Chapter VII. Domenic
VII
DOMENIC
SUMMER
Five years ago, the tragedy of Hanna Mayes and Domenic Barrow unfolded like this.
Flushing, the pair of them scooped up their books and trudged to where they’d been banished to the back of the classroom. The other students snickered as they slumped into their seats.
“What are you pouting about?” Hanna hissed at Domenic. “This is your fault for talking too much.”
“You were talking back!”
“Because otherwise you never shut up. Not all of us have a rich family as our plan B, you know.”
He scoffed—Hanna was fighting dirty. “What do you need a plan B for? You’re the top of our class.”
“Yeah, well, we’ve only been at the academy for two months.” Yet as she ignored him to resume her diligent notetaking, her frown warred with a smile.
For several minutes, Domenic too tried very hard to focus on the lesson—or at least on the rude doodle of their teacher he scribbled vindictively. But even as his fury faded, his eagerness still blazed white hot. Their promised guest would soon arrive.
While their teacher faced the blackboard, Hanna tossed a square of bubble gum across the aisle into Domenic’s lap. A peace offering.
He gratefully popped it in his mouth and whispered, “I don’t get it. You and I mastered bruise-healing ages ago, but they won’t even let us practice it yet! This whole class is just theory. I thought the academy was supposed to be hard.”
“Not for the ‘Danmere Duo,’ clearly.”
They’d invented the nickname on the train to Gallamere, when they’d spat on each other’s hands, shaken them, and solemnly vowed to join the Order together.
After all, they were lifelong best friends, both powerful, both brilliant, and the only two students from Danmere to pass the academy’s competitive entrance exams. And that was just the beginning, Domenic was sure, because theirs was a great story in the making.
“I bet we’ll be the first in our class to get Living Wands,” Domenic said.
“I bet we’ll be the youngest members of the Order ever.
What kind of wand do you think you’ll bond with?
I think I’ll bond with an enchantment wand.
No, a nature wand. But a corporeal wand would be cool, too, I guess.
That’s what the guest speaker has, right?
Do you think he could heal any wound? What about reattach a limb?
No, a head? Maybe if I had a Living Wand, I could—”
“Mr. Barrow, Ms. Mayes, do I need to ask you both to stand outside?” their teacher asked coolly.
Will Haden snorted into his sleeve. Connie Massey twisted around to sneer at them.
Hanna muttered a word Domenic had never dared use before. Then, louder, she answered, “No, ma’am.”
Domenic echoed her and slumped lower in his seat.
He sighed, shifting, fidgeting. His attention drifted to the window, to the dappled sunlight winking through the treetops of the grove.
He startled as the door opened, and even as tall and gangly as he was, from the rear of the room, Domenic had to stand to glimpse the newcomer: a stark-looking man, with a ruddy gaze and a wispy comb-over. But far more captivating than the magician was his wand.
Syarthis, Domenic thought it was called.
The ugly name suited it; it was an ugly thing, pale and emaciated. Even as the guest introduced himself, Domenic couldn’t hear, couldn’t quite look away from it. The dark rings in its shaft disturbed him. They looked like eyes, darting back and forth, up and down. As if searching for something.
Until they froze, locked directly on him.
Like the wand recognized him, somehow. Like they’d met before.
Hanna smirked. “What’s the matter with him? He looks like he’s gonna keel over.”
Domenic wrenched his focus from the wand to its wielder. Indeed, the magician wore a strangely vacant expression. His face slackened. His mouth sagged ajar.
“Um, sir?” their teacher spoke.
The magician heaved out a strangled gasp. Then, as one, the eyes of both the man and wand rolled back in their sockets. The coiled tip of Syarthis unfurled like a tongue and lashed out in all directions.
“What’s happening?” wailed Annie Page in the front row.
“Each of you, stay calm,” their teacher snapped, drawing her own wand. “We’re going to—”
She exploded in a torrent of red.
Domenic blinked several times, hard and with intention. He touched something undeniably warm and wet and real trickling down his cheek.
In a sudden roar, the windows shattered, and students screamed.
Domenic pressed his forehead against his desk and shielded himself with his arms. When he peeked up, he saw blood: the blood of his teacher splattered across the chalkboard, the ceiling; the blood gushing from the guest magician’s eyes and gaping mouth, puddling onto the floor.
Students shrieked and shrieked, but no one did anything.
They couldn’t. Even as the magician crumpled, a terrible pressure and heat emanated from Syarthis, writhing in his limp hand.
Domenic cried out as it drilled into his eardrums, his eyelids, his chest. And just as he dropped to the ground, as he swore his skull would crack, he saw things. Terrible things.
Memories.
A reel of shame and embarrassment, things he’d blurted out when he hadn’t stopped to think.
Every fear he’d ever felt, from the brutal monsters of Winter to his dormitory in the dark.
The way his parents looked at him that time he’d wandered home coated in wilderness and burned blistered from the sun, like he mystified him, like he wasn’t theirs.
He thoughtlessly kicked out, and pain burst across his back as his chair tumbled onto him. He gasped and opened his eyes, smearing away crimson tears. Five feet away, Kannan Thevar, his roommate, stared at him, his empty stare leaking red.
Domenic shakily pushed himself to all fours.
His memories still battered him, all the worse each time he blinked.
So he forced himself not to close his eyes.
Not as Annie Page collapsed in the center aisle, gory tracks raked down her cheeks from her own fingernails.
Not when Connie Massey vomited into her friend’s arms. Not even when Will Haden’s sobbing abruptly cut out.
Domenic twisted his head to glimpse Hanna, who lay curled in a fetal position. He called to her, and to his relief, she craned up her neck.
But she didn’t look at him. Instead, her gaze trailed to the front of the classroom. Domenic followed it, then cringed at the sight of Syarthis—sputtering, jerking, unbonding.
A desperate idea seized him. When the wielder of a Living Wand died, a new magician could succeed them, even on that very same day. And the wielder, so exsanguinated that his gums had shriveled back from his teeth, was certainly dead.
This would be the start of Domenic’s great story. He would rise to become the hero. He would save them all.
Yet as he tried to crawl forward, he couldn’t. He was paralyzed, aching, petrified. And when he turned to look again at his best friend, for three agonizing seconds, they held each other’s stares, and they knew.
Nothing they’d promised was ever going to happen.
Then, as Domenic braced himself to die, Hanna’s expression hardened.
Whimpering, she dragged herself forward.
Domenic tried to shout to her, but he couldn’t speak.
He tried to reach for his training wand in his backpack, but he couldn’t move.
He could only watch, worthless, as Hanna crawled over each broken body of their classmates, until at last, she grasped the Living Wand around the handle, and she let out a piercing scream.
The Gardens were Domenic’s refuge in Gallamere.
Unlike Valley Park, which was flocked with tourists and reeked of days-old garbage and cigarettes, in the Gardens, you could almost forget you were in a city at all.
The trees shrouding the pebbled trails obscured the high-rises.
The chorused birdsongs and buzzing of honeybees muffled the all-hours din of traffic.
And though it didn’t compare to the meadows where he’d grown up, when Domenic lay here, cradled in clover and wildflowers, he could almost grasp that feeling—when magic had been nothing but wonder.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
Domenic peeked open one eye. Hanna stood over him.
“Guess you’ve heard,” he said blandly.
“Yeah. Glynn told me. Said he scheduled the vigil for the first day of Winter. Thinks that’ll make it seem fortuitous or some bullshit.”
One of the many reasons Alderland believed Valmordion Chose its wielder from birth: they could bond with the wand at any time after its thawing, regardless of the previous wielder’s death day.
Hanna nodded at the dandelions piled atop his stomach. He’d been mindlessly plucking whichever ones were within reach. “You look like a corpse, you know.”
“I’m practicing.”
Hanna didn’t laugh. Instead, she sat on the ground beside him and gazed grimly around the Gardens.
They were always crowded as Winter approached, but this year, every wrought-iron bench was occupied, every plot of grass claimed by a picnic blanket.
People basked in the sunlight with collars unbuttoned and lips stained red from the last of Summer’s fruit.
They counted the passing clouds as if counting their blessings.
It would’ve been a pleasant sight if not for how starkly it contrasted with the rest of Gallamere.
Already, salt littered the sidewalks. The supermarket shelves had been gutted clean.
Half the windows were boarded, nonessential shops closing for the season.
Toilet paper was selling for twice its usual price.
“Syarthis has a collection about Valmordion, you know.” Hanna’s words were half-garbled as she simultaneously bit at her cuticles. “A whole wing. Goes practically all the way back.”
Domenic stifled a cringe, wondering if that was what had filled Hanna’s overtime hours these past five days—visiting the bowels of Syarthis’s Archives.
Domenic had heard rumors it was a ghastly process to watch, but Hanna always spoke about it casually.
Maybe that was for his benefit. On more than one occasion, Hanna had come home with blood crusted in her lashes or the veins of her eye sockets bulging like burrowed roots.
She always avoided him those nights, her door closed but her light still on. And he, like a coward, never knocked.
“What Valmordion is capable of…” Hanna continued. “It’s more dangerous than anyone realizes.”
Domenic forced a chuckle. “And to think, it’ll soon be in the hands of some lousy seventeen-year-old.”
Hanna squinted at him as if searching for some detail she hadn’t noticed before, some fine print she hadn’t read.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re not worried it might bond with you?”
He scoffed as he propped himself on his elbows. “I’m more worried about blowing up the moment I lay a finger on it. I’m the last magician that wand will Choose.”
“Well, you should hear some of the stuff they’re saying about you, since you and Caldwell took on that winterghast. That was … pretty incredible, Dom. No one knew you had it—”
“I’m not a hero, no matter what anyone thinks,” he snapped. “And I’m pretty sure that’s a prerequisite.”
With fingers already stained yellow with pollen, Domenic ripped dandelions from the grass, one then three then six of them. Hanna sucked on her bleeding nail bed. And before Domenic even uttered another word, her face crumpled. Like she already knew what he was going to say.
The two of us—we promised to join the Order together.
Thoughtlessly, he blurted, “After Valmordion’s vigil, I’m gonna try to bond with Ravfiri. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll try for Guinvallah, too.”
Hanna smiled, wide and goofy. “Yeah?”
“I … Yeah.”
That same dread ached within him, the roots squeezing over his heart. But as Domenic anxiously twisted a dandelion between two fingers, he realized he’d meant what he said. The only thing he loved more than magic was her.
Still grinning, she lay beside him and fished out a packet of bubble gum from her pocket. She flung a piece onto his stomach. “You know my barista this morning gave me a whole earful about destiny?”
He snorted as he unwrapped his piece. He and Hanna were seemingly the only people in Alderland who thought destiny was bullshit. “Really?”
“Oh yeah. He saw my Order pin and went off. Asked me what I thought about Valmordion. If I had any guesses who the Chosen One was. I think I offended him when I said I pitied whoever the poor kid would be.”
Domenic had been so preoccupied with his own possible demise that he hadn’t given much thought to his fellow classmates.
Truthfully, he hated most of them—their obsession with status, with gossip.
And maybe it was childish, but even if Domenic didn’t believe Valmordion’s wielder had been Chosen, he still thought they should be someone gallant, someone strong, someone noble.
And he could only think of one candidate who matched that description.
But he refused to wish that fate upon Caldwell. No matter how direly Alderland needed a hero, he struggled to wish that upon anyone who didn’t want it.
Pained, Domenic lay back down and shakily breathed in the last remnants of Summertime. And though it didn’t catch his notice, as he sighed, every tree, every flower, every blade of grass rustled. As though attuned to him. As though in a bow.