Surviving Magic (School of Magic Survival Book 1) Read online

  “I’m sorry I bothered you,” she finally said, turning away again.

  “You’re always welcome here,” he said. “I’m never going to lock my door, because I want my students to come and talk to me when they need to. It’s just… There’s more work than any of us are going to get done, and if we don’t get it done…”

  “People die,” Valerie said darkly. Maybe even her mom.

  She shook her head.

  “I’m going to go study,” she said. She heard him sigh again, but she didn’t turn back.

  She went down to the dorms and let herself into the room, throwing her backpack on the bed and sitting down at her desk. Sasha was on her bed. It had taken a couple of weeks, but she’d finally managed to add enough magic onto the door so that she could let herself in, unless she was upset or distracted. Valerie had seen her walk chest-first into it just this week.

  “Do you want to go eat?” Sasha asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” Valerie said.

  It was true.

  It was too early to go eat, yet, and she was too angry to actually want food. But the real truth was that Valerie was over sitting at a table by herself with Sasha, knowing that Sasha had people who would sit with her, so long as Valerie wasn’t there.

  There had been a lot of names, the first couple of weeks, once they’d figured out that Valerie wasn’t going to get moved up to the upper classes. Civilian. Legacy. Charity case. Refugee. The one that had stuck was the Remedial.

  They whispered when she came in the room, particularly at meals. Kids told her that their friend would have been the one to make it, if they hadn’t given Valerie a spot. That she didn’t deserve to be here.

  At classes, the whispering mostly stopped as she came in the room, but it wasn’t as bad because the teachers just started class. Yes, she had twice as much work as the rest of them, and Mr. Pallack often pointed out what extra stuff Valerie was supposed to be doing as he was assigning work to the rest of the class, but… Well, she could deal with that. It was the whispers and knowing that Sasha was bearing the cost of it right alongside her that she couldn’t bear anymore.

  “You’re back early,” Sasha said, checking her watch. “What happened?”

  “The teachers are all busy,” Valerie said. “I’m on my own.”

  “What?” Sasha asked. “What do you mean? How are you supposed to catch up?”

  Valerie suspected that Sasha would once again play a significant role in that, but she didn’t say it.

  “I’m going to the library,” Valerie said. “Maybe if I put up a big enough wall of books, everyone will just leave me alone.”

  Sasha gave her a concerned look, but Valerie didn’t want to answer the questions, so she got her backpack and stood back up again, walking out the door and down the hallway.

  The library was enormous, at the back of the school, two stories tall and three double-doors wide. There were dozens of tables in the middle, then the books.

  Valerie liked the smell of the place.

  Libraries had a dry, papery smell to them anywhere they were well cared for, but this one had an agedness to it that she adored. There was knowledge here. Secrets.

  It was just up to her to go find them.

  She wasn’t ordinarily a book worm, though she enjoyed reading and she’d gotten good grades all along in school, but the library had become something of a sanctuary for her, here, because when she came here - in the few spare hours they’d been allowing her since the start of classes - she got time by herself to just think.

  The plants from Mrs. Reynolds’ class, the ingredients from Mr. Tannis’ classroom, these were the only things she’d worked with in her own two hands, and it was like she could still feel them. Like they had a power in them that she hadn’t even known about, at the time.

  Her spellcasting classes were simpler, because she’d managed to avoid speaking in tongues and accidentally casting in a language she’d never before spoken, so she actually got to work with the class on most of what they were doing. She was behind three Romance languages, though, and they were delving into dead languages, now, so there she still had all of this stuff she was supposed to catch up on.

  She didn’t know how anyone expected her to do this. She’d been taking Spanish in school, but it wasn’t like she was supposed to speak it. Not like the School of Magic Survival expected it. There, she was trying to remember vocabulary words well enough to sort of stumble through a conversation about what she liked to eat and how to get from here to there.

  Now, she needed to have perfect diction and the ability to understand every word in a sentence, regardless of what kind of context it might have come up in, conversationally.

  They expected her to be fluent in the language, skipping over conversational entirely.

  It was so frustrating.

  She took out her textbooks, then went wandering the shelves of plant-based potion ingredients, finding an encyclopedia that had been written well enough that she actually felt like she remembered what she’d read, from day to day. She took that back to her desk and sat down, paging through the encyclopedia to where she’d left off on her list from Mrs. Reynolds the day before.

  Pall plants.

  There were eight types, a vine, a bush, a grass, a tree, a succulent, an algae, a tuber, and a moss. Valerie saw nothing in common about any of them but that the book insisted that they go together.

  Someone sat down across from her and she glanced up.

  She didn’t recognize him.

  “Hi,” he said cheerfully.

  “Hi,” she answered flatly, sensing a trap.

  “I don’t know you,” he said. She glanced at him again.

  “That’s not funny,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to be. I don’t know you, and I know everyone.”

  “Well, prepare to be disappointed,” Valerie said.

  Where had this person come from who was sitting in her chair and doing her schoolwork?

  A month ago, she would have jumped at the chance for a distraction from what she was doing, given a friendly face, or - even better - an attractive guy she didn’t know.

  “I could go ask,” he said. “But it’s my experience that people who introduce themselves do a better job of it.”

  She sighed.

  “It doesn’t matter what I say,” she said. She put her pencil down and looked at him squarely.

  He was more attractive than she’d given him credit for, on first glance, and at the same time she saw exactly what she needed to see to know how pointless this was.

  “You’re related to Elvis Trent,” she said.

  He pressed his lips.

  “So either you’re in love with him or you hate him,” he said.

  “He hates me,” Valerie said dismissively, going back to her work. “They all do.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “And, I mean, if I’m going to hate you eventually anyway, what do you have to lose talking to me before I figure out what a monster you are?”

  “Wasting my time,” she said.

  “Didn’t you just get out of class?” he asked, leaning across the desk to look at the book.

  “They call me the Remedial for a reason,” she said.

  “Are you stupid?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered, kneejerk defensive. He shrugged.

  “Then they’re idiots,” he said. “I’m Ethan. Ethan Trent. Elvis is my much-beloved big brother.”

  She put her pencil back down and crossed her arms on top of the book.

  “Does this work for you?” she asked.

  Who was she?

  Of course it worked for him.

  He was dark-haired and strong-featured, prominent cheekbones and long, straight jaw that came to a point under an expressive mouth.

  He pulled his mouth to the side and shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said. “Sorry.”

  He stood and she put her hand out, palm down.

  Why?

&nb
sp; She’d just made him go away.

  Why had she done that?

  “No,” she said. “Just a bad day. I’m sorry. I’m Valerie Blake.”

  “Blake,” he said. “Do I know that name?”

  “You might have heard of my mom, Susan Blake,” Valerie said, and he nodded.

  “The spy who went to ground after the war,” he said. “Huh. So… Remedial? You not get ready to start here in time?”

  “I don’t know anything about magic,” Valerie said. “Didn’t know it existed until the day before school started.

  He whistled, low, then frowned thoughtfully.

  “Don’t know how you catch up from there,” he admitted, and she nodded, tapping the book with her pencil.

  “Lots and lots of this, apparently,” she said.

  “Can I join you?” he asked.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Valerie said. “My roommate is dealing with all the ostracism I can handle right now, sitting with me at meals. You don’t… You just don’t want to. I appreciate you not being a jerk, but… There’s nothing in this for you.”

  “Why do I have to have something in it for me?” he asked. “I’m just asking to sit at the same table as you in the library. Surely the world has not gone that crazy in the first month of school that I’m going to get branded somehow for doing it. Besides, I’m a Trent. I can do whatever I want.”

  She suspected that was true.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can sit here.”

  He nodded and started unloading his backpack.

  “How have I not seen you before?” Valerie asked. Sure, she didn’t talk to many of her classmates very often, but she knew them all by face, and it wasn’t like there were that many places to hide. There weren’t that many people around.

  “I was out of the country for the last month,” he said, opening a notebook and getting out a pen. “I’ve been keeping up with assignments from Europe, mostly.”

  “You have to be awfully special for them to let you do that, don’t you?” Valerie asked.

  “You have to be awfully special for Lady Harrington to let you in without a stitch of magic knowledge, don’t you?” he countered.

  She smiled. It was the tone. Friendly. Playful, even.

  “You have friends here,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “Lots,” he said. “I know all of the guys in the freshman class and most of the girls. My dad travels a lot to see the prominent families, and I get to meet people in person a lot.”

  “You know Sasha Mills?” Valerie asked.

  “I know Bradley and Newton,” Ethan answered. “Sasha and her mom… They don’t stay in one place very much, so my dad hasn’t ever gotten to go see them. It’s like Ivory is avoiding him. We looked for her in California three weeks ago, but she wasn’t there anymore.”

  Did Sasha even know where her mom was?

  How had Valerie missed that?

  Obvious question.

  She’d been avoiding questions about moms.

  He saw the look on her face and shook his head.

  “Oh, no, it’s nothing like weird or anything. Her mom is a healer. She travels a lot, and she doesn’t… Well, it’s that she doesn’t tell my dad or anyone else on the Council where she is. That’s getting to be a big deal, right now. It’s not, like, weird. Just political.”

  “Oh,” Valerie said.

  “You don’t know about the politics at all, either, do you?” he asked, and she smiled.

  “I’m learning pall-type plants just now,” she said. “They’re saving the complicated stuff for later.”

  “Don’t eat Pall-moss,” he said, nodding sagely.

  “I’ll write it down.”

  She was smiling again.

  It felt strange on her face, after all this time.

  “If you have to write down everything that you’re not supposed to eat, I’m worried for you,” he said, and she grinned.

  “I’ve been a little unpredictable since I’ve been here,” she told him. “Call it an abundance of caution.”

  He laughed.

  It was a deep-chest laugh, and she wanted him to do it again.

  Yegads, that had come on quick.

  “Right,” she said. “So, why aren’t you at the School of Light Magic?”

  “Elvis was here,” he said easily.

  “So?” Valerie asked.

  “My dad wants us together for security reasons,” he said.

  He was a security risk, too? That actually made her feel immensely better.

  “But you’re going to the second-class school,” she said. “Doesn’t that like… I don’t know, diminish something about what happens to you later?”

  “My prospects?” he asked, his voice dark for a moment, though without any real brooding sincerity to it. “Kind of you to be concerned about them. My dad isn’t. No, I get it. My dad is worried about us, and Elvis had already gotten in here, because they take the pre-graduated students first, so this was where I was supposed to go. It’s fine. I can go to Light School next, if I want to.”

  “Do you?” Valerie asked.

  “I still haven’t had my first day of Survival School,” he teased. “How would I know?”

  She grinned.

  “Well, I’d offer to help you, but I haven’t got the first clue on any of this,” she said. He put his chin on his fists and frowned at her, considering for a moment.

  “No offense, but there’s a war on. I get why you’re here. If Susan Blake is out on the front again, they’re going to come for her daughter, and this is one of the safest places to be. But why are they teaching you?”

  “They actually told me I could take normal school by correspondence, though I can’t see how, without any internet.”

  “Mail,” he interjected, nodding, and she cringed.

  “Anyway,” she went on. “Um. I made things. In class. I made stuff, and she knew what it was and I didn’t, and… Apparently they think I’m worth it.”

  “You’re a natural?” he asked with a tone that wasn’t quite disbelief, but lived right there on the border.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” Valerie said. She hadn’t told anyone, other than Sasha, and to tell the head of the Council’s son just, boom, in conversation right off like that?

  Unbelievable.

  He smiled, and the chemicals in her stomach wanted to just forget skepticism entirely.

  Stupid chemicals.

  “You don’t have to worry about me telling my dad,” he said. “For one thing, one of the Council’s firm rules is that they don’t recruit magic users who are still in school. For another, I’d rather see my friends survive than march off to war. And for a third, Lady Harrington is required to tell him that kind of stuff, anyway, and the teachers are pretty reliable at passing on the reports that my dad wants to read. So. He already knows, and he knows that you’re worthless for a while. Until you get your Pall plants straightened out, at least.”

  She closed her book.

  It was playful, and he smiled, but she had no idea why she’d done it.

  “Do you want to go get dinner with me?” she asked.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “It was looking like you’d just started studying,” he said.

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “And they don’t have a problem with me leaving my stuff here for a while, as long as I come back for it.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, putting his notebook back into his backpack and standing up, leaving the backpack. She shook her head.

  “Look, you’re nice, but you’re going to want to take that. After you see what a big mistake you’ve made, hanging out with me…”

  “I’m going to come back and finish studying,” he said. “My roommate is using the most obnoxious music as a study aid tonight, and I’m not going back there.”

  “You’re going to switch tables,” Valerie said, and he grinned.

  “If you say so,” he said, motioning that he was waiting for her. He went to ge
t the door and she went through, smiling again - again - as she led the way to the cafeteria.

  She got a tray and went through the line, then went to sit down at an empty table, sitting quietly with her eyes closed, smelling her food and listening to the whispers.

  Ethan sat down across from her, and the whispers got louder.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Valerie said. “I expect you have friends you’d rather sit with.”

  “They’re coming,” he said, completely casual. She looked up and there were, indeed, four guys and two girls getting up from two other tables and bringing their trays over to where Valerie sat.

  “You guys know Valerie?” Ethan asked. “Valerie, this is Shack, Milton, Patrick, Conrad, Yasmine, and Ann.”

  “Shack,” she said. “I hear everyone call you that, but is that your real name?”

  “It’s what my dad’s been calling me since I could walk,” the boy said as he sat down. “I broke through the side of his tool shack in the backyard.”

  “Shack’s a bruiser,” Ethan said with a wide smile.

  “Where have you been?” Yasmine asked. “Everyone kept expecting you. And Elvis said he didn’t know.”

  “He didn’t,” Ethan said. “He and my dad are having a fight, so my dad told them not to forward Elvis’ mail when it came in unless it was urgent.”

  A giggle went around the table and three heads turned to look at where Elvis was sitting at a corner table with three of his cottage roommates.

  “So where were you?” Patrick asked.

  “Recruiting,” Ethan said softly, leaning over the table slightly. “They’re trying to get the magic users in Europe involved early, but they still say there isn’t a problem.”

  “But the Superiors are killing people again,” Ann said. “How can they say that isn’t a problem?”

  “They say that the Council hasn’t proven that it was organized Superior activity,” Ethan said. “And that the Council only exists to perpetuate the myth of hostilities among the viewpoints. I’m not kidding, they used those words. Basically, if my dad doesn’t have a war to general, he doesn’t have any point.”

  “But you’ve said that,” Yasmine said, and Ethan grinned.

  “So? One thing for me to say my dad is pointless, another thing for a dude in France to say it.”

  “So what are you studying?” Milton asked Valerie.