Ruthless Magic Read online

  “If you need help—”

  She shook her head with a jerk. “I can take care of it.”

  The flash of her dark eyes before she lowered them reminded me of the way she’d reacted to my blunder last night. I had no idea what she’d endured before this without anyone offering help—and without her needing it.

  But I wanted to understand. With every word, every casting she worked, she’d drawn more of my attention. I wanted to know all about her life, about how she’d ended up here, everything.

  I wanted her to think me worthy of telling.

  Rocío sang a couple lines in a hushed voice—Spanish, from the sound of it. Then she flexed her shoulders and twisted tentatively at the waist. Her sunburst charm slid across the tops of her breasts—and I detached my gaze before she noticed my attention on them.

  “That’s good enough for now,” she said, and resumed walking.

  “You’ll put Desmond out of business,” I joked. “Is there any sort of casting you’re not brilliant at?”

  She let out a laugh—short but genuine enough to warm me. “I’m pretty far from a magimedic,” she said. “It was just a standard first aid ’chantment. But... I’ve worked hard to make sure I’m as strong as possible in every area.”

  “You wanted to get into the college,” I said, and then could have smacked myself for stating the incredibly obvious.

  Her voice dipped. “I like learning just to learn—to see what I can do. What’s possible. If you keep reaching and reaching, it’s amazing how there’s always something more. But, yeah, I thought if I covered everything, there wouldn’t be any reason for them to doubt I could handle the courses. All I needed was to be Chosen, and there wouldn’t even be tuition.”

  “It’ll be the same if you’re Champion,” I said, but my mind lingered on the rest of her words. She’d given the Circle no reason to exclude her. Prisha they could almost have explained away, played down her marks as more middling than they were, but this girl—this spectacular mage of a girl—had done everything right, and they’d still rejected her.

  How many great mages had been Dampered because people like my granduncle were afraid of untried lineages?

  “It isn’t right,” I said. “I know you already know that, and I should have figured it out a lot sooner than I did, but...” It didn’t feel sufficient to call the mages in authority idiots; the problem was larger than that. “That’s not how I’d decide who’s admitted and who isn’t.”

  We continued in silence for a minute or so. Then Rocío said in the same quiet voice, “I appreciate that.” She lifted her head. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  All I’d determined with any certainty was that the radio’s static was carrying from a long stretch of branchless trees half-hidden by the mist ahead of us. I hadn’t narrowed the direction down more than that yet. She likely expected me to have an approach more refined than hunting aimlessly across the landscape.

  Or worse, maybe she didn’t.

  If I spent the entire Exam depending on other people’s skills, the examiners were never going to believe I deserved to stay a mage, and Rocío would never see me as anything other than a dolt.

  I dredged up a memorized verse about following music and channeled the sense of it over my tongue, grateful now for my extended practice in tracing ’chantments. My nerves jittered and my headache pounded. Ignoring them, I reached my awareness out into the quiver of the magic. A ripple ran through it, guiding me slightly to the right.

  “It’s over here,” I said. My forehead pinched, but I resisted the urge to rub it. In just a few minutes, we’d have the radio, and I’d look decently competent for once.

  The breeze rose, ruffling our clothes with a vigor that unnerved me. We did still have to worry about Prisha’s storm ’chantment. I sped up. Rocío scanned the ground and the trees we were approaching.

  “That was Latin you used, wasn’t it?” she said. “I’ve always wondered why the academies are so stuck on dead languages. My tutorial leader never had a clear answer.”

  “That’s just the way magic is done,” I said automatically, and bit my tongue. Clearly it wasn’t, if she cast in Spanish. “Or not. That’s how they teach us. The teachers say it’s to get us closer to the roots of magical practice. Drawing on those ancient tongues is supposed to align our minds with all that history. I guess they don’t teach it that way in the tutorials.”

  “The only Latin I know is ‘et cetera’ and ‘carpe diem,’” Rocío said. “Our teacher told us that what’s most important is our personal connection to the magic. He said it’d be easier for us to harmonize with it if we’re using words we relate to.”

  I had trouble picturing rows of kids in a dingy public-school room chanting archaic poetry. “Likely for the better,” I said. “Why go to the hassle of pushing all that memorization—”

  I snapped my mouth shut when I realized what was on the verge of tumbling out.

  “With a bunch of novices who are mostly going to end up Dampered anyway?” Rocío suggested tartly.

  My unthinking response would have been even more unfortunate. With a bunch of lesser-talent new-magic kids. That was how my Academy teachers would have spoken—but I knew better now.

  Were the new-magic families lesser in talent at all, or was that a lie the Circle had invented to justify who they admitted to the college?

  “I don’t think that,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking. Honestly, your theory makes at least as much sense as the one I learned.”

  Rocío marched on without looking at me.

  “Hey,” I said. “I mean it. I apologize.”

  She turned. The wind buffeted us, making her hair billow around her face. She gazed at me so directly I found it hard to breathe.

  “Why does it matter to you whether you’ve offended me?” she said. “No one else seems to care.”

  I knew without asking for clarification that she didn’t merely mean Prisha and Judith. There’d been a long line of slights and insults aimed her way by the Confed-associated mages she’d met before now. I’d heard enough of them, aimed at others like her, from my classmates, my granduncle, some of my father’s associates.

  I rubbed the back of my neck. “I, ah— Keeping spirits up is one of the few areas where I actually have a little talent. So if I’m failing even at that...” No, don’t make this into a joke, Finn. “I have a huge amount of respect for you,” I said. “You’re an amazing mage. I mean that. The last thing I want is to make you feel otherwise. If I ever say something that sounds like I’m putting you down, or new-magic mages like you... I deserve to be called out.”

  I must have said something right, because she nodded, and a little of the tension released from her posture.

  “So Spanish is the language you feel most comfortable with?” I said as we hurried on. She didn’t have any accent, but neither did Prisha’s family, other than the grandmother I’d met once who spoke clipped British English.

  “Most of the time, no,” she said. “I’m kind of rusty. There weren’t any other Latino kids in the tutorial class, and even my parents mostly speak English, so I haven’t practiced very much. But when I was a little kid, before I was in school, my abuelo and abuela—my grandparents—babysat me, and they only came here from Mexico after they were married, so they mostly knew kids’ songs from there. Something about that part of my life, being so little and unaware of everything else going on, it was so happy and, I don’t know, harmonious? I find myself coming back to it when I’m reaching out to the magic.”

  “And that helps you connect,” I said.

  “Yeah. Sometimes I feel a little guilty that I’m not more immersed in that part of my family’s heritage, but a lot of the time... I like that it’s kind of apart. As if that language is something sacred between the magic and me.” Her mouth curved with a faint smile.

  I’d never experienced that sort of feeling. I knew dozens of classic plays and poems inside and out, but I didn’t take joy in them, let alone have a sense
of them being sacred. The lines and lyrics always swam up through my thoughts with a brittle edge. I could probably blame that discomfort on the stress and sweat with which I’d drilled them into my head.

  My tracing ’chantment tugged me out of my distraction. I veered farther to the right.

  There, where two trees stood close together, the edge of something rectangular protruded. The static crackled louder as the wind warbled between the trunks. I hurried toward them, glancing at the symbol on my hand to shore up my defenses.

  The “trees” bore about as much resemblance to the real thing as the rubbery turf under our feet did to dirt. Their black, stumpy-limbed bodies jutted out of the ground like an overwrought art installation. Their lightly ridged trunks looked more like rippled plastic than bark.

  My radio was wedged amid one tree’s knobby roots. I bent over it, hesitant to touch it even though I’d handled it plenty yesterday. Up close, the static hiss shrieked hard enough to sting my eardrums. My hand dropped to my pocket, but Margo had said the dissolving rod only worked on organic matter.

  “You could just smash it,” Rocío suggested, coming up behind me.

  I was tempted to, but... “I don’t know what sort of rebound effect that might cause,” I said. “It’ll be safer to unravel the ’chantment.”

  I pressed my hands to the radio’s case. Magic rippled through the metal beneath my palms.

  I could do this. It was my responsibility.

  The wind blustered through the static, reminding me that I didn’t merely need to do it—I needed to do it fast.

  I rolled a few words off my tongue and focused my attention on the vibrations of magic inside the radio. The braided strands of intent I’d composed together shuddered. My headache jabbed deeper. I swiveled my thumb against the metal to ground me and twined my words, larghetto, with the melody.

  The threads of the ’chantment sharpened in my awareness. This one, I could snap. I pulled with a sharp accent, and the energy sizzled away through me. The ache expanded through my skull and down my spine.

  This thread, I could tease apart. Pain pierced the bridge of my nose as I adjusted my modulation to unwind the measure strand by strand. More magic shimmered away into the air.

  My gums were going numb; my tongue prickled. Dolor hic tibi proderit olim, as they said—someday this pain will be useful to you. I sure as hell hoped so. Squaring my shoulders, I called apart two more threads.

  The remaining structure collapsed in on itself like a cat’s cradle unstrung. The burst of energy clanged through my body, and then it was gone.

  I slumped, bracing my hand against the dense gray ground.

  “Finn,” Rocío said.

  My headache thudded in my temples, and the wind whirled around us. Rain had started to fall. As I shoved myself to my feet, tiny droplets sliced across my cheeks. No doubt about it—Prisha’s storm was upon us. I fought to orient myself.

  The tilted buildings the others had headed for were scarcely visible in the churning mists.

  Rocío caught my hand, and my heart stuttered for reasons that had nothing to do with the escalating storm. “Run for it?” she said.

  “Good plan, seeing as neither of us thought to bring an umbrella.”

  A laugh that seemed to startle even her burst from her lips—and was siphoned away into the rising howl of the wind. She squeezed my hand tighter, and we sprinted across the wide gray plain.

  The fog thickened around us, stirred by the storm. We plunged through the haze. The buildings had been swallowed from view, but I kept moving forward, holding the image of them in my mind.

  The rain turned to hail. It battered our skin, and the shriek of the wind rang in my ears. An abrupt blast wrenched us in opposite directions, jarring the elbow I’d banged in Rocío’s vise. I flinched, and her fingers slipped from mine. Another wallop knocked me to my knees.

  I scrambled back up, my chest heaving as I attempted to breathe through the rushing air. My vision filled with streaks of hail and crashing fog. I whirled around, searching. My headache prodded my skull with a dozen thick splinters.

  I’d lost Rocío. I’d lost all sense of direction. The wind was outright screaming now, pummeling me from all sides, and I hadn’t the faintest idea where to turn.

  Chapter Ten

  Rocío

  The fog roared around me. I spun, and my wet hair smacked my face. Finn had been right here next to me a second ago. I couldn’t leave him in this gale.

  I stumbled one way and then another. My groping hand collided with a shoulder. I clutched it, yanking us together. Finn’s arm slid across my back to hold us in place. He said something—I heard his voice by my ear—but the screech of the storm stole the words. Hail pelted us, and the wind lashed at us from all sides. I could hardly breathe.

  The only solid thing was Finn. I curled my fingers into the damp fabric of his shirt and sang into the stiller space between us. “Como veían que resistía.” Magic hummed from the vicious air into me. Maybe I could make a shield strong enough to protect us even against this force, or—

  The hum tickled through my mind like the brush of a hand. That presence again? An image swam up of the grate I’d come across in the courtyard, between the buildings. A grate that led to something below.

  I knelt down, pulling Finn with me, and pressed my free hand to the spongy ground. The wind tried to steal my next lyrics from my lips, but the magic raced through me all the same—through me and down, down, into an open space I sensed below us like a gasp of fresh air.

  I did gasp then, and forced out a verse. I’d never magically transported another person with me before, but I had to. I had to.

  The magic rushed up around us with the thrust of my words. I clung to Finn, singing the energy around him as tightly as I could. Then I propelled us downward with a lurch.

  We surged through rough blackness that rasped over my skin and landed with a feet-jarring thump. I exhaled in a rush, dizzy in the sudden quiet. My eardrums ached from the pounding of the storm we’d escaped and the effort of the conjuring.

  We crouched in total darkness. The surface beneath me felt like concrete. Cold dank air hovered around us with a faintly salty flavor that reminded me of the ocean.

  My fingers were tangled in Finn’s shirt, pressed against the lean muscles I’d admired yesterday. His arm was still around me. In the dark, I was abruptly aware of the rise and fall of his rasping breath, the warmth of his chest, and the answering warmth it sent through me.

  He was alive—we were alive—and in that moment, it felt like a miracle. I wanted to press even closer.

  “Ah,” Finn said, his voice distant through the buzz in my ears, “what just happened there?”

  “I took us underground,” I said. “It’s some kind of passage under the buildings. It seemed like the quickest way to get out of the storm.”

  “I see.” He sounded both shaky and amused.

  I couldn’t see him at all, but I could picture him perfectly: blond hair slicked back in the wake of the rain, alert green eyes searching for a hint of light, that smile curving his lips even now.

  “You know,” he said, “the person who was best at teleporting in my entire class—who you can be sure wasn’t me—needed five full minutes to work up the concentration to get from one end of the school to the other. On her own.”

  “Maybe she could have done it faster if she’d been about to be torn up by a windstorm?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Well, I’m not sure how to say this in a way that’s remotely adequate, but—thank you for saving my life.”

  His head turned toward me, just inches from mine. My skin flushed. “You’re welcome,” I said, which seemed pretty inadequate too.

  I eased back, and he let his arm drop. The loss of that warmth made my throat tighten. As if I didn’t have more urgent things to focus on.

  Light. We needed to see. I murmured a quick phrase and formed a handful of magic into a small globe in the air above us. It spilled a thin yellow glow
over the space.

  We’d ended up in a narrow corridor with a blank wall about ten feet to our left and a utilitarian door to our right. Like the Exam buildings we’d started in, the walls, floor, and ceiling were painted stark white, but smudges dulled the gloss on the walls and dust had gathered along the edges of the floor. The Confed had taken over this space, but they hadn’t paid much attention to it.

  I got up and tried the door’s metal handle. Locked. The faint hiss of magic emanating from the door suggested it was sealed in other ways as well. Remembering Axton made me hesitant to test it further. Were the examiners going to find some other way to test us while we were down here?

  When I turned back, Finn was peering at the ceiling. I thought his face looked more sallow than usual, but maybe that was an effect of the light.

  “Of course Prisha would choose now to put all her effort into a casting,” he said in his offhand way. “It’s all part of the examiners’ evil plan.”

  “It was actually pretty smart of them—in a horrible way,” I said. “They got to test us twice, once in casting the ’chantments and once in defending ourselves. If we’d known about the second part, we’d have held back on the first.”

  Finn blinked at me. “And now I’m making a mental note to never get on your bad side.”

  I blushed for the second time in as many minutes, but he’d already shifted his gaze back to the ceiling. His jaw worked. “Given the look of the buildings up there, I suppose the real question is whether they’ll have collapsed before or after the others made it to them.”

  His tone was still light, but there was a strain in his voice. He was worried about Prisha. Probably the others too. Of course he was worried. He was just trying not to show how much.

  “Or maybe they didn’t collapse,” I said. “Whatever happened, Prisha knew her own ’chantment. They had lots of time to prepare. She’ll have figured something out.”

  I hoped that was true. Maybe we should have all stayed together. But then the others wouldn’t have had the chance to make it to shelter. I couldn’t have transported everyone down here in one casting. I hadn’t even been sure I could carry Finn.