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1.
It was raining outside the yurt.
A “wood sprite outbreak” had increased the amount of wood craft found around the commune exponentially. The platform the yurt sat on was just one testament to the commune’s efforts.
Dad’s special playing card holder was another.
“Any twos?” he asked
“Go fish,” I said.
The sound of rain droplets hitting the waterproofed tarp was getting louder, but I didn’t mind. It made everything feel cozy.
Mom was watching our card game while working on her knitting. She had a big skein of fuzzy green yarn in her lap and her needles made soft clicking sounds. The crystal hanging from her necklace glowed as she worked.
“Any fives?”
Dad tapped a finger on his chin and pretended to be deep in thought before plucking out two cards from his holder and sliding them across the table. “Two fives for my little fish.”
I made a face at his silly nickname and shoved the cards into my hand.
Dad had dreamed about me before my conception. He said he saw an arowana swimming upstream through muddy water and knew he would do almost anything to live long enough to meet me. During graduation, Dad lost an arm to a maw-mouth but kept himself and Mom alive long enough that I could enter the world kicking and screaming six months later.
It was kind of romantic in the right light. So here we were, thirteen years later, a damp Welsh evening spent inside a yurt assembled at the outskirts of a hippy commune.
“Who’s winning?” Mom said.
“Does anyone really win at Go Fish,” I mumbled.
“Arjun?”
“Well,” and here Dad paused to tap his chin again as if there was anything actually important on the table to interpret, “I think El is winning. She has two books laid face down and I have none.”
“For a seer, you’re terrible at cards,” I said. I was proud that I was winning.
“It’s all part of my charm,” Dad replied. He kissed Mom on the cheek and then stood for a big stretch. He was so tall. I imagined his fingers could touch the ceiling if he stretched enough. “I’m feeling peckish. Perhaps, I’ll have a snack.”
Dad walked to the small trunk that held our non-perishables. He hovered his hand over the selection within. His hands wandered from student mix to dried fruit to the special jerky Mom traded her apple cider vinegar volumizing hair spritz for. He settled on the Cadbury fruit and nut bar from Aji’s last care package for a second. He caught my eye and winked before picking a pack of student mix.
Aji sent care packages every other month.
They were always filled with things that we rarely thought to buy or couldn’t get either in the commune or in the neighboring small towns. She sent bottles of the Rao family masala Dad rationed carefully, and bhakarwadi and other snacks I ate too fast, and small whimsical figurines and bags full of soft cloth and seeds that Mom liked. She always wrote a short note to Dad with little updates like a dutiful mother. I imagined she was as tall as Dad and that they shared the same deep brown eyes, dark skin, and long black hair.
Not a lot of people liked me, never mind loved me the way Mom and Dad did, but I always hoped my own grandmother, my aji, would tolerate me. Maybe she and Dad would introduce me to my panaji, the family matriarch. Maybe she would exclaim about how tall I was since she had never met me.
After Dad sat back down and shared some of the mix with me, I glanced at Mom before turning back to him. Mom didn’t speak Marathi very fluently, but I had grown up learning English and Marathi at the same time.
“Aba,” I said in Marathi. “I’m going off to school next year.”
“Too soon,” Dad replied in kind.
“We should go on a family trip to Mumbai before school starts.”
“My little fish,” Dad said. He was looking at me with an inscrutable expression on his face that I had never seen before. He looked like a stranger; his gaze was fixed in the distance to a place that I could not see and I was filled with an unnameable dread even as my dad said in his usual soft voice, “It’s not the right time yet.”
The moment was broken by Mom’s yawn. She gently brushed her knitting off of her lap into a basket and said, “I think I’m going to head to bed. Do you two want to finish up your game or call it?”
“I think El’s got me beat,” Dad said in English. He looked like his usual self to me again, and I squawked like I did every time when he leaned over the table and ruffled my hair.
All three of us cleaned up and got ready for bed. When I laid my head down, I dreamed about nothing at all.
2.
There were a lot of people in the New York enclave.
Life inside an enclave was terrifying and foreign. Almost everyone I met was a New Yorker. Mom’s familiar voice was my lodestone, and her hands on my face in the morning became a ritual I was determined to continue until the day I finally left for the Scholomance.
It was hard to believe that a week ago we had been sitting in the woods crying in each other’s arms after a near miss with a murder of mals.
It had scared me how tired Mom had looked after our brush with the darker things that went bump in the night.
When I had suggested we join an enclave, she had folded like a deck of cards. She had held me so tight and looked at me with love as she always did, but her shoulders had curved inward as if in defeat. The mal attacks had grown more frequent, like they knew this was the last year they could come and eat me before I went off for school.
Now, we were sitting in a small suite Mom had been given after signing on as a healer with New York.
Gwen Higgins was a marketable name even though Mom never meant to market her work in any way. When she had put out the word that she was interested in a place for her and her daughter, New York had answered.
Magistra Rhys was sitting across from Mom. I was standing at Mom’s side facing the Magistra and her son, Orion.
Orion looked to be about my age, but he was still shorter than me, and his ears stuck out from the sides of his head in a way that people probably told him he’d grow into. His hair was such a fine platinum blond he essentially had no eyebrows. I hated him on principle for growing up a little prince, but at the same time I felt the desperate need to be liked by him.
“Gwen, I hope that you have been finding everything to your satisfaction.”
“You’ve been very generous, Magistra,” Mom said. “El and I are grateful.”
The Magistra smiled and waved Mom’s words aside as if to say it was nothing. Maybe to her it actually was nothing.
“And how are you doing El?” the Magistra asked as she turned her full attention on me. Her gaze was piercing, but Mom and I had been careful. We’d moved or covered all the reflective surfaces in the sitting room, because lately, they’d had a tendency to rattle and show dark shadows when I was around. My powers were growing as my time to go to the Scholomance approached.
I hoped that the Magistra only saw what she wanted to see when she looked at us. Just a qualified healer and her daughter of unspecified magical power. We didn’t want to make it too obvious that I had the potential to become the tool of the dark forces my panaji had foretold I would become.
“I’m well,” I said. “I’m finding New York to be very new and exciting.”
The Magistra smiled thinly at my joke. She turned to Orion and put a hand on his shoulder. Her smile became more genuine. “Orion can introduce you to the others your age. I hope that you’ll grow to be good friends. Why don’t you show El around?”
“Great,” I said through clenched teeth. I tried to give Mom a reassuring smile and reached out to touch her hand for a second before I followed Orion to the door. I looked back one more time to meet Mom’s worried gaze as the door swung shut behind us.
“Do you have anything to eat? I’m starving,” I said. I’d skipped dinner last night to try and get over the drowsiness that came from moving between time zones. The meeting with his mom this morning had cut into any time for Mom and I to eat breakfast. Orion looked a little surprised like no one had ever asked him about food before. “I’ll eat anything I’m not picky. Whatever you’ve got in the kitchen I bet I could cook something edible up,” I continued. I had spent a lot of time in the kitchen tent where the cook tolerated my presence if I helped wash and chop the vegetables.
Orion led the way through a maze of corridors and lots and lots of doorways into a kitchen stocked with gleaming stainless-steel utensils and copper-bottomed cookware that managed to shine expensively.
I was sure I wouldn’t be able to find my way back, but by now I was more hungry than worried so I opened up the two-tiered fridge and dug around.
I put a few slices of rye bread into the little toaster oven on the counter. I prepared some yogurt with salt, and pepper, and broke a few eggs into a big bowl in hopes of making some scrambled eggs. Orion watched me making my culinary discoveries in near silence, so I designated him sous chef and made him whisk the eggs and chop chives and asked him about his favorite places to eat in New York City.
“Um, I don’t know,” Orion said. “I don’t really eat out a lot.”
“Alright, then what do you like to eat? Name a food you like.”
“I like chocolate chip cookies,” Orion said.
“That’s not a ‘food’. That’s a dessert.”
The debate about whether a food could be a dessert carried us through the rest of the preparations. I smeared my yogurt sauce onto my toast the way Mom said that my dad used to do, and Orion did the same after a second's hesitation. It was one of the only meals I’d had with a stranger that hadn’t devolved into some kind of fight, food or otherwise. Maybe Orion could be a friend.
“Do you like it here?” Orion asked after we had finished eating.
“I just got here, so I don’t know enough to have an opinion,” I said. “I just want my mom and I to be safe.”
“I could, uh,” Orion said. “Protect you. I’m good at that.” He looked earnest but his offer still made me angry.
“I can protect myself,” I said. I wanted to grind my teeth to dust. I wanted to shred his hair until it was nothing but pixie dust. What did he know about security, about safety, about rest? My patience with Orion had suddenly worn thin, but I reminded myself that he was the Magistra’s son even though he was acting like a prick after we had been doing so well, making a late breakfast together and all.
“I have a shift in a bit,” Orion said. “You could come with me to the gate. I can show you.”
“A shift?”
“As a gate guard.”
And that’s how on my third day as a probationary enclaver, Orion Lake and I managed to accidentally attract and then on-purpose kill a chimera the size of a small bus.
3.
The Polynesian called it mana, the Chinese called it qi, and the Star Wars nerds called it the Force. The harnessing of energy, of life, was what made magic possible. Magic was potential energy channeled into pathways of the universe that science did not have the means to describe.
I had no interest in exploring explanations of why magic is possible. I was a twenty-year-old high school dropout living in my mom’s yurt in a commune in rural Wales. I had better things to do.
It was a bright day, as evidenced by the blinding rays of sunshine gathering around the yurt when I stuck my head out the flap. Mom had left me some tea in a thermos and a plate of leftover finger sandwiches at our small camper table. I crammed as many sandwiches as I could into my mouth and got dressed at the same time. The smooth boards of the wooden platform I helped Mom install just before my fourteenth birthday were cold under my feet.
When I finally stepped out of the yurt fully dressed and ready to face the day, I was greeted by an unfamiliar face.
“Who are you looking for?” I asked.
“Um, good morning,” the man said. He sounded American. “I’m here for El? Like the letter?”
Great.
The man was definitely from an enclave. Sometimes, men and women smelling faintly of ozone came to see Mom to ask for advice, or healing, or one of her famous energy storing crystals. She didn’t need to tell me those people were from enclaves. They reeked of untapped power, and this man in front of me was no different.
“Great,” I said. “What do you want.”
“I’m Orion Lake,” he said and then paused like his name was supposed to mean something to me.
“Uh-huh, and what do you, Orion Lake, want?” I hated repeating myself, but I wanted to get to the heart of the matter. Why was some enclaver asking for me by name?
“I came to ask for a shield.”
Mom didn’t come into her healing prowess by accident. She had taken up healing at the Scholomance, and it had helped her make it through four years as a non-claver, a student unconnected to an enclave. She had tried to explain Scholomance nomenclature to me once, but I thought it sounded like bull. Did the non-English speaker have equivalent words or direct translations of the things the English speakers were calling each other? Was enclave culture identical among the international enclaves?
By contrast, I came into my abilities on accident.
The summer I made the platform for the yurt, I had been driven by fear of the increasing number of mals attacking us, by dread of the rainy season that would inevitably sink our yurt into the water-logged earth, and by my own desperate desire to stay with my mom, the only person who saw something worth saving and cherishing in me when all anyone else saw was an outcast. Some of the carpenters in the commune had helped me find the wood and tools, but I had been the one who had carefully watched the tutorial videos online at the local library, and measured all the angles and connection points with a borrowed retractable ruler. Magic was supposed to be about effort, and for all that it defied science, it was startling Newtonian in the sense that every magical action had an equal effect in the physical realm. I had created a ward against mals right under my feet.
“Why should I give one to you?”
Lake looked confused, then surprised when he realized I was El. He had probably been expecting some old geezer in a rocking chair whittling a stick of wood. I was good at whittling. It was frustrating work, and the magic I built from it was prickly like a hedgehog, but it was satisfying too. I was also beautiful the way someone destined for a villainous role in a fairy tale was beautiful, with my shorn dark hair and my long legs.
My great-grandmother, my panaji, had predicted I would become a source of infinite destruction, but I chose to become a creator of solely protective goods instead.
The warded wood under my feet, the small trinkets of minor safety Mom handed out along with her crystals, these were my efforts to avoid my fate. It had worked so far, and the price was one I was more than willing to pay. I would never be formally trained. My magic would only ever be intuitive and effort driven. All I would ever have was luck and fear. One small magical misstep could lead to the downfall of worlds. Not a big deal or anything.
Lake didn’t know all that of course. All he knew was that I could make him something he wanted, but he was looking up at me gormlessly like he had never had to explain himself in his life.
“Well?” I asked. I had booked some studio time at the wood shop in town and I was eager to leave.
“I kill mal,” he said. “And I have a shield, but it only works for me” Here he tapped his belt buckle. I was no artificer, but even I could tell it was an item of immense protection. “I need a shield that can repel mal. In case there are, um, bystanders.”
“You want a bigger shield,” I said. “And so, you can do what? Go ‘round like a one-man army destroying mal wherever they might appear?”
Lake blinked up at me.
The realization that he was planning on doing exactly what I was accusing him of was nearly enough to send me into a fit of laughter so powerful it would have ended me right there on my own doorstep.
I felt like I had no choice but to agree.
4.
Wu Wen spoke two dialects of Chinese, Mandarin and Shanghainese, and French. I spoke English, Welsh, and Marathi. We had been assigned to a maintenance shift together, and every time we passed the maintenance request between us, the paper shifted like a lenticular bookmark, shifting from English to Chinese and back again depending on who was holding it.
It was a quiet walk to the hall we were supposed to work on. A vent cover had been broken earlier this week and was making unpleasant sounds promising imminent collapse and a flood of who knew what.
Wu Wen crouched down to assess the problem while I kept a lookout. He opened his tool box and began to tap against the vent cover with a little silver hook.
After the initial diagnosis, he and I sat with our backs against the wall and braided metal wires together to the desired thickness. I stored the potential I had gathered from the effort into my crystal, and Wu Wen used his to fix the vent with more taps of his silver hook.
Just as we stood up and tried to stretch out the aches in our backs, Orion Lake flew past us in a flat-out sprint. We watched in surprise as he ran up a set of stairs before he disappeared from sight.
I looked at Wu Wen like he might have a clue what was going on, but he met my eye and shook his head as if to say, don’t look at me, I have no idea what that kid is up to.
Some things were simply universal.
Orion Lake, enclaver princeling and offensive magic affinity-haver, was like a power converter. He absorbed the malevolent power a destroyed mal gave off and converted it into pure energy that helped fill the magical pool the New York enclave drew from.
I was the same way except it was for death itself. Like an electron giving off energy as it fell from a higher energy level to a lower one, living creatures also gave off energy when they died. I could harvest a portion of that energy for myself. Unlike Lake, who I assume was born with his affinity, I had to achieve mine through months of meditation and lots of desperation.
I had to give credit where credit was due, Orion Lake had been the inspiration behind my efforts. My natural affinity for destruction and world domination had come in handy. It was like I could sense the approach of an ending.
Maybe he could too.
*
I came into the Scholomance three years ago with fifty empty energy storing crystals Mom had made for me, and since then, I have filled up more than half of them. There was, unsurprisingly, a lot of death at the Scholomance.
I still wasn’t a malificer, and I wasn’t desperate for alliances the way I would have been if I hadn’t made my magical breakthrough in second year. I was only biding my time until graduation, so when Orion Lake came through killing that soul eater and making demands about my allegedly evil intentions, I told him the truth.
Jack Westing dying as a result of my actions had been something I hadn’t foreseen. Mom said that my dad had been a seer, but that gift must have skipped over me.
As I sat at the head of my bed after curfew healing the gut wound Westing had given me, I couldn’t help but stare at Lake.
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
“I didn’t mean to kill Jack,” Lake said. “But he was trying to kill you! After he had already killed someone else!”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I muttered, but it wasn’t like I would miss Westing, so I gave up that thread of conversation and straightened up a bit more. “Give me your hand.”
“Uh, I‘m not really great at comforting people.”
“No, you fool, so that we can share power when all the mals inevitably invade my room.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Performing spells with Lake felt intimate. It felt like I was touching the edges of his psyche, a part of him that was so fundamental that it was impossible to know without seeing. The knowledge that he was seeing similar parts of me was terrifying but also exciting.
Every mal he destroyed fueled another layer of wards that I lay upon my door and around my room. Mals I hadn’t known were in my room began to sizzle and die from being inside the powerful magical barriers I was putting up one after another.
By the middle of the night, I had laid down so many protective spells that it felt like nothing was getting into or out of my room. The Aegis Ward on my door glowed bright and cold.
“Good job, Lake,” I said as I collapsed into my bed. I didn’t want to move again for another ten hours, but my watch said breakfast was in three.
“Please,” he said after a deep breath, “call me Orion. Mr. Lake is my dad.”
I kind of wanted to make fun of him for being such a dork, but instead I wrangled him so that he was laying down next to me and patted my hand over his face to shush him like I would an overly energetic dog. “Go to sleep, Orion. Breakfast is in five hours.”
I pulled my blanket over us and fell asleep warm for the first time in a long time.
5.
I used a razor to cut my hair to the scalp every other week or so. Most people who attended the Scholomance did something similar.
Protective hairstyles were, in fact, useful. And I knew some of the girls who did hair were making lucrative trades due to their skills. The younger students rarely brought lice to the school, and mals were deeply uninterested in becoming lice-like. They thrived on larger scales of destruction.
It was something of a status symbol to have nice hair, whether it flowed pin straight down your back or was styled in careful braids, knots, or locs, but it also wasn’t out of the ordinary to wear your hair very short no matter who you were.
Sometimes, you just wanted to feel the cool draft from the void blow against your fuzzy scalp as you slept. Plus, you never had a bad hair day.
Orion had fine, silver hair that hung into his eyes making him look like the little feather duster that could during breakfast, and the day I sat him down for a haircut was not a day too soon.
“Okay, just pretend I’m your regular hair stylist,” I said.
“I usually just cut whatever part is too long with a blade,” Orion replied. Of course he did.
“Okay,” I said again, this time through a grimace, “I’m going to fix that.”
I wasn’t a hairstylist by any measure of the word, but I had cut my mom’s hair all my life and I knew how to use a single blade razor to clean up the baby hairs at the back of the neck, so I figured I was all set.
After the first snip of the scissors along his bangs, Orion’s ears started to turn a faint pink as he looked up at me through the bathroom mirror.
“Who cuts your hair at home?” I asked.
“My mom.”
“The great Orion Lake, mummy's little darling,” I muttered as I moved to cut the hair covering his left ear.
Orion turned even more pink and said, “Well, who does your hair?”
“I cut my own hair. With a razor.” I grinned wide, threatening, but Orion only gave me a small smile in return. It was disarming to have this boy that I had hated for being too pampered, too self-centered, so docile under my hands, sweet as a lamb as I turned his head this way and that. His gray shirt was littered with little tufts of his own hair, and I brushed them away as best as I could before moving onto the right side.
“What was your hair like before you got here?” Orion asked.
It was a good thing that we had become friends, because if he had asked me that before, I would have pushed him off a set of stairs. As it was, I just sighed and touched one of his ears to see if it was as warm as it looked and then said, “It was really long. My mom would braid flowers into it from the farmer’s market. And it was really thick. Sometimes I would wake up with it in my face like it was trying to strangle me.”
Orion laughed softly and I went about cutting the hair at his neck to be shorter than the rest to try and give his hair some kind of shape.
When I finished, I pushed him into the shower stall and shook out his shirt so that most of the hair fell into the sink. I muttered a quick spell and the hair incinerated in an instant. Then I flushed it down the sink.
After the shower, his hair dried into a fluffy bird's nest that I teased him about as we walked back to his room.
“Um, would you like to come in?” Orion said. “You could pick out some more shirts, if you need any.”
“You just like it when I wear your things.”
“I think that they look nice on you,” Orion said earnestly. It was such a line, but I could admit it that I enjoyed being the object of Orion's attention. Plus, he said it all while smiling at me like it was a reward enough for him, to spend time with me, and that made me feel like a bird was beating around in my chest, wings out, soft and scared and exhilarated all at once.
“I could use a few more shirts, I suppose.”
He opened his door for me and I walked in. I flopped onto his bed face first, then turned to watched him rummage through his drawers. We were almost of a height, but I was still taller, so he picked a few longer tee’s and rolled them into a little bundle. When he came over, I pushed the shirts out of his hands and pulled him onto the bed on top of me.
“Will you kiss me?” I asked.
“I would like to, a lot” Orion said, and then he did.