Surviving Magic (School of Magic Survival Book 1) Page 6

  The red leaves, there, the way the green veins cut through the dark maroon surface of the leaf, that was interesting.

  She had no idea what it meant, if it even meant anything, but it was pretty to look at. She split the leaf in half along the spine, enjoying how it split. It didn’t tear; it broke.

  She put the two halves into separate spots on the desk, one in the middle of the fiber coils and the other off by itself.

  Turning her attention to one of the lettuces, the found the underside furry in an awkward, almost toxic way. She wanted to keep her fingers off of it. She broke the stem of that one, down at the base of the lettuce-y bit of leaf, and put it to her nose without touching it, then turned her head away at how acrid the fresh fluids inside of it were.

  She put it down on top of the solo half of the red leaf, then changed her mind and put the red leaf top-side down on top of the fuzzy surface of the lettuce.

  She browsed her fingertip through rest of the ingredients, coming up with the bit of tendril-y vine.

  As long as she was doing it, she may as well make it look good.

  She found the end of the vine hard, woody, but it split neatly with some force from her fingernails and the split ran down the length of it quite nicely. Inside, there was a pulpy fluid that she scooped out with another fingernail, just to feel the texture of it, then she wiped it off on the red leaf there with the fibers, and turned her attention once more to the other ingredients.

  “Come with me,” Mrs. Reynolds said, suddenly close. “Everyone else, turn in what you have. On my desk, face down, and put the plant subjects into the burn box. I’ll be back in just a minute.”

  Valerie’s heart beat hard against her chest as she stood to follow the woman to the door. Mrs. Reynolds paused to watch as everyone turned in their papers, then she opened the door and went out into the hallway, turning around to face Valerie as she pushed the door closed again.

  “Are you mocking me?” the woman asked. Valerie swallowed the apology that was halfway out of her mouth. This wasn’t what she’d expected.

  “No,” she said. “No. Um. I don’t…”

  “Who are you?” Mrs. Reynolds asked.

  “Valerie Blake,” Valerie answered, and Mrs. Reynolds straightened.

  “Susan and Grant Blake’s daughter?” she asked, and Valerie straightened.

  “Yes,” she said, prepared to be defensive at whatever the woman might say next.

  “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised they sent you in prepared, but mixing a poison in my classroom on the first day is hardly the way to win allies,” Mrs. Reynolds said.

  “Poison?” Valerie asked, and Mrs. Reynolds frowned, taking Valerie in down the length of her nose.

  “Don’t be smart with me,” she said. “I don’t take kindly to that sort of thing. How did you learn that preparation of gavon root?”

  “Which root?” Valerie asked, confident that none of those things had been roots.

  “Did your parents call it something else?” Mrs. Reynolds asked.

  “The viney thing?” Valerie asked.

  “Viney…” Mrs. Reynolds said. “What are you playing at?”

  Valerie sighed.

  “I have no idea,” she finally admitted. “I… I didn’t know magic was real until two days ago. Some guy showed up at our apartment and told Mom that she needed to come fight, and she sent me here for safe-keeping, apparently, but…”

  She shrugged helplessly, and Mrs. Reynolds frowned deeply, considering her.

  “Then where did you learn that preparation of gavon root?” she asked.

  “I’m still back at poison,” Valerie said. “I wasn’t mixing anything.”

  “Child, you were extracting the essence of the olla leaf onto the rust weed. All it was going to take was adding in the green welk and you had a classic neurotoxin. I’m not going to let you make that kind of thing in my classroom, I don’t care what you were doing at home.”

  Valerie shook her head.

  “I was just stacking things in hope you wouldn’t notice that I’ve got no idea what I’m doing,” she said.

  “But you made the gavon elixir,” Mrs. Reynolds said, exasperated. “And I’ve only seen that preparation of gavon root a few times. Mr. Jamison does it that way.”

  “He knew my parents,” Valerie said reflexively and Mrs. Reynolds snorted.

  “I’ll say he did,” she answered. “You can’t be trying to convince me that you don’t know what you’re doing. That was a very precise preparation. Non-traditional, I’ll grant you, but that is probably the strongest gavon elixir I’ve ever seen a student make.”

  Valerie realized that if she tried to move, her knees were going to buckle and she was going to fall, but at the same time her body was entirely tensed, preparing to take off running the moment the woman realized that she was telling the truth. She didn’t know where her body intended to go, when it took off, but the small of her back was beginning to hurt, it was so tight.

  “Come with me,” Mrs. Reynolds finally said, turning to walk away. Valerie worked each leg carefully to make sure it was going to hold her up before she followed, going back to the office and the woman who had liked Sasha so well and… Well, she gave Valerie a dark look as she followed Mrs. Reynolds in through the door.

  “Didn’t take you long to cause trouble,” Mrs. Young said, turning her attention from Valerie to Mrs. Reynolds. “What can I do for you?”

  “Is Mr. Benson in his office?” Mrs. Reynolds asked.

  “He is,” Mrs. Young answered slowly. “It’s the first day of school, though. You know he’s very busy.”

  “She was in the process of making a welk-based neurotoxin during my evaluation quiz,” Mrs. Reynolds said. Valerie wondered if maybe giving teenagers the ingredients necessary to make a neurotoxin might be a bad idea, but she kept it to herself.

  “Let me go get him,” Mrs. Young said, standing. “You can go sit in the counseling room.”

  Mrs. Reynolds led the way once more, opening a solid wood door and turning on the light in a small room with a smaller round table in it. The space was really only big enough to stand around the table, but they’d crammed four chairs in, anyway, and Mrs. Reynolds shifted her way around the table to sit, indicating another chair for Valerie.

  “I’m sorry,” Valerie said. “I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t. I… Please don’t kick me out. I don’t even know if my mom is at home anymore.”

  “Kick you…” Mrs. Reynolds said, then shook her head. “No. No, of course not. I just need to understand what I’m dealing with. If you’re acting out, we will deal with it, but if you are genuinely without the first foundations of magic training…?”

  She paused and was about to go on when the door opened again and Mr. Benson came in. He sat down in one of the chairs, shifting to try to get as much room as he could between the table and his chest, then he rested his elbows on the table and looked at Mrs. Reynolds.

  “Mrs. Young said that you had a complaint about Ms. Blake’s classroom behavior.”

  “No,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “That’s not it at all. I am concerned that she came into my room and promptly began mixing a neurotoxin, but I’m beginning to believe that that might have been your fault.”

  Valerie’s shoulders dropped and she stared at the woman.

  Mrs. Reynolds didn’t turn her attention at all from Mr. Benson.

  “Mixing…” Mr. Benson said. “Why was that even an option?”

  “I like to know the capabilities and the proclivities of my students upfront,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “You can tell a lot about a student’s personal interests by which herbs he or she can quickly and easily identify.”

  Valerie found that a very interesting point, and she also found herself liking Mrs. Reynolds more and more as the woman spoke.

  “There’s a long way between identifying herbs and mixing neurotoxins,” Mr. Benson said, and Mrs. Reynolds nodded.

  “I’ll agree that her tactics on identifying the ingredi
ents were highly unusual in my estimation, something I’ve not seen in many years at this school, but it doesn’t make them invalid methods. She says that she is new to magic.”

  “That’s true,” Mr. Benson said. “She came to us at the last minute because Roger Haem drafted Susan to go back to the war.”

  “Drafted?” Valerie asked, but neither of the adults looked at her.

  “And her parents hadn’t trained her at home at all?” Mrs. Reynolds asked.

  “Grant Blake went quiet during the war,” Mr. Benson said softly, and now Mrs. Reynolds did look over at Valerie.

  “I hadn’t heard,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Valerie looked from one to the other of them and nodded.

  “I don’t really remember,” she said. “It’s… you know.”

  “She really wasn’t trained?” Mrs. Reynolds asked Mr. Benson. He looked at her.

  “I was given to understand that you were being raised as a normal, civilian teenager,” he said.

  “You guys aren’t an army,” Valerie observed. “I’m not sure I get this civilian thing.”

  Mrs. Reynolds nodded.

  “I see,” she said. “You know no magic?”

  Valerie shook her head, considering mentioning the handprints on the back of her dorm room door, but not thinking that that qualified as knowing magic, since she wasn’t sure at all if she could do it again.

  Mrs. Reynolds looked at Mr. Benson.

  “I am without a doubt that she was one step away from a welk-based neurotoxin, and she made one of the most elegant preparations of gavon elixir I’ve ever seen. If she can do that without a single day of magic training, I’m afraid I cannot teach her without better understanding her capabilities.”

  They both glanced at her, and Valerie twisted her mouth to the side, feeling like she was supposed to apologize at this point.

  Mr. Benson looked once more at Mrs. Reynolds.

  “What are you suggesting?” he asked.

  Mrs. Reynolds smiled.

  And so Valerie found herself in the upperclass potions room.

  That’s what they said it was, at least.

  To Valerie, it looked like someone had let a storage closet get out of hand and take over a very large classroom.

  There were only sixteen desks in the classroom, and every wall was lined with boxes and shelves and baskets. Everything was labeled, and none of it made the first bit of sense to her.

  And there were nine adults standing at the back of the room watching her silently.

  Mrs. Reynolds, Mr. Benson, and Lady Harrington were joined by Mr. Jamison and five others - one of whom had to be the potions teacher himself, though Valerie hadn’t caught which one of them that was. The frowny-faced man from her first day at the school was scowling at her with crossed arms.

  She sat down on a desk facing them and frowned.

  “I don’t understand what you expect me to do,” she said, looking around.

  “The same thing you did in my classroom,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “Whatever that was.”

  Valerie spread her fingers.

  “I was just playing around,” she said. “I didn’t think there was a chance you’d give us anything dangerous on the first day of school.”

  “Magic is fundamentally dangerous,” Mr. Benson said. “Once you become familiar with it, some very dark, violent portions of the world have permission to involve themselves with you.”

  “Then why do you do it?” Valerie asked, still feeling very awkward with the adults all just… standing there. She wished Sasha was there. Or Hanson.

  Anyone.

  Just someone familiar.

  “Because we can’t let them go unopposed,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “Those who embrace the darkness. And because there’s a power to magic that you know, deep within yourself. You’re safer, staying away, but if you did have the opportunity to choose, would you?”

  “But I don’t get a choice, do I?” Valerie asked. “I’m stuck here, and you won’t even let me contact my friends to tell them that I’m not dead.”

  “Who told you that?” Mr. Benson asked and Valerie shook her head.

  “I can write him a letter, and you’ll read it and then give him the pieces you’re willing to let him have,” Valerie said. “He thinks I’m dead right now. My best friend.”

  “We’ll discuss that after this,” Mr. Benson said, shaking his head and stepping forward to sit down at the back-most desk. He wove his fingers and put them under his chin.

  “This school is full of remarkable students,” he said calmly, looking at her. “And we have a truly remarkable faculty here, trying to give them the opportunity to realize their full potential. Most of them have come to us through normal, predictable channels. You, though, are remarkable in a very different way, and we need to understand that, if we are going to help you.”

  Valerie thought suddenly of her mother’s note, that she didn’t know if Valerie could trust Roger or not.

  There was a war.

  Bad people.

  Dark magic.

  Some of these people might not be trustworthy.

  Should she be considering keeping secrets?

  She looked at Mr. Jamison, and he nodded.

  “Whatever it is you did to impress Mrs. Reynolds so much, we would all like to see it,” her mother’s friend said, and Valerie drew a breath, looking once more at Mr. Benson, and then looking around the room.

  “I really don’t know what it is you’re expecting,” she said after a moment, but she got up and started walking along one wall, just letting her fingers brush across the fronts of boxes and mesh bags, dipping into containers to pick things up and setting them back down again.

  Neurotoxin.

  It was a fancy movie word, or something in the news. She didn’t really know what it meant, other than the obvious translation that it was a brain poison.

  She’d almost made one.

  On accident.

  With a pile of leaves.

  What business did she have in here, looking all of this stuff? What kind of awful potential was here, just behind the cardboard under her fingers?

  Someone started to say something, and Mrs. Reynolds hushed them.

  “Just wait,” the woman said quietly.

  And then Valerie stopped walking.

  Her hand didn’t leave the box she was touching, and she went back to look into it.

  Vials.

  Tall skinny ones with black screw-on tops. She took one out and looked at it, then read the label on the box, which told her nothing of any value at all.

  All the same, her fingers closed around the cold glass and she went on, pulling things out of baskets, out of boxes, off of hooks. She came to a section full of wooden bowls and stone platters, glass trays and pewter plates. She took a stone bowl, going back to a desk and setting it down there, just looking at it.

  What had that bowl seen?

  She ran her fingers along the inside of it, feeling the angles there where the rough cut of the stone had been worn smooth through workman’s tricks and long use.

  And then she poured the vial in.

  There was a reaction, but she didn’t pause to measure it. Either she’d done something spectacularly bad or highly unexpected or… Well, she didn’t know what they expected. They’d put her in a room full of boxes and asked her to do stuff. Of course whatever she ended up doing was unexpected.

  She poked a small pewter box with her index finger, then opened it, taking out a soft green powder, like what you might get if you really mushed up green tea really well. She sprinkled it over the shiny red fluid in the bottom of the bowl, then tipped her head to the side, watching it.

  There was a bit of rope, maybe a foot long and made of something that felt an awful lot more like reptile than cotton. She picked that up and let it dredge back and forth across the bottom of the bowl, just watching the swirl patterns of blackening green powder in red liquid.

  She picked up a pair of stones, rolling them ov
er each other between her fingers while she continued to drag the rope back and forth, then she held one of them over the bowl.

  “Stop,” one of the men said. “Just… stop there.”

  “I don’t know that cast,” Lady Harrington said. Mr. Jamison had his fingers over his mouth and Valerie watched him, trying to figure out if it was shock or horror or something else.

  “That’s just how Susan did it,” her mom’s friend said after a moment. “I’ve seen her do exactly that.”

  “It’s a bomb,” the man Valerie didn’t know said. He was the one who’d stopped her. “Give me the pig’s ears?”

  Valerie looked around. She hadn’t found anything that matched that description.

  “The rocks, Valerie,” Mr. Jamison said.

  Valerie turned her hand over and let the man take them, and then Mrs. Reynolds came and took the bowl, rope trailing out of it. The two of them - the herbs teacher and the potions teacher - consulted, and Mr. Benson stood, looking at the rest of the things Valerie had picked up.

  There were still a good dozen things that had caught her interest before she’d ran out of space in her hands and her bowl.

  “I’ve never seen this variant,” the frowny man with Mrs. Reynolds said after a moment. “But I know this model. I’m confident enough that it would work that I won’t let her complete it.”

  “What else were you going to make?” Mr. Benson asked.

  Valerie shook her head, looking at the handful of grass. She picked it up and started dropping it on the desk on piece at a time, forming a circle and Mrs. Reynolds gasped.

  “The leather line,” she said to the potions teacher. “How would it interact with tell weed?”

  Tell weed. Is that what that stuff was? Valerie frowned at it. She probably ought to have recognized it, after how much Sasha had gone on about it.

  “It’s going to stabilize it, if you did it right,” the other teacher said. “Could be a fuse. Could be a shield. It all depends.”

  They looked at her, and Valerie let her hands drop.

  “Do you guys want me to keep going or… I don’t understand.”

  Mr. Benson stood and looked back at the teachers once more.

  “I think we need to have a discussion before we figure out what we’re going to do about all of this,” he said. “Mrs. Reynolds, can you take Miss Blake back to your classroom and ensure that she doesn’t have direct contact with any additional magical ingredients, please? We will hold a meeting at lunch with her teachers to discuss the issue.”