Chapter 15 #3
I read it all over her, from the glisten in her eyes, tears that she stops from touching her scratched cheeks, the violent wringing of her hands, the tension in her bones as she sits like a metal sculpture on the wooden bench.
Every time I glance at her, she’s still looking down.
Prints pass the podium, they come and go, moving through the list of the day, and still, Courtney is slumped over.
She doesn’t even look up when it’s finally her brother’s turn.
Everyone else does.
The call of James’s name shifts the energy in the room.
And it’s only his name called.
No partner.
No opponent.
He walks alone to the stage.
Oliver blinks awake and sits upright.
His fatigue drapes over him like a cloak, but the bloodshot weariness of his eyes stays open for this one.
Across the room, Dray lifts his chin a touch, the shadows darkening his sawdust hair. The diamond gleam of his eyes spears out through the dimness—and aims right at James.
He stops on the podium, hands wringing.
James is the only one in the entire year level with this print.
Iitrin.
Not such a simple print.
Can’t be explained as simply ‘mind reading’ or ‘intention telling’ or even ‘thought manipulation’, because it is all of those things, and more.
James might be my oldest friend, longer friends than me and Courtney since he hasn’t ended our connection like she has, but he isn’t an open sort of person.
I know little about him.
Even the whoppers I do know, he didn’t tell me.
So, like most of the audience, my interest prickles—and he has my undivided attention.
Master Wealdwine turns her cheek to him.
I trace her gaze to the chair against the wall, the one I notice only now, as if shadows are peeled away, revealing the one who sits there.
The headmaster.
Fleetingly, I wonder who the hell is running the academy right now. Looks like almost every master is in this room, but there are more students than the seniors at Bluestone.
Must be running amuck up there.
Free of his robes, Headmaster Braun rises from the plain wooden chair and approaches the podium.
Breaths pause all through the room.
From his trouser pocket, the headmaster draws out a small notepad and a pen.
I toss a look at James—
At the sickly sheen slicked all over him, the worried worming of his lips, the nervous shift of his weight from one shoe to another.
This is his hell.
A test.
A test with masters all around.
A test with the headmaster standing opposite him.
And, maybe worst of all, a test with every other senior watching him.
Bet he tried to get out of it, tried to worm his way into a sickbed in the infirmary, and had to be chased out by Witchdoctor Urma.
The thought curves my mouth.
“Headmaster Braun will write something on one page. You will tell me what he wrote,” Wealdwine announces. “Headmaster Braun will then write it again on a second page—and you are to change the outcome, to make him write something else.”
James looks on the verge of passing out.
The sickly sheen is turning green, and he runs the back of his hand over his forehead.
The hall is so quiet, I can hear the thick swallow that bobs his sharp adam’s apple.
But there’s no getting out of this.
The headmaster flips open the notepad.
He brings pen to paper and, without looking up, starts to slowly move the ink over the page.
Through the dim light, Dray shifts in his chair, angled more to face the podium.
His intense stare is locked onto James.
He’s not the only one.
Students shift, lean over others, arch up in their seats—all to get a glimpse at whatever the headmaster is writing or drawing.
But that’s useless, because shadows have settled back over him.
Now I’m certain he’s using some kind of enchanted item to hide himself when he doesn’t want to be seen.
The pen stills.
It pauses for the briefest moment.
James has a mousy voice on the best of days.
Today is no different. “The rabbit caught in a trap hopes for kindness.”
Headmaster Braun rips the page from the notepad and hands it over to Wealdwine.
She takes it, glances at it for the quickest moment, then brings her own pen to the clipboard.
A big tick.
A murmur ignites in the room, a collective warble said to no one in particular, just general awe.
James is overlooked.
Always has been.
Even I overlook him—all the time.
But I stare up at the stage, as the headmaster starts to write again, and James’s eyes have narrowed, his jaw tense with concentration, and I think I see him for the first time in a decade.
The headmaster writes, and his face is blank, no concentration, no furrowed brow—until the pen pauses on the paper, and he lifts a stunned look to James.
Headmaster Braun tears the page from the notebook, then—without looking at her—hands it to Wealdwine.
She reads it aloud, “I don’t want to be here.”
Heat roars on James’s face.
Landon scoffs, a light smile on his face that he forces back to stone.
Headmaster Braun announces, “I meant to write the hunter hopes for a full belly.”
Wealdwine tosses the paper to the mess on the trolley, then brings her pen to the clipboard.
Tick.
And James rushes off the stage, the eruption of applause following him back to his seat.
I crane my neck around Oliver to look at him, but Oliver has the same idea, and he’s leaning forward to consider the spotty-faced boy he’s ignored for the past decade.
James might be dropped onto his seat, his hot face hidden behind his hands as he folds over and starts the performance of a headache, but the stares have followed him, and it takes a while for the applause to settle.
When it does, Wealdwine calls up the next lot.
Serena and Asta stalk to the stage, smiles on their beautiful faces.
I check my watch.
Almost dinner time, and we’re only up to Illusion.
The breath that sags me is muffled by a yawn stretching through Landon.
I consider him out the corner of my eye, the way he runs his hands over his face, then looks over in the general direction of James…
And something clicks in my mind.
Iitrin.
That could very well be how it started between them.
If they had a moment of shared eye contact, or close proximity, something, and James felt Landon’s thoughts.
Felt, because this seems to have been going on a while—and there is no way James has been able to read and control thoughts for the past ten years.
These prints take time to craft, to perfect, to mould, and to channel. Even then, a lot of witches end up using pentacles, because it helps.
There are no pentacles used today.
Asta and Serena go without them on the stage, and they compete.
Oliver stays awake for it.
Their task—to become the headmaster—is timed against Master Wealdwine’s stopwatch. But the stopwatch is pointless, because Asta is terrible at her print.
All she manages is to mimic Braun’s voice, and it echoes around the room as if it came from somewhere in the ceiling, a speaker or a vent.
Serena transforms.
Not literally, of course.
It’s all illusion.
But to every single gaze in here, with gasps and laughter snaking around the students, she looks and sounds exactly like Headmaster Braun.
Then I blink—and she’s Serena again.
Oliver brings his hands together.
The first to clap, but it starts an applause around the whole room.
Serena’s smile is proud as she stalks back to her seat.
Asta’s face is twisted malice.
She obviously didn’t get the tick Serena did.
It must feel like crap.
All the extra work so many of them have been putting in this semester, snubbing the slopes and parties and sports, just to fail a practice exam.
Like Mildred Green, when the elementals were on the stage, pair after pair, eating away at the bulk of the day, and she failed to control all four elements.
Water is her strong suit. She turned it into a block of ice without even blinking.
Air, she did ok with.
The breeze was welcome in the stuffy hall.
But then the fire she tried to conjure flickered just twice before it died, and after that, when she tried to crack the soil down the centre, like an earthquake in a pot plant, a dusting of dirt puffed out of the pot, and that was that.
She failed.
It brought a smile to my face.
I’m not smiling now.
Not as Master Wealdwine announces, “Tomorrow, the practice examinations will continue. Attendance is mandatory for all.”
Even those who have done theirs already.
Even the deadblood.
My mouth tilts into a stroked line.
It will be another full day.
We’re only halfway through the prints. Eric hasn’t gone yet. Neither has Teddy.
There’s still prediction, star reading, numerous, rituals, shielding, summoning, resurrection, runes.
Tomorrow will be another long day.
And we’re ending this one with a demon, because just as everyone thinks she’s about to dismiss us, she announces, “The final test for the day is makut. Dray Sinclair.”
Bitterness spreads through me.
I look across the room, watching him push from the pew, shifting the shadows around him.
He is in the first row, so he walks directly onto the podium, into the warmth of the dim lights.
Master Wealdwine lifts a hand and gestures to the portraits on the walls. One for each wall, six in total, oil-painted and seemingly looking at each one of us.
I hate those paintings, like the family portrait in the foyer at Elcott Abbey. There’s just something unnatural about them.
Wealdwine commands, “Amaze me.”
A blank look slackens my face.
Oliver stiffens beside me.
In front, two seats down, Landon twists around to throw us a bewildered look.
I lift my shoulders just as Oliver shakes his head, a twin response of ‘don’t look at us, we don’t know.’
Of all the instructions and tests given today, none have been so open ended.
‘Amaze me…’
Whatever the fuck that means.
Dray has been given free reign in his test.
As long as it’s to do with the portraits, he can choose to put on whatever show he wants.
And he does.
Dray walks the circle of the podium, a slow and casual pace that is nothing less than predatory to me—because I’ve seen that walk before. The slow wind up before disaster strikes.
Leisurely, Dray cranes his neck from side to side, soft blond hair falling into his crushed-glass eyes.
Then he comes to a gradual stop—facing three portraits, and he flexes his hands before turning his palms upwards.
Light flickers around the room, disturbed, and it warps the portraits.
Faces of priests been and gone start to shift.
Chins sharpen, nostrils flare, eyes widen.
But it’s all so warped, like it’s in slow motion, a screen glitching, or even part of a dream—
A dream that distorts into a nightmare.
Dray only faces three portraits, but all of them in the hall come to life.
The faces in the portraits are turning in confusion, looking at one another across the vast hall, and then the voices start—
The shouts come out in such gravelly croaks, and all at once, I can’t string them apart. I catch words here and there, but nothing more, not over the sudden lift of noise from the seniors watching.
The awe sprawling out through the hall is bated with clenched excitement, that moment before the eruption, that moment of just waiting to see what happens next…
The screams.
That’s what happens next.
The voices, the shouts, the faces yelling at one another, it all warps into harrowing screams as flames ignite and swallow the portraits whole.
My insides run cold, ice trickling through me.
I can’t look away, can’t tear my horrified stare off the mangled, warped, contorted faces melting paint and oil.
The screams go on so long.
So fucking long.
My hands smack to my ears, hard, and I brace myself against it, the strangled cries, the shouts of awe from the seniors, the heat from the flames.
And the whole time, Dray is just standing there on the stage, palms turned upwards, and his face as blank as ever.
Totally uncaring, unflinching.
The flames die out.
The screams soften.
And left in the wake are scorched walls.
Not even the brass frames are left.
The breath that utters out of me is choppy.
My hands lower from my ears—
And in that same exact moment, an eruption of applause blasts through the room.
Students throw up from the pews, standing, cheering, howling, hands smacking together…
And I just stare at the wall.
Scorched.