Tessili Academy (6 page)

Phril, agitated, leapt from his perch on the
brillbane bush. He flashed through air, darting for Nylan’s eyes
like an angry spark. Nylan raised a hand as if to dash the tessila
to the ground.

The orderly shouted. “No!” His voice was
high and panicked. Nylan seemed to realize what he was doing. He
only used his hand to shield his face. Phril dashed himself against
the man’s fingers, clawing with his tiny talons, hissing and
snarling with hot fury.

“Contain your creature, girl.” Nylan grated
these words from between clenched teeth.

“Here,” Jey whispered, tapping her shoulder,
remembering at the last instant not to call her tessila by name.
But Phril was angry. She could feel his rage. He wanted to tear
Nylan to pieces, wanted to destroy him as completely as he’d
shredded the seed sack earlier. In other circumstances, it might
have been funny. The tessila wasn’t even as long as Nylan’s
nose.

But nothing about this moment was amusing.
Jey could sense the potential for disaster. It hung in the air like
a silent promise. Jey sent Phril a sharper command, this one
silent.

With evident reluctance, the tiny creature
left off attacking Nylan’s face. The orderly had caught up by then
and had set a hand on Nylan’s shoulder as if to push him away from
Jey. He was spluttering half sentences. “Irreversible damage … no
authorization.”

Nylan lowered his hand as Phril settled.
Ignoring the orderly, he reached out and seized Jey’s right wrist.
He pushed the sleeve of her dress up her arm to reveal the strange
gash. It was less red now, perhaps a little smaller. But it still
gave off that faint blue tinge around the edges.

Nylan dropped the arm as quickly as he’d
seized it. He let the orderly force him back a few steps. His face
was dark, eyes sharp with anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?” He
snapped the words in a tone so harsh, Jey flinched.

Jey’s heart was pounding. Phril’s violent
anger was like a red haze clouding her vision. Fortunately, she had
no idea what he was talking about. The blank look she directed at
him was genuine. Of course, she’d been aware of the mark on her
arm. The orderly that helped them to bed each night had rubbed
ointment on it yesterday. She also remembered Professor Liam
commenting on it. And it pained her, sometimes, if she pressed up
against something or bumped into that place.

But she didn’t know where it had come from
any more than she knew anything else from before the day Professor
Liam had told her to cast a spell on Phril and leave it there.

“She can’t answer you without a holdstone,
you idiot.” The orderly was fully red in the face now. He kept
glancing towards the door as if expecting reinforcements.

Nylan reached into his vest and pulled out a
syringe. Jey saw it, and her heart leapt. She felt a sudden fierce
anticipation, a feeling of desire so intense it churned in her
veins like fire.

The orderly saw it too. His red face paled,
his eyes widening with horror. “Not here, Nylan. Great Trisis, man.
Are you mad?”

Nylan held out one rough-palmed hand. He
locked his angry gaze onto Jey’s. She couldn’t look away. “Give me
your tessila,” he said.

The orderly pushed himself in front of Jey,
shielding her with his soft body. “No. Absolutely not. This is
insanity. You’ll bring it all down upon our heads.”

Phril, in any case, had tucked himself into
the warm hair at the base of Jey’s skull, quivering with fear and
anger. She knew he wouldn’t have gone, even if she’d told him
to.

The two men faced each other for what seemed
an age. Behind them, Jey could hear the quiet sound of Elle
crying.

Then, at last, six more orderlies burst
through the door, robes flapping, puffing as if they’d sprinted all
the way across the quad. Perhaps they had.

Nylan knew he was beaten. With a quiet oath,
he stepped backwards, returning the syringe to his vest. As the six
orderlies hurried across the stone floor, sandals slapping, all of
them asking questions at once, he turned and stalked back across
the room.

As he left, he spoke. “Perhaps they’d be
more effective if you didn’t coddle them so much.”

With that, he was gone, leaving the door
flung open behind him.

Nylan stalked into the audience hall – a
spacious, round room that overlooked the quad. It was a room Nylan
was familiar with. Once a week, he was summoned here to report
outcomes.

Today’s meeting, however, was not routine.
It was barely dawn. Nylan had been shaken out of his bed as the
first light had begun to pale the horizon. He’d been alarmed at
first, certain one of the girls had finally snapped, that something
had gone terribly wrong.

But no. It was nothing so dire. Nylan had
merely angered the bureaucrats with his unorthodox behavior the day
before. And today he would have to face the consequences.

Nylan wasn’t sure what the orderlies used
this hall for. It had seating for a great many – more orderlies, he
suspected, than currently resided at the academy. But that was not
surprising. There was space for more professors, more handlers,
more students.

Which was one of the reasons Nylan was
constantly stressed these days. It was growing increasingly
difficult to meet the demands placed upon him. While the number of
students at Tessili Academy was falling, the number of
opportunities Nylan was expected to complete was not.

It was a real problem, and one that showed
no indication of going away. If Nylan hadn’t had so much at stake,
he might have found a grim irony in the academy’s plight. After
all, this outcome was predictable. If you systematically cull a
population that expresses certain heritable traits, those traits
are going to become scarce as time goes on.

There was no quick fix. Nylan had proposed
what he thought a reasonable solution to see it summarily rejected.
Alarmingly, the idea of keeping the girls active for one more year
had gained traction not long ago, almost to the point of being
enacted. But then this crop of seniors came along. Support for that
idea vanished.

But none of that was why Nylan was here
today. He knew that. So he strode in, stopped on the circular floor
before the large desk where High Orderly Fras and two attendants
presided. He fixed the large, soft man with his glittering stare.
Behind the orderly, the sky was a pale shade of pink through the
high, narrow windows. “You wanted to see me, Fras?”

Nylan’s relationship with the High Orderly
was not a comfortable one. They existed on two separate trees of
power. The High Orderly ran the academy. He oversaw the other
orderlies and monitored the students. He was responsible for every
decision, small and large, that pertained to the daily life within
these walls. His authority on certain matters was total.

He did not, however, have authority over
Nylan. Nylan was on a different, separate, ladder. He answered only
to the Dean. What’s more, as High Handler, he was privy to certain
truths the orderlies could only guess at.

Fras knew this, and at times responded to
Nylan’s very existence as a personal insult. Now, he stared back at
Nylan. His eyes were hard and flat. He said, “Explain
yourself.”

Nylan knew what Fras wanted him to explain.
His forced entrance into the academy last night had been against
protocol. He’d known that at the time. But he’d needed to see – to
confirm for himself the rumor that had run to him through the
gossip chain of the orderlies was true. And now that he’d seen what
he’d seen, it changed everything.

“High Orderly Fras, perhaps you’re not
aware. One of our students returned from an opportunity with an
injury …”

Fras cut him off before he could finish his
sentence. “Not just any student, Nylan. Your student. You were
handler on the opportunity in question, were you not?”

Nylan looked up at the other man, feeling
his gut stir with disgust. He could never quite set aside the
visceral feeling of repulsion he experienced whenever he was in
close quarters with an orderly. Fras was no exception. This was a
caricature of a man – his voice strangely high, the lines of his
body too soft, too round. “I was. The injury was not evident when
she returned because it was inflicted by magic. The way it emerged
is consistent with our research. A deflected spell will leave a
mark, but it can take several hours before it becomes visible to
the eye.”

High Orderly Fras sat up a little straighter
in his desk. His soft cheeks quivered with contained irritation.
“So you decided to break every access rule we have, barge into the
senior dormitory well past faculty hours, and risk unsettling the
three most dangerous operatives we have at our disposal?”

It had been a rash thing to do. But Nylan
hadn’t been able to wait. For one thing, if the wound was magical
in nature it could disappear at any time. He’d needed to see for
himself, to be certain. And he had seen. Now he must deal with the
enormous implications of that one narrow, blue-tinged gash.

“With all due respect, Fras, I seem to be
the only one who recognizes the severity of the situation. Do you
not understand what the mark means?”

The question hung in the slowly dawning
room. Outside, the sky was brighter. The hesitant cheeps of sleepy
birds drifted in through the windows. The two orderlies with Fras
seemed suddenly very busy with their notes.

Fras stood, leaning forward to place two
meaty palms on the desk. “She did it herself, Nylan. She cast her
own spell, bungled it, and it hit her arm, leaving the mark.”

Nylan began to protest, to explain why this
was impossible on several levels, but Fras slapped the table with
one enormous hand. The shock of the loud sound surprised Nylan into
stillness.

“That is what happened.” Fras grated these
words out between clenched teeth, annunciating each one as if it
was its own sentence. “And as for you, Nylan, if you ever set foot
inside my walls without authorization again, my orderlies will
shock you senseless before you’re two steps past the gates.”

Kae drifted out of the dorm room, heading
for her first class. She murmured a soft, “See you,” over her
shoulder, and was gone.

Elle, who was finishing at the wash basin,
turned to look at Jey with a plaintive expression. “I don’t know
how I’m going to do it,” she said. Her voice was quivery, her eyes
wide.

Jey looked at her friend with a mix of
sympathy and worry. Elle, like Jey, could now remember. With Jey’s
spell knitted into place around her tessila, the flashnodes no
longer affected her. Which meant she could remember Nylan’s strange
intrusion into their room, and everything that had happened this
morning. She also, like Jey, retained a general if imprecise
understanding of the academy as a whole. But she had no specific
memories of anything that had happened before Jey had cast the
spell.

Jey had tried to explain everything, but she
was afraid she’d done little more than make Elle afraid. The other
girl had jumped visibly every time the flashnode had gone off this
morning. Afterwards, each time, Kae had gone still and silent, then
said something that was either repetitive or apropos of nothing.
Elle had seemed to grow more disturbed as the morning had
progressed.

Now it was time for them to separate and
make their way through the day ahead of them, pretending to be like
all the other students.

Jey tried to be reassuring. “It’s easy,” she
said. “Move slowly and look blank any time anyone says something to
you. If your tessila is on a holdstone, do answer questions, but
pretend it takes you forever to come up with the answer. When in
doubt, don’t say anything at all.”

Outside, they heard the click of the
neighboring dorm’s door falling shut and the soft step of other
students moving past the room. Elle took a deep breath, looked at
herself in the mirror, and held out her finger. Her tessila
alighted there. “Ok. Right. Easy.” She took a step towards the
door, then looked back over her shoulder. “Aren’t you coming?”

Jey was sitting on the edge of her bed,
Phril perched on her shoulder. “You go ahead.” She forced a quick
smile. “Probably better for us not to be out and about together for
now. It would be too easy to make a mistake.”

Elle nodded, gave Jey one last, long look,
and stepped out the door.

Jey sat a moment longer, staring down at the
soft slippers on her feet. Her heart was pounding so hard Phril was
getting concerned. She waited several beats, making sure Elle
wasn’t coming back. Then, she opened her hand.

A syringe lay in her palm. The glass tube
was warm with the heat of her skin, the needle bright and sharp in
the early light. She stared down at it in a mix of fear and
wonder.

She remembered taking it from Nylan. She’d
seen him tuck it into his vest and turn for the door. She’d
recognized the moment as an opportunity she was unlikely to ever
have again. She’d done something, then, something she didn’t fully
understand. She’d woven a spell. She’d done it without thinking,
and it had resulted in Nylan and the orderly going still for two
heartbeats. It had been enough time for Jey to lunge forward,
snatch the syringe from Nylan’s vest, and return to her position
behind the orderly. A moment later, she’d tucked the syringe
beneath the corner of her mattress.

In the aftermath of Nylan’s visit, with the
orderlies swarming the place and carrying on, with trying to
pretend she’d forgotten what had happened after the flashnode went
off, with worrying Elle would give them away, she’d almost
convinced herself it hadn’t happened.

But when everything had calmed down and
she’d crawled, at last, into bed, she’d checked and felt the cold,
hard cylinder where she’d left it.