Chapter 8 Back To School
Back To School
Present Day
Valarian College Dormitory
Malcroix Bones Academy
“You’re insane. As usual,” Miranda said fondly, staring at my course schedule where she held it in her hands.
Her eyes lit up, and she let her hands drop.
“Oh! Are you planning on going to the Second Years’ Party?
Jolie wanted me to ask. It’s not for a few weeks yet, but if you don’t have a dress for it, we should all go to Bonescastle and have something made.
Everyone goes absolutely all-out mad for this thing. It’s tradition.”
My mind had been elsewhere, lost in the list of books I had to get from the library that night, four for my theurgy class alone.
When her words penetrated, I looked at her in confusion.
“A party? Already? We’ve only had a week of class.” My mind scanned through dates, trying to make sense of it. “Is it a holiday?”
I’d thought I’d got all the Magique holidays on my calendar finally, at least those celebrated in Britain. Had I missed one?
I glanced down at her corgi, right as it head-butted into the chest of my monocerus, causing it to tumble backwards and into the wooden leg of the sofa.
My primal leapt up at once, stomping its feet and snorting before it ran after after the delighted corgi, head down, its black horn aimed right at the dog’s rear-end.
“It’s not this week,” Miranda said impatiently.
“We just have to order the dresses soon, especially if we want a decent designer. Shoo, you!” she scolded her corgi, before turning back to me.
“…Second week of October, I think? And it’s not a holiday, weren’t you listening?
It’s Second-Year’s party. Forsooth’s the one throwing it this year, since he’s our class faculty head.
Nyx’s older sister said he hasn’t done one in years and years, and he’s got a rep for going all-out.
She figures there’ll likely be crashers…
upperclassmen who want to see it for themselves, especially since he won’t do another while they’re in school. ”
I tried to be as excited about this as Miranda clearly wanted me to be.
Honestly, I was more interested to hear that Forsooth was our faculty head. How had I not known our entire class had a faculty head?
We were sitting near the brick fireplace in the common area of our new dormitory apartment.
Second-years got housed in Valarian College, which, unlike Grathrock, offered three-person accommodations, in addition to two. Jolie and I shared with Miranda now, after making the request at the end of last term.
I’d honestly worried that having three of us in the same space might be too much, particularly given Miranda’s more expansive personality, and her much more packed social calendar compared to me or Jolie.
But the dorms were also suites this year.
We each had our own bedrooms, and the shared spaces were larger than our entire room had been as first-years.
Miranda, who’d never managed to get rid of Elysia Warrington as her roommate the previous year, was so happy about the new arrangement, she’d bought me and Jolie four “housewarming” and “roomie-bestie” presents over the summer already, including a magical scratching post for Wraith, a full-sized magical-anatomy model for Jolie, magical mugs that never got cool for hot drinks or warm for cold drinks, and magical wall-calendars more complex and personalized than the maps supplied by the school.
She’d also insisted on taking the smallest bedroom in the suite, despite my arguing that: 1) she had literally four times as many belongings as me, 2) she had five or six times as many clothes as I did, and lent them out to me all the time, anyway, 3) all I needed was a window, a desk, and a decent bookshelf, and 4) Wraith would make herself at home in ALL the rooms, regardless of where I slept, so they should be allotted larger rooms to compensate.
Miranda dismissed every single argument I made.
So I huffed and tried to get Jolie to argue on my side, but in the end, Miranda wouldn’t budge, and I ended up with a too-large room for me and Wraith, with a too-large closet.
Mir, meanwhile, had a closet so overflowing with dresses, blouses, trousers, shoes, coats, hats, scarves, skirts, robes, jackets, stockings, socks, and every other article of clothing one could imagine, she could barely squeeze into it, or find anything.
I couldn’t get her to hang even her formal robes in mine.
I set up one corner of my bedroom with Wraith’s water and food dishes, her magical litter box, and Mir’s new scratching post. I moved my desk under the window, where I had a gorgeous view of The Eyrie, with Devil’s Fall in the background.
By the time I’d come back from dinner on that first night, four bookshelves had appeared on the open walls on the other side of my desk, already half-filled with books, both mine and books I’d pulled from the library, including an entire shelf on castes, the Obeah, and Sanctum Occulus.
I even had my own fireplace, with its own armchair.
Needless to say, I felt guilty about it.
I also loved it, and wondered if I’d ever leave my room again, apart from classes, meals, the library, and the occasional trip to Bonescastle on a weekend.
I hadn’t planned on going anywhere that weekend, though.
I was struggling a bit to settle into school.
After a summer spent with Alaric, obsessing on Bones, Dark Cathedral, and trying to improve every aspect of my protection, seeing arts, theurgy, and tracking spells, it felt completely strange to be sitting in a classroom again, discussing the ethical implications and possible side-effects of utilizing the blood of living animals in binding spells.
I felt even stranger in my Offensive and Defensive Magic practical, where I’d been paired off against Bella Chalmers, of all people, the same witch I’d seen in Bones’s lap on the carriage ride to Malcroix.
She’d hit me with an ice-shard spell, a vicious smile on her lips, and I hadn’t hesitated, not even to think about how hard I should hit back.
I don’t think I’d even been angry. I made the mudra and murmured the words suvarna hydra shirah, stepping into the full stance, which was something like a warrior pose in yoga, only with one hand out front, and blue-green fire blurred out of my palm in a torrential cyclone that rapidly formed into my weapon of choice.
Alaric, who was in my class, found it absolutely hysterical.
Everyone else, including our teacher, Rafe Quicksilver, did not.
To be fair to them, the hydra that erupted from my hand was absolutely enormous. It also chewed through a lot of matter in the Experimental Magic Shed, as I hadn’t thought to limit it to a ghostly form, so it came out full-blown corporeal.
To be fair to me, the only person I’d spent any time sparring with over the summer had been Alaric Greythorne, who was utterly diabolical when it came to offensive spells.
Endless matches with him, most of them in the cellar of the Dragon’s Keep, where they had a residents-only, professionally shielded, magical arena we could use, taught me, if nothing else, to go big from the outset.
If I didn’t hit back with adequate force, Alaric cremated me.
After two or three months of that, I’d learned to slam back at him before he could grab the upper hand, and to keep hitting him so he’d remain off-balance.
It was the only way I ever won.
So when Chalmers started off aggressive, I acted more or less purely on instinct.
Chaos erupted inside the experimental magic shed.
Quicksilver ordered me back, and forbade me from casting any more spells, so I could only watch from the sidelines while he stepped between Bella and the hydra I’d cast.
It was a good few minutes before things calmed down, and by then, the entire shed smelled like sulfur, smoke, and, faintly, of blood.
Green and blue smoke still billowed in waves over the curved, black ceiling when the class ended, and everyone in there was staring at me like they thought I was doing blood sacrifices at night while everyone else was sleeping, and maybe murdering people on the weekends for sport.
“Shadow. Over here.”
Rafe Quicksilver had been red-faced and sweaty by then, cords of muscle standing out on his neck, panting after he’d battled my hydra and finally managed to neutralize the spell so it wouldn’t bite a chunk out of Bella Chalmers’ arm, shoulder, leg, or maybe her face.
Quicksilver had always been decent to me.
Patient, even.
That day, he full-blown screamed in my face, in full hearing distance of the entire class, for a full eight minutes.
Everyone pretended to go on with their sparring assignments, but I knew not a single person in there missed a word.
I’d thought Quicksilver would keep going, honestly, maybe even after class finished, but at some point, he seemed to realize I wasn’t shouting back, or doing anything but standing there, my hands clasped.
His anger flipped abruptly from hot to cold.
He ended the lecture with a hard glare, his face only a few inches from mine, and words that hit a lot harder than he likely realized.
“Do anything like that again,” he growled, his eyes flat as a cobra’s. “And I’ll assign you to practice exclusively with Bones.” His full lips twitched when I flinched. “I suspect you’ll enjoy that a lot less, Shadow. He’s in his own magical shed for a reason.”
Everyone in school had heard the story by the time I got back to Valarian.
I tried to blow it off, but of course my friends were all intensely curious, and wanted to know where I’d learned the spell. I muttered something vague about “summer reading,” which Draken found as hilarious as Alaric had, seeing me conjure the hydra in the first place.