I would never recover the energy that I had lost in keeping myself alive.

A walking stick was made for me. I was allowed to whittle patterns into the dark oak before it was glazed and tempered. I couldn’t complete even short journeys without it. My eyesight was unsteady for those initial weeks afterwards. Light was finnicky and irritable and induced maddening migraines. On the day I completed the journey from my chambre to the cafeteria alone, without the support of Manon as a helper, I was met with many ‘well done!s’ and ‘so good!s’, even if I’d still needed my cane. However high Manon had claimed my spirits rose during that week at the Academy, it plummeted double that amount.

I couldn’t run anymore. I had lost that forever.

Fox the fox was stubborn despite my hostility. Even when I sulked in corners and glared at the sky and refused any conversation lest it be dotted with pity, Fox continued to trot after me, pushing his nose under my hand, sitting in those sulking corners and lounging under these glaring skies. “I can’t play with you anymore,” I hissed. “I can’t run with you. I can’t do anything.”

Fox didn’t care. Cat 1 and Cat 2 were equally as stubborn.

Manon kept a more watchful eye over me, even if she did so from an increased distance. I would sometimes catch her lingering around during my meditations. She would wave at me. I would ignore her. Ivra so often called her a ‘busy bureaucrat’, but she seemed to not be busy at all if she had all this time to watch me. She would give me extra cinnamon buns during breakfast (if Ivra was around, she would roll her eyes and put them back), she would see me reading one of the encyclopaedias and force a stilted conversation from that (“Are you reading about Latin? Would you like to learn it?” “I can’t read if you’re talking.” “Oh, of course.” “…” “But if you have any questions, my father was a Latin teacher…”), she would stand by my door when I’d returned from nightly meditations, arms folded, looking like she wanted to say a million things but knew my reaction to all of them would be silence.

“Summer’s coming.” She said, keeping her voice light and hopeful. “The Monastery is expecting you, aren’t they?”

I nodded.

“The fresh air will be good for you. I noticed you don’t wander off to the forest anymore. Maybe the seaside will raise your spirits.” She gave me a warm smile. “I’ll be here working, haha. Work, work, work. I’m jealous of your holidays, Avari.”

Fox, Cat 1, and Cat 2 all walked past Manon’s legs to enter my room, taking up their newly self-appointed positions on my bed. I hadn’t encouraged this, it was completely their own initiative, but I allowed it. I stroked Fox’s fur, my other hand scratching behind Cat 1’s ears. They both hummed.

“I don’t blame you, Manon.”

When I looked at her, she uncrossed her arms to hug herself instead, her head leaning against the door frame, her eyes big and round and…sad. During the day, she pinned her hair behind her, but at night it was a tumble of soft blue curls around her face. Her roots were red, and the combination was striking, more striking than what she was comfortable with. Her eyes were the same, top half red, bottom half blue. “Oh, Avari,” she sighed gently. She sighed and sighed and sighed. “Ivra does.” She laughed a little. “And she should.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Adults were always crouching. Always. She came up to my bed and crouched by the side of it, running her fingers over Cat 2’s fur. “Do you remember much of what happened?”

The Militarists hadn’t questioned me too strongly on who my attacker had been, because as an orphan with no family name, they had no real reason to pursue the case more than what was ‘necessary’, but the Alchemists were less convinced. Even if they could accept that the shock of the attack and the pain of the wound had dulled my memory, they couldn’t accept that the student that had attacked me was allowed to roam free. Manon had spent a significant amount of her career ‘repairing relations’ between the Militarists and the Alchemists, between the New Schools and the Old. Ivra had insisted on completely cutting off contact with the ‘French schools’ after my attack, but Manon was less convinced. And Ivra couldn’t fire her either, though she so often wanted to. “The little funding we get,” she’d muttered to me, “it’s because we allow your caretaker to ‘supervise us’. The fucking French.”

“Do you remember when exactly you were attacked?” She asked me. “Do you have a rough guess of how long you kept yourself alive?”

“Don’t tell her any details.” Ivra had warned me. “Everything you tell her, she’ll write in a report. Even if you remember – and I know you do – don’t tell her a thing.”

“And the rain?” Manon prodded. “There were no clouds that night. Was that you, Avari?”

I had already written to the Monastery to tell them I was bringing Fox, Cat 1 and Cat 2 with me for the summer. They’d accepted. Ivra had already written to inform them of my attack. They would ask more questions, and I would answer them. I couldn’t answer Manon.

“The friend you would spend the nights with. Where was he?”

“Busy.”

She nodded once. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not. Then, she smiled at me and stood up, ruffling my hair like the wind would. “Goodnight, Avari. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I didn’t say it back to her. When she was gone, I said it to my three friends instead. Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.

*

I turned 14 at the Monastery.

*

The forest was the same as I’d left it. I walked around it the day I returned from the Monastery, my walking stick crunching leaves underneath its steps, my feet doing the same. I could hear the soft rustling of Fox as he matched my slow pace, never impatient, always stopping and nuzzling against my hand whenever I had to take breaks. Many summer conversations with Nature had convinced me to return to the forest, but trying to venture through it caused too much panic, remedied only by following its perimeter rather than venturing through. The season’s change was turning the lush green into a vibrant orange and yellow, matching the golden undertone of my skin. The paths around it meandered, and I liked to meander, so I spent many hours learning walkways that I’d never bothered with, walkways that immediately accepted my presence.

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There was an apple tree in full bloom. I ate as many as I could, feeding some slices to Fox too, and then dozed off under its shade. My dream was a stupid one: I thought of myself sword-fighting with all the energy I had lost, then taking off in a long-distance sprint against the coastline by the Monastery. Following me: Fox, Cat 1 and Cat 2, but they were elves like me, elves with long arms and long legs and mouths that could yelp and cheer and speak Elven, or French, or even Latin.

I woke up. Fox was a fox. And I was alone outside the huge forest.

*

Ivra returned from the summer break some days after I did. The summer away hadn’t in any way quelled her anger at Manon, but I hadn’t expected it to. Manon could have been anyone else, any other bureaucrat, and even if Manon’s peppiness was a specific source of tension, there was no French supervision that Ivra could have ever accepted. If anything, she was surprised that Manon was still around. “I thought they would have fired you for your incompetence.” Ivra said, flipping through some papers that listed number after number, budget cut after budget cut. “After what you did to Avari, did the Monastery not complain?”

“Ivra.” Manon stood at Ivra’s desk, hands clasped in front of her, stood the way I might when I made a demand (often refused) for more cinnamon buns. “Did you read the-?”

“Absolutely not.” Her temper flared in no time at all, and ordinarily Manon would have blanched and balked, but today she stood firm. “You even dare suggest sending him back? How long have you been conspiring this?”

I was looking at myself in a pool of water on one of the alchemy stations, labelled ‘looking-glass-liquid, Test 19’. I touched the tip of my finger to the small puddle and it was immediately absorbed, making my fingertip lose all its colour so I could see straight through it. It lasted for maybe a second, before the liquid seeped out and re-joined the puddle.

“As I outlined in the proposal, this is ultimately his decision…”

“He is a child. He is under my supervision.”

“Our supervision, Ivra.” Manon said patiently. “Legally, actually – just mine.”

Fury overtook Ivra’s features so severely that Manon did balk at this, even taking a step back. “You bring up your bastardised French law when talking about the custody of an orphaned child? The state gave you custody because they want to monitor him! Not because you’re more capable. Not because you have his best interests.”

“It was not the state that ‘gave me custody’, Ivra. And I do have his best interest at heart. I do.”

“Taking him back to the Academy that almost killed him is your idea of his ‘best interests’? Absolutely not.”

As an act of ‘good will’, the boys’ branch of the North District Military Academy had constructed a permanent wing in their institution for visiting Healers. This wing was the product of years of negotiation and would have been constructed regardless of my attack, but the letter that Manon had received announcing this wing had cited me specifically. ‘We would love to have Avari come and be a first guest as soon as he is healthy and strong enough. With our renewed relation with your Academy, it is important to demonstrate unity and…’.

“He is their guest of honour.”

“You’re naïve. He is their object of speculation. They’re all taking interest in him the older he gets. You know that. You’re not as stupid as you so often pretend to be. You know that.”

“So what? We lock him here forever? Why not send him back to the Monastery if that’s what you think he needs?” When Ivra didn’t immediately respond, Manon scoffed. “It’s because you’ve already tried! But legally, you can’t send him back!”

They both looked over at me, but I continued rummaging through the vials. A green one was labelled ‘crushed grass from a tropical plain’. A notebook had been left open, and in it were pages and pages of calculations, somehow using arithmetic, chemistry, and botany to understand that combining some amount of ‘crushed tropical grass’ with some amount of ‘northern water collected at 3am’ created a puddle that could show your reflection like glass, and could also turn you transparent.

I hadn’t known that Ivra had tried to send me back. I knew that, when I was first assigned to Manon, the Monastery had tried to keep me but legally couldn’t. It wasn’t hard to work out why – something about Delphia being gone, about the state being the state, about Manon and her reports.

“It’s a gesture of forgiveness. It’ll be good for him to go back, to prevent trauma-”

“You know nothing about trauma.”

“-and to see his friend. He’s a 14-year-old boy surrounded by adults. We’ve no doubt already stunted his growth. But he made a friend, and we can’t let him lose that.”

“The boy who attacked him will be there.”

“They promised to renew their investigation if Avari agrees to return.”

“Pardon,” a new voice interrupted the conversation, the 23-year-old (maybe 24 now), the Alchemist ‘prodigy’, who was, even with a new batch of students, still the youngest. “Mais j’ai laissé mon cahier ici après mon…” She trailed off, spying me once again at her desk. I stared back at her, holding her notebook in my hands. She wasn’t French but had clearly been educated in a French school, because she defaulted to French when talking to her teachers like she must have always done. “I left my notebook,” she repeated in Elven, still glaring at me. She walked over and snatched it from my hands. “You’re always snooping, aren’t you?”

I glared back at her, but there was an unsettling new realisation in my mind, a new awareness that she was, despite being annoying and despite undoubtedly finding me just as irritating, pretty. The same weird realisation I’d had during my journey back to the Alchemist Academy, when I’d seen a huntress riding her horse with some rabbits tied to her back, and I’d stared at her with a confused sort of interest, an interest that had revealed itself to me without my knowledge. I wanted to ask this Alchemist about her equations and how she’d realised them, but I didn’t like her enough to want to speak to her, and I wanted to stare at her a little longer and figure out what exactly about her face made her so pretty, but this was even more embarrassing than the first want. So I said nothing, and looked away.

“Misa,” Ivra said, “give your opinion on something.”

Manon looked at the 23-year-old, incredulous. “You’re asking a student?”

“A second opinion.”

“You’re the second opinion!”

“A third, then.” Ivra stayed concentrated on the 23-year-old who now had a name, Misa, and Misa balked a little at the attention. “Do you think Avari should return to the Academy where he was stabbed to commemorate the opening of a new wing? Does that sound reasonable to you?”

Misa gave me another glare, as if this was my fault, then tried to meet Ivra’s tense gaze. “I…I think-”

“The investigation would be reopened,” Manon countered, “he would be watched and protected, and it’s important for a boy his age to be with other boys his age.”

“I-”

“He is not like the other boys his age.”

“He is. Stop saying that about him. Stop othering him. He is.”

“I think,” Misa said more insistently, her voice cutting through their argument – a Northern Elven accent, I noted; “that he’s 14 and is easily capable of making his own decisions. Excuse me.”

She left the classroom with her notebook. To give me the final say would be a gift neither Ivra nor Manon had ever bothered with before. I didn’t see how it mattered. I didn’t see how anything mattered. Days spent arguing amounted to a sudden compromise, a sudden concession. Manon wrote to the Military Academy, the Academy wrote back. Then Ivra, calling me into her office to complain and grumble and curse the French, informed me I would be joining Manon on the trip to the new Healers’ wing. “I suppose it could be good for you. I can see the logic behind it. I would never say Manon was correct, of course not, but she occasionally has persuasive arguments…”

In that budget book that always sat open on her desk, there was a very notable 4-figure gold amount written in bright red ink. Above it, the words: grant from military – Avari’s wing.