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

  Mr. Jamison folded his hands.

  “Is this about the war or your dad or magic in general?” he asked.

  “All of it,” Valerie said. “How could she keep a secret from me like that?”

  “You’ve always known,” he said. “Haven’t you?”

  She hesitated, and the corner of his mouth came up.

  “You have. You… If all of this had come as a complete surprise to you, you’d be sitting on the bed in your room rocking back and forth, not talking to me.”

  “You don’t know what I was doing before you knocked,” Valerie said. “Besides, there aren’t any bedsheets.”

  He frowned.

  “I wouldn’t have thought of that, either, if I’d only had a few minutes to pack. Let me see what I can do. I expect we can come up with the basics, at least. What do you have?”

  “Some clothes?” Valerie said tentatively. “I wasn’t watching very closely.”

  He nodded, then motioned at her dinner.

  “You should at least eat something, then I’ll walk you back to your room. I called Ivory Mills and she’s bringing Sasha tonight, so at least you won’t be alone. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do, the next few weeks.”

  Valerie nodded down at her dinner, still thinking hard, trying to make it all make sense.

  “Is my mom in danger?” she asked after a moment as she cut the lasagna into bites and pushed them around with her fork.

  Mr. Jamison sighed, resting his chin on his folded hands and frowning.

  “I can’t tell you that she isn’t,” he finally said. “Most of your childhood, you were probably very safe, but here recently, she’s probably better off with us, rather than out on her own. They’ve been looking for her, I have no doubt, hoping to find her without anyone at her back to help her. Easiest time they’d ever have, killing her, and they…” He nodded. “They all know. We do, too. It’s not fair. All she wanted was to be left alone and apparently for you to have a normal life, but today wasn’t the moment everything changed for her.”

  Valerie shuddered.

  “They tried to kill me,” she said. “It was…”

  He blinked.

  “She didn’t tell me that.”

  “I didn’t… I didn’t think to tell her,” Valerie said. “It all happened so fast.”

  “You’re safe here,” Mr. Jamison said. “As safe as you can be anywhere. And, honestly… Man, your mom makes good decisions in a pinch. She sent you to the School of Magic Survival. You’re about to go through the most aggressive self-defense training we know how to give you.”

  “I want to learn how to fight,” Valerie said, and Mr. Jamison nodded.

  “Of course Susan Blake’s daughter wants to learn how to fight. But first we have to teach you how to survive.”

  Sasha

  Sasha was thirsty.

  This meant something, she was certain of it.

  It was a tickle at the back of her mind as she worked, that she needed to pay attention to that, but she was focused.

  Focused.

  Magic took focus.

  Focus.

  Thirsty.

  If she looked up now, the house of cards of ingredients and incantations she’d been weaving all afternoon stood every chance of falling down, and she’d have to start again.

  And Proctor Tannis was watching her, taking notes.

  Once more, the pen scratched on the paper, over there, and Sasha’s mind twitched away from her work.

  The smoke from the burning tell-weed curled, and she almost missed putting it right again. You had to whisper the air still or else… Well, she didn’t want to think about how completely the spellwork would fail if the line of smoke broke.

  Thirsty.

  She blinked.

  Looked over at Proctor Tannis.

  There on his desk was what she had initially mistaken as a bird’s nest, but it was actually a cast of drain.

  He had been sipping at a coffee idly the entire time she’d been in the room, holding it off, but she’d been paying too much attention to her entrance exam to notice it.

  He held her eye, seeing her figure it out, and she shook her head.

  Tricky.

  Her mom had warned her that it would be tricky.

  Did she know how to break drain without interrupting her own cast?

  Or…

  She could weave it into the cast, add to the test parameters - had there been anything in the instructions against adding features to the cast? - and put a protection spell in on top of it to keep the impact of the drain cast off of her?

  She’d been in too deep on the exam cast, and the break in her focus bewildered her.

  Proctor Tannis’ pen scratched on his paper again and he took a sip of his coffee.

  Protection spell on a gullet base, designed for targeting death magic…

  Her parents hadn’t allowed death magic in the house, so she’d not done an awful lot of practicing around it, and the gullet… It was finicky. The tell-weed was keeping it in line, but tell-weed itself was one of the most ephemeral magics Sasha had yet mastered. Her mother was a master with it, though, and Sasha knew that the school would expect her to come in well-versed. It was only fitting she should use it as part of her entrance exam.

  She was getting thirstier.

  If she didn’t work it out soon, the drain was going to hit the end of her water reserves and start sapping her energy. Water was a known defense against a wide variety of magics, but Sasha had been too nervous to eat her breakfast this morning.

  She didn’t want to complicate the spell any more than it already required all by itself, but at the same time, it needed to set, and she couldn’t sustain it if the drain hit her solidly.

  What did she have available?

  She lifted her attention once more to look around the room.

  She was in the upper-grades potions room, with boxes on the wall of everything she’d ever heard of and many, many things she hadn’t.

  Proctor Tannis’ interest in keeping her from making a mistake only went as far as his own self-interest and her life’s safety. Sasha had heard rumors that kids had died, mistaking one ingredient for another and having a proctor who failed to notice in time, but she thought that these were stories that they told the kids coming up into the Schools to keep them sharp at their lessons and then again here.

  Mason powder.

  She liked mason powder. It had a nice, smooth feel to it, when it was prepared correctly, and it was dormant in the context of most spells, but, if she remembered her lessons right - oh, how she wished she could refer to her notebooks for this part - it also remembered the ocean floors it came off of, the streambeds, and it associated with water.

  Was it enough?

  She added a layer of stabilizing influence to her cast, trying not to crush the spell underneath it, just keep it still and calm for long enough to get to the crate and get out a pewter hinge-lidded box full of mason powder.

  She ran it between her fingers, marveling at how fine they’d ground it here, then she sprinkled it carefully down directly over the burning flame of the tell-weed, watching the thin flame gutter. The smoke didn’t come from the flame, it came from the burning weed itself, and she spoke cautious words, keeping her breath off of it, and the smoke maintained.

  The cast continued to set.

  She was still thirsty.

  It wasn’t like the mason stone was going to replenish what she’d lost.

  She just had to wait to see if it would be enough to keep the drain cast on Proctor Tannis’ desk from disabling her before the spell wholly set.

  She just had to wait.

  Valerie had eaten without tasting any of it, and then Mr. Jamison had walked her back to her room, where a woman in a pretty red dress had been standing in the doorway.

  She was a dead-ringer for Snow White.

  She took a step back when she heard their footsteps, quiet on the carpet, and she gave Mr. Jamison a tight smile, then looked at Valer
ie.

  “Wow,” the woman said. “Wow, can I see it.”

  “I know,” Mr. Jamison said. “And I didn’t even know her, back then.”

  Valerie looked from one to the other of them, then a girl’s voice called out from the room.

  “Is she here?”

  “Come on out, Sasha,” the woman said. “This is Sasha, my daughter. I’m Ivory Mills.”

  Valerie blinked and shook her head.

  “I was a friend of your mother’s from school,” the woman said. “She’s the one who first started calling me Ivory.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Sasha said, and Ivory nodded.

  “Yes. Susan was the most gifted Light magic user I’ve ever known.”

  “Not that I’m not glad you’re here, but why didn’t you try for Light School?” Mr. Jamison asked. “I know your scores would have been good enough to at least test for it.”

  Sasha looked at her feet for a moment and nodded.

  “I know how hard it was for everyone, during the war,” the girl said. She had huge red hair that was held back - barely - in a ponytail. “I want to be able to keep people safe. I’m not…” She looked up at Mr. Jamison. “I don’t want to go to war. I want to be a healer.”

  “Light magic is involved in a lot of healing,” Mr. Jamison said. “Again, not to argue with you.”

  Ivory smiled, putting an arm around her daughter’s shoulders.

  “She has a plan, Mr. Jamison. Just you let her sit you down after a couple of weeks, when all of the new has worn off and when she’s started talking everybody’s ears off like she does at home, and you ask her about her plan. She’s going to blow you away.”

  Mr. Jamison smiled, then glanced at his watch.

  The man actually wore a watch.

  “I need to go get back to my lesson plans,” he said. “I’m sorry. Valerie, you come find me, if you need to talk or if you have more questions I can answer, but I… Start of school is always crazy. Good to see you, Ivory. Sasha.”

  Valerie looked at the two women, then dipped her head and edged around Sasha into the room.

  “Your bed isn’t made,” Ivory said. “Do you need help with it?”

  “I don’t have any sheets,” Valerie said. “Or a pillow.”

  Ivory put her hands on her hips, frowning.

  “That won’t do,” the woman said. “What else are you missing?”

  Valerie spread her fingers and Ivory looked at Sasha.

  “Get out your list,” she said. “We’ll work off of that.”

  Sasha nodded quickly, going to a large backpack and digging through it for a moment to find a binder. She opened it on a desk and took the loose sheet of paper out of the front, offering it to Valerie.

  “I don’t even know what I do have,” Valerie said, going to get her duffel bag and opening it.

  “You were working quickly,” Ivory said. “Sasha has two older brothers we’ve already done this with, and we’ve already made all of the mistakes. Sasha, you read them out and we’ll go through and figure out what’s missing.”

  The woman pulled a drawer open and put her hand out for the jeans Valerie had pulled out of her bag. Valerie hesitated, and Ivory motioned with her hand again.

  “She’d do it for Sasha, if she was here and I wasn’t,” Ivory said. “We’ll unpack, we’ll do your list, and child, I’m going to buy you sheets. Best if you just move on and embrace it.”

  Sasha nodded as she threw herself onto her bed, running her finger down the list and looking at Valerie again.

  “You don’t argue with mom,” she said.

  “My mom, either,” Valerie muttered, then nodded and started unpacking.

  It was nearly midnight before Ivory Mills finally left.

  Valerie had sheets, she had towels, she had bookends for her desk, she had a pillow, and she had a set of nail clippers.

  Ivory had been oddly specific about the nail clippers.

  Sasha went to close the door and turned to face the room. All night, families had been wandering past, talking and laughing and unloading things into rooms, and Valerie recognized that it was going to continue on all day tomorrow, too.

  She didn’t want to feel sullen about all of it.

  Taking a step away from the circumstances under which her mom had sent her here, this was kind of a marvelous adventure: magic was real.

  Mr. Jamison had been right - she’d believed in it her entire life, well past the point when normal kids embraced the fact that it was just make-believe. She’d always checked out of the corner of her eye, hoping to catch reality slipping up and being fantastic.

  But she felt forced, cornered, and as friendly as Mr. Jamison and Ivory and Sasha Mills had been, Valerie wasn’t ready to just go along, yet.

  “So, that’s done,” Sasha said, coming to sit on her bed. She crossed her legs and wound her fingers around her ankles. “Sorry about her. Once she gets a plan in her mind, it’s hard to convince her to do anything else.”

  Valerie nodded, looking over at the wall for a moment, and then rolling onto her stomach and balling her pillow up under her chin.

  “I don’t know anything about magic,” she said and Sasha tipped her head to the side.

  “What? How is that possible?”

  Valerie shrugged.

  “My mom didn’t tell me anything. I didn’t know it existed until… well, until today. A guy showed up at our apartment and told Mom she had to go fight, and she said she’d only do it if they sent me here, to room with you, actually, and… And now I’m here.”

  Sasha whistled, leaning over to lay on her own pillow.

  “Wow,” she said. “Mom didn’t tell me. Did she know?”

  Valerie shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I’m… I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I was going to school, just… normal, and… I don’t know.”

  Sasha frowned.

  “You shouldn’t tell people you don’t know anything about magic,” she said.

  “What, you don’t think they’re going to notice?” Valerie asked, and Sasha twisted her mouth to the side.

  “It’s hard to get in here. Not every magic-talented kid will get into any school, much less one of the top-tier ones. You being here…” Sasha shifted, looking uncomfortable. “You’re taking a slot that a kid really wanted.”

  Valerie nodded, the pillow crushing under her chin.

  “I didn’t ask to come,” she said.

  Sasha’s eyes went wide and she nodded quickly.

  “No, I know, and… The way they whisper about the war when they think we aren’t around to hear… Everyone I know was in the war. I think there were families that didn’t participate, but everyone I’ve ever known was either in the war or too young when it happened. It was bad, and if it’s coming back… I don’t even want to think about it. They told Bradley some things, a few months ago… he’s my big brother, graduated from Light School at the top of his class… and he told Newton and me pieces of it…” She shook her head again, squeezing her eyes closed. “I love magic, and I hate the idea of people using it to hurt other people. I wouldn’t just… you know, walk away and say it isn’t my problem… But I think my mom killed people.”

  “I think my mom was good at it,” Valerie whispered, the realization coming to her as she spoke it.

  Sasha nodded.

  “I just want to take care of people. You know, build a place where they can’t get in, where the kids can all come and hide.”

  “I think that’s something someone has to do, right?” Valerie asked, and Sasha nodded again.

  “After I graduate Magic Survival, I want to go to Light School, and then, if the war isn’t happening, at that point, I want to go to the School of Natural Development.”

  Valerie shook her head.

  “I don’t know what any of those are.”

  Sasha nodded, rolling onto her back.

  “Light School is the top school. Bradley and Newton both went there. Newton’s a junio
r. My parents were surprised when I wanted to come here, but right now everyone at Light School is just all about fighting, and… I think you need a foundation of being able to take care of yourself and others before you should even think about learning to fight. Because if you don’t respect how hard it is to keep yourself and everyone around you alive, you aren’t going to truly value the life you’re taking when you fight.”

  Valerie tipped her head to the side.

  “I like you,” she said, and Sasha smiled at the ceiling.

  “Most people tell me that you don’t have to be a survivalist to appreciate a hike, or to be a hunter, or whatever.”

  “Killing should be hard,” Valerie said. “And I don’t care how exciting it would be to go fight off the bad guys, we need people who can defend home and take care of the people who can’t fight. I think it’s awesome.”

  Sasha looked up and back at Valerie.

  “Do you even know if you can do magic?” she asked. Valerie shook her head.

  “Mom said that I was supposed to be a natural. Said she’d been testing me, but I don’t know what that means.”

  “Probably the testing she’s talking about is something you do by drinking a test fluid of some kind. You can measure the response to it, if you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’ve never…” Valerie started, then frowned. “My mom is a good cook.”

  “Okay,” Sasha said slowly.

  “But she makes the worst soups on the planet.”

  Sasha smiled slowly and settled back onto her bed where she wasn’t looking at Valerie anymore.

  “I bet that’s when she did it.”

  Valerie pulled the blanket and sheets back, shifting to get into the bed, and looked at Sasha again.

  “I have a lot of questions,” Valerie said, and Sasha nodded, yawning.

  “I bet.”

  “You have to tell me if I get annoying,” Valerie told her, and Sasha giggled.

  “You have to tell me if I talk too much,” she answered. “I love to talk about school stuff.”

  “But not tonight,” Valerie said, reaching up to turn off her lamp.”

  “Yup,” Sasha said, rolling onto her side to get her own lamp. “Not tonight.”