“The promises we make are such curious things. Even when we do not keep them, they can reveal so much of who we are and what we truly value.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame as the first lines of his third wedding vows.

Jalaren, it turned out, was a bit of a showman. I’m guessing it was how he kept himself amused with his job enough that he didn’t start each day by magically shot putting a half dozen or so students over the Academy’s wall on general principal.

“Sir Reldin, do you make any demands or offer any concessions to the Accused?” he asked.

“Yes. I offer her the chance to change her plea. Should she admit to her guilt here and now, the Empress will be content with her expulsion from this Academy and final sentencing by the High Council,” Reldin said.

There was an odd reverberation in his voice. It was subtle, and I couldn’t place what was responsible but it seemed a safe bet that it was related to the suit of full plate armor he was wearing.

Grammy had always laughed at ‘Knights’ and their obsession with encasing themselves in giant cans of metal. On horseback, the armor wasn’t as much of an issue, but for foot fighting like this, she’d always insisted it was more of a hindrance than a help. I’d asked her why they didn’t use magic to make it light and fast and strong enough to provide protection against fireballs and things like that. Her answer had been that they did, but that it was still more of an affectation than a worthwhile tool. According to her, there were magics which could render a duelist’s skin stronger than the strongest steel and even the best armor always had weaknesses that an experienced duelist could exploit.

I’d believed her when she’d said that and imagined myself nimbly fighting a garrison of clumsy Knights who would be trapped waddling around in their steel suits while I danced from one to other laying them low with perfect disabling shots. 

Watching a real Knight prepare for battle though showed me how wrong I’d been and left me questioning Grammy’s wisdom in general.

Reldin wasn’t slow or clumsy in his movements. He was a wall of steel and blades ready to spring the moment Jalaren released them. I looked for the weaknesses and clever openings Grammy had insisted would be there and I saw several. The slit in his visor, a reverse thrust along his arm into his gauntlet, the hinge at his knee. Each one a potential liability and each one he was certainly aware of and definitely capable of defending.

“Idrina Ironbriar, how do you answer this offer?” Jalaren asked.

“The terms are an insult and I rejected them as such,” Idrina said. “I will extend an offer to the Accuser though, admit that the charges presented are lies and slander, swear yourself to my service for a year and a day and the Gold Phalanx may have you back when I am done with you. Otherwise only the crows and the worms will have any use for you.”

“The Accused cannot make offers to the Prosecution,” Jalaren said.

“The enemies of the Empire shall ever fall,” Reldin said, unsheathing his sword in what looked like more than a little irritation.

“Indeed they shall,” Indrina said, conjuring a single spear to her hands with a note of grim delight in her voice.

For as eager as the two of them were to start killing one another though, Jalaren wasn’t quite ready to let proceedings begin.

“As the Empress watches over us all, we take this moment to entreat that her favor be granted to the one who champions the righteous decision in the matter to be put to the blade,” he said. “It is in her name that justice shall be done and for her glory that virtue shall be redeemed. Let no one doubt that it is her divine hand which binds the fate of these two and her unquestionable holy wisdom which delivers the victor into the grace of her realm, with no taint or feud arising from their actions herein.”

As prayers went it felt a bit wobbly to me. If the Empress could see all and decide how the fight was going to turn out why would anyone need to entreat her favor? For that matter if the Empress had any power at all why would this trial ever have been necessary? Saying that ‘the result is the Empresses’ fault’ implies that the crime was the Empresses fault too.

Or at least it did to me. I suspected if I tried to advance that particular line of reasoning in the wrong places I’d probably get myself burned at the stake.

“Knight Reldin, do you stand ready, sworn in body, mind, and soul to uphold the honor the Empress Eternal and the Empire she preserves for us?” Jalaren asked.

“I do,” Reldin said, but his whole attention was on Idrina.

Idrina who was wearing no armor.

Idrina who was half a foot shorter than him.

Idrina who was only armed with a normal spear where he was carrying…my eyes finally locked onto the blade Reldin was carrying. 

It wasn’t a normal sword.

I couldn’t tell how I knew that, not at first, but even just seeing his blade made my skin itch.

“Irdina Ironbriar, do you stand ready, your fate bound to your sworn word to redeem your honor in the eyes of the Empress Eternal and the Empire she preserves for us?” Jalaran asked.

“I am ready to defend my honor with my life, but it needs no redemption as the lies before me tarnish it not and never shall,” she said.

“I declare that you are both joined in holy purpose and on my mark, shall the Empress’s will be done. Lay on!”

The two of them needed no further encouragement.

There was a burst of golden light from Idrina’s feet and the bang of an explosion from within Reldin’s armor, both of which propelled the combatants to the center of the ring where they met with enough force to blow the front row of spectators three feet back.

Well, most of the spectators. Narla didn’t move because she was Narla and Ilyan didn’t move because he was used to Idrina’s fighting style.

The two fighters spent a moment in the center of the arena, sword blade locked against spear haft. Reldin had the advantage in height and strength in that contest but I watched him surge forward, trying to drive Idrina back (presumably into the scorching silver flames) only to fail to move her more an inch.

At first that didn’t make sense. Had Idrina been hiding strength related magic from me in our fights? Then I noticed the gold light beneath her feet hadn’t vanished like it normally did. In fact a circuit of it went up her pant legs and emerged from her sleeves to reinforce her grip on the spear.

Reldin grunted and pushed harder, clearly seeking to shatter not only her body but also her magic in one go. That didn’t seem practical until I noticed that small runes on his armor which flared to life as he brought his might to bear on Idrina.

The sound of her spear cracking had the volume and tenor of a great oak being split in two. Before it split fully in half though, Reldin was leaping backwards.

Where he’d been standing four new spears appeared, blasting into the earth and throwing up a cloud of dust which instantly covered the arena and was only held back by the barrier of the silver flames.

As fast as the dust arose though, it plummeted to the ground, revealing Reldin with an outstretched fist as he cleared the arena to find his foe.

His foe who was unexpectedly absent from view.

To his credit, Reldin wasn’t taken as unaware by Idrina’s maneuver as everyone else in the arena was. A moment before her attacks hit him, he glanced up to find her descending towards him following a hail of black and shadowy spears.

I expected him to conjure a shield, or simply parry the ones which were aimed directly at him. Instead he moved. Fast.

In hindsight it was a good choice.

Where the shadowy spears landed, the ground dissolved into smoke. It didn’t burn, I would have smelled that, and it didn’t explode into dust like with the earlier attack. It disintegrated.

Idrina landed and called a spinning circle of spears up to guard her flank just in time to ward off something like two dozen blows which Reldin landed in the blink of an eye. 

Ilyan had been right. Reldin was able to deal with Idrina’s speed.

I’d been right too though.

Raising her hands, Idrina called a hundred spears up to rise in a circle, filling the arena.

There was no where Reldin could run to avoid them all.

And none of them were her actual attack.

With a wave of his hand, he shattered every spear between himself and Idrina, reducing them to harmless metal dust and wood splinters.

What he missed was the one she conjured from the ground directly below his right foot.

I don’t think it should have been possible for her to punch through the armor of his boot. The metal on Reldin’s foot was thick and all sorts of protective glyphs were glowing on it. If there was anywhere he was well protected, the bottom on his foot should have been near the top of the list.

The shadowy spear didn’t seem to care about any of that though.

Nor did Reldin’s foot fare any better than the ground had. 

One moment he was pinned in place and screaming in pain, the next everything below his knee simply puffed away into smoke.

With his one good leg, he leapt at her, slashing through a barrage of spears before slamming into a golden one Idrina summoned into her hands.

The force of his blow was unreal for someone who had no more leverage than a single legged jump could provide and Idrina wasn’t well braced for it. She managed to block the blade from sheering her in half but the impact spun her around and into the silver flames.

She rolled away instantly, dousing the flames which had sprung up around her right arm but as she rose I could see she hadn’t extinguished them before they did some serious damage.

Magical damage I guessed? She hadn’t burned long enough and her arm was too intact for there to be purely heat related trauma involved, especially since her right arm was hanging all but lifeless at her side. 

With her left hand, she conjured another barrage of spears. That would have been enough to finish Reldin off if he hadn’t risen to stand on both of his perfectly intact feet and sweep them aside from a wave of his hands. 

I shook my head and blinked.

Something smelled wrong.

Very wrong.

There was a buzzing in the air and the scent of a familiar and entirely unwelcome magic.

Idrina called another golden spear to her hands and met Reldin’s blade in hand-to-hand again.

He was ready for her speed.

And she was ready for his might.

Her first blow didn’t try to slip past his defenses, or come at his from a tricky angle.

She simply hit him so fast and hard that even catching her blow on his sword didn’t dissipate the force.

Reldin was knocked back into the same patch of silver flames that Idrina had been, and like her, where the flames touched him, his body went limp.

Except the magic came again.

The magic and a scream.

Utter anguish.

I felt my skin tingling and my nerves all light up.

I had to do something.

Something was horrible wrong.

I just had no idea what.

Then Reldin started moving again.

Without any weakness.

Without any hesitation.

And without any humanity.

I watched his next seven moves.

They were quick, but that was a given. They were powerful, but all of his movements had been. They were not human though ad that was new.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying how humans move. It was a rather important trick to work out so that people didn’t instinctively figure out I wasn’t one of them. 

Like I was instinctively figuring out that Reldin wasn’t human anymore.

I wanted to scream that they had to stop the fight. That it wasn’t fair anymore.

Except it had never been fair.

And no one would stop the fight.

Well, no one except Idrina.

It didn’t matter that her opponent was fast, or strong, or even inhuman, because I’d been right about something else – she had been holding back.

“Life, occasionally, presents us with impossible situations. Challenges which have no good answer, problems we cannot fix or even ameliorate. When there are no good paths open to us though, it’s is still essential that we carry on. Are all of your options terrible? Will every road lead to heartache and sorrow? So be it. 

Sometimes there is no dodging the blows fate sends at us. Sometimes we must simply take them and know that whatever may come, there will be something beyond the pain which will be worth our enduring it.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame at the first memorial service for the Great Calamity.

Idrina didn’t struggle at all. When one of the instructors explained the charges against her and the options which were on offer, she quietly nodded before accepting the Trial by Combat. 

I don’t know if the instructors had been expecting that. Terrified pleading or outright offers of bribery were the responses almost any other cadet would have given. Idrina though seemed perfectly calm. Cadets who planned to simply sacrifice themselves might have been as still but anyone who was paying even the slightest attention to the energy which was coiled up deep within Idrina would not have made the mistake of thinking she had any thoughts of losing the battle before her.

The instructors didn’t care about any of that though and wasted no time from there, detaching Idrina’s restraints from the attachment points on the wall and marching her out towards the tourney field. Right before they left, she turned her head to glance at the stray patch of air where Mellina and I were standing cloaked in shadows and offered the ghost of a smile to us.

“We need to get back,” I said. “Holman’s going to lose his mind when he sees her in chains.”

“Let’s follow them,” Mellina said. “It’ll be quicker and they won’t be looking for us there.”

I wasn’t sure of that but she was the expert on sneaking places invisibly, so I would have been an idiot not to follow her lead.

As it turned out, both of us were right.

Mellina got us back to the others safe and sound, and when we got there Holman was indeed losing his mind.

“House Ironbriar objects to this on the strongest possible grounds!” He was yelling loud enough that even though Jalaren had dragged him off to the side of the tourney field and behind one of the partitions everything he said was clearly audible.

“She has agreed to the Trial,” Jalaren said. “Even if there was a better option, it’s too late to look for it.”

As arguments went, that was one of the least sensible ones possible. The fight hadn’t begun yet. There was clearly still plenty of time for a more reasonable course of action to be taken. The problem was the only one who wanted to be reasonable about this was Holman.

Well, I did too, but as was readily apparent, what a Cadet from a minor house wanted was utterly irrelevant as far as the Academy was concerned.

“It sounds like things didn’t go well?” Yarrin asked once Mellina dropped the shadows which were cloaking us.

“Better than I expected,” I said.

“So she’s not going to fight?” Ilyan asked.He sounded surprised but I think most of that came from the growing concern for his sister’s safety that I could see blooming in his whole body’s expression.

“She’s going to win,” I said. “She told us so.”

He stared at me. Then blinked. Then stared some more.

“And you believed her?” he asked, confusion tightening every muscle in his face as he tried to figure out if I’d lost all of my senses or just most of them.

“I do,” I said. “She’s been holding back. A lot with me and at least a little in her Trial.”

“That’s not true,” Ilyan said. “She always fights flat out. It’s why I can never beat her.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid to break it to you, but you can’t beat her because she’s not willing to lose to you, and she’s good enough that she doesn’t have to. You’re her brother though, you can’t tell me that you don’t know she loves you? No matter how hard you fight, I’m betting she’s never wanted to really hurt you.”

“What are you talking about? How could you…what makes you think any of that is true?”

“She didn’t mean to kill me,” I said. “And even when she did, she was holding back. Her moves are like a surgeons. She’s so fast its hard to see, but she doesn’t throw wild strikes out. She knows what she’s doing at all times. She just makes her decisions so fast that it’s hard not to see it as pure reflexes.”

“That’s not going to help her against an Imperial Knight,” Ilyan said. “They know how to fight fast people, and strong people, and everything else.”

“Do they?” I asked. “How many people like your sister do you think there are? How many of the Knights have fought anyone like her? And how often?” To his credit, Ilyan did seem to be considering that, so I went on. “Whoever they pick, they’re going to walk into that arena with the full confidence that they’ll be fighting a fledgling cadet. A talented one maybe, but how many of them do you think will start off aware of who and what they’re faced with?”

“They fight Reaving Beasts all the time though,” Ilyan said. “All they do is react to things that have unexpected powers and unknown levels of strength. They’re going to figure her out fast enough to make a different, fast enough to survive. If they couldn’t do that they’d never be able to fight the Reaving Beasts.” His view of what Reaving Beasts were and how they fought was shared by almost everybody in the Empire but it wasn’t true. I couldn’t tell him that, and I hoped dearly that the Imperial Knights were as taken in by their propaganda as he was because that would help Idrina immeasurably. 

Ilyan couldn’t see that though. 

“This isn’t going to be good,” he said, his whole body crestfallen.

“Of course not,” I said. “This is a fight to the death for absolutely no good reason. There’s nothing good here at all.”

“I’m going to stop it then,” Ilyan said. “I’ll tell them I did it.”

“Already volunteered to do that,” I said. “She shot me down.”

“Why?”

“Because if you walk up there and confess, all they’re going to do is put the two of you through a Trial,” Narla said. “Kati’s right. There’s no getting your sister out of this.”

“She seemed confident she could deal with it though,” Mellina said.

“Can she? Can you see her future?” Ilyan asked.

“No. Not a definite one,” Mellina said.

“What do you see then?”

Mellina closed her eyes.

“She’s standing over her opponent with one of her spears pining him through the heart to the ground. She is bleeding out after being sliced open from shoulder to hip. The fight is interrupted by the arrival of a Reaving Storm – that’s not a likely future – or the fight ends with her embracing a Reaving Beast who saves her life – also not likely, though I do keep seeing it, which is odd,” Mellina said, opening her eyes when I could tell it would be easy for her to continue.

“So she’ll be okay?” Ilyan asked.

“No, I can’t promise that. What I see isn’t the future, I explained that didn’t I? All I can see are things that might be. It’s like imagining what’s to come but there’s magic wrapped around it that makes it feel so much more real than it is. Believing in future visions though is the worst mistake you can make. They’re not real. Only the future we actually make is.”

“This sucks,” Ilyan said, his gaze cast down to ground, the posture failing to disguise the worry that was growing worse every second.

“I know. It does,” I said. “She asked us to believe in her though, so let’s give that a chance.”

“She is going to be insufferable if this works out for her,” he said, lifting his head and forcing a smile onto his face.

“She’s not already?” I asked which earned me a short laugh from him.

“Come on, they’re done setting up the dueling pit. Let’s give a front row seat,” I said. “We can watch her win better from there. Or break all the rules, jump in, and run away with her.”

“I like that. Keep our options open,” he said.

Getting to the front of the crowds wasn’t that hard. There weren’t that many cadets on the tourney field and the space they’d setup was large enough that there was plenty of room around it to view the battle to come.

I’d expected them to use ropes or have some kind of short walls setup as barriers but instead they’d defined the fighting area with a circle of the same burning silver powder that they’d used to wall Idrina into the prison.

“I wondered what those looked like,” Yarrin said, nodding to the silver circle. “I’ve read about True Silver Barriers before. They block magic and cause pretty horrible burns to anything that crosses them.”

Idrina and one of the Knights were already inside the barrier, which answered the question of how they were going to handle that obvious problem of having them cross it. They’d also taken Idrina’s shackles off, which was good. If they’d expected her to fight with them on, it would have been grounds for justifiable homicide on every authority figure present and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been alone in the slaughterfest.

“Attention Cadets,” Jalaren said, his voice carrying over the chatter of the crowd despite a lack of magical amplification. “In place of the practical evaluations planned for this afternoon, we will instead be holding a Trial. The accusations are gathered into a charge of High Treason Against the Empire from the supporting charges of Destruction of Imperial Vital Property, the Summoning of Forbidden Entities, and Catastrophic Endangerment of the Population of an Imperial City.”

I glanced over at Yarrin.

“Summoning of Forbidden Entities?” I whispered.

“I heard that they’re saying she summoned the Reaving Beasts which were released,” he whispered back.

I shook my head, unable to process that at first.

It was such a blatant lie.

Did people think the Academy didn’t summon people from other worlds? Wasn’t it obvious? They’d done it in plain view during the Trials? 

I had to ask someone about that. Doxle. I needed him to explain what the hell everyone was on about there. Grammy had never mentioned anyone purposefully summoning people from other worlds. From her stories, it was always Reaving Storms which rent the fabric of the world and let in creatures and people from beyond. The Imperial Knights and others were supposed to be the first and best line of defense against the ‘monsters’ which summoned by the storms, and the authority of the Houses rested at least partially on their ability to keep the populace safe from the unpredictable and all too destructive attacks which plagued the Empire in the wake of the Calamity three centuries back.

“The Accused is Cadet Idrina Ironbriar,” Jalaren said. “Her answer to these charges is a declaration of ‘Not Guilty’ and in defense of this answer has chosen Trial by Combat. Standing for the Prosecution will be the Imperial Knight Sir Reldin of Gold Phalanx. Because the charges are gathered together under the central accusation of High Treason, the trial may only end when one of the combatants lies dead or should the Accuser submit and yield the field.”

There was a general murmur of surprise at that. Apparently most of the cadets weren’t aware that the farce playing out before them was quite so serious. From the chatter which sprang up, it sounded like most had thought this was a staged event.

And of course some still did, for what sounded like a variety of reasons.

“Should the Accused be victorious in the trial, all charges against her will be rescinded with no further doubt laid against her and no blemish upon her honor,” Jalaren said as though required to explain an eventuality which would clearly never come to pass. “Should Sir Reldin be victorious then all charges will be confirmed as fact, even should resuscitation of the Accused prove to be viable. I would remind both combatants that several of the overseers are gifted with either healing or transformative magics and that, while this is a duel to the death, it is intended that resuscitation will be attempted at the conclusion in order to apply a more fitting punishment once guilt is determined.”

I groaned at that. He’d started off with at least the pretense that he was taking a neutral view on how the proceedings would play out but, probably like the rest of the instructors and the Imperial Knights, he wasn’t able to conceive of any ending except the obvious one.

I think everyone was probably watching Idrina when Jalaren said that, but I’m not sure if anyone else caught the small and deadly smile that crossed her lips.

She was ready for this.

“You would think with a life as long as mine has been, there would be a fair chance that my great works would all be behind me. Surely the challenges of today must seem so small when weighed against all those which have come before. After so long, isn’t it time to gracefully rest and let the world just carry on?

I must confess there are days when that would be delightful, and days when the night’s before are just a touch too tiring and the world can go and do as it will.

The truth though is that our greatest works always lie before us. Whatever we’ve done has only served to create the world as it is. Our greatest challenge, no matter where or when we stand, is to create the world that will be. Even a small act, one kindness, one connection when placed atop a thousand earlier ones can have the weight to change everything.”

– Zindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame

We arrived at the next evaluation twenty minutes late, and I was so eager to hear how the instructors were going to tear us down. I’d been given free rein by my Advisor to cause havoc, and with the recharge he’d given me, all the misery from freeing the prisons had faded away leaving me with only the cheery warmth of knowing they were safe and sound and that the Academy was going to be frothing and/or terrified by their disappearance.

Laughing in their faces was definitely not going to win me any points.

But I was so very ready to do it anyways.

And then, no one noticed us at all. Because why should I get to have any fun?

Late arrival? Who cares? Not the instructors that was sure.

They were all clustered together arguing with some people I’d never seen before.

People in full Imperial armor.

“They think the Reaving Beasts are still in the Academy,” Yarrin said, since we (and all the rest of the cadets) were all watching the distant discussion intently. “Or some of them do. The Knights are arguing that if one or more escaped into the city there’s going to be hell to pay.”

The Evaluations had been scheduled to take place on one of the Academy’s tourney fields. They weren’t terribly different from the temporary arena where we’d run through the Trials to be admitted, just smaller by about two-thirds, probably because each class of cadets was less than a third the size of the applicant pool. 

The instructors and the Imperial Knights had removed themselves to the far end of the field. Behind them, a set of iron gates stood open leading to a tunnel of darkness which had to adjoin some part of the prison-stables the people I’d freed had been held in.

“I bet that monster went and set them free,” a raging idiot with a death wish said from about ten feet behind me.

I didn’t have to turn around.

Nelphas Lightstone was definitely talking about me.

He didn’t know I’d been the one to release the prisoners.

If he had he wouldn’t be mouthing off like that.

In fact, if he knew how I’d set them free, and had two gray cells to rub together, he’d be running for the Empire’s nearest border before getting on my bad side.

I mean, would Doxle even object to me thrashing the narcissistic jerk to within an inch of his life? I could be nice and leave one of his bones unbroken even. That would show restraint right?

“He’s walking over here,” Mellina said. “Try not to kill him.”

As it turned out though, I wasn’t the one she needed to warn.

“Come on, confession is good for the soul,” Nelphas said. “Which one of you deviants was the one who…” That was as far as he got before his words cut off with a strangled choke.

Since I’d been planning tripping him and then crushing his throat with my boots and had yet to do either of those things I turned to see who’d beaten me to the punch.

Narla.

She was a lot faster than her size would lead someone to expect. Also a lot less merciful than someone, in this case Nelphas, had counted on.

“Hi there cuz!” she said in a cheery tone.

Nelphas responded with a gurgle and a desperate scramble against the hand Narla had clasped around his throat.

“Do you know my father specifically told me that I should always do whatever you told me to because, and I am quoting here, ‘he’s the Lightstone you will never be’.”

Nelphas continued punching and scratching at Narla’s hand, adding in flailing kicks with his legs which were otherwise hanging uselessly below him as Narla hoisted him a good foot or two off the ground.

“Now that I’m not a Lightstone at all, do you think I should do everyone a favor by showing them what you’re like on the inside?” She was still speaking in a cheerful tone but the clawed hand she held up made it pretty clear how literal she was about showing everyone what was inside Nelphas Lightstone.

Nelphas, for all that he lacked Narla’s physical might, did overshadow her in terms of social power however, which translated into a half dozen of the lackeys he’d been performing for drawing their weapons and calling forth the beginning of their attack spells.

Part of me wanted so see the six or so of them try to take Narla on. I was reasonably sure it would go terrifyingly poorly for them, and likely spiral out of control into a general melee among the assembled First Year Cadets.

Part of me remembered Grammy though and her lessons about how raging crowds created more opportunities for hurting the innocent than the guilty.

“It sounded like he was making a Formal Accusation against my honor,” I said, reaching up to place a restraining touch against Narla’s outstretched arm. “We are required to hear the charges he proposes before issuing a Official Challenge.”

Narla looked at me and raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

I nodded calmly in return and she shrugged before lowering him back to the ground.

“Well then?” I prompted him, not waiting until he’d finished choking a few lungfuls of air through his rapidly bruising throat. “Did you have a Formal Accusation to make against House Riverbond? And if so shall we set the terms of the Trial here and now?”

“There will be no Accusations and no Trials,” Jalaren, the proctor from the Trials said as he strode through our two groups. “Cadets are allowed neither to give nor claim offense. Now break apart and be silent or I will assign you all to the city sewer detail.”

And with that he was gone, continuing his rapid walk to join the other instructors.

Since I was looking for the active mission detail and not the one where my enhanced sense of smell would be a horrible curse, I shrugged and turned my back on Nelphas.

It was a perfect opening.

He really should have tried to hit me, or stab me, or blow me up with some kind of spell.

Well, I mean not if he wanted to live past the next minute, but as a general thing based on what he knew of me, attacking then would have been a really great move.

Except for Narla I guess.

If he’d tried to shoot me with a spell she would have introduced the front of his face to the rear of his skull.

So, points to Nelphas I guess, he was not stupid enough to try for a cheap shot when there was someone demonstrably willing to murder him and eagerly looking for an excuse to do so.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said instead of attacking, wounded pride requiring some form of salve.

“Oh cousin my cousin, we both know you were going to try to kill me no matter I did, now, hopefully, you’ll make a decent attempt at it rather than being such an incredible disappointment.” Narla’s tone didn’t change at all and as far as I could tell from her body language and scent, she really did hope Nelphas would do his best when he tried to kill her and she really wasn’t worried about him succeeding at all.

I took a quick moment to sniff the air again.

Narla was fully human. At least as far as I could tell. 

That confidence though? I was something everyone here was afraid of and I couldn’t begin to match Narla’s level of courage.

“Not hard to see why the boys are falling for her, is it?” Mellina whispered to me, as our two groups parted.

I gave another quick sniff in Ilyan and Yarrin’s direction. 

Yeah. They were not exactly uninterested. Of course the whole area was basically a giant hormone cloud with all the young humans who were milling about but theirs had the tinge of purpose to it.

“Think they’re aware of that yet?” I whispered back.

“They’ll figure it out,” Mellina whispered. “Eventually. Probably.”

Yarrin flashed us both a frown, reminding us that while we were speaking too quietly for any of the other Cadets to hear us, his magics let him pick up on what we were saying just fine.

Shouting from the far end of the field distracted us all before we had to address that though.

It wasn’t only the Cadets who were getting into brawls worthy of drunken street rats!

One of the instructors was on his back.

Knocked out cold!

And standing over him?

Oh, hi Holman!

Two of the other instructors weren’t exactly holding him back, but had placed themselves partially in front of him with their hands raised in a placating gesture while Jalaren stood to the side, his head bowed as he pinched the bridge of his nose in something like resignation.

I glanced at Yarrin with probably five times too much delight in my eyes.

“They started talking about who was responsible,” he said. “Bolbrek, the guy who’s laying down there, was apparently the one who had Idrina arrested.”

If I’d seen him or had a functional nose when he and Idrina came into the ruins of the prison I might have been able to guess that but Bolbrek had the same bland old instructor-guy look as the others so maybe not even then.

“Let me guess, he wants to prosecute her immediately for the escape so that they can compel her to tell them where the prisoners went?” I said, trying to think of the most horrible option I could come up with.

“Sort of,” Yarrin said. “He was demanding a Trial by Combat,” he said.

“Cool! She will love that!” Ilyan said, looking far more cheerful than a loving brother should have. On the other hand, this was Idrina we were talking about and he was probably completely correct about her enjoying a little battle for her life and honor.

“A Trial by Combat with the Imperial Knights,” Yarrin said.

The fully trained, fully armed and armored Knights.

“She’ll still be into it,” Ilyan said, though with a touch less second-hand joy and a touch more concern. 

“With the guilty outcome severing her bond with Advisor Enika and replacing it with one to an Advisor of House Lightstone,” Yarrin said.

“What? Why would they do that?” I asked, growing more tired of, but less surprised by, the nonsensical policies of the Academy.

“They can’t,” Ilyan said. “You can’t force an Advisor to break their bonds.”

“You don’t have to,” Mellina said. “Not if they kill her first and bring her back quickly enough.”

“Wait, that’s not possible is it?” I asked, feeling reasonably sure Doxle would have mentioned if it was.

“It’s a theory which has never been successfully tested,” Mellina said. “Usually the pact makers can’t be brought before the bond with their original Advisor dissolves.”

“Then why try?” I asked before the obvious answer smacked me in the face. “Oh. Because they need a scapegoat.”

“But they need to know where the Reaving Beasts are too right?” Ilyan asked, sounding more worried than ever.

“No,” I said with a sigh. “They don’t. The prisoners aren’t causing any trouble they can see. It’s possible they even know that there’s no danger to the city or the Academy. They just need to put on a good show of ‘doing everything they can’.”

“Will she let us rescue her?” Mellina asked.

“From a fight?” Ilyan asked. “Only if we kill her first.”

“Holman’s demanding that they bring the matter before the High Council,” Yarrin said. “It sounds like the lead Knight, Reldin, isn’t in favor of that though. He’s saying the Imperial Academy has full authority over disciplining its Cadets. They…uh, they own us?”

“Pretty sure that’s not how it works,” Narla said. “Pretty sure that’s not how any of this works.”

“Pretty sure the guys in all the armor can make it work however they want,” Ilyan said.
“Reldin mentioned something about how Idrina would be an ideal candidate alive or dead and they should consider this an opportunity? I don’t get what they’re saying at all there?” Yarrin said, turning to us to see if anyone else had a clue.

Unfortunately I did and I felt the wonderful lunch I’d had threatening to make a return trip just thinking about it.

“Remember the dead bodies I saw with the magic thread going through them?” I asked.

“They want her for that?” Ilyan’s horror at the idea was more or less the same as mine.

“They had better hope not,” was all that I could say. The picture of Idrina’s neck slashed open with magic thread stitching it closed passed through my mind and evoked a response strong enough that I had to fight against transforming into something really awful to prevent that from ever happening. 

I had no idea if I could handle a squad of Imperial Knights. I had no idea if they were going to be stupid enough to push me into trying it either though.

“Instructor Jalaren suggested they ask Idrina if she’s willing to stand trial or wants her House to intervene,” Yarrin said. “And people are agreeing with that. Or. Wait. Not Holman.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Holman’s not an idiot. Why is no one asking Enika? Isn’t she supposedly responsible for Idrina’s behavior?”

“She was called away this morning and won’t be back till tomorrow,” Ilyan said. “She sent a message off to Idrina and me last night. Told us ‘not to do anything she would disapprove of’’.”

“I thought you broke away from Ironbriar?” Narla asked.

“Oh, yeah, they all hate me now,” Ilyan said. “But that doesn’t mean anything for a pact with an Advisor.”

“Couldn’t she have stopped you though?” Narla asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Ilyan said and paused for a moment. “Huh, wonder why she didn’t?”

“Holman’s leaving,” Yarrin said, interrupting Ilyan’s ruminations. “The others overruled him. They’re going to ask Idrina whether she wants a Trial by Combat or one before the High Council.”

I already knew what her answer was going to be. Ilyan already knew what her answer was going to be. Anyone who’d spent two minutes with the beautiful basket case knew what her answer was going to be. 

The more I thought about it though, the more I found myself sliding over to her point of view.

A trial before the High Council would cost Ironbriar all sorts of political capital (assuming Grammy’s descriptions of most trial results being effectively purchased was accurate). Even if the cost was low, that would tarnish what had to be a sterling reputation that she’d built up by being such an overachiever. Every time her name was brought up, there’d be the specter of being caught at something and failing to protect her House from the consequences.

In what I had to imagine would be the first time in her life, Idrina would be a liability to her House (however small and inconsequential that liability might be).

Trial by Combat though would allow her to completely clear her name. 

In fact, beating an Imperial Knight in full regalia would add a fair amount of luster to her name. Not only would she be cleared of any charges, she’d have the unwritten title of ‘the cadet who beat the Empire’s best’.

And, from what I’d seen, she probably could.

If I’d been in her place, I probably would have made a different decision, in part because to win a Trial by Combat with an Imperial Knight would have required revealing far more of what I was than would allow me to retain the privilege of not being hunted on sight. 

Also House Riverbond couldn’t really be hurt by anything I did. All of the real members of it were well beyond any pain this world could throw at them.

“You have to stop her!” Holman had chosen to exit the Tourney area through the mass of cadets who were waiting for the next Evaluations to start. He’d chosen to exit right through my group in fact. “Call Doxle, tell him I need him, here, now. This is madness.”

“He’s back at his house,” I said. “You can find him there.”

“No, I can’t,” Holman said. “He changed the misdirection spell on the door after my last visit. He always does that. He thinks its funny. Or mysterious. Or…” lacking words, Holman settled for an incoherent growl.

“I can take you there then?” I offered but wondered if I really should.

First, I had no idea what Doxle could do to change things since he wasn’t Idrina’s Advisor. Second, while I could see Holman was panicking over the thought of Idrina fighting for her life, I didn’t think his panic was warranted.

I’d only fought her twice. The length of my association with Idrina Ironbriar fit between less than a handful of sunrises and sunset, but even with only that, I believed in her.

Or believed in her fighting prowess at least. 

She could handle an Imperial Knight.

Especially if her life and/or freedom was on the line.

If I was completely honest with myself, the thought of seeing her fight with absolutely no restraints was kind of thrilling.

And that was a terrible reason for not to do what Holman was asking.

Plus, again being honest with myself, I had a much better card to play to keep her from taking part in this idiocy.

“There’s no time,” Holman said. “They’re going to ask her as soon as they have the tourney field setup. They’re going to ask her as they take her to her Trial. She’s not going to have any choice at all!”

Maybe I was primed to be angry at the Academy.

Maybe the rage which had driven Grammy to cut off contact with her Imperial peers was coloring my impression of things.

Maybe I’d had too many shocks in too little time, from being beaten and jailed because I didn’t dare reveal what I was, to the maddening suggestion that Trina was here, to Kelthas’ death, to everything else the Imperial Academy was. 

Maybe all that was true, and maybe responding with anger and rage wasn’t a healthy method of handling things, but the image of the Academy doing it’s best to kill yet another student – no, not just any student – Idrina – who was clearly the best student here – relit the embers in my heart that exhaustion and despair had threatened to snuff out forever.

“We don’t need Doxle,” I said placing my hand on Holman’s arm and squeezing. I didn’t hurt him, I simply made it clear that I was serious when I said that. Which was enough to hurt him, but I didn’t break him is the important thing. “Where’s she being held now?”

“They repaired one of the cells they say she destroyed,” Holman said. “But what can you…”

I didn’t bother letting him finish.

He was right. We didn’t have time.

Mellina, understood what I was asking for when I nodded to her, and in the middle of Holman’s question, shadows swallowed us and we were off.

“I left Narla and the boys behind,” Mellina said as we ran back towards the prison-stables.

“Good. They’ve done enough and if people see them back there they may not notice that we’re missing,” I said. Yarrin was small but with Darla and Ilyan there, Mellina and I were easy to overlook, or to assume we hidden behind someone.

“You’ll need to be careful what you tell her,” Mellina said. “And what you promise.”

Because while I could endanger myself as much as I wanted, it was challenging to do so without also putting my housemates in peril, and that was not something I could allow. Idrina could handle a fight to death, I had boundless faith in that. My housemates though? Not as much. Narla would have the best chance, but for as powerful as she was, I suspected an Imperial Knight would have the answer for dealing with the kind of things she could do since her abilities weren’t exactly subtle.

“I will be,” I said. “I owe you far too much to let anything happen to you. Any of you.”

“That’s not exactly what I was thinking,” Mellina said, but by then we’d arrived at the shaft down to the prison.

Which was guarded.

I mimed breaking his neck, not because that was my actual plan but as a short hand for combat in general. Mellina rolled her eyes at that, shook her head and simply walked past him.

It wasn’t that he stepped aside that surprised me, it was that she was able to open the lid to the shaft down and he paid her exactly zero attention.

If people knew what I could do, they would be eminently justified in being terrified of me. It baffled me that there people who knew what Mellina was capable of who had also put her in a position where she cut ties with her House. Granted she seemed to merely be happy to free of them, but if they’d angered her? 

I was not going to anger her. For really any reason.

We proceeded down into the prison to find in the short time since I’d been gone, not a lot had been done with it. There were plenty of people taking notes, and cataloging items, but the general ‘clean up all the broken stuff’ effort hadn’t really begun in ernest yet.

Idrina was standing in the smallest of the cells, cuffed hands and neck which sent unpleasant chills down my spine. In place of a door, someone had scattered silver dust in an odd pattern on the ground and lit it ablaze forming a one inch high wall of flame which apparently kept her from leaving her ‘prison’.

I mimed brushing the dust with my foot and Mellina shook her head again.

“Give me a moment to extend this spell and we can talk to her without anyone noticing.”

Right. Never ever going to make Mellina mad.

I felt the shadows widen around us and caught a bit of the flow of the magic she was using. There was an echo of familiarity to it, not quite something I knew, but something like a second cousin to the magics I was used to working with.

I didn’t have time to think on that though since the moment Mellina’s spell embraced her, Idrina’s eyes shot open and focused directly on us.

Surprise passed instantly into confusion when she saw who had appeared before her.

“You’re here?” she asked.

“Yeah. Mellina’s magic is making it possible,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be,” Idrina said.

“I know. You shouldn’t be either,” I said, stepping forward but not over the line of burning silver dust.

“It’s my fault the Reaving Beasts escaped,” she said. “I deserve this.”

“It is very much not your fault, and you absolutely deserve better than this,” I said.

“I’m not going to speak of seeing you here,” she said. It was the answer to the obvious plea I would be making, assuming I was desperate to avoid the punishment she was signing up for.

“You should,” I said. “In fact I think you have to.”

“Why?” Idrina asked. “I haven’t said anything to them yet. You’re safe, they don’t know that you were here at all.”

“Because if you go to Trial, I’ll have to tell them the truth and it would look a lot better for you if you bring it up first and then I confirm it,” I said. It wasn’t safe or wise, but my Advisor wasn’t away for the day, and I knew at this point that he had my back.

“Why would you do that?” Idrina asked.

“Because they are going to kill you,” I said. “They are looking for someone to pin this on and that someone should be the person who’s actually responsible not the one who did her duty and has done nothing wrong in her life.”

“I killed you,” Idrina said, daring me to disagree.

“Which was your duty,” I said. “Also, I’m noticeably not dead.”

“It wasn’t duty,” she said. “It was fear. I reacted out of fear. That wasn’t how the duel was supposed to go.”

That was oddly comforting? But also not something I had the time to unpack just then.

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t deserve to die for this. I don’t either but between the two of us, if they’re going to take a shot at someone, I damn well want it to be me.”

“No,” Idrina said. “You’re not responsible for this.” She gestured to the devastation around us. “This was my carelessness. This was my mistake. Whatever you came here intending to do, I was the one who lost control and allowed this to happen.”

“Only because I choked you out,” I said.

“Weakness isn’t an excuse,” she said.

“You’re not weak!” I probably shouldn’t have screamed that, but Mellina’s spell seemed to hold through it. “You’re not weak and you have nothing to prove to anyone. You know if we went again, you would win. I know that too and I’ll admit it right here and now if you will just tell them the truth.”

A strange, sad smile crossed her lips as she met my eyes. 

“What I say won’t matter. I can either face this alone, or I can drag you down with me. If you think they are looking for someone to blame for this, believe me they will be just as happy to assign that blame to two as to one. Please, I know I don’t have the right to ask this, but please, believe in me. I will not fail in this Trial. I am strong enough to keep us both safe.”

I wanted to argue more, to make her see that she didn’t need to go it alone like that, but that was when the instructors arrived to take her away.

“Have I ever knowingly covered up or impeded the investigation of a crime against the Empire or one of it’s duly swore representatives? Why no, of course not. What a ridiculous concept. Is it not clear that I am pledged, body and soul to this great Empire and the Empress in whose divine name we all labor so diligently? I would expect centuries of service would have made that clear.

Well, yes, my labors of late have been a trifle less than diligent. And yes, it has been a number of decades since the Empire has needed my services in a military capacity. Really though, what is a decade or so of being at loose ends and left to one’s own devices? I mean, you know what they say, ‘with no power, comes no responsibility’. 

Oh, the covering up of crimes, right. A dreadful topic, but we should get back to it. You say you found the assassin who relieved the world of the burden of the former Baron of Ropeturn and she was hiding in my house? Well of course she was there. I mean, I was the one who hired her, it seemed a reasonable part of her compensation package to provide free food and lodging while we looked for a suitable dress for her coronation as the new Baron.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame, moments before presenting a mountain of evidence confirming the former-Baron Ropeturn’s treachery against the Empress, the Empire in general, and the Imperial treasury in particular.

I’d always assumed that Doxle, being a demon, was touched by more than his fair share of madness. He’d made a pact with me after all and so far that had caused him nothing but trouble. To offer praise for what I’d done though? That suggested he probably didn’t know what I’d actually been up to. At least part of me hoped he didn’t since he might feel very differently about me if he knew the kinds of things I was really capable of.

“You’re proud of me?” I asked, because he’d had been nice so far and he deserved a chance to take back what he said before either of us regretted it..

“Inestimably so. To be perfectly honest I thought it would take far longer to convince you to act so openly against your Imperial overseers. I’d, quite foolishly it appears, had the niggling worry that your desire to be admitted to the Academy included some hopes towards getting a ‘proper Imperial education’. Always depressing when the societal conditioning takes hold, and quite the nuisance to scrub out of a promising mind.”

I followed most of that, but also didn’t.

“Don’t you work for the Empire though?” I asked.

“Once? Of a certainty. Once I was the very embodiment of faith in the nobility of our righteous society and the Most Divine Empresses Holy Rule. Well, I suppose there are those who would argue about that point, but they, sadly, are not here to contradict me.”

“Something happened though?” I asked, guessing that part easily enough, but without a clue as to what Doxle’s history might be like.

“Yes. I met her. The Empress.”

“And?” Why people gave obviously incomplete explanations of things was complete a mystery to me. 

I am aware that my tendency to give no answer at all is equally annoying, but I’ve been pretending to be a human for so long that some degree of hypocrisy seems an unavoidable side effect.

“And she knocked those silly ideas right out of my head.”

“Why?” I could have asked a better, more insightful question, but I’d been a puddle a few minutes prior and I still hadn’t been fed.

“Because she knew what the Empire was really like, and she decided to be kind to me for some unfathomable reason,” Doxle said. “What’s amazing is that you seem to have arrived at the same place without such aid.”

“I don’t know where I am.” I didn’t mean to disagree with him, but he seemed so happy and excited I didn’t want to leave him disappointed when I turned out not to be what he thought I was.

“As an expert observer of the phenomena, I would say that you on the edge of collapse,” Doxle said. “The wrong side of the edge in fact, unless I miss my guess.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “I’m okay now though.”

“You are surviving. Never mistake that for being a sufficient state for life to leave you in. You deserve more. Everyone does.”

“It’s the best I seem to be able to manage at the moment,” I said. If I was expected to work to do better than that I was pretty sure I’d fall apart completely.

“And your best is remarkable,” Doxle said. “But let’s see if we can’t make things a little easier for you, no?”

I had no idea what he was talking about until I felt strength flowing back into me.

The phantom agonies that were still resonating in my arms and body were washed away by the rejuvenating tide that swept through me.

In between one blink and the next, the dark clouds rolled back from my vision and the room came into clear focus.

The surge of energy and strength was so profound I felt like I was going to explode but the moment I was back at full power, it shut off.

“There, that should help complete the deception I would think,” Doxle said, sitting back in his chair.

Before I’d only heard the smile he was wearing, but seeing it on his face was somehow still surprising. He really did seem to be happy? With me?

“Deception?” I asked.

“You have but ten minutes till your next Evaluations begins,” he said. “If you were to show up as bedraggled as you were even the least observant of your instructors would stand a decent chance to connecting you with the disappearance of their precious Reaving Beasts.”

Which meant he did know what I’d done.

That was both comforting and disturbing, and I resolved to think about neither aspect of it unless I absolutely had to.

“If I show up hungry they’ll wonder too won’t they?” I asked, my stomach chiming in with a timely rumble.

“Indeed. I suggest you and your housemates take another half hour and show up for the Evaluation late. You won’t be the only slackers, but you may be the only ones who will be punished for it. As your instructors are doubtlessly looking for an excuse to punish you all anyways, this will be most agreeable to them and will play into their preconception that you have joined the Academy simply because I demanded it.”

“Why would they think that?” I asked.

“They’re under the impression that you are my pawn in a game to liberate a new avenue of funding as my usual ones are proving insufficient to cover the lifestyle I wish to lead,” Doxle said. “There were several disagreements on that count last night which have been settled with the bare minimum of blood loss by all the parties.”

It occurred to me that he’d shown up in my room reeking of blood, which suggested that the ‘bare minimum of blood loss’ was probably still a quantity which could be measure in buckets.

“None of that is for you to worry about though,” Doxle said. “I just wanted to encourage you in your endeavors and offer what aid I could.”

“What did you do? I feel fantastic now.”

“The bond between us allows me to drain magic from you. If you look to the equations which cover that particular bit of spellcraft though, it’s rather easy to discover how to reverse the process.”

“So you fed me magic rather than drawing it out of me?”

“It’s somewhat more complex that that. I had to translate the magic I held into a form which you would be compatible with. I wouldn’t recommend it as something for most people to attempt, but then I am not most people.”

“I thought all you had was the magic you took from me though?”

“That is the impression that most people have, and it is true for a number of Advisors, so I would appreciate it if I could rely on your discretion in this regards. I do drain your magic, it’s an inevitable part of the bond, but I also have my own reserves.”

“And that’s not common for an Imperial Advisor?” 

“Not common, no. Not generally considered possible in fact, so, again, do not mention it to anyone if you would be so kind.”

“And you’re really okay with my sending the prisoners back to their homes?” I asked.

“My dear, I am delighted that you…wait, you sent them back?” I didn’t think Doxle could look happier but I was wrong. “Oh, I missed that part. Really?” He got a faraway look in his eyes for a moment before continuing. “Well now I am proud and impressed. We’ll have quite a bit too talk about once you return home tonight, but for now go, enjoy the repast which awaits you, and should your instructors come up with a new Evaluation to replace the battles against the Reaving Beasts, I trust you will treat them with all the respect they are due.”

Grammy had used that phrase in, I was pretty sure, the exact same manner as Doxle intended me to take it, where the respect due those who were abusing their positions of authority was nonexistent or even negative value.

That wasn’t important though. What was important was that I was free to leave and get some of the delicious food that I could smell was being wolfed down as we spoke.

I turned when I got to the door, despite the pangs in my stomach and gave a glance back at Doxle who still had a look of profound surprise and happiness on his face.

“Thanks,” I said and left unstated whether that was for the rejuvenating boost of energy, his acceptance of what I’d done, or the encouragement he’d provided. It was, of course for all of those things and more.

Doxle shook off his reverie for a moment, met my gaze, and simply nodded before adding a gesture for me to go and eat.

Which I immediately did.

“You look like you’re feeling better!” Narla said as I plopped down beside Mellina and opposite her. 

Our seating arrangement seemed to have settled on Ilyan and Yarrin flanking Narla with Mellina and I on the opposite side of the table from them. I wondered if we should recruit someone else for balanced – the empty seat on my left felt like a placeholder waiting to be filled, but I had to admit that there probably wasn’t anyone who would have a reason to join House Riverbond at this point.

“Doxle had a healing spell for you?” Ilyan asked.

“I am back in perfect working order!” I said, providing as little detail as I could on how I’d arrived at that condition.

I then dug into the mound of food I’d collected before sitting down, in the hope that no one would try to grill me for information while I was filling my face.

“We’ll need to get to the evaluations in about five minutes,” Yarrin said.

“Doxle suggested we arrive late,” I said through a mouthful of food.

“Which will get us into the trouble we need to be sent on live assignments,” Mellina said. “He’s not what I expected in an Advisor.”

“He’s not like any of the Advisor’s I’ve ever met,” Ilyan said.

“That’s because he’s different from the others,” Yarrin said and then raised his hands as though he’d said something inappropriate. “I’m not giving away anything secret, he’s pretty well known for being unusual.”

“How is he unusual?” I asked.

“When the other Advisors were first summoned, each one was summoned by and pledged to the Empire itself, but they each had sponsors. One of the Great Houses would pay for the expense of the summoning with the understanding that the Advisor would be assigned to aid them. At least for a while, they’ve all moved around since. To start with though, I think the Advisors were usually summoned because there were casters that the Great Houses needed to bring under control for political reasons or marriages or whatever,” Yarrin said.

“Doxle said he’s only ever had one pact bond at a time though,” I said. “Was he brought over for someone specific?”

“I don’t think anyone knows,” Yarrin said. “What I heard was that the Empress summoned him personally and that it was the last thing she did before the Calamity that froze her in Eternal Ice.”

“I too have been pressed beyond the limits of all endurance and forbearance. Driven unto  the point of total breakdown, bereft of all strength and will. It is from times such as these that an important lesson can be learned however: value your laziness. It is not a moral failing, it is the mind’s stalwart protection against the depredations thrown at the scant resources available to us.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame after taking out the garbage.

While laying on the floor as a featureless blob of goo made for a great disguise, it wasn’t a perfect one. With as much speed as they’d fled the prison, the people who were supposed to be guarding the Reaving Beasts returned and were put to work cleaning up the wreckage of the cells and the adjoining rooms. I was lucky beyond words that the people I’d freed had gone on as complete a rampage as they had. I was even luckier than Mellina and Yarrin came looking for me when I didn’t exit the prison in anything like a reasonable amount of time.

“She’s right here,” Yarrin’s ghostly voice whispered less than a foot from where I was doing my best impression of nothing whatsoever.

“I can feel her with my magic but I can’t see her,” Mellina said. 

That made me feel a little better. If I was hidden from someone that close to me then I wasn’t in as much danger as I thought yet.

Mellina and Yarrin, on the other hand, were in “that much” danger though. The space in the prison was limited enough that a worker would eventually bump into them and then all the anti-magic effects in the world were certain to come popping out of the woodwork.

Since it had been a lengthy five whole minutes from when Idrina was taken away I’d…well I really hadn’t been able to recover much strength at all, but some of my usual magic reserves were refilling. Enough that I was able to manage the change back to my human form. In theory something smaller, like a mouse would have taken less energy, but what I was primarily lacking was control and focus and my human form was by far the easiest to manage in that regards. It was just so comfy and natural and sliding back into knocked a few stones off the mountain of exhaustion I was buried under.

What the transformation didn’t fix, and what I didn’t seem to have the energy, focus, or control for however was fixing my vision.

“Here,” I whispered, once I’d finished morphing to a puddle of girl at their feet rather than just a puddle.

“Grab that sheet,” Mellina said. “No one will notice it’s missing.”

I was momentarily afraid that was something I was expected to do, but a moment later I felt Yarrin wrapping a course canvas sheet around me. 

“Clothes,” I managed to say, proud of myself for forming the thought that we shouldn’t leave the clothes I’d been wearing behind since they would make for rather incriminating evidence.

“I’ve got those too,” Yarrin said. 

“Can you walk?” Mellina asked, even though it sounded like she knew the answer already.

“Yeah,” I lied.

I don’t think it was unreasonable to expect my legs to perform their assigned duty. They hadn’t been the body parts that had been torn apart repeatedly by opening and clearing rifts. In the grand scheme of things they really had very little to complain about at all.

The counterargument they proposed went something like this: “Oww. You. Are. Stepping On Broken Glass!”

As counterarguments went it was a well reasoned and compelling one. 

“Help her,” Mellina said and I felt my right arm – wow it was nice to have an intact right arm again – being supported by Yarrin’s shoulder. 

Leaving prison was less fun than it had been a few days prior and this time I didn’t get to punch a jailer in the face. On the other hand I got to make sure that this prison wasn’t going to be misused again for a while and left behind a storm of chaos which gave me a warm little glow inside, so there were some upsides.

 Mellina didn’t drop the shadow cloak from us until I’d had a chance to change back into my clothes, by which point Ilyan and Narla had managed to evade their pursuers and circle back to join us.

“So were you able to bust out the Reaving Beasts?” Ilyan asked.

“It seemed like there was plenty of commotion at least,” Narla said.

“And what was up with my sister?” Ilyan asked.

“Give her a moment,” Mellina said. “She’s not in good shape.”

“We’ll need to be careful about going to the healers,” Narla said. “They’ll be watching for anyone who got hurt since we’re all supposed to be safe at lunch.”

“I don’t need a healer,” I said. “My body’s fine.”

“Is it?” Mellina asked.

I felt a slight waft of air in front of my face and smelled her move her hand in front of me.

“Oh, well, apart from my eyes I guess,” I said. “Caught a slight case of blindness.”

“Doing what?” Narla asked.

“You really don’t want to know,” I said. “It was stupid even for me.”

“What happened with the Reaving Beasts? Did they do this to you? Or was it my sister?” Ilyan asked, an amusingly protective tone in his voice.

“Idrina didn’t do this,” I said. “She didn’t do anything wrong at all.”

Mellina gave a single snort which managed to convey a world of disbelief without putting any of it into words.

“We had a discussion,” I said. “With our fists. She  was very polite about it though.”

I mean, she was, but I could hear how that sounded too.

“The Reaving Beasts didn’t do this to me either. This was all my own doing,” I added, hurrying past any further discussion of how Idrina and I resolved our impasse.

“Why?” Ilyan asked.

It wasn’t much of a question, but it was a good one.

“I needed a lot more of my magic than I normally use,” I said. “Turns out it came with a price tag.”

“Will you get better?” Narla asked.

“Don’t know. This has never happened before.” There wasn’t any reason to lie to them, and being blind wasn’t the end of the world for me. I wasn’t used to relying on only my other senses, but I could, at least for a while.

“If it’s backlash, the effects should fade,” Yarrin said. “It’s a strange backlash though since your magic doesn’t seem to be focused on manipulating light?”

“Backlashes can mess you up with some really strange effects though,” Narla said. “I had a cousin with water magic who backlashed himself into being randomly intangible to metal for a couple days.”

I didn’t think my blindness was the result of a backlash – I hadn’t lost control of my magic during the whole grueling process of sending the prisoners back home – but explaining that seemed like a lengthy endeavor.

“We should go back home and have Pastries or someone make us a quick lunch,” I said. “We’ll need that as an excuse for where we were.”

Food was a sentiment everyone could get behind and so we set off, once again hidden by one of Mellina’s shadow cloaks so that no one would notice exactly when we went back to Doxle’s place.

With the Academy grounds being smooth and level and a crowd of four other people to navigate by, I didn’t think it’d be hard to manage the journey home. Mellina’s shadows binding me into my form even felt comfortable for a change since they allowed me to relax a bit and not worry that my less-than-entirely-stable-at-the-moment magic would warp me into an odd shape if I didn’t pay attention to it.

When I tripped regardless of all that though Narla caught me and whisked me up into her arms.

I opened my mouth to protest that I was fine but Narla jiggled me a bit to interrupt that  idiocy.

“Why don’t you take a break. I think maybe you’ve done enough for a little bit, okay.” She was most definitely not asking for a reply there or permission. She probably should have asked, but as embarrassing as it was to be carried like a baby, I couldn’t argue that she kind of had a point.

Also that let me take my attention away from keeping myself upright and onto the important things in life, like worrying!

“Your sister got arrested,” I said, assuming people would know I was talking to Ilyan. “Falsely arrested.” I amended to make sure they knew how wrong it was. It was the height of eloquence. Or the best I could manage. One of those two.

Yeah, rocking back in forth in Narla’s arms was not helping me stave off the exhaustion I was feeling.

“Are you sure?” Ilyan asked.

“Yeah. Heard ‘em put the cuffs on her,” I said. I didn’t like that sound. I didn’t like magic suppressing anything, but especially not shackles. Had enough of that in prison.

With a groan I tried to force myself back to wakefulness. Letting my thoughts go all sleep-loopy was not going to help anyone, and Idrina almost certainly needed our help.

“She’ll be fine,” Ilyan said. “She’s never broken a rule in her life. The worst they’re going to do is throw a disapproving glance at her before they drop some new award at her feet.”

“They think she let all the prisoners out though,” I said.

“Why would she have gone back if she did that?” Narla asked.

“They’ll invent some reason,” Yarrin said. 

“If they propose something dreadful, we could help her escape from it,” Mellina suggested. “If it’s bad enough you might be able to talk her into joining House Riverbond.”

Ilyan laughed.

“Sorry. Have you met my sister though? The last time I talked her into anything was, uh, never. She knows everything that’s expected of her and that is exactly what she does. All the time. No matter what.”

Which, I noticed, wasn’t actually true.

By rights, Idrina shouldn’t have fought me, and certainly not fairly. Heck she took a handicap into our fight with the distraction of the spear fan she was casting. If she’d been following the rules, she would have calmly left (or fought through us) and then gone to inform the relevant authorities. 

Fighting me herself might have merely been an act of hubris, but the fact that she covered for me afterwards? That was not at all the behavior of someone who follows all the rules all the time.

And I’d lain there like a blob while they dragged her away?

“I can stand,” I said a spark of anger pushing my fatigue away.

“Good. Cause we’re here,” Narla said and dropped me gently (and on my feet) in front of the door to Doxle’s home.

Rather than one of the mist women, Doxle himself was there to greet us.

“Returned for lunch?” he asked. “Your repast awaits you in the dining room.”

I raised a hand slightly to ask how he could possibly have known we’d be coming back when no mention had been made of returning to our dorms as being an allowed possibility but decided not to bother. Food was waiting and I really didn’t need to know why, just that I could smell at least twelve different dishes and each one promised to be more delicious than the last.

 “If I could have a moment of your time Lady Kati,” Doxle said as we all filed in.

I suppressed a groan. A ‘word’ meant no food right away. Also I had a guess what he wanted to talk about and I wasn’t in the mood to be scolded, even if what I’d done was worth it.

Letting my shoulders and head slump, I gestured for the others to go enjoy the wonderful food, while I got to sit through a lecture and they, fast friends and trusted companions that they were, scampered off without a second look backwards.

Doxle led me into a study that we’d used before and I plopped into the chair that I’d plopped into the last time we’d been in the room.

“I’d like to ask what you have to say for yourself,” Doxle began, seeming terribly, terribly severe.

And then he dropped into the chair opposite mine with a hugely delighted smile on his face and added, “but first I must congratulate you. That was magnificent. I really could not be more proud of you!”

“As amusing as this is, I’m afraid a terrible mistake has been made here. What’s that? Do I wish to enter a plea of ‘Not Guilty’ at this late date? No. That would be silly. I am quite thoroughly guilty, I assure you. 

Oh, of the charges placed against me? Well, yes, certainly of those too. Yes, with full knowledge and malice aforethought. It would be hard to imagine doing all that without malice now wouldn’t it? And, I mean, they were rather richly deserving of said malice, as I should think everyone would agree.

You wouldn’t? Ah, that’s not what this jury is here to deliberate? Yes, yes, I understand, but again, I feel it is imperative to explain a rather crucial detail which has been overlooked.

What detail is that?  

Why that consequences are what happen to other people.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame’s defense plea while half submerged in molten lead, moments before ‘The High Pass Incident’.

So I opened a rift to take the nice spider-lady home.

That sounds so easy right? Just cast the spell, make a doorway or something and send the good and valorous Miss Lilinelle back to her home dimension, rinse and repeat for the six other dimensions the rest of the ‘Reaving Beasts’ called home.

Even with a fairly good template to follow on how to weave the rifting spell and the innate foolishness to think crafting one was a good idea, I was nowhere near clueless enough to believe it was going to be either easy or a good idea overall.

To start the rift, I reached within myself. Not a great spot to begin tearing open the fabric of reality, but that’s where my magic is and sometimes you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.

Pressing my pincers together (since I was sharing Lilinelle’s giant spider form still), I called magic into their tips and held it there, giving it no form or function to flow into, letting the unnatural power eat away at the world I was standing in. 

If I’d focused on it, I could have reached through the vortex of magic to the origin of my power and pulled through the ever changing nature of that realm to give the unleashed power some shape and purpose. Without that, the hole the magic ate in the world grew and grew.

Letting uncontrolled rifts grow indefinitely ranks right up there on the “Obviously a Bad Idea” scale but, as Lilinelle was not a small spider-person, I couldn’t be anywhere near as careful with it as I wanted to be.

“What are you conjuring-crafting-calling?” Lilinelle asked, as she and rest of the people the Academy had kidnapped and imprisoned started to back away from me.

“A path-door-thread home,” I said.

“There is no safety, no home, no refuge in what you are making,” Lilinelle said.

“Not yet.” Holding a conversation while casting wasn’t making the spell any easier and with Idrina’s example of what could happen when a caster lost focus fresh in my mind, I decided that any further explanations weren’t going to do any of us any good.

Especially since I was at the hard part.

With the rift grown to about ten feet tall, it was time to make it into a proper portal.

My adopted world, the one I’d spent more than decade in, does not appreciate portals. It does not appreciate them with the fury of a blazing sun and the rancor of a room full of razor blades, both of which I felt like it brought to bear on me as I drew in a deep breath to synch with Lilinelle’s essence, reached into the rift, and finally cast a shape onto the wild magic that raged within it.

As soon as the rift had any definition whatsoever, the reality around me seized on that and tried to obliterate it. From a squishy, nebulously defined, vaguely oval-ish shape the rift shatter-froze into a tunnel of spikes and spears and blades of sharpest glass.

No one could move through that without being sliced to shreds.

And of course it was shrinking fast, as the world struggled to close the wound in itself.

Which meant I got the job of keeping it open.

And blunting the blades.

I should note that I am not uniquely armored against the damage a tunnel of rift shards can inflict. They are, in fact, perfectly capable of slicing me to ribbons, and that hurts exactly as much as you might imagine it would. Well, probably more than you can imagine since it was a good deal more than I could until I stuck my hands and body into the tunnel to blunt the crystalline edge the hard way.

Once good thing though? Screaming into a rift means the sound is cast beyond the world and no one on the originating side of the rift can hear a thing. Dignity preserved!

“It’s solid-anchored-transversable,” I said as I dropped what was left of my arms and body back out of rift, while struggling to hold it open with the two arms that I had left. “Go. Now. Please.”

“Not without you-savior-friend,” Lilinelle said.

“Yes. Without me. I need to help the others.” My breathing was not doing well. Which was indicative of all of the rest of me, so at least my body was being consistent.

“Why help? Flee now. Leave others. Too much pain. Save self.” she asked.

“Can’t. Failed before. Won’t fail again.” I said.

Which was enough for her.

With eight scurrying legs she vanished into the portal and passed through back to her own realm.  I had no idea what waited for her there but there were six more portals to open and precious little time to do so.

Releasing the form of the portal magic, I let it return to a column of reality devouring (rather than arm and body devouring) energy. Reality, as I mentioned, was unhappy with that and was doing it’s best to close the proto-rift and, with all due respect to my adopted world, it was really good at that. So much so that I had to delve deeper into my magic than I usually did.

Deep enough that the world started growing darker around me.

Like I was sinking into the Bathypelagic.

Which should have been concerning.

Like ‘flee in terror and never ever cast a spell like that again’ levels of concerning.

But I had six more to cast.

So that wasn’t an option.

The next closest ‘Reaving Beast’ (I really hate that name), was a lovely eight armed gentleman by the name of Ooasoolai.

“Us of you not are,” he said and I had to shift a little further towards him for my transformation to give me a clear understanding of his meaning.

“I am other. I change to you. To talk. To understand. To find your home. To good water and gentle flows I can send you.”

“Pain. You will suffer for this.” He wasn’t questioning whether it would happen but rather why.

“Suffering flows. Sinks away. Your safety remains.”

Nodding wasn’t something he could do, but the undulations which passed through him served more or less the same purpose.

Sometimes the first time you cast spell is the hardest. You make mistakes, you spend a lot more power on than you need to, it backlashes on you to various degrees. The next time though? With the knowledge of the first casting behind you, the next time is so much easier.

The portal spell was not like that.

I want to say I spent less time screaming into the void.

I want to say that mostly because lying makes me sound a lot cooler than I actually am.

Also the truth really isn’t that important.

All that matters is that in the end, I opened seven portals and managed to shift into the mighty form of…a small, easily overlooked pool of slime. I’d managed to attain said mighty form by the time the guards for the Reaving Beast Restraint Area returned, which turned out to be perfect since I was not only unthreatening but also pretty much noticeable in the devastation that remained of the prison room.

I was even still conscious enough (mostly) to hear just how upset they were.

Learned a bunch of new profanities that day.

I couldn’t see at that point of course. The darkness from the spellcasting had pretty much annihilated my sight no matter what form I shifted into but that was okay. I was a puddle of goo and not feeling like I had even the vaguest capability of being anything more ever again.

Doxle was going to be so unhappy. If he was draining my power at all then the poor man was definitely going into starvation mode at that moment. 

But it was worth it.

Thinking back to the people I’d sent through those portals, it was worth it.

“What in all the hells did you do here!” It was one of the guards who said that. He sounded like he was tall. Probably built like a small house too. The Academy seemed to prefer that in their guards.

I suppose I could have fired off a worry that he was talking to me but, first, who would ask that of a small puddle in a corner when the entire prison was in ruins, and, second, I just did not give a single solitary damn about what the guards or anyone else might do to me.

“I came to help get the Beasts under control,” Idrina said.

Which is how I discovered that I apparently did have the ability to worry about something still.

“Help get them under control? Under control? Does this look like we’ve got them under control?” The guard was screaming, which wasn’t a good look for a grown man when faced with what was demonstrably not much of a crisis anymore.

“The smoke is clearing,” Idrina said, her voice a bit more uneven than I could remember hearing it. That might have been residual fatigue from the spell backlash that ended our fight or it might have been shock at the state of the prison room.

The last I’d seen, before darkness had swallowed the last of my vision, the other prisoners vented quite a lot of anger and frustration on the contents of the room while I opened the portals for them. I was pretty sure the room wasn’t going to be usable as a prison again any time soon, and there was an outside possibility that they’d done enough damage that a total collapse was imminent. If so, the room wouldn’t be able to function as a habitable space of any kind within the next five to ten minutes.

No that was not enough to motivate me to get up and leave.

“No kidding the smoke is clearing! Do you notice what else is clearing!?” He was still screaming. It still wasn’t a good look. “Anything seem to be missing from here? Anything large and ugly and probably going to EAT US ALL!”

I was sort hoping that Idrina would stab him. I felt it would do him some good. Or at least let me go back to resting.

“Where did the Beasts go? They didn’t leave through the entry hatch,” Idrina asked, not sounding especially concerned with the fact that they were missing, only perplexed by the mystery of how they’d vanished.

“That’s a good question. That’s a very good question Miss Cadet. Maybe you’d like to give us the answer, seeing as you were the last one in here.” He’d stopped screaming. He didn’t sound any more calm or sane, but I wasn’t worried for Idrina yet. If he tried anything she didn’t like she would take him apart. I had infinite faith that she could take all of the guards in the room in fact.

I had missed something though.

“What is this about a cadet being the last person present during an emergency?” The voice belonged to one of the Academy’s instructors. I didn’t remember his name because I didn’t care about him.

“I took time during our meal period to familiarize myself with the enemies we would encounter, sir,” Idrina said with a crispness which told me she had snapped to rigid attention.

“And who authorized this Cadet?” the instructor asked.

“I undertook this action on my own, sir,” Idrina said.

“And were you the last one to leave this facility?” the instructor asked.

To which the answer was ‘no’ and Idrina obviously knew that. 

“I did not see anyone leave after me, sir,” she said which was technically true and something she should never have done for me.

“In that case the burden of suspicion must land on you,” the instructor said. “Guards place this cadet under arrest.”

In any sane world, the guards would have been choking on their own entrails less than a second after the instructor uttering those words, but I don’t get to live in a sane world. Instead, I got to listen to Idrina quietly submit to being bound in magic suppressing shackles.

Which was about the farthest thing from acceptable that I could imagine so I leapt back into my proper form to give them the smackdown that she, for whatever reason, wasn’t willing to.

Or rather I tried to leap back into my proper form.

My puddle body managed two ripples before I collapsed back into an inert goo.

I wanted to help her.

I wanted to fight.

I just didn’t have it in me.

“There are always obstacles which appear before us in life, particularly when we have the least time to deal with them. This is, occasionally, the work of some clever adversary or another, but most often I find it to simply be life itself which enjoys tormenting us at every possible opportunity.”

– Xindir Harshel Doxle of the First Flame

Say what you will about fire, it’s hard to deny that it’s an excellent motivator. One minute the hidden prison until the Academy’s stables was quiet and calm, the next smoke was pouring into the Reaving Beast Restraint Area and guards were fleeing hither and yon. 

I could have waited until they abandoned the Beast Stables but I had no idea how well our plan was going to work or for how long.

“If this goes wrong, run,” I whispered to Mellina and crept through the thick smoke to the first Beast Pen. 

Or I tried to.

There was only one small problem.

In place of an all-concealing cloud of smoke, a small area in front of the first pen had a fan blowing in front of it.

A fan of conjured spears magicked into a spoke-like formation which were twirling fast enough to push the smoke away.

Standing in the center of cleared out area a girl stood with her back to me.

“You came to inspect the Reaving Beasts before we faced them too?” Idrina said without turning around.

I tapped Mellina on the shoulder and gestured for her to step back.

Idrina was not her problem.

“Something like that,” I said, stepping forward into the clearing in the smoke.

“The smoke was Ilyan’s idea wasn’t it?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder.

“He wasn’t opposed to it,” I said.

“They’ll catch you for this,” Idrina said.

“They might,” I admitted, since she was almost certainly right at this point. “Still worth it though.”

“I didn’t think you would seek to excel at the fighting evaluation?” Idrina asked. 

We were not having a friendly chat. She was sizing me up, the same as I was her. That she was managing to do so while maintain a spell like the spear fan over our head filled me with both appreciation and a fair bit of dread.

“That’s not why I’m here,” I said. I figured the truth would be more confusing for her than anything else and a confused and questioning Idrina was an Idrina who didn’t have her whole head in the game when it came to stabbing me.

“Because you don’t think you need to understand your foes?” she asked with just the hint of insulted pride in her voice.

With the smoke in place it was more difficult to pick out olfactory cues than normal but I could swear I was catching hints of sadness from Idrina, which did not add up at all.

“Because I don’t want them to be my foes,” I said. “I don’t think we should be fighting them at all. They didn’t agree to this and they don’t deserve it.”

The fan blades slowed noticeably as Idrina tried to absorb my words. 

“And how would you accomplish that?” she asked at last. “Talk them out of it?”

“Something like that,” I said. In truth it was something exactly like that plus some spell casting that I probably shouldn’t be attempting. In my defense though, it was the Academy’s fault for giving me both a reason to attempt it and a template to build the spell around. 

“I believe I’m supposed to stop you then,” Idrina said. “Interfering with official Academy evaluations is explicitly forbidden in the by-laws.”

I can’t say I was surprised either by her knowledge of the rules and regulations, or that she’d chose to stand in support of them. Maybe a tiny bit disappointed but since there had been no rational reason to assume Idrina would do anything but oppose me here I kicked my feelings aside.

“We could do a lot of damage if we fight here,” I said which seemed like a sensible counter argument to her opposing me, except for the part where I didn’t have the time to take our fight anywhere else.

“Fists only,” she offered. “No weapons. No spells.”

I blinked and caught myself from rocking back in surprise.

“That would be acceptable to you?” I asked. Given that she had an active buzzsaw of blades hanging over our head, her offering to forego her best and most comfortable options was almost sweet.

Or the smoke was getting to me.

That was also a possibility.

“No spells and no transformations,” she amended, which was what I’d understood her to mean in the first place but it occurred to me that she probably couldn’t be sure yet exactly how my magic worked, and being specific was definitely the wiser course of action.

“What would you prefer as the end condition? Unconsciousness?” I asked.

“Or submission,” she said. “We still have the evaluations to do get to. Don’t make me damage you.”

“I can heal,” I said, not relishing the prospect at all. I could have made a similar demand of her but given our relative levels of skill that seemed like an overly prideful claim for me to make.

Idrina nodded, and settled into a loose fighting stand. “When you’re ready.”

As though I would ever be ready to fight someone who’d spent their whole life studying combat and refining themselves and their techniques.

I feinted that I was as close to ready as I was going to get and that was all it took.

Even without her magics Idrina was terrifyingly fast. She hit me with a punch in the stomach and one under the jaw before I fully processed that she was attacking me. 

I brought my arms up to protect my head from any more blows and she rabbit punched me in the ribs about a dozen times which hurt a lot more than it should have from someone her size and weight.

Where she had the advantage in speed though, I had it in durability. I’d built my body to be as sensitive as a normal body would be, but there were elements of how evolution had crafted the human form that I hadn’t been able to help tweaking with a few small improvements.

I wasn’t armored internally or anything like that. My organs were still soft and squishy and mostly where they should be. I’d made my bones just a bit stronger than they should have been and reinforced the connective tissues to not tear or snap under the strains a ligament or tendon could be reasonably expected to encounter. I’d even tinkered with my fat cells a little bit so that they provided extra cushioning and resilience.

All that worked in my favor but with Indrina hitting like her hands were made of solid iron it still wasn’t terribly fun trading blows with her.

So I stopped.

Punching her wasn’t going to get her to submit and with her training I wasn’t confident I could knock her out without cheating and hitting her hard enough to cause potentially fatal levels of damage. That left me with one obvious option though.

I grabbed her.

Punching is great, right up until the time when you can’t move your hands anymore.

This wasn’t a surprise to Idrina. “Grapple the boxer” is a move even small children are capable of working out. The moment I grabbed her hands (and that was not as easy as I’m making it sound), she went to work with her knees.

Knees hurt a lot when you know how to use them.

To my credit, I did to something useful in response to the hits I was taking.

I dropped to the ground.

And more importantly, I took her with me.

Idrina proved to be an excellent wrestler. Also she was bigger than me. Both of those things count for a lot. Even without transforming myself though, I was a lot stronger than she was and that counts for something too.

I also had something she didn’t to help me in our ground-level struggle – I knew human anatomy extremely well. How joints could move, how they shouldn’t move, fun combinations that they could move in, and, most importantly, the ability to move through arcs of motion that would damage me but shut off her ability to apply her strength against me. 

I didn’t like hurting myself, or her if I was being honest, but what I was trying to do was too important to go easy on either of us.

I heard a growl escape from her as she flexed against me and writhed, trying everything she could to escape. It was pointless. Unless my strength ran out first, I’d won at that point.

But she was not going to admit that.

Up close I could smell it.

She couldn’t admit to being beaten.

She would struggle till her heart exploded and then keep going until the blood in her veins stopped moving completely.

I twisted my hold, leveraging an arm against the sides of her neck.

Blood chokeholds are an incredibly bad idea.

They can kill far too easily.

Since it was that or let her work herself into an aneurysm though I went for it.

My plan was to release the hold in no more than two seconds whether or not it worked. If that was too short and she broke free then so be it.  I wasn’t going to kill Idrina in my fight to save the Reaving Beasts. 

As it turned out, I didn’t have to.

About a second and a half after I started to squeeze my arm against her, I managed to break her concentration. She wasn’t unconscious yet, but her hold over the fan of spear finally slipped.

Yeah. I might have forgotten to account for the fact that she was still maining a highly energetic spell.

The spears, for their part, did not forget about the momentum they’d been given. They only forgot about the forces which was holding them together.

As it turned out an exploding star of spears was extremely good at wrecking pretty much everything in their path.

The good news was the Beast cages were a whole lot easier to get into in the aftermath.

The bad news was that the backlash from the spell had succeeded in knocking Idrina out and the formerly caged Beasts weren’t particularly restrained anymore.

I turned to Mellina seeing precisely one chance to keep this from going completely to hell.

“Get her out of here,” I said.

“You need me here,” Mellina said. 

“I do. To save her. Trust me, I’ve got this,” I said, pleading that Mellina understand that I was telling the truth.

She looked at me in the growing smoke far a much longer moment than I would have preferred but ultimately nodded once and called forth a cloud of shadows to lift up Idrina and cloak them both.

That left me with, by a later count, thirteen creatures from seven different realms.

Thirteen very large and very unhappy creatures.

I could have stopped them from smashing the rest of their cages. I could have tried to preserve Imperial property like a proper Cadet, except for the fact that I couldn’t imagine any conceivable reason why I would want to do either of those things.

Instead I picked the nearest one, dropped my hands, inhaled deeply and let its scents fill me as I sunk deep into my magics.

My magics which were darker than I was used to, almost as though my dream from the night before was still lingering in the back of my mind.

From a human girl, I felt my body flow and change, taking on the shape of a spider the size of a large-ish horse.

“Weaver-Sister-Friend-Not-Foe,” I said in the hissing breaths and carefully positioned forelegs of the Archelletes (a species I had never heard of til now, but which the transformation told me so much about), “This is not our web. I see-spin-walk on strands which lead to home. Will you walk-hunt-abide in them with me?”

“This web is pain-hunger-death. I will walk-hunt-abide anywhere else you would take us Sister-Weaver-Food-Sharer,” Lilinelle the giant spider girl said.

And so I opened a rift to take her home.

“What I miss most about youth is all of the ill-advised plans I never got to enact. One hears stories all the time of wild adventures and acts of phenomenal stupidity which people engaged in during the years leading up to their more sensible adulthood. 

Sadly, such was not my life. I was, be all accounts, a perfect angel of a child. 

This was largely because I was focused exclusively on the pursuit of my mystical skills. One is unlikely to cause much mayhem when one spends every waking hour with one’s nose between the pages of a book.

I was happy enough with that at the time I suppose, but in my later years I was left with the ache of all that missing childhood foolishness and misadventures.

What? No, that explains nothing about why I act as I do now, why would you imagine such a thing?”

– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame to the Empress Eternal

Finding friendly backup waiting to support me in my latest crazed endeavor was the worst thing in the world. I had a dozen different highly effective arguments to make in support of that too. All I needed to do was pick the best one.

“Nope. No protests,” Mellina said, silencing me with a gesture as I drew in a breath to either scream at them or just scream (those were the top two counter arguments I could think of).

“You’re off to get in trouble,” Yarrin said. “We know.”

“It’s why we’re here, we need to get in trouble too, remember?” Narla said. 

I felt my toes curl in frustration. Yes, we had talked about purposefully getting on the instructors bad sides so they’d be agreeable to sentencing all of us to the Field Work program early, and yes I had been planning to do something that would put me solidly on the instructors bad sides if they found out about it, but those two things were not connected.

“Not like this!” I said, fighting to keep my aggravation from raising my voice above a whisper. “We’re supposed to make small mistakes, or be disrespectful. Not…”

Not what? Did I really want to tell them that I was sneaking off to find the Reaving Beasts so that I could send them back to their home realms? Yes, even the mindlessly murderous ones.

“Not be a part of something that’s going to splash back onto us if and when our House leader is caught – and let’s be clear that it’s definitely going to be when she’s caught because if we can predict where she’ll be then so can a lot of others?” Mellina asked with feigned sweetness.

I glared at her, but my gaze attack bounced of her shield of Actually Being Entirely Correct. That, unsurprisingly, did not make me any happier.

“There’s getting in trouble and there’s doing something that they will definitely expel me for, assuming they don’t execute me instead.” I really did not want them being a part of what I had in mind, even though I was absolutely certain it was the right thing to do.

“If it’s something that you’re willing to do that’s bad enough for them to kill you what makes you think we wouldn’t want in on it?” Ilyan asked.

I stared at him. He’d made either one of the bravest statements I’d ever heard or one of the stupidest, and I was reasonably certain he lacked enough awareness to be properly afraid of being horribly murdered which ruled out courage.

“We’re not looking to die,” Narla said, having at least a handful more functioning brain cells than Ilyan it seemed. “Mellina and Ilyan are right though. We’re in this together, like it or not. If they put you up on the gallows for a good reason, it’ll be real easy for them to find a bunch of bad ones to stick us up there with you.”

I blinked and looked from face to face. My housemates seemed to be in agreement on that.

“But…wait, shouldn’t you be trying to stop me then?” I asked. I didn’t think they could stop me, but not even bothering to make the attempt was, I’m not sure, lazy? Irrational?

“You’re aware that we saw what happened to all those guys who tried to stop you last night, right?” Ilyan said.

I frowned at him. I was not going to turn into a Dire Wolf on them. Not yet anyways.

“We’re not trying to stop you because we don’t know what you’re doing yet,” Yarrin said. “So far you’ve saved each of us, avenged Kelthas, and fought through a bunch of jerks on House Lightstone’s payroll in the Research Quarter. None of that is anything I’ve got a problem with. Make it kind of easy to give you the benefit of the doubt and ask what you’ve got in mind this time, instead of assuming you must hate me because you wouldn’t let me be part of whatever you’ve got in mind.”

“Even if what I’ve got in mind is something you’ll hate?” I asked.

Ilyan actually laughed at that. Like burst right out in a chuckle that he clamped his mouth shut to suppress before anyone could hear us.

“You would have to try very hard to make us hate you more than we hate the Houses we come from,” Mellina said.

That was probably true, but hatred wasn’t a competition. 

“Whatever it is, we should probably do it soon,” Yarrin said. “Unless you’re planning to take off for the rest of the day?”

Doxle had warned us against that particular strategy if we had a program in mind. Skipping the evaluations would mean the instructors would assign one for us, and it definitely wouldn’t be Field Work.

“I want to free the Reaving Beasts,” I said. Yarrin was right. We didn’t have time to waste. Also, if they hated me, then they could hate me. I’d rather know that about them sooner than live a life tiptoeing around a lie.

I’d expected shock, potentially outrage, maybe even a bit of fear and/or loathing.

What I got instead was mild confusion and curious glances.

“Okay? Uh, why?” Ilyan asked.

I felt like I had as many reasons for wanting to free Reaving Beast as I had days of life lived as I was. I also felt like none of that would make sense to them. I wanted to go with “Because” or, even better, my usual response of dead silence, but neither of those were going to work either.

“They don’t deserve to be slaughtered for the amusement of the instructors and the other cadets,” I said, pulling that thread of truth out from all the others.

“Huh, I thought you were going to say because they might kill more of our fellow cadets,” Narla said.

“That too.” I hadn’t been thinking about that angle consciously but it felt like it had been part of the equation nonetheless.

“You have more of a plan that that,” Mellina said. “If you just free them, they’ll be slaughtered as they run rampant,” Mellina said. “Also more than a few of our fellow Cadets and the townsfolk at large will be slain before they’re brought down.”

“I’m not going to let them run loose,” I said. “I’m going to send them back where they belong. Back to their homes.”

“Uh, that’s not possible is it?” Narla asked, looking to Yarrin and Mellina for support.

“No, it’s not,” Yarrin said, his expression transforming from disbelief, to confusion, to questioning, to an uneasy acceptance of something he alone could see. “Not for any regular caster. You’ve done it before though, haven’t you?”

“Only once,” I said. “But, yes, I can do it again.”

I was being optimistic there. The last time I’d sent a Reaving Beast home someone else had opened up a handy rift for me to let them walk back through. I thought I could duplicate that effect if I tried hard enough, but there were roughly a million different things that could go terribly wrong with that part of the plan.

“Well now I definitely want to go!” Ilyan said, with the same stupid glee a puppy offered a fresh bone might show.

“As do I,” Mellina said, an entirely different, and far hungrier tone in her voice.

Neither of their approaches made me feel better about the idea of them tagging along, but we were at the point where I could either cripple them to ensure they stayed behind or give in and let them join me.

I considered that for a bit.

The crippling option wasn’t really a bad choice. They wouldn’t be happy with it, but they’d be alive to not be happy.

In the end though, all of us wound up in the  stables since I wasn’t sure it was even possible for me to cripple Narla or Ilyan, and the idea of causing injury to Mellina or Yarrin made me physically ill.

“Well, there’s no horses here, so that’s a good sign, right?” Narla said.

We were cloaked by Mellina’s magics which just made the twenty stall stable seem that much emptier. Given the lack of straw, and the absence of any lingering scents of horse manure, it was pretty obvious that this place hadn’t functioned as a regular stable in years.

“It’ll be a bad sign if it means we run out of time looking for the Beasts,” Yarrin said.

“There’s a more important consideration,” Mellina said. “There are no guards here.

“Why would there be?” Ilyan asked. 

“Because if they had enough Reaving Beasts to send out against our entire class, they wouldn’t leave them free to break out of their cells and run amuck,” Yarrin said.

Despite the absence of horse-scents and the assorted paraphernalia a stable should have held, I knew we’d come to the right place.

“They’re not holding them above ground,” I said.

“How do you know?” Mellina asked.

“People have been through here,” I said. “Often. And there is a lot of waste magic around us.”

“She’s right,” Yarrin said. “Most of its passing up through the floor but I can see where some of it is escaping the seals on the prison door.”

“What prison door?” Ilyan asked.

“This one,” Yarrin said and traced his finger through the dust and sand in the floor at the far end of the stable.

Where his finger passed a trail of silver light was left behind and the scent of a hundred different strain of magic rose up.

The access hatch didn’t swing up, or shift to the side, it simply vanished.

Yarrin moved his fingers backwards along the pattern he’d been tracing and the access hatch reappear, complete with exactly the right coating of dust and sand to match the areas around it.

“They’re down there,” I said, the scent of so many lost life forms hitting me like a hammerblow. “But I have no idea how they got there.”

The access hatch led to a ladder which descended vertically about twenty feet. It was wide enough that that two of us could have descended at one, but that was still too small for some of the Reaving Beasts that were waiting for us.

“You’re not going to like what they do to get the Reaving Beasts in there,” Mellina said. “But that’s probably a conversation for later.”

She wasn’t wrong about that.

“There will be guards down there,” Yarrin said. “Is sending them back going to attract attention?” 

Last time I’d been hidden by a wall of fog. I think even with that they’d noticed the Reaving Beasts disappearing though.

I nodded. I could take on a form where they wouldn’t have any idea who was freeing the Beasts. Or I could take on a well known form and let them sort it out later. The guards were going to react fairly strongly to either approach though.

“That’s our job then,” Yarrin said. “Ilyan, Narla, let’s go provide a distraction.”

“What kind of distraction?” Narla asked.

“Fire. No. Fires. Those make a great distraction. We’ll light the stables on fire and make sure it look like it’ll spread down here,” Yarrin said.

“Oh hell yeah!” Ilyan said, because of course he did.

“Count me in for that twice!” Narla said, relinquishing her claim on the greater share of brain cells between the two of them.

“But…” I tried to protest, only to be shushed by Mellina again and beckoned downwards to the hidden sublevel of the stables..

“Give them a couple of minutes,” she said after they ran off and we’d made it to the entryway of the detention level. “If the plan doesn’t seem to be working, I’ll follow them and get them away with my magics,” she said. “You can come along or do whatever you need to.”

“How will we know if ‘light everything on fire’ is working?” I asked.

The choking cloud of smoke which blew down into the detention level with tornado like force wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but it was clearly the one I was going to get.

“The principal problem with being stabbed repeatedly is not the blood loss as most people would suppose. Oh, certainly if you’re burdened with a pesky limitation like ‘needing blood to survive’, the blood loss is significant. Once you’ve eliminated that particular eccentricity though, the primary issue of enduring repeated bodily trauma is that it tends to remove the aches and pains which have become familiar companions over the years and replace them with new ones. 

Where the old injuries were content to merely whimper and growl when they could catch you at unawares, the new ones are just so happy to be part of you that they’re constantly clamoring for your attention. This, I believe, is why the gods invented strong drink.”

– Xindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame

Starting the first day of Cadet Training off with a test seemed both stupid and cruel. Thanks to Doxle though I knew it was only meant to be cruel and the stupidity came from the Academy’s self-interest running rampant and trampling its initial reasons to exist into the dust.

“Think we’ll get to fight each other?” Narla asked as we changed into our official Cadet training armor.

With Mellina, we were the last three in to girls locker room, having arrived “late” (though perfectly within the posted time) thanks to Pastries’ fantastic breakfast spread. Supposedly we would have to run ten extra laps for our tardiness but breakfast had been good enough that I regretted nothing.

“Probably not,” I said. “It would be crueler for them to make you fight whoever scored lowest and me to fight the one above that.”

“What? That’s not even going to be a fight though,” Narla said. The regulation armor didn’t come close to fitting her, which wasn’t terribly surprising. What was interesting to see was that she’d apparently developed magic to deal with that problem.

Crushing the chainmail shirt in between her hands, she whispered something in a language no one else on this world spoke. “Be Bigger!” was what I heard by rippling my ears to match hers and then back to my own. When she unclenched her hands, the chainmail had indeed obeyed her order (and the magic she’d sent surging through it) with the chain shirt enlarged and morphed to fit around her shoulders, chest, and waist perfectly.

“Was that an intelligent spell?” I asked, more curious than was probably polite to be.

“Oh, yeah,” Narla said. “It’s a nice one though, I learned it when I was really little.”

Intelligent spells weren’t creatures in their own right, but they were generally tied to intelligent beings from the plane the spell’s magic was drawn from. From what I’d heard, they tended to be fiercely dangerous to work with because the denizen whose aid was requested by the spell could twist the request back on the caster, sometimes dragging the caster into their realm, sometimes dragging themselves into the caster. 

“They won’t start us with fights,” Mellina said. “We’re expecting that. They’ll start us with exams, written and verbal.”

“On what?” I asked, deciding that was probably an even crueler option that the one I’d proposed.

“A wide variety of subjects about which they expect us to know very little,” she said. “The goal is to convince us that we’re ignorant of all the important things a Cadet needs to know and that we therefor need to look to them to enlighten our poor, feeble minds.”

“And if we decide we don’t care about the tests and are fine not knowing the useless trivia they think constitutes valuable information?” I asked.

“Low scoring people will be given unpleasant tasks. High scoring people will be given perks which makes the rest of the Cadets jealous and resentful of them.”

“So which do we do? Neither one of those sounds good,” Narla said.

“We can choose to fail,” Mellina said. “Passing is at the whim of the instructor who’s grading the exams. We won’t get to see our scored test sheets for the written exams, or learn which answers we were given credit for and which were deemed incorrect. For the verbal exams, they won’t be that kind.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that if we were willing to bribe the instructors properly, we could improve our grades substantially?” I asked, more or less already aware of what the answer would be.

“Do we have gold to spend on grades now?” Mellina asked brightly but without a hint of sincerity in her voice. I’d told my housemates about going to see the escrow holder for House Riverbond with Doxle later and that we were essentially broke until I convinced them to open the purse strings for us.

“Why would you pay to be hated by everyone?” Narla asked. “It’s so easy to get that for free.”

An hour later I had a decent understanding of why one might use gold to escape the testing phase of our training.

Where the first part of the test had been a half hour sprint through a hundred pages of explanatory text and the questions which were scattered randomly within it, the next five hours were a face-to-face interview where students were called forth to sit in front of all of the rest of the Cadets and face a panel of judges.

Cadets were called in a random order, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs or trios. Each set were asked questions which, according to the judges, were part of the reading materials we’d been given.

The Cadets who’d breezed through the Trials breezed mostly breezed through the interview questions too, though it looked like that was more a case that they’d been given the questions they would be asked before hand rather than the judges pitching them obviously easy ones.

The first time I was called up, it was alone, and I was given twice the number of questions as the group before me. All of them were phrased in as convoluted a manner as possible and covered obscure and exacting points of Imperial doctrine regarding the privileges and responsibilities of ill defined ranks in the hierarchy of the Great Houses.

“I have no idea,” was my answer to all of the question, except for one on the size of the annual allowance for footwear due a landless second daughter from her elder sister who had married into a non-ranked household of another Great House. Grammy had mentioned a story about that once and so I was both surprised and certain that I knew the answer.

And they told me I was wrong.

I wanted to fight them over the point since looking like an idiot in front of a full class of cadets wasn’t exactly fun, but I held my tongue. I could murder every one of the judges and still not win that fight.

My housemates didn’t fare much better than I did, though Mellina answered two of her first three questions well enough to get “partial credit” and Yarrin answered his with perfect accuracy only to be shot down on each one as the judges changed the definition of the question out from under him. 

The only other cadet whose answers I paid attention to was Idrina. She was given six questions. She answered four of them correctly, and the last two were “partials” only because the judges cut her off before she could finish giving the correct answer.

I was sitting three rows back and I could feel the rage radiating off her from that distance but, like I had, she didn’t bother fighting it. 

This wasn’t a test. It was public humiliation. We could argue for fairness, but the Academy had no interest in fairness and none to give out. They wanted us angry and defeated, and after a few minutes I saw that the right answer was to give them neither.

That belief was put to the test when the “grades” were given out and I was at the bottom of the list.

“Those who have shown more brawn than intellect,” the head judge said, “will be assigned child’s implements for this afternoon’s sparring and bestial combat sessions. Those who have proven their mastery of the basic information all Cadets were assumed to be in possession of as a prerequisite to application will be granted the use of their choice of armaments, with the most gifted being allowed to select a prestige weapon from those supplied by the courtesy and grace of House Lightstone.”

Most of the Cadets seemed to be caught up by the idea of ‘prestige weapons’ but the bit that drew my attention was the judge’s mention of ‘bestial combat sessions’.

Sparring I’d been expecting. Combat against more Reaving Beasts though? I was neither prepared for nor willing to partake in that. 

That was true in spite of Yarrin making a good case earlier for why we needed to join the Field Work program, which would absolutely involve working with, and likely fighting, Reaving Beasts in the wild.

“We’ll be expected to arm and outfit ourselves for battle on Field Work assignments,” he said. “The people who want us dead will still attack us, but that will happen no matter where we are. If we’re stuck with mucking out the latrines, we’ll be at too great a disadvantage when those who wish to see us dead make their move.”

“But if we’re in a Reaving Storm, or fighting a Reaving Beast, won’t they be able to catch us while we’re distracted?” Ilyan asked. “There’s a lot that can go wrong on those hunts, even without people creating accidents on purpose.”

“I’ll be able to see any traps they leave for us,” Yarrin said. “If we throw our attackers into their own traps once or twice, they’ll stop trying to use them, and we won’t have a better opportunity to do that and get away with it than with a Reaving Storm to cover our tracks.”

Going out on a Field Work assignment wasn’t a great option, but compared to the others it seemed like the right call. The biggest downside was that it would bring us into conflict with the Reaving Beasts that came forth from the storm. 

I’d talked one such creature into returning to its home, and I had every intention of repeating that for every Reaving Beast I came across if I could. As Yarrin had said, a Reaving Storm could cover up a lot of activity.

If they were making us fight Reaving Beasts on the grounds though, there wouldn’t be any Reaving Storm to hide within. It would be me and another beast with no options aside from killing each other or being killed together by the staff of the Academy.

“If we have time before the sparring starts, would you be able to help me get somewhere?” I whispered to Mellina.

“Where?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said, knowing that to call the idea I had a ‘plan’ was laughably over valuing it.

“There are many places it’s not wise for us to go,” she said.

I paused at those words.

She was not wrong.

I had been though.

Asking her to help me did nothing but put her in danger for a cause that I didn’t want to explain to her and that she would likely not be in favor of. I could be selfish, and I could be cruel, but I owed Mellina better than that.

“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t go charging off after stupid ideas all the time.”

I was being honest there. She was right, and I knew my idea was stupid. I was still going to charge off to do it, but doing so without bringing anyone else into danger was at least bordering on an intelligent option I felt.

We were ordered to the mess hall for a midday meal, something I’d heard the common tier Cadets weren’t being given, and instructed that once the meal was complete, we would begin our sparring matches.

That gave me something like an hour to work with, and so as the testing hall emptied out, I lingered behind, hoping to be able to make a clean break and attend to the Reaving Beasts before anyone could work out that I was missing.

My plan, such as it was, involved claiming I’d needed to check with Doxle on something and that Advisor privileges came before the dictates of the Academy. That probably wasn’t true, but it sounded good enough that at least the other Cadets might buy it.

I’d separated myself from the throng of Cadets and allowed my housemates to go on ahead without me before making a decidedly wrong turn down one of the hallways towards where I thought I’d seen a stable setup. I didn’t expect them to be mixing the Reaving Beasts with horses or other animals, but since I hadn’t seen inside the stable yet I pegged it as a good place to begin searching for a group of otherworldly creatures who were being goaded into acting as killing machines.

I felt rather proud of myself for the stealth I’d displayed in slipping away unnoticed.

That feeling last roughly thirty seconds before I turned a corner and nearly plowed into Narla and the rest of my housemates.

“Told you she’d be here,” Yarrin said, accepting a gold piece from Ilyan.