April 18, ’94 (8 days before the Fire)
“Yes, Miss Stone?”
Cassi Stone, the best student in this section, one who had exclusively used Lyrian in the classroom, asked a question in Ettasi.
Farisa’s face grew hot. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly. You’re asking me if what is true?”
The poor girl, who repeated it, had been caught in the crossfire. Farisa had seen Elior, today without the usual snoozy grimace, scribble the note—as Elior’s election to headmaster had been made official, and he had the power of expulsion—and pass it to her.
“I’ll answer you. Give me a minute.”
The teacher had, against Erysi’s advice, chosen a set of aggressive opening moves. “The scores on last week’s quiz, while not bad, were disappointing to what I have come to expect from this otherwise outstanding class. Therefore, we’ll dedicate a lecture to vocabulary review.” She worked into her example sentences words that sounded increasingly like the name Tenessa. None of these garnered even slight reactions from him, so she wrote on the board this sentence, still there:
Ven tsun vahel ett Tenessa-ka raenulo.
“Tenessa’s bell has been rung by an old man,” the teacher explained.
(Ven (tsun (vahel ett) Tenessa-ka raenulo.))
And that had opened the loathsome headmaster’s eyes, set his hand to scribbling, and led to the passing of the note that became the question Farisa had been asked to answer.
(“You’re asking me if what is true?”)
(“That…that you are…b-b-barren.”)
Barren, mage. Deny nothing. Admit nothing. Don’t humiliate her. Answer her calmly.
The teacher spread her feet as she stood in front of the class.
“Right.” Farisa took two steps, a controlled rather than nervous pacing, then faced the class again. “The old accounts of magic were written in Lyrian, but those aren’t what we study here. Even if they were, it would not matter. you can’t become a mage—become infertile—by reading one book or a thousand about the old talents. Nor will you go mad—suffer the Marquessa—because you read the chorae or the Nine Tragedies in the original. It is a completely harmless thing to do. Excellent question, Miss Stone. Thank you for asking it.”
Elior looked at his twitching hands. In spite of having pushed the girl to ask it, he said, “I found her question rather rude.”
“I understand your position.” Farisa lowered her hands, making her arms long and letting her palms face out. "I would rather they risk asking a rude question than hold back a hundred that aren’t rude. I have nothing to hide from anyone. Curiosity is a virtue, and I’m here to encourage it.”
Elior XIV stood, face bloodless. “Then let me ask you a question.”
Farisa tightened her stomach muscles as if preparing to take a blow. “Please do.”
“Why are you here?”
“If I am paid for a job, I am going to do that job.”
“Right. So, why are you paid? Why do I allow my name to be signed on—”
“As you’ve observed, I teach four classes. I consider the rate fair, but if you’re suggesting we raise it, then I am willing to have that discussion, but as it has no pedagogical value for my students, we should handle the matter at some other time.”
He smacked his knuckles against the other palm. “Do you take me for a fool?”
A nervous laugh spread like a brush fire among the students.
“No.” Farisa folded her arms. “Your predecessor hired me. If you want to know why I’m here, ask her when you get the chance—if you’re lucky enough to go to the same place.”
Elior’s glare hardened. “Magic is unreliable and dangerous, right?”
“That’s right, but I’m not sure why you’re—”
He stood up and walked toward her desk. “You’re a mage. You’re Farisa La’ewind.”
Farisa inhaled. The Marquessa’s pulse ran in the same veins as hers. She refused to give in to the panic; if she lost herself, Elior would win. There were seventeen students here who deserved their teacher at her best.
“He's right,” she finally said.
The class fell silent.
She raised her sleeve, revealing the scar on her shoulder. “It’s obvious that I’m not from here. I’m four shades darker than any of you. I am exactly who he says I am: a refugee whose parents died in the war.” She pulled a two-grot silver coin out of her pocket and placed it on her desk. “Had his predecessor not seen talent in me, this is more money than I would have ever earned.”
Farisa closed her eyes. The coin rose to stand on its side, then bobbed in the air. She threw her anger into it, making it spin so fast it whirred like an electric motor. With the precision of a hummingbird, it zipped in front of Elior’s face, hovering six inches from his eyes before she lost her hold on the blue and the coin fell to the floor.
“Now that Elior has told you who I am, there is something else you should know.” Her mind flitted back to Analysis of Place, Katarin’s topology book. Farisa drew an oval on the blackboard. “This is Cait Forest—obviously not to any scale, and I’m not expecting to be nominated for any art awards.” She drew two squiggly lines. “Lepid River.” She put two notches in the oval. “This is Rooksnest Bridge. Every one of you crossed it to get into this place. It might strike you as strange, this claim that there is no other way.”
She drew an arrow coming in from the eastern marshes. “You can go out in this direction, but everyone who tries to get in this way gets lost. Why? No one knows. Compasses become unreliable. There is a theory that an enchantment called a kasa—no mage alive today can create one—has been laid that has crumpled up the space, like a piece of paper, so that our ordinary-looking eastern swamps are a place where one cannot trust a straight line for more than a quarter of a mile. Is it true? No one knows. The belief that it is true protects us. Why do you think Cait Forest has been in no wars for thousands of years? Why hasn’t the Global Company, with its infinite violent capability, marched in to take this place? Do you really think there’s nothing here that Hampus Bell wants?
“You pay my salary, Headmaster, because the world can be strange, and strange things merit study.” She threw a piece of chalk so hard her shoulder hurt. The stick of soft rock crumbled, rather than collide with the bridge of his nose. “People like me protect the rest of you.”
Elior seemed to be gritting his teeth.
“Now that I’ve answered your question, may I return to the lesson?”
The old man’s lips quivered, and he seemed smaller than before, but his voice came with the force of a gunshot. “Are you mad, woman?”
“Professor Sotheby—” Erysi started.
“Elior,” Farisa said. “Hiero Elior. We have to call him that now. The Sixteenth, right? Or is it the Seventeenth? Have you considered skipping? The larger the number, the more impressive.”
Erysi added, “And if you’re not skipping to Seventeen, at least can we?”
“Erysi!” Farisa said. “I can’t let that slide. Now, apologize to Elior, or I’m writing you one-third of a demerit.”
“A whole third? Hard-ass.” Erysi pouted and sat back down.
“Okay, a sixth. Only because you’re cute.”
Elior shook his head in swallowed fury.
“I’ve acknowledged your question, Headmaster, so you can sit back down.”
He did not.
A black-haired girl near the front timidly raised her hand.
“That’s what they do when they want to speak,” Farisa said to Elior.
“Headmaster,” said the young woman, “I’ve been through grammar school, preparatory school, and I’m in my second year here. Farisa is the best teacher I’ve ever had.”
“Aye,” said one of the boys, rapping his hands on the desk. “Aye, aye,” said a girl as she joined the chorus. The volume of the drumming built to applause—better than applause, it was thunder.
The man left without a word, and Farisa did not see him at all the next day.
#
April 20, ’94 (6 days before the Fire)
Spring, it seemed, had been skipped on the way to summer. There were no classes today, so Farisa was still in bed, reading, when Erysi knocked on her door at ten o’clock in the morning.
“I didn’t see you at breakfast. I brought scones from the cafeteria.”
Farisa shut her open journal. “Not even May and it’s four and a half flags.”
“You said you had something to show me.”
“Oh, right.” Farisa started changing into her outdoor clothes. “It’s not far from here. I had to hide it.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not at all.” Farisa laughed. “It’s valuable. If I had bought it, it would have cost me thirty grot, but I found the parts on campus, and the labor is my own.”
They walked east, taking shade where they could. Erysi’s swatting away of flies seemed to only attract more.
“Have you seen much of Elior?”
Farisa smiled. “He did not come into my classroom once yesterday. I guess he learned everything he wanted to know.”
“Learned his lesson?”
Farisa groaned. “Awful pun.”
“I meant to ask you something.”
They began to cross an open meadow with white flowers where there was no shade. “What’s that?”
“You’re a mage.”
“That’s a declarative statement, not a question.”
You can enter minds, right?”
Farisa looked around to be sure they were truly alone. “I can.”
“Why haven’t you…?”
“Elior?”
“Right.”
“That would be a bad idea for several reasons.”
“Worse than stealing his old letters?”
“We didn’t steal them. He’s not a stupid man. The smarter someone is—the more complex the mind, in other words—the harder it is to get anything. Also, since he has known who I am for some time, he has probably read up on how to block entry. There is also the risk of entanglement.”
“Entanglement?”
“Three years ago, I healed someone—I tried to, I believe I succeeded, but who knows? She was my best friend’s mother. Whenever she experiences an intense emotion, I still feel it at a distance, a little bit. We are talking about someone good, someone kind. If I became thus entangled with someone like Elior, who knows what I would be pulling into myself?”
“I see.”
“Last of all, he’s old. Entry, if he fought it, could kill him, and if you’re inside someone’s mind when they die...”
“What?”
“I’m not entirely sure. The literature says, ‘The outside becomes the inside.’ It sounds like...”
“Something not to mess with.”
“Exactly.”
They reached a cluster of yew bushes. Farisa looked through the vegetation to make sure her hidden treasure was still there. “I might need your help, Erysi.” She tugged a metal bar. “No, I’ve got it.” She pulled the machine’s metal frame out of the branches, and stood the contraption up. The pedal-powered vehicle had two rubber tires and a handlebar for steering.
“What is that?” Erysi’s eyes widened. “It looks like a torture device.”
“It’s nothing of the sort. It’s called a ‘velocipede,’ or ‘velo’.” Farisa walked the bicycle to the trail, where she rode for a few hundred feet before steering herself around and pedaling back.
“You made that for me?”
“Well, I didn’t invent it. I found the blueprints and parts in the machinery building, and put it together up here, but yes, it’s yours now.”
“Farisa…” Erysi’s eyes watered. “Sorry. Spring does this to me.”
“It’ll do twenty miles per hour on a good road. I wouldn’t take it past ten on a trail, though.”
“What am I going to do with it?”
“Ride it, of course.”
“How?”
“It’s easier to balance than it looks. You took physics, right? Once you’re moving, the angular momentum of the wheels stabilizes you.” Farisa demonstrated by pedaling a couple dozen yards forward. “See?”
“Where would I go?”
“Wherever you want.”
“Farisa...”
A cloud obscured the sun, bringing a damp but rainless chill to Farisa’s arms. “I don’t ever want to leave Cait Forest, but if the evil that is rising here is one I am unable to defeat, then I will be gone without notice. If that happens, you must go to the cabin. I will leave a note in my tea kettle to tell you where I have gone. Use the bicycle to come after me.”
“Farisa, I’m never going to learn how to ride that thing.”
#
April 21, ’94 (5 days before the Fire)
The next day was neither cold nor hot nor rainy, nor overwhelmingly overcast, nor especially sunny. No birds were singing, so she could hear every step of hers as she followed the brown gravel trail to the Old Schoolhouse. The sense of something being wrong sat square in the center of her tailbone, and it rose up her spine unless she could fixate on something else. She stretched her hands. She increased her pace. When she got into the classroom, she held the chalk at all times, more tightly than she needed to. There was an electric hum in her ears of no accord, and her hands felt hot.
Elior opened the schoolhouse door, but did not take his usual seat in the back row.
“Good morning, Headmaster.”
He waved a hand. “Excluding the teacher, you are all dismissed.”
The students looked at Farisa. She shrugged. She did not have the authority to contradict him.
He shouted, “Leave!”
His breath smelled especially bad—like a compost heap of rotting crayfish and pig manure—this morning. He handed Farisa a letter. “You might prefer to wait for them to leave, before you read this.”
Nervous energy drove her fingers to open the envelope anyway.
The last of her students looked back, nervous concern on his face, but she nodded to indicate that she could handle this herself, even though she was unsure she really could.
She had seen Cait Forest’s letterhead before, as well as this pompous font, used to announce formal events and celebrations, but she already knew this occasion would be an unpleasant one. In a booming, melodramatic voice, she read: “Effective this Twenty-First Day of April, mumbledy-mumbledy Ninety-Four—uh, congratulations for getting the date right, Elior—”
“I did not write this.”
“The Board of Cait Forest. No, I didn’t say that with enough vigor. The Board!—Of Cait Forest! has determined that, in light of blah, blah, buppity-bup bu-bah… hold our personnel to the highest…da-da-daa… What’s this? What the hell’s this?”
She waved the offending missive in Elior’s face, but he did not react.
“Moral turpitude?” Farisa crumpled the letter and swung her shoulders so she faced the man chins-on. “Is this a joke, Barris? Moral fu—Moral turpitude?”
“I might have softened the tone, but I stand by our board’s decision. Your employment is terminated as of right now.”
“This makes no fucking sense.”
“We might add a charge of insubordination for your use of profanity.” Elior coughed. “Do you know how many complaints I get?”
“Complaints? About what? My teaching?”
“Your teaching is passable. No, I get complaints about… what you are.”
Farisa bit her lip. “Do you want to call me a tarsha? Do it, then. Say it. Call me a—”
“This isn’t about that, Farisa.”
“Then what is it about?”
“You are to leave Cait Forest by eleven o’clock. Our guards are instructed, if they see you after that time, to surrender you to the Global Company.”
“The Global Company? The Global Fucking Company, Barris? Cait Forest is my life, in which I was never any threat to you, but if you chase me out of here, I have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go but up your mother’s cunt, you fucking pompous—”
“Eleven o’clock, Farisa.”
The classroom door, though twenty feet away, swung closed. The lock turned.
“Tenessa Bell,” Farisa said.
The man said nothing.
“When she was thirteen, you wrote to her a sort of letter no child should ever read.”
“I don’t know what—”
“I have it, and it’s sitting somewhere you will never find.”
Elior’s face lost volume and hung like a sheet, then turned red. “You mean to extort me, Farisa?”
“We can pretend this entire conversation never happened. Here is how you will save your life, Barris. You will go to the board and demand another vote on this decision. You will announce, in a defense of my character, that your prior issuances against me were in error. You will vote in my favor. I will be present while all of this occurs. If the result of all this is that the board still wants me gone, then I will accept my dismissal and you will never hear from me again.”
“You are in no position to set terms, Farisa.”
“Neither are you.”
“You are a stupid, stupid girl.”
Farisa laughed so hard she covered her face.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“What’s so funny?”
“I just remembered. You threatened me with the Global Company, but Hampus Bell already knows I am here.”
“I’m not talking about that idiot. God knows, he doesn’t want to find you. You are worth little, but your legend holds value, and he knows this, but his people might still be enticed by the reward. I’ll hand you over to Grackenheit myself. You say you have a letter, somewhere, that might—if the content you describe is there, if Hampus Bell ever learns of its existence, and if he believes a word of it; and these are all heavy ‘ifs’, Farisa—cause me to hang alongside you. You know what? I will take that risk. I have fewer years to lose than you do. Would you give your own life for a chance—not a high chance, but a chance—of killing an old man?”
“You’re disgusting. I had not been on campus for three full days when I was first told not to end up in Professor Sotheby’s office with the door closed for any reason. Your breath smells like the toilet of a leper colony. There are handsome old men, but you are not one. Your face is misshapen and that’s not age—that’s you. You are absolutely, from the crown of your head to the bones of your feet, repulsive.”
“Repulsive? A woman who lusts after other women calls me repulsive? What, do you think I didn’t know all about that?”
“What does that have to do with anything? I’d love to hear what you think I’ve done. Please, educate me. Detail your accusations.” She grabbed a piece of chalk and handed it to him. “Draw it on the board. Tell me what two women do, you leering codger. Tell me what I did, with whom, and for how long. Let’s hear every fucking detail—the sensations, the mechanics—of what you believe I have done, and if you can’t do that, then you don’t know a flake off the face of fuck and you might as well shut up forever.”
“Farisa.” Like a chemical reaction that had run out of fuel, his face and voice turned calm again. “The decision comes from our board, not me. You need to leave Cait Forest by one o’clock. This conversation is over. Unlock the door.”
“No.”
Elior went to the door and tried the knob. “If you do not let me out of here right now—”
“Elior, I decide when this conversation is over. I will leave Cait Forest, but on my terms.”
He struggled with the locked door. He banged his shoulder against it.
“It would be easier if you would hear what I have to say.”
He turned around, face red.
“You said I’m fired. Stop my wage, if I’m not teaching. However, I will need more than two hours to get out of here.”
“This is not a negotiation, Farisa.”
Farisa lifted the termination letter over her head and let it fall gently. The paper blackened, and the heat of the flame kept it buoyant enough not to reach the floor until it had turned mostly to ash. She stomped it out. “Unless you can telepathically summon a locksmith, I believe it is a negotiation.”
He looked at his hands, then behind himself at the door, then at her. He nodded.
“I will need seven days to get out of here.”
“I’ll give you two days. If you’re here a minute after this time on—”
“Six.” She recited from otherwise unwanted memory a passage from one of his dead letters. “Six days.”
“Five days,” said the headmaster. “I will handle the cancellation of your classes. Our arrangement is one you will keep entirely secret.”
“Then we agree.” Farisa opened her desk, grabbed a key, and unlocked the classroom’s front door. “I will be gone by April 26, at ten in the morning. You’ll never see or hear from me again.”
The headmaster walked away, head down. The set and slump of his spine and shoulders, against the harsh spring light, were like those of a decrepit king who’d seen himself unclothed for the first time in forty years.
At two dozen paces, he turned around. “I was not lying when I said the board made the decision, not me.”
“We both know that’s bullshit, Barris.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m rejecting you.”
Farisa chuffed. “You are rejecting me. Don’t feel bad about it. You’re not the first, and you certainly won’t be the last.”
#
She had left this place on her own volition once. It had not gone well. She was older and more experienced. She knew that money was the key to it all, and that not all of Cait Forest’s wealth was rooted to the ground, but the onslaught of decisions that had to be made—and quickly—resulted in a haze of frightened unreason. The journal entries were of her own penmanship, but she could not remember writing them.
4/21/94: It happened! Fired. Expelled. E-16 never liked me. I fucking knew (scribble). Must leave by 4/26 at 10:00. No, be safe. Leave by 25th. Gives me four days.
4/22/94: Woke at 1:30pm, unable to get out of bed. Didn’t eat. SEVERE Marquessa attack at 3:30 pm. Ate one meal around 7:00 couldn’t keep it down. Not sure how I get out of here on MY terms, not sure how I
4/23/94: Told Erysi what happened. She begged me not to leave. Said, why don’t you hide in cabin, no one knows it’s here. She’s right I could but I have been hiding my whole life and do NOT want to hide anymore and 1.5 mi from campus is NOT safe whatever she says because if the Globbos do a grid search they will find this place and then what.
Went to campus at 2:30 am for food and water from supply room. Picked up a hylus ball, not sure why I have it. Throwing it up and catching it. Throwing it up and catching it.
4/24/94: can’t read, what’s the point. NEED to get out safely. Claes knows what to do, will know what to do, always knows. Wrote him, not heard back. Think I can reach his house, need food water for travel, plus hotels, fares, 300+ gt to do it safely. Money money money where do I get money. Marquessa ever present. Cabin traps heat, 5 flags outside, prob. 6F indoors. Erysi came for dinner but we had nothing to say to each other, I’m sick really sick and this heat isn’t helping it has not rained since fuck off long ago I can’t remember I barely
4/25/94: Might stay after all. could KILL anyone who tries evict me. Elior? The board? Bored. Bored, I am. Bored and trapped. Want to leave but no clue how I get the fucking MONEY. what can I steal on campus? Gold or gem sales reportable to GC—too risky. Art can’t resell on the run. What does Ct Forest have I can sell as soon as I answer I’m out of here. What is worth money, I don’t know I never had to live like this, money money I can’t fucking do this world, someone bring me a better one before the bad smells get here and my face peels off and fucking fuck cunt shit I hate this I hate this I HATE this!!! There is no place where it is safe to be Farisa. There is no place safe and guess what Elior I will do whatever it takes to survive. If you test me I may fail but you will certainly
#
April 25, ’94 (one day before the Fire)
It had been night on her cabin’s ceiling; now it was afternoon. When she looked at the same spot for too long, chemical formulae and complex Lyrian sentences covered the ceiling, and they were always replete with errors, and she could never correct them because they would change as soon as her eyes moved.
She looked through her journal, mildly irked that she had let the previous four days go by in a swirl of incoherence. Crisis had struck her and she had let herself be stunned. She now had about eighteen hours by the official deadline, but Elior had already broken his word, so she truly had no time at all. Recent memories were fluid, but she did remember this—last night, under an almost-full moon, she had gone to campus to steal dried fruit from the pantry, only to find a crude portrait of her face, posted above her name along with the text, Wanted Alive—5000 Gt Reward. The paper had the same dotted pattern as newspapers, so she knew it had been printed rather than drawn by hand. She had taken down all thirty copies she found on campus. She had burned them in a metal trash can. And then time had passed. Now it was now.
Erysi knocked on her door.
Farisa said, “Come in.”
“You look like hell.”
“I’m sure I do.” Farisa sat up in bed. She described the posters she had found overnight. “Elior promised me five days of safety. He lied.”
“It’s not surprising.” Erysi shrugged. “You did threaten him.”
“This isn’t the Company’s world. It’s Cait Forest. A person’s word is supposed to be worth something.”
“It’s worth what it costs.”
Farisa scoffed. “Thanks to that old bag of shit, I suppose I’m in danger every minute I stay here.”
Erysi sat beside her. “If you leave, take the velo.”
“I can’t. I gave it to you for a reason.” Farisa put a hand on each of Erysi’s bare upper arms and looked into her dark eyes. “It’s yours now and, one day, when you’re ready to come after me, you’ll ride right into the wind on a smooth night road and you’ll find that it’s glorious.”
Erysi looked aside.
“It would draw attention to me,” Farisa said. “I’ll need to travel in absolute secrecy, and even then it’s going to be risky. If the posted reward is five thousand, I’ll need ten.”
“Double that, in case you need to pay off more than one person.”
“Twelve thousand grot.” Farisa fell back on the bed. “That’s why I haven’t left. I still haven’t figured out how to get the money. I’ve considered all the options. Gold or diamond sales are reportable, by Company law, so I’ll be caught inside two days. There’s silver in the dining room, but it’s too close to campus. There’s a lot of art that would fetch a blue penny, but I can’t carry a stack of old paintings while I’m on the run.” She growled. “I can’t think in a fucking straight line right now.”
“You need sleep,” Erysi said.
“That’s the last thing I can afford.”
“If you don’t expect Elior, or the Globbos, to come up here in the next four hours, it’s what you should do.”
“You’re not wrong,” Farisa said. She got out of bed, opened her desk drawer, and drew out the revolver, which she handed to Erysi. “Remember when we found this?”
Erysi, taking the gun, said, “It seems like that was years ago.”
“Barely a month.” Farisa closed her cabin door. “Watch over me. You are absolutely right that I need to sleep, and I’ve not been able to, because I’ve been so worried about someone finding this place. Sit over there, and watch the door, and make sure I’m safe.”
“I will do that,” Erysi said.
“When I wake up, I’ll have a plan. I promise.”
“I’m sure you will.”
Farisa laid back on the bed, closed her eyes, and felt safe enough to go into a dreamless rest, which passed slowly into what seemed to be too vivid to be an ordinary dream, but more like a vision, with people in strange clothing, the kind worn hundreds of years ago, walking about. The seasons seemed unstable, because time was passing so fast, until the flickering of day and night became a slower stutter, then visible motion, then ordinary almost-stillness, and it was early evening. She stood outside a circular hedge—standing up on tiptoes to see above it, a labyrinth—about fifty feet in diameter. She walked inside. These flowers would have been bright yellow and deep purple in daylight, but were merely light and dark in a swirl of twilight, dotting the walls with no apparent pattern but sufficient variation that she could progress and backtrack through the maze by memory. A red setting sun rose—time was still pulling backward, but not so fast, because there were hundreds of people here, silently praying for something like a storm to happen—over the walls of vegetation. She heard sobbing, then a little girl’s voice. “I’m lost. I’m so lost.” She found her way to the center by this sound, and when she got there, she saw blonde hair of a girl who had buried her face in her knees, but Farisa tried to get the girl’s attention, the sky cracked open and it rained blood.
Farisa woke up to the sound of her own voice.
Erysi, who had been reading, said, “Bad dreams?”
“Flowers,” Farisa said. She sat up. “I feel better. How long was I asleep?”
“Three hours or so.”
“Did you know that this place used to be a tulip garden?”
Erysi shook her head.
“I didn’t either, until now.” She paused. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“I figured out how to get out of here safely. I figured out how to get the money. What’s a Blue Fancy worth? Two hundred grot per bulb, right?”
Erysi scratched her neck. “If they’re worth two hundred, they’ve surely been picked.”
“The greenhouse,” Farisa said. “It’s perfect. It’s all glass so it’ll be easy to break into, I know where everything is, and a few dozen tulip bulbs won’t be missed. The only problem is—”
“It’s right by Mason Hall.”
“It is.” Farisa looked south. “I will need your help. The sun sets in about an hour. I’ll need your help. Destroy every lamp on campus within a half mile of the place. I will break in at eight o’clock on the black minute, and I’ll be gone as soon as I can be.”
“I can’t come with you.”
“I know you can’t.” Farisa put a hand on Erysi’s arm. “Come back up here in two or three days. Tear the cabin down. When you’re ready to find me, take the bike and ride east. This isn’t goodbye. I refuse to say goodbye.”
#
Farisa used her remaining time to pack a spare set of clothes, three days’ worth of dry food, a few maps, a hammer, and the hylus ball she’d found two days ago. By half past seven, the sun had set far enough that no one would recognize her unless up close, and she didn’t expect to allow anyone to get near her. The evening was chilly enough that her hooded sweatshirt wouldn’t draw attention. Creeping from dark space to dark space, she held entirely still when she heard others’ voices.
A girl asked, “Do you know why all the lights are out?”
“Probably some vartero prank,” said a boy.
The girl scoffed. “Vart boys. There really isn’t a single good thing that can be said about them.”
You’re not wrong, Farisa found herself wanting to say.
Their lanterns swung as they walked away and over a hill.
She reached the greenhouse’s back wall at five minutes to eight, awaiting the exact second of Mason Hall’s bell announcing the hour, as this would give cover to her noise as she swung the sledge hammer and broke the window. There, she ditched the hylus ball, hoping it would take blame for the broken glass, and went inside, feeling through the darkness to the locked cupboard where the most valuable bulbs were kept. Her key to it still worked. She gathered Blue Fancies, Red Candelas, and Erika’s Spirals, all of these in too much hurry to count.
In the darkest clothing she owned, she left the greenhouse with about fifty bulbs. Some of the lights near Mason Hall had already been fixed, so she took a detour, avoiding paths where moonlight might fall on her face, for fear of her skin tone giving her away, walking as fast as she could without visibly running, on her way to leave Cait Forest forever.
#
She shivered, as if she had fallen into a cold lake. The full moon was overhead—it was near midnight; hours had passed. She had been in the greenhouse for no longer than ten minutes, so where had the time gone? She was wearing a light-colored dress she had never seen before.
A woman’s scream cut through the air.
Ignore it, Farisa. Your duty to protect this place ended the day you were expelled from it.
The scream came again, so terrible—there was a sobbing, sad break in the sound—that it put Farisa immediately into action. She ran toward it, reminding herself that Cait Forest’s few predators could be chased away with ease by a simple show of confidence. Coyotes here were shy. Wolves were seen less than once in a generation. Black bears, if they existed at all here, lived up in the mountains.
“I’m coming,” she yelled to the girl. “I’m the ranger. It’s probably as scared of you as you are of—”
When the mage came over a hill, she saw a creature twice the size of an elephant, a vermin with a milky silver-white skin and forty eyes, along with at least as many legs. It heaved itself against the ground, emitting moans of self-pleasure. It had at least a dozen mouths, some emitting warbling trills of ecstasy while others gnashed their teeth against the victim, whose face had become a screaming red slush. The dying woman’s wails mingled in the violated air with the chitinous chittering of the larvalike beast. Her torso thrashed and her legs kicked frantically, then stopped.
The mage had come too close to escape the beast’s notice. Its forty eyes—some foggy and half-closed, some clear and piercing—had come to focus on her. Some were brown, some were blue, and some were honey-colored. The biggest eye, in the beast’s center mass, had receded halfway into its socket, from which a rheumy snot dribbled. The creature emitted a flash, brighter than an electric arc, and Farisa jumped behind a rock but even still, her chest explode in pain, her limbs slackened, and the Monster’s breath condensed on her skin.
The light is its weapon. The flash stops the heart.
When it emitted a second pulse, Farisa blocked her shut eyes with an arm, preventing as much of its light from entering her skull as she could. She retched. She put herself into the blue so the flash against her face would not spread into her brain. She stepped back. A third blast, not as bright as the first two, came. She grabbed her chest and expected to fall backward and die, but the veins in her arms softened, then the arteries crossing her chest did as well; a fluid warmth perfused her body as her vital fluids thawed.
It is still weak, because it has just been born, and it is hungry. It must feed before it can do that again.
The Monster’s dozen tongues scoured the raw flesh of the dead woman, getting red gore all over its silver skin and squealing in what could be mistaken for nothing other than joy. The segments of its larval body pulsated in succession. Farisa wanted to run, felt she stood a good chance of escaping, but realized she might be the only person within five hundred miles with a chance of killing this thing, which would otherwise go on to inflict a thousand more deaths of a kind that even the worst of Cait Forest, let alone the best, did not deserve.
Tendrils like thick vines came from behind, whipping around Farisa’s ankles and thighs.
I own this tree, Farisa, said an inaudible but discernible voice. I’ve lived here forever. This is my place, not yours, and you have stayed beyond your welcome.
She struggled to free her legs, but the vines tightened like iron cuffs. The Monster was still yards away, devouring its previous victim, but a searing pain traveled up Farisa’s left leg as the skin on the sole of her foot broke, drawing blood.
I don't have to touch you to hurt you.
She had learned spells to create and shape fire. She had learned spells to move metal. She had therefore learned spells that could kill but, because of the admonitions against using magic in such a way, she had never learned a spell to kill, and she regretted this gap in her study, because she did not believe the efforts that would stop a human assailant would work against this thing. If she boiled out one pair of eyes, it would still have thirty-eight to see with.
The creature had finished consuming its first victim. It moved closer. Farisa could taste the watering of her mouths, smell her own blood from all directions, and she knew she must dive into the blue with desperate force, sinking as if she were the most leaden and heaviest version of herself, destined for the midnight black of the blue, a place where unnamed sorceries lived, where new spells were found and the laws of land did not apply. Patterns existed here in forms not meant for minds; glyphs could be found in four, five, six dimensions, requiring a calligrapher’s precision to trace, and she could not discern the useful tangles from the noisy stir, not until she felt another bolt of pain from her leg, a branching electric impulse from her wound that tore its way up her body.
That thing cut my foot open. It hurts.
The pain has spikes and branches. It has...
... a geometry, a pattern.
Still in the blue, still in pain that was scrambling up her leg, the mage tried the glyph that her own agony traced inside her body, and although her muscles seized and her skin felt hotter than glowing coal, her eyelids opened to the discovery one of the Monster’s eyes sizzled shut, followed by its twin. A second pair of eye sockets followed, with bubbling yolk oozing out. A third pair did the same. The Monster thrashed against the ground, and every sight of it fighting to survive made Farisa hate this creature even more, to the point that she knew she would continue this spell—a fourth pair shut—no matter how much it sickened her, and even if it killed her. A fifth pair of eyes, blue flames visible, burned out. The beast’s silver-white skin, like a moth’s nest in a fire, lost opacity, revealing the beast’s innards, a mess of misshapen human limbs and twisted faces.
The Monster emitted a flurry of loud noises—the howl of ferocious wind, the sickening crash of a train disaster, earthquake rumbles—until its voice converged on that of a young woman.
Stop it, Farisa! You’re hurting me.
The Monster’s cries roused no sympathy, not in Farisa, as she had seen it murder and consume a real human, and so nothing would stop her from continuing the spell, even though every muscle in the mage’s body hurt. The creature’s skin, as if it had been set over a bonfire, continued to pop apart while its viscera, now visible through the meat, throbbed. Stomachs and hearts bumped against each other as if in a state of indiscriminate copulation. The Monster’s runny inner fluids dripped out, sizzling, turning to sulfurous smoke before reaching the ground.
Stop it, Farisa! I’m so scared! Please stop!
The Monster’s eyes shut in pairs. Farisa could imagine herself shutting them by visible force, though she was thankful to have no physical contact with this creature. Six pairs of eyes were still open. It seemed harder now to tell where the Monster ended and the rest of the world began. One pair closed; five were left. Farisa realized she was taking a life for the first time. What was this thing? A god whose name had been forgotten? Cait Forest’s protector, no monster but an angel? One more pair shut; eight eyes were left. Spiders have eight eyes, Farisa. Spiders were not malevolent; eight eyes were no sign of danger. No, Farisa. This is almost over. You are almost done. She clenched her fists, letting double that primal hate for a creature she had seen so viciously take a life. The burning inside her lungs, the violent beating of her heart, did not matter. An eye ruptured, spewing black snot. The one next to it did the same. Six left.
We are sisters, Farisa. I am your mother. I am your daughter. I am your lover. I am your—
Another pair of eyes closed. The dying Monster’s effluences had formed a smoldering black puddle on the ground.
“You’re a killer,” Farisa said to the beast, sure it would neither understand her language nor put into mind at all, if it even had one, the young mage’s opinion. “I have to do this.”
You’re a killer, too. You are killing me, here, in my home.
Two more eyes shut; only two were open. Most of the Monster’s mouths and legs had dissolved into smoldering black carbon. It had no weapon but one—its own terror, at its own coming death—which it injected in Farisa all the force it had left. The Monster was now so small it could be torn apart with a bare pair of hands. The limbs it still had could barely move. Its two living eyes shifted in place to take a human shape, and fixed their gaze on Farisa, and looked so much like Erysi’s eyes that the mage could not force them shut.
She was Fay, the tiny girl in the freezing orphanage. She had never left that place. Lani was pulling her hair while Boof buried her face in yellow dog piss slush. She would never be adopted because she was chubby and brown and weird. The twins, the older girls who took turns, one pinning her arms while the other lifted her shirt and jabbed a wet finger in her belly button, were coming back around. Weird Fay. Witchy Fay. Monster Fay.
I am the Monster. I am killing the Angel of Cait Forest, the guardian of this place. I am the darkness, and she is the light. If I defeat her, I am a murderer. I will be nothing else. I will die in a madhouse.
This quarter-second of vacillation proved to be all the time this adversary needed to turn the fight. The creature, whose size Farisa’s spell had reduced to that of a bodiless head, swelled back to its original extent, its taut milky skin regrown, its forty eyes all open. A fiery red light spilled out of each of the Monster’s mouths.
Mother of mothers, to your bosom my soul returns.
Farisa fell to the ground and the black rest gathered inside her.
Death refused.
But, death never refuses.
If I am not dead, then....
Her fiery will had continued the spell even through that moment in which Farisa’s conscious mind, lost in the labyrinth, had doubted its way. The evocation was complete—Farisa was standing, her blood was still fluid, and the Monster’s body had erupted in magnesium-white flames. It tore at itself blind like a cornered insect, emitting shrill cries in desperation. You’ve done it this time. To the madhouse you go, you spent mage, you evil cunt. You’re a barefoot killer, Farisa, a barefoot killer is what you are, is all you are. The taunts and shrieks never stopped, but they climbed the octaves into inaudibility, and so too did the Monster’s ashes take the air, swirling in the wind, losing their yellow-white glow in favor of the red of ordinary flame, then fading as the black night air cooled them.
Farisa felt no sense of victory. A woman’s corpse, her face and chest torn up beyond recognition, lay at her feet. Farisa checked the woman’s arm, knowing Erysi had a mole there, finding none. The victim could not be identified by her clothes either—the dress, blue with pink stripes, fit a pattern that had become so fashionable, nothing could be determined.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you,” she said.
She could not, of course, leave this corpse in its ruined state. If it were found, the morning after Farisa’s departure, no one would blame the violence on a five-thousand-year-old Monster seen by only one living person—instead, the world’s interest in capturing the mage would triple and triple again. Farisa would be nowhere to defend her good name and, even if present to do so, knew no one would believe her.
Thus, she dragged the body behind a rock, making sure she and it were out of all the campus’s lines of sight. The mage had little left of herself, but she could make a fire, and the ground was bare dirt here, so nothing would catch. The woman’s body burned from the inside. Fat bubbled and spat like cooking oil. Muscle charred, filling the air with a metallic scent. Skin blackened and bones cracked. The flames turned yellow, then white, consuming the body faster than natural fire could, then vanished when nothing of the Monster’s victim was left but a charcoal smudge.
I’m sorry for that, too.
She looked up at the night sky, scanning the stars for a sense of direction. Farisa was sure she had been in this patch of woods before, but she had never seen it in this state, and could not recall which direction was east. The stars, at least, had not moved, though the space between them seemed rusty. She walked through brush, knowing she would find a trail if she kept this direction.
An ember fell, seemingly out of nowhere. She decided to reach it and stamp it out before it could ignite the grass, but when she arrived, she found that the falling light had never existed. A star had seemed to move, and it had tricked her eye.
No, I am safe. The air is cool, the sky is clear. There is no— Was that lightning? She looked around. It couldn’t be; there was no thunder. A meteor? Had a meteor shower been forecast? Harmless. They burn up in the sky. They leave pretty trails. No forks of lightning, no lingering light of a meteor. And yet, another flash. This one did bring a rumble, five or six seconds later—about a mile off. The colors were pleasing; they were buoyant—a warm yellow orange, a pale electric green, then the bright transfixing pink of a collar lily—like fireworks.
Fuck. My cabin. The chemicals under my bed. Sodium orange; barium green; potassium purple. The horizon reddened; her cabin had caught fire.
Farisa ran toward Observatory Hill, knowing that on a clear spring night like this, she had a good chance of finding...
“Cassi! Cassi Stone!”
The girl lay on a blanket she had set on the grass; her silhouette sat up. “Farisa?”
Winded, Farisa fought for each word. “I’m not here. You never saw me. Go to Hooke Chapel and ring the bell nine times. Three, then a pause, then three, then another pause, and—” She bent over, hands above knees, to catch her breath. “And then three more.”
Cassi’s eyes widened, as if she had been accosted by a madwoman. “Nine means...?”
“Fire.” Farisa pointed to the menacing north, where a yellow line glowed. “After the chapel, go to Mason Hall. There’s a key to the wine cellar under the stone lion in Ka—in Room 307. Then get yourself to the dorms and wake as many people as you can. They all need to get underground. Now.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I’m scared myself.” Smoke had begun to invade the northern sky. “The tunnels have enough space for everyone. The winds are in your favor, but fires move fast. You have fifteen minutes. I have less.”
“You’re not coming back to Cait Forest?”
“Hell no,” Farisa said. “That’d put me in a lot more danger than I’m in from this damn fire.”
When she heard herself saying those words, she did not know when she had said them, nor whether they had been heard, but could tell that time had passed because she recognized this dark farm road as being three miles from campus. She spoke not a word more, because no one was around, but also because every taste of air was strength she could need to keep ahead of raging blaze. She could trust Cassi, she knew, to run back and save as many lives as could be saved, but she knew even now that some people would not survive the night. Somehow, she knew how many would die and where they would die, all but one—she knew this like she knew herself to be the cause of the Monster’s waking—but she could put none of this gnosis inside logic, nor could she stop for it. She had to keep going. She ran and she ran and she ran and she ran with an inferno at her back.