Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

B eginning my last year at the Fount with a blackened eye wasn't ideal, but at least it gave me an air of mystery. Though I caught several people looking at me curiously the next day, it wasn't until I was eating lunch in the refectory, book propped open in front of me, that anyone asked me about it outright.

"Your face looks like shit. Did you walk into a door?" This question was accompanied by Agnes Quest plopping herself down onto the bench beside me and stealing a piece of fruit from my plate.

"No," I said, lowering my book. "I walked into Sebastian Grimm."

Agnes's eyes widened comically behind her gold-rimmed spectacles. "You fought? Already , Leo?"

I told her the story of my evening, not bothering to hold back the details of my less-than-legal activities. Agnes didn't exactly support my lack of regard for rules, but she never condemned me for it either. Our lives had been intertwined since long before the Fount, through both the friendship and the politics of our parents. The number of people with a seat in the Citadel, Miendor's department of magical governance, formed a very small circle, and their children an even smaller one, which meant Agnes and I had shared near identical childhoods full of high expectations and too many fancy parties. We had emerged from the experience bonded. This bond was cemented during the time after my mother's death, when I lived at her family estate for several months. We knew each other's best and worst qualities, and in general supported or forgave them, but this time Agnes's forehead creased in a frown.

"I thought you were going to keep your head down this year."

"I wasn't even back on Fount grounds yet!" I protested. "It was a last hurrah. A parting kiss with revelry before I commit myself to turning over a new leaf. You really needn't scold me." I prodded gingerly at the sore skin underneath my eye. "Not when I've already paid for it."

Her dark braids bounced as she shook her head at me. "Well, it serves you right. Do you know how long it took me to haul your luggage inside last night? The least you could have done was send along a charm to make the chest weigh less. Now hurry up. I'll give you worse problems than a black eye if you make us late to Duality."

I closed my book without further prompting. The passage I'd been reading had focused on obscure words anyway, and I did my best to avoid those in my spells. Anything too obscure and the magic might think I was actually trying to write something complicated, and that was a problem.

The first time such a problem had occurred was when I was eleven and set fire to my tutor's beard.

It would have been amusing if I'd intended for it to happen (it was a small fire, and he was an odious man), but that wasn't the case. And facial hair wasn't the only victim of my warped compositions. I wrote a spell meant to help my brother practice his sword forms, and he ended up with a broken collarbone. Agnes still has a tiny scar on her cheek from where one of my spells had exploded in her face. I nearly killed my cat trying to use magic to get him down from a tree. The list went on. Any time I attempted to write Grandmagic, it twisted to something wrong in my hands.

Depending on who you asked, I was either a menace or a waste of space. Neither option made casters particularly eager to test out my spells. Fortunately, Agnes had no such compunctions, and she was who I'd been paired up with for Duality class.

The seats were mostly taken by the time we got there. Grimm was stationed at a table on the far side of the room, impossible to miss thanks to his pale hair and height. He had a clear view of the doorway, and I watched his eyes narrow and lips grow pinched as he noticed my arrival.

"Don't start," Agnes muttered, and pulled me past Grimm's table, farther into the high-ceilinged room.

Like everything at the Fount, the lecture halls were beautiful in an austere sort of way, marbled floors and dark wood-paneled walls offset by tall windows that lined one side of the room. Beyond the glass lay sprawling, sunny gardens, still flourishing in the last few weeks of summer.

Agnes and I had just found our seats when, from the front of the room, there came the sound of a throat being cleared.

Silence fell immediately. The few sorcerers not yet seated scurried to find their places as Sorcerer Phade rose from their desk, cane in hand. Phade had been at the Fount longest out of all the instructors, and it showed in the wrinkles creasing their dark skin and the stark white of their hair. Phade was not the type of old that grew feeble. Instead, they had gathered their years around them like the assembled rings of a tree and used them to become formidable.

The cane they carried was a souvenir from the same library break-in that had left the Fount's security so heightened. Supposedly, Phade had arrived first on the scene and taken on the thieves single-handed. During our fourth tier, they had barely been able to walk at all, but now they simply moved with a pronounced limp.

"Scrivers, please rise," Phade said in a carrying voice.

Chairs scraped and feet shuffled as we complied. There were fewer scrivers than casters in the room, which was not uncommon. It's easy to test whether someone can cast magic, harder to tell if someone is capable of writing it. You needed a scriver to imbue the words of a spell with magic, otherwise it was just ink on paper. But even someone who did have the gift for scriving still needed to use the old language to write spells, and not everyone learned it as children. Gentry families, like my own, usually passed the language on, or hired tutors to do so, but if you weren't born into a family of sorcerers, your chances of learning it were small. As a result, plenty of scrivers went unnoticed and untrained.

To make up the difference, some of the tables in the room housed groups of multiple casters working with a single scriver, while a few of us remained in pairs. This was similar to how the disparity was dealt with in the Coterie, where sorcerers usually worked together in troops but occasionally operated as a duo.

Phade's eyes flickered over us, face stern and remote in a way that reminded me of Grimm.

Rumor had it Phade was the one who had nominated Grimm for admittance into the Fount when he was discovered as a child. I'd often wondered if this early association was to blame for Grimm's character. Perhaps he'd imprinted on Phade like a baby duckling and decided to emulate their forbidding nature.

Phade began to walk down the line of tables, cane tapping lightly, and as they walked, they spoke.

"For the past four years I've endeavored to teach you how to work with a specific partner, or partners, learning what you can of their skills as a means to hone your own. Partnerships such as this are useful and essential to much of magic. But the situations that arise outside this room are not nearly so neat and controlled. The Coterie will have its eye on many of you this year, and they want sorcerers who are versatile and cooperative. Sorcerers who can work well with everyone in their troop. It is my job to make sure you are ready to meet this challenge. Which is why I will be assigning all scrivers to new tables for the rest of this tier."

A murmur of surprise rose and then subsided just as quickly when Phade brought their cane down on the floor with a bang. "The new partnerships will be chosen at random and will not be reconsidered. When I call your name, please come to the front of the room."

I looked at Agnes. She shot me a sympathetic look back but shrugged slightly. There's nothing to be done , that shrug seemed to say.

Someone was about to be very disappointed by hearing my name called. No fifth-tier caster would be satisfied practicing charms and cantrips.

"Cassius Bethe," Phade said, and the sorcerer who had been seated next to Grimm stepped forward.

Cassius was short and slender, with mousy brown hair that flopped forward to cover half his face. He had the sort of soft voice and wide eyes that made people underestimate both his age and his skill, but he'd already had two of his own spells added to the Fount's library, a fact I was heartily tired of being reminded of. Cassius was too inoffensive for me to truly resent him, but the way our instructors fawned over him made it a near thing.

He paused in front of Phade's desk and picked a slip of paper from the basket they held out. Unfolding it carefully, he read aloud, "Agnes Quest."

Agnes let out a little sigh of relief, which I tried not to take personally. With Coterie recruitment beginning soon, Cassius was a good match for her. I stepped aside to let him take my place at our table and stood awkwardly in the middle of the aisle as I waited for my name to be called. I hoped that I would at least end up at a table with only one caster, so as not to dash the hopes of too many people.

"Leovander Loveage," Phade said.

I don't think I imagined the little pause that ran around the room when my name was spoken. Like all the casters who had not been matched up yet were suddenly bracing themselves.

Ignoring this, I walked up to Phade's desk and plucked a piece of paper from the top of the pile.

While I had many acquaintances in the crowd, there were none in particular I would have picked to work with besides Agnes. There was one person, however, who I definitely would not have chosen.

"Sebastian Grimm," I read aloud.

This time the hush that fell over the room was of a different variety, crackling with a certain level of amusement.

It was no secret Grimm and I did not work well together. In fact, we'd been actively banned from interacting in most classrooms, the results having been deemed "too disruptive" by our instructors. Now every eye in the room fixed upon me, waiting to see if I would drop the piece of paper with Grimm's name on it right back into the basket.

I nearly did just that, thinking that the same rules that normally applied to Grimm and myself must apply here as well, but then I caught Phade watching me, keen-eyed with interest. They had not said a word of protest when I drew Grimm's name. Abruptly, I remembered their promise that no new pairing would be reconsidered, as well as the letter of warning from the Fount board that I was under strict orders to heed.

Not one toe out of line. That's what I had committed to, or else the past four years would be for naught. I just hadn't expected that commitment to be so soundly tested, and so soon.

I met Phade's eyes squarely over the scrap of paper. Then, after the briefest hesitation, I crossed to my new seat.

The atmosphere in the room seemed to lighten as everyone realized all at once that they no longer had to worry I would end up at their table.

Grimm said nothing as I placed my bag down and slid onto the bench next to him, only sat there, straight-backed, looking deeply displeased. This close, I noticed Grimm's sash was held together by a neat line of stitches. He had obviously gone to great effort to make the stitches as careful and small as possible, but the repair still stood out, like a stain on a white shirt. Perhaps I should have felt a glimmer of remorse. Instead, all I felt was a savage sort of glee at witnessing the blemish in his otherwise perfect image, knowing I put it there.

Once partners had been assigned, the scrivers were instructed to choose one of the spells we'd written over break for our new partner to cast. My offerings were slightly more intricate than usual, given that I'd had all summer to devote to their making, but they were still only charms and cantrips. Nothing that would be a stretch for any caster in the room. Yet, similar to the night before, Grimm spent an inordinate amount of time studying the spell I handed him. In fact, he took so long looking at it that many of the other sorcerers finished casting before we had even begun.

I watched the woman at the table in front of us flicker in and out of sight as her partner recited a lackluster invisibility spell. Across the room, a spell meant to freeze someone in place went wrong and left broken bits of ice melting on the floor. The scriver of that spell swore as Phade pursed their lips at the mess. Many different Grandmagic spells were being tested, with varying levels of success, but the most ambitious one by far was cast by Agnes. I looked over at her table just as the spell in her hand finished burning away and Cassius's form shimmered and began to wiggle and shake like jelly. It was both uncomfortable and fascinating to watch, but after only a few seconds of this display Cassius disappeared altogether, replaced by a small brown sparrow.

The spell lasted less than a minute, but this was still very impressive. Successful transformation spells were rare.

A petty part of me couldn't help but notice that Cassius didn't quite dare test out his wings. He simply sat on the chair for the duration of his birdhood, occasionally letting out an excited chirp.

My spells may have been small, but they were fully functional.

Grimm cleared his throat pointedly, and I turned back round to face him as he began casting. Gray tendrils of smoke drifted up from his hands. The windows in the room were all cracked open, but I knew my hair would smell like fire for the rest of the day.

Once the paper was gone, Grimm brushed the ash from his hands, unfazed. Not for the first time, I wondered what it would be like to have that kind of power at your disposal.

Scrivers can't cast. Or at least, we can't cast anything that requires more than a thimbleful of magic. It was dangerous to try for anything more than that. Bite your cheek. Feel the softness against your teeth as you bear down. Press to the point of skin breaking. You could keep going, but why would you? There's a line there, between pressure and pain. No one needs to tell you where it is; you can feel it for yourself.

That's casting a spell.

I don't know exactly what Grimm felt, but wherever that point lay for him, it was far past anything I could even imagine.

Grimm frowned. "Your spell didn't work."

"Oh, it did," I told him. "Maybe too well."

He looked me over, clearly confused. "What is it meant to do?"

"It warms your clothes. So that you never have to put on cold socks, or cold anything, really. I probably should have just taken something off for you to cast it on, though." I was already sweating.

Grimm looked around the room, at Cassius, who was marveling with Agnes over the fact that his bird form had left behind a downy feather on the bench, and the woman who appeared to be holding a very tiny lightning bolt in her hand, and even the partners who were busy cleaning up the puddles on the floor. Then he looked back at me.

"I see," he said.

Those two little words, spoken with such cold formality, managed to convey far more than if Grimm had said twice as much. It was the verbal equivalent of someone looking down their nose at you. Phade had been keeping an especially close watch on our table for the duration of the class, so I could not respond as I wished to, but I resolved then and there to only give Grimm spells I knew he would hate for the remainder of our partnership. I would smother him in cosmetic charms and prank cantrips. I would give him exactly what he expected of me, and nothing more.

I didn't linger over this choice at the time, but in hindsight, I think it's what sealed our fate. This one simple, petty decision, not so different from others I had made before. All because I couldn't stand the way Grimm looked at me.

I did it to spite him, but really, I have always been my own worst enemy.