Chapter 2
Now that Rose had officially entered her twenties and her final year at the Hendricks Academy for Sorcerous Pursuits, she looked forward to finally beginning her glorious career as a preeminent sorceress of dream magic.
She’d lived at school since her parents sent her away at the tender age of six and she wouldn’t miss it at all.
Despite her mother’s predictions that Rose would find friends, or at least peers, at the Hendricks Academy, she lived an isolated life. She was a quiet island with no visitors, within sight of a land teeming with people. Her teachers adored her. Her classmates did not.
At first, as a child caught up in the chaos of adapting to her changed circumstances and the excitement of her challenging new classes, Rose hadn’t really noticed her friendlessness.
Mostly she missed Aster, her first and only friend, the pony growing chubby and lazy in the stables back at Northbrooke Keep.
Now she only saw him on brief school holidays.
She hadn’t had any friends at Northbrooke, unless you counted her nannies and tutors.
Nor did she have any siblings. Not living ones, anyway.
Nobody ever spoke of her dead twin. If not for the gravestone marked LILY OF NORTHbrOOKE, with her birth and death dates the same as Rose’s own birthday, Rose might have forgotten about her sister altogether.
Sometimes Rose had wondered, though, if Lily had lived, whether she herself would feel more …
normal. She never had liked being touched, even by her parents, and even before she’d manifested as an oneiromancer, her dreams had been oddly vivid.
Sometimes she felt more alive in dreams than awake.
She certainly felt more comfortable in her skin.
Besides her inherent strangeness, as one of the youngest students at HASP—as it was referred to by the students, and some faculty—Rose had no natural cohort.
Children were bound by the blood geas when their magic manifested or when regular testing identified their potential, in cases of weaker, less showy talents.
Tales spoke of children as young as toddlers being bound.
Supposedly, the infamous sorceress Oneira, greatest oneiromancer of them all, had manifested as powerfully magical so young that she’d been blood-bound and taken into HASP before she was old enough to talk in complete sentences.
Most schools didn’t accept students until around the age of twelve, the median age of manifestation.
Also, as a standard business practice, few academies cared to invest in the intensive caregiving required for very young children except in very special cases.
It was only with those outliers, like the infamously dangerous Oneira, who reputedly nearly destroyed the ancient castle that had been her family’s home for centuries, that the academies took in those very young and wildly uncontrolled someday sorcerers.
Rose was another of those outliers. While not as young as Oneira had been, Rose possessed nascent potential as a powerful oneiromancer, promising to be wildly talented in that rare and dangerous specialization.
As a precocious only child, she was also unusually independent and mature, so HASP had been willing to take her in that early.
Besides, her father, Clotaire, was determined that Rose have the best and most training possible.
As a sorcerer contracted to the king of a neighboring realm, he possessed enough political influence to make what he wanted happen.
A young child living among much older ones, and strange even to herself, Rose focused on schoolwork and making her father proud.
When adolescence hit, and everyone around her seemed to burst with wild socialization, Rose became keenly aware of her loner status.
She did not know, however, what to do about it.
Having an analytical mind and keen powers of observation, Rose spent some effort trying to determine why she didn’t have friends.
Especially why none of the boys liked her.
Even though she still didn’t like being touched, she’d gotten more tolerant of it as she grew older, and she thought she might actually enjoy it from one of the boys she had small crushes on.
Except, they seemed to ignore her, instead buzzing like bees around certain girls that everyone seemed to have agreed were ideal for no reason she could discern. It defied rational explanation.
Aside from her general oddness, one factor that Rose determined set her apart was that everyone at the academy was aware that her contract had been purchased for an investment so significant that it bordered on breathtaking.
Never mind that the vast sum also meant she would have that much more to pay off someday, the coin from her eventual contracts going primarily to debt service.
Knowing the steep road she faced, and having a naturally studious nature with a belly full of fiery ambition cultivated by her father, Rose devoted herself to her studies with a focused diligence that inevitably stoked resentment within her classmates. Nothing she could change there.
As a final nail in the coffin that contained her deceased social life, HASP, like most academies, discouraged close friendships among the student population.
Their future relationships would be determined by their employers and it wouldn’t do for them to have complicating loyalties outside of the ones required by their eventual contracts.
None of them knew who might eventually contract their services.
Any number of the many warring kingdoms might elect to employ the most powerful among them to assist in their ongoing conflicts of fear, greed, and desire.
As sorcerers blood-bound to their contracts, they’d have no choice in their eventual enemies.
Any of them might end up facing a former classmate on the battlefield.
So, succumbing to the dubious allure of friendship was the height of foolishness.
Although the ever-shifting tides of romantic alliances seemed unconcerned with those details.
Besides all of that, Rose also lacked opportunity.
Singled out for a specialized educational track from the beginning, Rose received individual tutoring almost exclusively.
The larger survey courses where she might have had contact with other students covered material she’d already learned via intensive study with her father and the tutors he’d hired for her, so she was exempted early from those classes, all the better to advance in oneiromancy.
On the occasions when students did gather, Rose observed their gregarious interactions with distant fascination and a tinge of envy, especially those who paired off for those semi-illicit romances, giggling and cooing like birds.
Some unused muscle in the vicinity of her heart twinged with longing to belong to someone—someone romantically, not her doting father—but she eventually set that emotion aside as not important, and as something Clotaire would be terribly hurt to know.
Rose mentioned the problem to her father only once, when he came on one of his regular visits.
“They fear you, rightly so,” he explained. “Having no intimates isn’t a problem. Quite the reverse, my rose. It’s an indication of your excellence. These pitiful boys recognize their own inadequacy compared to you and can’t handle it. What could they possibly offer you?”
“I just get lonely sometimes.”
“All truly great people are alone. It’s a sign that you’ve risen above the rest of humanity. Connections to other people will only get in the way of your path to ultimate power, understand?”
When she nodded, though she didn’t truly understand, he smiled with great pride and affection. “Besides, you always have me, and your daddy loves you more than anyone else in the universe. Look what I brought you.” Presenting her with a jewelry box, he nodded for her to open it.
Inside she discovered a jeweled barrette for her long and heavy black hair, a sturdy one that could hold the whole fall of it, one decorated with the jewellike roses he loved to gift her.
She’d received the first on the day her magic manifested, after she’d been bound with the blood geas, uneasy with the still-prickly enchantment seething under her skin.
All the adults assured her the sensation would quickly fade, that she wouldn’t even notice the blood geas after another day or so.
As long as she obeyed the implicit will of her contract holder, they would never have to command her and she’d never feel any pressure from the enchantment, which would bind her until the day she died or paid off her debt.
Though they’d also said she wouldn’t remember the torturous process of the blood-binding and she did. She remembered always, with creeping loathing.
But her parents had been proud, and her father had withdrawn a small, velvet-covered box from his pocket. “A special gift for my special girl on her very special day.”
With careful fingers, she’d opened the box.
Inside, a rose pendant sparkled on a black ribbon.
It looked almost real, except that unlike the honey-gold and peach roses in the garden behind the kitchen at Northbrooke, it shimmered with that jewellike rainbow of colors.
The petals seemed almost to breathe, shifting through shades of iridescent pink, blue, and fiery orange.
When she poked it with a tentative finger, she found the curved petal edges nearly sharp instead of soft.
It shimmered with magic, with a bit of sideways unreality, and she felt a kinship with it unlike anything she’d known before.