by S. W. Clarke
Goodness. Everyone here was obsessive about what seemed to me a very slim definition of good.
“She does teach Rescue,” Aiden said. “It’s kind of baked into the class.”
“Like search and rescue?” I said.
The three of them met eyes, and I could see it in their exchanged glances: I had a lot to learn.
“Something like that.” Aiden rose from the table. “We’ve got to go if you don’t want to be late for your meeting with the headmistress.”
I stood with him. “I’ll get Loki.” I hadn’t seen my cat since the moment we’d walked into the dining hall, when he’d nearly sprained an ankle booking it into the kitchen.
Eva waved me on. “I’ll find him. All I need to do is dangle some fish, right?”
She already knew my cat so well.
Aiden and I left Eva in the dining hall to find Loki. And, too, she clearly wanted to stay with Torsten, who was only halfway through his three plates of breakfast. I couldn’t blame the girl; a crush may be intangible, but it’s as real as anything.
As the two of us descended down to the ground, Aiden explained the houses in greater detail. Of one hundred students at the academy, only thirteen belonged to Whisper.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because those who can fly are in short supply. And there aren’t many faefolk to serve the light any longer.”
“Are there dark fae, too?” Of course, it was hard to believe, after meeting Evanora Whitewillow, that fae could be otherwise.
“Some.” Aiden walked ahead of me down the stairs, so I couldn’t see his face. But I could hear the gravity in his voice. “The world is no longer balanced, Clementine. Not since the Battle of the Ages.”
The Battle of the Ages. Another puzzle piece I filed away. “That’s why you said it’s important that I apply myself.”
He ushered me through the clearing, past the amphitheater. As we approached the enormous double doors I’d seen the night before, he nodded. “Yes. For more reasons than I have time to explain right now.”
I stood before the doors, staring up their length. They had been so intricately carved with flowing trees and rivers and flowers I would have to study them piecemeal if I wanted to pick out all the details.
As it was, they gave off an aura of majesty. Doors like this only stood to signify the importance of what lay behind them.
“This is where the headmistress is?”
He gestured me in. “This is it.”
There was no handle. I raised my hand to one of the doors, searching for some sort of handhold. “How do I, uh…get in?”
He grinned. “Push.”
I made a face as I pushed the door. It didn’t move. When I looked back at Aiden, he shrugged. “It’s five hundred years old. Put some back into it.”
I set both hands against the door and leaned into it. This time, it scraped open. As I stepped inside, his voice echoed in, “See you around.”
But I was already overwhelmed by the enormity of the space I had just stepped into. The door naturally closed with a carrying echo, sealing away the outdoors and leaving me in almost-darkness.
Before me lay a cavern of a room, wisps of blue light hovering far above. They bobbed and float like lures on a fishing rod. But unlike lures, these seemed...alive. Organic.
They didn’t respond to me at all, though. Not as I stared, and not when I called out.
My eyes lowered. The wisps provided enough light to see the floor, which was inlaid with an even more elaborate carving than the doors. What lay beneath was as intricate as a painting, sprawling from the center to every edge of the room.
Along the nearest edge, I recognized figures and trees. Wings. Bows and arrows. I stepped closer, turning to see the carving at the angle it was meant to be observed from.
Yes, that was a fae with a bow and arrow. And they were shooting something covered in fur beneath the trees.
This was a story. And as I turned a circle, I recognized it was a very long tale.
I took one step right to take in the next section. Here, a woman on a horse rode through the forest toward the fae. Her robes streamed out from behind her, and fire sparked from her horse’s hooves. She raised her hands, riding with only her thighs, pointing her fingers at—
A voice sounded from far above. “Is that you, Clementine?”
I straightened with a flinch. It had been so quiet in here I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone.
That had been Headmistress Umbra’s voice.
I lifted my eyes into the darkness, where I saw no one. “The one and only.”
“Come up to my office, then. And be quick—you don’t want to be late for your first class.” That was followed by the sound of a door creaking shut.
My first class. Wasn’t the first day of school supposed to be an orientation that involved trust-building exercises and snacks?
I took a step toward where her voice had come from; only the twinkling blue lights glinted at me from high, high up. “Umbra? How do I get to your office?”
No answer. Which meant… Goddamn, another test. And this one timed, too.
Well, first step: figure out what I had to work with. I set my hand against the interior of the tree, following it around the smooth edges of the cavernous room, all the way back to the doors I’d entered by.
There hadn’t been a single abnormality in that long, curved hollow. Not a groove, not a hitch. No stairs, and no lift, either.
But the headmistress had called down to me, and I’d heard a door close. Which meant…
I raised my eyes upward, squinting through the dim light. Finally, eyes adjusting, I spotted a balcony. So that was where the headmistress had been.
But how to get up there? Did she expect me to fly?
Fly.
Aiden, Torsten, and Eva had been certain I would end up in Whisper, the house of flight. And they’d said witches could fly, after all. Hell, even I knew that—it was in just about every story about witches ever.
But I didn’t have a broom. Witches didn’t fly without brooms.
I walked to the center of the room, closing my fingers to fists. This is so stupid, I thought. But at least I didn’t have an audience.
“Fly,” I whispered.
Of course, nothing happened.
“Fly!” I said, louder.
Nothing.
I’d just begun to think I should pair my command with a jump when a light flitted down in front of my face. One of the blue wisps from high above.
I stepped back as it bobbed before me, dancing from side to side as though observing me. It was beautiful, and appeared almost sentient. I reached my fingers toward it, but it slipped away at the last moment. “What are you?”
A whispering noise returned, like the tiniest voice on the wind. Had it spoken to me?
I leaned closer, cocking one ear. “What was that?”
“Shadowend,” the tiny voice whispered so softly I had to concentrate fully to make out the words. “You return to the ancient place.”
“The ancient place?”
But the blue light didn’t respond. It only weaved left, then right.
Shadowend. You return to the ancient place.
What on earth did that mean?
Chapter Nine
I stepped closer to the little light. “What is the ancient place?”
The wisp didn’t answer. Instead, it veered away, sailing back up toward the ceiling to mingle with the others. They all proceeded to ignore me once again, like a gaggle of hot-and-cold teenage girls.
Which left me exactly where I’d started: standing in the center of this large, otherwise empty room with a balcony some twenty feet up. I turned a long, slow circle. The only things I could interact with were the walls and the floor… The floor that was covered in a story.
I walked back to where I’d left off: the woman riding through the forest on her horse. I kept following the tale around the edges, trying to decipher each new set of images in the dim light.
On she rode, deeper into the forest until she reached the fae with his bow and arrow. She charged toward him and brought out her second weapon: a flail with a spiked ball on the end of a chain, itself in flames.
The fae and the woman fought long and hard in the middle of the forest. In the next panel, a human woman stepped up next to the fae, her long hair streaming behind her. It was clear they two were joined in their purpose to take down the horsewoman.
And the horsewoman? She summoned an army of darkness, greatly outnumbering the fae and human.
I continued to the next section. Here, the two sides engaged in a terrible battle. With each step I took, more bodies from the horsewoman’s army accumulated. Except the horsewoman’s army never seemed to dwindle. Where one died, another took its place.
Through this, the fae and the human fought on.
I walked faster. Finally, the horsewoman’s spiked flail felled the fae. Only the long-haired human remained to stand off against the horsewoman and her army.
The human was badly outnumbered. But in the penultimate panel, she sundered the horsewoman’s spiked weapon, splitting it into shards. At once, her army dissipated into the earth. But before the human could kill the horsewoman, she escaped on her steed.
As I came to the end of the story, the human opened up a seam in the forest, which burst with light. She ushered the remaining fae through and closed the seam up, leaving her alone in the forest. Except now, the sun no longer reached down past the trees. And beneath the canopy, the four-legged creatures began again to roam in the places where the sun could not penetrate.
And there in the semi-darkness of the forest, the human dropped to her knees and wept.
I got down on my knees, tracing the sun. I had seen this symbol before, carved into the roof of the amphitheater outside. The sun was important, somehow.
And then Umbra’s words came back to me, snapping into the fore of my brain.
By instinct, I pressed my fingers into the carving’s center. It’s almost as though I’m touching the sun. That was the phrase she had used yesterday.
The carving of the sun depressed under my fingertips. A noise began somewhere within the tree trunk to my left, and a series of steps slid out one by one, leading straight up to the balcony.
I stood up. So much in this place, it seemed, was full of secrets. And the headmistress certainly seemed to enjoy testing my ability to suss out those secrets.
Why?
If they served goodness, why were they keeping secrets?
I ascended the steps to the balcony, pausing for a moment at the top. I set my hands to the railing, staring out at the blue lights hovering in the air. They were much closer now, and beyond them I could see, very faintly, the ceiling.
Something glimmered up there, too. But I didn’t have time to study it right now.
The headmistress was waiting for me.
I turned toward the door, the outline of which served up a golden light. Before I entered, I heard the sound of the double doors far below opening, shutting, and tiny paws scrabbling up the stairs to the landing where I stood.
Loki appeared, his eyes luminescent in the semidarkness.
I leaned over, gazing down the stairs to the entryway. “How did you open that door?”
His tail swirled through the air. “I pushed.”
But he was a tiny cat, and those were enormous doors… Whatever, I thought as I shook my head. I was nearly late. “Let’s go in, then.”
As I stepped forward and pressed the headmistress’s door open, I found exactly the opposite of what I’d expected. If the room I’d just stood in was grand, Headmistress Umbra’s office was humble. It was small, cozy, and fragrant with…was that freshly-baked bread?
Yes, I thought as my eyes fell on the desk set opposite me, it is. Atop it sat a plate with a round loaf of bread and a generous helping of marmalade. Beside that sat a steaming teapot and two cups.
The long oak desk was fielded by an overstuffed armchair. Headmistress Umbra sat there, bent over a book, her pen scratching along. Behind her stretched a wide bookcase brimming with tomes on all sorts of advanced magicks; I spotted conjuration, illusions, and healing written down several spines. And around her, adorning the walls, were mostly indecipherable sketches and notes pinned up like she was some sort of conspiracy theorist piecing together a mystery.
I did spot several sketches depicting a woman on a horse with flames sparking off its hooves. The horsewoman.
When I stepped toward one for a closer look, Headmistress Umbra’s pen hit the desk. “Clementine.”
I spun toward the headmistress like I’d been caught. She spurred that feeling in me, even though I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
But she believes I am—or I might. That much was clear.
She gazed at me like she expected me to say something. So I obliged. “Your office is so…” I waved around, searching for a diplomatic word.
“Small? Yes.” A smile touched her face. “I like it so. Don’t you?”
I pointed toward the door. “But out there is so…”
“Large, I know. It is a bit misleading, isn’t it? The architects of the academy believed facades matter, even if the first headmistress preferred a more modest space for her own work.” She pressed the book in front of her closed. “Come, sit.”
I took the chair opposite her desk—a hard, wooden piece that was actually surprisingly comfortable when I’d properly sat down in it. Loki hopped up into my lap and settled down for a nap. “The architects?” I asked.
I didn’t miss her glance; she was surprised I’d paid attention. “Yes, they who saw fit to create an academy for the training of young magic users after the Battle of the Ages.”
“And who were they?”
“The survivors,” she said with unabashed vagueness. “Those who remained to serve the light. Every twelve-year-old who’s crossed the veil knows such things, but you will have to learn about our past in your history classes.”
So she doesn’t have time to talk about the past, or she doesn’t want to.
I stroked Loki, biding my time with the important questions. “I heard you were giving me my schedule today.”
She nodded, but seemed to have something else on her mind as she observed me. She set one hand to her chin, leaning forward. “You found the staircase to my office quite quickly. Faster than most, in fact. After how long it took you to see the academy last night, I hadn’t expected as much.”
I ignored the slight—I had a thick skin when it came to people I didn’t really know—and tapped the side of my head. “I remembered what you said about touching the sun.”
“Ah, well done. Do you often remember what people say?”
I nodded. “I don’t forget much.”
“Then you’ll remember this: don’t allow anything any of the other students say to you to get under your skin. You’re a witch, Clementine, and with that comes a carriage full of baggage.”
My eyebrows went up. “Oh. So now there’s actually a legitimate reason for people to think I’m strange.”
A faint, rueful smile appeared. “People are people, whether or not they can use magic. We all have our unfounded prejudices.”
Unfounded prejudices. Sounded like witches got a bad rap in the magical world, too. “How bad are these prejudices? If it’s chucking-rotten-fruit-at-my-head bad, then I can deal.”
“I should hope not. Students at the academy, as you’ll learn, are by and large held to high standards of conduct. We don’t tolerate any fruit chucking, because in truth, we don’t have time to waste. Whatever you feel about this place or the people here, don’t let it overcome the importance of what we do.”
My stroking hand paused atop Loki’s head. “What do we do?”
The headmistress lifted the teapot set between us, pressing an
empty cup toward me. She filled it with a slow and methodical pour. “We are the hedge between evil and light. We are the first and the last defense between the underworld and this one. And our light is dimming.”
My thoughts drifted back to the carving on the floor, the sketches on the walls of her office. “That battle depicted in the room downstairs… Who was the woman on the horse? With the flaming hooves?”
This triggered something inside Headmistress Umbra; I could see it in the way she lowered the teapot to the desk before she met my eyes. There was steel in that gaze, and I knew I’d finally asked the right question.
“We call her the Shade.”
The Shade. Anyone whose name started with “the” had to be a badass. “Who was she?”
“Is,” the headmistress corrected. “She has not died.”
“But…when did that battle take place?”
The headmistress picked up a slice of bread, began spreading marmalade on with a knife. I sensed it as her effort to stay busy, to keep herself from giving away how much this discussion affected her. “Five hundred years ago.”
“And she’s still alive.”
“Yes.” The headmistress took a bite of bread and a sip of tea, that steel finally dropping away to calmness. “You will know all with time and education. A history of the magic world is a requirement for you, by the by. And, on that note, we should be getting to your schedule.”
Headmistress Umbra opened a drawer, slipped out a sheet of paper which she passed to me. On it were printed four classes:
Flight
Rescue
Combat
History
Well, this wasn’t your typical college curriculum—not by a mile. I knew already that flight didn’t mean aviation school, and I suspected rescue didn’t refer to lifeguarding.
And combat? I was already a pretty scrappy fighter. My latest opponent—my former boss, Maury—had learned as much. Of course, now that I lived in a world of darkness and light, of fae and mages, I wanted to be better.
Like I said: if someone starts trouble with me, I finish it. And I never wanted to end up slung over someone’s shoulder again. (At least, not unless I consented.)
