by Cecilia Tan
Alex picked up a tray from a cart and Kyle said, “So magic users drink soda?”
“And whatever else we can get our hands on. We’re supplied by the same food service as the rest of the college.” Alex led him to the large crocks of soup, hot entrees, and fresh-baked bread. Kyle read the labels on the crocks. New England Clam Chowder and Vegetarian Tortilla Soup. He ladled himself out some chowder, then followed Alex into the kitchen-y area.
The chef was behind a high divider so they could only see him from the shoulders up, but Alex seemed to have engaged the man in an animated conversation. “Yeah, so that’s why I don’t eat poultry,” he was saying to the chef.
“Well, eat the pasta, then,” the man answered, gesturing with a pair of tongs toward the serving counter. “There’s a ham, peas, and asparagus topping for it, or red sauce. Or just butter, if your delicate constitution can’t handle anything more.”
“Ohh, you are cold. Is there grated cheese? Ah, I see it. I’m all set then.” Alex gave the man a quick salute, then proceeded to serve himself ziti with red sauce and smother the entire plate in grated cheese. He popped the plate into a microwave oven.
Kyle finally saw the sign that listed the three lunch entrees and ended up getting a chicken cutlet from the chef, along with a little pasta and the ham and peas. Alex pulled the plate out carefully with two napkins as improvised potholders, and the two of them went to sit down in the main room next to a boy Alex introduced as Michael Candlin.
Michael had large round eyes and large round glasses to match. The food on his tray seemed to be entirely cold cuts and little cubes of cheese, and he was eating them one after the other with a fork. “Pleased to meet you. Wadsworth, was it? Any relation?”
“Um, yeah, sort of distant, but here I am.” Kyle sat down and spooned up some soup. “My first day here, actually.”
“Oh? A late arrival?”
Alex answered. “You could say that.” He glanced at Kyle as if for permission to say more. Kyle just shrugged. “Kyle here didn’t know until yesterday he was magical.”
Michael’s eyes got rounder and he seemed to hunch down in his seat. “That hasn’t happened in a while.”
“Not since I’ve been here, anyway,” Alex replied. “Jess said the bell was ringing for him.”
“Indeed? So, then, Kyle, what’s your talent?”
Kyle had just slurped up some soup and found it nearly too hot to eat. He nearly dropped the spoon. “Oh, um, I don’t know yet.”
“Curious. Usually people show some weirdness by your age.”
“Weirdness?”
“You know, speaking in tongues, or extraordinary luck or intuition, or understanding what animals say, or calling down lightning, or being struck by it but not killed...”
“No, no, nothing like that.” Kyle shrugged. “As far as I can tell the only magical thing I’ve ever done was walk into the admission office in Peyntree Hall, sign the book, and apparently make the bell ring.”
“Interesting,” Michael said, and watched Kyle eat for a bit, as if Kyle were a fascinatingly interesting animal.
“We figure ol’ Finch will probably have some test for him or something. Or maybe we just have to wait and see how he does.” Alex was eating his pasta with such enthusiasm that Kyle was glad none of them was wearing a white shirt.
Kyle returned his attention to his food for a few minutes, then looked up when someone else approached the table. Two girls sat across from them and started chattering to Alex immediately. Before he could get the girls’ names, another student came up to them, a pale-skinned boy with black hair. Kyle just stared as the newcomer slid his hands over Michael’s shoulders and Michael tilted his face upward for a quick kiss of greeting.
They made almost a matched pair, though Michael’s cheeks were a little rosier and his hair like straight silk, while the other’s curled in small black tendrils. “Who’s your new friend?”
Michael kept looking up at his friend. Boyfriend, Kyle corrected in his mind. “His name is Kyle Wadsworth. Seems to be a bit of a late bloomer.”
The newcomer extended a hand to Kyle, who shook it. “Frost. Timothy Frost.” Had his hand felt cooler than Kyle expected? Or was it— “Frost, like...”
“Robert Frost, yes. Hmm, Wadsworth, eh?”
Michael shook his head and spoke as if he’d just read Frost’s mind. “He hasn’t been assigned a house yet. Or shown any aptitudes.”
“That is curious,” Frost said, moving away from Michael and taking the empty seat on the other side of Kyle. “No party tricks? No visions?”
Kyle opened his mouth to say “No, I...” then stared in disbelief as Frost snapped his fingers and a few fronds of some kind of plant appeared in the palm of his hand. He opened Kyle’s limp hand and dropped them into his palm.
“You seem less than impressed?” Frost’s eyes were ice blue.
“I, um, I’ve never seen anything like that before...?” Kyle stammered.
“Not a botanist either, I would guess,” Frost said with a sniff. He snapped his fingers again and Kyle jumped as the long fuzzy flowers in his hand suddenly developed ice crystals.
“How did you do that?” Kyle said, too amazed to worry about the sneer Frost was giving him.
“He invoked his Name,” Alex said, glaring daggers at Frost. “Yeah, I’d call that one a party trick, Frost.”
Frost shrugged. “I’ll always be able to prove who I am though, won’t I? Put your eyes back in your head, Wadsworth. If they fall on the floor, they’ll get dusty.”
“How many times did the bell ring for you, Frost? Once?” Alex said, a toothy smile on his face.
Frost’s pale cheeks reddened, but he didn’t say anything in return. He just stood smoothly and returned to standing behind Michael’s chair, running his hand over Michael’s smooth dark hair possessively.
Michael looked up at him again. “Fourteen,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“According to Kimble, anyway.”
Frost’s eyes narrowed. “The cards will decide,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll see you later, darling.” They exchanged another very quick kiss, then Frost left.
The two girls were glaring daggers at his back as he went and Kyle felt a bit better. “Honestly, Michael, I don’t know what you see in him,” one of them said.
Michael shrugged. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Apparently not. But really, fourteen? Kyle, that’s amazing.” She had wavy red hair with blond highlights and reached across the table to shake his hand. “My name’s Marigold, but I can’t make marigolds come out of my ass,” she said with a last glance toward the exit.
“I’m Kate,” said the other. She had her straight brown hair pulled back in a pony tail. “Fourteen, hmm?”
“So they tell me,” Kyle said. “I wasn’t counting at the time.”
“Isn’t there something about fourteen?...Hmm.” Kate got up quickly. “I think there is...”
Alex watched her hurry into the room with all the books, then disappear from sight. “Well, you just shot her afternoon, Kyle.”
“What?”
“She’s going to spend hours now trying to look up the reference she’s trying to remember. Happens a lot here at Scipionis House.”
“Ah.” The bookworms, right. Kyle was still staring at the flowers in his hand, though the frost had melted to beads of water now. He set them down on his tray. “So that was...that was real magic? Or was it a sleight of hand?”
Alex shrugged. “Who knows for sure? A great magician never reveals his secrets.”
Michael made a noise. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you call him great.”
“That was sarcasm, Mike,” Alex said, rolling his eyes. “You really ought to dump him.”
Michael pursed his lips. “I like him just fine. He’s perfectly nice to me. Maybe if you didn’t bait him all the time, he’d be nicer to you, too.”
“Not too likely,” said Marigold with a snort. “Oh
, here comes Kate again, with Master Lester!”
Kyle turned to see the girl returning with someone rather professorial in tow. He was even wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches, had a tuft of gray hair atop his head, and a pipe, though it was unlit. She was relating to him, from what Kyle could hear, the story of how Kyle had ended up at Veritas.
“Hmm, well, yes, you’re right, there is a line about fourteen heralds in the prophecy, but well, hmm.” The man walked up to Kyle, who got to his feet. “The prophecy,” the professor said, “goes like this:
“One will come from land and one will come from sea
And fourteen shall herald when first they lay eyes…
“You may have noticed though, Kate, that it doesn’t say fourteen of what. Now the translation from the original Avestan to Magian dialect may be faulty, but it’s largely assumed that the ‘fourteen heralds’ referred to here are fourteen angelic beings. Fourteen tolls of the bell, though, yes, it could be.” The man coughed. “And you say your name is Kyle? How interesting then, that relates to another couplet in a few lines later:
“The jasmine will meet the fairest flower of the field
And the narrows will be plied by the spirits beholden…
“Kyle, after all, being Scottish for ‘narrows’ or ‘strait,’ you see.”
Kate beamed. “And what do you make of the fact that Frost just gave him a handful of flowers of the field, Master Lester?”
The man burst into hearty laughter. “Oh! As for that, my dear girl, well, I suppose you may count it if you want, but most interpretations of the ‘flowers of the field’ give it a much grislier meaning, usually referring to the stain of blood on the ground under each fallen soldier. But well, I suppose, a literal interpretation, how novel! Yes, must think about that. Thank you, my dear.”
And with that, Master Lester turned and left the room.
“Kate’s doing a semester project on prophecy interpretation,” Marigold stage-whispered to Kyle. “It’s kind of like literary criticism, only...”
“Only even more bullshitting,” Alex finished.
Kate sat back down and stuck her tongue out at him. “At least I’m going to do my junior project.”
Alex waved a hand. “Yeah, well, what’s the rush? When I find the right topic, I’ll go for it. I’m wasting everyone’s time until I figure out what I want to do.”
“Yeah, right.” Kate got up with her cup in her hand and went to get a drink.
Marigold turned to Kyle and said earnestly, “You can basically take almost any of the old prophecies and, you know, between re-translation and metaphors and ambiguities, you can make it seem like they predict almost anything. Wars, assassinations, the weather...” She shrugged, but her eyes were quite serious. “That one Lester was quoting from, a series called the Avestan Prophecies, is about a kind of magical apocalypse, where we’d all disappear from the face of the Earth.”
“Like the Rapture,” Alex added.
“Rapture?” Kyle asked.
“You know, some Christians believe God is going to come down and judge everyone, then take those who are worthy off to Heaven? Right?” Alex said, looking around at the others for confirmation. “There was a church around here for a while putting up posters all over saying what the date and time was going to be, too. Then that day arrived and...”
“And?”
“Well, I don’t think anything happened. You don’t see those posters anymore, though.”
Michael pushed his glasses up his nose. “Maybe that’s because their God came and took them all away on that day.”
Alex laughed. “I suppose I can’t fault your logic there.”
Marigold shook her head. “Anyway, the Avestan Prophecies, the first cycle in it is one of the oldest and most famous, so no wonder Kate was all over it. But it’s also one of the least understood, worst translated, all that. Master Lester is one of the world authorities on it, though. They say he can recite the entire thing in like five languages.”
Alex yawned. “Yeah, cool. Anyway, gotta go.” He stood and Kyle followed. “See you all later.”
They made their way back out into the sunshine of a perfect late September afternoon. “All right, let’s see what else I can show you before you have to go to Finch’s office.”
Alex showed Kyle many interesting things that afternoon, but the memory that stayed with Kyle was of the stalks of timothy turning icy in his hand.
October
Song
When we came home across the hill
No leaves were fallen from the trees;
The gentle fingers of the breeze
Had torn no quivering cobweb down.
The hedgerow bloomed with flowers still,
No withered petals lay beneath;
But the wild roses in your wreath
Were faded, and the leaves were brown.
T. S. Eliot, published in The Harvard Advocate when he was a student, around 1907
Kyle sat on the high stone bench outside Robinson Hall looking at the poem in his lap. Each time he read it, his mind seemed to go blank at the end. What was he supposed to say about this poem? It’s sad. Resigned. There’s an inevitability about it.That was about all he had come up with, and any half-wit could say those things.
There were probably all sorts of magical metaphors and meanings lurking within, of course, but he didn’t know what they were. Was the wreath special in some way? Was that a reference to a pagan ritual, maybe? Or was it the sort of wreath put on a door rather than worn on the head? Well, no, “your” wreath...it definitely had to be the kind that was worn on the head.
Class was due to start in twenty minutes and he still didn’t have anything prepared.
It didn’t help that Frost was in this class, too. Frost seemed to know everything there was to know about poets and poetry. At least this one was a magical class. Kyle’s other literature class, the one on actually writing poetry, was all mundane students, most of whom wrote truly awful poetry, too. At least in that class, he seemed to be doing well.
His other two classes were both magical: Introduction to Alchemy, and Soothsaying Practices in the English-Speaking World. He was barely keeping his head above water in them, but at least he had plenty of help. Jeanie Kwan was in the Soothsaying class and was happy to help him with it. She seemed to think the course was a gut, an easy A, and Kyle remembered how confident she had been that first night when Alex had done the Tarot reading for him. And Randall always had advice on Alchemy, as did just about everyone.
Life would have been easier, of course, if he’d just stayed at Camella House, where all his friends were. But fate hadn’t dealt him that card.
It had dealt him the Ace of Swords.
He had gone to Madeleine Finch’s office that Saturday as he’d been instructed. Her office had a much taller ceiling than he’d expected, and the windows were all set high near the ceiling, perhaps creating an optical illusion that the ceiling was higher than it actually was? She had set him without preamble into the green leather chair in front of her desk and handed him a pack of cards. “Best get this part over with,” she said, as if she didn’t have much enthusiasm for the process.
The backs of her cards had intricate designs and they were larger than regular playing cards. He shuffled them clumsily in his hands, then decided he’d best not go on with that too long or he might drop them all over the floor. He neatened the stack and turned up the top card.
A figure was painted there, white skin glowing as if in moonlight and black hair a bit wild, as if blown by the wind off the moor. Blue eyes stared past the sword he had upraised, directly at Kyle. “That looks a lot like Timothy Frost,” he said.
Ms. Finch let out a huff of breath. “Indeed. And there’s no question, the Ace of Swords means Gladius House for you. I’ll let Dean Bell and Master Brandish know.” She took a seat behind her desk and brought a computer screen to life. Its glow gave her glasses a bluish cast. Kyle blinked. He hadn’t even noticed the computer befo
re and it looked out of place now that he had. She tapped on the keys, then looked up at him. “You seem surprised to see we use e-mail.”
“Oh, um, I guess so.”
“Where we can, we’ve adopted the best system we can either for purposes of camouflage, or efficiency. We had magical means of instant communication long before the non-magical population did. But magic of any kind requires energy...well, so does e-mail, but it comes out of the plug on the wall and the university pays the bill. Trust me, e-mail is better than a magic mirror.” She tapped on a few more keys and examined the screen.
“Now, I’ve spoken to a few people about fitting you into their classes, and honestly your choices may be a bit limited, both by your lack of prior knowledge and the fact that the semester is already three weeks old. I’ve also spoken to Admissions and it would appear you will be required to finish a year of English in order to receive your high school diploma, which they will require.”
Kyle tried not to fidget as she looked at him. “Um, the others were saying it might be helpful if I told you what my aptitudes are.”
“Indeed,” she said. “And what are they?”
“Well, that’s the problem. I seem to be a late bloomer.”
“Ah. Yes, I suppose it would be too easy if you just waltzed in already an accomplished Seer or obvious prodigy in Enchantment.” She tapped a few more keys and the sound of a printer coming to life whined in his ears. She stood and turned to get a page coming out of the printer behind her. “Here, have a look at this list. The simplest form of Soothsaying for us here is probably for you to pick out what looks most interesting for you, and let’s hope you don’t pick too many things that meet at the same time.”
Thus he’d chosen his three magical classes, including Poetry: Analysis and Interpretation Through the Ages, and one regular English, in poetry writing. Ms. Finch thought maybe that was too much poetry, but it worked in the schedule and made Admissions happy, so she approved his schedule.
