by Natalie Grey
When I finished, I looked up to find that I could no longer see the city at all beyond the trees. My laughter died.
Of course. We were still going to the Acadamh. Last night hadn’t actually changed anything. I should have known.
And I did know now that I couldn’t outrun him. I pushed myself up in silence and followed him out of the clearing without looking back. Much to my own annoyance, I was fighting tears. Why had I hoped that things would be different when I woke up?
I could feel him looking over at me and I kept my gaze straight ahead. He might be gorgeous. He might be sympathetic. He might say all the right things. But he was still exactly who I’d feared when I met him the first time.
“Okay,” I said to him sometime later that day. “Tell me about the Acadamh.”
The fake sun was shining, the fake birds were chirping, and the fake trees were rustling in a fake wind, perhaps all in an attempt to soothe me. I had resolved not to let it lull me into a false sense of security.
“The Acadamh is a school,” he said finally. “Surely you’ve gathered that much by now?”
“Sarah described it as a prison.” I threw the words out coldly.
His lips tightened, but he didn’t respond to my provocation. “Acadamh—academy. Gaelic isn’t so different from what you speak now as English.”
“Right.” We had crested a hill, and I found myself staring out over a wooded valley, showing the massive, shifting shadow of a huge cloud. I let myself soak in the view for a moment before following him down the hill.
“So you won’t tell me why Sarah was so afraid of the idea of me learning to use my magic?” I asked him now.
He stopped and looked at me, eyes suddenly wary. “Why do you say that?”
I blinked at him. “You said that I had to learn to control my magic,” I said patiently. “She thought that was bad enough that she was willing to die to keep it from happening to me. Why?”
“Oh. I thought you meant—oh.” He shook his head. “And I don’t know.”
I might not know jack shit about my own life, but I knew a lie when I saw one. “Yes, you do.”
He started walking again. “It’s not my place to teach a sorcerer.”
“Stop lying to me.” I hurried after him. We were already climbing the hill on the other side of the valley, and I could practically feel the time ticking away. “Look, it’s not like you don’t know. It’s not like it’s wrong for me to want to know what’s going to happen to me, right?”
His hand clenched where it rested on one of the daggers at his hip. He liked to walk with his hands resting on the hilts, shoulders loose, back straight even while he made his way over the rough terrain. It was one of the most beautiful, most dangerous-looking things I had ever seen.
“I told you how druids and sorcerers are different,” he said finally. “I serve the Acadamh, but druids aren’t trained there.”
“Why not?”
“We aren’t born with our powers. It’s different for us. I could only learn what I know now through years of study. There’s no way to be a druid without discipline—and without being connected to the life-force of the world.”
“Hippie.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I hid my smile. “So … druids train somewhere else. Why serve the Academy, then? Acadamh. Thing.”
“Because I am part of the magical world.” He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I was intending to give him a look, but we hit the top of the next hill a moment later and I saw the unmistakable glint of the sea in the distance. I gasped, and when I looked back, he was smiling at my expression.
“It’s beautiful,” he agreed with a smile. “Almost there.”
My smile died in a moment, and his faded when he saw my face.
“It’s going to be okay,” he told me.
“I think you know why I can’t just take your word on that,” I said shortly. I looked down and made my way down the hill without waiting for him.
“Nicky.” He caught up with me. “It’s going to be all right.”
“Then tell me the truth.” I could feel the heart pounding in my chest, hard enough to explode.
“Fine.” He reached out to take my arm gently, and pull me around to face him. “You’re right. You deserve to know. I’ll tell you. I … I’ve never brought someone your age who didn’t know it.”
I leaned up against a tree and crossed my arms, raising one eyebrow. I wasn’t sure he was above starting to tell me and just running out the clock as we kept walking. He was going to tell me here and now, and I wasn’t moving until he did.
He seemed to find my resolve amusing. He took a seat on a nearby boulder and considered his words carefully.
“The Acadamh didn’t always exist,” he said finally. “Druids and sorcerers weren’t always allies. Not that we were enemies, we just stayed out of one another’s business. What do you know of world history?”
It was a fair question, all things considered, but whoever had put a block on my memory hadn’t thought it was important to block this. “About as much as anyone, I guess. Cleopatra. The crusades and all that medieval stuff. Um. World War II. A bit about most things.” I considered. “Nothing about magic.”
“Okay. Well, you mentioned the crusades, and they’re where it all started, I guess. The dark ages had been … lawless, for the most part, at least in Europe. The lords all ran their little fiefs, the libraries were gone. The church tried to impose order, but there wasn’t much for it to work with. Without any strong governments in place, it was pretty easy for us to survive for a while, even if things weren’t great.”
I nodded.
“And then things started to recover.” Daiman was looking out at the sea. His brown hair ruffled slightly in the breeze. “The kings got stronger, and they were in the church’s pocket—and the church hated anything like magic. It was getting worse and worse. We tried to ignore it, but when the Templar order got back from their crusades, some of them were tortured and killed for witchcraft and heresy, and we couldn’t pretend anymore.”
I slid down to sit on the ground, and found a ready-made cushion of moss waiting for me. Daiman was always considerate.
I hated that.
“We called an assembly to try to figure out what to do, how to survive in this new world. There were three factions that emerged there.” He held up three fingers and bent two down again. “The first was the Unitarians.”
“The Christians?”
He smiled “No. Not related. The Unitarians wanted us to send an envoy to Rome, to expose ourselves and fight for representation as a valid power within the world. They believed it would be possible to become arbiters of peace and citizens of the world, and didn’t think we should hide ourselves away. The second was the Separatists. They wanted us to hide. They were afraid that if we told the world that we existed, we would be hunted down. The third—”
“The Monarchists,” I guessed.
He smiled slightly. “Yes. Well remembered. The Monarchists believed….” His mouth twisted bitterly. “That magic users were superior to other humans,” he said finally. “They believed that we should rule the world. Hence, Monarchists—like kings, they would claim a divine right to set themselves above others.”
“You called Sarah a Monarchist.” I frowned.
He lifted a shoulder. “She is.”
“Was.” The word escaped me before I could stop it.
He paused. “Yes,” he agreed quietly. “In any case, they still exist. The Acadamh was the invention of the Separatists, you see.”
I stared at him wordlessly.
“It didn’t happen quite that easily,” he explained. “The Separatists won at the assembly by a large margin. Too many were afraid to reveal ourselves to the world, and too few were willing to claim a divine right to rule.”
Daiman waited for me to speak but I said nothing. I had the sudden fear that the Monarchists hadn’t just gone away quietly, and saying t
hat seemed uncomfortably like slandering Sarah.
“The assembly dispersed,” Daiman explained. “If that had been the end of it, the Acadamh probably wouldn’t exist. But the Monarchists were determined to … win, I guess.” He shook his head. “One of them, a sorceress, pretended to ally herself with the Unitarians. She got them to send envoys to different courts, revealing our existence—or so the Unitarians thought. She had given each one of the envoys a ‘gift’ to present as a goodwill token, and it was laced with disease.”
My eyes widened.
“And that,” Daiman said wryly, “was the Black Death.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I wish I was.” He shook his head. “But I’m not. I’m told it cost us hundreds of druids and sorcerers to stop her. I wasn’t born until a hundred years or so after that,” he added as an afterthought.
“Wait—how old are you?”
“Five hundred years. Give or take.” He lifted a shoulder.
I gaped at him. This was too much information in too short a time.
“Nicola Beaumont was eventually killed,” he told me. “That was the sorceress. She was killed by a man called Terric Delaney, the sorcerer who started the Acadamh. He still runs it. He believed that sorcerers should be trained in their powers in seclusion from the world, and taught the history of what happened, so that such an event would never occur again.” He lifted one shoulder sadly. “Also, so that those born with magical talent would not be killed outright by people who did not understand. Most people I bring to the Acadamh are only a few years old. Their families are usually eager to part with them. Childhood tantrums are bad enough when the child can’t summon fireballs or earthquakes.”
I shuddered.
“It’s part of why I looked into your head,” he explained. “Magic manifests early. For about half of your kind, it—well, it eats you alive.” He shook his head at my expression. “Not you, obviously. If it was going to, it already would have.”
“Comforting.”
He managed a wry smile. “In any case, the Monarchists went through all the motions of disavowing Beaumont, but they never stopped opposing the Acadamh. To them, it was a prison—just like Sarah said to you.
“They never saw the point behind it—or they never believed that our secrecy as magic users was worth hiding our children away. If they find magical children before we do, they will raise those children themselves, and shield them from us. They think it’s saving those children from … well, you know: slavery.
“That’s what happened for you, I’m assuming. My guess is that you know an awful lot more about them than they want us to know—locations of safe houses, members of their organization. They didn’t want to take the chance that you would tell me any of that.”
He stood and came to offer me a hand up. “So that’s our history,” he said simply. “I do what I do because the children who are born with magic don’t know enough to hide themselves, and the world would hurt them for what they are—even more now that we have the technology we do. One or two have gotten caught in government laboratories and been taken apart piece by piece, looking for the source of what gives them magic.”
I pressed a hand over my mouth. The thought made me physically ill.
“Can you….” My voice trailed off. A thought had come to me, hitting me like a wave. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen this solution before. It was so obvious, and it solved everything.
“Can I what?” He jerked his head at me. “Come on. We should keep walking. They’ll want to test you tonight, see how your powers manifest.”
“What if they didn’t?” I called after him.
He turned to look back at me. “What?”
“What if they didn’t have to? What if I gave up my magic?” I could feel the wind in my hair, smell the faint whiff of salt from the sea.
“You’d want to give your magic up?” The thought seemed to make him sad for some reason.
“Well, I can’t remember ever using it. And I don’t want to go to the Acadamh, and….” I swallowed hard. “Look, the only thing I know about my magic is that it got Sarah killed. I don’t want it. I don’t want any place in this war, either. What do I gain? The ability to do weird things with ice or something? It doesn’t seem worth it.”
“Well, you do get immortality,” he joked.
I didn’t smile.
He walked back to me. I couldn’t decipher the expression on his face, but I knew some of it was pity. “You have those powers,” he told me. “I can’t change that. No one can. But that doesn’t trap you. You’ll be able to leave the Acadamh someday and forge your own path. Your magic doesn’t make you who you are—what you do with it does.”
His voice trailed away and I realized I was swaying toward him.
He swallowed, and turned away. “Come on.” His voice was distant. “We have to keep moving. There’s a real bed for you tonight—that’s worth looking forward to, right?”
I followed him in silence. For two days, all I had wanted was to know what the hell was going on.
Now all I wanted was to un-know it, and not be a part of it.
And no matter that Daiman said it was impossible, I was determined to find a way to get rid of my magic. Someone at the Acadamh had to know how to do that. I kept walking with a renewed sense of purpose. I’d persuade them.
I had to.
7
The Acadamh lay on fog-shrouded cliffs at the very edge of the ocean. This wasn’t some tropical beach with white sand and palm trees. No, it was a rainy, windswept coast with a rippling expanse of coarse grass and a beach of grey pebbles.
It was strangely beautiful, though, and I had the uncomfortable thought that I might not mind it here.
The building itself was a sort of castle, although it would never have been defensible. The walls sported large, beautiful windows, and underneath the moss and vines, the stone was so clean that the building almost looked new. Daiman caught me looking and pointed to tiny carvings set at regular intervals.
“Sorcerers don’t like things like lichen colonizing their pretty walls,” he said, with a grin. “They’re very picky about aesthetics.”
“What, and druids aren’t?” I cracked my first smile since our history lesson.
“Lichen doesn’t seem all that different to me than moss,” he said with a shrug. “Stones weather, that’s the way of things. There are beetles and birds making nests and mice finding little scraps of food. Humans try to build permanent things, but that’s not how most of the world works—in nature, things are constantly making way for other things.” He smiled. “But we build things, like the druidic arts, that survive for thousands of years. And there’s a beauty in that, too.”
I looked down at my feet. When Daiman spoke, the world seemed to make sense. I supposed maybe things got clearer after five hundred years.
Then again, the Monarchists had clearly come to very different conclusions.
The path to the castle appeared as if out of nowhere, and I had the sudden suspicion that if I weren’t with Daiman, I would have seen neither path nor building.
We stepped through a gate that swung open silently on oiled hinges and walked into a large courtyard that had been made into a garden, full of benches and arbors, out-of-season flowers blooming in a bewildering profusion of scents. I looked over to see what Daiman thought of this, and he shared a smile.
“It’s one of the least strange things you people do,” he said with a wry smile.
My people. I let that one slide.
People stared at us as we walked, heads turning to acknowledge Daiman—and give me a curious examination. They clearly knew the druid by sight, as I supposed they would, and therefore, they knew exactly why I was here.
It made me feel like they knew more about me than I did.
A boy with deep brown skin and the widest smile I’d ever seen came pelting through the garden in a shower of rose petals, screaming Daiman’s name, and Daiman picked him up to swing him around in
the air. The boy shrieked with laughter and pelted off again, and Daiman watched him go with a smile.
“I brought him here a few years ago,” he explained. “His parents didn’t want to give him up. It was hard to convince them, but they knew it was best, in the end. They’ve been able to see him a few times since he came here.”
I nodded silently. Something had unknotted in my chest when I saw the boy’s uncomplicated adoration of Daiman. He’d been so happy to see the man who brought him here, and I didn’t know what to think of that. Sarah wouldn’t like it, I knew.
But Sarah wasn’t here, seeing this place.
Daiman pointed up to the top of the tallest tower, an almost-too-picturesque confection of white stone with trailing vines and stained glass windows. “That’s where you’ll be tested. Sorcerers also like all the trappings. You know, tall towers, magic wands, leather-bound books. Some of them even like those pointy hats.”
He was trying to set me at ease, but my heart was beating so fast that I thought I was going to be sick. I tried not to be too obvious about wiping my clammy palms on my shirt as we made our way into the building and to the winding staircase that led up to the tower.
The stairs narrowed for a time, and I let myself sink into the pattern of going around and around, watching the worn stone steps and the blocks of the walls. When the stairs widened to show a set of ornate double doors, Daiman stopped me.
“It’s not a test to worry about,” he told me seriously. “They aren’t going to try to exhaust you or anything like that. It’s just to show them what kind of magic you have, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“So they know how to train you. Whatever your magic is, there’s probably a student here who can do something similar. For instance, if it’s ice, they can show you things to do with ice and frost—useful applications. They’ll teach you how to use it so you don’t split the sides of houses or explode glass. That sort of thing.”
