21. Lily
LILY
On Friday afternoon, Lily went to alchemy and turned in the homework with their names side by side on top of the page. The class was a lecture, and they were able to ignore each other without incident, though she dreaded the coming Wednesday when they’d have their first lab assignment.
On Friday evening she watched a movie with Gran and the Girls from the attic, with her brain a million miles away.
She woke up sweating from a nightmare of the red and black curse page.
She’d dreamt that in order for the monstrosity to be born, it had to consume her.
Its teeth against her skin, its winged embrace—both had been as horrifying as they had been enthralling.
Late Saturday morning and into the afternoon she spent with Daphne and Gemma in the Litchfield common room.
Gemma plucked absentmindedly at the little-used grand piano while Daphne and Lily played a variation of French Tarot.
She’d been grateful for Daphne’s text asking if she wanted to hang out.
She needed an excuse to get out of her own head.
Work quickly devolved into gossip and loitering—Gemma had taken roughly fifty pictures of herself at the piano, making sure the light slanting in through the windows illuminated her in a way that was appropriately ethereal.
Daphne was a savage Tarot player and had taken several tricks to Lily’s none, additionally casting several cantrips to double cards and otherwise cheat.
After a third, merciless victory, Lily threw her hand down in disgust, using some of her spontaneous reserves to make sure the cards folded themselves into an elaborate tower.
Daphne laughed her quiet, flat laugh, and it was one of those rare moments in which Lily felt perfectly normal—a typical college student, spending the day playing cards with her friend.
“I forgot to ask how it is?” Daphne signed at her.
“How what is?” Lily frowned, signing back.
Gemma slid off the piano bench and deposited herself messily on the oriental rug with a dramatic sigh.
Daphne rolled her eyes at her sister. “Isn’t Sebastian Allsaires your alchemy partner?”
The normalcy vanished. Gemma’s eyes narrowed as she clued into the conversation.
“Oh, it’s fine, I guess.”
“Fine, I guess?” Both Daphne’s hands and animated face registered her sardonic disbelief. “Gemma won’t shut up about their one-night stand.”
“It wasn’t a one-night stand,” Gemma snipped. “He came over on Thursday.”
Daphne’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline.
She had the same dark honey-blonde hair as her sister, but her eyes were softer, nearly lavender, and her skin several shades paler from spending summers at art camps instead of on tennis courts.
Even though Lily knew that Allsaires had seen Gemma on Thursday, he’d made it seem like he’d gone to get her number.
She wondered briefly which of them was obfuscating. She wondered why she cared.
Daphne turned to Lily conspiratorially. “Gemma said that riding him was like—" Gemma tackled her younger sister and they both dissolved into laughter.
“We should go if we want decent seats.”
Lily thought about ducking out, her head suddenly full of Gemma, naked, on top of her equally naked alchemy partner.
Daphne gave her a Significant Look. Leaving this early meant that by “decent seats” Gemma wanted to sit front and center, where Allsaires would surely notice her.
The idea of sitting so close mortified Lily.
With a sigh, she put her books in her bag.
Gemma settled them in the third row, just far enough back that they could see over the heat-shimmer mirage of wards meant to catch stray spells.
The stands filled in slowly around them.
Across the ring, Hawleyhurst and his cohort took seats in the middle of the first tier.
Chant was here again, far back in the upper tier.
Unless she missed them coming in, Vis and Beaumont were absent.
The starting bell chimed softly and a hush fell over the arena.
As Allsaires and his opponent entered, cheers swallowed the quiet.
There were two more months of preliminary matches between Windermere students.
After winter break, the regional tournaments would begin between Windermere and the other two schools on the eastern side of the continent—Quebec’s Savarelle and Savannah’s Dunmoody—before the annual North American Tournament reigned for a week of chaos with the start of the Sower’s Moon.
Hosting the tournament rotated between the six major North American schools.
Last year Vadoria, in Mexico City, had hosted, and for a week the dumb joke on campus had been about how Allsaires had managed to go to Mexico and come home with gold but without a tan. This year it was Windermere’s turn.
Next to Daphne, Gemma groaned as Allsaires entered the ring, Orb in hand and helmet under his arm.
“I cannot handle how hot he is.” She looked close to a swoon.
Lily forced herself to look at Allsaires.
“Hot” wasn’t the word she’d have used. In the high-necked, gold-trimmed, navy-blue uniform with its side-front closure, he looked serious and calm.
His soft, dark hair waved back from his face and curled to brush his forehead; his hazel eyes held deadly focus.
His mouth was set, but not tense, and as he slid the helmet on, the tapers that protected the sides of his head framed the sharpness of his jaw.
Allsaires faced Liesl Edinger, a German international student and one of the few female Cantrèa players on campus. Women weren’t prohibited from playing Cantrèa, but they certainly weren’t encouraged. Cantrèa, like most things in their society, was stuck far in the past.
In the Magic and Feminism class Lily had taken last spring, she’d been shocked to learn how many female Magicians had been killed in the Inquisition and Witch Hunts—enough that, for a time, the future of western magic had hung in the balance, since male Magicians had apparently decided they’d rather die out than dilute their lineage with non-magical blood.
Professor Ebbing had specifically not looked at Lily while she doled out this information.
Prior to the Middle Ages, Magical society had actually been somewhat matriarchal, but the Witch Hunts had allowed a patriarchal model to flourish and take hold to such an extent that in some of the Great Houses they still followed primogeniture.
As shocked as Lily had been to learn all this, she was more shocked that she hadn’t known it, that it had been swept quietly under the rug for centuries.
Lily kind of wanted Liesl Edinger to win. She was a good Cantrèa player and had made it to nationals the year before. Liesl was quick on her feet and smart with her spells. Almost immediately, she jumped from the inner triangular spell zone into the physical zone.
Against Allsaires, Liesl’s chance of winning with physical points was almost nonexistent, so her best chance was with well-aimed spells—but until someone broke the spell-seal nobody could cast. Liesl was planning to draw out the beginning of the match with avoidance as long as possible, hoping to frustrate Allsaires into doing something stupid to break the seal.
If she did it right, this had the potential to be a very long match, though by default the spell-seal opened after ten minutes.
Lily had seen plenty of matches over in much less.
After several minutes of feints and dancing around the ring, Allsaires opened the seal with his only environmental spell.
Next to her, Daphne gasped. Using an environmental spell, which could affect both players equally, often for the duration of the game, was a bold move.
The ground under Liesl’s half of the ring bucked and roiled as Allsaires cast Living Earth.
As much as she was rooting for Liesl, Lily couldn’t help but grin.
Living Earth was a fiendishly difficult spell, and it made the affected area completely unplayable.
Allsaires had effectively halved the size of the ring, forcing Liesl to play in extremely close combat.
The Allsaires who’d lost to the lesser Braithwhite had died and been reborn.
Liesl put up a good fight, the best she could possibly muster.
She launched her first spell, a well-aimed, sinuous, Rusalkan Tresses, which entrapped one’s opponent in slippery tangles of seaweed that grew tighter the more one fought.
It forced Allsaires to spend one of his two defensive spells by throwing up 白雨落平湖.
* The Tresses pattered against it like rain striking the surface of a pond, and the scent of ammonia and rotting sea hung over the arena.
He used the fading energy of his spell to rush Liesl and get within physical striking range.
After that, things went downhill quickly for her.
Allsaires was stronger and much faster than she was.
His physical points accumulated so quickly that even Lily could barely follow the action, and Liesl’s parries became frantic and then sloppy.
When Liesl’s Orb finally smashed against the sand, it happened in such a blur of movement that Lily only realized the bout had ended when she saw Allsaires’s Orb disintegrate and dissolve into golden dust that momentarily took the shape of an oak leaf.
“What a match." Daphne grinned fiercely.
Lily agreed as she stood up to collect her things. Gemma fluffed her hair and checked her makeup with her phone’s camera. When she raised her eyes, they were full of determination.
“You guys go ahead; I’m going to wait for Sebastian.”
Sebastian.
Keeping her face neutral, Lily turned to Daphne, who rolled her eyes at her sister behind her back.
“I have a lot of work to do, I should get going,” she signed to Daphne.
Daphne nodded. “Same. I have fifty art history slides to memorize before tomorrow.”
Lily grimaced. Every student at Windermere had both a magical and a mundane major.
Lily’s traditional major was ostensibly psychology, but she would be dead two weeks after she had to declare.
Daphne had chosen art history, which was especially punishing in the first two years, filled, as it was with endless lectures and memorization for identification tests.
“See you later.” Lily didn’t bother saying goodbye to Gemma as she slid past her.
She headed for the woods. Being an arboretum, Windermere had plenty of weird and rare trees, but Lily liked the woods on the southwest side of campus, filled with ash and hickory, sycamores and maples.
There was a creek that ran through the woods, spilling out of Orchard Lake, that eventually made it all the way into the Hudson.
Sometimes, depending on the rain or snowmelt, it could turn into a torrent, and she’d fallen in more than once while trying to cross downed logs, and had to bike home with chattering teeth and ice-block feet.
Spring was her favorite time in the woods, as the snowmelt rushed and the ferns unfurled from hibernation.
Every year at the beginning of April she gathered the fiddleheads that her mother loved to sear and dress with ramps and almonds.
Sometimes, if she was exceedingly lucky, she found a handful of morels, pushing up out of the black dirt like wrinkled gold.
Spring was her favorite time anywhere, and she had a hard time imagining that it could be better anywhere besides Windermere, with its cavalcade of blossoming trees that turned the air itself into a honey-scented dream in pinks and creams.
This will be your last spring.
Lily forced her thoughts away, burying her feelings—an art she’d perfected over a short lifetime—and thought instead about the golden fall.
Here in the woods, it felt less performative, more organic.
She settled in the root-made crevice of one of her favorite trees, throwing her light jacket on the ground to protect her pants from dirt, and began to read.
* 白雨落平湖 (báiyǔ luò pínghú)—“White rain falls on still lake,” from the poem 《曙光石湖》 “Dawn at Stone Lake” (shǔguāng shíhú) by 黄轼 (Huáng Shì), Tang Dynasty.