29. The University

29

The University

Safira Chastain

I t was awful. Leyweaver had complained about the portals once, but I hadn't anticipated how truly appalling they were to use. It felt as if I was being pulled apart into random chunks, the way someone might idly shred a leaf. All of my bits were still mine – I could feel them all just as if they were still part of my body – but they were all definitely disassociated into approximately zucchini-sized chunks, ranging from the kinds that are nice to eat to the ones you forget under the leaves for weeks and have to turn into weird pies.

I had about enough time to be extremely unhappy about being turned into zucchini before I got smashed back together, with no more kindness than Marin kneading bread dough. The portal put all my pieces back in the right places and I stepped right out into the portal room of Merrhenya Spire, feeling rather like I wanted to puke. Luckily nobody was in the room, and I was such a magical nobody that I sincerely doubted the Archmage would notice me wandering around. His servants might, but Merrhenya was at the center of the University, and the public floors of it were accessible to anyone who wanted in, from sunrise to sunset.

With a slight smile and the sort of confident walk people have when they're comfortable and headed somewhere, I strode out of the portal room into the central circle, and took the transport ring down to the ground floor. There were plenty of people there, talking and bustling around, but while I got a few glances, no one challenged me. I breezed through the entry room, dodging around a group of tourist-looking people being talked to by someone wearing a pin like a badge, and walked right out the main door of Merrhenya and into the University.

It had been five years since I'd set foot on the University grounds, and it felt like I'd never left. The University and Merrhenya Spire were far to the south of Barixeor, and somewhat to the west. It was approaching evening, but even in the late autumn the temperature was balmy. The perfume of tropical flowers hung thick and cloying in the humid air, mixed with more exotic scents. Wild birds made raucous calls from soaring trees. I recognized some bred from abyssal thorn-ash and white-apple, and one that had to be descended from the silverleaf birches from Ethereal.

More mages lived at the University than any other one location in the world, and their presence affected everything, from the popular affectation for long hair to the landscape. Some of the animals were what might be found in the wilds elsewhere; others were highly bred and enchanted things. A vivid crimson songbird the size of a falcon sang arias from its perch on a statue of some sorcerer or another, and a black-and-cerulean harlequin hare ate the weeds out of a flowerbed.

It was like walking into a storybook, the sort of place plays and songs are written about. Once, it had been my home, and I'd never lost my childlike wonder at the ever-changing strange things to be found.

Any one of the people I strode past might have been a mage of incalculable power. Many of them were young, ranging between fifteen and thirty, though some of the faces I saw were older. I didn't stand out in the cultural blend of the University. There were dozens of languages spoken around me, a bewildering slew of clothing styles, and people of every shape and color. Naga and fauns intermingled with humans ranging from the darkest of browns to pale cream. An older woman walked stately by with a giant aberration at her side, a thing like a hound with a face made of toothed tentacles.

Though I knew it was stupid, I felt safe here. Everything was so familiar, the cosmopolitan strangeness of it all a feast for the senses. It was beguiling and alluring, the sort of place that made you want to beg to stay. I'd come within the central ring of the University many times as a child, watching and listening to everything, climbing into strange trees to chase birds and listening to lectures on arcane topics outside of open windows.

I heard someone barking out a sharp incantation, and distaste slithered down my spine. As a child, I didn't see the invisible line between me and those who wielded magic. I didn't notice the way that the mages sized each other up, the slight posturing when they spoke to each other. It was a world I had no access to, the realm of power and ley impact that only the magically powerful could access. As I looked now, though, I could pick them out. They walked differently, and reacted to things us mere humans couldn't. They talked differently, with their own slang and phrases that others could imitate but not quite match.

It disgusted me. Leyweaver wasn't like that with us, but she still moved through the world differently from us, with the expectation that things would work out for her. Only people with great privilege could act that way, wearing a little puzzled look whenever it was suggested that things might go badly. How could they go badly? They never had before. The University was a strange microcosm, a world unto itself and a playground for mages. The mage-oaths would kill you if you broke them, but the things they forbade were so few. So many unpleasant things happened under the cover of birds with the voices of women and in the shade of the exotic trees.

Kip lived outside the University, in one of the many towns that encircled it. Icelight, named for a sorcerer from a thousand years ago, a pretty place with glittering glass sculptures and many-paned windows. The memory of it filled me with a sick sort of fear that I shoved into a small corner of my heart. Though I had spent so many months being broken down under the cold beauty of that scenery, there was nothing inherently dangerous about faceted glass. I didn't need to fear it. It was only glass.

I focused on the logistics. It wasn't far, but it wasn't a short walk, either. I took one of the many scenic footpaths through the jungle so that I wouldn't be so obviously hiking down a road most traveled on the backs of animals or simulacra. The natural world helped calm me down, the rabbit-fast beat of my heart quieting and the shivering adrenaline energy easing. Mage-lights along the path lit as the sky darkened, attracting moths and small biting insects. Jeweled beetles thrummed through the air to ping! against the glass and tumble down to the earth, dazed.

Me, too, little beetle , I thought, passing by a large one on its back, waving its legs without rhythm. I'd flown towards the beauty of magic and been struck brutally by it. Kip had seen to that.

I made it twenty feet before the crushing sorrow wrapped around me. I turned around and walked back to the poor thing. It still lay there, feebly moving its legs through the air. I picked it up and carried it into the woods so that the light wouldn't be so obvious, then clambered a little ways up a tree and set it down on a branch, holding it in place until it settled its feet. It clung to the bark, one wing akimbo, and tapped its long antenna on the wood. I watched it for a minute, wanting almost to cry, and returned to trudging down the path.

This whole place was haunted. So many mages just did things, without bothering to think about the consequences for anyone. They didn't have a long view of the world, or of how the changes they made rippled through it. I respected Celyn so much for the way he thought of everything as an interlinked system, and considered things on the scale of millennia. A lot of people could benefit from seeing the world like that.

I came out of the jungle into the tended land several hours after dark. The moon hung heavy in the sky, gibbous and bright, casting shadows across the fields and orchards.

My hands started shaking as I walked through the familiar landscape. There was Magus Truthsight's house, where Kip had berated me in front of a room full of mages for flirting with one of them, a man I'd only smiled at and whose face I didn't remember. I'd wept on that bench for an hour after he 'd wrung the neck of the kitten I'd rescued when she peed on his dirty laundry. We promenaded in that park, my layered lace shawl obscuring the bruises on my arm. I'd learned very quickly that a wizard could deal violence far more effectively than a mere woman.

The dark memories hazed the edges of my vision. I clenched my hands so tightly the ring on my right hand bit into my skin. That edge of pain dragged me back to reality, helping me anchor myself. I made myself focus on the reality of the world around me, and not the ghosts of my past. The rustle of leaves in the breeze, the call of night-birds, the chirping of bats on the edge of hearing, the woebegone howl of a hound. The depth of shadow beneath the trees, the moonlight glimmering on the surface of a brook, the tall grass waving. The rich scent of night-blooming jasmine and the heady smell of wet earth. The feel of the gravel crunching beneath my feet.

Every focused observation took me further away from the clawing fear, easing the knot under my breastbone and slowing my panting breaths. When I reached the edge of Kip's land, I was only afraid in the normal way, not drowning in my worst memories. Sweat chilled my skin and my damp blouse clung to my back. I felt a trickle of wet run down the small of my back.

I knew the spells on every inch of the property, and I suspected that Kip hadn't bothered altering them in the past years. He believed in his own designs with an unchecked arrogance, unwilling to accept any form of criticism, and doubling down when anyone suggested anything different. Every one of his security measures linked back to his own power, so that it would never need to be refreshed or tended. He'd always scoffed whenever anyone raised the question of vulnerability, and that pride would help me now.

A spell tied to your power was always kept fresh, true—but anything that happened to you affected the spell. Celyn's bargain meant that Kip's magic would slide off of me. A mage's power followed their oaths without their direction, the ley channels of that oath as secure as the great spells that maintained the Spires. He'd sworn not to interact with me, and that meant his spells wouldn't touch me. I thought that even the alarm spells wouldn't notify him of my presence, because such a thing would be seeking information about me.

I walked up to the ornate iron fence and walked straight though his front gate without pause. The enchanted stone drakes didn't leap down on me, nor did my feet freeze against the ground. No mage-lights sprang into life in the house. I walked down the path towards the house that had been my prison, sweat dripping off of me, and nothing touched me.

The stable was in the back. He would keep Celyn there, alongside the animals.

I walked through the gardens, grimly hanging onto the present moment as my vision tunneled and my heartbeat roared in my ears. My body kept shivering in waves, going alternately hot and cold as I kept moving. My skin throbbed to the beat of my heart, and my harsh breaths sounded loud enough to wake the dead. Part of me was dead certain that Kip knew I was here, that he was awake and only waiting to make the dread rise high enough to snap the jaws of the trap on me. He was so good at keeping people off-balance, measuring his responses so that you never knew how he would respond to an infraction.

I passed through his gardens and went down to the stable. The slide of the barn door in its runners sounded like screaming to my ears, everything heightened in my adrenaline terror.

The inside of the barn was impenetrable black. Only the moonlight through the door let me see anything. But I knew this place, and I had come too far to give up now. I walked down the short building, past the two boxes for his prize mares and to the next door. I peered into the deep dark of the enclosed stall, moonlight slanting in through the barred window in the back. A pale horse stood in there, head low, a foal sleeping in a heap in the straw.

The fourth box, then. I felt my way down the wall and came to the last stall, my heart pounding and palms sweaty. There was no light in the stall, the space where the window should have been as black as the rest of the wall. I could hear the breathing of something large within, but the air didn't smell like horse. It smelled like the clean breeze off of the lake, crisp and cold, with the hint of rain.

"Celyn," I whispered into the dark.