My PK professor was telling us every rule of thermodynamics was wrong when the beeping finally penetrated my sleep. I rolled over, hit the clock with one numb hand, and discovered my alarm had been going off for forty-five minutes.
I arrived at Historical Tarot fifteen minutes late and out of breath, and got an unpleasant look from Professor Madison. I sat down and tried to be invisible. Embarrassing myself in front of one of the best diviners on campus: what a great start to my day.
By the time I got to Hurst for lunch, the flood of adrenaline that propelled me out of bed had long since faded, leaving me sluggish and more than a little worried about the day ahead of me. But I’d made one decision in my sleep. If I’d screwed up my athame, I’d rather find out from friends than from Grayson.
Robert unwrapped the blue silk, taking care not to touch the metal. I was already embarrassed by asking for the favor; now I spared a little for my choice of knife. Rather than a simple kitchen tool or a wide-bladed hunting knife, I’d picked something for which the closest word was “dagger.” It wasn’t as flashy as a sorcerer’s sword, which some people used for big rituals, but watching Robert examine it, I wished I’d chosen something more mundane.
Robert would be the last person to twit me for a flamboyant choice, though. He just sat back and looked thoughtful. I bit my lip. Julian came up then with his tray, and Robert gestured for him to inspect my athame. I shifted in my chair.
Julian bent over the knife, one hand hovering a scant half-inch above it. He remained like that for a long moment, then sat down with a motion so abrupt it made me jump.
Unable to bear the silence any longer, I asked, “Where did I go wrong?”
Robert shook his head. “Nowhere. Grayson will send two-thirds of your classmates out to try again, but this one, she will pass.” He spread his hands and gave me a seated half-bow. “Congratulations, my lady.”
My surprised pleasure didn’t last for long. “But then why—”
I cut the sentence off, but not fast enough. “Why what?” Robert asked, eyebrow raised.
Julian was eating roasted potatoes with methodical precision, not looking at me, yet I knew I had his attention, too. “It just felt weird,” I said, covering my lapse as best as I could. “And I thought that meant I’d done something wrong.”
“External discipline,” Robert said, with a hint of smugness. “You are accustomed to the internals, the telepathic sciences in particular. Of course it feels odd.”
But Julian laid his fork down and said, “I can check it more closely, if you’d like. It could be something crept in—not a flaw, but a resonance you weren’t expecting. Was the strangeness while you were keying, or after?”
Had Robert not been there, I might have considered admitting my problem with the circle. Or not; it was like telling a native speaker how you turned a basic greeting from their language into a mortal insult about somebody’s pet hippo. With Robert there, it was out of the question. “No, don’t worry about it,” I said. “Gods know you’ve got enough work of your own, without adding some of mine.”
“Indeed you do,” Robert agreed, to my surprise. Was he trying to save me from Julian’s curiosity? “You looked like a corpse when I came home last night. And you look not much better today. What have you been doing to yourself?”
“Combat shielding,” Julian said. “It’s more draining than I anticipated.” A bland enough answer, but a thread laced through it, that in a less restrained person might have been annoyance.
“And you, being a damn fool, are taking it in the same quarter as two other heavy CM courses. You’re going to bloody kill yourself.”
I almost cut my thumb on my athame, wrapping it back up. Robert’s tone was still light, but the edge it carried wasn’t. He wasn’t diverting attention from me; he was truly worried, enough to have this conversation in front of me, and screw Julian’s pride.
And now that I was paying attention, I saw why. Julian did look drained. He was naturally very pale, but there was even less color in his face now, and his eyes, when I risked a glance at them, were faintly bloodshot. This didn’t prevent him from directing a level, unamused expression at Robert. “I’ll be fine. That’s why I’m taking Power Reservoirs in the same term. It’s tiring, but soon I’ll have a source I can draw on. Then things will be all right.”
“And what will you do until then?”
“Survive.” Julian drank down half a glass of milk.
I glanced at his tray and kicked myself for not noticing it before. He was eating amazing quantities, a sure sign of heavy energy use. At least he had the sense to balance his diet to compensate, which was probably the only thing keeping him going. That, and sheer stubbornness.
But for what purpose? I knew why I was driving myself: a rabid and not entirely rational desire to face and maybe overcome my weakness with CM. Julian took on a herculean load every quarter. There had to be a reason for it. Hoping to draw him out, I said, “Why not Power Reservoirs first?”
“Grayson only teaches Combat Shielding once a year.”
“You have another year left at Welton,” I reminded him.
Julian shrugged. Him not meeting anybody’s gaze was habitual, but sometimes—like now—it felt evasive, too. “Schedules change. I don’t want to miss my chance. Besides, she’s thinking about offering a seminar on experimental shielding theory next fall, and I stand a better chance of getting in if I take this class now.”
I narrowly avoided saying “bullshit.” Grayson would take him in a heartbeat, pre-req or no. But it was entirely possible Julian wasn’t sure he’d be at Welton next year.
I didn’t know of any reason he would leave—but then, I didn’t know why he was here to begin with. For all the press releases freshman year about Welton’s commitment to diversity, political correctness didn’t begin to explain it. Robert’s brick-bat attempts to get an answer had all failed; so had my more subtle ones, and Liesel wouldn’t push for anything he didn’t want to say. But whatever the reason was, maybe it could go away as inexplicably as it came. And Julian was either making the best use he could of the time he had—or trying to convince someone he should stay.
Hell, even I didn’t know why he should. Wilder training was to a normal college education what military boot camp was to intramural sports. Whatever brought him here, it wasn’t the learning opportunities.
But I was glad he’d come. I might have had more of a social life if I spent less time with the campus’ only resident wilder, but I wouldn’t trade if I could. Even if being friends with Julian meant swallowing half my questions, out of respect for his privacy.
Robert had taken advantage of my silence to start an argument over Julian’s stated logic—or to try. Julian, ignoring him, had gone back to eating. And when he finished, he jerked the conversation onto another track without bothering to invent a plausible segue.
But now I was paying attention, not just to my own difficulties, but to Julian’s. Any thought I had of asking him for remedial CM help was well and truly dead—he really didn’t need the added work—but I could and would make sure he didn’t collapse.
Assuming I didn’t collapse first. After all, I still had that PK test to get through.
~
Every heartbeat made my whole body shake. I took a deep breath and tried to relax, tried to find energy somewhere deep inside. This was PK, not a ritual; I couldn’t draw power up from somewhere else and use it for this exercise. Besides, even that would use some of my own strength, and right now I had very little left.
I exhaled. One more try.
The flame burned steadily in front of me. I focused on it, trying not to blink, and concentrated. The flame wavered, bent, and slowly flattened out into a disc. My jaw creaked from my gritted teeth.
A ruler floated over the flame and hovered briefly, just long enough for Townson to measure the diameter. I tried to hold on, but an instant later I lost control of the flame and it shot upright once more.
My professor gave me a searching look, then scribbled something in his notebook. He was in the telekinetics department, but I hoped he had enough empathic skill to sense how tired I was. Then again, he probably didn’t need empathy to figure that out. I just prayed he’d be lenient. My first two tries had failed even worse than this last one.
I didn’t watch as Townson moved on to Ana and Geoff, and they, thank the gods and sidhe, didn’t say anything about my test. When class ended, I parted company with them and went back to Wolfstone, where I threw my book bag onto the couch with a snarl. My eyes took in the state of the room, and my mood worsened. My stuff was everywhere. Between CM and PK, I’d done little more lately than read, practice, and sleep. Not enough sleep. And we were less than a month into the quarter.
What the hell had I gotten myself into?
My favorite tarot deck lived in a small box on my desk. I excavated it from beneath a stack of books, shoved everything else onto the floor, and began to shuffle the cards.
Most of the time, if I had a question that hit close to home, I got Akila or somebody else in Div Club to read for me. It was too easy to misinterpret things otherwise; my preconceptions got in the way of my gift. All my attempts to figure out where I was going wrong with CM, for example, turned up nothing but confusion. But this wasn’t a question I wanted anybody else answering.
Where was this little crusade leading me?
For path questions of this sort, I generally used a modified Celtic cross layout, with a branched final position. After setting my significator, the Knight of Cups, on the surface of the desk, I began to shuffle the cards, letting the familiar motion soothe and center my mind. Grayson’s class. Tackling the problem of CM head-on. What did I stand to lose if I gave it up, and what did I stand to gain by sticking with it?
Those answers would come at the end. The first card up, symbolizing my environment, was Strength. More or less what I expected; Grayson’s class definitely qualified as a challenging situation. The woman wrestling the lion even looked a bit like her—not physically, as the figure on the card was white—but they shared a certain cool determination. I crossed that with the obstacles card, and frowned at the five of cups thus revealed. Its interpretation varied between decks, but none of them were good. An excess of emotion, maybe? It got in the way of working magic. I’d learned way back in high school to center myself, though, so that couldn’t be the problem. The cloaked figure brooded over five goblets, some of them knocked over. Sorrow? Obsession? Regret? I nudged my gift, hoping it would cough up something of use, but no luck. This came too close to the question I could never answer: why I failed.
I moved on. For tools, I had the Lovers. Friends could help me? I thought of revealing my difficulties to Julian, and grimaced. I knew better than to argue with the cards, though. And it was reassuring to hear I didn’t have to do this on my own.
The fourth card was more puzzling. Generally that position signified hopes or ideals. In this case, it held the Knight of Swords. An active person, highly skilled, brave in the face of danger; the obvious interpretation was a Guardian. After all, that was why I was doing this: to see if that dream was attainable.
But the obvious interpretation felt wrong—no, incomplete. Court cards usually indicated people, but who? By the traditional physical associations, swords should represent someone like me, with dark hair and blue eyes. But then again, I used cups for myself, which wasn’t traditional at all.
Julian? The Knight of Swords certainly fit him—the Guardian type, even if he hadn’t gone that route professionally. Did this mean I wanted his approval? Or to be like him? Not a wilder, but someone that strong? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t ferret out the proper reading.
The next card, by contrast, took no interpretation at all. My past: the Queen of Pentacles. “Hello, Mother,” I muttered. She’d come up that way too many times in my readings for there to be any doubt. Sighing, I flicked the next-to-last card out with my thumb.
The Chariot, reversed. I didn’t know what I’d been hoping for. Something signifying happy relaxation, the avoidance of stress? But no: this was the future that awaited me if I abandoned my current course, and the cards were calling me chickenshit. If the Chariot upright signified triumph, this was defeat. More, it meant quitting wasn’t going to make me any happier. Maybe the opposite. I didn’t like the idea of giving up on anything.
So what would I get by sticking with it? That was the second half of the branch. I turned last card over, hoping for an improvement.
Death.
After a moment of staring, I laughed. This was the problem with divining for yourself. You got invested in certain expectations, and the upsetting of those expectations could be … well, upsetting.
I wasn’t some head-blind freshman, though. I knew Death, in its divinatory sense, wasn’t inherently bad. Still, its presence in the spread surprised me. Profound change, even to the point of beginning a new life. Was that what lay behind door number two? I stuck with Grayson’s class, and came out the other end a different person?
It seemed excessively dramatic. This was just a class, after all. But maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was a stepping-stone to something bigger. Like Guardianship. Which should have been pleasing. My gift, however, working through its impressions, wasn’t sure that the change foretold was even one I was going to choose for myself. That worried me. My mother seemed a likely candidate for the one pushing change on me, and I knew where she wanted me to go.
Lies, damned lies, and prophecy. On the other hand, forewarned was forearmed; the reading didn’t mean my mother would win out, and it might help me prepare to resist her.
If I was right about it being her at all. I wasn’t sure of that, either.
Frowning, I swept the cards together, preparing to stow them once more in their box. As I moved to tap them straight, though, something caught my eye.
The Moon.
I pulled it free, staring. The Moon hadn’t been anywhere in that spread, had it? Sometimes cards stuck together, though—fate’s way of telling you something was more complicated than it looked. Only, which card had the Moon been stuck to?
An involuntary shudder ran through my shoulders as I looked at it. Deception. Danger. Hidden enemies. Was it an obstacle, or something linked with my past? The reversed Chariot took on a more ominous cast in my mind. Not just a quitter, but unprepared.
That word echoed up from the instinctual depths of my gift. Unprepared. For what? I had no idea. But whatever was coming … I might need to become a different person, if I wanted to be ready for it. Somebody like a Guardian.
Or at least somebody who could cast a circle properly.
I shook my head and shoved the Moon into the middle of the deck, where I wouldn’t have to look at it. That interpretation was a house of cards, both literally and figuratively; I wasn’t at all sure I had it right. And there were lots of things still unexplained. It had carved itself into my memory, though. This was going to be one of those readings that kept prodding me at odd moments, I could tell.
It had given me this much, at least: no way in hell was I quitting Grayson’s class. Whatever the rest of it meant, I didn’t want to accept defeat.
And I definitely wanted to be prepared.
~
Common courtesy meant most students placed shields over their dorm rooms, to keep everyone from sharing in the drama and adventures of their neighbors. The minute Liesel walked in, though, she caught the brunt of my frustration and annoyance. “Problems?”
She’d been out doing a volunteer shift for Open Door, one of the campus peer-counseling groups; I hated to unload my problems on her, too. But after two years of rooming together, I knew Liesel wouldn’t ask if she weren’t willing to listen. “Parents. Of the maternal variety.” I sighed and yanked my hair into a fresh ponytail. “She called a little bit ago. I told her about Grayson’s class, and made her day. But then I brought up Julian.”
Liesel didn’t need me to explain why that was a mistake. She sighed, setting her bag gently on the floor. “Why does she hate him so much?”
“She doesn’t hate him,” I said, knowing it sounded defensive. “I mean, she’d never call him a—a changeling or anything. She just doesn’t approve of me associating with him. It’s a social issue.” One plenty of people shared. Robert had once let slip that he wasn’t the first person the University asked to room with Julian, though he refused to say how far down the list he’d been. It could have been a terrible pairing, with Robert all impulsiveness and extroversion, and prone to planting his foot in his mouth. But it had worked out well in the end, dragging Julian into enough of a social life to keep him from self-destructing out of sheer isolation.
By way of Liesel, as it happened. “Your mother takes it further, though,” she said, fetching her hairbrush from the bathroom. “I mean, I understand the basic problem. Robert invited me to dinner that first night because of my empathy; he trusted I’d at least be nice to Julian. But you were the one who turned it into friendship. Without you, I might not have gotten that far. He’s very … off-putting.”
“That’s a polite way to put it.” I dropped my shoulders firmly, trying to relax them, and scrubbed at my eyes. “He makes people’s skin crawl. His Krauss rating’s got to be through the roof.”
“And everything about them is so secret,” Liesel said. “At least in Germany. All I really knew, growing up, was that wilders are dangerous, and that’s why the government handles them.”
“They aren’t dangerous, not once they’re trained.” I could hear the frustration in my own voice, and tried to moderate my tone. Venting at Liesel was not going to make the world get over its stupidity. “That’s the whole point of them being wards of the state: the government can keep the wilders from torching themselves and everybody else while they’re learning control. But once that’s done, they’re fine.”
Liesel nodded, then stopped so she could twist her hair into a bun. “I understand that, intellectually, but on a gut level it makes no difference. Julian still feels like he could take the roof off Wolfstone if he wanted to.”
I wondered briefly if he could. He could survive both Combat Shielding and Power Reservoirs at once, while still taking three other courses. And passing them all. “Anyway, my mother just doesn’t like me being friends with him. It’s a mild social taint among her peers. I frankly don’t give an iron damn.”
“What does your father think?”
I shrugged. “Who knows. He’s wrapped up in his work. He does less of the high society thing than my mother does.”
Talking about her wasn’t making my mood any better. I brooded at a small stain in the rug while Liesel plugged in her port and woke her screen to check for messages. Then she said, out of nowhere, “Grayson was going to assign the first big practical yesterday, right? Have you tried that yet?”
Either her tact had just failed in spectacular fashion, or her empathy told her I needed to talk about this whether I wanted to or not. My head fell against the back of the couch with a thump. “Yes. And it was … weird.”
Liesel perched on the armchair and listened to my description of the previous night, and the guys’ verdict on my athame that morning. I kept it as clinical as I could, not to hide anything from her—a lost cause—but to help myself think through it. When I was done, she mused, “So they said you did it right. The athame, that is.”
“Yeah.” My failure with the circle had dominated my thoughts, but that was something to be proud of, I supposed.
Liesel had on what I thought of as therapist face, attentive and kind, which meant her mind was whirling behind those big hazel eyes. “This was a modified Yan-style circle?”
I nodded. “The principle of it was sound enough. The problem wasn’t in the method. And according to the guys, it wasn’t in my athame, either. Which means it must be in me.”
“What does that mean, though?” Liesel asked. “What kind of problem?”
“I’m just never going to be good at CM.” The words came out with difficulty. I didn’t want them to be true, because of what they meant.
“But didn’t you say you were able to channel the power?”
“Draw it,” I corrected her, but frowned as I said it. “Which … I don’t know. Usually people with small talents can’t pull much power to begin with, like I can’t light much more than a candle. But I guess there’s other ways to be untalented.”
Sounding for all the world like a Socratic philosopher, Liesel said, “What’s talent, though?”
I rolled my eyes. “What you’re born with. Or what you manifest with, in this case. As opposed to what’s learned.”
“Do you think the difficulty with your circle is one you could learn your way out of?”
I started to answer reflexively, then stopped myself. I’d drawn power—more than I ever did when I was a teenager. That had to count for something, right? The problem wasn’t what I’d thought it was a month ago. And in that case…. “Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t at all sure, but it was worth believing in, at least for now.
And then I remembered the cards. “But I think I might need help.”
“Help?” Liesel echoed. “How so?”
I got up and fetched my deck, mostly to feel the reassuring weight of it in my hand. “You don’t have to remind me what I’ve got taped to my screen. But I did a reading for myself, and it suggested I look to other people for assistance.”
Liesel tilted her head in thought. “I don’t think you mean Grayson’s office hours.” She laughed at my vehement gesture of refusal. “But I bet Julian would help, if you asked.”
“No.” That bothered me almost as much as the prospect of Grayson. “I’m not going to him with this. He’s a wilder; it would be like asking a fish for swimming lessons.”
Amusement curled the corners of her mouth, but she didn’t push it. Then one of her hands rose to hover in mid-air, as if about to close around an idea. “Would you like to join the Palladian?”
“Your circle?” I pulled back in surprise. “I’m not really Wiccan, though.”
“Neither are half our members—Rafael’s practically an atheist. Those of us who care about the religious aspect take center stage on the holidays; the rest of the time it’s a social thing, and some low-grade ceremonial magic. Good practice for you, in a context where people are used to helping each other out.”
I busied myself putting the cards away in their box, buying time to think. The Palladian … they were Liesel’s friends, much more than mine. I knew them all, well enough to sit with them in class or eat the occasional meal together, but we weren’t close. And I knew their leader well enough to foresee one potential problem. “Michele wouldn’t like having me there. Agnostic and unreliable with ritual magic? She runs a tighter circle than that.”
“But would you like to? If you do, then I can talk to Michele, and see what she thinks. The others would be fine with it, I’m sure.”
Would I like to? No. It would mean admitting my weakness in front of others, after years of pretending I just had no interest in CM. But maybe this was what I needed.
“Sure,” I said, and crossed my fingers as Liesel went to call Michele.
~
Robert cast the circle with an easy competence I envied. It was no big deal; tonight’s ritual wasn’t anything requiring authorization from the University Ring. We weren’t summoning imps or ghosts, or messing with the weather. We were just doing a quiet little initiation.
We. The seven members of the Palladian Circle, and myself, about to become the eighth.
The members of the group were a motley bunch—from all three psychic sciences departments, with several international students—but they’d had been going strong for nearly two years now. Most freshman circles bit the dust much sooner.
The difference was probably Michele. The circle’s French leader was exactly the kind of person every organization needed, the one who made sure things got done. How Liesel had convinced her to let me in, I didn’t know. Michele and I had shared a few classes and swam together at the gym every week last spring, but we’d never quite warmed to one another, even though she and Liesel had dated sporadically since freshman year. With the baggage I was bringing along, I would have expected her to say the Palladian wasn’t the place for me.
Her opening invocation showed no hint of reserve, though. It was all about friendship and the strength we gave each other. Next came a bit of call-and-response, with Robert, Liesel, Geoff, and Ana presenting symbols of the four elements, and then the focal point of the ritual: the binding itself, the connection that linked us to one another, transforming the seven-plus-me to a stable ring of eight. I wouldn’t have trusted myself to handle that personally, but I didn’t have to. Michele, who despite being a postcog clearly knew her way around ritual magic, had it well in hand. All I had to do was say, “By this I seal our bond,” and prick my finger with the tip of my athame.
A crimson drop welled up immediately. Health Services had certified all eight of us clean, and so Michele pricked her finger in return and touched it to mine. An electric jolt ran down my arm to my heart. Only a touch of blood, and only the lightest of bindings through it. But the element that made all this possible was there, invisible: the sidhe blood in our veins. A tiny genetic legacy, yet one which shaped all of our lives.
It took a few more stabs with the athame to get enough blood for the six remaining members. I was fleetingly glad the circle wasn’t even bigger. Drop by drop, I felt the connection grow, until a fragile web hummed between us all, a channel through which we could share power more easily.
Or I so I imagined. If it was there, and I thought I felt it, was that any different from feeling it in truth? Yes, because what I expected to feel might not be accurate. Study could fix that, though. I should have asked Liesel—or better yet, Robert—to break down the specifics of the binding for me. I liked knowledge. It made a good shield against uncertainty.
Knowledge, and friends. Liesel touched me with reassurance, and I smiled back at her. It would be rude to whisper telepathically to her in the middle of the ritual, but afterwards, I’d be sure to thank her. Whether this turned out to be the magic wand for my problems or not, I was glad she had suggested it.
~
When I got to Hurst the next day for lunch neither of the guys was there. I stood for a moment, puzzled. Julian was often a bit late, but Robert was usually early. Shrugging, I dropped my bag at our window table to reserve it and got food.
By the time Julian came, even later than usual, Robert still wasn’t there. “Where’s your roommate?” I asked as he put his things on an empty chair.
“Having lunch with Dr. Lo. He won’t be here.”
“Ah, he’s sucking up.” I grinned at Julian, but he returned it only briefly before getting his own tray.
When he came back, I tried to examine him without being obvious about it. He looked a little more worn, a little more drained. In a way, it was a relief: Julian was human after all, whatever his Krauss rating might be. Still, I worried about him. People like Grayson could handle that kind of load; strength and endurance grew over time, and with practice. Most college students would have been flattened in the first week, though.
Robert’s absence gave me a good opportunity to pry. “Grayson’s beating shielding into us now,” I said by way of an opening. My soup bowl I shoved aside; the watery excuse for bisque they were giving us today was just inedible. “She explained some of how it works, and it’s fascinating.” Much more so than when my Yan teacher went over it. Even if I was having the usual trouble with the execution.
Julian just nodded. Come on, I thought, give me more than that. Shielding was one of Julian’s favorite subjects; he’d returned to it again and again since coming to Welton. Come to think of it, the shielding course he was taking this quarter was one of Grayson’s, too. I asked, “So how does the combat version work, anyway? I know they’re different, but not how.”
He gave up on the bisque, too, but answered me. “Daily shields are just a precaution against ill-mannered people, and ritual shields prevent contamination by outside energy. Neither are built on the idea that someone’s deliberately and repeatedly trying to penetrate them.”
I could have figured that much out for myself. I had him talking, though, and that was a start. “So you need a mechanism for doing something with the energy thrown at them. If you just let it hit, the disruption in the energy flow makes weak spots, and pretty soon the shield comes apart.” There had to be some way to steer this around to him, instead of magical theory. Peeling an orange as if I might find a clue inside, I asked, “So what sorts of tricks do combat shields use?”
“Various things.” Julian said. “If you’re good enough, you can absorb the energy into your own shield. But it’s tricky—if you take the power in directly, the negative energy eats away at the shield instead. So you have to transform it as you absorb it.”
“While in the middle of a fight.” The mind boggled. “What else?”
Julian gave me a slantwise look I couldn’t interpret. “You can spin your shields, to lessen the force of the attack and deflect it to one side. Or sink it into something that can take the hit, like the earth. Or make your shield reflective, and bounce the attack off. Though that’s not one you want to try when innocents are around.”
I shuddered. “I would think not.”
“Or even plants, for that matter. Most of them just die, but Grayson showed us one that was mutated by a reflected attack. It looks like a Venus flytrap gone wrong. It tries to bite her when she waters it.”
It sounded like the kind of story Robert would make up, but Julian was serious. “Why am I not surprised she keeps souvenirs like that?”
“She’s got an unseelie streak in her,” he admitted.
“So what do you think—is Combat Shielding worth taking?”
His expression shut down again. Did he think I was considering it for myself? I couldn’t even cast a proper circle yet, not that I’d admitted it to Julian. “Yes and no,” he said, his tone carefully flat. “It’s a good class, and Grayson’s brilliant, but there’s no way it’s worth the drain if you don’t have a compelling reason.”
Now I let him see me evaluating him, judging his condition. “I kind of gathered that from the way you look.”
Julian grimaced. “I wouldn’t give it up for anything, but no, it’s not easy. She drills us on the basic principles until we have them down cold, but it isn’t just a theory class. Once we’ve practiced a method, Grayson tests us by flinging levinbolts at our shields.”
My appetite went away with a bang. “So if you haven’t built it well enough, you get hurt? That’s barbaric!”
“It’s not that bad. She puts her own shields on us, under the ones we’ve built. But she deliberately leaves them weak, so we know when we’ve let something slip through. In real life, failure will have consequences, and we need to understand that.”
He sounded entirely undisturbed. Was this how wilders got trained? “I’m surprised the university lets her get away with it.”
“Think, Kim.” The hard edge in his voice startled me. “Everyone in the class is planning to be a Guardian or a bodyguard or something else dangerous. Grayson can’t let us go unprepared. Coddling us could have fatal consequences.”
“But you’re a student,” I said. “You’re not about to become a Guardian, or you wouldn’t be at college. So what’s your ‘compelling reason’ for putting yourself through this?”
I couldn’t even tell why I was so upset. Maybe just simple fear, the consequence of imagining myself in his place. But my hands were clenched into fists atop the table, and all thought of food was gone. Julian, for his own part, was staring out the window, as if trying to decide how to phrase “it’s none of your business.”
When he finally spoke, though, his answer was gentler than I expected. Only his shoulders communicated the tension he kept from his words. “It’s something I need to do, Kim. I may become a Guardian, once I’m done here; I don’t know yet. But in the meantime, this is what I have to do—and I’ll be all right.”
And what the hell did that mean? I didn’t know, but I knew I’d pushed more than enough for one day. “Just be careful,” I said, defeated. “I don’t want you burning out.”
Julian seemed amused, but he nodded. “I promise.”
~
The odds of him keeping that promise seemed higher the following Sunday, when he and Robert showed up at Wolfstone with the news that Julian had finally built up a reservoir of power large enough and stable enough for him to draw on it for shielding.
“It’s about time,” was Julian’s only comment before he sank into the deep armchair and closed his eyes.
Liesel gave him a bottle of juice. From my perch on the edge of my desk, I surveyed his condition both with sight and psychic senses. He was bone-weary. A few of his shields were down for once, and from what I saw, I could only be glad the reservoir finally worked. Even he could only take so much strain.
“So now, my ladies,” Robert continued—he’d been the one to announce the news— “it is up to us three to make sure this fool gets some rest.”
They stayed there for a while, chatting—or rather Robert chatted, and Julian drank down bottle after bottle of fruit juice. Before long he pulled himself together and sat up, but I couldn’t tell if he was really feeling better or if he’d just resumed his pretense of energy.
I didn’t have much chance to judge, because Robert decided to grill me on how Grayson’s class was going. I hadn’t failed any of the practicals yet—though I’d come close, on our recent shielding test—but I didn’t want to admit I was scraping through only by sheer logic and determination. Instead I focused on the theoretical side, where I had much more success. “Impressive,” Robert acknowledged with a nod of his head. “She force-feeds it so quickly, most students find themselves choking within a month.”
“Yeah, well, I knew a lot of it from before,” I said—and then cursed my slip.
Robert’s eyebrows shot up. “I thought you hadn’t taken a CM class before.”
“Not at Welton,” I said uncomfortably. “Earlier.”
I could sense Liesel about to steer us away from the rocks, but Robert spoke before she could. “You were not on your high school’s team, of that I’m sure … oh, my lady, tell me you weren’t subjected to that Yan nonsense.”
Even Liesel couldn’t save me from this now. Making the best of the situation, I said, “It isn’t nonsense. The Yan Path gives you a head start. Hell, I just said it’s the reason I’m keeping up in Grayson’s class.”
“Yes—but you also waste your time going through the motions of exercises that can have no possible result, because you have no gifts to power them!”
“Sometimes that’s a good thing.” It took all of us a moment to realize the words came from Julian; we’d pretty much forgotten he was there. He swiped one hand across his eyes and set the latest bottle down empty. “It’s how wilders are trained. We learn the theory and practice the form before we attempt it with power.”
I nodded. “Yan got his idea from that, I think. I don’t really know the details, but he figured that if early training was good for wilders, why not for ordinary bloods?”
“Because it teaches you failure,” Robert said. “Go through the motions of calling up energy or what have you, but of course nothing happens, and so by the time your gifts come you expect nothing to happen. It might work for wilders, where non-response of the gift is hardly a problem, but for the rest of us?” He shook his head in disgust.
Startled, I looked to Liesel. Her expression might have been drawn by a cartoon artist: an appalled wince, the kind someone has right after a clumsy oaf knocks down their house of cards.
Was Robert right? Was my problem that I’d trained myself to fail?
Liesel had recovered by the time anyone else looked at her, and diverted Robert into an argument over the specialty schools in Germany. It gave me time to think. He couldn’t be right, not all the time. Plenty of people took Yan lessons and went on to perfectly successful careers in ceremonial magic. The system worked.
But nothing was perfect. Maybe I was one of the duds—not me, not something innate to my gifts, but the way the training had affected me. All those exercises, all those empty motions, building up a pattern in my head.
And Liesel knew it. I could translate her wince; no doubt she’d figured this out a while ago, and had been trying to lead me gently down the path to overcoming that block. If she’d said to my face, “Your problem is that you expect to fail”—as Robert had just more or less done—it would have put me precisely where I was now: even more tangled up in my own head. Any doubts I had now would feed on themselves in a vicious circle.
My roommate’s tactics were good. Since they’d just been blown out of the water by one enthusiastic Irishman, though, I had to fall back on the one thing I knew I was good at: sheer damned stubbornness. This was something I could fix, and I would.
Fortified by that thought, I glanced over at Julian—and he looked me in the eye.
The effect was appalling. He rarely met anyone’s gaze, because he knew what it did to them. The strangeness of him, the inhuman presence that set him apart from me and everyone else, grew stronger by a hundredfold. Every hair on my body rose at once. His shields were fully up, and his grey eyes held no expression whatsoever. And I could not look away.
A hand landed on my shoulder. I jumped. “Kim, tell Robert he’s being unreasonable,” Liesel said. When had she moved behind me? The faint squeeze of her fingers said she’d noticed me caught, and had come to rescue me. In gratitude—and because it was a safe bet—I parroted her words obediently.
By the time I glanced back, Julian had begun to gather up the empty bottles, gaze carefully averted again.
He’d known. At least, I thought so. All my determination not to let him see, but Julian was hardly an idiot; maybe he’d even spotted the Yan book in my hand at the library. Why hadn’t he said anything, though? Not as bluntly as Robert, necessarily, but something?
Maybe out of respect for my privacy. Maybe just to spare my pride a bruising.
Well, I’d take bruised pride over continued failure any day. Especially when it meant that maybe—if I re-trained my brain—I could do CM after all.
And maybe become a Guardian.
My delight at the thought was tempered by a single, small chill. I have to be prepared. Ever since that reading, my gift had been whispering those words in my ear, reminding me that something was coming. I hadn’t forgotten the Moon, and I doubted it had forgotten me.
~
Robert started half out of his chair when the door crashed into the wall. He didn’t relax at the sight of me in the entrance to his dorm room, and I couldn’t blame him.
He eyed me warily from his half-crouched stance as though debating whether to bolt for cover. “Are you angry at me, my absent roommate, or some poor ill-starred third party?”
My only response was to show him the tarot deck in my hand. He nodded, lowering himself back into his chair as I shuffled three times, cut, and threw down the top card.
It skidded across his desk and landed at a skewed angle. Lurid flames leapt forth from cracks in the walls of a crumbling spire. Pieces of masonry fell to earth like burning comets. People fell alongside them, hands outstretched as though that would save them. “The Tower,” Robert said. Sorcerer he might be, but he could recognize the Major Arcana.
I rammed it back into the middle of the deck, shuffled, cut, and dealt.
The Tower.
Shuffle, cut, and deal.
The Tower.
And again.
Robert leaned back in his chair and quirked one eyebrow at me. He seemed more amused than anything else. “Las Vegas would have great use for you.”
“It’s not me.”
The harsh words froze his easy grin. Slowly, cautiously, he shifted forward again, not looking away. “I believe you.” He paused. “Do it again.”
“I was doing class work for Historical Tarot,” I said as I shuffled and cut. The motions were soothingly familiar and kept my hands from shaking. “Trying to, anyway. But every single time, no matter what the question is, the first card up is the Tower.” And once more it held true.
Robert spun his chair and plunged one hand into a chaotic drawer. He fished around blindly for a moment before coming up with a nearly-new deck. Dropping the cards into his hand, he shuffled more times than he needed to, cut, and dealt.
Six of cups, reversed.
He repeated his test. The nine of wands landed on his desk.
Grabbing a scrap of paper, Robert began to write furiously in his illegible scrawl. “How many times?”
I closed my eyes and tried to remember. “Five here. One other time with this deck, making six. Four times with an eighteenth-century deck, once with an original Rider-Waite, once with a Manifestation-era Urban Tarot, twice with my Piacenza. And every time it was the Tower.”
Still writing, Robert extended his free hand. “Do you mind?” I handed him the deck without hesitation; the cards were a library loan anyway. Twice he shuffled, cut, and dealt. The first try turned up the two of swords. The other produced Temperance.
Robert handed the deck back and shrugged. “It seems to be you.”
Repeating the test with his cards, I got the Tower again. I sighed and sank into his roommate’s empty chair. “I kind of hoped Julian would be here—no offense.”
“None taken. He seems the natural audience for such strangeness.”
I hadn’t seen Julian since he came by my room; he’d missed lunch on Monday and Wednesday. I’d never told him about my own reading, and the Moon. There hadn’t seemed much point: a vague warning in response to a personal question, and nothing indicating Julian except maybe the Knight of Swords. But now this.
Robert leaned back and looked pensive. “The Tower. A card of destruction, as I recall, or sudden and severe change. Have you tried other tools? What do they turn up?”
His mind was a gem. “Do you have runes?”
“Somewhere.” He gave the drawer a vague look. Then his hand dove in again and came out holding a bag. “They’re wretchedly cheap.”
“I don’t care.” I stuck my hand in and grabbed the first piece my fingers encountered.
“Well?” Robert asked impatiently. “What is it?”
I laid the square of plastic down on his desk. He glanced at the figure painted on it—an H-shaped character, with the cross-bar tilted at an angle—and shrugged. “I confess ignorance. Three years I’ve owned these, and never used them.”
“Hagalaz,” I said slowly. “Sudden change, again, and destruction. It can also mean a bridge between worlds, but its primary significance is like the Tower’s.” I tossed it back in, shook the bag up, and drew. Neither of us was surprised to see Hagalaz again.
Robert glanced around the room. “I have no other divination tools, and I’m damned if I’ll touch Julian’s things to find any. You might want to experiment further, to see if this continues. Your class meets tomorrow, yes?” I nodded. “Ask then, I suppose. Perhaps others have encountered this phenomenon.”
“What do you make of it?”
“You are the diviner, not I.”
“I know what I think. I want to know what you think.”
Robert’s brow furrowed. “Well. It must be serious, to produce results this consistent even when you try to ask different questions. If others have experienced the same, be assured the university will set people to investigate at once. More likely, though, the change augured is specific to you.”
He’d arrived at that conclusion without even knowing about my prior reading. It cemented my growing fear. But then Robert surprised me by adding, “If the change is not personal, and you are the only one to see it, then it’s also possible you are unusually sensitive—or being specifically targeted with a warning.”
Somehow, that was even less comforting than the thought of the Tower in my life. “Not likely. I’m not going to pick up something everyone else would miss. And no one has a reason to target me.”
“I should hope not.” Robert dropped the tarot cards and runes back into his drawer. “Ask tomorrow, I would say. And then go from there.” I nodded agreement. Then he frowned in sudden thought. “Not to cast a pall over what should be a happy occasion—but could this be related to your birthday?”
His question froze me where I stood. I’d been so caught up in homework, and then distracted by this anomaly; I had honestly forgotten what day it was.
My skin felt as if somebody had thrown a bucket of cold water over me, but I forced my mind to work. “No,” I said slowly, eyes unfocused. “I—I don’t think so. I could be wrong, of course … but that’s the kind of connection my gift would make if it were there. Even if I didn’t get anything else. Until you said that, though, I didn’t even remember that today’s my birthday.”
“Given your strength of gift, for you not to even think of that aspect does argue against correlation, yes.” Robert snorted then, and gave me an amused, chiding look. “Why were you doing work anyway, silly child? You ought never work on your birthday.”
“Don’t go there, Robert.” I stood up and stretched, trying to release some of the tension that had taken up permanent residence in my body. “I don’t need another lecture on my course load.”
“Because it is your birthday, I will concede the point. For now.” He rose to make a mocking bow. The antique clock on his desk chose that moment to begin chiming softly, and our heads both whipped around. “Blast! We’re overdue in the Arboretum.”
I stared at him blankly. Then memory returned. The equinox: the Palladian Circle was holding a Sabbat ritual. “Crap. I have to get my things.” I grabbed the tarot deck and headed for the doorway, then paused. “Thanks, Robert. I still don’t know what it means, but I feel better anyway.”
He nodded. “Any assistance I can offer is yours, my lady.”
~
Later that night, when the ritual was over, and the celebratory dinner, and the singing of “Happy Birthday” deliberately rendered in thirteen keys at once—a real achievement, when only seven people were singing it—I went into the Arboretum, feeling my way carefully in the new-moon darkness, stripped off my clothes, and jumped into the Copper Creek.
It was tradition, dating back to my childhood in Georgia. There, I would spend an hour floating in our pool, thinking over the previous year. Minnesota in late September was not so congenial to that, at least not by my standards. But I kept the practice up in modified form, meditating upon the bank, then jumping into the water at the end. Why should a little hypothermia get in my way?
My meditation this year was a disaster, though. Happy thoughts about possible Guardianship kept being interrupted by logistics—what requirements would I need to complete before applying to graduate programs?—and personal hurdles—what would my mother say? Once I swept those concerns out of the way, I hit the underlying foundation of tension, the Moon and the Tower, and my gift’s refusal to tell me anything more about them. Finally I gave it up as a bad job and dove in. There was a second tradition to follow, this one dating from my freshman days at Welton, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Two years ago I’d been hurrying home from my dip, cursing my own idiocy and cataloguing better ways to continue the practice, possibly involving indoor pools or even bathtubs. I hadn’t been looking where I was going, beyond a serious desire to get home before I died. My path cut through the center of campus and the massive monument there: a huge circle of dark green marble, edged with the seals of all the countries that abided by the sidhe-blood laws laid down in the Cairo Accords, and ringed with three grey marble arches symbolizing telekinetic disciplines, telepathic disciplines, and ceremonial magic. I’d been halfway across it and thinking only of home.
And then something brought my head up with a jerk.
Someone else was there, approaching from the opposite edge, a wraith all in black, with hair that looked silver in the moonlight and skin as pale as bone. And his eyes….
I met his gaze before I knew what I was doing, before instinct could warn me away. That we had a wilder on campus was common knowledge, but unlike some people, I hadn’t gone out of my way to gawk. Quite the opposite, in fact—until now.
Wrenching my gaze down took a herculean effort. And then a second one, to keep walking, to nod as I drew near. As if he were just another student, passing in the night.
“Are you all right?”
His voice reflected oddly from the stone. I blinked, and he clarified. “You’re shivering. And wet.”
I touched my dripping hair and blushed. “Oh. It’s my birthday.” Which didn’t explain anything, so I babbled onward. “I do this every year—go swimming on my birthday—so I jumped into the Copper Creek.”
He nodded, as if that made sense. I glanced down, saw he had a fistful of battered-looking late roses. “CM assignment,” he said, when he noticed me looking. Then he handed one of them to me. “I’m Julian. I’m sorry to have startled you.”
No last name given, but I didn’t need it. I knew what he was, and that his surname would be Fiain. It was the Irish word for “wild,” and an international committee formed after First Manifestation had agreed it would be given to all of his kind, who had no families.
I still had the flower, dried and sitting in a bud vase on the windowsill. And the surreal quality of the whole thing had stayed with me, untouched by our subsequent friendship.
A year later, when I was on my way home again, full of disappointment that Julian hadn’t come by or called to wish me a happy birthday, I found him waiting in the circle again. This time he gave me a pendant of smooth quartz crystal, intricately wrapped in silver. I’d used it as my focus in magical work ever since.
So now, even though it was quite out of my way, I headed for the circle.
He was there, of course, and just as striking in the monochrome setting as before. He rarely wore black. Why he did it for my birthday, I didn’t know. His smile, though, lessened the effect. “Happy birthday, Kim.”
I smiled back. “Thanks. Fancy seeing you here.”
He extended one hand. I never quite shook the feeling that he did this by rote, as if he’d read in a book that normal people gave their friends presents on their birthdays. Still, I appreciated the gesture. This time, a black silk bag nestled in his palm; when I lifted it, the contents clinked. Reaching in, I felt stone, and pulled one piece out.
It was a rune. Raido, the symbol of movement and journeys.
Julian touched my wrist lightly. “Are you all right?”
Fleeting as it was, the physical contact jolted me. He did that even less often than he met people’s eyes, and for the same reason. I looked up, involuntarily, and found his face lined with worry.
“No,” I said, the admission leaping free of me. “I came to Kinfield this afternoon, but you weren’t there—something weird’s coming up in my divination.” I gave him the story of the Moon reading, in simplified form. The warning of hidden threats. Then today’s second act: the Tower, and Hagalaz.
Julian didn’t need the significances explained to him. “But you drew Raido this time.”
“Yes. It seems to have stopped now. But I don’t think anything’s changed. Julian….” There was no rational explanation for the fear lurking in my subconscious, no reading or omen I could point to. Just my gift, whispering in my ear. “I think this has something to do with you.”
He didn’t move, not even to blink. But in that stillness, everything drained out of him, leaving behind a person I hadn’t seen since freshman year—not Julian, my friend, but the wilder who first came to Welton. Focused. Prepared.
And not entirely human.
Then he breathed, and broke the effect. “It’s possible. I’ll try to find out.” Life came back into his face. “You should get home, before you freeze.”
I curled my hand around Raido. It was inscribed in silver on a flat piece of black onyx, and absolutely gorgeous. He lived off a government stipend. How did he manage gifts of this quality? “Thank you, Julian. For these—not for the mother-henning.” He smiled, and on impulse, I offered a hug.
He accepted it, surprising me. No skin-to-skin contact, but still, wilders didn’t do that kind of thing. Then he stepped back and nodded me onward. “Good night, Kim.” He turned and walked away across the circle, hands in his pockets. He wasn’t going toward Kinfield.
I rubbed my shoulders to erase the lingering chill. Then, curling my fingers around the bag of runes, I went home to the bed I so desperately needed.