Chapter 7
Talisa
That night, I couldn’t fall asleep despite feeling utterly exhausted in body and mind.
I lay on my narrow bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the soft swish of the breeze moving through the trees planted outside and the occasional creak of floorboards from the corridor outside my suite. My body ached with fatigue. But my mind refused to stop replaying the day’s events.
My close call with the sabotaged potion. Mage-Instructor Varro’s contemptuous dismissal of the incident. And Lukhan’s triumphant smirk, perfectly calculated and perfectly cruel.
I rolled onto my side, pulling the blanket up to my chin.
The sheets and pillowcase smelled nothing like home—no salt air, no dried lavender from Mama’s sachets, no hint of wood smoke from the hearth in my bedroom.
Just odorless linen and the faint mustiness of a mattress that had housed dozens of homesick students before me.
Homesick. I pressed my face into the pillow and allowed myself to admit it, just for a moment. Just to know what I was fighting against.
Then I lay on my back again and forced myself to examine my current situation in the same way that Mama had taught me to assess a patient’s wounds instead of flinching from them.
It had only been one day, and already Lord Lukhan FitzMurad had maneuvered a mage-instructor into isolating me at the worst workbench in the Intermediate Potions lab, arranged for my supplies to be tampered with, and nearly blinded me in front of an entire class.
One day.
And he’d probably do it again tomorrow. And the day after that.
Dread weighed down on my chest like a boulder of ice, making it hard to breathe.
What am I supposed to do? I can’t complain to Mage-Instructor Varro—he’s already made it plain that he sides with the aristos. And I can’t go home.
My throat tightened with something close to panic. Mama had already sailed on the season’s last ship to Herrewick. I was now trapped here on the mainland until spring.
And even if by some miracle I found a ship willing to risk the autumn gales, how could I pay for the fare? More importantly, how could I face Mama and Papa and confess I’d abandoned Mira and Juno to run away from the academy like a coward?
I imagined Papa’s disappointment and his angry words. I’d experienced them often enough when one of us fell short. Mama wouldn’t show any emotion at all, and that was worse. No anger. Just that careful blankness she used when she didn’t want us to see how much something hurt her.
No. I won’t run away.
Anger flowed through me like the glowing lava from Wyrmbeorg on the Isle of Imber, which was rumored to have a great dragon slumbering at its heart.
When I was ten years old, Mama, Jacinthe, and I had taken the ferry over to the great Imber Midsummer Market Fair.
We’d watched in awe as the snow-capped cone at the center of the island belched clouds of gray ash while the ground rumbled and shook underfoot.
I’d never forgotten the sight of cracks in the mountainside bleeding yellow and orange streams of molten rock, filling the earth with the rotten-egg stench of brimstone.
I’m have to stay. I can’t let Lukhan and his friends win.
The stone on my chest cracked and melted away like a glacier in the lava’s path.
There was no way I was going to allow a pack of spoiled aristos with their fancy robes and family crests and cruel snickers drive me out of the finest magecraft academy in the Human Dominion.
I’d earned my place in the second-year classes, and not by an accident of birth. Because Mama and Papa had worked diligently to teach me and my sisters the basics of magecraft and the healing arts.
Back home, we had a saying: The tide doesn’t ask the cliff for permission.
We were islanders. When bad weather hit, we didn’t leave. We wrapped our cloaks around us, hunkered down, and waited for the storm to pass.
We dug in and endured.
If Lukhan FitzMurad wanted a war with me, then I intended to win it. Not by matching his cruelty. I had no interest in becoming what he was. But by wrapping my cloak around me and standing my ground until, like a storm, he ran out of ways to knock me down.
I didn’t doubt he’d keep trying. That much was already obvious.
Because he was afraid of me.
That wasn’t a comfortable thing to sit with. Fear didn’t make people back down. Fear made people desperate, and desperate people were dangerous.
How can I convince Lord Lukhan that I’m not a threat to him?
Maybe I could convince his hulking friend, Mr. Corvellan, who seemed to have a conscience and possibly a heart.
Why else would he protect Mira and Juno today?
My thoughts drifted sideways, the way they did when I was too tired for them to hold their course, and landed on my sister Jacinthe.
Right now, she was probably helping Papa in our family clinic while Mama was away. If the autumn fever season had started early, the two of them would be seeing patients until well past dark.
I could picture it now: Jacinthe behind the counter, measuring out doses of febrifuge elixirs while Papa worked in the treatment room, casting healing spells on the inevitable axe and saw-blade injuries from our neighbors who’d hurt themselves trying to harvest enough wood to last the winter.
I’d always admired Jacinthe more than I’d ever admitted. She had a kind of grace that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with who she was—patient, gentle, and unshakably warm to us, her younger sisters, who hadn’t always deserved it.
Now, after a day filled with my own humiliations, I felt shame at how I’d treated my older sister.
The week before we’d left home, I’d made fun of her for dropping a jar of dried herbs during a morning lesson. Papa had yelled at her for being clumsy and wasting valuable supplies when the truth was she’d been up all night helping Mama with our neighbor Editha AEthelflaedsdottir’s difficult labor.
They’d both returned at dawn, exhausted but triumphant. Mama had staggered upstairs to take a nap. Jacinthe had gone straight to the kitchen to stoke the fire and prepare breakfast.
After Papa finished berating her, Jacinthe had gone to sweep up the mess without a word.
She’d always done that. Absorbed Papa’s angry tirades and my thoughtless barbs, and carried on as if nothing had happened.
She used to walk me home from the market when I was small and the older boys were unkind. She’d take my hand during ferry crossings, when sudden storms lashed the water into white-capped fury, and talk to me the whole way across so I wouldn’t be frightened.
I’d spent years hiding how much I loved her because Papa didn’t like it.
I’d learned early on that he hated Jacinthe for being another man’s daughter.
He was always pleasant to her when Mama was present, but when Mama wasn’t there, Papa made it clear that he only tolerated Jacinthe to stay in Mama’s good graces.
I was ashamed of the way I’d behaved now. Of hiding my admiration and love for my older sister. Of letting Papa’s bitterness dictate how I spoke to her and treated her.
I thought of Jacinthe holding my hand on those stormy ferry crossings, and swore an oath to the Divine Mother. No matter what Lukhan FitzMurad throws at me, I will be to Mira and Juno what Jacinthe has always been to me. Their anchor. Their safe harbor. Their protector.
Somewhere beneath all my fear and fury, something steadied. Not peace exactly. But solid ground.
It was enough. I knew I’d be able to sleep now.
∞∞∞
My first week at the Imperial Academy taught me many things.
I learned that Lord Lukhan and his friends were creative with cruelty.
And that Mage-Instructor Varro went conveniently blind when one of his noble favorites made a mistake in his Intermediate Potions lab, but his eyesight improved dramatically when a commoner did the same.
And if you left your textbook unattended for even a moment in the library or the dormitory common room, it would turn up later in a fountain, or not turn up at all.
My missing books were only the beginning.
By the third day, someone had cast a charm that made everything I brewed smell strongly of fermented fish, no matter how often I rinsed it out.
Varro ignored the illicit use of magic, of course. Meanwhile, Lukhan and his friends wrinkled their noses and commented loudly about fishwives invading their academy.
On the fourth day, someone tampered with my five-page homework essay on Mage Sancola’s Commentaries on the Discipline of Magecraft and page three mysteriously vanished right before I turned it in.
By the fifth day, I’d stopped counting the “pranks” and thefts and found myself on constant high alert.
And wherever I went, cruel whispers followed me through the halls. Fishwife. Peasant. Island savage. Charity case.
“So, did you learn to read before or after you learned to gut fish?”
“Look at that! She can’t do anything right. It’s proof that standards here are slipping.” This after another one of my Intermediate Potions exercises had been sabotaged.
The persecution was relentless, like water wearing a channel through stone. I went to bed every night with my jaw aching from how hard I’d been clenching it all day.
The one bright spot in my day was my Fundamentals of Magecraft II class and lab.
Mage-Instructor Mundise had a gift for appearing next to an aristocratic student and requesting to see that student’s lab notes right when that student was reaching to steal something from my workspace.
A whispered conference between Lord Lukhan and his friends would be interrupted by Mundise calling one of them to the front of the lab to demonstrate a technique.
Mundise did these things quietly, without comment or confrontation. But I was deeply grateful to them for letting me succeed or fail without interference from my fellow students.