Jey scrambled to reset herself. She took a few steps backwards and settled into a ready stance, her weight balanced evenly between her two feet, her muscles relaxed but ready. She drew in a long, slow breath and waited for Professor Straph to come at her again.
Except, he didn’t. While she had moved away, the lean man had set the end of his staff on the ground. Now he stood looking at her with his dark eyes. “You’re distracted, J114.” His voice was low and smooth, difficult to hear if you weren’t paying enough attention. “And your tessila is restless.”
Phril, Jey thought. His name is Phril.
It had been an hour since she’d left Professor Liam’s classroom. She’d taken a walk around the quad, hoping to settle herself and her tessila both. She’d stood beneath a flashnode and waited for it to fill and go off. It hadn’t helped. I can remember. The time between her lesson with Professor Liam and this moment was whole – a complete, unbroken block of memory.
Jey felt as if she’d found herself on a road. Although her shoes were worn with walking, though she carried a pack and clothing, when she looked back there was only a sheer cliff face with a thousand foot drop into empty, fog filled sky. The road continued ahead of her, but it did not go back.
She bowed her head. “My apologies, master. Professor Liam has asked me to see how long I could hold a spell. It’s distracting for me, and uncomfortable for Ph … for my tessila.” She tried to take deep breaths, to keep her eyes soft. She knew things, things Straph himself had taught her, about how to make her body suggest to others it was harmless. That she was harmless. She called upon that knowledge now.
Professor Straph’s eyes sharpened. He took a step towards her and looked into her face. Although her mind was racing, Jey forced her gaze to relax. He was near enough she could smell the sandalwood scent of his soap. “When was your class with Liam?”
She pretended it took her some time to find the answer. She let her eyes slide partway shut. “Just before yours.” This had the benefit of being true, even if it was misleading. Liam had used only a few minutes of their lecture hour, but if Straph checked her schedule, he would see her period with Liam had ended five minutes before she’d arrived here.
Straph spent another moment looking at her through his narrowed eyes. Then he turned and moved away, walking like a cat on his quick feet.
Cat. The word had appeared in her mind, unbidden. And now, like the path, she couldn’t seem to attach it to anything. What is a cat?
She had only a moment to wonder. Straph reset his grip on the staff and whirled it towards her head.
◈
Jey left the washroom and joined the ranks of girls drifting towards the dining hall. She watched the other students. They all seemed to wander rather than walk, moving with a strange, dreamy lack of purpose Jey tried to emulate.
Phril rode on the ledge of her collarbone, looking around with his bright, dewdrop eyes. She could feel he was excited. She could also feel the weaving of her spell on him. It was still in place. Over the course of the day, it had grown easier to leave it there, easier not to think about it. It occupied a corner of her mind, but it grew more comfortable as the time passed.
And time did pass. Time passed, and Jey could remember. Classes had been dismissed for the day. All the girls were being shepherded towards the dining hall. Orderlies moved among them in tan robes, encouraging the flow with soft words or light touches on shoulders or backs.
For the girls did not move with any sort of purpose. Every now and then one of them stopped, going still to look vaguely out over the green expanse of the quad. The younger girls, in their blue gowns, did this the most often. The older girls, in silver, moved with more confidence.
Up ahead, Jey could make out two white gowns, bright against the tones of blue and silver around them. Elle and Kae moved like the others, drifting along with the general flow.
Ahead of them, girls filed through the doors to the dining hall. Jey was near the end of the group. She and a few other girls, one blue, two silver, were passing below a column when the flashnode at its top went off.
Jey froze, but she did so out of reflex. Around her, the other girls reacted as well. The one in blue faltered, her steps lagging. The orderly at their elbow guided her forward and through the doors.
The two in silver stopped walking entirely. There were only two orderlies outside now. They stood next to the doors, waiting to close them. Jey glanced at the blank, vacant looks on the other girls’ faces and tried to imitate it. She stood in place like they did, eyes wide and glassy.
One of the two orderlies released an annoyed sigh. “For the love of Priam.” The orderly’s tone was low and quick with frustration. “This is a ridiculous place for one of those rotting things. And today with a senior right next to it.”
The other orderly didn’t reply, only gave a small, nonchalant shrug. He moved forward to one of the silver girls, speaking to her in a low tone, nudging her shoulder to encourage her forward. She seemed stuck for a moment. At last, she moved. The other girl in silver went with her.
Jey hesitated, uncertain how quickly she should pretend to recover. They do something. The thought raced through her head in a frantic effort to understand. The flashnodes do something to our minds.
The other orderly approached Jey, gripping her wrist to try to pull her forward. She resisted more out of reflex than a decisive desire not to move.
“Too much force.” These words were spoken by the orderly who’d shrugged. He was a smooth faced man, with thin limbs and the hint of belly beneath his robes. He turned from shepherding the two silver girls into the dining hall. With surprising dexterity, he took a few quick steps forward and rapped the other orderly on the wrist. The first orderly gave a sharp grunt and released his grip.
Jey let her head list to one side to get a better look at him. Where the other orderly had a soft look to him, this one was different. He had a rugged look to his face. His palm had been rough against her wrist. He was young, his shoulders square with muscle.
The older orderly spoke. “You must be soft, smooth, gentle at all times, most especially if you touch one and her tessila is on her person”
Phril had indeed bridled at the orderly’s behavior. Jey could see the red smudge of his form out of the corner of her eye. He’d raised his head and had his small, beaked mouth open, his wings flared, as if he could somehow drive the orderly away.
The younger orderly looked at Phril with a look of distaste. In fact, he looked angry. Some fierce spark burned deep within his eyes.
The older orderly saw this too. He took a step closer to the young man, so close their shoulders almost touched. He spoke in a low whisper, but his tone was firm and menacing. “Listen to me, man. One of these girls is a thousand times more valuable than you. Get one of them rattled and I promise you they’ll have removed you by morning. I don’t know how you arrived here, but I assure you we all followed the same path. Some of us live with what happened. Some get angry. If you choose anger, you choose your own end.”
With these words, the older orderly turned back to Jey. For a moment, she felt a vague bloom of recognition. She seemed to recall his face, a younger version, smiling at her.
“Come now, Jey,” he said. She took a tottering, uncertain step towards him. He set a gentle hand on her shoulder. “That’s right. It’s dinner time.” His voice was smooth and soothing. She understood she knew this man – had known him for a long time. But she didn’t know his name.
Jey let herself be guided into the dining hall as the younger man, seething with quiet anger, closed the large doors.
◈
It was dark and quiet in the senior’s dorm. The windows were open. A night breeze sighed through the large space. Jey lay in her bed, listening to the cadence of Elle and Kae breathing as they slept.
Phril was on one of the brillbane bushes that grew in large, earthenware pots set about the room. He’d burrowed his way into a husk and was gnawing his way through the sweet rin
d on a seed sack. Jey could feel his simple pleasure with the undertaking.
Jey was not as relaxed as her tessila. She had emulated Elle and Kae as they’d brushed out their hair, donned their night dresses, and climbed into their plush beds. But Jey had not been able to get to sleep. She’d been lying awake for hours now.
The only light in the room came from the flashnode set into the domed ceiling. As she lay in tense wakefulness, she watched it fill slowly with light, then flare in a sudden, silent detonation. It did this, on average, twice an hour – though sometimes it seemed to fill a little slower or more quickly than usual.
Jey had followed Professor Liam’s instructions. The spell she’d cast on Phril still clung to him, an invisible weave of protective magic. The strange thing was Jey now couldn’t understand how she’d done it. She could remember Professor Liam telling her to cast the spell – could remember doing so without any particular confusion or difficulty. But now, if she tried to cast the same spell on anything else it was impossible. It was like trying to remember how to fly.
Somewhere out in the night, an owl hooted. Owl. The word popped into her head like “cat” had earlier in the day, but both words were the same, devoid of attachment to any meaning.
There was a soft click. The door to their room opened on silent hinges. Jey felt her heart begin to race. She forced her eyes closed, forced her face into a smooth mask, forced her body to go slack and still.
An orderly padded into the room. He moved on soft feet. First, he stepped into the alcove where Elle’s bed was tucked against the wall. A moment later, he emerged and went into Kae’s. At last, his soft feet approached Jey’s bed.
It was so difficult not to move – yet somehow Jey knew betraying the fact she was awake could be disastrous.
She heard the rustle of robes as the orderly approached her bedside. A moment later, a smooth, cool palm rested briefly against her forehead. It sat there for a moment, gentle on her skin.
Jey focused on the muscles in her face, on keeping them relaxed, preventing her eyelashes from fluttering. The hand was removed from her forehead. There was a clink and a puff of air. A fine mist drifted down over Jey’s face. She breathed in the familiar mist produced by a spritzer.
The orderly lingered a moment longer, then he moved on. She heard him set the spritzer bottle down, heard him pin their schedules to the boards above their desks. A moment later, the soft click of the closing door suggested he was gone.
It was the third time an orderly had checked on them in the night. Jey hadn’t known anyone came into their room when they slept. But then, up until yesterday she hadn’t known anything.
◈
“Back straighter, V567. E236, to flow through the turn you need more energy in that preparatory step. Orderly Cam, relax your arm. She’s a girl, not a tiger.”
Professor Tucram provided these instructions in an endless litany, directing them at various couples as he moved among them in the dance hall. A narrow, spindly man, he walked on light, delicate feet. He carried a short cane with him as he wove through the dancers, executing his own elaborate series of steps to stay out of everyone’s way.
He used the cane at intervals to touch a shoulder, lift a hand on a back, or otherwise correct something about the posture or movement of his students.
A light sheen of sweat had broken out on Jey’s forehead. It was a warm, bright morning, and her head was fuzzy from her sleepless night. It was extra hard, she was finding, to emulate the blank, passive behavior of her classmates when her mind felt dull with fatigue.
The dance they were practicing was an intricate variation of one that had been popular last season. Jey had stumbled several times as her orderly dance partner led her through the steps. She felt clumsy and thick-headed. Every time she deviated from the pattern, she felt conspicuous.
Phril was dozing. He sat with the other tessili. They occupied the holdstones that sat in a line on a slim table at the top of the hall. Phril didn’t care much for the dance classes. He disliked the orderly touching Jey for so long and resented that sometimes she got quite far away from him, as the hall was long. He was not allowed to follow because he needed to remain on the holdstone.
The dance class was nearly over. Jey felt as exhausted as if she’d spent the entire hour executing sprints. She knew the dance, somehow. Judging from what Professor Tucram said, she’d learned it last year, as had all the other girls. She moved through the steps easily enough, but she could not remember learning it, couldn’t say how she knew to move her feet or lean her body this way or that, responding to the light pressure of the orderly’s hand on her palm or waist.
Jey had spent much of the night trying to fit the pieces together, trying to understand how she could have cast a spell she didn’t know how to cast. Now, dancing a dance she had no memory of learning, she thought she understood.
The dance lesson had 13 students, all of them in white or silver. Elle and Kae were there, moving with fluid grace through the elaborate steps. Their tessili sat in line on the stones with Phril.
Increasingly, over the course of the hour, it was the holdstones that preoccupied Jey. They were unremarkable at a glance. Dull and gray, smooth all over, they varied in size and shape. But they were all the right size for a tessila to settle onto and relax. It seemed to Jey, based on the undercurrent of Phril’s thoughts, that they were also warm.
And, Jey was beginning to suspect, Phril’s presence on one of those stones enabled her to remember how to dance.
As she let herself be swept through the turns again and again, listening to the soft rustle of the skirts of her classmates and the repetitive drone of the single orderly playing his violin at the top of the hall, Jey felt as she was in color and everyone else in the room was a pale shade. Every time Professor Tucram’s glittering eyes swept over her she felt certain he would stop, do a double-take, and call a halt so he could accuse her of remembering.
But that did not happen. Jey danced until the violin stopped. The couples swayed to a halt. Orderlies bowed. Jey curtsied in time with the other girls. Silence fell on the hall.
Professor Tucram’s cane made a brisk tapping on the stone floor as he turned on his heel and headed for the door. “Class dismissed. Collect your tessili.”
Jey stood for a moment as the orderly who had been her partner turned from her and began to move with the others towards the door, checking his timepiece with an expression of mild worry. Although they’d spent nearly an hour in close proximity, he didn’t say anything to her as he left – no parting words, no comment on what they had or had not accomplished. The orderlies flowed out of the hall. The girls drifted towards the table where their tessili sat curled on the holdstones. Soon, the only orderlies left in the room were the two observers. They were packing up their notebooks and inkpots, speaking to one another in low tones.
Jey followed the tide of silver and white dresses, letting the other girls get ahead of her. The girls were quiet, not speaking as they filed up to the holdstones and encouraged their tessili to step back onto their hands. Most of the tessili seemed reluctant to come. Some needed to be stroked on their jaws or coaxed with wheedling words.
Jey approached Phril. He regarded her with his sharp, bright eye. She expected him to be one of those who resisted leaving his stone, but he was not. He stepped onto her hand the instant she presented it. He did this as the two orderlies who had observed the dance class walked by. She noticed one of them witness the ease with which she collected her tessila. He paused to look at her, brow furrowed. She pretended not to notice him. He moved forward again a moment later, taking a few quick steps to catch up with his companion.
Jey let out a short sigh of relief. Around her, the other girls had collected their tessili. They moved in a vague stream towards the doors that opened onto the quad.
Later, Jey would never quite understand what made her do it. It wasn’t something she decided. It was simply something she did. As she turned from the table, she noticed no one wa
s watching her. In an instant, she let her hand trail over the last holdstone on the line. With a smooth, slow movement, she curled her fingers around the small, warm rock. She tucked it into her palm and left the hall.
◈
Five minutes later, Jey almost ruined everything. She arrived at Professor Liam’s classroom a minute or two early for her next class, having tucked the holdstone into a broken brillbane husk on her way through the quad. It was the best she could manage. Her white dress had no pockets, no folds, no hidden compartments. It was plain and smooth, with skirts that fell softly past her legs. She wore a soft under shift as well as a pair of silk skivvies. The holdstone was too heavy to stay put in any of her clothing.
She had thought of tucking it into her slipper. But her footwear was soft and delicate as well. She was afraid it would shift and click when she walked.
Hiding it in a husk had seemed her only option. She’d paused, reaching into the pod to pry free a seed sack. As the sack fell into her hand, she tucked the holdstone back into the husk, behind the other pods. Then, she’d given the seed sack to Phril.
It wasn’t a perfect hiding place. Other girls might see the broken husk and stop to provide their tessili with a snack. But Jey hadn’t had time to come up with anything safer.
Now she walked into Professor Liam’s classroom, feeling a slight lessening of the tension that had been riding her shoulders all day. She wasn’t sure why, but she liked Professor Liam. And he, after all, had told her to cast the spell on Phril. Walking into Liam’s classroom the day before was the first thing she could remember – the beginning of the path that started out of thin air.
That couldn’t be a coincidence, Jey was sure. So she walked into the classroom again today with a hopeful sense she might learn more.
Later, it would eat at her, how close a thing it had been. She strode into the room with too much purpose, too much knowledge on her face. But it was that first, small mistake that saved her from a worse one.