“What do you mean?” replied Alex with as much serenity as he could muster, despite the frustration running through his veins.
“I forgot,” Jari admitted quietly.
“Well, what else have you got going on?” Alex asked, exasperation slipping through his mask of calm.
“I’ve got a few things I need to look over while I have the chance. The library is usually pretty empty at lunchtime, so I’m afraid I have a lunch date with some dusty old pages.” Jari flashed a hopeful grin, but Alex was in no mood for humor anymore. He had been looking forward to spending some time with his friends, if only to find out more about how they were and to see if he could be of any use to them.
With them keeping very much to themselves and their personal projects, Alex couldn’t help but feel out of the loop with them both. Jari had his scheming, but never seemed inclined to ask Alex to join him. Natalie had her extra work, but never wanted to talk to Alex about it, shunning the issue if he brought it up. He saw them mostly in lessons, and, though they didn’t say anything to confirm it, Alex felt like they had begun to view him as a hindrance, needing them to cover for him. Slowly but surely, Alex felt himself being pushed away, constantly held at arm’s length.
“Can’t you just leave it for one lunchtime?” asked Alex tersely, trying to keep the hurt from his eyes, not wanting to let on how wounded he felt by their apparent ambivalence toward him.
Jari shrugged. “It’s too important, man. Sorry.” He at least had the decency to look ashamed as Alex scraped back the legs of his chair and stood sharply.
“If you need me, you know where I am,” said Alex, discarding his apple. He turned and walked from the mess hall. The temptation to look back at the small circular table was compelling, but he managed to resist as he strode out into the hallway without so much as a glance over his shoulder.
It was a lonely walk toward the entrance of the manor. The corridors were empty of students, all of them still eating in the mess hall or catching a moment to themselves in the library or study hall. Alex did not pass another living creature as he walked along the familiar route, his footfalls echoing between the cold, damp stone of the walls.
Each day, the duty rested on a member of staff to remove and replace the golden line around the steps into the manor, to give students the opportunity to go out into the gardens. Hardly anyone took the offer up, but Alex liked that. The gardens were still a place of peaceful retreat from the restraints of the manor, and though they weren’t exactly classically beautiful in their gray desolation, Alex loved to roam the ruins of what must once have been an exquisite feat of horticulture.
With a wry smile, Alex recalled the stern, displeased expression on Aamir’s face as he had shown Alex the gardens for the first time, before accusing Alex of not taking magic seriously. Alex couldn’t help wondering if Aamir had been right; perhaps he still wasn’t taking it seriously enough. Elias’s sour words of reprimand crept in, leaving Alex with a sudden surge of motivation as he walked across the scorched earth, the skeletal trees bowing against the strong breeze whipping up around the gardens. He refused to be left behind.
Overhead, the sky was an even, dull gray, the monochromatic shades blending into one another without much definition. It felt as if it might rain.
Uncovering the hatch in the ground, Alex dropped down into the familiar subterranean vault. It was chilly at first, but the room warmed up quickly once Alex lit the torches that stood in the brackets on the earthen walls. The flames flickered and danced, casting lively shadows across the hard-packed floor.
Without Jari or Natalie to help, Alex knew he’d need something to practice on. As he wandered over to the crumbling wine racks at the back of the cellar, he could still make out the indentations in the floor where they had sparred last time, and felt the returning pang of disappointment that his friends were not there with him. Pushing it stubbornly away, he brushed a finger over the remaining bottles that lay within the disintegrating honeycomb of shelves until he found one he liked the look of.
Carefully, he pulled the dusty wine bottle from the rack, sending up a puff of dirt as he did so. A small brown tag was tied to the neck of the bottle. Curious, he turned the card over and read the name. Fields of Sorrow, 1908.
Alex felt a sudden pulse of fury as he turned the bottle over and read the label, which bore the same foul name as the tag. He had seen it before—he knew he had seen it before. It was all coming back to him. He had seen the name when Aamir had brought him down here and left him alone that first time, when Elias had appeared to him. The name had meant nothing then, but now it meant everything.
The sudden realization made Alex feel sick with disgust. The Mages had celebrated the genocide of his people, had even named a vintage after it. Blood-red wine to toast the blood-soaked battlefields that had wiped out his kind. He wanted to smash the bottle then and there, but, breathing deeply, he moved it into the center of the room.
Pulling the slim notebook from his pocket, he formed the familiar square screen between his palms and read over a number of the techniques, wanting to put them into practical use on the vile bottle and its abhorrent name. Shaking off his anger, he stood at one end of the cellar, close to the old indentations on the ground, and let the anti-magic flow through him. The tendrils of black and silver rippled smoothly around his fingertips, awaiting instruction. Pinching the vaporous substance between his fingers, he forged shards of glinting ice that shone with dark menace in the torchlight. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he sent the shards hurtling toward the bottle on the floor, creating a whoosh of air as they shot across the room.
With some disappointment, Alex saw they had missed the bottle, but pride washed over him as he noted the shards sticking out of the ground nearby, holding their form for a moment or two before they began to melt. The savage tips had been sharp enough to cut into the hard ground, where before they would have shattered and snapped before they had even reached it. He was definitely making progress.
His confidence boosted, he kept his eyes on the bottle as he forged a dense shield around it, using the inverse technique he had figured out from Gaze’s class. Once he was certain it was strong enough, the anti-magic pulsing and crackling with vivid silver sparks, he held the shield steady with one hand as he conjured the body of an ice spear with the other. Brow furrowed, he focused on how he wanted the weapon to look, the anti-magic flowing and shaping with each turn of his fingers and each instruction from deep within his mind. The triangular point sharpened as he turned his fingers anti-clockwise. The tip of the long, shimmering rod glowed with an almost pearlescent quality as Alex held it in the air above him.
Still holding the shield steady around the bottle, Alex launched the icy spear with full force at the thrumming barrier, watching as it rebounded, the spear shattering into a million glittering pieces that fell to the ground in a shower of diamonds. The shield had held, protecting the object within. Alex grinned, feeling a trickle of sweat running down the side of his face from the exertion of performing two complex anti-magical tasks at once. He had focused his energies, and he had done it—he had performed two things at once, protecting and attacking at the same time.
It felt good, and he knew he had the notebook to thank for it. The ghosts of his heritage had steadied his hand and focused his mind. It occurred to Alex that Leander might’ve used those very skills on the battlefield, perhaps even in the final moments before the ambush that sealed his fate.
As Alex imagined the carnage, he felt a pull of somber empathy, and the shield around the bottle grew suddenly stronger, pulsing with a vibrant silver energy that rippled across the room in shimmering waves, like heat rising up from desert sands. The almost-liquid current undulated from the glittering barrier. His emotions, he realized, were tied to the fabric of his anti-magic, making it stronger and more potent, depending on how he channeled it and how keenly he felt that emotion.
Alex dropped the shield from around the bottle and set about attempting to make a barrage. He had done i
t by accident when trying to forge a shield for the first time, but wanted to see if it could be done more powerfully to create a useful tool in a fight.
The anti-magic swirled in the air as he lifted his hands and forged a ball of silver and black, the glinting sparks making the energy resemble a faraway galaxy. Alex slowly let the anti-magic slip back inside his body, one wisp at a time, feeling the peculiar sensation of it running through his veins, piggybacking on his blood, as he held it inside for a moment. Moving his hands sharply outward, he focused on the power of the barrage, his muscles tense, and released the fury of his anti-magic out into the cellar.
A rush of cold air whipped up about him as the wall of snow and ice surged forward in a dense mass, more of a blockade than a simple barrage, and exploded with a bone-shaking bang against the far wall, the small room filling quickly with a blizzard of detonated flakes. Alex whooped with excitement, punching his fist into the air as he felt some of the snowfall land on his cheek, the cooling sensation welcome as it melted against the heat of his sweaty skin.
Sitting down to take a breather, Alex flipped through the pages of the notebook, considering what else he might like to try while he had the time. He paused on the note about death magic. He knew the basis of his ‘essence’, but wondered how it could be physically used, when it was tied so intrinsically to the inner soul of a person. For a brief second, he thought about reaching inside himself and trying to find the corners of this ‘essence,’ but couldn’t bring himself to do it, feeling a tremor of fear shiver up his spine as he recalled the sacrifice Leander had mentioned, in using this mysterious death magic. It was a valid fear—one Leander had shared.
Alex stood back up and held out his palms, contorting his fingers to conjure the body of a sword. He started with the blade, shaping it to his requirements. It emerged from the twisting energy of black vapor and silvery shards, the edges thinning to razor-sharp points that seemed to tremble with power. A radiance shone through the length of the blade, glinting almost like real steel as it stretched out from the bare bones of a hilt.
The notebook had mentioned a focus technique in which the Spellbreaker pinpointed the very center of the object and forced the mind to feel the weight of the weapon it wanted to manifest. Alex concentrated on the sword until he imagined he could see the icy radiance firming up, becoming more tangible. Grasping the weapon, he could feel the weight of an actual hilt in his hand, cold like metal on his skin. The freshly forged blade gleamed as Alex swiped it through the air. Experiencing the sheer weight of the weapon, he held it in both hands as he cut through the atmosphere, feeling the icy rush and powerful vibrations that pulsed down his forearms with each slice.
He practiced for a while, getting comfortable with the weight as he whirled the sword around. Alex was surprised to see that the weapon maintained its shape far longer than any previous attempt had achieved. He liked the feel of it, imagining himself a warrior of old, taking down a Mage on the back of a savage beast.
Eventually, the sword disintegrated, but the bottle still lay unbroken on the floor. With his mouth set in a grim line, Alex held out both hands and turned them upward, moving them in a perfect mirror-image of one another as he created a crackling, violent, snapping ball of black energy, flecked with glimmers of silver. Raising the ball into the air, he snatched his fingers into fists, and the projectile hurtled toward the bottle on the floor. Alex watched in delight as it smashed with an audible crack of glass, the contents erupting in a wave of sour, blood-red liquid that seeped into the ground.
A small vengeance against the Fields of Sorrow, 1908.
Chapter 20
Alex yawned as he made his way back to the dormitory, tired after a brief spell in the library looking up the many uses of clockwork. Unable to focus, he had called it a day and decided to go for an early night instead. His muscles ached a little from his lunchtime sparring, but it was a good pain—it was the ache of progress.
As he opened the wooden door to the dormitory, he was surprised to see Jari sitting on the bed. Jari hadn’t spent any evenings in the dormitory since the curfew had been placed upon the manor, spending what few hours they were permitted elsewhere. Alex was often asleep by the time Jari crept in with a few minutes to spare before the curfew came into action, and he was usually gone again by the time Alex awoke in the morning. After being let down at lunchtime, Alex couldn’t help but feel a lingering annoyance toward his friend, and he struggled to muster a smile as he walked over to his own bed. Jari jumped up and wandered over, his brow furrowed.
“What’s the matter?” asked Alex, seeing the nervous twist of Jari’s hands.
“I need your help,” he whispered, glancing over at the door.
“With what?” Alex tried to stop the irritation from creeping into his voice. Of course Jari would only want to talk these days when he needed something.
“I need to break into the Head’s quarters,” explained Jari, his voice shaking slightly as he met Alex’s eyes with earnest. “The time has come. I have to be certain the Head is gone.” He mumbled something incoherent beneath his breath as Alex sank down onto the mattress.
“Does it make a difference?” said Alex wearily, trying to ignore the tense atmosphere of Jari’s desperation.
“It makes every difference, Alex. There is information we can gather to use against him. This might be our only chance, if he has truly gone.” Jari perched on the edge of the bedframe as he cast anxious glances in Alex’s direction.
Jari made a good point. The Head’s office was a source of untapped knowledge, Alex knew, as he recalled the bookshelf behind the Head’s desk, the one ringed in a glowing red protective barrier. Alex was stronger than he had been the last time he had broken the defenses. Perhaps he could break in more easily a second time, to pilfer whatever he wanted while they had the chance.
Alex remembered Elias’s teasing tales about rare books. If those books were going to be anywhere, they would be on that bookshelf in the Head’s office. Of that, Alex was almost entirely certain.
He heard the disappointed frustration of Elias’s voice once more, replaying in his mind, telling him to go and find the Head if he wanted answers. Even if the Head truly had gone, who knew what answers Alex could find left behind? The risk would definitely be worth the reward if he uncovered something about the Head or the history of the manor. Alex hoped he would uncover something within those secret tomes that would help him in his ongoing plot of escape or that might shed more light on who he was. If there were any Spellbreaker books in the manor at all, they would be in the Head’s office. The stolen books on the Havens might also be hidden there, locked away from prying eyes.
It was too tempting an offer to turn down, though Alex knew the stakes were high.
“Fine,” he muttered.
“You’ll really help?” asked Jari.
Alex nodded. “I could do with checking out his book selection,” he said with a half-hearted smile as Jari’s face visibly relaxed with relief.
“There’s something I might need too,” explained Jari, his tone secretive, though he didn’t elaborate as Alex waited patiently for him to say more.
“Like what?” Alex pressed, when Jari said nothing else on the subject.
Jari shook his head. “I’ll tell you if I manage to find it,” he said, the response frustrating Alex.
Trying not to let it get the better of him, Alex lay back on the pillows and took out the book on the Great Battles that he had stuffed down the back of his mattress. Absently, he began to read, going over the familiar names and skirmishes before he became aware of Jari’s eyes staring intently in his direction.
“What?” asked Alex, looking up from the page.
“Well, are we going or not?” said Jari sternly, a small black bag slung across his shoulder as he nodded toward the door.
“We’re going now?” replied Alex, shocked. He knew Jari had been planning something for a while, but he hadn’t expected to have such little notice where his part was c
oncerned.
“Yeah,” said Jari simply.
Alex got up, putting the book back behind the mattress as he glanced down at himself. He wasn’t sure what else he could wear to make himself less conspicuous; most of his clothing was already black. His eyes lingered over the black scarf hanging from the back of the wardrobe door, but he remembered Natalie’s response the last time and thought better of it. Looking over, he saw that Jari had on much the same as him and figured he’d be okay.
“Are we getting Natalie?” Alex asked, as they stepped out into the hallway of the boys’ dormitories. It was dark, and he could hear the low chatter of other voices coming from behind the doors that lined the corridor.
Jari nodded. “I didn’t have chance to tell her it was tonight, but she should be good to go.”
Although it wasn’t yet nine o’clock and the curfew hadn’t come into action, the hallways were pretty much deserted as they took the familiar route toward the girls’ dormitories. As an extra precaution, they kept to the shadows, anxious not to set off any alarms or get in anybody’s way as they stealthily went to find Natalie. They were just turning a corner when they almost ran headfirst into the very person they wanted to see.
Alex stepped out of Natalie’s way just in time, but it didn’t stop her from shouldering into Jari as they collided. She looked up with an air of surprise, and Alex was alarmed to see the state she was in. Her face was deathly pale in the weak light cast from the torches. Beneath her eyes were deep, dark circles of fatigue, made all the more worrying by the drawn, sunken look of her features. Her shoulders were sagging, and she looked dead on her feet with exhaustion, her hair dull and bedraggled, but she managed to muster a feeble smile as she asked them what they were up to.
“We’re heading to the Head’s quarters tonight to see if he has truly gone,” explained Jari quickly, giving her the simple version. “We were just on our way to get you, to see if you were good to come with us?” he added, frowning at her.