Surviving Magic (School of Magic Survival Book 1) Page 5

Valerie watched it burn for a moment, entranced, then put her hand out gently.

  “Can I have it?” she asked, and Sasha handed her the bottle, still whispering in a language Valerie had no experience with.

  Valerie took the oil and poured it out onto her hand, rubbing it between her fingers and just feeling the way it sat on her skin.

  When she blew across it, it went cold.

  More than just evaporation.

  Cold, cold.

  There was a reflex of instinct, and Valerie lifted her chin, looking at the slow curl of smoke coming off of the green flame and burning grass.

  Just.

  Do it.

  Do it.

  She pulled a piece of the grass out of Sasha’s basket, rolling it in between her fingers hard enough to crush it to dust, and then rubbed one hand against the other in a quick slicking motion. The dust dissolved and disappeared, and both of her hands were coated in oil.

  She blew across her palms, feeling the bone-deep chill come out of it, then put both hands down to the fire, letting it catch.

  That was stupid.

  Wasn’t it?

  It didn’t feel stupid.

  The green flame leapt to her palms and Sasha jerked away, looking at Valerie with alarm, but not interrupting whatever she’d been saying in her odd language.

  Valerie stood and walked quickly to the door, putting both hands flat against it with a hiss.

  There had only been an instant, there at the end, when her skin had felt hot, and the hiss startled her, and it felt as though something were boiling against her palms, but it wasn’t heat.

  She wasn’t burning.

  She let her hands drop to the side and she tipped her head, looking at the two black handprints she’d left on the wood.

  Sasha was beside her in another moment, using her fingertips to paint the doorframe with the same oil. She put some on Valerie’s fingers and indicated that she should do the other side, and the two girls met in the middle over the top of the door, then Sasha went to get a piece of green-burning amber grass and set fire to the damp oil at the bottom of each side of the door. The oil lit in a roll of green flame, burning out after just a few moments, then Sasha went and blew out the burning grass on the piece of slate.

  “How did you know to do that?” she asked Valerie when she stood again.

  “Don’t know,” Valerie said. “Just did. Is it wrong?”

  “No,” Sasha said. “It’s awesome. Though I think I’m going to have a hard time getting into the room without focusing.”

  “Sorry,” Valerie said, and Sasha shook her head, bending forward to look at the marks.

  “They’re perfect,” Sasha said. “Usually you drip oil or miss something… Let me see your hands.”

  Valerie put her hands out and Sasha pored over them for several moments.

  “Not a scorch in sight,” the girl mused. “You did that better than I ever could have. And the timing. I wouldn’t even try.”

  “I don’t know better,” Valerie said. She looked at the handprints again. “Am I going to get in trouble?”

  “Oh, most certainly,” Sasha said with an amused tone. “But not for that.”

  “What do you mean?” Valerie asked, and Sasha grinned.

  “I mean that you are definitely a natural.”

  They spent a day going through the supplies that Sasha considered to be standard, quizzing on the ingredients and their properties. Valerie couldn’t tell the difference between tell weed and angel hair, not for anything, no matter how often Sasha insisted that they were completely different.

  Sasha told her about the various ways to group magic - the way it was cast, the nature of the things you used to cast it, the purpose of the cast - and the battling philosophies trying to encompass all of how magic worked.

  “You seriously mean to tell me that you guys don’t have this figured out?” Valerie asked, and Sasha grinned at the ceiling.

  “Of course not,” she said. “What else would the old people have to sit around and argue about, if not magic?”

  Valerie picked the things up off of the floor and put them back into the caddy one by one, looking at each of them.

  Magic.

  Her handprints were on the door. There was no arguing about that. And it had a sense of connection to it, that she’d put a piece of herself into it, not in a dangerous soul-eating way, but the way she might have felt about a painting if she’d had a gift of art. Familiar and personal were those handprints.

  She still had moments of complete and utter denial, but she believed that magic was real. It had been there on her hands, a part of her mind and her body forged together.

  But the idea that this bit of dried grass clippings or that bottle of clear oil could be magic… It was completely disillusioning. She wanted it to be thunderbolts coming out of her hands and purple smoke. Everything in Sasha’s box was clear or somewhere on the tan-yellow-gold axis. Like the bits of flotsam a child would pick up on a walk.

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to tell your friend?” Sasha asked, rolling onto her side. Valerie shook her head, the sullenness swelling in her chest without warning.

  “I don’t like them reading my mail,” she said. “Maybe it would serve them right for the police to come looking for me, here.”

  “They wouldn’t ever find it,” Sasha said. “There’s warding all the way up the drive. You basically have to know it’s here to be able to find it.”

  “I left my cell phone in the apartment,” Valerie said. “He’s going to be frantic. There’s no way to find me here… It almost feels like I really have been kidnapped. I mean, what am I supposed to tell him?”

  “The closer to the truth, the better,” Sasha said. Valerie straightened.

  “Are there rules?” she asked. Sasha shook her head, draping her forearm across the bridge of her nose.

  “No,” she said. “But there are reasons.”

  “That sounds like your mom,” Valerie said, and Sasha laughed.

  “It is. You don’t tell civilians about magic because knowing about magic is enough to take away some of their protections, and there are worse things in the world than us.”

  “Than genocidal maniacs?” Valerie asked. “Prove it.”

  “The Superiors aren’t mostly genocidal,” Sasha said. “I mean, not the way my mom talks about them. Not most of them. Just the ones that we’re always fighting with. Most of them just thought that we ought to be in charge, because we’re more powerful. That just voluntarily being powerless around them out of some sense of consideration… I mean… You kind of see their point, don’t you?”

  “No,” Valerie said, and Sasha laughed.

  “Yes, you do,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we be allowed to use magic just because they don’t know it exists or know how to use it? We keep it a secret voluntarily. Every one of us. And I can see why some people would just decide they didn’t feel like doing it that way anymore.”

  “Okay,” Valerie said slowly. “What’s that got to do with Hanson?”

  Sasha nodded, rolling onto her side to look at Valerie.

  “Evil exists,” she said quietly after a moment. “Mostly it doesn’t care about us, but if it wanted to come mess with us, it could. Some of the Superiors, some of their magic… Magic goes on a spectrum from light to dark. The things that you use for it, the way that it works. The School of Light Magic only uses… you know, light magic. Survival School is a lot more pragmatic about using what works. I mean, we aren’t using ravens’ guts and stuff, but almost everything I brought from home is kind of there in the middle.”

  Valerie looked at the box and then over at the handprints on the door.

  “Dark magic,” she said quietly and Sasha sat up, pointing.

  “That’s not dark magic,” she said. “So… don’t think that it is. I used amber oil for it, and amber oil is one of the lightest oils I have. I actually picked it because it’s going… Because you’ll be safer if the Superiors come for you
and try to open the door with dark magic. It goes directly against it.”

  Valerie turned slowly to look at her roommate, frowning hard.

  “You were thinking about that when you did the spell?” she asked. Sasha paused, awkward, then lay down again.

  “I had six oils to pick from,” she finally said. “Tell weed is okay with any of them - I use tell weed in almost everything I do… kind of a thing - so I was thinking about the reasons to use one over another and… Well, yeah.”

  Valerie’s throat closed and she paused, waiting to be able to swallow again.

  “Thank you,” she finally said.

  “You’re welcome,” Sasha said simply.

  “Does my mom use dark magic?” Valerie asked, and Sasha shrugged.

  “She went to Light School. Possible she only uses light magic. I don’t know. My mom won’t touch anything darker than that.”

  She motioned to her ingredients, and Valerie nodded.

  “She doesn’t feel like it’s corrupted somehow?” she asked. “Using something that isn’t pure light magic?”

  Sasha shook her head.

  “No. It’s like… you want to be careful as you go over the middle, but… Anyway, it’s not like you really get to pick. Some magic works for you and some magic doesn’t. They’ll probably do a whole bunch of aptitude testing to see where you are on the spectrum, so that they can tailor your classes to the kinds of magic that you’re good at.”

  “Like, I’m going to be lighter or darker than you?” Valerie asked, alarmed.

  “It isn’t about your character,” Sasha said. “No one knows what makes people able to do some things and not others. It’s just… what it is. You’ll figure out what your strengths are and you kind of play to them.”

  “Can I get better, if I’m not good at light magic?” Valerie asked, and Sasha twisted her mouth to the side.

  “I don’t know. Some yes, some no? You can practice and be more precise with how you do things, and that will make them work better, even if you’re not very good at them, but you’re never going to really be better at them. You’ll just do them better. Does that make sense?”

  Valerie went to sit on her bed, checking the clock - the clock - to see how long it was until dinner.

  “How long have you been doing this?” she finally asked.

  “Since I can remember,” Sasha answered.

  “And how good were your test scores, coming in?” Valerie asked. Sasha shook her head.

  “They were good,” she said.

  “How good?” Valerie asked.

  “Um,” Sasha said. “Proctor Tannis told me that I had the highest marks of the incoming class.”

  Valerie nodded.

  “I’m not going to survive here, am I?”

  “You are,” Sasha said. “I’m going to help you.”

  “No,” Valerie said. “You’ve been studying your entire life. You know all of this stuff. And I don’t know any of it. It’s like… Oh, my gosh, I was going to say it was like trying to learn another language, but they actually expect me to learn another language.”

  “I was studying French at my old high school,” Sasha offered, and Valerie shook her head.

  “I was taking Spanish, but it’s like, yeah, I can fill out some blanks on a vocabulary form and say some words that kind of sound like Spanish, but that won’t work, will it?”

  Sasha paused, then shook her head.

  “No. You have to have perfect pronunciation and diction in the context language. And Spanish… I don’t think they use Spanish much.”

  Valerie closed her eyes.

  “Why didn’t Mom tell me?” she asked.

  “If you see them, they can see you,” Sasha said, her tone ominous. Valerie sat back up again and looked at her.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. Sasha burrowed the corner of her mouth into her cheek, then looked up at the ceiling.

  “It’s why you can’t tell your friend everything. If he knows about magic, the demons can use him.”

  “Hold the phone,” Valerie said. “Demons?”

  Sasha nodded, still looking up at the ceiling.

  “They can’t hurt civilians. People who don’t know anything. Like, there are… I don’t know. My parents don’t talk about them much. But they were involved in the last war, and they’ll probably be involved in this one.”

  “Demons are real,” Valerie said flatly, and Sasha nodded.

  “They can teleport. Spontaneously manifest. If the school wasn’t warded, they could just pop into the school if they wanted to, because we know about magic and we know about them.”

  “And do what?” Valerie asked.

  “They’re pure evil with a twisted sense of humor and a desire to ruin things,” Sasha said. “They do whatever they want.”

  “Like, run through the hallways killing people?” Valerie asked.

  Sasha shrugged.

  “I don’t know. My parents never told me what they did in the war.”

  “So… me coming here, and you telling me all of this stuff… means that demons can come kill me now,” Valerie said.

  “Hopefully they don’t ever show up again,” Sasha said. “I mean, most magic users never have anything to do with them, in a lifetime. But… I guess so.”

  Valerie lay back down on her bed, weaving her fingers behind her head.

  “Wow,” she said. “I mean… I guess I can see why my mom would want to walk away from that.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Dinner in ten minutes,” Mrs. Gold said, her footsteps not pausing as she went to the next door down the hallway and knocked on it as well.

  “Everyone ought to be here by now,” Sasha said. “If you want to get to the cafeteria before the line is out the door, we can go early.”

  “What am I going to tell Hanson?” Valerie asked, still staring at the ceiling.

  “The closer to the truth, the better,” Sasha said. “Lies get complicated really fast. But you can’t tell him everything. It wouldn’t be safe.”

  Valerie closed her eyes and sighed.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said.

  And, no, being a natural wasn’t helping anything, just now.

  Class

  Seven-thirty in the morning.

  Valerie sat bleary-eyed at a desk in a room that smelled funny. The kids around her whispered and shuffled, getting things out of their backpacks or writing in notebooks, but Mr. Benson had put Valerie into Botanicals and Herbs first thing in the morning, and Sasha was… Well, Valerie didn’t remember, but her redheaded ally was somewhere else.

  Valerie was on her own in a classroom that was about to discover that she had no business being here.

  “Good morning,” the woman at the front of the class said. “I am Mrs. Reynolds, and you are going to be on time to my class, or we are going to have trouble. I want all of you to know that I will not hesitate…” She paused as another girl came in, sitting down behind Valerie, then Mrs. Reynolds pressed her lips in silent commentary and went on. “I want you to know that I will not hesitate to send you to Mr. Benson or Lady Harrington if you are tardy more than once, and I will fail you if you are late more than twice in a semester. All magic requires promptness and attention to detail, and it doesn’t matter if you know your herbs dead to rights, if you can’t use them on time. You are warned.”

  She stood from her desk and looked up and down the rows. There were eight students in the room, in total, and Valerie was feeling a distinct lack of cover, compared to her real school.

  There, if you sat in the back and didn’t make eye contact, no one would even remember if you were there.

  “Freshmen,” Mrs. Reynolds said, shaking her head. “So full of themselves to have made it this far, and so far to go before they are anything resembling true magic users. Don’t get ahead of yourself, in my class. Plants have distinctive traits that will keep you safe, so long as you know all of them. If you mistake wolfbane for sallow root in a pot
ion that you imbibe, it will kill you before I can go through your potion closely enough to find your mistake. All right. Yes? Let’s have some fun.”

  Valerie blinked as the woman transformed, figuratively. She tossed her hands out to either side at shoulder-level and went back to her desk, where she picked up a cafeteria tray with eight round plates on it.

  “This is a selection of twelve different kinds of light-gray greenery ingredients. Rating sixty-five to seventy-five. I would like to see how many of them you can correctly identify by their spellcasting name, bonus points for being able to identify scientific or civilian-use name, where to find it, and which of these three you combine to form the most potent healing poultice.”

  She passed out the plates like it really was a treat, then she went back to lean against her desk, watching them.

  “They aren’t labeled, so you need to identify them by key characteristic in order to get any of the credit.”

  Valerie began picking through the so-called ingredients, smelling them, putting them down on the desk, piling them this way and that in ways that she hoped looked insightful, then she got a piece of paper out of her backpack and set it down in front of her with a pen, looking at the plants.

  Lettuce.

  Lettuce.

  Tree branch.

  Grass.

  Celery.

  Lettuce.

  Leaf.

  Leaf.

  Leaf.

  Vine.

  They meant nothing to her. Just more stuff that a kid would take home from the park.

  She remembered the way Sasha’s oil and powder-stuff had felt on her hands, and she picked up each of the items more carefully, running her fingers over them, hoping that something would speak to her the way the oil had.

  Celery.

  Her fingers itched when she held the celery, and she broke the end of it, looking at the fibers inside of it. One by one, she started pulling them out, listening to the zippery way they peeled loose, feeling how cool they were to the touch as the water inside of the stalk - whatever it had been - hit the air.

  It was satisfying.

  She made little coils of the fibers on her desk, just for something to do with them, then put her pincered fingers under her nose again. It had a clean, earthy smell to it.