Casting Theory room nine, was taught by a thin man called Professor Doksu who graded in four colours of ink and hated Han Yeju by the end of the first hour.
He did not hate her for anything she did. That was the part she came to appreciate later, when she had the distance to find it funny. He hated her because of what she was about to do to his understanding of the world, and some part of him smelled it coming across the room in foresight.
The class was half-full of first-years who had all, two days ago, watched a monster come through the sky, and it was clear none of them had settled. They flinched at dropped books. A girl by the window kept looking outside. Doksu ignored every bit of it. He had seen thirty entrance mornings and he had run out of patience for young people's feelings somewhere around the twelfth.
The lesson was glyph structure. He drew a first-circle ignition glyph on the slate, the same hooked line the store had put in Yeju's hand two days ago, breaking it into parts with no intrest, truly a man who has explained simple things to stupid people for twenty years. Intent, channel, release. A glyph was a sentence. It had a grammar. Break the grammar and the spell failed, or worse, succeeded wrong.
Yeju wrote that down.
He's never once said this. A whole magic system, a boy who can read Heaven itself. Nobody ever sat down and said what a glyph is FOR. I asked. I asked twice. I got a paragraph about ancient bloodlines.
A thin unpleasant man in a room nobody wrote is standing at a board explaining that magic runs on the law I've spent my whole life on. Break the grammar and it succeeds wrong. That's the note. That's my note. Maybe magic will be good for her.
She underlined it twice, in a borrowed girl's too-hard hand.
"You," Doksu said, not looking at her, chalk moving. "F-core. The fire one. Since you've apparently cast this form already, against every regulation and most of physics, come and reproduce it. Properly. Let's see the process behind the miracle."
The class turned to look.
Oh, good. Day two.
Yeju went to the front, took the chalk, and stood in front of the practice slate with a problem she had not anticipated, which was that she did not know the process. The store had given her the spell whole, like a word, from nowhere. She could cast it. She had no idea how. In two days she had never once put it on paper, because her hand simply knew the shape in the air.
So she did what she had always done with a thing she did not understand, which was read it.
She looked at Doksu's glyph, the textbook one. Then she looked at the shape her own hand wanted to make. They were not the same, she caught that much instantly. The textbook glyph was efficient. Hers had an extra hook in it, a small doubling at the release, a flourish that served nothing.
That's handwriting.
She filed it under the same silence where Bori lived and drew the textbook version instead.
It lit. A small clean flame, no bigger than a candle, holding steady off the slate.
The room made a sound. Doksu did not.
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"That's wrong," he said.
"It's the glyph you drew."
"You're an F-core. An F-core cannot hold a clean ignition, the core hasn't the density, the flame should be guttering." He came closer. His eyes had gone narrow as he looked directly at her, which he had not done all hour. "It is not guttering. How are you holding a clean flame."
Yeju looked at the small steady candle of fire off the slate.
I don't know.
He's right. I'm an F-core, the flame should gutter, it is not guttering. Something under this borrowed spell is holding it clean. It has nothing to do with my decorative little core, and I cannot see what.
Neither can he. He's a professor of this exact thing and he's staring at my fire like it insulted his mother.
[ Don't answer that, ] said the panel, quietly. [ Truly. Don't. Let the flame go out, apologies, sit down. This is one of those moments where being memorable costs more than it pays. ]
For once, Yeju agreed with it completely. She let the flame go out.
"I don't know, Professor," she said, which was the truest thing she had said in two days. "It felt right."
"It felt right?" Doksu repeated it like a crime. He took the chalk back and turned to the board. In the corner of it, in the red ink he saved for failures, he wrote a single word where a grade would go, underlining it twice.
HOW.
"Sit down," he said. "You give me a headache, Han Yeju, and it is day two. I intend to have you in this room for four years you know. Sit down."
The class was staring at her now, all of them. Honestly it made yeju shrink. A girl two seats over put her hand up and asked, in a small reasonable voice, whether F-cores were supposed to be able to do that, because she was also low-rated and would like to know if she had been sold short. Doksu told her no, F-cores were not supposed to do that, Han Yeju was an anomaly, the rare breed that made him take a tonic for his blood pressure. The girl wrote anomaly in her notes with a small worried face beside it and went back to wanting a quiet life.
Pak Jinju. She's in the book for one line, in chapter forty, standing near a door.
She's going to spend four years being told she's fine.
Yeah, it was safe to say that Han yeju had more than just memories the book, bordering on obsession.
In my defense, the book was such a wasted potential.
Yeju sat down. Bori, who was in the same class because the school assigned rooms alphabetically and had a sense of humour, slid a piece of bread onto her desk without looking up from her book.
"He's going to be a problem," Yeju murmured.
"No," Bori said, writing. "He's going to be a professor who thinks you're a problem. Those are useful. He'll watch you closer than anyone, and he'll be honest about what he sees, because he wants to catch you, not protect you." She turned a page. "When you really need someone to tell you the truth about yourself, it won't be a friend. It'll be him. Eat your bread."
Yeju ate her bread.
Three wrong things in two days: a flourish in a spell that shouldn't have handwriting, a flame produced by a core that can't hold it, and a girl a machine can't price.
None of them touch each other. Fine. Not my problem. My problem is a boy who needs his romances back.
The panel stirred one more time as the class packed up.
[ End of your first week's projection, ] it said. [ Points balance: 5,003. You are, against every reasonable expectation, rich and enrolled. ]
[ One housekeeping note, since you'll ask eventually and I'd rather you asked when I've decided what to tell you. ]
[ You keep noticing the small wrong things.]
[ Stop noticing them for a while. As a favour. To both of us. ]
Yeju looked at the empty air where the words had been.
Nobody has ever asked me to stop noticing things.
Nobody. Not once, in an entire life. It's the only thing I'm good at. It's what made me an editor, and I'm fairly sure it's what made me lonely.
That's the most suspicious thing that has happened to me in three days of extremely suspicious things.
So she did the opposite, quietly, in the privacy of her own head, she started a list. Not on paper, which can be read. A list in the back of her mind, kept in the same place as forty-one abandoned pages of a novel she had died without finishing.
I'll get to the bottom of all of it. Later. After I survive the semester.
I am going to be so bad at leaving this alone.
Doksu's red HOW sat on the corner of the board, underlined twice, waiting to be erased.
Nobody erased it.