocking motion and the sound of rain on the roof nearly lull me to sleep. But then the latest news comes on, scrolling across the screen over the doors. No one else on the train seems to pay attention—it’s just the most recent addition to a long string of bad news for the earth—but I do because I know so much of it is my fault.

  The report is that, as of the last hour, over two hundred fish have washed up on the northern shore of the Flower Sector. The fish are a heavily mutated strain of catfish, warped over the years from adapting to pollution of the Pacifik and Upper Inlet and one of the few kinds of fish still able to survive in local waters. City water authorities have no explanation so far for the sudden mass death of the school of fish, and admit the population might take years to fully recover, if ever.

  I’m wide awake the rest of the train ride home.

  My eyes are still bleary from lack of sleep as I head out of the teahouse the next day. The events of last night haven’t stopped pulling at me, filling my brain at a low buzz that won’t completely quiet.

  I didn’t think it would be easy advancing to the final of the tournament. I’ve always considered myself a long shot. That Shire got there is never so much a source of hope as it is one of discouragement—she spent years training to control her magic—she was the reliable and dependable daughter.

  But still. As the first rounds passed, I began to believe it was possible. That maybe it wasn’t such a wild idea, getting to the final.

  And now here I am, fighting for the rest of the tournament without the Guild’s protection. They’ll cover the cost of my magic when it comes to the earth, but not to me.

  I might really die fighting for marks.

  Just like Shire did.

  For a second, the idea of walking away from the whole thing washes over me. Sure, my parents will lose the teahouse and a family legacy that goes back hundreds of years, but at least not both their daughters. Rudy’s dead and can’t care about my breaking my promise. Shire’s dead, too, and just as Embry said, everyone who enters the tournament enters knowing they could die.

  But all those reasons—they’re also the same ones why I can’t quit. My parents and everything they’ve worked for. Rudy, who might still be alive if not for me. Shire, who didn’t know she’d be fighting someone dirty.

  Finch, Oliver, the puzzle of Rudy’s notebook and what was written inside—I know all of that will keep eating at me. It will never leave me alone until I find out what all of it means.

  I cross the street in the direction of the Textile Sector. For the Mothery, and Piper.

  I dreamed last night that she had dropped me as her fighter. I’d broken the rules and my chances at winning were slim—why would she continue to back me? The possibility left me shaky enough—on top of fighting vulnerable, the last thing I need is having to go back to worrying about marks for ring starters—that I knew I had to go see her in person and convince her she hasn’t made a mistake. So I told my parents I was going to work and slipped out.

  My web of lies, still being spun.

  And then I stop cold.

  Jihen.

  He’s sitting at one of the sidewalk tables of the café down the street. He’s branched out this time with his striped suit, but his sneakers are as glaringly white as ever.

  I start to reverse direction before he can see me, but it’s too late. He’s already getting up, throwing marks down on the table for his bill before he rounds the gate and heads toward me.

 
Always tempted to use magic to get away from him, my hand nearly goes to my starter bag. The healing meds I took last night worked—though slowly, making me wonder if I’m getting too used to them—and I woke up this morning without pain, despite having barely slept.

  But I’m fighting tonight, and now without the Guild’s protection. And I’ve actually got marks on me, a few left over after replacing the rest in the teahouse’s safe last night. I might as well pay him and get him off my back again for a bit.

  “Aza, good morning, shall we walk?” He takes my arm and guides me along the road.

  “I guess so?” I try to throw off his hand, but his grip is irritatingly strong today. The thicker-than-usual undertone of ownership in it makes me uneasy. I glance over at him as we walk. “I have marks for Saint Willow. Let go of my arm and I’ll give them to you for him. And then you can leave and do whatever it is that you guys do when you’re not robbing or killing people.”

  His hand squeezes. “You can’t rob those who owe you. And we only kill when we have to send a message. Messages are important. They let others know what is expected of them.” Another squeeze and I regret not casting magic to get away after all.

  We’re not too close to the teahouse, but close enough that I’m uncomfortable. I turn a corner in the opposite direction, trying to get Jihen farther away from my parents.

  “Here.” I pull out the marks from my pocket. “There’s more than there was last time—just take it.” I brace myself for another round of Jihen making threats because it’s still not enough. It is more, but never has it been enough.

  Instead of counting the marks, though, Jihen stuffs them into a pocket. He gives me his greasy smile that’s somehow a little too predatory today. That earlier uneasiness comes back, and I wonder if I’ve missed something.

  He pulls me closer. He whispers into my ear words that turn my blood cold: “I know you’re a caster of full magic.”

  I stumble. His grip tightens and still we walk. I’m only dimly aware of the world that’s fading in and out. The rain-damp sidewalk recedes. Shops and other casters go silent. The scents of tea and leaves lingering inside my mask fade. There are only his fingers that dig into my arm, keeping me from running away.