by Natalie Grey
“Oh.” I opened my mouth to ask another question, and then remembered that I wasn’t intending to learn any magic. “Okay, let’s go in.”
Daiman was right about sorcerers liking the trappings of magic. The floor was a beautiful black-and-white inlay that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Versaille, and paintings on the ceiling showed astronomical diagrams and gold-etched runes.
At the far side of the room were five chairs that could only be described as thrones. The center chair, grander than the rest, stood empty, and the others held a group of surprisingly young people in flowing robes. I frowned, and then remembered how old Daiman was and realized that they probably weren’t anywhere near as young as they looked.
“Daiman.” One of the women, an ornate braid of flaming red hair draped over one shoulder, smiled at Daiman and, more reservedly, at me.
“Maggie.” Daiman smiled back. “Where’s Terric?”
“Away.” The woman’s face had gone carefully blank. “Apparently Julius had something to show him.”
Not a single member of the group betrayed even a hint of emotion, but I could feel displeasure radiating from Daiman, and I knew enough to judge their silence. Whoever Julius was, they clearly hated him.
“I see,” Daiman said shortly. He gestured to me. “This is Nicky, the talent I went in search of a few weeks ago. Nicky, this is the Coimeail. They oversee the Acadamh.”
I nodded my head nervously.
None of the members of the Coimeail spoke to me. Instead they looked to Daiman for an explanation of who I was.
“I found her in the company of a Monarchist agent,” Daiman explained. “Her mind has been shrouded. She does not know what her power is, nor does she have any memory of using it. I verified that. She knows little more than her name.”
“Do you know how old you are, my dear?” Maggie looked at me kindly, but there was an impersonal assessment behind that gaze.
To her, I realized, I was a rebel. A five-year-old couldn’t be held accountable for knowing about the Acadamh, but I had clearly been raised on the run. That was why they looked to Daiman for an explanation—they didn’t trust me.
If everything went well, however, they would trust me a bit more in a moment.
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “And I have a request.”
Out of the side of my vision, I saw Daiman look at me sharply, but I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see his sad expression again at the thought of me giving up magic. He had chosen what he was. I hadn’t.
“Yes?” A man with long black hair regarded me without any visible emotion in his eyes.
“I would like you to remove my magic,” I explained. “I don’t want it. I don’t want to learn how to use it. I would rather you just … took it out of me. You could wipe my memory, right? Then I wouldn’t know about this place to be a danger to you.”
There was a silence. Daiman looked away from me and I tried not to feel bad about disappointing him.
I’d forget him, too. The thought was sudden and unwanted. That made me sad. Maybe I shouldn’t care, but I did.
“There has to be a way to do this, doesn’t there?” I looked between the blank faces. “Doesn’t there?” I repeated.
The Coimeail looked amongst themselves. If they were speaking mind to mind, I wasn’t sure. Certainly, their faces betrayed nothing.
“No,” a woman said finally. She had the darkest skin I had ever seen, and close cropped hair. She shook her head regretfully. “You are a sorcerer, your magic is a part of you. It cannot be removed without killing you as well.”
I swallowed. The walls seemed a little closer than they had a moment ago. I was going to be stuck here. I hadn’t thought of this place as a prison when I didn’t think I’d be staying, but suddenly, the thought that I might live here was unbearable. I would be shut inside these walls for years. When they gave me my memory back I would remember everyone I had left behind, and no matter what Daiman said, the Acadamh was never going to let me go back to the Monarchists.
I felt Daiman’s hand on my shoulder and I shook it off instinctively. I knew he was trying to comfort me, but I found myself hating him right now. He was here because he’d chosen to become a druid. He’d trained for years, choosing it over and over. I hadn’t wanted any of this. I was being imprisoned for something that wasn’t even my doing.
Now I understood what Sarah had meant when she said she had gotten to live her entire life in freedom.
The man lifted his fingers and I felt a rush of sudden warmth in my chest.
“Your powers have been unblocked,” he told me.
I looked down at myself, and then around the room. I wasn’t sure what I expected—fireballs, maybe. Whatever the case, unblocking my magic seemed to have done nothing at all. It was almost disappointing.
I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I barely noticed the cage appearing in front of me. I jumped when I saw it. It was the strangest cage I had ever seen, about as high as my knees. Every bar seemed to be made of something different: stones, metals, wood, glass. One bar even seemed to be made of pure sapphire. Inside, a brown-and-white rabbit wiggled its nose at me.
“We administer this test to all newcomers.” The fourth member of the Coimeail spoke now. She had wide-set, slanted black eyes, and a round face. Her lips moved differently than the words she said; she was speaking another language, and somehow imparting her meaning to me. “There is a cloud of poison there.” She pointed to a faint, greenish shimmer in the air. It was drifting toward the cage slowly but surely. “We trust you will not let the rabbit die.”
I saw the man settle back in his chair. His eyes were closed. He was administering the test, I guessed. Beside him, Daiman had taken a place next to the chairs in a warrior’s crouch, his elbow braced on his knee.
I looked at the rabbit. The rabbit looked at me, and hopped in a curious circle around the edge of the cage. I told myself that it wasn’t real, but it definitely seemed real. I could smell the scent of its fur, and when I knelt to poke my fingers through the bars, I felt the touch of its whiskers as it sniffed me.
I tried to remember how to do my magic, and found nothing in my head. I paged through every memory I had, and I couldn’t remember a single thing before that forest. There had been yelling. Someone introduced me to Sarah. Running, and Sarah’s fight with Daiman.
Nothing about my magic.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said blankly.
None of the Coimeail said anything.
“Daiman.” I looked at him pleadingly. “I don’t know how to save it.”
He said nothing. His face was clear. He gave me a tiny smile of encouragement, but he was clearly forbidden to say anything.
I rattled the bars of the cage. The wood, I reasoned, I could probably break. But for some reason, it didn’t so much as bend, even when I put all my strength behind it. I wound up and punched the glass bar as hard as I could, and got nothing for my trouble but an aching hand.
The cloud of poison, meanwhile, had gotten about halfway to the cage.
“Look, I don’t know how to do this.” My voice was getting more and more panicked. “I don’t. You can’t just let the rabbit die.” I had the horrifying realization that this animal was going to be the second person in a week to die because of my magic, and dashed tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand.
Still, no one said anything.
I tried to waft the poison away, and succeeded in getting chemical burns on my hand that forced me to yank my arm back with a cry.
“It’s going to die!” I shouted at the man doing the test. “It’s going to die because I don’t know how to do this! Just put the test off, take the blocks out of my memory, then I’ll know how to do this—but I don’t know how to do it now!”
His face didn’t even flicker.
I fought the urge to stomp my foot.
“Stop the test.” I put as much command into my voice as I could. “Stop it. Stop it.”
Noth
ing.
I looked at them all wildly. “None of you? Not one of you is going to save this animal?”
Still nothing. Fury was beating a steady rhythm in my heart.
“Stop it!” I yelled the words, knowing he wasn’t going to listen, but I didn’t know what else to do. “Stop it, stop it, stop it—”
And then the anger that had been rising up in my chest this whole time at the useless cruelty of this found an outlet. Where, I didn’t know. How, I didn’t know. I just knew that if I stopped the man who was doing this, the poison might go away—and I threw everything I had into making that happen.
His chair disintegrated in a shower of splinters and dust, and I heard screams. Something knocked me flat on my back and held me in place, and the only thing I could see was the air around me fizzling and dripping as if I had unleashed a poison of my own. The cage was gone, and the rabbit with it. I couldn’t see the poison at all, for which I was grateful. My hand still stung like I’d dipped it in acid.
There was the sound of a door opening, and running footsteps, and I was hauled upright a few moments later, held between two guards. My muscles didn’t seem to be working, and my head lolled to the side as I tried to take in the scene.
Daiman had come to his feet, his eyes horrified, and the Coimeail were staring at me like I was the devil incarnate.
“I couldn’t save it.” Whatever sent me over backwards had knocked some teeth loose. I could taste blood. “I had to stop you. You were going to kill it.”
There was a long pause. Maggie turned her head to look at Daiman. “We will call Terric back,” she said simply. “He will deal with this.” She pushed herself up and came to me, laying a single finger over my heart. I felt ice spread inside me, and had one moment of sheer terror before her eyes met mine. “Your powers are blocked. You will not be able to use any magic to harm another.” There was no warmth in her now. “We cannot take the risk of you doing such a thing again.” She nodded to the guards. “House her in one of the tower rooms.”
“Wait just a moment.” Daiman’s voice was worried. “She didn’t do this to hurt Akihito.”
“We will talk about this later,” was all Maggie said.
Heedless of the discussion, the guards turned me around on my useless legs and dragged me toward the door.
“She didn’t mean to hurt him,” Daiman was saying.
“Terric will deal with this,” another voice cut in.
And then the doors slammed shut behind the guards, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was entirely alone.
He had promised. There were tears of fury in my eyes. Daiman had promised me that there was nothing to worry about, and he had been wrong. Because apparently there was a way to fail the test, and I had done it.
8
The room they brought me to was surprisingly pleasant, though from the dust, it clearly hadn’t been used in a while. There was a bed, a desk and chair, and an armoire. It had its own tiny bathroom, which left me with a sense of gratefulness that the Acadamh apparently believed in modern plumbing, and the unsettling question of how they managed all of that without any water pipes, as there clearly weren’t any.
On the other hand, I preferred wondering about water pipes to wondering what the hell was going to happen to me now.
My muscles began working about halfway through the walk to the tower, so I paced while I waited for something—anything—to happen. By the time Maggie appeared, I was almost grateful to get whatever it was over with. I ducked my head at her, hoping that there wasn’t some ceremonial greeting I was supposed to use.
She wasn’t an outstandingly beautiful woman, though her coloring was striking: so pale that her skin under the freckles seemed almost translucent, and her lashes were strawberry blonde. Her brilliant red hair drew the eye, however, and she carried herself with the same confidence Daiman had—the confidence of centuries spent using her power.
She nodded back at me. “As we said in the Coimeail chambers, Terric will assess your powers himself. He has been summoned. During this time, you are permitted to walk in the gardens, and to attend meals in the great hall.”
I said nothing. I was sure that wasn’t the end of this.
“You will not attend any classes,” Maggie said firmly. “The library is forbidden to you. And you are not to speak to anyone about what happened during your assessment, or about the nature of your powers. In fact, it would be best if you refrained from discussing any personal matters.”
“But I’m allowed to talk to people?” The words came out surlier than I had intended.
Her nostrils flared slightly. “We safeguard our people, nothing more. I know some of what you have been told about this place—”
“No, you don’t,” I interrupted. “I don’t even know what I’ve been told about this place.”
She paused. “…But we are not your jailors,” she finished quietly. Her hand came up, as if to touch me, but she stopped herself.
“Go ahead, look.” I lifted a shoulder. “Daiman couldn’t see anything, but maybe you can.”
“No.” She folded her hands in front of her and took a deep breath. “Terric will oversee the unshrouding of your memory. It is not my place to do so.”
In the silence that followed, I looked out the window into the garden below. Classes must be in session, because the children were gone. The gardens seemed less bright without them there. I could see a few adepts kneeling by certain plants; I wondered if they were coaxing them to grow, or studying their processes.
“Can I see Daiman?” My question surprised me, but as soon as I said it, I realized how alone I felt. Five days ago, Daiman had been a harbinger of death and destruction, the person I hated most in the world. Now, he was the only person I knew, and he was likely to be the only person who would tell me what was coming.
But the Coimeail was not about to allow such things. Maggie shook her head.
“No,” she told me flatly. “Rest assured that he has spoken on your behalf.” Her face looked as if she had smelled something unpleasant. “He has other duties to attend to, however. Now that you are here, you are our concern, not his.”
Of course. Daiman would be leaving again to go hunt down other sorcerers. The thought was unaccountably distressing, and I dropped onto my bed without a word, cradling my still-stinging hand in my lap.
Maggie left without another word, which was fine by me. I didn’t have anything more to say to her beyond the questions she clearly wasn’t going to answer.
I had no intentions of staying cooped up in the room, however. I opened the door, wincing at the feel of the cool metal on poison-burned skin, and stared down the two guards.
“I’m going to the gardens,” I announced. I swept down the stairs with as much dignity as I could muster in dirty clothes—perhaps I should have asked Maggie about that—and rolled my eyes as they trailed silently after me. So much for, we are not your jailors.
As much as the sorcerers had tried to make the garden a haven of eternal summer, the sea wind was relentless and prone to ruffle my hair as I walked, adding the scent of saltwater to the air. I could faintly hear the crash of waves when the wind turned the right way, and once or twice I saw seagulls and terns wheeling above.
This could be a peaceful place, I told myself. I could learn to live here if I had to. I was surprised, in a way, that it was so new. Part of me had wondered if I was once here, and escaped, but this place was entirely foreign to me. Neither the garden nor the outline of the turrets against the sky seemed familiar.
I clenched my hands and shook my head at myself the next moment. This wasn’t where I belonged, I knew it in my bones. They didn’t want me here—that much was obvious—and wherever I had come from, I was evidently some sort of outlaw. I was old enough that I could have turned myself in if I wanted; clearly I hadn’t wanted. When my memories came back….
My mind skittered away from that thought, but I was determined not to let it. Marching to the edge of the garden, I sat myself down
on one of the benches and resolved to remember as much as I could before the all-powerful and mysterious Terric returned to do so, himself.
I tried to reason my way backwards from things I was sure I had to have known. Someone had introduced me to Sarah, but who? Could I picture her in place that I’d been told? For a moment, I thought I saw a glimpse of a fireplace and wooden walls, but the image vanished as quickly as it had come.
What about where I’d lived before this? Could I remember a bedroom? A quilt on the bed, perhaps? Pets?
A boy’s laughter jolted me out of my reverie and I looked over, nervous at the thought of introducing myself to the other students here.
But the little group, two girls and a boy, did not see me. They were walking in close headed conference, a curly-haired girl waving her hands as she spoke, and a boy and girl who might have been twins listening in, their brunette heads bent to hear her.
“Now you’re just exaggerating,” the boy said scornfully.
“I am not!”
Their path was curving around close to where I sat, and I decided that I wasn’t up to meeting anyone just now. I drew my knees up to my chest and eased myself onto the shadowy side of the bench, half hidden among the trailing leaves of an ornamental tree.
“All I know is, she came in with Daiman, she went into the tower, there was an explosion, and Sarra saw her dragged into the tower by guards.” The curly-haired girl held up her fingers and ticked off points on them. “Akihito wasn’t there for our lessons, Maggie went to the tower again later, Jean said they sent a message for Terric from the aviary, and Daiman was seen arguing with Therese.”
The group had stopped walking, and the twins looked at one another. I shrank even further back into the tree. Great, just great—people had heard about what happened. With my luck, this was going to be all over the Acadamh by the end of the day, and Maggie was probably going to think I was the one to tell everyone.
“But an explosion could mean anything,” the brunette girl said uncertainly. She stuffed her hands in her back pockets and frowned.
