by W. M. Martin
Maggie could tell that Kylie was taking her “punishment” from Mr. Akiyama very well. In fact, she was struggling to keep her excitement in check. Thomas, on the other hand, looked as though he had just eaten something which was seriously disagreeing with him.
Maggie, who was bringing up the rear of the class on their way to study the properties of an artifact called the Lincoln Blade, felt a strange sensation run up her spine and permeate every follicle of hair on her head. The feeling rushed over her like cold waves over hot sand as she walked past the Pentagem.
“Did you feel that, Alice?” Maggie asked.
Alice looked quizzically at Maggie and answered, “Feel what?”
Maggie crossed her arms and began rubbing them to try and stall the dim current running up them.
“I just had a strange jolt run through me,” Maggie stated.
Alice was clearly flummoxed by Maggie's words. She looked around and leaned in toward Maggie and asked, “What do you mean?”
Maggie shrugged her shoulders and shook her head because she was just as confused as Alice.
“I don't know. It's the only way that I can describe it. I've never felt anything like it before. It's weird, Alice. I think it came from the Pentagem,” explained Maggie.
Alice looked skeptically at her friend and stated matter-of-factly, “The Pentagem is dead, Maggie. Avior used all of its power when she created the Kindred Academy. It's just an old relic.”
Maggie looked unsure, but accepted Alice’s words as truth. After all, after Kylie, Alice was the most well-read and knowledgeable in regards to Kindred artifacts and history.
CHAPTER NINE
The Kindred Academy's Field Festival, which marked the six month point of Maggie's first Kindred year, was in full swing and the fun to be had was in abundance. The entire student body and the faculty had gathered out near the Jagged Mirror Lake and were enjoying the festivities together. There were totem races on the far side of the grounds that had attracted a fair number of hopefuls, with each totem being eager to bring their Kindred the prestige of being crowned the winner. There were many students who had decided that a refreshing dip in the water would be more enjoyable and were having a great time swimming in the lake. A loud crashing sound heralded a robust and lively jousting competition which was being headed up by Ms. Holiday and Mr. Carver near the tree line of the Forever Forest. Mrs. Bonifassi had been happily overseeing the festival’s catering for the day and was busy fussing over a particularly delicious looking structure made entirely of ice cream, which was in the form of the five Clans’ first totems. The mere fact that so many suns were high above the academy and the ice cream sculpture had not shown the slightest sign of melting, was a small wonder and a simple testament to the power inside of the Veil. There was a veritable cornucopia of different meats, cooked every way imaginable. Vegetables that had been smoked, steamed, grilled or left to be eaten raw were plentiful on the picnic tables which pocked the fields. There were also countless pies, cakes, tarts and treats everywhere, seemingly as far as the eye could see. The pleasant aroma of such a wide variety of foods, being carried by the resplendent day’s gentle breeze, seemed to wrap itself around and enthrall everyone who was outside. Young and old alike had been reeling with anticipation to try a bite of anything and everything that had been laid out before their eager eyes.
Mr. Akiyama was even having his version of fun. He was strolling with his totem, Kiyoko, and pouring over a scroll in one hand and swinging an odd antique candelabra, which hosted eight green flames, in the other hand. Mr. Akiyama had been greeted by everyone who had walked past him while he was lost in his musings. He never even looked up or acknowledged any of them. Alice, Kylie and five other students had joined him to no doubt suss out the mysteries of whatever he was trying to find in broad daylight with a large, lit candelabra. Mr. O’Sullivan was easily having the most fun out of any of the instructors who were present, maybe even more than the students. He was refereeing a boxing competition which was being warded by Siobhan for the students’ protection. Mr. O’Sullivan invited anyone who felt brave enough to join in and to put on a pair of gloves and duke it out. The winner would, of course, have to face him. Every time a blow from one student connected with the face of another, Mr. O’Sullivan’s boisterous laughter echoed over the entire field.
Mr. Evans and Nancy were both watching the entire festival’s proceedings with equal happiness, as evidenced by their wide smiles, interspersed with the occasional guffaw. The entire festival was alive with the melodious sounds of gayety and merriment. All of the totems were enjoying the celebration just as as much as their Kindred counterparts were. In fact, there had not been a single Kindred whose totem was not present beside them, in corporeal form, to take in all of the fun that the academy’s festival had to offer.
Maggie walked up to one of the many tables covered with food and grabbed a handful of deliciously plump, red grapes.
“Would you like one, Elliot?” Maggie teased.
Elliot replied, “I don't eat grapes, Mags. You know that.”
Maggie laughed, “I just thought that I'd ask. I'll get you to try one someday, just you wait and see.”
Elliot dryly retorted, “I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor. I would sooner go swimming than eat a grape.”
Maggie giggled at her totem’s loathing for a food that he'd never even tried. As far as Maggie could tell, Elliot simply believed that sustenance which he had not caught, himself, was somewhat beneath him. Maggie had found it strange at first, Elliot eating like a “real falcon,” when he was a totem, while Elliot had found Maggie’s ignorance about totems’ eating habits equally odd. The fact that totems had no need to consume their sustenance did not have any bearing on whether or not they enjoyed the act of eating. They most certainly did. The pair eventually found a common ground of understanding as they grew together and were educated about one another in equilibrium.
Maggie continued on and made it to the pie-eating contest which was being dominated by Jax Cooper. He was easily the largest First Year at the Kindred Academy and his voracious appetite was quickly becoming legend. Jax was on his eighth pie while his closest competitors, a boy named Ted from Clan Secarn and Maggie’s friend Oliver, were on their second and fourth pies respectively. Both of the challengers to Jax’s steadily approaching first place medal were treading perilously close to nausea. The sweat from the strain of trying to keep up with Jax at an eating contest had perforated Ted and Oliver’s foreheads and the fix was soon to be in. Their determination to win the pie eating contest would not be near enough to sidetrack Jax on his way to sure victory.
As the first place medal was placed ceremoniously around Jax’s neck, Oliver ran out into a clearing behind the contest stage and relieved his aching stomach of its contents. Ted soon joined Oliver to plaster the grass with pie filling. Jax waved to everyone who stopped by the stage to watch him out-eat his opponents and with a final tally of twenty-two pies, Jax Cooper set the new pie-eating record for the Kindred Academy’s Field Festival. As he walked off of the stage, Jax grabbed one more pie to go.
Leaving the pie-eating competition area, Maggie saw Stephanie talking to two Praetorians near a couple of marble benches which were gilded and covered with rubies in the Courtyard of Clovers. Maggie had remembered how Stephanie had talked with her about wanting to join the ranks of the Praetorians after their leader, Commander Hjalmar, had offered them both advanced training classes. Mr. Carver informed Maggie and Stephanie that both they, along with Lucy, had been recommended for the Praetorian battle courses. Maggie had no particular desire to be a Praetorian herself, but she was looking forward to whatever she would be able to learn from Commander Hjalmar and the battle courses. Stephanie spotted Maggie walking by and turned to smile and wave. Maggie returned the gesture and continued on past her classmate and the two Praetorians who flanked her, offering their views to Stephanie on why joining their ranks was a worthy and noble cause.
Elliot noticed Ms.
Holiday in the field ahead of them. She had left Mr. Carver to oversee the raucous jousting competition on his own. She was meandering through the grass, enjoying some strawberry flavored ice cream steeped deeply and piled high on a chocolate waffle cone. Ms. Holiday was lazily humming a soft tune to herself while soaking up some of the multitudinous suns’ rays. Elliot had never been particularly impressed by the galaxies that surrounded the academy like Maggie had been ever since her first night entering into the Veil. Maggie remained in a perpetual state of awe in regards to the Kindred world in which she had hoped that she would never recover.
Elliot drew Maggie's attention to Ms. Holiday and said, “Perhaps now would be an opportune time to address your concerns about Armor Envelopment to Ms. Holiday. Look, she walks just over there and she is unaccompanied. Let us approach her, Mags.”
Maggie was unsure about interrupting her instructor who seemed to be perfectly content to wander alone and eat ice cream, but she took Elliot's advice, and made her way over to Ms. Holiday.
“Hey y'all,” Ms. Holiday greeted cheerily. “Ain't this just the loveliest day? Or night? I reckon it all depends on where you stand out here.”
Maggie peered out over the Forever Forest which was covered by a blanket of night, and she nodded her head in agreement. Ms. Holiday continued on with her assessment of the stark dichotomy of the day and the night cycles inside of the Veil, when she suddenly paused in her observations and noticed Maggie respectfully waiting to speak with her.
“What'd y'all need, Ms. Bennett?” asked Ms. Holiday before taking another small lick of her frozen treat.
Maggie answered, with a twinge of embarrassment, “Ms. Holiday, I know that you said I'm holding something back and that's probably what's been keeping me from transfiguring a set of armor, but I can't think of anything that that could be. I was hoping that you might have an idea, you know, about what’s wrong with me?”
Ms. Holiday tilted her head slightly to the right and her facial expression swung swiftly from blissfully bored to mildly concerned and infinitely understanding.
Ms. Holiday took a final, long lick of her ice cream cone and then carelessly tossed it over her shoulder before candidly offering, “There ain't a thing wrong with you, Ms. Bennett. Every student who's ever attended this school has struggled in some way or another.”
Maggie looked around to make certain that she and Ms. Holiday were out of earshot of anyone else and she said, “Lucy doesn't struggle with anything.”
Ms. Holiday giggled slightly and cocked a knowing eyebrow at Maggie and said, “I repeat, Darlin’. Every student who's ever attended this school has struggled in some way or another.”
Maggie had remembered Lucy’s struggle to initially summon Maverick, but over the past six months, Lucy had not only learned to summon Maverick with ease, but she could also link with him and fly just like Maggie and Elliot could.
Maggie looked askance at Ms. Holiday and asked, “What does Lucy have a problem with here?”
Ms. Holiday replied, “I can't and won't get into that, Ms. Bennett, but I will tell you a little story if you'd care to hear it?”
Maggie would have rather heard about the secret struggle of her peer, but she did not want to seem ungrateful to Ms. Holiday, so she accepted her instructor’s offer.
Ms. Holiday was obviously pleased and so she began, “This here is a true story about my momma. That'd be Mrs. Holiday, sugar. She’s a baker in a lovely little human city called Savannah, Georgia. She met my daddy there. He's a human by the way. Momma loves humans, always has, so she decided to live outside of the Veil and work with the humans and to become friends with them. Momma always said that it was weird for her at first, y’know, the way humans don't have totems, but she thinks that's what makes humans special; they don't need totems to be complete or happy.”
Maggie was starting to worry that Ms. Holiday was losing sight of what her original story was supposed to be about and how it would translate into something that could, perhaps, help Maggie to understand why she could not envelop herself in any armor yet. Maggie continued listening to Ms. Holiday, for what felt like an eternity, hoping for a cogent point to be made about any of her personally perceived failures in her sanguine and southern instructor’s class. Ms. Holiday continued waxing philosophical about the world-weariness of a Kindred woman in a human world and of the southern social-status structure and the place of bakers within it. Maggie could feel that Elliot was desperately hoping that Ms. Holiday would come to some semblance of a point and preferably very soon. Finally Ms. Holiday seemed to be nearing the end of her family’s tale.
“Well then, I suppose that brings me to the moral of my little story, darlin’,” stated Ms. Holiday, breathlessly.
“Thank the Nexus!” Elliot exclaimed telepathically to Maggie.
Maggie stifled a giggle and squeezed her nose, pretending to stop a sneeze in order to hide her smile from her instructor. Elliot hardly ever betrayed his emotions like that, so whenever he did, it always caught Maggie off-guard and made her laugh. Ms. Holiday had been lost in her tale of a pastry chef’s woes and of the lunacy of the human general public and their disdain for true artisanal panache at the talented hands of a Kindred woman and her human husband.
“And so, Ms. Bennett, that's how Momma and her totem, Atticus, saved the bakery, how Daddy learned about the Veil and the Kindred, and how it can be said that the difference between a sweet potato pie and a braced battle axe is actually pretty slim.”
Maggie looked on in disbelief at the kind and beautiful Ms. Holiday and wondered how her instructor could have possibly drawn any correlation, whatsoever, with her problems in Armor Envelopment class to a sweet potato pie and a battle axe?
“Does that help clear it all up, Ms. Bennett?” asked Ms. Holiday hopefully.
“Yes, Ms. Holiday. Thank you,” Maggie lied as she quickly rushed off to find Alice before Ms. Holiday could toss out an addendum to her strange story.
Ms. Holiday watched Maggie walk away, hurriedly, in the direction of Mr. Akiyama’s odd but diligent little search party. She was gently stroking her totem, the tiny chameleon, Remy, who was clinging effortlessly to a long diamond necklace around her slim and lovely neck.
Remy looked on with his Kindred and said sympathetically, “I don't believe Maggie understood what you were trying to tell her, Annika.”
Ms. Holiday looked down at her tiny totem and replied, “I don't either, Remy. Bless her heart.”
Alice was deep in the throes of concentration. She was cautiously turning a small, purple and yellow spotted mushroom in the palm of her hand. Alice held the colorful fungus up to the green flames of the candelabra in Mr. Akiyama’s hand and a look of shock spread swiftly across her face.
“You were right, Kylie, they do live on these types of mushrooms,” stated Alice with a sense of magnanimity.
Kylie beamed with a sense of self-satisfaction at Alice’s admission.
Maggie walked up behind Mr. Akiyama’s small group and asked, “What was Kylie right about?”
Mr. Akiyama turned around abruptly to face Maggie and he looked her squarely in the eyes without saying a word. Maggie knew what Mr. Akiyama’s gaze meant; she had seen it everyday for six months in the Veil. Maggie had forgotten herself in the heat of the moment, brought about by the festival’s energetic and joyous atmosphere. She had broken Mr. Akiyama's singular and cardinal rule. She had just asked a question in his presence.
Maggie quickly interjected, “I was talking to Alice, Mr. Akiyama!”
Mr. Akiyama, wordlessly, turned back around to the mushroom being showcased in Alice’s hand, just as swiftly as he had turned to stare down Maggie.
Maggie silently worded to Alice, “That was close.”
Alice smiled in agreement and though she didn't make a sound, her eyes were laughing at Maggie's faux pas.
Alice handed the purple and yellow spotted mushroom over to her instructor and said, “Thank you, Mr. Akiyama,” before excusing herself to go and spe
ak with Maggie.
Kylie decided to join them and the trio walked closer to the edge of the Forever Forest which was still under the cover of night.
“What were you two looking at with Mr. Akiyama?” asked Maggie.
Before Alice could say anything, Kylie answered excitedly, “Tandyls!”
Maggie shifted over toward Alice and shot her a look of bewilderment. Maggie had endeavored to listen, with laborious effort, for the past six months, to Kylie’s infatuation with all things related to the science and biology of the creatures and plant life which were native to the Veil. It was not that Maggie was doltish about or uninterested in those kinds of things at all. On the contrary, she found nature inside of the Veil to be lovely and interesting.
Her apparent disconnect with remembering certain plants or beasts was merely due to the fact that there were so very many strange and wonderful things which were native to the Veil. The vast number and divergent categories of wildlife were still so alien to Maggie, that it made it extremely difficult for her to keep track of any of them. Much to Kylie’s consternation, Maggie had managed to forget virtually everything about anything pertaining to Kindred science.
“Tan-what now?” inquired Maggie, sensing that she had probably heard of tandyls before, and more than likely, directly from Kylie herself.
“Tandyls, Maggie. I’ve told you about them at least three different times! Wonderfully beautiful, angry little tandyls!” sung Kylie in response, while completely ignoring Maggie’s forgetfulness about the tandyls.
