10. Seb
SEB
He did it on purpose.
That was the first thing Seb thought when he saw Conrad enter the stadium.
And that was his first mistake—thinking.
He didn’t think when he played Cantrèa. People thought he did, that it was strategy, thinking six moves ahead, like chess on your feet, but it wasn’t.
Cantrèa was every best instinct he had, bottled, shaken, and set to explode.
Cantrèa was a melody he heard in his sleep, and that his body remembered on waking.
He’d learned a term for what happened to him when he played Cantrèa—it was called a flow state—and it was him at his freest, as the most platonic ideal of himself.
But today he was thinking. Not only thinking but worrying.
When he should have been pivoting around Braithwhite’s laughable attempt on his Orb in the opening salvo and shooting an elemental attack under his arm at his ribs, he was thinking about Conrad—whether he’d done it on purpose, whether Con was actually that malicious—and moving back two zones like a six-year-old in their first skirmish.
When Braithwhite iced the ground under his feet, he should have already been running, should have been moving in a spiral fashion to throw Braithwhite off guard and center his breathing.
Instead, he was thinking about the guilt in his stomach from sleeping with Gemma, and that guilt felt an awful lot like nausea.
When Braithwhite smashed him upside the head with his foil, he was worrying about losing, which was basically a death sentence.
Then his headache came back twofold, undoing Tori’s temporary panacea.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t lost before—of course he had—but he had never lost in a truly embarrassing fashion, never against an opponent who was in the bottom five percent of seeds in tournament play.
He could have turned it around, probably.
Definitely. He could have thought about standing in the river, could have reached out his hand to Magic, could have recited his Words, but he didn’t.
If he’d been introspective in the moment, a subconscious part of him might have wondered if he wanted to lose.
If losing wasn’t what he felt like he deserved.
If losing wasn’t the thing that would let him feel all the anger and guilt and self-loathing that he wanted to feel, without having to dig any deeper.
Seb lost. He wasn’t sure exactly what happened except that he’d thought about losing, and that was about as close to manifesting a loss as he could, short of magic.
It was as if, whatever he would normally do, his brain and body conspired to do the opposite.
When his Orb smashed on the ground—from a shoulder-check, no less—he stared at it dumbly, watching it happen in slow motion.
Mechanically, he sheathed his foil, shook hands with Braithwhite, and walked away.
“Sorry, man,” Braithwhite said when he entered the locker room some time later. Seb still sat on the bench in his booze-sweat-soaked gear, trying not to vomit. He didn’t sound sorry.
Somehow, he already had a text from Adriana.
He swiped it open. It said simply: Do better, dumbass.
He smiled a little in spite of himself. The reminder of Adriana Mérida, his best competition for the Collegiate Tournament in the spring, did exactly what it was supposed to.
From Mexico City’s Vadoria, she was the second-ranked player in the league, though Seb was worried she was actually better.
When they’d first met at the tournament freshman year, they’d made a promise to face each other in the finals.
It should have happened last year, but she’d broken her leg in a free-soloing accident the week before the tournament, so it hadn’t been much of a tournament at all, and his win felt a little hollow.
Their friendship, formed in high saturation over short bursts, was lovingly antagonistic, based as it was in competition.
Most of their conversations were Cantrèa-related, because even though their temperaments in the ring were perfectly matched, on paper they had nothing in common.
Adriana was a thrill-seeker who loved gambling and game theory.
Seb liked to read in his room and pretend he was straight.
He went to the grove. It was self-flagellating, and he knew it, but he did it anyway, because he owed it to his tree to witness—and apologize, at the very least. Windermere was an arboretum covering some thousands of acres, and full of strange and wondrous, stunted and smelly trees, but Seb’s favorite part was the grove.
Cantrèa had gotten its name and its gameplay from the French.
Formally, it was Cantrèjeux, the Game of Cantrips.
Its weird and wild symbolism, though, it had gotten from the glens of Scotland and the mountains and valleys of Wales, and the druids who had lived there before they’d been systematically wiped out.
It spun his head to think about the possibility of Cantrèjeux at Camelot.
It made him feel like one green shoot in a vast and immeasurable forest of tradition, and that, of course, was the point of the grove.
In your first tournament win, whether that happened at six or sixty, your Orb became an acorn.
That acorn was taken and planted in your home grove.
Seb’s first had been planted in a section of Central Park hidden from non-magical eyes.
He’d visited it after every bout, imagining that he could see it growing.
Sometimes he actually could. The oaks were a magical hybrid perfected over centuries.
With each win, your tree grew. With each loss, it stunted.
Tournaments could age your tree entire years—rings growing as fast and fat as they would in the most temperate years.
After his first tournament win, Seb had sat all afternoon and into the evening, watching his sapling shoot skyward and push the first buds from its twigs.
After his first win at Windermere, his tree had sprouted a single acorn that had been carefully harvested.
It was then couriered two hours north in a hermetically sealed container and planted in the grove here while he watched.
A not-insignificant crowd had watched as his acorn caught up to his first tree and fanned out, leaves uncurling and then spanning hands of brilliant summer green.
Now the sun-gold leaves dulled, and he forced himself not to look away.
“Quite a match.”
He turned to see Professor Chant standing a few feet away. He realized he’d seen him in the stands as he left, sitting, he was pretty sure, next to the dark smudge of Lily Perkins’ curse aura.
Seb laughed bitterly. “I think that’s giving it a dignity it doesn’t deserve.”
“Perhaps. I would say ‘it happens,’ but I don’t think that’s what occurred.”
“No,” Seb agreed, stepping backward to draw even with Chant, taking in his fashionably distressed shirt for an unbearably avant-garde Welsh band that Asher loved and he could sometimes tolerate; the muscles underneath; his fine, dark hair; his fine, dark eyes. “It wasn’t.”
Chant didn’t say anything, which was the only appropriate response. He let Seb’s thoughts breathe and they watched his tree die a little in silence.
“I think maybe I wanted to lose.” He looked at Chant for an answer, for validation. Chant wasn’t going to let him off so easily.
“I think that’s an interesting thing for a Cantrèa Champion to say.” All the usual play was gone from his tenor.
“And?” Seb pinned him with his gaze. He knew it made him seem a certain sort of way, letting Chant see the intensity he usually tried to hide behind tailored oxfords and an air of aloofness.
“And?”
“What’s the rest of that sentence?” He regretted it as he said it. It was too direct a way to talk to a professor, even if that professor was barely thirty and wearing red canvas high tops.
“And I think it would be worthwhile to consider what that means.”
Seb stared back, saying nothing. Eventually, he looked away as his tree dropped a single, dull-gold leaf.
“I’ll see you in class on Wednesday, then, Sebastian.” Chant stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked away.