The little war orphan, no older than four, looked up at the woman. Eyes, the color of a rich blue dye, darkened in thought. Still, she sat quietly while the woman persisted. “You will make sure she is not harmed or discovered. Your life depends on it.”
Discovered? Verna closed her eyes. The unease that had plagued her raised its shapeless form, pleading with her to object. When she felt she had control again, she opened her eyes to look at the child—so innocent. “Yes.”
The woman—whose name was barred from Verna’s mind—motioned for the child to leave her side. But the girl pulled on the woman’s shredded black cloak and looked up into her eyes with a desperate sort of grin before offering up her arms, wishing to be held. The woman pushed the child away one last time with more force, a tear twinkling on her soiled cheek. The little girl stomped over to Verna, the grin replaced by a straight line and a piercing blue glare.
The woman breathed into her fingertips and whispered incoherent words, a dark glow illuminating the lobby. Verna’s left eye twitched. She fought too hard against the incantation. Gasping, the fog lifted from Verna’s mind. Words were a struggle; she wanted to ask so many questions, but only one made it to her lips. “What’s her name?”
The woman, who had stood in front of the lobby’s window, turned. Tears had made two clean lines down her otherwise dirty cheeks. “Delilah,” she said in a hoarse voice. She had teleported and gone in the time it took Verna to blink, the truth about the child implanted in her mind.
Gripping the thin file in her hands, Verna slowly shakes her head. How can it be that fourteen years have passed? She hardly recognizes the small portrait of Lilah in the file compared to the young woman who Verna knows today. “Oh my. What would the truth do to you?” she muses solemnly. But her mind won’t let the thought go.
Verna comes out of her reverie as the knob of her door turns. Damn. I thought I had more time before Director Shannon would be in the office. “Director Shannon, I have those files right here for—” Before Verna finishes her sentence, a stranger ducks into her small office, shuts the door, strides over to Verna’s desk, and exposes a dagger, at least ten inches in length.
The Warrior smiles and gazes at Verna with a wily grin. “Hello, Mother. I need a favor.”
Heart pounding in her chest, Verna’s lungs spasm, and she wheezes. “Charlotte?” she says, breathless. No trace of Charlotte’s green eyes nor her cherry brown hair remains, but Verna knows it is her daughter beneath the wide, gray eyes and high cheek bones of the transfiguration incantation, just as surely as she knows her own two hands and their infinite intricacies. “My child?” But as soon as the words drop from her lips, she knows this is not the child that she mourned the loss of years ago.
When the Sisters’ War was ending, the only remaining Lux recovery team disappeared. Thirty people had been sent into a burned and pillaged town to seek any living and to bury any dead. Many in the recovery team were newly graduated youths, volunteering in the war they grew up in, among them eighteen-year-old Charlotte. There was a large group of parents who disagreed with the graduates being used in the war, partly seeing the effort as pointless—no survivors were ever found after battles—and partly not wanting to lose any more of their quickly diminishing numbers. They were dispatched anyways, the best students of healers, pathfinders, among others.
Where could thirty disappear? At first, it was thought they were killed because later when pathfinders—those with the ability to find targets after having touched something they owned or the target themselves or blood—searched the area, they found nothing. Even after performing several locating spells, the results came back jumbled and senseless. No bodies were ever found. There was no evidence of a struggle. It was as if they’d flown away, a ludicrous idea, but stranger things had happened.
“Yes, who else would call you ‘mother?’” Charlotte sighs, and the masquerade ends. Verna watches as Charlotte’s skin and hair—the very structure of her body, too—change in a breath. On Verna’s next inhale, it is her daughter’s form grinning back at her.
Something in the way Charlotte speaks makes Verna doubt that this is her daughter. It makes her yearn to hear from the little girl who begged for a piece of chocolate, fully aware that the plea would work. But this woman is not that daughter. This Charlotte is not innocent. The daughter that Verna knew died that day, thirteen years ago.
With renewed fear, Verna watches the woman in front of her, wondering if she plans on using the dagger in her hands. What have you become? Charlotte is the image of her father, a man who Verna hates still, even though he’s long since dead.
She was thirty-seven and given the assignment—by Director Shannon, who at the time was only assistant director—to visit another orphanage that was just being established in a poorer city on the border of Lux and Nox territory. Verna was to assist them in the organization of a filing system, since she created the one for Littlewood, too. It was in that little city, whose name she’s somehow forgotten, that she would be assaulted.
Verna had read the reports. She knew that the city had a high crime rate—the reason the orphanage was being established in the first place—typical of cities on borderlands. She had listened as Assistant Director Shannon warned her again before she left, but none of it mattered in the end, despite taking precautions. When she arrived, the orphanage had been attacked, the children—three girls and one boy—had been killed and laid on the ground. Verna had never seen the dead. But it wouldn’t be the last time. She thought the murderer was gone but heard a loud ruckus come from a back room, then—
Verna blinks at her daughter, her breathing ragged. Cherry brown hair falls in delicate waves across her face. Her complexion is sickly, and her forehead beads with sweat. Charlotte’s almond-shaped evergreen eyes stare at her, filled with an ever-growing revulsion, just like her father’s when he raped Verna. A bulging four-inch scar outlines Charlotte’s upper left hairline and a faint one rests on the curve of her exposed left clavicle. Tiny lines etch the corners of her eyes, aging her beyond her thirty-one years—Verna never lost count, even after she had accepted her death. Charlotte wears black gear, the red insignia of conjoined twin women on her chest, and a dark cloak drapes her shoulders. Alessandra Hilt’s crest?
“I see I still disgust you.”
Verna looks down at her own hands where two signa give her limited abilities to protect others. When Charlotte’s innate skill of transfiguration became apparent as a child, Verna did not celebrate the discovery. It repulsed her to think she created a child with a notorious Nox ability. “Not all power comes from brutality, Charlotte.”
Her daughter purses her lips and waves her hand in the air, as if completely erasing Verna’s words. “I don’t care what you think. You are nothing to me”—a fragment of Verna’s heart shreds to bits—“I came to get intelligence from you.”
“And why do you think I would willingly give you anything when you wear that insignia, Charlotte?”
The Warrior looks side to side and then behind her for show. “Because I don’t see anyone here to stop me,” she pauses for a split second, perhaps to reconsider what she is about to say—or do, “and because you are my mother.” Charlotte wipes her mouth, as if saying the word makes her feel dirty.
“That’s more than nothing,” Verna says, her voice cold, but just beneath the surface, tears are ready to pour forth.
Charlotte growls and runs her tongue slowly over her plump lips. “I need all the files of the children acquired fourteen years ago.”
Verna swallows but finds her mouth dry. As sternly as possible, she says, “You will never get anything from me. Those children are under my protection.”
Shaking her head, Charlotte laughs softly. “You are a fool. I will get what I’ve come for. Our cause is too important to forsake, not when we’ve come this far. Her will is too strong to falter.”
“Her? Do you mean—” Without hesitation, Charlotte grabs Verna by the throat and sinks the dagger into her chest.
Verna’s last sight is Charlotte snatching the stack of files gathered neatly on her desk, among them, the one file she should have destroyed. Oh, Lilah. Forgive me.
Chapter Two
The old floorboards creak as Lilah walks down the long hallway to her room, the white walls begging for a sign of those who live here. Her door is the last in a line of bedrooms that make up the women’s dormitory. On this side of the academy, a large communal bathroom and a multitude of study rooms exist solely for the female students. The young men have the same kind of accommodations on the opposite side.
She opens her door and enters.
The walls are painted a crisp yellow, the same color of the light that cascades through the windows throughout the clever architecture of the academy. The room is square in shape, with a window opposite the door, a source of infinite distraction when Lilah studies at her desk. A bed with a plain red comforter sits just to the side of the window, while a white desk rests on the other.
“How’s your day been?” Alicia says, her voice high-pitched but smooth like running water.
“Mother of Aura, Alicia! You can’t do that to me!” Lilah swings herself around to where her friend stands laughing in the threshold of her door.
“I’m sorry . . . I forgot you had a date with Marcus.” Alicia bats her eyes dramatically.
Lilah laughs and looks down at the black brand, her angry skin fading to a dull pink. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why do they insist on punishing me in this way?”
Waterstone Academy, WA as many of the students call it, is where Lilah currently studies. It is the eighth academy she’s attended, since she started at the age of six, the normal age of admittance for all Nox children. WA is an academy for those in their last year of education, when the students are supposed to decide what they will do after their schooling. It is a time to eliminate choices, not a time to expand them. But instead of her paths falling away to reveal one, they seem to break away to create an impossible labyrinth of futures.
Lilah is determined to stay here the whole year, and it’s one of the reasons she’s allowed herself to make friends with Alicia. The past couple of years she has isolated herself, unwilling to even smile in the direction of her fellow students. She learned long ago that friends are the most treacherous of things and being alone made it easier for her when she eventually was expelled and had to start afresh somewhere new. Having friends only brought pain, to either Lilah or the other. As she got older and her innate skills as a warrior accelerated exponentially, the attention she received from instructors made anyone she might have befriended turn against her, seized by their own jealousy.
The other reason lies inside the seed for kindness Verna planted within her. Perhaps it is only because this stranger grows that she is now aware of another, more sinister force maturing, too, a faceless thing haunting her anima.
This year must be different. She must do it for Verna.
Waterstone Academy is located in the northern Nox territory next to a great lake. Lilah can look out from the front steps, turn, and see the passive pale blue waves mirror the sky. Often, she runs along the shore and imagines jumping into the waters, but it is forbidden. Across the lake is Lux territory and the water is lawless.
The tall stone buildings of WA have pointed rooftops. On a winter day, such as this one, with the first snowfall having happened only days ago, the gray clouds mingle with the blue of the sky and create a collision of color. Lilah must make do with taking silent moments throughout the day to try and remember every detail. To seek beauty. It has become a little game, a secret little game she plays when she finds herself alone.
Could she remember the gentle whisper of the wind as it sweeps across the water and hurls itself into the stone of the walls on a windy day; the rough texture of the buildings themselves, how the stone deteriorates in gritty beads, which seem to seep into her skin; the smell of the once new blooms that are now dead and gone? What of the inside? Could she recall the exposed wooden beams that hold the ceiling; the doors that don’t unlock and the spells to conjure in order to wiggle them open and peek inside?
Yes, it became a game to her. A test of memory, of will.
It is an ancient school, one that has stood for hundreds of years and through the Sisters’ War. Because of this, it a proud school with a tradition of eminent graduates. It used to function as an academy for all ages of Nox, but with time, this changed.
Acres of fertile land surround the academy. With much of the country’s land scarred by the enchanted fires of the war, fertile land is critical and rare. Lilah imagines the school gets a hefty profit from the land by allowing farmers to come and sow crops. Perhaps that is the one thing keeping Waterstone alive, unlike many other academies, which have had to close their doors due to lack of funds.
No other student in the academy—or any academy Lilah has attended—has the number of brands that she does. At seventeen, her arms and various other spots of her body are enveloped in them, permanent signs of her disobedience. The black ink stands out on her pale skin, a warning to all those who look at her. Disobedient, ruffian, dissenter. Managing to be expelled from numerous academies because of her general disregard for rules, among other things, Lilah has made quite a name for herself.
Lilah received her first brand when she was ten years old. The instructor in her first Warrior class had demanded each student slice their own skin so they would know the pain a blade brought and be able to conquer it. She’d placed the edge of the dagger against her palm but wasn’t able to draw it across the skin. So, Lilah was dealt a permanent reminder on the palm of her hand: a thick black line.
She wants to be known for her skills as a warrior, not for the brands that mark her. That’s why she can’t wait to prove herself in the upcoming Ludi. The Ludi are a glorified set of competitions where the Lux and Nox graduating classes compete against each other. In older times, competitors would kill their opponent, but since the war, it is more a way for the sects to showcase their strength and power. At the end of each year, only the finest students from each academy are sent to compete at the Ludi. This year, they are being held in Lux territory.
“You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Lilah. It isn’t fair for you or for me. You’re my only friend here, too, and if you’re forced to leave, where do you think that puts me?” Alicia says, wide-eyed with apprehensive.
Lilah looks at her brands with something just short of rage, but within her lies a kind of pride in them, too. She still remembers the first tenebrae brand she received and how the pain had caused her to faint. Now, the pain is barely like a slap on her wrist. With a wry grin, she thinks, Pain is inevitable.
Here lays another dilemma. Such bombastic signs of bad behavior are potential ringers when entering the real world. What employer wants a worker who doubtlessly will cause trouble? With graduation only weeks away, it’s something that worries her more than she’d ever admit. Even to Alicia.
“Yes, of course, I know. I have no plans of leaving.” Lilah sits on the bed and pulls the comforter around her. The upper floors of the academy are notoriously cold, and even colder in the winter months. Lilah brings a hand to her temple, where a dull throbbing robs her of thoughts. She lies back against a pillow and closes her eyes.
“I’ll let you rest.” Alicia’s voice grows distant.
Lilah lets the hum of the fan lull her to sleep.
“Don’t move! Quincy Blundell is here!”
Charlotte . . . Verna thinks back. The blade. Was I stabbed? She should be dead. It feels like she’s dead. She waits for the healer to make a sound. Buzzing obscures her hearing.
“Verna? Can you open your eyes for me?” an unfamiliar voice begs, pitching up in tone at the end.
Verna knows it belongs to the healer because no men work at Littlewood. Taking a deep breath, warmth fills her body. Verna focuses on her eyelids, but they feel as though she’s been sleeping for years and the light will wound them the moment they open. She imagines this is how ne
wborn babies feel, terrified and yet compelled to see, to be. Verna takes another deep breath, slowly opening her eyes. The bright green-tinted light and the amount of people hovering around her gives her a shock. “I feel . . . fine.”
“Good. Now, can you tell us what happened?”
Verna explains to the small gathering of colleagues and Quincy what transpired moments before, making sure to leave out the fact that the attacker was her daughter. When she’s done, she sinks into her office chair and asks Director Shannon if she can go home for the day to rest. Director Shannon grants permission, but only if Quincy accompanies her. Verna accepts. She might have argued any other day but having company on the walk will be comforting.
Meeting Verna at the steps of Littlewood, Quincy smiles and tells her that everything is going to be fine in a voice that reminds Verna he’s still young, merely seventeen or eighteen. The same age as Lilah.
Imagining Lilah standing beside the Lux youth, she sees the stark contrast between the sects. Quincy’s thin lips grin slightly, and his eyes alight with a faint glow while he stands comfortably. Lilah stares out with a severe expression burned into her features and poses in a stance fit for war. With a blink, the mirage of her ward disperses into the fading dusk light, and a burning at the back of her throat gives her pause. Charlotte is not the only daughter that Verna feels she’s losing to some greater force.
An ominous mixing of gray and ebony clouds huddle over the city, embracing the few buildings in town. The infrastructures of the ancient societies fell long ago, and those that remained were destroyed in the Sisters’ War, now only new buildings deemed more habitable for the world stand.
Littlewood is in the northern Lux territory, close enough to the Nox territory that Verna can visit Lilah at the end of the year and not have to worry about large traveling expenses. She came back to Littlewood once Lilah was admitted into academy at six years old. The humble town consists of barely a hundred citizens, all Lux who are trying to rebuild the city to its former glory.
Premonition Page 2
