He lay there, breathing hard, and heard the approaching feet as Aamir walked over to him. Aamir knelt, and Alex wiped the ice from his face to see the boy’s exhilarated expression. He was not smiling, but his eyes were bright, his chest heaving up and down.
“My win,” he said.
“Not yet,” Alex snapped, jumping up. “Again.” Aamir’s smugness was intolerable, and Alex wasn’t ready to give up.
“Are you certain?” Aamir laughed.
“Yep,” Alex said shortly, and immediately bowled straight into him, all his frustration, his rage, his helplessness pouring out of him, directed at his friend.
Aamir gave a yelp of surprise, and Alex saw a hand snap out, fingers forming the sign of lightning. Concentrating his void into one hand, Alex slammed it into Aamir’s palm, disrupting the nascent spell and sending a wave of icy crystals over both his and Aamir’s skin. Then, without thinking, Alex brought a hand around and punched Aamir in the chest, putting the other boy on his back with a gasp. Aamir’s eyes flashed with exhilaration as he brought his other hand around, and once again Alex pinned it down.
The two of them lay like that for a long moment, panting, their hands pressed together and covered in frost. Mud coated both of their clothes, and Alex was bleeding from the corner of his lip.
Aamir opened his mouth. Alex hesitated.
And then a cold, precise voice split the silence.
“What, exactly,” it said, “is this?”
All three of them turned. They had been too intent on the fight to notice that the trapdoor had opened, and someone had let himself in. Alex had to look twice to recognize the man who stood there, straight-backed and proud.
Professor Derhin looked at the two of them, sprawled on the ground, and shook his head in derision. His eyes were deep and laced with eerie anger, his hands folded primly behind his back as he took a measured step into the room.
“Brawling like commoners,” he said, shaking his head. “I had heard disturbing rumors, Nagi, but I hadn’t expected to find this.” He laughed. “Tell me, when you challenge a teacher, do you expect to punch them out? I might have expected this sort of behavior from a weak novice like Webber, but from you? I had higher hopes.”
“Challenge?” Aamir said, keeping his tone carefully neutral.
Derhin gave him a scathing look. “Do not insult me,” he said. “Do you think that any of us failed to notice what you were doing when you vanished from class? You thought any one of us would be so negligent as to just give up our position?”
Aamir’s back straightened, his hands balling into fists, but he said nothing.
“Your little friend Petra could only cover your tracks so much,” Derhin continued. “He’s smart. Smarter than you.”
Aamir was shaking now with fear. Alex moved to step in front of his friend, but Derhin held out a hand.
A coil of magic curled around Alex’s neck, and he halted in his tracks. The magic wasn’t hostile yet, so his body hadn’t responded naturally. If he had wanted, he was sure he could have ripped the little tendril away, but the resulting ice would certainly reveal him as a Spellbreaker. He drew in a shallow breath, feeling the force of the professor’s magic against his neck.
It was a sinister malevolence, coiling tighter and tighter around him, and all at once his suspicions were confirmed. There was only one group of people who had the skill, potency, and perverse motivation to curse both Aamir and Natalie. And there was only one who felt like that.
He stared at Derhin, breathing steadily to control himself, and held perfectly still as the professor walked up to Aamir, his usual awkward gait replaced with an unconcerned stride.
“So who were you going to challenge?” he asked. “Lintz? Esmerelda? Renmark?” A smooth smile rolled out over his lips, his tongue flicking out to wet them.
Aamir glared up at the professor, and Alex felt panic boil up inside him.
Don’t say it, he thought frantically. Don’t say it, don’t say—
“You,” Aamir said.
The smile on Derhin’s mouth widened into a feral grin.
“Me,” he said, almost seeming to savor the word. “Yes, I suppose you would. Stupid Professor Derhin. Untalented, unassuming, and clumsy to boot.”
For the first time, Aamir hesitated. Alex could have kicked the boy. Only Aamir could have been bullheaded enough to not notice the malevolence flowing off the man. To not have heeded Alex’s warning!
“One week,” Derhin said.
Aamir jumped, blinking.
“One week, sir?”
Alex heard the boy try to bite back the honorific, but it spilled out anyway. Derhin noticed as well, and he refolded his hands behind his back with a smirk.
“That will give you some time to continue your training, won’t it?” he said, glancing between Natalie and Alex. “Even if your choice of opponent is…lacking. We’ll go with what you trained for. One week, on the lawn. I’ll inform the Head.”
Alex’s irritation with Aamir’s overconfidence and condescension dissipated as the older boy was threatened with a much crueler, much more dangerous version of the same.
He turned, and walked to the base of the ladder. When he reached it, he looked up, and with a little hop, he shot up through the open hatch, leaving only a ruffled burst of dirt in his wake.
The slip of magic around Alex’s neck vanished, and he heaved in a deep breath, turning on Aamir.
“Are you insane?” Alex breathed.
Aamir’s face was blank.
“I am not sure any other teacher would have been better,” he said.
Alex scowled at him. “I told you not to pick Derhin. I said—”
“Look,” Aamir interjected, his voice cracking. “What is done is done.” He looked down at his feet, and Alex could see his chest moving, his breathing a little too rhythmic to be natural. With a sudden movement, Aamir turned toward Natalie, who had remained uncharacteristically quiet for the whole event. Now she looked up at Aamir from where she sat, her eyes distant.
“Chevalier.”
Natalie started at the formal address, rising to her feet.
“Yes?”
“Are you and Alex still planning to destroy Finder?”
She nodded uncertainly. “I am figuring out the magic, little by little,” she said. “I am not sure I understand it perfectly yet, but—”
“You have one week,” Aamir said with finality. When Natalie’s brow furrowed, he explained, “When Professor Derhin and I duel, the whole school will be in attendance. It is the perfect distraction for whatever mischief you want to get up to.”
Alex frowned. “Aamir, no, we’ll be—”
“Exorcising the bastard who dragged me into this,” Aamir said through gritted teeth.
A silence fell over the room. Alex stared at Aamir’s clenched fists, at where the boy’s eyes were glittering with frustrated tears.
“I think I can make the duel last long enough to get you a window,” he said. “Use it. Please.”
Alex’s eyes narrowed. “You’d better not be planning some sort of noble sacrifice.”
Aamir drew in a deep breath, then turned to Alex, a wavering smile plastered to his face.
“I just meant that I wouldn’t beat him too fast,” he said with forced nonchalance.
He looked over at Natalie. “I think we know who is cursing you now, at least.”
Her eyes widened, and he thought he saw her pale ever so slightly. “You don’t mean…But why?”
Aamir was staring at the ladder. “Because he does not want the students to be too powerful,” he said wonderingly. “He does not want them to thrive. If they do, they might grow strong. And if they grow stronger than him…”
“They could cast him out,” Alex finished, nodding. “So he gets rid of his enemies before they have a chance to know their foe.”
The group sat in silence, absorbing the information. The whole room felt cramped. It was as though there were something else in the cellar with them, sl
ithering around them, slowly wrapping its coils tighter until it crushed the life right out of them.
Chapter 36
It seemed impossible to even imagine how complacent they had been. Alex thought about the days spent sitting by the fire, reading the Historica Magica or researching some other, more insignificant topic. He thought of Natalie reading her leather-bound tome of necromancy, the curse paling her face by the light of their candles. He thought of his training with Aamir, never too fast, never too rough.
Everything had changed now. Jari had seized Aamir by the shoulders at the news of the duel and dragged him away. When Aamir had asked where they were going, Jari had responded: “Training your stupid self.”
The two hadn’t been in class since. It had been two days, and Alex had only seen them when they came back to the room, exhausted and covered in mud. Their living space had begun to smell like a sty, but none of them really noticed. Alex woke once during the night to see Jari lying with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. When he noticed Alex’s stare, he rolled away, his shoulders forming a small but solid wall.
If Jari blamed Alex for what had happened, Alex couldn’t fault him. Every time he thought of Aamir, his gut twisted. If he had been more careful, maybe they would have noticed Derhin before he saw them brawling and talked their way out of things. If he hadn’t agreed to train with Aamir, maybe it could have turned out differently. If he had just taken Jari’s side and told his friend to lay low and go to class, he wondered if he would still need to feel like this.
Unable to focus, Alex took to sitting with Natalie in the library as she pored over her book. He had taken her notes and perused them, occasionally asking a clarifying question or requesting help with her flowy handwriting. His thoughts were mostly on Aamir, though, and he wished more than anything that he could be of some help to him.
“Do you know what a ‘source’ is?” he asked, pushing a page toward Natalie.
She glanced up, pinning the page Alex was looking at under one finger and pulling it toward her. She frowned, shooting him a disbelieving glance.
“It is explained on the page you just read,” she said, pointing.
Alex looked, then sighed. It was indeed. He was finding it so hard to focus.
Source: a central item used as a focus for a spiritual summoning. Usually, but not always, the corpse of the deceased.
“Can’t believe I missed that,” he muttered.
“Neither can I,” Natalie replied, her eyebrows drawn in concern.
He sensed she was about to ask how he was feeling, so before she could, he said, “So it sounds like we might need Finder’s body. Where do you think it is?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured, looking a little panicked. “We should have had more time to look!” she burst out, and rubbed the bridge of her nose with both hands, calming herself.
“Well, his body wasn’t at the altar,” Alex said. “The Head might have it in his wing.”
Natalie nodded, then stopped.
“No, I do not think so. Necromantic sources give off distorting waves of magic.” She raised her arms, wiggling her fingers in the air, presumably to illustrate distorting waves. “Little things, like that mouse I made, would not be too bad. But something big, like Finder’s source, would really mess up anything around it. I do not think the Head would keep it anywhere it could interfere with someone’s magic. If he had it in his office, someone would notice.”
Alex stroked his chin. “That leaves us with…”
“Everywhere else, yes,” said Natalie with a hopeless sigh.
“But the only place that’s far enough away from everyone and has a protective golden line,” said Alex, realization hitting him, “is the crypt.”
“But we didn’t see a body there. Unless…”
Alex remembered the three-eyed skull. “Unless it’s actually beneath the statue…It must be the skull.”
They stared at each other.
“But of course it is the skull,” Natalie breathed. “What else could it be?”
As Alex considered her question, his optimism ebbed. It could be any number of things, actually. It could be buried anywhere else, even somewhere far from the manor, protected by something they weren’t familiar with…He rubbed his face. With Aamir’s predicament playing incessantly at the back of his mind, he was finding it so difficult to think in a straight line. His brain felt foggy, crowded.
He rose to his feet. “I need some fresh air,” he told Natalie. “Just give me a few minutes.”
“Okay,” she murmured. She gave him a worried frown, then sunk her head back down to her book.
Alex gathered his things and left the library. He drew several stares as he walked through the manor, but nobody thought to stop him. It was common knowledge by now that his friend had been called to a duel by Professor Derhin, and whispers gathered in his wake.
“…They were caught fighting…”
“…Probably encouraged him…”
“…Idiot rookie…”
He tried to ignore them, hurrying down the hallways and toward the garden. Fresh air. He just needed some fresh air.
The sky beyond the windows today seemed bent on expressing Alex’s mood, with curls of lightning rolling through black clouds that hung low over jagged peaks coated with ice and frost. Sleet clattered against the windows, the noise loud enough to block out the sound of Alex’s footsteps as he walked. When he eventually reached the door that led out to the front lawn, he opened it into a flood of icy pellets.
Alex almost laughed. After all his training, the natural cold seemed to roll right off him. Compared to the icy waves of breaking magic, the sleet was nothing. He stepped out into it, his jacket flaring behind him.
In the end, it had been Aamir who had been training him. Alex had been so focused on improving himself and beating the other boy that he hadn’t even registered how little Aamir had probably benefited from their mock duels. The only time Aamir had seemed even remotely pressed had been their last encounter, and that had ended in abject disaster. Jari’s face when he had learned of the duel, that twist of surprise and scorn, lingered in Alex’s mind as he walked through the storm, his hair filling with little white shards of ice.
What had he thought he could teach Aamir, anyway? How to fight a Spellbreaker? Alex laughed aloud at the thought. He was part of a dead line; as far as he knew, he was the only Spellbreaker to have emerged in decades, maybe even centuries. He was no help.
Quickening his pace, Alex found himself at the front gates of the manor, staring up at the great iron bars. With his increased training, he could now feel the throb of the magic that locked the great portal; it stifled the air, its presence cold against his skin.
Alex swept out his hand, willing his energy to flow with all his might, and the hazy outline of a blade appeared at his fingertips. With a curse, he swiped it at the gate.
His attack caught on the ivy coating the metal and simply exploded. Ripples of magic burst out, howling through the air past him, leaving icy white slashes across his face. He growled, reforming the blade and taking another swing, then another. Each time, the weapon broke harmlessly.
He should have done more, done better. He should have had this anti-magic figured out by now. He should have had a grip on what was going on in this prison of a school. If he had tried harder, he could have even saved Natalie before she’d reached the end of Spellshadow Lane, could have prevented all this mess. If he had been smarter, quicker…
Alex smashed yet another sword against the ivy, and watched as the blade tore asunder, shards of ice spearing into the snow all around his feet. He swore again.
Natalie had been so vibrant before coming here, so alive, so exuberant. And now? Now she was hopeless, dejected, all but friendless, and cursed—always feeling ill, always coughing and trembling. And here he was, the only one with the power to break that curse, but he wasn’t even capable of that.
He let out a long, steaming breath through his teeth as he strained
to draw another blade, smacking it weakly against the gate. It collapsed into chilled flecks in his hands. The hail had slowed, growing fatter and softer until it became snow, drifting down to land softly on his hands and legs.
What did he think he was going to accomplish out here? Was letting Natalie lead the fight against Finder the best way forward? Of course not. He needed to head back. He should be the one battling these impossible forces, battling Finder, escaping the Head…
He had briefly searched for the Head in the records of the Historica Magica, but it had not surprised him that, even in the meticulously detailed annals of the old book, the man had not appeared. He was like a wraith, the patron deity of the school. Alex supposed he could be any number of the several wizards who had lacked a date of death, but narrowing it down was impossible. Also, those men had all lived hundreds of years ago. If the Head was truly one of them, then the man was not only powerful, but ancient. Alex wondered what hope they had of defeating such a man. They could wound him, of course. They could take his resources and harass him, but Alex found it hard to believe they had enough time. In five days, Aamir would likely be killed by Derhin…
Lost in dismal thoughts, Alex barely noticed when someone crept up behind him and touched his arm lightly. He spun, wide-eyed, and saw Natalie.
“I needed some fresh air too,” she said quietly, sniffing and lowering her eyes to the ground.
Although Alex had initially wanted to be alone, he felt glad for her company now. Her arrival helped draw him back to the present, which, however stressful, was better than being lost in his head, blaming himself for things he couldn’t change.
She drew closer for a hug, and they both stood still beneath the snow, their gazes drifting to the ivy-ridden gates. It was hard to fathom that just a few feet away lay escape, freedom—something Alex had taken for granted his whole life and now, something he would risk losing his life to obtain.
Feeling the press of time acutely, Alex cleared his throat. “We should go,” he said hoarsely, detaching himself from her and turning back toward the manor.