Now, as they hurried through the quiet streets of Deramor, a thousand questions bit at Jey’s mind. Who was this man? How had he known where to find them? As she walked, she rubbed the heel of one hand over her right forearm where the strange, blue-tinted magical gash had marked her arm months before. That wound had been the tipping point – the beginning of the crazy spiral of events that had led Jey, Elle, and Kae to escape from the academy, and Kae to lose her life when her tessila was killed in the process.
“He’s the one who attacked me,” she whispered to Elle as they passed the few other homes of craftsmen between the cheesery and the road. “Months ago, when I was on an opportunity.”
Elle, moving as silently as smoke, said, “I thought you attacked him?”
Jey grimaced and shrugged. Before she could answer the road wound past the last building. Trees began to rear up on either side of them. Phril, elated to be out, flitted and danced in the frigid air. He did not like the cold, but for now his excitement and curiosity kept him from noticing the temperature.
“Here.” The voice came from off the road. Jey turned to see the strange young man step out from behind a tree long enough for them to see him. Then he stepped out of sight again.
Nervous now, Jey drew her knives. It seemed an odd way to set a trap, but she and Elle hadn’t stayed free by growing careless. Jey went first, knives bared. Elle came behind, short, brutal crossbow held at ready.
Jey moved up an incline and around a tree. She looked down into a moonlit vale.
Lokim was there, crouching on the ground next to a slender girl. She was bound and gagged and lay in the pool of her dark cloak.
It was a cloak exactly like the one Jey wore now, and Elle also.
The girl was a student at the academy.
Jey hurried forward, sheathing her knives as she moved down the incline. When Jey stopped at the girl’s feet, Elle moved ahead. She crouched, touching a dark discoloration on the girl’s forehead. “I hit her,” Lokim said. He sounded embarrassed. “With the hilt of my knife. She was following you, Elle. When you stopped at the edge of town to make sure no one was about, I hit her and tied her up.”
Jey and Elle stared at each other. A bitter wind stirred their cloaks. Phril came and darted above the girl’s head. The man’s orange tessila joined him. For a moment the two flitting shapes were a blur of movement in the silver air.
“What are we going to do with her?” Elle said. She straightened from her examination of the girl’s wound. “I think she’ll wake up soon. If we let her go, she’ll go back and tell them … she’ll tell them she saw us, that I came here to Deramor.”
Jey felt dread uncoil in her heart. The man, only a shadow, watched them with unconcealed interest. His eyes were dark and intense in the low light. She ignored him, focusing on the more immediate problem. She spoke to Elle. “Can you fudge her memory?”
Elle shook her head with uncertainty. “The flashnodes,” she said. “The drugs. It’s too many unknowns. I could try, but I don’t know if it would hold.”
The dread grew sharper. Jey looked down at the slender girl. She lay with her eyes closed. Her hair was coiled and pinned, the same way Jey’s own orderly had taught her to pin hers up years ago. Her skin was covered by dark leather, but Jey knew if she could see the inside of the girl’s left arm she’d find it pocked and scarred by the pricks of dozens of needles. On her wrist a plain silver bracelet gleamed. Jey felt giddy with rage at the sight of it. She remembered the oath she had been forced to speak each time she was sent on an opportunity. Once I have left this place, I will not pursue any other task, desire, or goal other than that which I have been given until I have returned. She remembered the searing pain it had caused Phril each time she’d tested the oath and tried to defy her orders.
Elle seemed to be following Jey’s train of thought. She spoke in a desolate tone. “It’s not her fault, what she is. She’s like we were.”
The three of them were silent a long while. Jey said nothing. She could think of a dozen ways to quickly and painlessly kill this girl without waking her. Jey, after all, had been trained since her earliest days, honed into a lethal weapon. Jey had killed many people in her life, including sleeping girls not so different from this one.
But that had been before. Before she’d had any choice.
Elle, eyes desperate, looked at Jey. “We can’t kill her.”
Jey closed her eyes. She was certain she’d never been so tired in her life. For six months they’d been dodging the hounds and the trackers the academy sent looking for them. They’d barely made it through those first desperate weeks as they’d tried to form a plan, to come up with a sustainable way to move forward. Winter had forced them out of the woods and into the cheesery, but still they were not independent. They needed brillbane seed sacks if their tessili were going to survive. And in spite of searching every inch of the woods surrounding Deramor, they had not found a single wild brillbane plant.
Lokim cleared his throat. He spoke into the silence of the night, his words slow and somber. “There might be another way,” he said. “If you were willing to leave this place, I could offer you the protection of my people.”
◈
Lokim waited as the girls withdrew to discuss his offer. It was hard, letting them move away. More than anything, he was afraid of spooking them – afraid they would bolt into the shivering night and disappear forever. He didn’t doubt they could lose him. He’d been watching them long enough to know they had evasion down to a science. The two girls had different strengths and they worked together seamlessly. Lokim himself had his fair share of skills and abilities. But in the night, in the cold, he doubted he could keep a lock on them if they decided to run.
He waited, trying not to shiver. Bliz came to him and alighted on his collar, worming her way down between the soft fabric and the warm skin of his neck. He could feel the cold in her wings and the excited beating of her heart. She’d been lonely this last year. The tessili bound to the two girls were the first she’d seen since they’d left the Valley of Mist. Now, after her quick flight with Jey’s red tessila, Bliz was feeling suddenly shy.
Lokim could not hear what Elle and Jey were saying, but he could follow the undercurrent of their conversation. They were of different minds about what to do.
At last, they seemed to reach an agreement. Jey stepped forward, skirting the bound girl who lay on her cloak. Elle trailed behind, crouching again to set a hand on the girl’s temple. “We’re going to try a passive persuasion,” she said, “and send her back to the academy.”
Lokim felt a dip of disappointment, but Jey wasn’t done. “At the very least that will give us some time. Even if she does remember, they will still need to search. We’ve hidden from them before. We can do it again. And maybe she won’t remember at all.”
Lokim felt a tug on the air as Elle began to weave a spell. He felt it flow out of her slender hands, settling, sinking into the unconscious girl’s mind. “She’s very good at passive persuasion,” Jey added.
The girl on the ground did not react to the magic. She lay in her bonds, the dark bruise on her forehead growing more pronounced by the minute.
Jey glanced over her shoulder as Elle straightened, swaying a little on her feet. Lokim had to resist the urge to go to her, to steady her. Jey fell back instead, offering her friend her arm. “We have to get back to the cheesery,” she said. She stared off into the silver woods for a moment longer, then turned to Lokim. “You probably saved our lives tonight. How can we thank you?”
In the distance, an owl hooted. To the east, the rim of the sky was growing pale with the first tendrils of dawn. Lokim’s eyes shifted from Jey to Elle. “Can we meet again?” he said. “To talk?”
As he spoke, a memory returned to him. It was of the very first night he saw Elle, almost a year ago now. He’d just arrived in Deramor. With Bliz stowed in his collar, he’d been prowling the streets, holding a passive echo spell to keep himself hidden. He’d walked into an alle
y outside a brightly lit mansion overflowing with guests. Elle had nearly startled him into a heart attack when she’d appeared before him, dropping her own passive echo spell and walking past him, unaware of his presence, to make her way out to join the party.
She hadn’t been wearing her leathers that night. She’d been wearing a glittering gown. He’d tailed her, watching as she’d made her smooth way into the mansion. She’d spent hours in there. He’d waited in the shadows, watching for her. When she’d left, she’d done so by the more conventional means of stepping into a coach. Lokim had tailed the coach. It had led him back to the bridge across the river that led onto a walled island where hounds bayed in the night.
He looked at Elle and was struck silent with the force of all the questions he wanted to ask. He said, “I think we could help each other.”
◈
Nylan stared at the pale girl, trying to contain the hatred that seemed to boil inside him constantly now. The girl had a dark bruise on the left side of her temple. She could not tell him where it had come from.
The deployment node was dark except for one shuttered lantern. That had been part of the plan. Nylan knew the girls who had escaped were coming in. They had to be, because they would need the brillbane that was cultivated within the academy walls but had been eradicated beyond them as systematically and thoroughly as the tessili themselves.
For months, the academy had been flailing in ineffectual spasms. They’d increased patrols on the wall, set the hounds to sweeping the grounds day and night, and had orderlies watching the older girls 24/7. Such methods were not much, however, to defend against those who had already escaped, who could scale walls, make themselves invisible, and identify patterns of movement in order to work around them.
Part of the problem, Nylan suspected, was the orderlies and the administration, even the professors, didn’t understand how dangerous and capable these girls were. Nylan knew. He, after all, had sent them out to accomplish impossible task after impossible task. And 99% of the time, they’d returned successful.
Which was why it was so frustrating, now, to have come so close only to be in danger of tripping at the finish line. Nylan had finally talked the dean into trying things his way, which was to make the academy inviting, to keep the hounds in their kennels, and to set other students—the most capable they had—to watch for their compatriots.
It had taken a month, but it had worked. This girl, M215, had caught the feeling of a spell being dropped at the base of the bridge. She remembered that much. She’d followed one of the escaped students, L134, and tracked her through the woods.
But then her memory cut off. She’d woken up back near the bridge with a headache and no recollection of anything else that had transpired.
Nylan had to resist the urge to hit the girl, to take her to the room where her tessila lay, weighted down by the heavy, padded harness that prevented it from dashing its ridiculous brains out, and forcing her to watch him break its tiny wings.
Realizing he was on the verge of losing his temper, Nylan turned his back on the girl. He limped away to look out one of the windows. The eastern sky was bright with dawn. His knee flared with pain as he moved. Even six months after the injury, the joint was not whole. The damage it had sustained from that one blow had been considerable. He was told he was lucky he was able to walk at all.
Nylan did not feel lucky. He felt precarious. Here he was, poised on the eve of the fruition of all his years of hard work and two teenaged girls were threatening to cost him everything.
That was the real problem here. Nylan’s performance was under review. He was on probation, pending the recovery of the two lost operatives. An empty syringe had been found in the senior’s dormitory, along with a stolen holdstone. One orderly knew Nylan himself had taken the syringe into the dormitory that night – the night he’d made the worst mistake of his life. And so far that orderly had not spoken.
If the man did speak, or if Nylan did not get the two missing operatives recaptured or neutralized, this would be Nylan’s last year at the academy. Which would mean, if he was lucky, he would have wasted the last decade of his life. If he was unlucky it would mean the end of his life entirely.
Nylan stood for a while, listening to the quiet, scared breathing of the girl. With a frustrated growl, he turned to the desk and opened the top drawer. The glass bodies of syringes clinked as they rolled with the movement of the drawer. He pulled one out, closed the drawer, and approached the girl. “Roll up your sleeve,” he said.
She did, though he could see the question in her eyes. He waited until her arm was turned towards him, the pale underside exposed. He plunged the syringe into a vein.
For one moment, Nylan hesitated. The drug was hard on the girls. It taxed both the heart and the nervous system. He’d seen some of them collapse into seizures over the years. A few had not gotten up again. This girl had already had one injection tonight. The possibility of an overdose was very real. Nylan couldn’t afford to lose one of the two new seniors. Neither one of them showed much particular talent for anything, but they were all he had. And he still had work to do.
He didn’t know if the drug would help. It stood to reason it might. The drug, after all, was a powerful psychosomatic stimulant, among other things. Unfortunately, Nylan was up against magic, not science. Magic was nothing if not unreasonable.
But Nylan also couldn’t afford to lose the information this girl had, locked away somehow in her head.
The girl went rigid as Nylan depressed the stopper. She sucked in a quick breath and blinked several times. Then she said in a quiet, dreamy voice, “I tracked her back to Deramor, to the outskirts, near the north road. Then someone hit me on the head. That’s all I know.”
Then, the girl collapsed.
◈
Jey scooped up a handful of cheese curds. A heap of molds lay on the long table before her, some full, some empty. She packed the curds into an empty mold, pressing them down evenly, as Holdam had taught her. Beside her, Elle was doing the same.
Phril was perched on Jey’s shoulder. Although she couldn’t see him, she could feel the small weight of him, the snag of his tiny talons in her homespun shirt. He was sulking again because she’d asked him not to fly. He could almost never fly these days. It was too risky. Passive echo spells did not work very well on tessili in general and became nearly useless when one was flying. Since it was critical Holdam and Biala never see Phril or Shai, the two tessili were commanded to lie low on a daily basis.
It was not a natural way for a tessila to live. Jey attributed that, and the lack of brillbane bushes, to Phril’s recent bad temper. Though Jey and Elle managed to supply their tessili with the seeds they needed to survive, it was evident the small animals were suffering from not having access to brillbane bushes as a whole. Phril’s scales were duller than Jey could remember ever seeing them, as he had no brillbane husk to polish himself against. He also didn’t seem to sleep as well or as deeply now that he couldn’t climb into the heart of one of the brushy plants and feel safe there.
These things were problems. They were problems on Jey’s long, long list of problems. When they had escaped from the academy, it had been out of necessity. They’d been mere hours away from scheduled death. They run, not knowing what they were running into. Their situation was less dire now, but they were a long way from being able to feel safe.
“How is it he has a tessila but no one else we’ve seen since leaving the academy does?” Elle spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. She stood a few paces down from Jey, her dark hair tied back in a blue scarf.
Jey shrugged, setting the full mold aside and reaching for another. She felt dull with fatigue. Even when she and Elle had returned to their room and collapsed into their beds, she’d hardly slept. Discovery by the academy had always been a possibility, but knowing they’d come so close rattled her.
Jey had noticed, of course, when she’d been sent out on her opportunities to complete one mission or another, the
people she encountered didn’t have tessili. But it wasn’t something she’d ever thought much about. She hadn’t thought much about anything, in those days. She’d been unable to. The drugs and flashnodes in the academy had rendered her incapable of forming cohesive memories.
Now that they were outside the academy, Jey and Elle had discovered something they’d never suspected: tessili did not seem to exist out in the wider world. No one spoke of them. There was no brillbane, either in people’s gardens or growing wild in the forest.
More than that, the very subject appeared to be taboo. Elle had discovered this the hard way when she’d asked Holdam what had seemed an innocent question about why there seemed to be so few tessili about. She’d dropped the inquiry into casual conversation on one of their first days at the cheesery. The man had turned white as whey, started shaking, and stammered that he and his wife had no love for magics and he didn’t know why anyone would think he knew the first thing about tessili. He’d been so upset, Elle had cast a passive persuasion on him so he would forget the conversation.
That had been the real blow. Jey wanted nothing more than to leave, to head into the hills and see what lay beyond the next ridge. But she couldn’t, because Phril needed brillbane to survive, and if Phril died, so would she.
The bare fact that another human being outside the academy had a bond with a tessila was a huge relief. The problem was, Jey didn’t know if they could trust him.
“He must have access to brillbane,” Elle continued. She was speaking in the tone she used when she was trying to wheedle Jey around to some conclusion she knew Jey would resist.
Jey thumped her full mold to settle the curds with a little more force than necessary. She felt Phril swell with the desire to flit about the room. She paused, closed her eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath. It made her tessila’s difficult task harder when she let herself grow frustrated about their circumstances.
“He must,” Jey agreed. Then she voiced the deep, secret fear that had been gnawing at her heart since the strange young man had materialized in their bedchamber. “But Elle, what if there’s another academy? One for men? What if he’s from there? What if he’s a trap? What if the whole thing with catching the girl that followed you was staged, so we’d trust him? What if he’s going to lead us straight into our enemies’ hands?”