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

  “I guess so,” she said. “I mean, I’m not very popular or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Why not?” Valerie asked. Sasha smiled and sat up.

  “Were you popular at your school?” she asked, going to get pajamas out of a drawer and grabbing her shower kit.

  “Maybe,” Valerie said. “I mean, I had a lot of friends. I wasn’t one of the really popular girls, but… You know. I had a lot of friends.”

  Sasha frowned.

  “Don’t you miss them?” she asked.

  “Hanson,” Valerie said.

  “But not the rest of them?” Sasha asked, and Valerie considered this for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Maybe I will, sometime, but…”

  Huh.

  She could go through her classes, her table at lunch, and she could make a list of all of the people she would laugh and talk with, but Hanson was really the only one she was going to miss.

  Sasha shook her head, getting her towel off of the back of the door.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “I miss my friends from school. I’m going to write them letters tonight and just let them know how school is going.”

  “What will you tell them?” Valerie asked, sitting up.

  “That I met my new roommate and I really like her a lot, and that I got into all of the classes I wanted and there are a couple of teachers I don’t like, but my favorite teacher is awesome, and I can’t wait to see them at the first break home,” Sasha said simply. “Just leave out everything about the war and magic.”

  Valerie frowned.

  “But what is there but magic?” she asked.

  “Not a lot,” Sasha said. “But it means they’ll write me a letter back, and then I’ll hear what’s going on at school, still.”

  “Why did you come here?” Valerie asked. “If you know everyone here and know that they aren’t your friends, when you have good friends you miss back home?”

  Sasha frowned as though the question didn’t entirely make sense.

  “Because I need to learn magic,” she said. “And my mom is a really good teacher, but she has a job, and it takes a lot of time. This is the best way.”

  “Why do you need to learn magic?” Valerie asked, and Sasha smiled.

  “Because I don’t already know it,” she answered. “Can you leave the door open for me so I don’t get locked out again?”

  Valerie felt guilty, but she didn’t know what to do, so she just nodded. Sasha picked up a book from the floor and put it between the door and the frame, waving over her shoulder as she left the room.

  She started the next morning with Mrs. Reynolds class, but at the end of the day, Mr. Tannis was standing outside of her classroom door.

  “And now the real work begins,” he said.

  Ethan

  Ethan walked slowly down the hallway of the castle, aimless for the moment.

  Castles all seemed so exclusive and glamorous from the outside, and so many magic users liked to call the things home, but at the end of the day, once you got inside, they were just giant stone buildings.

  Drafty ones.

  “Mr. Trent?” someone asked, and Ethan waited a full beat before he turned.

  “That’s me,” he said, looking at an attractive woman in her early twenties.

  “You aren’t supposed to be here,” the woman said. “You were supposed to wait in the library.”

  “There isn’t anything in a library but books,” Ethan answered. “I got bored.”

  “Your father expected you to be there, when he got out of his meetings with Madam Pelletier.”

  “Then he should have told me how long he was going to take,” Ethan said.

  “Please come with me,” the woman said, annoyed without any real energy.

  He shrugged and followed her back down the wide hallway. At some point, some rich king or noble or something had lived here and been quite proud of the place. Ethan couldn’t imagine. No electricity, no plumbing to speak of, no light. The scars showed where it had been added in later, and it was all just weary and sad.

  He followed the woman back to the library where they’d originally planted him, and Ethan went to go sit down in one of the high-backed leather armchairs, leaning against the side so his father got nothing but a slight profile of his face.

  “Insolent boy,” Merck Trent said. “You have some of the greatest opportunities a boy your age could imagine, and you wander and sulk.”

  “Opportunities,” Ethan said. “I got into a second-tier school because of my stain, and you won’t even let me start on time.”

  “You begin classes next week,” Merck said, and Ethan sat forward.

  It wasn’t so much that he was excited to be in class as that he hated traveling with his father. Politics bored him at their best, and this was the worst of them.

  Lots of closed-door meetings in out-of-the-way, secure locations, lots of secrecy and discretion. No teenagers.

  Everyone looked at him sideways, wondering why Ethan was even there.

  “You figured out how to use her then,” he said, trying not to sound too interested.

  “Apparently she’s quite simple,” Merck said. “Has no idea about any of this. Should be quite easy to convert and keep in place. The one thing Susan Blake will not do is abandon her daughter.”

  “Still can’t believe you lost track of your own spy the moment she hit the field,” Ethan said with a quiet snort.

  “I have her daughter,” Merck said. “That will be enough, assuming that you can keep her.”

  Ethan sighed.

  “Have you ever seen a girl I couldn’t entrance?” Ethan asked.

  “No,” Merck said. “What I doubt is your commitment to task, as always. I’m hoping she is as pretty as they say, at least.”

  Ethan grinned.

  “She’s pretty?”

  “I’m going to give you all of the notes I got from inside of the school. I expect you to study them all the way and arrive prepared,” Merck said.

  “Anything to get me out of this purgatory,” Ethan said.

  “Your plane takes off tomorrow morning,” Merck said. “Don’t disappoint me.”

  They hadn’t lied.

  They ran her ragged.

  For four weeks, Valerie worked from before the sun came up until well after it went back down again, memorizing and practicing, reciting and listing and identifying. Sasha helped as she could, but they didn’t just bring everybody together at the school because they were too geographically dispersed to learn magic any other way. The School of Magic Survival was intent on using all of everybody’s time.

  And then, quite abruptly, the fifth week of school, Mrs. Reynolds told Valerie that she was going to have to study on her own time.

  Apart from Mr. Tannis, Mrs. Reynolds had taken the most interest in Valerie and her talents, and Valerie felt dismissed and rebuked, standing at Mrs. Reynold’s desk at the end of the day.

  The woman was poring over a list, marking it here and there with a red pen, when she looked up at Valerie once more.

  “Is there a problem?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t understand,” Valerie said.

  “You’re making fine progress,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “I think that you’ve reached a point that, with the right reference books and some work on your own part, you can continue to make fast progress without being here in my classroom.”

  Valerie took half a step back, looking around.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she asked. “I’ve been working hard.”

  Mrs. Reynolds looked up again and gave her a half a smile.

  “The war,” she said. “We try to keep the kids and the schools out of it, but sometimes when needs must, the teachers will help with magic prep work. Especially us. Magic Survival? They always end up calling on us for pre-packaged magic work to help keep our side alive, and things picked up a lot here in the last few days. So I need to get through this list so that I can start assembling ki
ts tomorrow. We won’t be doing any of it in class, but I can’t do it with you here. I’ve been very impressed at your dedication, and I do sincerely believe that you’ll be able to continue on your own with just some good guidance, but regardless, Miss Blake, I need to refocus my energy right now.”

  Valerie paused.

  “Mrs. Reynolds, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just memorizing lists and… it’s boring. I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

  The woman frowned at her, and then gave her a wry smile.

  “That’s what magic is to most of us, Valerie,” she said. “It’s a long set of lists, words, plants, orders, placements, whatever it is that you’re using to invoke the power, it’s something that someone once wrote down and now you have it memorized. The fact that you can create it so simply out of thin air is nothing short of remarkable. Someday I would love to really inspect how you are doing it, but for now…” She looked at her list with an earnest frown. “For now I must be content that you won’t blow us all up by mistake.”

  “Should I go see Mr. Tannis instead?” Valerie asked, and Mrs. Reynolds shook her head.

  “You’re welcome to, but it’s my understanding that the list of requests they delivered to him this afternoon was twice as long and three times as complex. They assume the man can work miracles, and he’s too proud to disabuse them of it.”

  “So I just…” Valerie said. “Read books and…”

  “I will test you,” Mrs. Reynolds said. “I will write a separate test for you and you will sit twice as long as the rest of the class to take it. I will expect you to maintain your rate of progress even as I am unavailable to work with you, because you have demonstrated yourself to be a capable student, and because…” She paused, looking up once more. “If I am going to be working extra hard to keep us all safe, I think that it’s not unfair to expect the same of you. What do you think?”

  “No,” Valerie said. “I’ll try.”

  Mrs. Reynolds nodded and returned to her work. Valerie stood for another moment, waiting. The woman didn’t look up, but she did eventually speak.

  “Did you need something else?” Mrs. Reynolds asked.

  “Have you heard anything about my mother?” Valerie asked.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Reynolds said, laying her hands on the papers and looking at Valerie with a sad concern. For a moment, Valerie’s world froze cold hard solid, a fear that she hadn’t yet taken a moment to acknowledge, and then Mrs. Reynolds shook her head. “No. No one has heard anything about her, and I should warn you that we likely won’t. Your mother’s skill is in disappearing, looking for information that isn’t being kept carefully enough, disrupting plans as they’re being formed. I would call her a spy, but a spy implies a double agent, and that isn’t how it works. More accurate to call her a magic sniper, I think.”

  “Sniper,” Valerie said slowly. “Does she kill people?”

  Mrs. Reynolds sighed, then shook her head.

  “I don’t know. There are a lot of people with very specialized skills that the Council called up to return to the war, but it’s been a long time, and unless you knew them, personally, most of us don’t remember the exact details of what people were doing during the war. I don’t know. Your parents were… They were involved a long time before I graduated Light School.”

  “So if something happens to her, how will we know?” Valerie asked.

  Mrs. Reynolds folded her hands and frowned.

  “The field agents like your mom, they report back to the Council or someone who reports to the Council. When something happens, they stop reporting…”

  “They go quiet,” Valerie said. Mrs. Reynolds nodded. “She really never did know what happened to my dad, did she?”

  Her teacher resettled in her chair, pulling the corner of her mouth down.

  “I think that… I think that’s a question you should ask her, when you get to. That’s personal, and I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

  Valerie nodded, suddenly overwhelmed. She picked up her backpack and went out the door, leaning against the wall and covering her eyes with her hand.

  It was happening.

  She’d been so preoccupied with trying to make it, to fit in, at the school, and she hadn’t even considered that her mother was out there somewhere, risking her actual life. Doing something that had killed Valerie’s dad fifteen years ago.

  Somehow she’d managed to put her head down and work and not think about it, but that moment, the hesitation on Mrs. Reynolds’ face, the suggestion that something might have happened…

  She pressed her hand against her stomach, trying to make it stop hurting, then she went upstairs to Mr. Tannis’ class. The door was locked.

  Across the hallway, someone was singing.

  Valerie went to look in Mr. Jamison’s classroom, finding the man erasing the white board that spanned the entire front of the class.

  “Mr. Jamison?” she asked. He looked over and smiled.

  “Valerie,” he said, then stopped. “Are you okay?”

  “You were friends with them,” she said. “During the war.”

  He nodded, setting down the eraser and coming to sit on the edge of his desk.

  “I was. I considered the two of them to be some of the best friends I ever had. Still do.”

  “Is she going to be okay?” Valerie asked.

  “She’s the best,” he said. “I can say that without hesitation. But the Superiors… I can’t make you a promise, Valerie. I’m sorry.”

  She nodded, looking out the door at Mr. Tannis’ classroom.

  “Mrs. Reynolds told me that she can’t work with me anymore,” she said. “And Mr. Tannis… he almost lives in that room, doesn’t he?”

  “He does a lot of work to maintain all of the ingredients that they store in there,” Mr. Jamison said quietly.

  “He locked the door to keep me out,” Valerie said.

  “Not you specifically,” Mr. Jamison said. “But he’s… busy.”

  “I have no idea what I’m doing here,” Valerie said. “I thought that I was doing well, making progress toward something, and that they were going to tell me what it was, like, later, when I could understand it. But they’re just giving me busy-work, memory tests.”

  Mrs. Reynolds had been too kind to deserve it, but Valerie was frustrated and afraid, and it felt good to be angry.

  “You’re catching up for years of exposure to the concepts of magic,” Mr. Jamison said. “And it isn’t like they can get you involved with the hands-on work, after what happened the last two times. You need to know what you’re doing before you can start rejoining your classmates in their class work.”

  She frowned harder, trying not to cry again.

  “Is the point of this just to make more soldiers?” she asked. “Am I supposed to graduate and go off to war? Is that why Mom ran away?”

  “I like to think that the war will collapse, this time,” he said. “That the Council won’t make some of the mistakes they did last time and let the Superiors get so far ahead of us in planning… I don’t like to consider that the war might still be going on, by the time you graduate.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Valerie asked. “It’s not like I can apply to a college, based on all of this, and go get a job.”

  He laughed.

  “The jobs that magic users can do are very specialized,” he said. “And they tend to pay quite well, so long as you’re clever or working with someone who is clever. I don’t expect you’ll have any problem.”

  “There’s a big market for someone who can make plant-based magical neurotoxins?” Valerie asked.

  “Bigger than I’d like to admit,” he said softly, then shook his head. “We don’t approve of those uses, but I know that the black market for spells is very lucrative. There are an unknown number of Survival School and Light School graduates who avail themselves of it.”

  “So that’s what I’m supposed to do?” Valerie asked. “Mix potions and sell them?”

 
“Is that what you want to talk about?” Mr. Jamison asked. “Career paths? I can see why you would feel like you don’t see it, but… It’s an odd time, and I have requests on my desk from the Council right now, myself.”

  She scratched the back of her neck and turned away.

  “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  She started for the door, then turned back.

  “Mr. Jamison, how long did the last war go?”

  “Nine years,” he said. She nodded, angry. Oh, she was angry.

  “And if my parents were both spy-snipers who only contacted the Council every once in a while to check in, how did my mom end up having me?”

  He licked his lips.

  It was the right question.

  He didn’t know.

  “You think my mom cheated on my dad,” she said.

  “I know that your dad never doubted that you were his, not for a moment,” he said finally. “But there were plenty of people who asked that question, at the time. They…” His nostrils flared at an old memory and he turned his face to the side. “They thought that it was worse if they had found a way to contact each other than if she’d cheated on him while she was out. The spies aren’t supposed to have contact with anyone but the council, for their own safety, and if they found each other, they were risking operations that were critically important.”

  “Why didn’t she ever tell me anything?” Valerie asked, not expecting an answer.

  “They were hard times,” Mr. Jamison answered. “She ran away to keep you safe from them. I wouldn’t have expected her to tell you any of it. When wars go bad, people… They don’t treat each other very well, sometimes. You really see what’s at people’s cores.”

  “Can’t we just kill them all or something?” Valerie asked. “I don’t want this.”

  He blinked, then shook his head and went to sit at his desk, drawing a tired breath.

  “I know you don’t mean that,” he said. “But it’s the philosophy that caused thousands of innocent civilians to end up dead. The fact that we didn’t want a war, we ignored it, and we let it happen.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that.