I set up a line of metal targets about 10 meters away from me and stepped back.
“Okay… Now how do I aim…”
I slowly cast the spell and tried to point my hand towards the first target. I cupped my hands to fire the spell. The bolt of energy fired out and narrowly clipped the edge of the target. I tried again. It missed. Another clipped the other edge. I took a deep breath, focused my concentration on the centre of the target, and slowly constructed the spell. The bolt flew straighter this time, but still didn’t hit the middle of the target. I kept trying for about ten minutes before I took a break. I knew I was getting closer to the middle of the target, but I had absolutely no idea what was different. I pulled the book I’d taken from the library out of my bag and turned to the page which talked about the spell.
“Ballistics-type spell… Right-angle… Aiming…” I skimmed through the page until I found what I was looking for. “‘Don’t miss’… Useful…” I remarked as I leafed through the rest of the book. I snapped the book shut and put it down. “Guess I just keep trying…” I sighed as I pushed myself to my feet.
After another half an hour’s worth of practicing, I’d managed to get the spell working pretty consistently. I still couldn’t quite hit the middle of the target, but it was close. Using it against a moving target though… that was another issue altogether… I was vaguely confident I’d be able to get it working if I needed to, but it definitely wasn’t going to be too useful if I ended up hitting one of the others with it.
I rooted through my bag for a drink, but it was empty.
“Great…” I groaned as I threw the bottle back. I looked over at Raven. She was still trying to work out the same spell that had sent her spiralling the week before, but she was really starting to get somewhere. It was complicated, way too complicated to bother trying to describe, but there was something almost hypnotic about it. I leaned against the wall and watched for a minute. Embers flicked in front of her as she constructed the spell, slowly growing into bigger flames. They blended in to each other, making a bigger flame, until… Raven let her arms drop. She exhaled deeply as she relaxed her body.
“That was awesome!” I shouted over as I pushed myself back onto my feet.”
“Thank you…” Raven sighed. “It really isn’t anywhere close to perfect though…”
“You’ll get there in the end. I’m sure. You’re too amazing to let it beat you.”
“Thank you…” Raven smiled. “I know I’ll get it right eventually. It’s just taking a lot out of me…”
“Yeah, no shit.” I laughed, remembering what had happened the week before. “Just don’t hurt yourself again, okay?”
“I won’t… I promise…”
“Good. If you end up dying of exhaustion, I’ll kill you,” I joked as I picked up my bag. “Anyway, I think that’s enough for today… I’ve got an AMP essay that won’t write itself… Though maybe there’s a spell for that…” I shrugged. “Hey, guys! I’m off! I’ll see you all tomorrow!” I shouted over to Matt and Leigh as they took a break from sparring. They waved as I walked out of the door.
*
“What the actual fuck happened to you?!” Mum frantically questioned as I walked through the door.
“I thought you had a late shift?” I put my bag down and took off my jacket. The dressing on my arm was mostly clean, but I could see that some traces of blood had soaked through. “Shit…” I muttered under my breath. Mum ran up to me and grabbed my arm.
“Is that blood?!” she questioned as I unwrapped my arm. “What the hell happened, Em?”
“I… I got in a bit of a... disagreement… before school…”
“You were in a fight?! And what happened to your arm?!”
“She had a knife. It wasn’t that deep.”
“No, you do not get to act calm about this! You’ve come home covered in bruises, with a massive cut in your arm. You’re going to tell me what happened. Now.”
I sighed.
“I… There’s a girl at school… The head girl, actually… She walked up to me at school, and started talking to me… about the stone… She didn’t say anything specific at the time, but then she started threatening me… She did it once after one of the dance committee meetings… and once outside the main building, where she stopped me from moving… I only got away that time because someone came to help. Then, when I got into school this morning… She attacked me… Straight out tried to take the stone by force. I managed to beat her away in the end, but I got beat up pretty badly beforehand…”
Mum stood up.
“Does the school know about it?”
“I told Professor Greyford straight away. I don’t know what he’s planning on doing now, but whatever happens, she’s not going to try and hurt me again,” I assured her. “Please, try to keep calm. I’m totally fine, I promise.”
Mum opened her mouth to speak but stopped. She dropped down onto the sofa.
“Okay…” she breathed deeply. “So, do you need to get to a hospital or something?”
“Dr Birchwood stitched up the wound, and that was the only real damage. I could do with another bandage though… maybe a cloth…” I looked down at my still-slightly-bleeding arm.
“I should have some proper dressing somewhere…” She started rummaging through drawers and cupboards. I poked the stitched-up cut lightly. It still stung.
“Sorry, Mum...” I apologized. “I know this isn’t fair on you, having to worry about me like this… the only reason I didn’t call you when it happened was because I didn’t want you to be worrying all day…”
“To be honest, you’re totally right… I wouldn’t have been able to work at all if I’d known before…” she admitted. “But next time, tell me. Straight away. It’s my job to worry about you.”
“Okay…” I sighed.
“Promise?” Mum pushed. I smiled. I’d found so many friends, not to mention an actual sister, that I sometimes felt like I forgot that for the first 17 years of my life, she was all I really had.
“I promise, Mum…”
42
The next couple of weeks passed slowly. Like I’d hoped, Polly hadn’t tried to do anything else to me since she’d cornered me outside of school, though she definitely gave me some death-stares during dance meetings. Still, I generally felt a little bit more relaxed, which helped with just about everything, not the least my studying. And it was a good thing as well. Because whatever had happened with Polly, nothing else had stopped. And exams were about to start.
The exams were carried out in the school’s main hall, which I hadn’t actually seen that many times before. It was big, definitely enough for the whole school, though they spread out the desks a lot in the exam setup, though that still gave enough room for the whole of a year. And that hall scared me more than any Syndicate fighter. Actually, that’s not true, but my point still stands.
I’d been spending almost all of my free time studying, though I made sure to keep taking the advice I’d been given not to push myself past what I could concentrate on. But I was still worried it wasn’t going to be enough.
“Okay, what’s your first exam?” Mary asked as she leafed through her own textbook.
“AMP,” I replied. “It’s the slightly easier paper, and that’s this afternoon… Then I’ve got the Beginner’s Magic exam tomorrow morning.”
“Right. And how are you for the physics?”
I pulled the Advanced Magic Physics textbook out of my bag and flicked through it.
“I mean, I should be able to push through it. I’m hardly going to get anything world-changing, but I’ll manage… the second one’s the one I’m worried about… There are so many formulas in there, and I can’t remember anything…” I closed the book and dropped down onto the bed.
“Don’t stress yourself about that yet. Focus on what you’ve got to do today. You’ll just throw yourself off otherwise.”
“I know…” I groaned. “I almost wish the Syndicate would try and blow s
omething up…”
“I’m gonna assume that was a joke…” Mary sighed. “You’ll be fine. You do know this. You just need to give yourself a chance to remember it in the exam. Just take each question at a time and do what you can, okay?”
I sat up and stretched.
“It’s not like I can stop it happening. I’ll just cram as much as I can this morning, and hope for the best…”
*
There was a constant low-level murmur as we all waited in the library to be taken to the exam hall. The Advanced Magic Physics class had about twenty people in total, none of which I particularly talked to. A few people had clustered into a couple of different groups, with the outsiders like me shoved into the corner of the table.
Eventually, our teacher walked in and stood in front of us. Instantly the noise stopped. We were herded into the exam hall, spread out across the front of the room. The papers were face-down on the desks, and they’d left a spare pen there for everyone. I breathed slowly as I went and sat down at the desk with my name on it.
So how much do you actually know… Can you actually remember any of it?
“Ssh…” I quietly tried to quieten my own brain. I looked up to see one of the invigilators give me a sideways glance. I straightened myself in the chair and waited for the exam to begin.
The paper was just as bad as I had expected. I managed to take the first couple of questions out relatively easily, they were multiple choice, and pretty basic, at least for AMP. Once I got to the first written question things started to get trickier. The question was asking me to explain how magic energy was structured in its particles, and I only half-knew the answer. I started scribbling down what I could think of, filling up about half of the space I was given. It was at least 50% complete bullshit, but I remembered enough of it to pull a couple of marks from the answer.
I skimmed through the next few questions. Most of them were pretty simple, a couple more multiple-choice questions that didn’t give me too much trouble. The essay questions were the ones I had trouble with.
‘Describe how mana is able to be harnessed through the use of Somatic Movement’.
Essentially, how do spell constructions work. I spent about three minutes staring at the paper, two minutes trying to work out how to start the sentence, three more minutes trying to fight a song I’d heard on the bus out of my head, and then fifteen minutes writing down a page full of what I’m pretty sure was the wrong thing altogether. And the rest of the paper wasn’t much better. I only had any kind of useful grasp on about half of the paper. I could just about remember the practice essay we’d written on Fogg’s Spacio-Temporal Model, as an explanation for Acceleration Magic, so I managed to pull back a few marks on that. I just about managed to recall the information on how magic energy was able to absorb and release heat energy, thanks to some research I’d already done on how my own ice magic worked. But then there were questions about the particles in mana atoms were structured. And the questions about how specific forms of magic that I’d never actually seen used by anyone used magic energy to do whatever the hell they actually did. And the questions about every other seemingly illogical, impossible, random behaviour that somewhere down the line magic had arbitrarily decided it wanted to use to connect two completely unconnected things. Also, I had that song stuck in my head again. Perfect.
I leafed through my paper, swearing under my breath at every unanswered question. I’d left about three in total, including one of the essay questions, and I was kicking myself for it, but there wasn’t really anything I could do. I closed the paper and leaned back in my chair.
It’s not going to be good enough… I’d be surprised if you got any right at all… You might as well not bother with the other paper…
The voices whispered in my head. To be fair, I didn’t altogether disagree with them. I had seriously messed it up, and I wasn’t even surprised. I stared at the clock at the front of the room as the last few minutes ticked away.
“Please put your pens down, the exam is now over,” The invigilator mercifully announced. I breathed a sigh of relief as I waited for my row to be called away.
When I walked back into the library to pick up my bag, August was sitting at the table staring at her own notes.
“Hey.” I balanced on the edge of the seat next to her. August looked up.
“Hey. How was the exam?” she asked as she looked back down at her notes.
“Yeah, not great… I’m going to have a hell of a time picking up the pieces in the second paper…” I groaned. “What about you?”
“I’m trying to cram last-minute, just to be safe.”
I looked down at the ocean of notes laid out on the table.
“Sociology, right?” I tried to remember what subjects she did.
“Kind of. Magical Socio-Politics. It’s all about how Magical society is structured. I really should know more about it, given who my father is… It’s interesting, but there’s a lot to remember,” she explained. “Not as bad as Advanced Magic Physics though…”
“Hey, I came in late. They put me in where they could…”
August laughed.
“I know, I know… Anyway, I’m sure it didn’t go as badly as you think it did. You’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, maybe…” I sighed. “Anyway, I’m gonna go get something to eat. I’ll see you later.” I stood up and picked up my bag. “Good luck!” I called back as I walked out of the library.
*
“So, how did it go!” Mary enthusiastically asked as I walked into her and Raven’s room.
“Disaster…” I groaned as I put my bag down. “But, it’s done now. Nothing I can do to change it.”
“You just need to focus on what’s next. Beginner’s Magic, right?” Raven asked as she walked into the kitchen with a pile of washing up in her arms.
“Yup… Not as hard as AMP, but still not a lot of fun.”
“All you need to remember is the differences between Source and Arts magic, probably a few of the common gestures that we use, and a couple of bits that you already covered in AMP. Then it’s just matching spells with effects,” Mary reminded me. “You totally know all of this. We’ve gone over it enough that something must have sunk in.”
“Let’s hope so… I guess it can’t go as bad as the AMP…” I supposed as I pulled the textbook out of my bag. “One down, two to go…”
*
I made a point of doing everything you were supposed to do on the morning of an exam. Mum actually brought bread for once, so I threw myself together some good old-fashioned toast for breakfast. I got up at a decent time, and even had a decent night’s sleep the day before. Mum was on a later shift at work, so she went over some flash cards I’d made to remember some of the spells I needed to remember. That was especially reassuring, actually. Mum had absolutely no idea whatsoever about how magic worked, but she still pushed through, making sure I could match spell to effect without actually knowing what any of it meant. I actually managed to leave the house feeling at least somewhat prepared for the next exam.
Mary had her first exams that morning, so I had to make my final preparations for the Beginner’s Magic exam on my own. I went over the notes again, tested myself with the flash cards, and loaded myself up with way too much coffee. Until I had to make my way to the library again.
Matt and August were already in the library, staring at their own notes.
“Morning…” I sighed as I sat down and got my own notes out. “So, are you guys doing any better than me?”
“I just need to focus on this last couple of pages…” August mumbled as she speed-read through the textbook. I looked at Matt.
“She’s pretty focused, huh?” I questioned. Matt nodded.
“She’s just trying to remember the more complicated spells. She’s pretty sucked in…”
“I mean, I can’t say I don’t sympathise… There’s just so many spells…” I groaned.
“At least we don’t have to actually cast anything fo
r this. Practicing for my Geomancy practical is killing me…”
“You’ll do fine.”
“Good morning, everyone.” Artemis walked in and stood at the front of the library. I slipped into an empty chair and dropped my bag on the ground. “Today you will be completing the end-of-year exam for your Beginner’s Magic course. It will last two hours, and consist of three sections: Basic magic theory, spell construction, and spell identification. Each section should take you around forty minutes, so make sure to focus on your timings.” Her monologue was rehearsed, and it was clear that she was used to giving the speech. “Now, now that that’s all out of the way…” Her voice became gentler, more like her normal self. “I want to say that I know this year, especially the second half of the year, has been tough for all of us. This school has been through a lot, and I wanted to say that I am proud of all of you. You’ve worked hard, despite everything that’s happened, and I have no doubt that it will pay off.” she reassured us. “I wish the best of luck to all of you.” she smiled as she gave way to the school’s examinations officer to herd us into the exam hall.
I sat down at my desk, this time closer to the middle of the room, and slowly opened the first page of the Beginner’s Magic paper. At the top, in bold, SECTION A: Basic Magic Theory. I looked at the first question. It wanted the technical definition of magic. At least that was a few marks I could be confident on. Most of the first section could have been worse. Some of it overlapped with AMP anyway, and the rest of it I just about managed to remember, more or less. I definitely wasn’t going to get 100%, but I was feeling better than I had expected.
The second section started to get a bit harder. As opposed to the more general nature of the first section, the second part of the exam focused on the more specific, individual parts of spell construction, and that was a lot harder to bullshit my way through. The key point was that the majority of spell constructions involved hand gestures that, for the most part, could be broken down into specific descriptions. However, as should be obvious by now, I never was the best at describing spells. So, the second part of the test was mostly guesswork. Which never went well.
The Arch Stone: Foxway Academy: Book 1 Page 30
