The Test

by Todd Fahnestock

  “Hmmm,” Oriana said, thoughtful. Whenever she contemplated something, she looked icy and regal, like she was overseeing a distant battlefield.

  Brom cleared his throat. “The Four could burst in here at any moment. Oriana says it’s stupid to run into the blizzard. But I say now is the time to escape. It may be our only chance.”

  “We’re not going to escape,” Oriana said.

  Vale looked at her. Royal crossed his muscled arms and nodded emphatically.

  “I came here to become a Quadron,” Oriana said. “I’m not leaving until I become a Quadron.”

  “But the Test of Separation is a sham!” Brom said. “You’re not going to become a Quadron, you’re going to become a slave.” He couldn’t get Arsinoe’s vile expression out of his mind, like he wanted to pluck Vale’s limbs off one at a time while she thrashed and screamed.

  “The knowledge is here. The power is here. I’m not leaving until I have it,” Oriana said.

  “Neither am I,” Vale agreed.

  Royal smiled in satisfaction. He wanted a fight. Whether it was against the Test of Separation or The Four themselves. Fighting was what made sense to him.

  Brom quailed. His daring invasion of the tower, his harrowing escape—it was all for nothing if his Quad mates didn’t run. He’d wanted to make them safe, but instead they were going to spit into the teeth of The Four and get themselves killed.

  “We find a way around the Test,” Vale said, her brown eyes flashing. “Knowing what we know, we can use our time here differently. We can all four continue what Brom and I were studying. We have two years to come up with something.”

  “Yes,” Royal rumbled.

  “Two years?” Brom said. “We don’t even have two weeks. They’re going to find me, and when they do, they’ll devour you, one way or another.”

  “I have an idea,” Oriana said quietly.

  “I’ll leave.” Brom said. “I’ll go tonight. I’ll lead them away. The three of you deny you knew anything about this.”

  “Chivalrous,” Vale said with a warm smile. “But stupid.”

  “Olivaard would read our minds,” Royal said. “They could find out what we know regardless.”

  “Which is why we all have to run!” Brom insisted.

  “Run away from those who have betrayed us? Who hold hundreds of students in thrall?” Royal growled. “I think not.”

  Brom threw his hands up in the air. “We can’t beat them!”

  “You did,” Vale said softly.

  That stole Brom’s wind so suddenly and completely that he couldn’t think of what to say. Vale had talked convincingly about not loving him, but her eyes glowed with admiration and a fierce pride. His heart ached. “All I did was run away,” he said.

  “Successfully.”

  “I have an idea,” Oriana said quietly, and this time, everyone looked at her.

  “We fight them,” Royal said.

  Vale rolled her eyes. “Maybe we should just ignore the men for a moment. What do you have, Oriana?”

  “They are looking for someone,” Oriana said. “But they think it is a Sacinto.”

  “That’s what they said before they saw Brom. But they can’t think that now,” Vale said. “They chased him. They mind-probed him. Kelto’s beard, they saw him. He jumped out their window.”

  “I think they still believe he is a Sacinto,” Oriana said.

  “Why?” Royal asked.

  “Because they aren’t here,” she said.

  “Sacinto have branches growing out of their heads!” Vale said. “You don’t need a good long look to realize someone doesn’t have branches growing out of their head.”

  “Not all Sacinto branches are long,” Oriana countered. “Brom was wearing a cowl, and there was a blizzard. I will bet my life they don’t know it’s him. I don’t think they suspect a student could invade their tower. We can scarcely believe he did it.”

  “No,” Brom said. “Olivaard knows everything about me and everything about you. He mind-probed me.”

  “That is why I think I’m right,” Oriana said.

  Royal gave a frustrated sigh. “That’s why you’re right? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “To you,” Oriana said. “But you are not a Mentis. Listen. Assuming that Olivaard obeys the same rules of magic that I do, it is unlikely he knows everything about Brom.” She turned to Brom. “What you described is called a mind-stab. It is meant to break mental defenses and seize top-level thoughts. It is not meant to grasp details, deeper memories. That takes more far more effort. Being inside a person’s mind is like seeing words floating on a river. Primary, immediate thoughts rise to the top; they are the easiest to read. In your case, this would have been fear of The Four, terror at having opened your fourth Soulblock, and hope for escape. Those were the big thoughts in your mind at that moment. Olivaard commented on your fourth Soulblock. But he called you little Sacinto.”

  “He did,” Brom said, stunned. He’d thought it was an insult; he hadn’t thought for a second that Olivaard believed Brom himself was a Sacinto. “He said that.”

  Oriana nodded. “Your lesser concerns at that panicked moment would have been far more difficult for Olivaard to detect, like the fact that you were cold, or that you must soon decide where to go next. That kind of thing. And your memories—your sense of identity, your own name, your thoughts about all of us—were far deeper and much less important to you at that instant he mind-stabbed you. It would have taken time and effort to read them. He had neither.”

  “What is your point?” Vale asked.

  “I cannot see the face of someone I mind-read,” Oriana said. “I can almost never pick up their name unless they tell me directly. How often do you think of your own name? My point is: it is quite possible The Four still think they are chasing a Sacinto.”

  “Unbelievable...” Royal said, though he was obviously thinking it might be believable.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Brom said. “They’re going to search the school. Whether they think it was me or not, they’ll scour the campus.”

  “I agree,” Oriana said. “So we must hide.”

  Vale sighed, as though she’d been waiting for a great reveal and was disappointed. “Hide?”

  “Olivaard isn’t going to come at us with a mind stab this time,” Brom said. “They’ll line us up and dig as deep as they want.”

  “And they’ll have all of the Mentis masters working for them, too,” Oriana said. “Yes. They’ll find what’s in our head. We can’t stop them from looking, so we must forget what we know.”

  “Forget?” Royal asked.

  “Brom’s visit to the tower, The Four, and the insidious nature of the Test,” she said. “Everything.”

  Royal’s brow furrowed, and Vale’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

  “You’re talking about mind control,” Brom said. “Memory erasure.”

  “That’s fourth-year magic,” Royal said.

  “She can do it,” Vale said at the same time Oriana said, “I can do it.”

  Oriana looked sidelong at Vale. “How did you know?”

  “Because I’m not an idiot. I saw the books you were reading, the spells inside. It’s not a far jump to assume you were trying to master them.”

  “Since when?” Brom asked.

  “For the last two months,” Oriana said.

  “And how did you practice that, I’d like to know,” Royal said, a flush of anger on his cheeks.

  That brought a whole new slate of questions. Had Oriana used mind control on them? Would Brom have noticed if she had? He thought back over the last several months, trying to decide if he’d ever done something out of character and passed it off as a quirk to be ignored. He couldn’t think of anything. But if she really could do mind control, she could have made him forget whatever she wanted. Frantically, he began to search for any conspicuous blank spots in his memory—

  “I have not used it on any of you.” Oriana interrupted his thoughts. “As you know, I have
never even read your minds without your consent. Every time I’ve read your mind, I’ve told you, and you’ve agreed to let me. We worked too hard to break the boundaries between us. To keep secrets.” She gave a pointed look at Brom and Vale. “And I, at least, wish for this Quad to thrive.”

  Vale held Oriana’s gaze with a wry smile. “You think just because Brom and I hid a few things from you, I’m going to let you jump into my head and rearrange me?”

  “If you trust me,” Oriana said.

  “I don’t like this idea,” Royal said.

  “No sane person likes the idea of being mind-controlled,” Oriana said. “But our options are few, and this may be the best of them.”

  They fell quiet, and Brom felt each of his heartbeats like the ticking of a clock. Every second was another opportunity for The Four to burst through that door.

  “I say we do it,” Vale said, suddenly flipping sides, as she often did. “How does it work? If you wipe our memories, how does this plan succeed? You’ll still know what we know. Once they snap the lock on your mind, they’ll have it all anyway.”

  “No,” she said. “I will...manipulate my own mind as well.”

  “That must be handy,” Vale said. “Being able to erase whatever you don’t like about your life.”

  Oriana fixed Vale with a stare. “I have never taken anything vital from my own mind, only a few things in practice, and I have always restored them. There are dangers to manipulation, especially of one’s own self. Our experiences make us who we are. Quadrons who erase too much of their own memories...it doesn’t end well.”

  “So we could lose ourselves?” Royal asked.

  “It is possible, but it is certainly no more dangerous than attempting to restore a fourth Soulblock,” she said, arching an eyebrow.

  “This is insanity,” Brom said. “We should simply run. Give up being this slave of a Quadron they have planned for us. Give up on this entire school!”

  “No,” Royal said firmly. “We are already victims of some kind of green flame spell. I am not running from these monsters. We make things right, or we die trying.”

  “I’m not leaving, either,” Vale said.

  “The Four are deadly to us!” Brom blurted. He felt like he was trying to convince children not to dive beneath the ice of a frozen lake. “There is no happy ending if we stay under their thumbs. Forgetting what we know makes The Four more dangerous, not less. In the long run, they’ll pick us apart like carrion birds.”

  “We will not forget forever,” Oriana said. “I will...hide it. Then restore it.”

  “How?” Brom asked.

  “What do you mean, hide it?” Vale said.

  “Memories inside a person are like...” Oriana paused, as though struggling to find the right words. “They’re like...trinkets, let’s say. Inside many different boxes. A thousand boxes stacked a hundred high. I will...take the memories of Brom’s adventures and discoveries. I’ll take them out of you and put them in a hidden box in my own mind.”

  “And a Mentis wouldn’t be able to find that box?” Brom asked.

  “No,” Oriana said, too quickly. At his look, she pursed her lips. After a moment, she said, “There is a chance. There is always a chance. But the Mentis would be forced to search every single one of my memories. It would take days, even weeks, and they’d have to know exactly what they were looking for. With just a cursory look, a Mentis would never find the box. And they would never look that deep, most notably because they would never suspect a second-year student capable of such a spell.”

  “They might suspect Quad Brilliant,” Vale said. “The Four said we were messing with the system because we’ve accomplished so much.”

  “How do we get our memories back after?” Royal asked, waving away Vale’s warning.

  “A tripwire,” Oriana said.

  “What is that?” Royal asked.

  “It’s like an animal trap.” Vale spoke before Oriana could. “A wire that triggers the trap. Likewise, a wire that triggers a spell.”

  Brom had read about tripwires, but only a little. They were magical mechanisms, set to lie in wait until a condition was met. Once the condition was met, the waiting spell activated. The spells he’d encountered in the tower of The Four were all tripwires.

  “So when something specific happens,” Brom said. “That trips the tripwire, and the box opens. And you’ll get your memories back?”

  “Yes,” Oriana said.

  “And you give us our memories back,” Royal said.

  She nodded. “It will happen all at once, for all of us, if we are in close proximity. If we’re far apart, then the memories will return once I am near you.”

  “What is the tripwire going to be?” Vale asked.

  Oriana held her hands out, palms up. “We would have to agree on that.”

  “I don’t like the idea of forgetting what I know about The Four,” Brom said. “It would be like turning my back to them and pretending I don’t know they’re evil. Except without the pretending.”

  “That’s what makes it a brilliant plan,” Vale said. “Not only are we too young to pull it off, but we’d be foolhardy to try. That’s what they’ll think. I like it.”

  Royal looked like he’d eaten a piece of rotting fish and was trying to choke it down.

  Oriana spread her long-fingered hands across her lap like she was spreading cards on a table, and she drew a steady breath.

  “At any rate, that is my idea,” she said softly. She looked like she hadn’t made up her mind about whether it was a good idea or not.

  Brom hated the notion of losing his hard-won knowledge, even for a short time, but...Vale had a point. Oriana’s plan was so bold it was insane, and that made it hard to predict. Even for The Four. Was running really a better idea?

  “We can’t make the tripwire be something that happens too soon,” Vale said slowly. “It would have to be a month away at least, past the end of the school year.”

  “Why?” Royal asked.

  “If we regain our memories too soon,” Vale said, “they might still be searching. We can’t know how long they’ll take to get around to looking at the students, or how long it will take them to look at all of the students’ memories.”

  “So you really want to do this?” Brom asked her.

  “I want to stick the dagger in these fucks,” she snarled, once again the feral urchin. “They lured me here, trapped me here, and from the sounds of it, they never intended to let me leave. Yeah, I want to hurt them. And we can’t do that if we run away. Like Oriana, I came here to become a Quadron, even if it kills me. And in this moment—only this one—we have the advantage of surprise. I don’t think we should waste it, no matter the risk.”

  Royal’s chest puffed up at her fervent declaration, and any doubt in his face vanished. “Yes,” he said with conviction. “We fight.”

  “Not the 1st day of Summermarch,” Oriana said quietly. “The last day of Summerdawn. Year’s end testing.”

  Vale snapped her fingers and pointed at Oriana approvingly. “Yes. Perfect. When they give us the writ of passage. That is our trigger.”

  “That’s more than a month away,” Royal agreed. “If they don’t find their culprit by then, they’ll stop looking.”

  “It is a good tripwire,” Oriana said. “Certain. Soon. And the year-end ceremony is something we have done before, so I’ll be able to imbed it accurately in my mind.” She nodded. “Except we don’t know which master will be giving us the writ of passage.”

  “So make it anyone,” Vale said. “Who cares who it is? Simply make it that if any one of us is given a writ of passage by anyone else, it trips the wire for you,” Vale said.

  Oriana looked thoughtful for a moment, then she nodded. “Yes. I can do that.”

  Brom felt a deep foreboding, but he didn’t have a better plan. He suddenly realized that once Oriana began poking around in his head, she would discover that he and Vale were lovers. It would be another surprise in a night of surprises, b
ut he gauged that Oriana must take that in stride, in the face of their larger problems. The secrets were mounting, and if the Quad got free of this immediate threat, they were going to deal with a lot. But if they didn’t move fast, none of the rest of it was going to matter.

  “What will you take?” Brom asked. “I want to know exactly. What are you going to remove?”

  Oriana nodded as though she had expected the question. “As little as possible. For Royal and myself, I will remove tonight’s activities from the moment Brom showed up at my door. Luckily, in our case, we didn’t know what you were planning or what you were doing. So it will be fairly simple. Removing an anomaly during the night when we should have been asleep anyway will make easy sense to our minds. Vale will be trickier. I must remove tonight’s activities, but in addition I must take away the plans you two made to storm the tower. I may need to go back weeks for that, but it must be done. I don’t want the two of you getting it in your heads to try again before we’ve recovered our memories.”

  “And for me?” Brom asked.

  “You will be the most difficult. I must remove your visit to the tower and all of your preparation for it. I must also remove that night when you ran the river with Vale, when you discovered the green fire spell at the wall.”

  “That far back?”

  “The memories are all built upon one another.” She pursed her lips and glanced downward, in thought. Her delicate brows wrinkled slightly. “Imagine your mind like a pile of rocks, each rock a memory that creates your current state of mind. I must carefully remove all the relevant rocks, otherwise your mind will go searching for them. But I cannot remove too many or your mind will tumble in upon itself. In short, I must be precise. The fewer gaps I leave, the less your mind will fight, trying to recover what was lost. The most difficult will be removing the inciting moment.”

  “What is an inciting moment?” Brom asked.

  “The one that pushed you to do something so ridiculously dangerous as invade the tower of The Four. For this, I’ll need Vale’s help.”