Chapter 16 #2
He wielded a staff. When he was not busy demonstrating how you could cast lightning and stun-spells and fireballs at each other in the name of defense, he was ramming the dirt end of the staff on the floor, a staccato that went through the arena.
In that first lesson, he had said, “If any of you wish to survive in the world outside Umbrveyl, you need to be able to defend yourself. Now, that is theoretical baloney, because what does that mean? Does that mean any student who hasn’t yet learned how to disarm an opponent deserves to die?
Not on my watch. Today is not just your first class.
Today is your first demonstration of how you deflect an enemy’s spells, how you disarm them with a simple flick of your channeling device. ”
It had been nothing but a false promise. Two hours later, every student was sore, bruised, crying, holding their hands. None of them had been able to deflect Professor Barrowhane’s spells. All of them had been humiliated in front of each other.
That was the first lesson.
Now Professor Barrowhane was starting individual dueling lessons so the students could learn more advanced spells—could defend themselves against more dangerous mages, if such people were out there in the world.
He was a stalwart Vanguard man. Every other lecture ended with a threat: the Deathless were out there, Mortandagh was not dead, and soon enough the second Necromancy War would be upon them.
The memory Lesya’s mind pushed to the front was that first duel.
Her turn was second to last. Before her, Professor Barrowhane had humiliated every student in the room.
They would throw a spell. He would deflect it.
Then he would throw one that stunned them, or left them injured, or put them across the hall.
And he would laugh. He made it clear that the ridicule was the point.
By the time Lesya’s turn came, he was growing more irritated with the sorry bunch he had to train.
All of them had relinquished their egos—even the proud students of House Solaris, Freya and Theo among them.
Everybody in that ring was a victim. Miles too.
House did not matter once the staff was in Barrowhane’s hand.
When Lesya came up for her first proper duel, he said, “You. You have not even displayed the slightest aptitude of a good duelist. You stand and you take spell after spell and you don’t fight back. In the real world, that might get you killed within ten seconds.”
Lesya, who had been adamant about rebuilding her life, chose not to mention that in the real world, taking spell after spell on her body had made her relatively rich.
People paid for that sort of thing in the streets of Lynsfeld.
She did not mention that the world outside was a sick place where people relished the torture of vulnerable children.
She most certainly did not mention that if she had learned to fend for herself in those rings, she would have been killed.
Nobody wanted a rebellious kid in a spell-ring.
A poor girl from Lynsfeld was somebody they could practice on—vent the frustration they had accumulated through the day.
She was still lost in that when Professor Barrowhane sent a lightning bolt through the air. She did not deflect. She was too slow. It hit her square in the chest, electrified her, made her skin feel like it was on fire. She screamed and went down.
“Get up,” Professor Barrowhane said, striding toward her. “Fight back.”
He slung spell after spell at her.
“You think this is the best way to live life? To just lie there and take it?”
There was no way he knew about her old life. Or was there? Was that why he was so hell-bent on delivering this particular lesson to her?
All she knew was that the second she tried to get up, another spell would injure her and send her reeling.
So she lay there as he stung her, electrified her, scorched her.
When she was curled on her side, whimpering, crying, he stood over her with a loathsome look and turned to the rest of the class.
“If you want to survive in this world, don’t be like her. She won’t make it a day out of this academy. A pathetic excuse for a student. And to think this is what House Balthazar offers us.”
He might as well have spat.
“Class dismissed,” he yelled, and walked into his private office.
As the room emptied, it was her classmates who flocked to her.
They got her down to the undercroft. Trisha tried her healing; it brought some semblance of calm.
The brunt of so many offensive spells in such quick succession had still left Lesya maddened, tortured, on the verge of something that felt like insanity.
That was when Cassian Veilmonte entered her life for the first time properly, and refused to leave.
She already knew of him, and had greeted him in passing, seeing as how he was the student head of the House, but other than that, she had known him as well as any other Balthazar student. Not anymore.
She lay in her bed, sobbing into her bruised hands.
All of her skin was at this point either deep purple or dull red from the blood that had come out of her open wounds.
The professor had inflicted several gashing spells that had split her skin open, and she was beginning to think that it had something to do along the lines of the personal rather than educational, because while he had inflicted similar torture upon every other student, none of it had been this extreme.
That night, she had contemplated leaving this godforsaken place for the first time, and then the door had opened to the girls’ dormitory, and a spectacle had walked in, with his white hair short over his brows, and his posture tall.
He came up to her, and as he did, the rest of the girls who had been sitting quiet, tending to their own injuries, left.
“Who did this?” Cassian asked, sitting down on the stool beside her bed.
It was the mercy in his voice that broke her, for she had not expected anyone to give her even the slightest bit of sympathy, and so she wept, and he just sat there in silence, not touching her, not saying anything, just listening to her as she cried.
When she was done weeping and heaving, he offered her his handkerchief. She sat up, mascara running down her cheeks, looking at Cassian as if somehow all of this was his fault, as if he could have warned her against it.
“You know who this was,” she said. “It seems like everybody is in on the joke. Every senior, every faculty member, even Armen. What is this place, and why does it hate people like us? Why did Professor Barrowhane do this?”
She said this while revealing her arms. She was only wearing a black camisole, and so it wasn’t her arms alone that were exposed—her chest, her bruised shoulders, her neck.
“Is this truly necessary?” she asked.
Even though Trisha’s spells had dulled some of the pain, they were not as effective in removing the source of the pain, and as far as going to the infirmary, that was out of the question.
Professor Barrowhane had threatened them against it, that if they were to go there or cry uncle or snitch to anybody, he would make it his business to make sure that the next time they went to the infirmary, they would be in even worse shape.
You’re all mages. Learn to dish it. Learn to take it. In real life, there are no infirmaries or hospitals waiting for you at the battlefield. Even the healers have to fight, and even the healers die.
That’s what he had said, and at that point Lesya had truly accepted the bleakness of the world outside, as seen from the lens of this nihilistic, sadistic professor.
Cassian scoffed, not at her but at the thing she had said. He had anger in his eyes. He bit his lower lip as he looked at her injuries, and then ran his hand along her hand and said, “Do you mind?”
“It can’t be any worse than what Barrowhane did,” Lesya said.
He whispered something.
And suddenly, every single bruise on her body stopped hurting. The purple disappeared, as did the dull blood, and the wounds closed. Cassian grunted in pain, revealing his own forearm, and now it was bruised.
“What did you do?” Lesya asked, her eyes wide.
She could breathe now, and her ribs didn’t feel sore anymore. In fact, she could stand up now. Only the mental part of the trauma had remained, none of the physical.
“Alchemical sympathy,” he said. “You looked like you needed it.” He grunted, revealing his hand.
“I took all of your pain, transferred it to myself. I’m a senior.
I can take it. I should have done this sooner, and I’m sorry.
I had things to do. It’s not easy being the head of house, and we have other matters to attend to. ”
He winced as he ran his hand against his bruises. He took out his spellblade and gently rubbed it against his forearm, reciting a healing spell—one that was far too advanced for Lesya to know about.
In an instant, his forearm went back to normal. No more bruises or blood. Just perfect pale skin, muscular, stiff. Lesya held back a sigh.
This was the first time she was so close to him and alone. And now that she could see him, she could see that his face was sharp, that his jawline was really chiseled, and that his eyes were intense.
He wore spectacles, something that was giving him an intellectual edge over the rest of the students, and his hair was white, but more importantly, there was worry apparent in his expression, concern for Lesya, and he sat so close, smelling so fresh.
It was as if he was her personal guardian angel sent to her in this moment to right whatever had been wronged with her.
“How did you do that?” Lesya asked, nodding at his forearm.