Minnelil did come back the next day. I was outside when she arrived and watched her climb the stairs toward the dorm. She looked pensive, frowning and watching her feet. I called out to her and she rearranged her face into a delighted one.
“Hey!” she shouted, waving a hand at me.
I wondered what that was all about. I knew I hadn’t imagined it, but maybe I had. It wasn’t my business anyway.
Inside, she congratulated all of us for passing the exam, and even hugged Grit. She looked at me like she was asking for permission, but I nodded at her and thanked her for lending me her notes.
She had passed the exam on the Scriptures earlier. I still wasn’t sure how long she had been in the school. Maybe I would ask her soon. Or ask Fek or Grit. Maybe it would be an insensitive question.
Grit had to hold Minnelil back from grabbing my new book. “I can take it! It’s worth it!” Minnelil shouted, as the book rattled and shot blazing sparks into the air.
Lucky that Grit was stronger. I promised Minnelil she could read it over my shoulder.
Three days rolled by. One new merchant was leaving, and I collected the fees for the Bursar. She told me the real reason why she wanted me to do it: all the merchants tried to haggle and holding back from killing them made her internal machinery heat up too much. She said it was inefficient and a waste of resources.
Ferne’s thoroughly bored rune lectures continued. Fek set his blackboard on fire, but Ferne praised him for doing it only once. I wasn’t sure if she was joking or what kind of menace Fek had been earlier. We both got the credit for finishing the three runes. Drawing them was hard, but not so much harder than writing. Drawing them into thin air would probably be worse.
We trained channeling with Minnelil. It was still hard. Minnelil said I was making good progress, but I was so frustrated I banged my thighs on the tabletop when I jumped up. Grit complained about the racket as I crawled around the floor, cursing and laughing despite myself. Minnelil laughed so hard she snorted, a sound I hadn’t thought she was even capable of.
The bruises were massive.
I felt… nice. It was disturbing and worrying, like I wasn’t me. And like there was a sword hanging over my head constantly, held up by a thread I knew was fraying.
At least that feeling was familiar.
“When are you going to read it?” Minnelil asked, eyes gleaming.
I lay down on the bed. The soles of my feet tingled. I had put the book in the chest at the end of the bed and hadn’t touched it yet. I guess I should start, if I wanted to have any chance of passing the exam. It was only a week and a half to go, but I hadn’t wanted to touch the book yet. “Soon, soon.”
“How about now? The lectures are over, and you still have some hours before dinner.”
“You mean we do.”
“Pleaaase, Lina,” she stretched out the word, wringing her hands. “I have dreamed for a literal hundred years to lay eyes on this book. It’s usually reserved for students at the very end of their studies. I hear they’ve been utterly despondent that it’s been holed up here. In that chest.”
“Have you been here a hundred years?”
“What? No! Since I was a child. Don’t all kids dream of becoming necromancers when they grow up?”
“I didn’t,” I muttered, glancing at the chest. I hadn’t needed to extra pressure of knowing all the other students were waiting for the book, but it did make me wonder what Falar was up to. If the book was so advanced, how was I supposed to understand anything about it?
Whatever. I’d show him. I kicked to push myself from the bed up and opened the chest. “Let’s do this.”
Minnelil made a squeak that was so out of character I laughed. The laugh turned into a muffled grunt as I picked up the book, and it sent shivers all through my body.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s the book. It tingles and makes my eyes vibrate,” I said, squeezing said eyes shut.
“You’re that sensitive? There are ways to tone down the feeling, if you need to. We should get back to learning channeling,” Minnelil said, sitting at the table.
“Maybe we should start with that, then!” I said, motioning to drop the book back into the chest.
“Noooo!” Minnelil howled. “I mean…”
I snickered at her and placed the book on the table. “Relax. Let’s see what the floating skull has been scribbling in this one.”
I needed two hands to open the book. The cover thudded on the tabletop, sounding like it made a dent in the wood. The pages were thick like leather, so luckily the book wasn’t as long as it had looked. On the other hand, Coratorus had written each page in painfully tight script, letters like ants scrambling on each other. “Were they trying to compensate for having such thick pages? Why is everything here so dumb?” I asked.
“I think they wanted to make sure the book lasts,” Minnelil said, eyes glued to the page. “This is one of the most sought after grimoires on the continent. Maybe he soaked one and decided the next one shouldn’t melt if it got caught in the rain. Turn the page, already.”
“I didn’t even start reading yet.”
Minnelil wrote down so many notes that she might have as well copied the whole book. I asked her why no one had done that, but she just groaned and said it wouldn’t be the same. Counterfeited stuff never was, but this was just a book. Words. How could they be different?
And yet, my eyes ached and I found my finger following the lines across the page, tracing a thought that jumped from one line to another, words on different lines forming sentences, letters of different words forming words of their own.
“They were right,” Minnelil muttered. “Reading about it and reading the actual book is different. I feel like I’m not getting it all just because I’m sitting a bit to the side. Damn, Coratorus didn’t end up a lich by accident, did they?” She rubbed a hand on her face, massaging her temples.
“What is a lich… actually, never mind that,” I said. “You are still getting something, right? Because I’m not sure if I am.”
“Are you certain about that? You really have been focusing. Dinner is in a couple of minutes.”
“What, for real?”
“For real!” Fek shouted.
“Where did you pop out of?” I blurted.
“I’ve been here for half an hour. I said hi when I came in.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, hi.”
He waved at me, smiling like a doofus. “The book is pretty good, I guess? Can I look too?”
“Don’t touch it,” Minnelil said, slapping his hand away absent-mindedly, eyes still locked on the page.
“Ouch, oh, right.”
I closed the book slowly, watching them both lean down and try to read as long as possible.
When the cover thunked shut, Minnelil blinked, seeming to realize her head was pressed to the tabletop. “Oh, right,” she said as well. “Dinner, anyone?”
The air outside was different. Different from the pleasant normal air inside the rooms, the spaces warmed by people and lit by tinted orbs of light. I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse, not at the moment. The wind struggled to break out from the area it had been shackled into in the middle of the building, at times causing a gust of wind to tug at our black robes.
When Minnelil came back, she had worn a pair of green pants the color of leaves and a tunic of dark red leather with a bright white shirt under it. I had gasped at the colors. Seeing them had been like drawing in a fresh breath of air after living underground for two weeks. Now her brown hair was under her dark cowl, pulled up like all of ours.
“The weather is acting up,” Grit said, holding a hand before her face to stave off the wind. We had run into her the moment we stepped outside. “And they just reinforced the wards. Maybe they didn’t do it properly.”
“Nah, I heard Falar handled it,” Fek said. “The wards should be fine.”
“Well, how come I’m getting icicles on my face, then?”
The wind wrenched at my cowl, trying to wrench it off my head. People walked pressed close to the walls. I saw a skeleton get yanked off the stairs on the other side of the building. It fell in a handful of white bits against the dark wall.
“It is unusual,” Minnelil said. “Even he could have made a mistake?”
She didn’t sound very confident. I heard the worry in all of their voices. I lifted my hand into the air to test it, feel the flickering tendrils of magic. The choker pushed the oppressive feeling of pressure away, making it easier to sense the other magic suffusing the place. Only now I realized how much of it there was everywhere. The walkways, the walls, even the air, everything tingled in different registers. “The air vibrates,” I muttered out loud.
“Yeah, we call it the wind,” Fek said.
Grit scoffed and pushed him on the shoulder. She then yelped and grabbed on, as Fek’s feet slipped on the ice and he swung his arms around, about to topple over.
“Careful,” Minnelil said. “If the main ward really isn’t holding, the other ones might not work properly either. Falling off could be dangerous.”
“They have wards against that?” I asked. “Why don’t they just add in some goddamn railings?”
“Wizards are wizards everywhere,” Fek said. “Why add in railings when you can enchant the ground to slow down people before they slam into it?”
“Wizards are wizards,” I repeated. Now that I thought about this, this place wasn’t that much dumber than what went on in the Magic Quarter of Tenorsbridge. I had heard my share of stories of the ridiculous things people had seen when stealing stuff from the wizards back home.
Home.
I pushed back the cowl and lifted my face to the wind. The wind threw sleet on it.
I was getting used to the dinners. The skeletons laying down feast after feast before me, without even being asked. All the people around me, the place busy and loud like the Market Square on a late summer day in Tenorsbridge.
My eyes lingered on the skeleton’s arm as it took the empty plate from before me. I had grabbed a bone off one earlier and someone had said something about it. “Is there some challenge to nick pieces from a skeleton? Where do people get these ideas?”
Grit and Minnelil looked away, a mix of scoffing, wrinkling their noses, and frowning. Fek grinned and hooted.
“What?” I asked.
Minnelil sighed. “There are a lot of challenges and dares. A bunch of traditions that are passed over from one generation of students to the next.”
“And there was that student representative. Frederik? Is he related to that?”
“Yes, he runs the student representative council, which organizes the traditional events and everything. You went through the welcoming ceremony.”
I brushed the badge on the front of my robe. It tingled against my fingerstips, enchanted to stick to whatever it was pressed against. Another useless magical gimmick when it could have been just sewn on. Wizards. “Right. But… does everyone take part in those?”
Minnelil and Grit exchanged glances. Minnelil pouted before answering. “I know what you’re asking. We don’t. Maybe about half of the students do.”
“I would like to,” Fek said. “Haven’t managed any, so far.”
“They’re mostly a way for rich kids to socialize and admire each other and how amazing they are,” Grit said. There was real bitterness in her voice, and Fek seemed to deflate. “Some of us actually focus on our studies or need to work, so we can’t just leave for a week to try to break across the Kertharian border, get caught by the Janitors, and pay the fines.”
“Why would anyone even want to go there?” I muttered.
“I don’t know, but the student council does. They try it every year,” Minnelil said. “That’s why we haven’t seen any of those people for a while. They’ll still be gone for almost a week.”
I leaned back in my chair, smiling and patting my stomach. “Nice. So with all of them gone, it probably won’t matter if I grab an extra steak?”