Tessili Academy (8 page)

Elle’s face went a little harder. “They have
to know,” she said. “After all, they’re the ones who teach us.”

Jey thought of Professor Liam. Increasingly,
she wondered about him. She thought back on the moment he’d told
her to cast the spell on her tessila and hold it. Had he known what
it would do? Had he done it on purpose? Or had it been a thing of
pure chance?

Jey looked at the mark on her forearm, the
one Nylan had barged in to see last night. It was fading, going
light. She remembered, now, what had happened. She’d been told to
go to a particular house, to change a lord’s mind about an upcoming
vote in the House of Laws.

But a man had been waiting there. He’d worn
a cloak with the hood pulled up. He’d tried to talk to her when
she’d dropped her passive echo spell. She hadn’t seen him in the
corner of the room – in retrospect, she realized, because he’d been
casting a passive echo spell of his own.

She’d attacked him instantly. He’d seemed
startled, blocking her incoming knife with a blast of pure magic.
She hadn’t stopped to think about it at the time. She’d kept at
him, whirling in for another strike. He’d blocked that one too,
with a staff he summoned out of thin air. He’d seemed about to say
something when the lord, who’d been sleeping in the great bed at
the top of the room, sat up.

The hooded man had looked her in the eye,
and vanished.

Jey decided to say something about Professor
Liam to the others. But before she could speak, the latch on their
door clicked again. An orderly bustled into the room. He was a
small man, with the smooth face and thin limbs all the orderlies
seemed to have. He clucked when he saw them. “Time to clean up and
get changed, girls. Come on, now. It’s bed time.”

The girls began to put away their things.
Jey had to remind herself to move slowly, to not focus her eyes too
sharply on anything in the room. Elle and Kae began to do the
same.

The flashnode in the ceiling went off. All
three of them froze, going entirely still. Jey held herself that
way for a moment. Then she blinked a few times and began to stare
at the closed notebook in her hand with what she hoped was a vague
expression. Elle and Kae made variations of the same face.

Jey, aware of Elle’s blank eyes, felt a
sudden, furious desire to laugh. It raced through her body,
snagging in her throat like a living thing. She fought it,
struggling to keep her face passive, her thoughts smooth.

The orderly heaved a huge sigh, as if he’d
been asked to fill a hole he’d only just finished digging. “Bed
time girls,” he repeated in the same, smooth voice. “Time to clean
up and get changed.”

Jey, fighting the laugher, turned to look
for her night dress.

Then, as the orderly came to help with the
buttons on the back of her dress, she wondered when she had last
really, truly laughed.

She couldn’t remember.

She stood while the orderly’s deft hands
worked their way down her back, the desire to smile gone.

The next morning dawned fine and fresh.
Glittering rainwater dripped from the gray tile roof of the
cloister compound. The bright gardens all but glowed in the new
sun.

Jey stared out the window as she brushed her
hair to braid in preparation for the coming day. She’d slept
poorly, jumping at every creak in the eaves and shift in the wind.
She’d been so afraid she wouldn’t wake when the orderly came in to
spritz them, that she would sleep through it and find her mind
closed and shuttered again in the morning.

It hadn’t happened. She’d heard the orderly
enter. She’d blocked the effects of the drug. This morning, she
could still remember.

But now she had a new problem. It stood on
the other side of the smooth lawn. A wall – gray and solid,
glittering with fallen rain, throwing its thick shadow across the
ground.

If it had been an ordinary wall, it wouldn’t
have been any kind of barrier. Jey could think of a half a dozen
ways to escape over it, under it, to sneak through the gatehouse,
or force her way past the guards.

The problem wasn’t the wall. The problem was
the magic.

She could barely sense it from this distance
– a slow shimmer in the morning light. It permeated the stones of
the wall and the ground below and the air above. It was a subtle
spell, and it was a targeted one.

As Jey watched, a flock of small brown birds
wheeled over the wall to settle in one of the rosebushes that grew
at its base. The magic didn’t affect them. Had a human climbed over
the wall, it wouldn’t have touched him either.

The magic in the wall harmed only the
tessili.

Jey knew this, because she’d worked on the
wall. Once a week, Professor Liam led a group of his most
accomplished passive casters out to stroll along the wall’s base,
to test the shieldstones set in among plain stone blocks. Every
week, the students replenished these with their own magic,
refilling any that were growing weak. Jey could remember doing it,
over and over, year after year, strengthening and caring for the
magic that kept Phril prisoner.

Behind her, Elle and Kae seemed to be
experiencing similar thoughts. The other two seniors looked tired,
as if they too had spent much of the night awake and worrying. Now,
Jey thought ahead to the charade that would be her school day. She
felt abruptly exhausted.

As if reading Jey’s thoughts, Elle sat down
on the couch, thin shoulders bowed as if beneath a great weight. “I
can’t do it,” she said in a strained voice. “How long will we have
to keep pretending?”

Kae straightened from securing her slipper.
Her tone was sharp and determined. “We’ll keep pretending until we
find a way past that cursed wall. Maybe we can figure out a way to
sabotage the spell during our maintenance shifts.”

Jey looked over at Kae, a little feeling of
hope lifting her heavy spirits. “That’s a good idea. If all three
of us passed over one shieldstone each time we do maintenance,
maybe we can make a gap, a place where our tessili could fly
through.”

Elle was frowning, twirling the end of the
braid between her fingers. “But the other students. They’ll notice
and fix it.”

Kae answered quickly, before Jey had a
chance to respond. “We could cast a passive echo spell on the
stone. Then the other girls will pass over as if it’s not
there.”

All three of them considered this plan in
silence for a moment. Phril, who had been rubbing his red scales to
a shine against the outside of a brillbane husk, leapt into the air
to make a darting loop around the domed ceiling. Jey could feel he
was happy. His scales had been warmed by the morning sun. His wings
felt strong and true.

Jey watched him, feeling her heart turn over
with that deep sense of love. She imagined him flying over the
wall, of following her out of this place, to freedom. “It might
work.”

Elle was staring down at the bright rug
under the table. “What about the other girls? We can’t leave
them.”

Kae’s response was immediate and fierce. “We
can
leave them, Elle. We can, and we will. It’s going to be
hard enough for the three of us to avoid calling attention to
ourselves as it is.”

Elle went quiet, staring ahead in silent
sadness.

Jey spoke. “We’ll come back, Elle. The
others, they have more time. Our leaving won’t harm them. Once
we’re free we can come up with a plan to bring this place down from
the outside.”

Orderly Brint had come to terms with the
reality of his situation. In many ways, he recognized what he had
was better than the life he most likely would have ended up with
had the course of events taken his life in another direction.

When he’d been sentenced to death for
poaching, Brint had thought he would die. He’d thought he would
die, and dying had seemed like a relief. It meant no more
scrounging for food, no more losing people he loved. He’d been only
a boy then, not quite shaving. He’d had a boy’s perception of the
world.

They’d come to him the night before he was
scheduled to hang. They’d made him an offer. Death, or castration.
Removal from the earth, or removal from society. If he chose to let
him do their surgery, he would be safe forever. They promised him
food and shelter and an easy life. They’d brought him food, even,
when they’d come to him – a loaf of bread and a wheel of cheese.
They’d spoken to him while he ate.

It hadn’t been a hard decision for a boy
who’d been hungry his whole life to make.

As far as Brint’s parents knew, their son
was dead. As far as the world knew, the place where he now passed
his days did not exist. He’d undergone his surgery. The years had
passed. The marks of manhood that had begun to appear had faded
from Brint’s body. His muscles had softened. His cheeks were as
smooth as a girl’s. He lived here, a prisoner kept in peace and
plenty. There was a rhythm to his days. He had purpose. He had
security. Did he need freedom as well?

Not all the orderlies saw it that way. Some
endlessly plotted their escape. Some chafed and snarled and scowled
until they were reprimanded. Sometimes, the reprimand made no
difference.

When an orderly was removed for misconduct,
the others were always informed. High Orderly Fras would call them
to convene in the evening hours, after the girls had been put to
bed in their dorms. He would always explain the infraction, the
series of steps that had been taken to correct the wayward
orderly’s behavior. He would speak with regret about being forced
to come to the decision to remove the orderly from the academy.
“It’s for your safety,” he would say, solemn and grim. “It’s for
the safety of us all.”

Fras never precisely spelled out where the
orderlies went when this happened, but it wasn’t hard to figure
out. After all, what could one possibly do with a man who was
already dead, but kill him?

Of course, there had been one or two quiet
cases – instances where a man had simply disappeared. No
reprimands, no noted infractions. Just gone. When this happened,
Fras would give the same speech, explaining something had come up
suddenly, they’d had to act. Brint wondered, sometimes, if these
men had managed to escape.

Brint did not think about escape. He could
see no benefit in attempting to return to the outside world. He was
now even less likely to scrape out a place for himself beyond the
academy walls. What use would the society that had rejected him as
a poor boy have for him as a castrated male?

The only thing that bothered him about his
life was the girls. The seniors, in particular. He tried not to
think about it, tried not to look into their faces, to wonder what
was broken in those pretty heads. He didn’t believe the girls
graduated any more than he believed the orderlies who grew too old
to work were retired to a place they could be better cared for in
their twilight years. Brint didn’t even mind the thought of being
quietly murdered in his dotage. If he hadn’t been brought to the
academy in the first place, his chances of seeing old age would
have been too slim to calculate.

In truth, Brint saw little benefit in
dwelling on outcomes he could not change. So he did his duty. He
did the best he could for the girls. He watched them grow from
small, frightened children into vague, scattered teenagers. Then he
watched them each receive a diploma. He did not, thankfully, have
to watch them die.

He was used to the cycle. But now, the cycle
was disturbed.

It had started with the missing holdstone.
One evening, the orderlies had been called to the meeting chamber.
High Orderly Fras had explained a stone had been lost – most likely
bumped off the table in the dance hall and perhaps kicked into a
corner or otherwise overlooked. The dance hall had been searched,
but the missing holdstone had not been discovered. The next day,
Brint had helped search the dormitories. Each chamber had been
scoured, the scant belongings allowed to the girls meticulously
sorted through and examined.

No holdstone had been found. Brint had been
inclined to believe it was merely lost. Holdstones were small.
There were any number of ways such things could go missing.

But now there was the more serious matter of
the missing syringe. Nylan had called Brint to the deployment block
complex the day before. Brint had gone with reluctance, fearing
some retribution for the fact that he’d stood up to the High
Handler, interfered with him the night he’d swept into the academy
flaunting authority he did not have. The guards had caved before
Nylan’s flat stare and certain step. Not Brint. He knew the rules.
He knew, knew for a fact, that handlers were not allowed within the
academy walls under any circumstances. A handler most certainly
wasn’t authorized to go into a dormitory unsupervised and harass a
senior.

Brint had responded to the message in spite
of his reservations. Nylan had asked him, casually, if he’d
happened to hear of anyone finding the syringe Nylan must have
dropped in his haste to leave the senior’s dormitory that night.
Brint had stared at the other man, a feeling of slow unease
beginning to uncurl in his belly. He’d said he had not. Nylan had
thanked him for coming. Brint had left, unsettled.

And now, today. This morning the orderlies
had read the announcement in the small antechamber that lead to
their sleeping hall. The seniors, having accomplished so much,
would be graduating early. There was to be a special ceremony the
following morning. The orderlies were to see the three girls
through their day with special care. In the morning, instead of
going to class, all students were to convene in the quad after
breakfast.

Brint could well guess what would happen
after that.