Lone Sorcerer

The first thing I learned at Aes Sidhe Academy was that magic smells like burnt sugar and ozone, and the second was that I was the only person on campus with a dick.

Not that anyone let me forget it.

"You're in my seat," said the girl with silver hair braided so tight it pulled the skin at her temples. She stood over me in the lecture hall, arms crossed, and the air around her fingers crackled with a thin violet static. First-year Evocation, eight in the morning, and she already wanted blood.

I looked at the empty chairs on either side of me. Twenty-seven girls in black robes, and twenty-six empty seats. "There are options."

"Not for you." She smiled, and it wasn't nice. "That's the seat where the top-ranked first-year sits. I'm the top-ranked first-year. Move."

I moved. Not because I was scared. Because the static was starting to smell like something burning, and I'd learned in my first week that a pissed-off sorceress at Aes Sidhe could turn a boy's eyebrows into a memory before the professor finished taking attendance.

Her name was Seraphine Vale, and she hated me with a purity that was almost admirable. I'd done nothing to her. That was the thing. I existed, and that was enough.

The professor swept in, a tall woman with gray-streaked hair and eyes the color of dishwater, and the room went quiet. Professor Ashcroft taught Evocation like it was a punishment she'd been assigned. She wrote a sigil on the board, three interlocking circles with a line through the middle, and turned to face us.

"Channel," she said. "Everyone. Now."

I pressed my thumb to the sigil etched into my desk, the one that connected to the school's ley line, and felt the familiar pull behind my sternum. Heat crawled up my arm. The air in front of me shimmered, and a small flame, no bigger than a candle's, flickered to life above my palm.

Around me, the girls produced fire. Some of them made infernos. Seraphine made a column of blue-white flame that licked the ceiling and made the professor nod once, a gesture so rare it was practically a medal.

I looked at my little candle. It looked back at me, unimpressed.

"Pathetic," Seraphine said, not even looking at me. "They let anyone in now."

The thing is, she was right. I was pathetic. I'd been at Aes Sidhe for three weeks and I couldn't do anything the other students couldn't do better. I'd been admitted because of a prophecy, which is a stupid reason to admit anyone to anything. A seer had looked at me when I was six years old and said I would either save the world or end it, and the school had decided that was worth a scholarship.

No pressure.

After class, I walked the long corridor toward the dining hall, past the portraits of alumnae who'd gone on to do great and terrible things. The stone walls sweated moisture in the autumn chill. Somewhere above me, a bell tower rang a note that hung in the air too long, like it didn't want to leave.

"You walk slow," said a voice behind me.

I turned. A girl with dark skin and a shaved head fell into step beside me, hands in her pockets. I knew her by sight. Imogen Ash, second-year, the only person at Aes Sidhe who'd spoken to me without either contempt or pity.

"I walk normal," I said.

"You walk like you're waiting for someone to hit you." She glanced at me. "You should stop that. They can smell it."

"Who can smell it?"

"Everyone." She pulled an apple from her pocket and bit into it. "Seraphine's going to challenge you to a duel by the end of the month. You know that, right?"

I stopped walking. "Why?"

"Because you're the only boy, and she can't stand that you're here, and if she beats you in front of everyone, she proves something." Imogen shrugged. "To herself. To the school. To her mother, probably. Seraphine's mother was top-ranked when she went here. Seraphine is expected to be better than her mother. You're an easy target."

"I haven't done anything to her."

"That's not how it works." Imogen tossed her apple core into a planter and kept walking. "You're a symbol. Symbols don't get to be innocent."

She left me standing in the corridor, and I watched her go. The bell rang again, the same note, the same refusal to fade.

I ate lunch alone, which was normal. The dining hall was a cathedral of dark wood and floating candles, and the girls clustered at long tables in tight groups that parted around me like water around a stone. I sat at the end of the farthest table and ate bread and cheese and watched them. They watched me back. Some of them smiled. Most didn't.

Then Seraphine walked in, and the room shifted.

She moved like she owned the floor. Maybe she did. Her braid had come loose, and silver hair fell across her face, and she was arguing with a girl beside her, something about a summoning circle, her hands cutting the air. She was beautiful in the way a storm is beautiful. You admire it from a distance and hope it doesn't come for you.

She looked up. She saw me. Her face did something complicated, a flicker of something that wasn't hate, and then it was gone, and the hate was back, and she turned away.

I finished my bread. I went to my room. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the prophecy.

Save the world. End the world. Nobody had ever told me which one I was supposed to do, or how I was supposed to choose, or what it would cost. They just gave me a scholarship and a room and a target on my back and told me to study hard.

My door opened without a knock.

Imogen stood in the doorway, and behind her, in the hall, I could see two more girls, and they weren't smiling.

"Seraphine wants to see you," Imogen said. Her voice was flat. "Tonight. The old observatory. She says it's about the duel."

"And if I don't come?"

"Then she'll come to you." Imogen's eyes met mine, and for a second, something flickered there, something that might have been warning. "I'd come if I were you. She's not patient."

She closed the door.

I lay back down and stared at the ceiling, and the bell rang again, and this time it didn't stop.