Liesel
“So, have any of you managed to spot him yet?” Carmen asked, sliding into the last chair at the lunch table.
Liesel shoved a forkful of salad in her mouth to keep from sighing. She liked Michele, a French student she’d met through the International Students’ Union. She liked one of Michele’s two roommates, Sara, who was sitting next to her. But Carmen . . . .
“Spot who?” Sara asked.
Carmen rolled her eyes. “Jesus, of course.” Liesel cringed. Carmen was an atheist, and tolerated Michele’s Wiccan faith.and Liesel’s.because at least it was suitably “magical,” but she kept needling Sara over being Catholic. “The wilder.”
“I haven’t been looking,” Liesel said, laying as much stress as she dared on the pronoun. Unlike some people.
She might as well have said it. Carmen snorted. “You’re just about the only one. Even the professors are out for his blood.”
Her choice of words drew a sharp look from Michele. “What do you mean?”
Carmen waved her concern away with a careless hand. “Not like that; nothing bad. Well, I heard some guys on the cross-country team were planning to jump him.but that’s students, not professors, and besides, they’re probably too scared to try anything. And the total bigot teaching my Latin class keeps threatening to leave if the changeling stays, but whatever.”
Her words made Liesel’s skin jump as if she’d been shocked. “You shouldn’t call him that.”
“What? Changeling? My Latin professor said that, not me. I told you she’s a bigot.” Carmen went on before Liesel could find a response to that. It wasn’t just her insensitive behavior that made Liesel dislike her; the girl had a bulldozer quality that made her almost impossible to influence, short of the kind of empathic intervention that was totally inexusable outside of therapy or crisis work. “But no, the professors are all being scientific. Studying him, you know? Not with actual blood.though I dunno; maybe some of them are running the Krauss test on him, just so they can drool over his rating.but they’re all tripping over themselves to see what he can do. I heard that iron bitch Grayson kept him for three hours after class last week.”
“Poor guy,” Michele said. “I’ve heard some scary things about Grayson. But she used to be a Guardian, didn’t she? They were probably just talking shop.”
Liesel had expected the student body to lose its collective good sense over the wilder among them. After all, very few had ever met a wilder, unless they were like Kim and their parents’ work brought them into contact with Guardians. And college was supposed to be about new experiences. But professors? She had expected better from them.
A vain hope, apparently. Professors were human beings, too. Academic ones, no less, who made their living from studying things. Of course they wanted to study the wilder.
Her own thoughts made her frown. It didn’t seem right, just thinking of him as “the wilder.” But she’d kept the vow she’d made with Kim, not even going so far as to look up his name in the directory. Until Carmen started talking, she’d managed to avoid almost all the gossip about him.
Now that Carmen had opened her mouth, though . . . Liesel almost wanted to take that vow back. It sounded like the guy could use a simple friend. Somebody who didn’t care about his Krauss rating, in a bad way or a good one.
Liesel stopped just short of rolling her eyes. Carmen would see it, and assume the gesture was aimed at her, rather than at Liesel’s own foolish thoughts. She’d never so much as laid eyes on the guy. Who knew what he was really like? Deciding she should be his friend just because he was a wilder, and ostracized, was as big of an insult in its own way as any of the other stupid things people were doing. In fact, Liesel probably wasn’t the first person to think of it. And she doubted he would welcome yet another stranger treating him like a charitable cause.
Carmen was still going on about him. Liesel resorted to a brief tap on Michele’s thoughts. Can you help me change the topic? She’s really starting to make me uncomfortable.
Michele slid her a smile while Carmen was distracted by a message on her port. I’m glad to know it isn’t just me. Do you think it would distract her if I started flirting with you?
It certainly distracted Liesel. Her face heated; she tried and failed to hide the blush behind her water glass. Michele took it as encouragement, and Liesel couldn’t find it in her to complain at all.
Kim
Several dozen of my fellow freshmen had shown up to the first meeting of the Div Club. A month and a half into the quarter, that number had dropped sharply. We might not be as dangerous as the pyros, but we weren’t as exciting, either.
At least, to anybody who wasn’t a hard-core divination geek. People still showed to the occasional meeting, and Akila told me they got lots of messages from students wanting to set up individual readings, but when it came to regular attendance, there were only maybe thirty of us.freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
When I mentioned that to Liesel, she just grinned and said, “Thirty of you, eh?”
All right, so I already counted myself as one of the regulars. And it might be true that I’d tried to argue my advisor into letting me squeeze in a seminar on Shang oracle bones alongside Introduction to Divination and a sortilege practicum. Apparently Welton had a policy against freshmen taking six courses in their first term, though.and besides, the seminar was meant for upperclassmen.
The seminar was being taught by a visiting professor, though, and I was still annoyed that I wouldn’t get another chance to take it. Div Club might be a good place to find out about obscure prophetic methods, but even for them.us.scapulimancy was out there.
Akila had promised to introduce me to a new kind of deck, though, one that wasn’t tarot-based. After the co-presidents had dealt with organizational business, she and I went off to the side for her to show me the cards.
“They’re mythological,” she said, spreading them out for me, “but rather than each one representing a single cluster of concepts, they’re intended to connect to other cards in the deck. So if you draw Amaterasu, she resonates with Susano-o and Tsukiyomi, because they share myths.but she also resonates with Apollo and Ra and Tonatiuh, because of the solar connection, and with gods who reflect other aspects of Amaterasu’s nature. So you have to consider the spread as a whole, even more than usual, to pull out where the connections are.”
I thought it through, chewing on my lower lip. “You mean, if Amaterasu shows up with Apollo, it might suggest something about the moon, or maybe a brother or sister, because both of them are paired with a lunar sibling. But if Ra shows up instead, it’s more likely to be something about.oh, leadership or nationalism or something, because of the connection with the emperors on one hand and the pharaohs on the other.”
“Right,” Akila said. “If you’ve got a question you want answered, I can walk you through it.”
I definitely wanted a demonstration. All the card systems I knew were like Akila had said, with each card representing a more or less coherent set of ideas, rather the assortment attributed to gods. The cards always modified each other, of course, but this sounded a lot more interconnected than I was used to.
The question was, well, what question to ask. “Just do a general reading for me,” I said at last. Everything I could think of was either too trivial, or too personal for me to share it with Akila. “My birthday is tomorrow; might as well do the reading for that tonight.”
“Happy birthday in advance, then,” she said with a smile, before taking a deep breath and closing her eyes to center herself.
Once we had shuffled and cut the deck, she began to lay out the cards in a circle. Six of them, with space for a final card in the center. “I like to use the seventh as the capstone,” she said, when she saw me looking puzzled. “Sort of a final thought for the reading.”
“Ah, I get it. Usually I put a signifier there, and I do it first.”
“A lot of people do,” Akila said. “You might try this approach, though,
and see what it gets you. Anyway, what do we have here?”
What we had was Hermes reversed, Ganesha reversed, Loki, Brigit, Thoth, and Papa Legba. Akila and I both frowned over the cards, thinking them through.
“Well,” Akila said at last. “Ganesha is the one who removes obstacles, and he’s reversed. That part is clear: whatever’s in your way is going to stay there, at least for the near future. And the obstacle in question is Hermes reversed. Are you having trouble communicating with someone, or are there money problems?”
I shook my head, eyes unfocusing slightly as I stared at the cards. “No, but I know what it means. I’m supposed to consider the whole spread, right?” My hand hovered over Thoth, not touching. These were Akila’s cards; she wouldn’t want me contaminating them. “Hermes Trismegistus. A syncretization of these two, and the origin of hermetic magic. My mother wants me to study CM, but I’m going to major in divination.”
If Akila was any good, her gift would tell her there was more to it than that. I wasn’t about to explain, though. We didn’t know each other well enough, and besides, the rest of the Div Club was ten feet away, busy with their own readings and conversations. But Akila was experienced enough with divination to also know that pressing the client rarely helped. She only said, “That’s an issue you’re not going to be able to resolve yet. But Loki follows Ganesha. In another context, it could mean trouble, but you’ve got other tricksters in here. I think it’s suggesting that you should just route around the problem, at least for now.”
“And get to Brigit,” I said, nodding. “She’s prophecy-related, but it might be wishful thinking on my part to read her as validating my choice of major.” After all, the whole point of having Akila read for me was that my own interpretation might be biased.
She drew another deep breath. It seemed to be part of how she focused on the hints from her gift. “I don’t think it is, actually.wishful thinking, that is. She’s not the only one in here that’s prophecy-related. I’m getting an echo of that from Thoth, and Papa Legba has associations with Orunmila, who’s the one who brought Ifá to the world.”
I squelched the urge to ask about Ifá. There was controversy about teaching it at universities, and I didn’t know where Akila stood on that issue. Besides, I had to focus on this reading, not all the other divinatory methods I wanted to be learning. “So I should put my energy into divination, and Thoth’s presence means my studies will go well.”
She grinned at me. “Which one of us is doing this reading, me or you?”
“Sorry,” I said, putting my hands up. “I didn’t mean to horn in.”
“No, not at all. You’re doing really well. Most people would have more trouble with cards they don’t know, especially on a reading for themselves.” Akila laughed and gestured at the spread. “Even if this was telling you not to major in divination, I’d probably encourage you to do it.”
“Well, it isn’t like what they forecast is fixed anyway.” I cocked my head and considered Papa Legba. “Crossroads. A choice of paths.” Divination or CM? I’d made that choice already, though.
“Mmmm.” Akila frowned, then drew in another deep breath. “Connection to the world of spirits, too. He resonates with Hermes on that front. Let’s see what the final card says.” She drew it from her deck and laid it in the center.
Lugh of the Long Hand. Another Irish god, like Brigit. Not particularly prophetic, but he was associated with the Otherworld, which might connect to Papa Legba. The problem was, Lugh was one of those gods with enough built-up associations that in divinatory terms, he could represent damn near anything.
I sighed, defeated. Whatever meaning was in that card, my gift couldn’t tease it out. So much for interpreting for myself.
When I looked up at Akila, though, her mouth twisted in wry apology. “Sorry. Lugh’s a hard one to read, and I’m really not sure what he means here. Something to do with the Otherworld.so, with magic in any form, whether CM or divination or whatever.and I guess there’s a choice for you to make, or at least something that might fall out in different ways. I can’t tell what it is, though.” She swept the cards up and returned them to her deck. “We could try again, if you like. Use Lugh as the significator, and see what else we get.”
My stomach growled, and she laughed. “Yeah, not right now,” I said. “I think food needs to come first. But thanks for showing me the cards; I’m really tempted to get my own deck.”
“You totally should,” Akila said, getting up from the floor. “And there’s a class Bradley teaches every other year, on alternative cartomancy. That’s where I heard about this deck, actually. I bet you’d like it.”
One more for the list. Twelve terms at Welton were not going to be enough for me to take all the divination classes I wanted, not if I also wanted to fill out my requirements and get my diploma.
But there was always graduate school. Smiling to myself, I went to find dinner.
Robert
Everyone knew the urban legends, of course. The freshman empath who snapped under the pressure of her roommate’s stress and, depending on the narrative variant, either drove the offender mad in a sudden burst of telepathic fury, or bashed her head in with a paperweight. According to the empath who sat next to Robert in their class on the Cairo Accords, there was no true historical incident behind the tales . . . but college was trying enough, and the psychic control of most eighteen-year-olds still imperfect enough, that breakdowns of a less violent sort did indeed occur.
Robert.who knew quite well that he had the empathic sensitivity of a whelk.did not expect to have any such difficulties himself.
But as it transpired, empathy was unnecessary, when living with a highly-stressed wilder.
Not that Julian showed stress in the ordinary ways. No breakdowns for him, no shouting or fits of tears; indeed, he hardly seemed capable of such a thing. Robert was just as glad. Strong emotion played merry hell with psychic abilities.one reason why manifestation in adolescence was such a volatile affair.and a wilder in a snit could be expected to wreak truly epic havoc. Which was, no doubt, why they were forbidden to have snits.
But control of the usual signs of stress did not equate to a lack of stress itself. And Robert very soon came to recognize the signs peculiar to Julian: speech increasingly terse and opaque. Fanatical tidiness of person and surroundings. A general impression of rigidity.rather like an antique boiler, whose cast-iron sides only barely contained the mounting pressure within.
One did not have to be a trained psychologist to guess why. A variety of students had already pestered Robert to introduce them to his roommate; two were persistent enough that he had to offer to introduce them to his fist instead. The rest plagued him with questions instead, about everything from what Julian ate to whether he ate at all.
The belief that wilders did not need to eat came about because Julian was, as near as Robert could tell, avoiding the dining halls as if they were infested with cockroaches. He could not blame the fellow. Far easier to take one of the campus’ many portable options and eat somewhere that offered a modicum of privacy. But such practices did not solve the basic problem, which was that Julian had no discernible life outside of class and studying, and sooner or later the lack was going to make him explode.
What god had a sufficiently perverse sense of humour to assign the duty of prevention to Robert, he did not know. Perhaps he had only himself to blame, accepting this assignment of roommate, without asking whether amateur counseling services were part of the package. But the task was before him, and so he set about it as best he could.
“Bah,” he said one evening, when Julian came home from wherever it was he had been. Not class.not at this hour.and certainly not any extracurricular activity. “If I have to read one more word of this patronizing twaddle, I think I will go mad.”
He looked up from the article he was reading, and could not entirely control a flinch. Julian was, for reasons Robert did not want to guess at, dressed all in black. Jeans and a long-sleeved shirt.p
erfectly ordinary clothing.except that on him, the lack of color was just this side of terrifying. His hair was far too light, his skin far too pale; he looked like a ghost. One that did not want to have a conversation right now.
But Robert had planned this gambit, and having started it, his mouth went blithely on, before his common sense could sound the retreat. “There is a late-night movie being shown in Carson Commons. The Ides of North; I thought I might go. Would you have any interest, yourself?”
Julian had bent to unlace his boots, hiding his expression. Now he stepped out of them and shook his head, still without looking at Robert. That, too, seemed to be a sign of stress, as if he did not want to engage with anyone. Including his roommate. “No, thank you.”
He should drop it; he knew he should. And yet he went on. “Is it class reading that calls you away, or a lack of interest in the movie? Or a lack of interest in movies more generally, I suppose.”
“I have work I should do,” Julian said. Which only answered part of Robert’s question.
Hanged for a fleece, hanged for the mother of all sheep. “But that does not tell me what you think of movies, and whether I should offer such invitations in the future. Surely you must have some hobbies, man.”
“Not movies.” Julian picked up his bag.
“Very well.but what takes their place? What do you like to do in your leisure time?”
Julian drew breath as if to answer; Robert found he was holding his own. Then Julian shook his head, a curt gesture, cutting off whatever he’d been about to say, replacing it with something else. “Do you remember what you said to me on the first day?”
He had said so very many things, his tongue running free out of sheer nerves. Like it was trying to do now. “Er.”
“You asked me to tell you if you said something wrong.”
Robert had not, in a month and a half of living with a wilder, ever looked Julian in the eye. He knew well enough what would happen if he did. But even without looking, he could feel the weight of that gaze on him. It should have shut him up.but he could not help asking. “This offends you? My asking about your hobbies?” He floundered for understanding, as Julian turned to go, and came up empty-handed. “For the love of all the gods, why? It’s a simple question.”
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