Tears rolled down Tamsin's cheeks. "I'm not lying. I don't know what happened or why I didn't know about your school. But please let me attend. It's my only hope."
The recruiter studied her in silence for several minutes. Then she nodded, reached out and snuffed out the bundle of herbs with her fingers. "I believe you," she said. The woman was transformed now. Where she was fiercesome and threatening before, now she seemed cheerful. "I do have to apologize for that little show. One of my duties as a recruiter is to gauge the emotional maturity of applicants and sometimes it's necessary to get a little spooky." The woman giggled, causing all of the bells on her dress to jingle along with her.
Tamsin couldn't help but laugh in return. "Does this mean I'm in?"
"Well of course you're in, dearie. Of course. Though you'l be at a serious disadvantage. I should warn you about that. Our semesters are based on the solar calendar—each quarter stretches between equinox to solstice, so school starts on Monday and I'm afraid you've entirely missed orientation. And pick of rooms. And likely many of the classes are full." The recruiter frowned as she realized just how far behind Tamsin was. "Also, since you've been hidden from our community all your life, you're going to have a lot of catching up to do with the most basic fluency in magic. Your classmates will have been magically active all their lives."
Tamsin exhaled sharply. She was accepted, which was good. But she was literally going to be like a preschooler thrown into high school, which was bad.
"No one would judge you if you decided to take a year or two before attending. Perhaps one of the normal schools that accepted you would be a good place to get some real life experience before diving into the deep end at Penrose?"
Tamsin shook her head. "I didn't get in to any other schools."
The recruiter gave her a look like Tamsin had told her that she shaved dogs for fun. "That's impossible. Your transcript is flawless. You should be a top candidate anywhere."
"I thought," Tamsin began, then coughed politely. "I thought maybe you had something to do with that? Eliminate all the other schools and then force me to come to yours."
"That's not how we do things, my dear. One of Penrose's many mottos is The Choice and the Consequence are Yours, which honestly sounds less sinister in Latin. We believe that everything must be chosen freely. If someone has been tampering with your college applications, it wasn't us."
Something shifted in the recruiter's eyes and Tamsin wondered if maybe the woman wasn't telling the whole truth. Were there factions at the university that saw things differently? Was another motto Help Good Students Make Good Choices, which was a favorite of her high school principal and was used to justify every draconian measure he could think of?
From her sack purse, the woman produced a thick sheaf of papers, a room assignment and a guidebook. Tamsin spent the next hour filling out forms in triplicate, sealing her fate at the Penrose University of Magic.
5
She knew?
When Tamsin arrived back home, the sun was nearly setting and her mother was waiting for her in the dining room.
"How'd it go with dad today?" Tamsin asked. The smell of the recruiter's incense bundle clung to her pleasantly but her head was fuzzled and befogged.
"Where have you been? I expect this sort of disappearing act from your brother, but not from you."
"I was at the library and I lost track of time. You know how it is."
Her mother pursed her lips. Behind her, on the table, were Tamsin's college files stolen from her room. Every rejection letter and application were stacked in neat piles. "You should have told me about this." Her voice was cold and sharp with disappointment. "I have too much on my plate with your father and work to be micromanaging you, Tam."
Shame and rage flared up inside her. Tamsin's skin felt uncomfortably hot under her clothes. "You went through my things?"
"Did you get in anywhere? I see even the community college rejected you. What happened?" Venom dripped from her mother's voice. It must be terrifying to be on the other side of a conference table from her.
"I don't know what happened, but I got in to one school. And only one school." Tamsin swallowed hard, trying to push back the flames she felt on her skin.
"Oh, where is that? One of those internet schools where you watch YouTube videos all day?"
"Penrose University," Tamsin said. She braced herself for the recriminations, the questions, the need to explain that it was a real school despite the fact that googling it was impossible.
The blood drained from her mother's face. "Fuck."
"You know it?" Tamsin's eyes were wide as saucers. How did her mother know about Penrose?
"Your grandmother went there, for one year. Then she got pregnant with my brother and left." Her mother sat down and ran a shaking hand through her hair. "She never regretted having your Uncle Doyle, but she always said leaving that school was the worst mistake of her life."
Her mother knew about magic. She knew that magic was real, and she never told her. The flames on her skin grew hotter, the annoyance became almost painful.
"You kept this all a secret," Tamsin said. "Strange things have happened all my life, and you never told me. You never once said it might be magic."
Her mother laughed. She bent over and laughed deeply, whooping and cackling until she coughed and then she laughed some more.
"It's not funny," Tamsin said. She crossed her arms and frowned at her mother.
"You're going to have such a great time, honey. It's going to be amazing." When her mother looked up at her, her pale green eyes shone with pride.
The flames within her subsided. A wave of exhaustion washed over Tamsin.
"School starts on Monday," Tamsin said. "I don't even know where it is." The world was growing dim and before she knew it, she was curling up on the floor and falling asleep.
"Shush, my love. We'll figure it all out," her mother said. "And you'll find a cure for your father."
6
Tell Me Everything
They spent the weekend gathering up school supplies, rushing from one store to the next. Tamsin's mother was a tornado with a credit card. She was a life coach, tutor and personal shopper all rolled into one. Jiro tried to con his way into coming along, hoping he could score new shoes out of the deal, but someone had to stay home and keep an eye on their father and that was his job now.
While Tamsin tried on new jeans and knee-length gray dresses, she quizzed her mom about Penrose and about magic.
"Grandma must have told you something," she implored as she tugged on another pair of jeans that were skinny in all the wrong places. “I need to know everything. I can’t go in blind.”
"She told me all sorts of things, but she made most of them up." Her mother had a checklist of the thirty things every incoming first year student needed to have and she was ruthlessly obtaining them. "She said that she lived next door to a were-lion in her dorm who used to get drunk and wander the halls in animal form scaring the bees wax out of everyone. She said that Leprechauns were real, but kept to themselves in a neighborhood in Dublin. She said she met a dragon and traded soup recipes with it and tricked it into giving her a kiss."
"She sounds amazing. She never told us those stories."
"Yes, well, you were young when she passed and I really do think she was making nearly all of them up."
"Nearly all? Which ones were real?"
"No one knows, dear," her mother said. "Maybe a size bigger?"
7
The Guide to Not Getting Expelled
The train station was quiet that Monday morning when Tamsin's mother dropped her off. On the train from Seattle to Vancouver there were only business people clutching their briefcases, two desperate looking families, and a handful of people Tamsin's age. Were any of them going to Penrose to? Tamsin didn't know what a witch or a wizard looked like or what a Penrose student might look like. Would they stand out? Would they have pointy hats and broomsticks? Or would they look just like everyone else
? Just like she did.
It was raining and dreary when she hugged her mother goodbye. The rain falling on their faces hid their tears pretty well but their bleary red eyes gave them away.
She hadn't said goodbye to her father or Jiro. If she had it would have felt too final. She would see them again. She had to. There would be school holidays and a spring break and a quarter off. Though she doubted that she could bring herself to say goodbye at the end of those visits either.
On the train ride, Tamsin sipped a triple shot mocha, and read the guidebook the recruiter had given her. It was called, "The Penrose Student's Handbook: The Guide to Not Getting Expelled." The tone of the book was all over the place and extremely frustrating. It went from a purely academic history of Penrose that referenced the faculty who founded the school and the budget measures used to pay for it, to chatty discussions of safe sex with shapeshifters. From page to page it veered wildly. It gave Tamsin whiplash. The layout was beyond maddening. Entries would begin halfway down a page and then stop with a note saying they would be continued elsewhere in the book, without any guidance as to where they would be continued. Some entries were written in circles, so Tamsin had to spin the book as she read. Others looped and whorled like fingerprints. Dry academic writing was interrupted with questions from the editors and the lunatics who compiled the book and then left in the text. Magic rituals were name dropped and not explained.
It was the singularly most frustrating and interesting book she'd ever read. If the rest of Penrose was anything like their student handbook, she'd be a raving madwoman by the end of the quarter.
She switched trains in Vancouver without incident. And the Canada Rail train heading east was crowded with commuters and students and tourists.
The Penrose Student Handbook did offer some valuable information eventually. There were three cardinal rules that were never ever to be broken.
Magic may not be used to create wealth of any sort.
Magic is never to be used to return life to the dead.
One must never ever consort with demons.
Each entry was footnoted and the footnotes were footnoted, highlighting what appeared to be legal cases and scholarly studies for each of the points. Tamsin read what she could, but if was harder to follow than the medical journals she'd been reading about her father's condition.
The train rocked gently on its tracks and outside the sprawl of Vancouver gave way to forests and farms. Beyond it all loomed the gorgeous mountains, strong and unchanging. Tamsin returned to the book again and again, but the more she read the more she drifted off into daydreams. The swaying of the train didn't help, nor did not getting quite enough sleep. But the biggest distraction was the excitement.
She was going to university. Finally! How many years had she been planning this? Basically her whole life. And now here it was—approaching at the speed of train.
She tried to manage her expectations. Surely not everyone would be a witty, fascinating genius. Surely not everyone would be interesting and beautiful and dying to be her best friend. But it did not help at all that it was freaking magic school that she was going to. She'd been keeping it together ever since the meeting with the recruiter, but the nearer she got to Penrose, the more Tamsin wanted to scream with delight.
8
The Runic Shield
The train station for Penrose was one stop past the little town called Hope. When Tamsin disembarked with her trunk and her duffel bag slung across her back, only two other students left the train with her. The bus was waiting for them. It looked like any other bus, except for the word Penrose in raised gold lettering on the front. Tamsin handed her things over to the bus driver, a thickly built woman in her fifties, who puffed as she stuffed them into a compartment under the bus.
"Ticket?" The woman said. She was scowling at Tamsin with the look of a woman who had to deal with a whole lot of bullshit in her job.
Tamsin fished the ticket that the recruiter had given her out of her pocket and handed it over to the driver. As soon as it touched her hand the driver’s entire demeanor changed. Her smile was like the sun rising.
"Welcome to Penrose University," the woman said. "You’re a first year, aren't you?"
Tamsin nodded.
"Well, hold on as we go through the runic shield. The first time through can be quite disorienting. It’s gets easier later, but this first time—it’s going to try and get to know you.” The bus driver winked at her.
"Runic shield?" Tamsin asked.
A boy three seats behind her answered. "It's a protective barrier around the school, powered by ley lines. It can turn off spells and enchantments as you pass over it, so be careful." He had greasy hair that hung over his eyes and a voice that screamed know-it-all. But not literally. He was sitting with his arm tightly around a girl with sickly greenish dreadlocks and skin that was extremely pink. She rolled her eyes and Tamsin couldn't tell if it was meant for Mr. Know-It-All or her.
She was pretty sure it was meant for her.
"There it is," the boy said.
The street looked like any neighborhood street anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, with trees crowding the sides of the roads and houses that had seen their best days a century ago. Except for the fact that there was a foot wide swath of gold cutting across the road, the grass, and through part of a tree. It looked like real gold and as they neared Tamsin saw that it was carved with thousands of words and symbols. The bus slowed to a crawl and shuddered as it crossed the runic shield.
A sensation of hot water ran over Tamsin's skin, but she couldn't see anything. She tried to stand up, but the fluid held her in place. It ran under her clothes and over her hair. It dipped into her nose and pushed its way down her mouth. It was everywhere and nowhere at once and just as she felt like she was going to choke on it, it stopped. They had passed through the barrier.
"Ergh," the girl behind her said. "That was a bad one." She looked different now. Thinner and taller, with eyes that shone with a lilac light and her green hair coiled and shifted like serpents. She noticed Tamsin staring and rolled her eyes again. "It's called a glamour, First Year. Get used to it."
"They added new runes to the shield,” the boy whined. His look was unchanged. He was digging through a bag in his lap with frantic gestures. He pulled out his phone—the screen had a deep crack in it. "It's completely fried. Goddamn it."
Tamsin checked her phone, too, and found that it was now a very shiny and very useless brick.
The bus driver laughed. "Didn't they warn you? Magic and technology don't get along. Well, at least until third year.”
"My glyph should have protected it," the boy moaned behind her. "I spent weeks researching that spell."
"It's okay, babe," the girl said. "We'll figure it out. We can talk to Moseley."
Tamsin watched them for a moment as they forgot about the busted phone and started loudly kissing each other. The sound was like two fish having a slap fight. Then she realized she was being completely inappropriate and turned forward again. Did wizards have different feelings about public displays of affection? Or were these two just kind of gross?
It was late afternoon when the bus pulled up outside the beautiful Gothic building that was her dorm. Tamsin was greeted by six stories of gray stone and gargoyles and columns. The style wasn’t consistent though and odd beams and bits of stone jutted out of the facade, as if the architect had changed her mind every day while designing the building. The truth was that before the school implemented magical restrictions in all of the dorm rooms, the students had a nasty habit of changing the rooms to meet their needs.
Indeed, there was a ten-month period in Penrose's history known as the battle of the shifting walls. During which students refused to go to class in favor of waiting until their neighbors left their rooms. Then they pushed their own walls over a few feet at a time, making their rooms much larger. It began innocently enough in a single in Darden Hall, where one Alyssa Knox first invented the wall moving spell. It shifted not
only the concrete and stone work and the wooden beams, but also the plumbing and electricals and the mice and spiders inside the walls.
She was careful.
Her girlfriend, whose name is lost to history, was not.
One night, drunk with possibilities, she expanded her room to fill the entire floor of Lachrymose House.
After that, the spell got out and started the ten-month long battle.
Penrose had different problems these days
After Tamsin exited the bus and politely thanked the driver, she turned to the two love birds that had been sitting behind her. "Hi, I'm Tamsin. You say you know someone who can fix phones so they work here? Because I could really use that." Without a phone she would never know how her dad was doing. She thought she could handle not seeing them in person until the next break, but not hearing from them at all? Impossible.
The bus driver slid a wand out of a holster on her belt and with a flick of her wrist lifted the heavy bags out of the compartment under the bus. "That's so much easier," she said.
The love birds picked up their bags and gave each other a look like they were wondering if they could trust Tamsin. The girl nodded at her boyfriend, and turned to Tamsin. "This is Breakon. I'm Grace. And yeah, maybe we know some people who could help you, like, circumvent some campus rules." Her green dreads hissed at Tamsin.
"What can you do for us?" Breakon interrupted.
"I have money?" Tamsin offered. "Not a lot, but I could pay you?"
Grace rolled her eyes. "Do we look poor to you?"
Tamsin looked them over. "Kind of?"
"Well, we aren't," Breakon snapped.
"What do you need then, if not money?" Tamsin asked.
The bus driver wasn't paying them any attention. She'd fished a thermos out from under her seat and was sipping something steaming from it.
Light Up The Night: a Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy Romance (Lick of Fire Book 2) Page 3
