Caster

by Elsie Chapman

  The Guild, their essence all around, casts.

  A creaking sound comes from deep inside the earth.

  The blue-gray sky shifts, begins to tilt over. As if the horizon has become some kind of stationary axis and the outer surface of the world wants to spin around it.

  My stomach spins with it, and I clench my teeth against a wave of dizziness.

  The ground shifts now, right along with the sky. It follows the same tilt, so now the sphere of the earth is spinning around the axis of the horizon.

  I fall to a crouch as the ground keeps curving around. Some of it’s instinct, getting low—if you’re going to fall, you won’t have as far to go—and some of it’s because I’m still dizzy.

  But getting low to the ground is useless here. If the earth is going to be completely upended, I’m going to fall no matter what.

  Everyone’s going to fall.

  The entire river’s going to spill out.

  And then we’re all upside down.

  But my shoes stay planted in the mud. Only the heaviness of my blood slowly collecting in my head tells me I’m upside down. Or that somehow I’m still standing up even as I’m hanging from my feet from the top of the world, an impossible that is now somehow possible. The scents of wet soil and flowers—lichen—waft up my nose.

  “Let me guess,” I call out over the creaking of the earth, over the thunder of the rain, “the sky’s the ground and the ground’s the sky?”

  Embry nods. “Gravity still applies, of course.” He gestures upward toward the blue ground. “Mostly.”

  Finch points down at how the blue mud is making him slip. “It’s ‘mostly’ no help with the rain.”

  The rain that is now coming from below us, landing at our feet above our heads.

  Still crouched, I slip another inch. My mouth goes dry as I glance at the river. I look at the thin line of trees that’s keeping the embankment from sliding into the water.

  There’s that, at least.

  It might have to be everything.

  All my thoughts have become snarled. Everything I know to be true is now half a lie. There’s gravity, but I can still stand upside down. The sky’s moving and it’s not the clouds making it look that way.

  Embry’s smile is wry as the world spins back to upright again. “Do you think the greats ever said, let’s wait for better weather before we fight?”

  “Maybe.” I flick mud off one of my shoes with my hand. “If they didn’t want to end up in the river.”

  “And if they embraced the river as part of the fight?”

  I glare up at him. I can’t shake the dizziness from this world he’s built. And I’m still tired of water from yesterday’s ancient baths.

  “So here we are,” he says. “There are two of you left, but only one will win. You can choose how you fight, or you can let your magic choose for you, but either way, only one fighter will remain standing. Good luck.”

  Embry gets up, turns around, and disappears behind the lip of the embankment.

  There’s still mud in my palm from cleaning off my shoe.

  It’s a head start, two seconds.

  I flick my eyes toward Finch. My heart’s a knot in my chest. Head start or not, I should cast a shield spell. That’s always first.

  But.

  I draw, close my palm, and cast.

  Heat blasts upward from the mud at my feet and drives itself into my veins.

  The red cloud of my magic blooms wide in my mind. I make it tear the mud thin beneath his feet. His green eyes flash and then his feet plunge through and he disappears into the hole in the ground.

  The crowd roars. It’s the sound of my name. The noise is rapturous, washing over me just as the rain does. Rudy.

  My bones are on fire from the casting, like magic’s spilled over and is burning them up. I ignore the pain. I claw at more mud. I draw and cast again, and my magic piles mud on top of Finch. I flick blue from my fingers, draw on my palm, and yank a gold starter from the key holder. I cast again, and my magic directs Finch’s blood to thin. My head is starting to pound; the pain in my bones is now agony.

  The crowd bellows. My pulse flies, and magic is red and hot and seething through my veins. Agony sharpens, goes as pointed as knives.

  I drop the used-up gold coin into the mud. My fingers are trembling, wet with rain. I lift them to the blue bead starter.

  I have just seconds. He’s bleeding and hurt, buried down there beneath the mud. But I know he’s also already fumbling for his starters, preparing to cast on me. But still, I can take his magic right now, and it’ll all be over.

  Or, I don’t take his magic.

  I can just eliminate him. Just cast a simple spell to close his airway, or one to change his oxygen into something else. Either way, he’ll be knocked out and I win.

  I could even kill him, except for a pact. That damn pact.

  But … this is my chance to hurt him beyond anything else. Without magic he’ll never fight again, just like he’ll never be voted into the Guild. Embry can no longer cast, but he Ivored after he was already in.

  And the price is only me.

  Indecision is a roar in my mind. I don’t know, but I need to be sure—

  An invisible kick knocks me backward. I hit the ground with a thud, and the pounding that’s still in my head soars.

  I look over. Finch is free. Through the rain and mud there are flashes of his face, of his green eyes as he pushes at mud. There’s the sound of the crowd—bellows of his name, heightened cheering, Fiiiiinch!—and applause for his magic strokes the land of the Painter’s Cliffs, just the way a brush does over canvas.

  Dizziness swarms. Desperation to get away is suddenly everything—I can’t think!—and panic licks as hot as fire. My hand shakes as I rip off a silver starter. I draw and cast—shield.

  The air around me bends, shapes over me as a protective cocoon. When the cost of the spell comes, it’s a series of internal punches that leaves me out of breath, even more panicked.

  Not good. I have to slow down. The effects of casting are piling up fast.

  I begin to struggle up the embankment, the blood pooling in my face as the world keeps spinning. The ground up there can’t be sloped, right? There the mud would only be messy instead of dangerous. If I can just get on even ground, the Guild can wheel the earth around as much as they want and I won’t be so dizzy. If I can just get up there, I’ll know if I’m ready to cast my magic away. My shoes slide in blue mud and the river below (above?) foams. Rain lashes downward.

  I twist, looking for Finch, reaching for a starter, when every muscle in my body freezes. My shield shatters. Pain slaps at me all over, and I utter a single useless gasp as I fall face-first into the mud.

  Blue liquid stings my nose, gets shoved into my mouth. A vise cranks tight around my chest and breathing becomes impossible.

  The vise cranks harder.

  Then I’m flung sideways across the ground, an invisible force reverberating along my ribs as I skid along. Blue mud curls over me in a wave and splashes back down, coating me. To one side, the river flashes, a wild stream of yet more blue.

  For a second, nothing makes sense. Finch can kill me right here. But instead he just casts his magic as an impact spell. A strong one, but that’s it. Not even enough to knock me out.

  Suddenly I get it.

  He’s going for show tonight. He wants to win the Guild over completely, the Guild who loves style and skill most of all.

  I’m whooping for breath, coughing mud and rain from my mouth. I drag myself to my knees. Finch approaches, a figure against all the blue that has become the world. The ground shifts, and my stomach swims.

  Is this it, then? The end?

  “You almost killed me,” he says. His voice is stunned, almost betrayed. But he’s also short of breath, holding his side. Casting is costing him, too.

  I turn my head and look him in the eye. He’s a sight, covered in blood where he’s not blue.

  “You should have neve
r asked Oliver to give up his magic for you,” I say.

  Another impact spell, and I’m blasted along the embankment. No, down the embankment—toward the rushing river. Pain explodes in my head. I try to grab for some kind of hold as mud grinds into my teeth, but my hands only flail at the ground. The thin line of shrub is ten feet away, maybe even less.

  I get to my knees again. There’s mud in my palm. I draw, I cast.

  No reaction. Finch didn’t feel it all. He’s cast a shield spell.

  “He owed me,” he says. “And he didn’t deserve to keep it. He let it ruin everything.”

  The cost of casting skewers through me anyway, a thin line of agony that makes me utter a low scream even as I scrabble for mud and cast again. Fresh heat fills my legs, chest, hands, mind. I form the red cloud of my magic into a knife and push it into Finch’s head.

  He stumbles, shield spell shattered.

  “How’s the headache?” My words are thick and clotted with mud, strained with fatigue and pain. My own headache blooms, and I nearly retch. A wild buzzing grows in my ears, promising me the end is so close, that I’m nearly there. I grab at more mud and cast again, suddenly unable to care how much it hurts, I just want him done.

  Finch grabs the sides of his head even as agony slams into mine. Through tearing eyes, I watch him bend over and gag. His fingers clutch at the ground.

  I stagger to my feet. The earth turns and turns, past the halfway mark now. Blood begins to leave my face and head—we’re no longer standing upside down. The sky twirls and nausea rises. I smell soil and flowers and fire, the scent of cast magic. Rain pelts.

  An invisible fist meets the side of my face. I rocket back. My shoes skid through mud as I struggle for balance, my arms out. My hands smash into branches, leaves—I’m at the line of scrub. The river just behind it roars for me.

  I reach for the key holder at my hip. I grab the blue bead and tear it free. Magic pounds in my veins, is a red fire in my mind, and I see Shire in there, helping me build it. Rudy and Kylin are in there, too, stoking the flames.

  My eyes fill.

  Am I really doing this?

  Magic for revenge?

  Finch is gasping. His gaze is all ice. “I could have let her live, you know that? But magic isn’t fair. It never will be.”

  Then he casts around the mud in his hand.

  A blow. It sends me slamming back into the trees. I scream as a branch pierces my shoulder from behind. Fire lights up my casting arm, turns into a white ball of agony to spear my brain.

  The roar of the crowd swells.

  I keep my arm across my chest, pinned there because to hold it any other way hurts even worse. The tip of the branch sticks out of my front like a giant thorn. The world and the sky and my stomach all spin.

  Finch is bent over, struggling to stand up.

  “She begged,” he says. “She knew what I meant to do and she begged.”

  Rage floods, as hot as pain, as hot as magic.

  I drag my other arm up. Still clutching the blue bead in my fist, I begin to draw on the palm of my casting arm with a shaking finger.

  He staggers close now, his face pale with pain, still half-bent with it. He grins at me and reaches down for a final scoop of blue. The rain pours down.

  “I just laughed,” he says.

  The tiny dark pit in my chest explodes.

  I drop the blue bead into the middle of my spell spiral.

  I cast.

  Magic is never lost.

  Lost is too gentle a word.

  We never lose it the way we might lose a mark, or a shirt, or a word that stays forever on the edge of our lips.

  Magic, it turns out, is taken.

  It is ripped from us like the removal of an organ, the cutting out of a tongue. It is the excising of the part of our brains that stands for language, one of the ways we communicate. In Oliver’s mind I saw it as a burned-down tree, because magic is fire, alive and vital and hot. All that’s left afterward is ruin.

  I watch Finch change, a part of who he is extinguished like the snuffing out of a candle. A shadow crosses him the way a cloud would have once crossed the hidden sun, and for a long second, every part of him dims. When he comes back, the only thing he has left of his magic is the memory of it, a smoking tree in the landscape of his life.

  I’ll never see it for myself, because my magic is also gone. As I watched it be taken from Finch, he watched it be taken from me, and now his eyes are dull with disbelief. The pain I see in them now is phantom pain, the pain of absence.

  “No.” He backs away from me. He falls into the mud. “No.”

  I nod. But I can’t talk because I’m crying. I clutch my torn shoulder and drop the used-up blue bead into the mud. I’m standing in the middle of a woven world, but the absence of my magic is as fresh as a new wound, raw and stinging and undeniable.

  And magic is as real as blood, but is as formless as a dream—where is mine now? Taken, but to where? A burst nebulous cloud now in invisible pieces, lying around waiting to be collected, re-formed, reused?

  I shudder. To have someone else take my magic, to take it for their own—

  The noise of the crowd begins to break through the shock of what I’ve done. The earth and sky continue to spin, the river to foam—so much blue, forever in motion. There’s no sign of Embry to signal the end of a round.

  Because the tournament isn’t over, I realize. The Guild still needs a clear-cut winner. One of us has to be knocked out by the other, or one of us has to bow out on our own. Or one of us can die.

  Except neither of us are full magic casters anymore. Or casters at all. We are without magic, and neither of us belongs here. The crowd has no idea they are cheering for no ones.

  Before I can do anything, Finch—he’s still sitting in the mud—slams his hand three times into the blue mud.

  Bow-out.

  From his expression, he’s as stunned by his surrender as I am. And there’s delusion there, too. As though he won’t believe his magic is really gone. That if the round will just end, he will feel his power again. That this tournament might be over for him, but he’ll fight again in the next.

  The crowd is yelling, shouting. The sound of it is like thunder rolling across the Painter’s Cliffs. I hear my name, the word champion added to it.

  Embry emerges from among all the casters. He stands in front and peers down at us from the top of the embankment. Everyone falls quiet until there’s only the sound of the rain, of the rushing river. Finch is still sitting and staring down at the ground; I’m standing near him, my hand cradling my bad arm. Both of us are blue, soaking wet, miserable. The idea of pretending to celebrate makes me even dizzier.

  “Everyone—the champion of this year’s Tournament of Casters.” Embry’s smile is reserved, which it usually is anyway. But his eyes are too aware as they go from me to Finch, and I wonder if he knows. Then his gaze meets mine and I know he does. “Thank you for fighting as legends do, Rudy.”

  I am no legend.

  I’ve won, but I am empty.

  I shut my eyes and around me the world changes back.

  From within the dark, the spinning of the earth and sky comes to a halt. The rain stops and the river goes still. The scents of wet soil and blue lichen fade away. And when I open my eyes again, the Painter’s Cliffs of ancient Rinra are gone, and once more it’s just the abandoned warehouse in the Electronics Sector.

  Everyone’s moving again. Casters start making their way toward the bets counter, wanting to pick up their winnings. I’m half-aware of Finch getting to his feet and slinking away. For a second I wonder if I should call him back—but to say what? Everything I could ever think to say—about Shire, about Kylin and Oliver—was all wrapped up in what I took from him, and the price I paid to make him listen. There’s nothing left.

  I follow him for two steps anyway, thinking about Oliver, wondering if there’s anything left for me to say to him. How maybe I need to see him once more to know.

 
There shouldn’t be. We only ever had Finch between us. And I think for the next little while, Finch is going to need his brother again. More than he’s wanted to for years.

  It’s Piper who I see first. She’s grinning as she walks over, so pleased with me for what I’ve done. There’s still honor in doing what must be done to survive, even if such ways are ugly.

  She shakes her head at seeing my shoulder. The branch is gone now, a part of the Guild’s fighting ring. But the hole it left remains.

  She takes a small swatch of silk from her purse, draws, and casts. Her leftover magic works on my shoulder, turns the throb that’s deep inside into something closer to a thrum.

  My eyes sting from the gesture. “Thanks. It feels better.”

  “Oh, we both know it’s nothing, but it’ll help a bit until you recover enough to cast again.”

  She doesn’t know how that’s impossible. Some wounds never close, never get filled back up. This is just the new tiny dark pit that’s replaced the first.

  “I’ll go pick up your winnings from the bets counter now,” she says, “and after the Guild gets you your two hundred thousand marks, we’ll meet again for my cut of those winnings, Aza.” Then she’s gone in a swirl of gold silk.

  The Guild.

  Embry.

  I search the crowd for signs of him, needing him for something that has nothing to do with collecting my marks. Dizziness creeps back as my eyes scan the room for bright teal ones. I shouldn’t have waited this long, but—

  “Rudy.”

  It’s Oliver, headed toward me, coming out of the milling crowd.

  It shouldn’t matter that I’m seeing him again—that he cares enough to not blow my cover by calling me Rudy still, even though the tournament is officially over—but it does, and my pulse skips.

  One look at him and I know he knows. Finch must have already found him and told him, then. Or maybe Oliver only had to glance at Finch to know. To recognize the touching down of that second of dim across his brother’s face and know what it means.