Chapter 16 #4
Professor Eldric slammed his hand on the table, and everybody shut up once again. Nobody helped Professor Barrowhane stand up. He stood up on his own and went to the table, muttering angrily under his breath.
“Oh my God. Who did that?” Trisha whispered in Lesya’s ear.
“I don’t know. I guess karma’s come calling for motherfucker Barrowhane after all,” Lesya said.
“Tell me about it. I’m still sore from what he did to me,” Trisha said.
“You and me, and everybody else,” Lesya said absent-mindedly, happy at the thought of Barrowhane tasting his own medicine.
“Not you and me, sis,” Trisha said. “You got the VIP treatment. You got a visit from Cassian himself. How was he?” she asked excitedly.
“A gentleman does not kiss and tell,” Lesya said.
“Yeah, but I’m not asking the gentleman, and you’re no lady.”
Lesya and Trisha laughed together, and did not talk further on the matter, but it was an unspoken understanding between them that there was something there, and Trisha respected Lesya enough to not question her further about it.
* * *
Later that day, she went all alone, making sure that nobody was tracking her, down the winding path toward Riovan’s shack in the forest behind Umbrveyl, and there he was, Cassian, dressed in comfortable linen pants and a white shirt, flexing his spellblade, walking around the forest, immersed in deep thought.
“I’m here,” Lesya said.
“Ah, so you are,” he said, smiling at her. “I was beginning to worry that you might never show up.”
“And thank you for what you did to Professor Barrowhane.” Lesya laughed.
“Hey, that was the ghost of Balthazar the Fourth, if I am to understand.” Cassian chuckled.
“Yeah. Right. Ghost.”
A sudden intensity came over Cassian as a secret.
He came close to Lesya and said, “I have decided that I care about you, and it is based upon that decision that I care about you. I have also decided that anyone who means you harm is a foe of mine, faculty or not. Should he do something like that again, he’ll get his ass handed to him again, but I’m not going to do that to you.
Today, I’m going to teach you the fundamentals of actual Arcane Defense, and after that, the next time you step into his class, you will be the one who did what the ghost of Balthazar the Fourth did earlier today. ”
He winked at her.
Cassian circled around her once the first dueling lesson started.
He was deliberate and elegant. His movements were like a fine dance.
He was light on his feet, and the way he circled around her looked as if he were floating in the air.
Lesya stood there, feeling a little amused, her hand harness at the ready.
“Did you take dancing lessons when you were a kid?” she called out and chuckled, clapping her hands.
“You might think it is funny,” Cassian said, still circling her slowly.
“But a good duel and a good dance are two very similar things. You see, you’re supposed to anticipate what your partner does next.
When a spell comes your direction, you have just a fraction of a second in which to decide whether you are going to deflect or sidestep.
It’s the same way with a dance when a partner is in your arms. Everything that is happening is happening within seconds. One step here, one step there.”
He paused and came forward.
“May I?” he asked, holding out his arms.
She blushed. But then she nodded. “You may.”
He placed his hand along her waist, pulling her close, and held her other hand. Lesya put her free hand on his shoulder.
“You see, we’re close together now,” Cassian said, his voice no more than a whisper.
Around them, the afternoon sun was sending slivers of orange through the canopy.
Birds chirped in the trees, and a gentle air made all the leaves whisper.
And yet, at the center of this clearing, on this forest floor of twigs and fallen leaves, there was a sacred kind of quietness hanging suspended in the air around Cassian and Lesya.
“Look into my eyes, Les.”
“How do you know I like to be called Les?” she asked.
“Well, don’t make fun of me, but I overheard your best friend Trisha calling you Les, and sometimes nicknames are perfect like that.” Cassian laughed goofishly. “And in your case, Les is more.”
Lesya laughed and said, “You’re silly. You know that? You’re a very silly guy.”
“It’s okay. I’m the whole package, stupidity included. Come on now. Step. One, two, three. One, two, three.”
There was no music as they danced, just an internal metronome to which they stepped forward, stepped backward. He swung her, she spun, and he caught her in his arms again.
“Imagine,” Cassian said, “that we are at a ball. It’s just you and me on the dance floor. All the nobles and all the ladies are eyeing us with envy. They want to be us, and yet they can’t, because only you are you, and only I am I, and so we dance.”
She was enthralled by his presence, by his words, by his smooth movements, and she danced with him, letting go of her worries, of her troubles.
And soon enough, she discovered that this exercise wasn’t just a romantic one.
He was teaching her swift movement very fast, because just within five minutes they were dancing fast, and it was not a ballroom kind of dance anymore.
This was more of a lively tavern dance with tapping and clapping and jumping and spinning.
She was laughing, waving her arms out as she spun, and dragging fallen leaves around her.
And she did not realize that now she was the only one dancing, and Cassian was just standing there, his hands in his pockets, looking at her with great admiration.
“And it was supposed to be I who took the dancing lessons,” he said, clapping, grinning.
“Oh, come now. A girl is not a girl if a girl can’t dance,” Lesya said, raising her arms above her body and making elaborate patterns with them. “See this? This is what the troupe members did when they came to Lynsfeld.”
Was she seducing him with this strange carnival dance? She did not know, but he seemed to be enjoying it, and so was she, and so she continued, and she spun, and she spun, and then she saw a spell coming at her from nowhere. But since she already had momentum, she swerved and dodged it.
And there was Cassian standing at the other end of the clearing with his spellblade aimed at her.
“Now for the fun part, Lesya. Are you ready?”
“Hey, there was no warning!”
“Well, you remember what Professor Barrowhane says: there’s never going to be a warning. The dance part’s over now. Dodge this.”
And as he said that, he slung another spell at her, but her body was already nimble and fast because of the warm-up, and so she jumped, and the spell just missed her by an inch.
This was not fair. Cassian had lowered her defenses with that dance, and now he was slinging spells at her.
In her anger, she aimed her harness at him, and she threw a series of spells, some of them lightning ones, and the others more of the fiery nature that she had learned from the books that Professor Barrowhane had assigned their class.
Those spells were really easy to learn, but it was quite difficult to cast them within quick succession of each other without depleting her mana entirely.
And yet, in that moment, as she cast that flurry of spells, she was not worrying about mana.
She wanted a little bit of retribution for that spell without warning that Cassian had sent in her way.
But when the spells reached Cassian, she stood and watched with her mouth wide open as he flipped through the air and spun so elegantly that not a single spell hit him.
“How the fuck did you do that?” she asked, eyes wide, the thought forgotten that she was right in the middle of a duel.
“I may not have taken dancing lessons, Lesya Rosefield, but I may have taken gymnastics,” he said, and he did a front flip, closing the distance toward her, and then casting a disarming spell at her. The spell hit her square in the hand, and her hand harness slipped off her fingers.
“Hey, no fair!” Lesya said, picking up her hand harness. But by then, Cassian had already cast his next spell. Lesya slipped her harness back on and deflected that spell with a protective shield.
“Good, Lesya. Good,” Cassian said, determination in his voice.
“You’re learning to differentiate between parrying an attack and defending yourself by stepping back.
That’s the lesson. That’s what Barrowhane doesn’t want to teach you, because otherwise, if he taught you that, how would his menacing aura be preserved in his classroom?
The guy can send a couple of spells your way, but he does not expect you to parry them, and he does not expect you to sidestep. That’s the first lesson.”
Okay. She could see what he meant. When Professor Barrowhane inflicted his violence upon his students, he didn’t anticipate them defending themselves properly, and so maybe now, with this one lesson that she had learned, she would be able to stand up for herself.
“But I’m not done,” Cassian said when the first duel ended. “You have another class with him on Monday, and I can’t just send you out there like a lamb to the slaughter. I have to teach you more.”
“Bring it on,” Lesya said.
“Okay, this is a bit of a theory of mine, and not something that necessarily exists in a book,” Cassian said, slowing down and reclining against the trunk of an ancient oak tree.
“See, offensive magic is fast, it’s instantaneous, but it has its flaws.
What I was thinking was if you could use the elemental nature of alchemical sympathy in a duel.
I’ll admit, I have tried it a few times, and I might be able to teach you how to do that. ”
Lesya was intrigued. This was more than just dueling. This was now in the realm of the principalities of alchemy, a subject that interested her deeply.
“Okay, teach me,” she said, stepping up to him.