THIRTY
Angela took the back seat in the long, rectangular classroom, carved from the same dark stone as the rest of the Keep. Here, the walls were lined with symbols that ran around the room in thick lines, like wallpaper.
Only this room was softened by tall windows that allowed afternoon sunlight to spill across the wooden desks worn smooth by generations of hands. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with jars of dried herbs, powders, vials, and bound texts that looked older than most governments.
The students sat in uniforms of slate-gray tunics, belted at the waist. There were no silver threads on their cuffs or any staves marking their sleeves. The only variation lay in the details of the patch embroidered on the upper area of their tunics.
That was where the similarities ended, as some wore wooly undershirts and trousers, different colored sashes, and boots worn thin at the heel carrying dirt from fields, rather than through polished stone corridors.
They ranged from barely adolescent to perhaps eighteen—sorted not by age, but by when their magick showed that they could be schooled, so they told her. They had also explained how those from the outer regions volunteered to come here with dreams shining in their eyes of being part of the Vanguard.
Apparently, the Vanguard was a position of honor within Paradox, that some of the students sat so rigidly, as though they were part of the Vanguard ranks already.
The professor also wore a uniform of sorts. A charcoal-cloak with gray cuffs that also held silver threads in a runic language she had no idea how to read.
But what she knew, from the students’ sneaky side glances, was that she didn’t belong here. And she had never felt so old in her life.
It was ridiculous for her to even be here.
Now desperate enough to hitch a ride on the nearest horse and cart, if she had the faintest idea where the exit was.
Of course she was no Dorothy, and there was no Tin Man pointing her home, but if she had her mace and her handbag, she’d do what she could to get back to her life instead of being stuck in a magick school full of children.
Come on, she had no magick. Their tests proved that. So why couldn’t she go home already?
Today, the professor droned on about the foundational magical properties of herbs, that Angela followed too easily as it was so familiar.
At times, Aunt Claudine’s voice drifted over the lecture like a second soundtrack.
How protection circles were disguised as kitchen floor patterns.
Latin phrasing got tucked into gardening advice.
The logic of balance hidden in bedtime stories about wayward spirits, stubborn saints, and goddesses worthy of more than one mention.
Now, as the realization trickled over Angela like a wave, along came the shame for all those years of dismissing her aunt’s stories with an overdramatic eyeroll. Laughing at her aunt’s folklore remedies. Refusing to see what her aunt had gently tried to share with Angela all her life.
Pity her aunt’s tarot cards didn’t predict her trip to Paradox.
But then, as she lowered her head with shame, Angela realized that even if they had, she would’ve ignored it.
She had a lot to make up for with her aunt.
“Now, if we all turn to page one hundred and forty of the textbook,” the professor called from the front of the room.
Angela turned to the page she had already read.
That was the problem.
Aunt Claudine had wrapped these same principles in folklore and herbal lore that she had also learned from her mother before she could ride a bike.
The rest was from overhearing conversations with strangers who paid for advice as customers at their apothecary bookstore for as long as she could remember.
Angela had dismissed all of it because she had never believed.
Now here she was, at thirty years old, stuck in a classroom as the lecturer droned through material she could have summarized more efficiently, while the eager students leaned forward in the front row, lapping it up.
The bored ones filled the middle seats. And the rebels occupied the back—which was where she had planted herself, all alone.
Yet, every one of these kids possessed a visible magickal ability. One student lifted their quill without touching it. Another coaxed flame on his fingertips with nothing but concentration. Some required wands. Others required spells.
And here she was—the anomaly.
“Aunt Claudine would be in her element in this room,” Angela muttered under her breath as she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. She missed clock-watching to know how long she had before the break.
High school had bored her as a teenager. But here, now as an adult, it was worse because that old restless streak rose inside her, the one that had always questioned authority.
Outside, the day was offensively beautiful.
That remarkably cozy cornflower blue had embedded itself in the sky like a blanket stretched over green fields that made her think of some oil painting of Scotland that only needed an ancient crumbling castle to complete the image.
Rich, when she was sitting inside a castle watching the way the sunlight draped itself over soft hills in a way that made the stone walls of this place feel heavier.
There had to be more secrets in that thick forest that edged the valley than here in this room, the one she called The Forest of No Hope.
After six days trapped behind these castle’s stone walls, she missed her daily walks.
Even with the traffic humming along the road beside her small local park, that was nothing more than a heavily mowed landscape of trees and woven paths, it gave a sliver of nature.
That park had dogs that eagerly greeted her, their familiar owners smiling or waving, and children she’d watched grow from their parents’ first careful pushes in strollers into reckless preteens speeding past on bikes.
Her local park wasn’t perfect. There were days the trash cans were rank, and you didn’t visit after dark.
Not with the glow of smokers clustered beneath streetlights, and the low thrum of music that resulted in spills of empty beer cans at the base of freshly graffitied walls.
But it was so normal that none of it looked out of place because it belonged to her world.
And here…
“What I’d give to be outside in the sunshine rather than trapped in here.” Her eyes lifted toward the ceiling where they had no fans or vents. Not even a fire alarm or a sprinkler system.
“Miss Duboise.”
She looked to the front of the room, at the professor who was obviously bored with his job from his monotone that put people to sleep. But she shouldn’t be thinking like that as an adult. Right?
“Do you have something to share?” the professor asked carefully.
Angela knew that tone; they’d been warned. Everyone had. Under the Captain’s protection, it seemed no one was willing to risk upsetting her.
“I do. But it’s not about magic.” She sat higher in the ridiculously uncomfortable chairs. Hadn’t they heard of ergonomics in Paradox? Oh, right, they probably had healers who got rid of arthritis with the wave of a wand.
“Please ask. We’re here to help.”
“Okay, well, if there was a fire in this room,” she said, gesturing to the ceiling, “what’s the contingency?
Do you have any fire alarms? Where are the fire extinguishers?
Or sprinklers? What if someone miscalculates one of these flame demonstrations or a science experiment goes wrong? ” Did they even do science?
Of course, the students turned to look at her, then back to the professor, some rolling their eyes with the obvious message as if you didn’t already know.
“These rooms are heavily warded against such occurrences, I assure you,” the professor replied. “Flame cannot spread. And we extinguish most magical mistakes through spell work, or the wards will activate to contain it.”
“So, no hope of the fire alarm tripping, huh?” She had tripped a few in her time to skip classes—mostly gym and biology. No one ever suspected that the quiet girl with the perfect attendance record would do such a thing, chalking it up to a simple systems error.
Fire alarms. Drills. Sprinklers. Liability forms. All of it was an invisible infrastructure that was so normal in her world that no one thought twice about it.
But the other students stared at her. And the professor gave her a nervous smile, as if he couldn’t quite grasp such a foreign concept when they lived in a world that trusted its invisible safeguards without question. “I’ll return to the lecture.”
All the students dutifully swiveled their attention to the front of the room, and the professor’s drone-like tone once again filled the room.
At the back, Angela slumped in her chair and stared out the window, fiddling with the medallion. “I wish the fire alarms would go off so I could soak up some of that sunshine,” she whispered under her breath.
In her world, even prisoners were entitled to yard time.
Zarek might insist she wasn’t a prisoner, but it certainly felt like one with Tamarr, her smiling attendant, waiting outside the door to shadow her movements. And how every stone corridor twisted into another without ever leading to a gate, a courtyard, or a door that opened to the world beyond.
No wonder they called it the Keep.
She fiddled with her medallion on the slender chain.
Honoring the treaty. Attending lessons that were boring her to the edge of sleep, while unearthing her rebellious teenage self again.
So how come her compliance did not feel the same as freedom?
What were her actual rights in a realm governed by magic instead of law?
If she pushed too hard, would the protections promised to her aunt dissolve? Would Zarek reconsider the treaty? Not that she believed he would. But a good lawyer never stopped stress-testing a contract, even one she’d already signed.
What else could she do? Return to her chamber and stare through another window, imagining paths to home that did not exist?
No.
This was a prison.
An elegant one. But a prison all the same.
A drop of water struck the desk in front of her.
She blinked and looked up, just as another droplet fell from the ceiling.
Then another.
Students murmured as more droplets fell, light at first, then heavier.
“Stop, whoever is doing that,” the professor snapped.
Suddenly, the rain started pouring from the ceiling in a torrential cascade, as if they were sitting under a waterfall. Books were abandoned. Chairs scraped across the floor as students rushed for the corridor while water drenched their classroom.
Angela was soaked within seconds as she rushed out of the room.
“Is that normal, Professor?” she asked, as rain continued to fall from a perfectly intact ceiling.
“No.” The professor frowned at the rain from the open doorway. “This room is protected. Magic should not function here.”
“So does that mean class is over for the day?” She didn’t even bother hiding the hope in her voice. She really wasn’t good at high school.
“Until we stop this, yes,” he muttered. “All students will remain in line. No one is to move until the culprit steps forward.”
“Does that include me?” Being ordered about like a schoolgirl again grated against her spine more than the soaked clothes.
“No,” he replied quickly. “You’re free to go.”
Free? Really?
“You don’t have the power to do this… do you, Miss Duboise?”
“Pfft. I wouldn’t even know how.” She laughed at the absurdity of it.
“Stop! Whoever is doing this, just stop?” The professor waved his wand at the raining room, but nothing changed. “Magic cannot work here—the room is warded.” He tried again with the wand.
But the rain had intensified so much that the water was spilling under the door.
“And that’s my cue to leave.” Picking up her soaked skirts, Angela followed the water trail down the corridor away from the classroom. She didn’t know who’d done it, but she was ever so grateful for the escape.