by Tasha Black
If a spell like that existed, then healing my brother should be easy by comparison.
It occurred to me that maybe there was some way I could lay my hands on a healing spell today. Even if I couldn’t learn to use it right away, if I learned it before I left the school, then I could work on it from Luke’s place. I would have nothing else to do.
Suddenly, surrendering to the bond didn’t seem completely hopeless.
I had only one day. But I was going to use it to change everything.
26
Bella
A light mist clung to the emerald grass of the athletic lawn. Some of it was the haze that always floated around the campus. But a lot of it was from our Magical Combat exercise.
Looking around the group was like watching a scene from a movie, even the lighting seemed dramatic. The statues that marked the bounds of the combat area all bore dour expressions and faced inward to where Eve paced and lectured, as if they were listening intently. The gathered students were just as serious. The only difference was that the statues wore white marble togas, while the student were all clad in the signature Primrose Academy green gowns.
I was eager to learn, but the spell that tied me to Luke had me distracted and desperate. All I could think about was his eyes, his hands, the reassuring throb of his heartbeat, and the endless hours between now and tonight when I could be with him again.
I had been right this morning when I felt my attempts to deny the bond were hopeless. I didn’t have the discipline to study magic when his magic broke my concentration at every turn.
It was probably the reason every witch from Primrose Academy accepted her bond and left. It wouldn’t be hard to convince a woman to leave school if she was too tortured to learn anything anyway.
“Never mind, Bella,” Eve said sharply, snapping me out of my thoughts.
I gaped at her. Had she really asked me a question and I hadn’t noticed or answered? The group tittered at me for the fourth time so far today. I couldn’t even blame them. Before I could even formulate a half-hearted apology, she moved on.
“Let’s try someone else. Putting up a smoke screen is the magical equivalent to what, Esme?” Eve asked the witch with the golden curls on the opposite side of the circle.
“A rape whistle?” Esme giggled.
The others laughed too.
“That’s actually fairly accurate,” Eve said, eyebrows raised. “The smoke screen will provide a distraction, allowing you to escape a situation you can’t handle. It can also alert nearby witches that you need help. Some of you are having trouble with this exercise because you’re treating it like an attack. A smoke screen requires a light touch. Again.”
I closed my eyes and tried to picture plumes of smoke sliding from my fingertips. The way Eve did it made it seem effortless.
But when I repeated the words, there was nothing but a splutter of mist emitting from my thumbs.
The field was growing cloudy again. Across the circle Esme released a cloud of pretty pink smoke.
“Nice work, Esme,” Eve said approvingly.
I still hadn’t learned her last name. To the students, she was simply Eve.
Beside me, Cori was concentrating so hard her cheeks were red.
“Let’s have someone come up and give an example,” Eve said.
A dozen hands shot up.
“Cori,” Eve said, glancing at my roommate.
I could actually feel Cori’s spirit sink.
Cori struggled enough with her magic that she was still studying combat with the first-years. She had a natural gift with weather magic, which was very powerful and notoriously hard to control, according to Anya. But none of the professors cut Cori any slack. She was always having to redo assignments, go in early, and practice over and over to make up for her mistakes.
Cori ran a hand through her curls and headed to the center of the circle.
The other students backed up to the edges of the green circle right away. I figured she must have a track record for mistakes in Combat class, just like everywhere else.
Cori lifted her hands, palms up, and closed her eyes in concentration.
The breeze picked up a little, lifting her curls so that she looked like a heroine in a Jane Austen movie on BBC.
Her lips pursed slightly as a thin line of smoke slid out of her index finger, then another from her thumb.
We collectively held our breath and watched both hands issue plumes of slate-gray smoke.
Cori was doing it, really doing it. This was a textbook performance of the exercise, and I was bursting with pride for her.
What happened next was hard to follow.
At first it looked like the smoke was thickening, circling and jamming into an ice cream-like swirl.
The first tiny flash of lighting inside the handful of fog was a pretty surprise.
The second, larger one was accompanied by a slight crash as it hit the grass at Cori’s feet, and we all realized that instead of a smoke screen, Cori had created a storm cloud.
“That’s enough, Cori,” Eve called out loudly.
But Cori’s face was smooth and calm now, her eyes focused on something far away, as if she were no longer present in her body.
The thunderstorm in her hands ballooned outward, sprinkling anyone within a ten-foot radius of her with a small, but driving rain. Several students squealed and scrambled out of the way.
“Smoke screen, Cori, not thundercloud,” Eve called out, striding over to try to put a stop to it.
Cori blinked as if waking up and lifted her hands slightly.
At just that moment a bolt of jagged lightning blasted out of her hands, hitting a statue of an archer on the edge of the circle.
Amazingly, the statue wasn’t harmed, but instead blinked to life. He lowered his bow and arrow, and looked around at all of us in confusion as we stared up at him.
There was just enough time for him to take a breath and open his mouth as if to speak, before he turned to stone once more.
For one golden instant, we all caught our breath.
Then the statue toppled over, his body position no longer balanced in the way the sculptor had intended.
After that, everything seemed to go in slow motion.
My eyes traced the trajectory of the falling statue to Esme’s head below, but there was no way for me to get to her in time to do anything about it.
Eve flew across the circle, moving faster than I would have thought possible, muttering the words of a spell as she did.
Esme barely managed to raise her arms over her head as the statue fell.
A gust of air moved past us all, rustling our skirts and playing in our hair, and somehow halting the fall of the statue long enough for Esme to move out of the way, but not before the archer’s stone arrow made contact with her outstretched arm.
Eve released her spell and the statue hit the grass with a resounding thud as it cracked into two pieces.
“My arm,” Esme yelled dramatically, as her friends gathered around her. “That thing almost killed me.”
I looked over to see if Cori was okay, but she was already running back toward the school, sobbing.
I moved as if to go after her.
“Stay, Bella,” Eve commanded. “Let her be.”
I stepped back, sorry that I had to leave my friend, but unwilling to argue. I was in enough hot water already with being so distracted all day.
“Okay, let’s see this injury,” Eve said, striding over to Esme with a dubious expression.
The other girls stepped back to reveal Esme, sitting on the ground with her dress arranged becomingly around her, clutching the nasty-looking cut on her forearm.
“It’s going to scar,” she moaned. “How can I be forced to take classes with an out-of-control gutter witch who is allowed to put an ugly scar on me without punishment?”
“If you’re worried about ugliness, you might want to watch your mouth, Esme,” Eve said sharply as she snatched a scarf from the neck of one of the
onlookers and wrapped it tightly around the wounded arm. “We don’t use those slurs here. I’m going to the library for a healing book. Try not to start a war, or any more rumors, while I’m gone.”
The group went silent.
“What’s a gutter witch?” I asked Anya quietly, although I had a pretty good idea from context that it wasn’t anything good.
“It’s not a real thing,” she said firmly. “Just a stupid name some of the legacies have for those of us whose parents didn’t attend a magical academy.”
“How nice,” I said. “Is Cori going to be okay?”
As a fellow target of the mean-girl contingent of Primrose Academy, I felt for her. At least I didn’t have to put up with it for much longer.
“Of course,” Anya said. “She’ll just cry it out in the storage room next to the library like she always does. She doesn’t believe me, but I keep telling her that even though she’s struggling more now, she’s going to be more powerful than anyone else in class later. It’s totally worth it.”
I nodded, but inwardly wasn’t so sure that Cori wanted to be all that powerful. She was such a kind and caring soul. The power to use weather as a weapon didn’t seem to suit her. She was more the type that would use her magic to keep it from raining on someone’s picnic.
A few minutes later, Eve returned with a leather-bound volume in her hand. She marched over to Esme and paged through it as she stood before her.
Even from across the circle, I could feel the power of the thing. The only book in the library I’d handled that had that kind of force was the one with the raven inscribed on its cover. And that was only when I actually touched it. This book must be in a whole different league if I was picking up on it from so far away.
“What is that?” I asked Anya.
“It must be a book from the vault, or she wouldn’t have gone for it herself,” Anya said. “The more powerful healing tomes are kept in the tree.”
“Lucky, Esme,” I thought out loud.
“Uh, I guess so,” Anya said. “It probably would have been luckier not to get hit by a falling statue.”
We all watched silently as Eve read from the book. A soft light seemed to glow from its pages.
She leaned over Esme, one palm upraised, murmuring softly. The glow moved from the book into the instructor’s hand and then slid in a glimmering beam to caress Esme’s forearm.
Esme gasped and closed her eyes.
A moment later it was over. Eve unwrapped the makeshift bandage, revealing perfect skin beneath.
“Perfect,” she said, straightening and heading back toward the school. “Class dismissed.”
“You’re just as pretty as ever, Esme,” Dozie assured her friend.
“If we could make what’s inside her that pretty, we’d be in business,” Eve muttered as she walked past Anya and me, just loud enough for us to hear.
Anya hid her smile behind her hand.
“Oh, Eve, wait,” I called out. “Please.”
She turned to me. “What is it?”
“I have, um, a private question,” I said. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“Sure,” she said.
Anya gave me a look as if she were offering to stay.
I shook my head. There was no need for her to be here. And Eve was probably more likely to help if it was just the two of us.
27
Bella
“Bella, if this is about the mate bond,” Eve said as soon as all of the other students were out of earshot. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.”
“It’s not,” I told her. “I understand that it’s important for me to fulfill the school’s obligation. I’ve come to terms with it.”
“You have, eh?” she asked me, arching a brow. “That guardian must have been very… convincing.”
I felt my whole face turn red.
“Anyway,” I said, “I understand that I can’t keep attending school. But I came here for a reason. I need to help my brother.”
“What kind of trouble is he in?” Eve asked, sitting on a stone bench near the broken statue, placing the book down carefully beside her.
“My brother was in a bad car accident,” I said carefully. “He can’t walk now. I want to heal him.”
“And you’re hoping I can do a healing spell on him,” Eve guessed.
“Or that you can teach me to do it so I can help him myself,” I said quickly. “I’m sure Luke would let me go home for a day—”
“—I’m going to stop you right there,” Eve said. “I don’t know a spell that could fix someone in that condition.”
“Is there someone else at the school maybe?” I began.
“Combat and healing are two sides of the same coin,” she said gently. “There is no better healer at the school than I am.”
“But this is the only reason I came here,” I moaned. “When we met, you said the best witches could hold back death.”
“Oh dear,” Eve said, running a hand through her dark hair. “Let me explain some things to you.”
“I’m listening.”
But my head was already buzzing. If I couldn’t help Jon, then what the hell was I even doing?
“Our magic comes at a price, Bella, did you know that?” she asked.
“Professor Sora talked about it on my first day,” I said, nodding.
“Then you can see that while it is theoretically possible for a witch to hold back death,” she went on, “or even do the extremely complicated sort of magic it would take to bring movement back to your brother’s limbs, the practical cost of it would be too great. Magic like that hasn’t been used in the world in hundreds of years.”
“You mean the Raven King?” I asked. “The other side of the veil and all that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“The graffiti on the fountain says he’s coming back,” I pointed out.
“Bella, I don’t want to disappoint you, but there have been rumors that the Raven King was coming back ever since he disappeared,” Eve said. “The truth is that if you studied for your whole life, building up dedicated, disciplined magic without ever using it, you might be able to help your brother. But even then, it wouldn’t be a sure thing.”
I didn’t have a lifetime. I had a day. I felt my chest tighten.
“And even if you did have the power to do it, Bella, it would be extremely dangerous,” she said. “Fiddling about with someone’s spine isn’t like closing a fresh cut on an otherwise healthy young woman’s arm. The tiniest miscalculation could kill him. It could even kill you.”
I looked down at my hands. They went blurry from my unshed tears. It was over. I had ruined my brother’s life and I officially couldn’t help him.
Unless…
“Are there things I could do to make him more comfortable?” I asked her. “What can I do for my brother?”
“That’s a fantastic question, Bella,” Eve said, hopping up and pacing around the garden to think.
While she mused, listing out different charms that could possibly ease pain and suffering, I went into action.
I locked my fingers around one of the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on my school gown and tugged hard, coughing to cover the sound of it popping off the fabric.
It was tiny, but it was all I had. Hopefully, she wouldn’t notice. And hopefully it would stay in place.
The next time she turned her back to me, I slipped the button into the binding of the book and brought my hands back to my lap as swiftly as I could.
28
Bella
I made it until late afternoon somehow, dreaming my way through lunch and a lecture on water magic, then pacing the halls once everyone else went to do homework.
Anya and Cori exchanged sympathetic glances, but let me be. They probably assumed I was nervous about the claiming that would surely happen tonight.
And they weren’t wrong. I was distracted with thoughts of Luke. But I had a task to complete before I saw him again. A task that could let me have my cake
and eat it too, if I played my cards right.
When the sun began to sink, I headed toward the library, my backpack packed, wondering how I was going to pull this off.
Just inside the double doors, Nina was organizing a stack of slim, cloth-bound volumes on the glass surface of one of the cupboards.
“Hey Nina, you aren’t the only one on duty, are you?” I asked her.
“Sure am,” she said. “The others left early since there’s a staff meeting tonight. Did you come to keep me company?”
“I came to tell you that Anya was just looking for you,” I lied. “Want me to keep an eye on the place while you go chat with her?”
“I’ll go see her after my shift,” Nina said. “Unless you think it’s urgent?”
“She did seem kind of upset,” I confided. “Go ahead, I’d feel better if you did. And I seriously have nothing to do.”
“Really?” Nina asked.
“Of course,” I told her, feeling rotten. “Glad to help.”
“You’re a life saver,” she told me as she jogged out of the room.
Okay.
Okay, okay, okay.
I had maybe ten minutes to get the book and get out of here before Nina came back wondering why I had lied to her.
I opened my backpack and pulled out the school gown I had been wearing this morning.
Professor Batts had told us that the parts of a thing want to come together to form the whole. I had failed at nearly every spell I had attempted. But this was my last shot. And it sounded like the subjects of my spell would be inclined for it to work too.
I held the gown out in front of me and approached the mighty oak at the center of the library, murmuring the words of the spell.
At first nothing happened.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to breathe slowly. I pictured the dress and the button, back together again. It had seemed so easy when Lark put the pieces of her ring back together.
I spoke the words once more, slowly and clearly.
