Chapter 22 Unanswered Questions
Unanswered Questions
Present Day
Valarian College Dormitory
Malcroix Bones Academy
Icouldn’t get out of bed the following morning.
Well, I suppose I could do, technically, since I did eventually get up, but the effort felt like a whole new torture, somehow worse than the nearly four hours he’d put me through the day before.
It wasn’t just my body, although I did find bruises on large swaths of my skin when I finally got to the shower.
My magic felt drained, too, which was almost worse.
I soon learned those feelings wouldn’t be unusual.
Nor did those types of mornings grow any less as the weeks passed.
The day after every one of my fight-training sessions with Bones, I struggled to get out of bed, and generally walked to my first hot shower of the day like a ninety-year-old with a spinal injury.
I forced myself out of bed each morning anyway, partly to keep Jolie, Draken, Luc, and Miranda from worrying.
To say they’d been alarmed by my new arrangement with Bones would be an understatement.
They grilled me on it incessantly the night after it started, cornering me in Frumpy’s as soon as they heard.
I told them I was fine, that everything was fine, but my frequent winces and inability to sit down without arranging my bum in six different positions first probably didn’t help much to sell my words.
They absolutely didn’t believe me that Bones wasn’t hurting me on purpose.
Anyway, on this particular morning, about a month into our training, I couldn’t lie in bed, not even to blow past my early alarm and get up at the second one.
I had a quiz in Ancient Rituals.
I needed at least an hour to review my notes, especially as I’d been nodding off in Frumpy’s the night before.
I limped to the shower first, even though I probably should have been looking over my class notes during those precious minutes too, and stood under the hot water, trying to get my muscles to work.
Draken and Miranda had quizzed me about Bones again, just the night before, probably because he’d kept me over four hours for the third time that week.
I’d really tried to answer all their questions and concerns, but I hadn’t satisfied them that time, either.
The three of us talked for over an hour, drinking hot chocolate in front of the fire, but it had been difficult not to nod off, even with how far behind I was in my revising.
In the end, I had to beg them to let me study, if only for the last hour.
Afterwards, I’d struggled to keep my eyes open long enough to read the section from my Theurgy text we were supposed to cover, but I kept obsessing on the uncomfortable conversation with my friends.
Mir made it clear she wasn’t content with my half-answers that time, either, not after several weeks of half-answers around Bones, not to mention the night of the Second Years’ Party, and what Strangemore had done to me, and how I’d gotten away from him, and where I’d spent the night, and so on.
I’d told them the highlights of what happened at the party, of course, and everything I’d reported to the school.
My explanations still left a lot of gaps, and unlike the Malcroix administrators, my friends weren’t willing to let those go.
The time gap alone was difficult to explain, given they’d last seen me barely an hour into the party, then nothing until I’d stumbled back to our dorm at something like noon the next day.
Mir knew I wasn’t telling her something.
Like I had the year before, I told her and Jolie that I’d fallen asleep in Frumpy’s, but that excuse was even less plausible the second time, and Miranda didn’t hide the fact that she didn’t believe me.
I tried to combine those two nights into the same story, telling them how I now believed Strangemore drugged me the night of the Eleusínia Myst?ria dance, as well (which happened to be true), but my explanation still didn’t satisfy her.
Really, it probably didn’t satisfy any of them, but Mir was the most openly angry about my refusal to admit it wasn’t true.
I eventually gave up revising altogether when Mir and Draken wouldn’t stop whispering to one another about what, if anything, “corpse-boy” was up to, why he’d agreed to teach me at all, why I looked like I’d been fighting werewolves, and what Forsooth was up to, letting Bones anywhere near me in a magical combat situation.
I put down my book, and tried to think about their questions objectively.
Unfortunately, I didn’t feel I could be entirely honest with them about any of those things, either.
In the end, I decided that lying to them and omitting more things would only irritate Mir more.
I retreated to Valarian, and my bedroom, and my bed.
I ended up falling asleep with Wraith curled up by my belly, my head on my Theurgy textbook, which I spent at least part of the night drooling on before I shoved it to the floor.
As for my Offensive and Defensive Magic classes, I found them more frustrating than anything, mostly because I didn’t seem to be getting any better.
The thing was, Bones had taught me things.
I didn’t fully understand why he harped on some things and not others, but there was no doubt he knew what he was doing, and had strong opinions about what I needed to learn.
He didn’t care at all when I did things like destroy a chair of his, transmorphing it as part of a monkey-tail spell, (for example), or when I clawed at his skin, or tried to gouge his eyes out to get away from him, or summoned rats to attack him, or tried to knee him in the bollocks, or break his leg with a particularly vicious hex, or when I tried a deeply grey, bordering-on-dark spell like “exsanguinate,” even though all those things were technically against the rules.
When Bones went through the points of everything he thought I’d done wrong, those didn’t even make the list.
He instead scolded me for letting him get too close to me physically.
He said I had a bad habit of overly relying on physical hits without infusing them with magic. He lectured me for not using any sight skills in anticipating his moves. He said my attempts at diversionary spells were clumsy and obvious.
He pointed out that I could have used magic on him multiple times, even in my first attempts to fend him off, as most shielding spells were useless once you had skin-to-skin contact, which was one of the few advantages of close-quarter fighting.
He said my shields were shit, my blocking was barely passable, and I needed a much, much wider repertoire of attack skills, given my small size relative to that of most mages.
Oh, and despite all of my work of the previous summer, he said my mental concentration was basically nonexistent, which made me slow to react, easy to distract, and not particularly creative with spell combinations.
He wanted me to meditate, at least twice a day.
He also said I had too many emotional vulnerabilities that would be easy to exploit, and taught me a number of self-hypnosis techniques that were supposed to help me hide those things during combat.
He said I ignored him as an actual opponent. I did nothing whatsoever to assess his skills, try to gain access to his mind or magic, or even really pay attention to what he was doing. In his words, he “might’ve been a lamppost, or a dead troll lying in your way.”
After he listed off all of my failures, he usually would spend what seemed like an inordinate amount of time teaching me how to improve my balance and stance.
As he’d warned me that first day, he didn’t care at all about the elaborate forms Quicksilver focused on for passing the tests.
Bones seemed to mostly want me to remain on my feet, no matter how hard I got hit.
He said the moment a bigger male or halfway-competent witch got me on the ground, I was “dead,” either literally or in terms of the fight.
He gave me a wide variety of gravity-strengthening and grounding spells, in addition to the meditation and self-hypnosis techniques, and wanted me to practice those on my own time, too.
For the rest of our sessions, he usually interspersed spell drills with hitting and kicking at the heavy bags, push-ups, pull-ups, kicking drills for balance, and doing so many sit-ups I usually vomited at least once, sometimes twice.
He gave me a stretching and strength-building routine he expected me to do at least once a day, in addition to the meditation and all the rest. He warned me to practice every spell he taught me on my own, or he’d know, and he’d extend our sessions more to make me practice in front of him.
After our very first session, which ended up lasting a full four hours, he wanted me to know every single one of his gravity and balancing spells before we met again on Thursday.
He did tell me that future sessions “likely” wouldn’t last that long.
So far, that hadn’t proved to be true.
If anything, they seemed to be getting longer.
I felt like I’d joined the army, without anyone telling me I had.
“He’s… disciplined,” I’d admitted to Mir and the others, after my second week of training with him.
Glancing around, I’d kept my voice low. “He talks like a military commander most of the time. Honestly, I can’t imagine he didn’t go to some sort of military training camp on his summer breaks, even in middle school. Are we sure he’s not a secret Warlock?”
Draken grunted, looking decidedly unimpressed.
“Did you get any good hits in this week, at least?” Mir asked, her mouth quirked.
I laughed ruefully. “No. Emphatically no. Sorry, Mir, but that’s unlikely in the extreme. He’s really, really fast. Any contact I make, with any part of his body, will be solely because he lets me.”
“And you’re sure he’s not hurting you?” Draken asked, his voice and eyes hard. “You don’t have to take any abuse from him, Leda. I’ll go to Forsooth myself, if he’s really the one who put that prick’s name forward––”