Ruthless Magic

  There’d been no good solution. Which seemed to be just how the examiners liked to play this game.

  “Even if she can’t find a way to counter it, she said the storm should fade before too long,” I said.

  “Thank the Fates for that,” Finn said. “Should we hold out here or tackle that door?”

  “The examiners have some kind of protective spell on it—I’m not sure it’d be smart to mess with that. At least here we’re safe for now. I can cast a conjuring to signal us as soon as the wind has died down. When the storm is over, I’ll teleport us back up and we’ll go find the others.”

  I stitched the casting together—a line from a childhood song here, another from an elementary school poem I’d liked there—and tossed the magic up through the ceiling. It quivered into place on the ground several feet above us. The raging of the wind sent a vibration along my spine.

  When I looked at Finn, he quickly dropped his hand from his temple, straightened up, and winced.

  Crap. “Are you hurt?” I said. I should have asked that earlier.

  “No, no.” He waved me off, schooling his expression to be calm again and smiling. “Just a headache, from the wind and— Nothing critical. It’ll pass.”

  If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed the slight tightness in his smile. I remembered Prisha touching his head, checking in on him. Whatever had caused the headache, it hadn’t started with the wind. How long had he been in pain and hiding it from the rest of us?

  How bad must it be now that he couldn’t hide it anymore?

  I might not have a special affinity for healing, but I had plenty of practice in this particular area. “My dad gets migraines,” I said. “I have a simple ’chantment that helps relieve them. If you’re okay with me casting on you.”

  From the way he drew in his breath, I thought he was going to say no, but he paused, and his smile turned wry. “I’ve already let you drag me into a secret underground lair. What’s a little pain relief after that?”

  I knelt beside him, and he closed his eyes, his lashes stark against the sharp pale angles of his cheeks. Between his storm-tousled hair and the smudges of blood on his rumpled clothes, he didn’t look much like an old-magic Academy boy anymore.

  I touched his forehead gingerly and thought of Dad, of the many evenings he’d come home reeling from all those hours in the noise and heat of the call center. “Arrorró mi sol,” I murmured, focusing the hum of magic into a gentle cooling balm to smooth the muscles, settle the nerves, and ease the blood vessels’ flow.

  Finn’s breath shuddered. He must have been in even more pain than I’d guessed. My gaze dropped to his mouth, to the angry cut left by my binding ’chantment, the blood dried and starting to scab now. Instinctively, the words to seal the flesh rose up. I spun them out, willing the skin to stitch itself back together.

  A mark still remained when I was finished, but there was no chance of the cut bleeding again. Finn pressed his lips together. Then he met my eyes.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

  My pulse jittered with the awareness of how close we were to each other again. “It was my fault.” I shifted back to give him more space and to slow the thump of my heart. “You don’t have to pretend you’re feeling okay when you’re not, you know. The Exam is taking a lot out of all of us.”

  “I know. That was sort of why— I figured you have enough to worry about already without me adding to the mix.”

  Oh. He’d been trying to protect me.

  I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. Restlessness gripped me. I found myself getting to my feet. For some reason, it seemed important that I recheck the door.

  “Rocío?” Finn said.

  I jiggled the handle again, but it still wouldn’t give. I frowned. My alert conjuring hadn’t gone off yet. The storm was still active above. This was our only way out.

  “We’re not safe here,” I said. The words spilled out of me. “We have to go. There’s got to be a way out.”

  “You’re right,” Finn said, his own voice abruptly frantic too. He scrambled up, hurried to the opposite wall, and began rapping on it. “There’s something—” He froze, his body going rigid. “Desmond’s ’chantment.”

  Urgency gripped me. “We have to find it. If we don’t…” There was something out there, on the other side of this door maybe. Something we needed.

  “No.” Finn was shaking his head. “It’s just going to make us— We’ve got to fight it. How did he say to break it?”

  “I have to break the ’chantment on the door!” I said with a rush of resolve.

  Finn’s eyes widened. In the second it took me to turn toward it, he dashed across the tunnel, belting out in a thin tenor. “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.” He grabbed my elbow, still singing. There was no casting in the words; they didn’t catch on the magic around us.

  I stared at him. “What are you doing?” I demanded, but he kept going, through that verse and into the next, his fingers tight on my arm. The blare of panic in my head dulled.

  Desmond’s ’chantment. My thoughts tripped back to the conversation outside the dorm room, what felt like weeks ago. Desmond’s defensive ’chantment had to do with distracting—convincing people of some urgent need elsewhere. It’s sound based, he’d said. Drown it out...

  Finn paused for air, and I broke in. “It’s okay. I’m okay now. It worked.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It was the first song that popped into my head. We should keep talking, though. The ’chantment can only get to us in the gaps.”

  “If we could break it…” I frowned. “I guess Desmond’s ’chanted object is probably up there in the storm somewhere.”

  “He’ll deal with it, or it’ll fade. We just have to give them time.”

  “Yes.” I nodded and found I didn’t know what else to say now that I had to. No wonder he’d resorted to kiddie songs. Maybe I could ’chant a general babble of voices?

  “Your parents’ names,” Finn said. “What are they?”

  Small talk—that worked. “Ana and Miguel.”

  “Mine are Jonathan and Laura. Any siblings? Name, age?”

  “Older brother. Javier. He—ah—three years older. You?”

  “One sister, one brother, both older. Margo’s twenty-four and Hugh is twenty-si— No, wait, he had his birthday last month. He’s twenty-seven now. Birthdays! When’s yours?”

  “April twentieth.”

  “October seventh. Where’d you get that necklace?”

  My hand automatically darted to the sunburst charm. “My mom gave it to me… before I left for the Exam.”

  The flicker of Finn’s eyes told me he’d realized that wasn’t the best avenue to pursue. He tapped the front of his leg. “Easy questions, easy questions, ah—”

  “Maybe we should do longer questions,” I said. “I mean, ones that take longer to answer. So we don’t keep having to come up with new ones.” I hesitated. I had one that’d been nibbling at me since the first moment I’d seen Finn in the courtyard. “How did you and Prisha become friends?”

  “What, we don’t seem a likely pairing?” Finn replied, but his voice softened. “Okay, the long version but not so long I have to stop talking to think about it: We’ve been classmates since second year at the Academy. That’s when her family moved into the neighborhood. It took her parents that long to figure out that she’d be better off there than in the local tutorial where they were living before.” He must have caught my puzzled look, because he added, “They’re Dulls. She’s the only one with magic so far.”

  I couldn’t help interrupting. “She’s new magic?” Prisha certainly put on the old-magic airs well.

  “There’s always a few at the Academy,” Finn said. “I hadn’t really thought about why there weren’t more. I mean, I assumed it was for practical reasons, but I didn’t realize… the tuition—Anyway.” He coughed. “We always got along pretty well. We were good at
bouncing off each other’s jokes, and I liked that she spoke her mind, but we weren’t exactly close until— This is a little embarrassing.”

  “Go on,” I said, both to fill the space and because, despite myself, I was twice as interested after that admission.

  “We were performing demonstrations in class…” Finn’s gaze drifted away from me. “Fifth year. Basic conjured illusions—the beginner version of your dragon. Right as it was my turn to go, one of the Circle mages came into the class. They drop in at the various academies from time to time. He looked at me, and I realized he knew who I was and that if I cast well enough, he might mention it to my granduncle, and then I utterly screwed it up. Couldn’t even hold the image long enough for anyone to see what I was trying to cast. I’d done it at least half a dozen times before. I just...”

  “It’s harder to cast when there’s pressure,” I offered. “It messes with your concentration. That’s normal.”

  “Yeah. I made a joke about it and acted like it was nothing, but it ate at me the whole rest of the morning, because I knew he’d tell my granduncle all about what had happened, so at lunch hour I snuck off so I could drop the act for a bit. Prisha came looking for me. She told me she hated having to do any type of casting in front of the class, that she was always afraid she was going to screw up, that she felt totally wretched when she did, so did I want some company? And it turned out I did.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “Since then, we’ve always filled in for each other’s weak spots. There were a lot of unspoken old-magic rules she kept tripping over that I could help her with. And I’d test out castings with her, and we’d cover for each other, that sort of thing.”

  The only close companion I’d ever had besides Javi was a Dull girl from a Dominican family that had moved into the building next door when I was seven. We’d only run around together for a few months before neighborhood talk about just what kind of family mine was got to her parents, and after that they’d sent me away when I came by. But telling Finn that felt like a far more pathetic admission than anything he’d just admitted to.

  I fumbled for another thread to keep the conversation going. “What do you mean about ‘Circle’ mages? What are they?”

  Finn laughed for the half a second it must have taken him to realize I honestly didn’t know. Then his mouth pressed shut. “They’re the top tier of the Confed,” he said. “The mages who keep all the other departments and divisions running? They’re sort of half appointed and half voted on, and then they stay until they decide to bow out or… well, they die. Maybe you don’t end up hearing so much about them when your granduncle’s not one of them.”

  His explanation had tickled my memory. “No, I do remember hearing about them. We just... When you’re outside the Confed, you tend to see it all as one big mass, I guess. Who exactly is in charge doesn’t seem to matter that much. Are they the ones who run the Exam?”

  Had his granduncle sent him in here, knowing it’d be like this? Now that was a cabrón I wouldn’t want to meet.

  “I think they appoint the Exam committee, and then the committee handles everything from there,” Finn said. “Now that I’ve seen what goes on here, I’m pretty sure the Circle doesn’t know how far the examiners go. Maybe they don’t want to know. Plausible deniability and all that.” He laughed again, roughly this time. “My granduncle being one of the Circle was enough to guarantee I’d be Chosen, but I still don’t think even my dad had the slightest idea it—” He seemed to catch himself, clamping his lips together.

  My mouth dropped open. “What did you just say?”

  He stayed silent, and then cocked his head. “I’m not feeling the ‘chantment working on me. It must have wound down, or else the others came through fast.”

  “Finn,” I said.

  He averted his eyes. “I was Chosen.”

  “But…” I couldn’t wrap my head around that revelation.

  “I was Chosen,” Finn said, “because the system is rigged and if your family has enough influence, the Circle just lets you in. But it’s rigged the other way, too. Prisha wasn’t Chosen, and she should have been, and...” He sat down against the wall and rested his hands on his knees. “I couldn’t just accept a spot at the college, knowing that. My choice should have been between being Dampered and declaring. So I declared.”

  I stood there where he’d left me. He’d been Chosen. He could have walked right into the Confederation college next week without anyone standing in his way, but he was here instead.

  I doubted his little stand would make much difference to the Confed. If they’d cared, he wouldn’t be here right now. But there was clearly more going on behind that smile than I’d ever assumed.

  I sank down next to him. For all he’d told me in the last short while, I’d managed to avoid sharing anything substantial about myself. Maybe that was why I let myself say, “Is that why you were always taking books from the library? You were studying… so you’d deserve being Chosen?”

  “Something like that. It didn’t quite work out. I mean, I am a better mage than I’d have been without the studying, but there’s only so far—” He glanced at me. “How would you know about anything I did in the library?”

  “The last three years, I was studying there a lot,” I said. “I wanted to learn everything I could, and the library’s open to all novices even if the rest of the Academy isn’t. It’s got all kinds of books I couldn’t have found anywhere else.”

  Finn’s eyebrows had risen. “I don’t remember seeing you there. I’m usually sharper than that.”

  “I didn’t want people to notice me,” I admitted. “The first couple times, I wasn’t so cautious, and the other students... weren’t exactly friendly. I kept a low profile after that. And you weren’t normally there for very long.”

  Okay, that was enough. I shut up before I started sounding like a stalker.

  Finn nodded. “I did my studying at home. Fewer questions that way. You must be overjoyed, spending all this time with us Academy kids here.”

  I thought of Prisha grabbing me to join her for dinner last night, and the help Finn had offered me this morning, and Judith pushing through her fears. They were Academy kids, but here in the Exam, the field felt a little more level.

  “It’s strange,” I said slowly, “but I actually kind of like that part of the Exam. Not specifically Academy kids, just... being surrounded by people who hearken magic and understand how much it matters. My tutorial class was pretty small. I didn’t really click with anyone else there, especially after—” No, I wasn’t ready to talk about Javi with him.

  “The Dull kids either avoided us or harassed us,” I went on. “There are some tight-knit groups in my neighborhood, people from the same background sticking together, but the way they feel about magic always overrides anything else we might have in common. Even my extended family—none of them are mages—they’d never shut us out, but they can be kind of weird about it. It’s been… I don’t know, a little lonely.”

  For a moment, we sat without speaking. Then Finn reached across the space between us and wrapped his hand around mine. He still didn’t say anything, just held on with a gentle pressure.

  A weight I hadn’t even noticed building in my chest eased. I thought of last night and his apology, so simple and left to stand alone. Maybe Finn’s real talent wasn’t what he said but knowing when to say nothing at all.

  It might have been the uncertain situation we’d been thrown into together, but right then, in the chilly tunnel with the solid warmth of his hand over mine, I felt closer to him than I had anyone since Javi.

  Then I shivered. It wasn’t just the tunnel that was chilly; my clothes were damp against my skin.

  Finn was warm. It would be so easy to shift a little nearer. To learn what it would feel like to have him hold me not out of necessity but because it felt good to be together.

  The thought had barely crossed my mind when my body balked. Finn was good-looking and charming and not only old magic
but part of one of the most prominent families in the Confed. He probably had girls falling all over him—girls with connections, girls who knew the unspoken rules, girls who wouldn’t sound ignorant when they talked about magic.

  I’d been drawn to him when I’d seen him in the library for a reason, but that was his world: the Academy, the Confed, in among the people who’d looked down their noses at me, who’d seen my abilities as a threat. A world in which he hadn’t noticed me and might never have.

  I was safe as long as I just sat here and enjoyed the feel of his palm against mine without expecting it to mean anything more.

  “I bet the rest of the group isn’t having this much fun,” Finn said breezily, but I heard the underlying thread of worry. He said what he meant, even when he said it like he didn’t mean it.

  “They’re probably sitting in one of those leaning buildings, watching the rain,” I said. “And wondering where we are.”

  “Is there any way we could send them a message?”

  “Through that storm, without knowing where they are, I don’t think so.” I had no sense of where those buildings stood relative to here, and the magic propelling those winds would scatter any attempt to send out a seeking spell.

  “Right.” He let go of my hand to stretch his arms out of front of him. “So do you figure the examiners are cutting us a break down here, or are they lulling us into a false sense of complacency?”

  That did seem to be their pattern: giving us a moment to relax and then hitting us when our guards were down. “I don’t know. The only things they’ve thrown at us today have been our own ’chantments, and we’ve gotten through all of those except Mark’s, unless that followed him the way he expected it to. But I have trouble seeing that as a guarantee of anything.”

  “Maybe they’re trying to kill us with cold,” he said, pulling his knees in closer.

  His clothes would be damp too. “I can cast a shell around us for warmth and protection,” I said. “And then... we could try to get some rest, while we have the chance. Who knows the next time they’ll give us one.”