By Monday morning, Lily felt as though she had not truly slept at all.
Her eyes were gritty from crying into the pillow. The skin beneath them still throbbed, even after cold water and forced composure. Her throat held the rasp of unanswered apologies. She fixed her hair and buttoned her uniform precisely. She arranged her usual docile mask, but still felt unrested.
The first week had not repaired anything cleanly. It only taught her the weight of Samantha's absence, even when Samantha was in the same room and chose, out of kindness, not to cross it.
That should have made this morning easier.
It had not.
Students drifted toward the lower practical courts in clumps of Monday malaise. They griped about early hours, unfinished assignments, and the academy's belief that competence was forged through exhaustion. Lily moved among them in measured silence, her satchel slung over one shoulder. Her pulse thudded, annoyingly alert for reasons unrelated to practical magic.
As if that was going to help.
She had already seen Samantha once that morning across the refectory. Their eyes met, and they exchanged a brief, routine greeting - one that would have fit any two students who recognised each other only by sight. Samantha chose a seat away from Lily.
Now the walk downhill felt shorter than it should have.
By the time Lily entered the open-sided chamber above the sea terraces, she kept her face intentionally still, holding herself with the kind of controlled posture that usually meant she was about to display excellent restraint - or, if unlucky, trigger a public disaster.
The class was gathered in a long, open-sided chamber of old stone arches and ward-etched floor tiles. Beyond the western side, the grounds sloped toward the sea in a series of terraces bright with spring light. The chamber itself smelled of chalk, hot metal, and spent spellwork.
At the front of the court stood the instructor: a broad-shouldered woman in dark instructor's robes with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a scar cutting through one eyebrow. Her hair was braided so tightly it seemed intended as a warning. She had the stance of someone who had spent years explaining the obvious to idiots, only to be disappointed every time.
"You," the instructor said, looking over the assembled students with the expression of a woman assessing structural defects in a bridge, "are here to learn control. Not spectacle. Not panic. Not whatever fresh stupidity several of you inflicted on this academy last week."
Her gaze passed over the students in a slow, merciless sweep. It paused, very briefly, on Lily.
"Instructor Marris," she said. "If you survive the term, you may call me that. Waste my morning, and I will find more inventive names for you."
No one laughed.
"Good," Marris said. "Some promise after all."
She turned, flicked two fingers, and the ward-lines gouged in the floor flared pale blue. Waist-high stone stands slid up from hidden slots in the floor, each topped by a shallow brass dish scarcely larger than a dinner plate.
"Today's task is elemental shaping," Marris said. "Not generation. Not force. Shaping. You will be given a stabilised source and asked to manipulate it into a form with continuous structure. If your control is poor, it collapses. If your concentration wavers, it disperses. If you attempt to compensate with brute output, the wards will choke it, and I will embarrass you personally."
That earned a shift in the room. Several students who had been standing a little too proudly suddenly looked more cautious.
Marris extended a hand toward the nearest brass dish. A narrow tongue of flame rose from it, steady and orange. With her other hand, she drew a tight, economical circle in the air.
The flame lifted.
It narrowed, bent, and unfolded into the shape of a hawk no larger than her forearm. Not a crude suggestion of one, but something clean and living in motion: hooked beak, spread wings, tail fanned in exact proportion. It circled once above her wrist and dissolved back into the dish without so much as a stray spark.
"That was acceptable."
She gestured again. This time, water rose from a second dish in a clear ribbon, then twisted into a serpent that coiled around her arm before falling back with a soft slap.
"That also was acceptable. You are not expected to match my precision. Just don't disgrace the concept." Her eyes hardened. "Choose flame, water, or air. Build a shape. Hold it. Keep it coherent for one full minute. I care less what form you choose than whether it remains whole from start to finish."
She folded her arms.
"Begin."
The chamber filled at once with the sounds of effort: muttered incantations, hurried breaths, the hiss of released air, the wet slap of water losing structure. Several dishes ignited in bursts too violent to be useful before the wards clamped down and flattened them into something manageable.
Lily did not move at first.
She stood at one of the outer stations where the sea light washed the floor tiles in long pale bands. The brass dish before her offered a waiting flame. Small. Simple. Barely worth contempt.
Annoyance pricked at her more sharply than difficulty.
This was the sort of exercise one gave children to teach them not to crush delicate things by accident.
She could have done it with her eyes closed.
That, unfortunately, meant she now had to do it badly enough to remain plausible.
To Lily's left, a blond boy was attempting to shape water into a hound and producing something that looked like a collapsing boot. To her right, a girl with two tight braids had managed a respectable spiral of air that held for nearly ten seconds before unravelling into a gust that threw her hair back into her face.
Across the chamber, Samantha stood three stations away.
Lily noticed this by accident and, because the morning was determined to be uncooperative, noticed more than that.
Samantha had chosen air.
It suited her infuriatingly well. She stood with one hand loosely lifted, posture easy, face composed in that way that always made Lily want to distrust her on principle. The current above her dish formed not a crude spinning ring, as it did for most, but something nearly invisible at first - a tremor in the light, a soft distortion like heat over stone.
Then it clarified.
Butterflies.
Three of them at first, each outlined only where the moving air caught the sun. Their wings showed in ripples of brightness and shadow, not colour, but the shapes were unmistakable. They circled Samantha's wrist, drifted to her shoulder, then looped about her head in a slow, elegant orbit.
The effect was ridiculous.
It was also beautiful.
Lily looked away at once, already irritated with herself.
It was only shaped air, she thought. Decorative. Excessively self-aware decorative air.
"Valois," Marris said from somewhere near the centre of the court.
Lily's attention betrayed her and flicked back.
"Better than the rest," the instructor said. "Still a touch vain. Reduce the flourish and stabilise the wing edges."
Samantha inclined her head once. "Yes, Instructor."
The butterflies tightened at once, their flutter less showy, their movement cleaner.
Naturally.
Lily glared at her own waiting flame with faint, private hostility.
She should have chosen something simple. A ring. A bird. A leaf. Something dull and harmless.
Instead, because her mind had become treacherous and her fatigue dulled her caution, she raised her hand above the dish, fingers steady, and caught herself thinking - not of hawks or leaves or safe student patterns - but of a tall figure standing in sea-bright light with small things moving around her.
The flame rose, whitened, steadied, and unfolded beneath her hand with the effortless obedience of an old habit.
First came the figure.
Not a crude suggestion. Not a student's stylised approximation. A perfect miniature rendered in pale living flame: a tall girl, one shoulder slightly turned, head tipped in that infuriatingly self-possessed way. Every line of posture was balanced and elegant. The details were impossibly fine for the scale: a sweep of tied-back hair, the length of her limbs, the calm lift of her chin. Even reduced to the height of Lily's palm, the likeness was unmistakable.
Then the butterflies appeared.
They were smaller still: petals of shaped fire, each one delicately articulated down to the rhythm of its wings. They circled the tiny figure in a slow orbit, rising and dipping exactly as Samantha's butterflies did across the room. The whole thing wasn't just inspired by what Lily saw.
It was a perfect replica.
For one appalled instant, Lily could only stare.
No, she thought.
Absolutely not.
The construct turned slightly in the air above the brass dish as if caught in the same sea-bright light. The butterflies wheeled around it in clean, luminous arcs. There was depth, proportion, motion so precise it seemed stolen rather than invented. It was beautiful in the deeply irritating way only flawless things can be.
Lily had not made an exercise piece.
She had made a tiny, reverent scene.
"Harmin."
Instructor Marris's voice landed directly in front of her station.
Lily looked up too quickly.
Marris had stopped dead. For the first time since class began, her severe expression shifted to something harder to classify. Not softness. Certainly not that. But unmistakable attention.
"Well," the instructor said after a beat. "That is not beginner's control."
The words were not loud. They did not need to be.
Several nearby students glanced over. Then several more. Attention spread across the court in widening ripples as one person noticed another staring and turned to see why.
Lily felt it happening in real time and hated every second of it.
The boy with the collapsing water-hound lowered his hands altogether. The braided girl to Lily's right forgot her air spiral and let it burst across her own face. Two students farther back began openly leaning to get a better look.
"Gods," someone murmured.
"Is that a person?"
"Who is that supposed to be?"
"It looks real."
The tiny figure continued to stand in its orbit of flame-butterflies, poised and graceful and far too recognisable.
Across the chamber, Samantha had gone still.
Lily did not want to look at her.
She did anyway.
Samantha's own air-butterflies still circled above her dish, but all of her attention was on Lily's construct now. Her face was unreadable for one heartbeat, then not quite. Surprise reached her first. Then something warmer and far more dangerous followed it, quiet and intent and impossible to mistake.
Lily felt heat rise under her collar.
"Who is it?" another student whispered.
"Some saint?"
"No, someone in class, surely."
"That's Valois, isn't it?"
That last murmur, half-scandalised and half-delighted, landed like a thrown stone.
Lily's concentration jolted.
One of the tiny butterflies faltered. The orbit wavered. The miniature figure flickered at the edges, still beautiful, still precise, and now suddenly unbearable under so many eyes.
Lily became aware of everything at once: the students staring, the sea light across the tiles, the absurd intimacy of what she had accidentally revealed, Samantha, watching from across the court, Marris standing right there and seeing far too much.
Self-consciousness closed over her like a trap.
The spell broke.
The butterflies collapsed first, their wings turning to sparks. Then the figure folded inward along its own bright lines and vanished in a soft rush of heat, leaving only a white thread of flame that snapped back into the brass dish.
Silence followed.
Lily lowered her hand very carefully, as if restraint now might undo any of what just happened.
Marris studied her for one long moment.
"Excellent control," she said at last. "Terrible instinct for discretion." Her gaze cut briefly across the watching students. "Which is a problem I would prefer more of you had."
That broke the hush. A few people laughed nervously. Most did not. They were still looking at Lily with the bright, hungry fascination of those who had just been given fresh material for rumour.
Lily wished, with real feeling, for the floor to open.
Marris turned away from her station and raised her voice to the class. "Release what remains and listen. If your shaping fails because someone looked at you, then your control is ornamental at best. We will now test whether any of you can hold a construct while another caster interferes with the local pattern."
She surveyed the room with brisk contempt and pointed without hesitation.
"Valois. Harmin. Since you are the only two here who seem capable of producing a form worth insulting, you will demonstrate."
The court went very silent again.
Lily closed her eyes.
She did not trust herself to look.
If she opened her eyes now, she would have seen Samantha standing opposite her with the whole class watching, and whatever fragile control she had left that morning would probably have died of humiliation on the spot.
So Lily did the only thing that felt survivable.
She listened.
Not with her ears. With the older sense beneath them. She let her own magic go still, closed her hand over the waiting flame, and reached not outward in force but sideways in attention, searching for the shape of Samantha's working through the web of stirred air and ward-light filling the court.
There.
Samantha's magic found her at once.
It was exactly what Lily expected and somehow worse for being expected: bright, controlled, elegant down to its smallest pressure shifts. Air answered Samantha as if pleased to be touched by her. The pattern was clean, balanced, a little vain in the way Marris had already called out, but now there was a new edge folded into it. Restraint. Caution. A stiffness born not of lack of skill but of feeling held too tightly in hand.
And under that, unmistakable even through all the composure, lay a small hard bruise of offence.
Lily winced internally.
Yes, she thought. Fair enough.
"Establish your construct," Marris said somewhere beyond the blood in Lily's ears. "The other will adapt to pressure changes without collapse. If either of you turns this into a duel, I will be annoyed in ways that matter."
Lily barely heard the last of it.
She had already chosen.
Whatever Samantha did, Lily would work with it. Not against it. If she could not yet manage 'I am sorry' with her own mouth, then she would attempt it the only other way available.
Across from her, Samantha moved.
Lily felt the shift before the court reacted. The air tightened into fine, deliberate lines, gathering with the same exquisite control Samantha had shown with the butterflies before. But this time the structure was smaller, denser, more personal. Not a demonstration piece. Not anything Marris had asked for.
A ripple went through the nearby students.
Lily opened her inner sense wider and nearly choked on the shape of what Samantha had made.
It was Samantha.
A tiny Samantha of spun air and pale sunlight stood above the brass dish, no higher than Lily's hand. The likeness was absurdly exact despite the medium: the tilt of the chin, the long line of her posture, the infuriating elegance of stillness. Only now the miniature version had turned one shoulder, arms folded tightly across her chest, head angled to the side in unmistakable displeasure.
She was sulking.
The court went very quiet, then not quiet at all.
"Gods," the blond boy breathed somewhere to Lily's left.
"She copied it back," someone whispered.
"No, look, she's angry."
Lily would have liked the ground to claim her immediately.
Even without opening her eyes, she could feel the shape of Samantha's pride in the construct. Not cruelty. Not even really mockery. But certainly no easy absolution. Samantha, in all her terrible competence, had mirrored Lily's earlier disaster and handed the embarrassment back with interest.
Fair enough, Lily thought again, more painfully this time.
She exhaled.
Then she lifted her own flame.
Very carefully, she fed it a narrow white thread of power. No flourish. No spectacle. The fire rose from the brass dish and gathered into a second miniature figure, small and pale and almost painfully simple beside Samantha's elegant little sulk.
Mini Lily.
Unlike the other construct, this one did not appear poised. She appeared hesitant. Her hands clasped once in front of her, then separated as if she had thought better of the gesture midway through. She took one tiny step toward the crossed-armed Samantha and stopped.
The miniature Samantha turned her face away more pointedly.
A scattered sound ran through the court that was perilously close to laughter.
Lily felt heat flood her face even through closed eyelids.
All right, she thought at the offending tiny version of Samantha. I deserved that, too.
Mini Lily tried again.
She approached another step. Lifted one hand. Lowered it. The tiny air-Samantha tapped one foot, partly facing away, every line of her posture communicating a prodigious amount of offended dignity toward something made of moving flame.
Lily could feel Samantha's control in every detail. Precise. Intentional. A little angry.
Something in Lily's chest tightened and softened at once.
Her miniature self bowed her head.
That changed the shape of the silence.
The little Samantha did not unfold her arms, but she did glance back over one shoulder.
Mini Lily brightened at once and, in a burst of misplaced hope that was entirely Lily's own fault, took two quick steps forward.
The miniature Samantha promptly pivoted away again.
Several students failed to suppress their laughter this time.
Lily nearly died.
"Harmin," Marris said sharply.
Mini Lily froze.
But Lily, eyes still closed, had fallen too far into the strange quiet between her own magic and Samantha's to stop then. The whole court had faded around the two tiny figures. She could feel Samantha there across from her, feel every minute correction in the air-working, every hesitation, every guarded allowance. Samantha had not broken the construct. She could have. She had chosen not to.
That, Lily thought with sudden clarity, was its own answer.
So she tried once more.
Mini Lily did not rush this time. She stepped closer and sat down on the edge of the brass dish beside the offended miniature Samantha, leaving a respectful sliver of distance between them. She did not reach. She only sat, small shoulders slightly hunched, silver-white head lowered.
For a heartbeat, nothing changed.
Then the tiny Samantha's crossed arms loosened by half an inch.
Not forgiveness.
But not refusal either.
The first butterfly appeared without either of them quite intending it.
It formed above mini Lily's shoulder in a flicker of white fire, too sharp-edged at first, wings cut from light rather than softness. Samantha answered by instinct. A second butterfly of shaped air spiralled into being above her own miniature self, cooler, clearer, gentler in outline. The two tiny creatures circled once, brushed too close, veered apart.
Another pair followed.
Soon, the little scene above the dishes had become something halfway between argument and truce: two miniature girls sitting side by side without looking at each other while mismatched butterflies wheeled around them in increasingly complicated orbits, some graceful, some peevish, some colliding in brief bursts of sparks and gusts before reforming.
It was, Lily suspected dimly, not the assignment.
"Enough," Marris said.
This time, the word came with magic.
The instructor's interference entered the local pattern as a hard, disciplined seam, a pressure wedge aimed to cut cleanly through both constructs and force the demonstration back into something resembling pedagogy. It was not a violent strike. It was a correction.
Mini Lily reacted before Lily consciously did.
The little fire-figure was on her feet in an instant. She stepped directly between the descending interference and the tiny air-Samantha, lifting both arms as if she could physically shield her.
The wedge hit.
It did not merely fail.
It disappeared.
Lily's white fire flared around the miniature barrier in a sudden, clean burst and wiped Marris's interference out of existence so thoroughly that the air snapped back with an audible crack. Several students gasped. Somewhere metal rang as one of the dishes vibrated on its stand.
Emotion rushed in behind the reflex.
Too fast. Too hot.
The white butterflies around mini Lily sharpened at once. Their wings lengthened into bright cutting shapes. The air around the dish surged wild and furious, grief and embarrassment and protective anger tangling together faster than restraint could catch them.
Across the little scene, mini Samantha turned.
The tiny air-figure unfolded her arms at last, not to retreat, but to step squarely in front of Lily's brightening swarm. Her hand lifted in one firm, elegant motion.
Stop.
The command was never spoken, yet Lily felt it as clearly as if Samantha herself had laid a palm over her racing pulse.
The attacking butterflies hesitated.
Then, with maddening gentleness, mini Samantha shaped one small butterfly from air and sent it drifting toward mini Lily instead.
It landed delicately atop mini Lily's head.
The whole court seemed to forget how to breathe.
Mini Lily went very still.
The white butterflies lost their knife-bright edges all at once.
Across from her, the real Samantha's magic changed again beneath Lily's closed attention. The bruised caution remained. So did some lingering temper. But now there was amusement at the edges of it, and something warmer beneath that, loosening very carefully back into the pattern.
Lily's mouth betrayed her first.
It softened at one corner.
Mini Lily reached up, touched the butterfly on her head with two tiny, cautious fingers, and then looked at mini Samantha with such naked, startled hope that Lily was grateful her own eyes were still shut.
Together, without discussion, they built the ending.
Mini Samantha straightened and summoned a new orbit of air-butterflies around them, no longer sharp with offence but bright and buoyant. Mini Lily answered with white-fire butterflies softer than before, warmer, less reverent and less defensive. The little figures shifted closer until they stood side by side in the centre of the mingled swarm.
Mini Samantha's shoulders relaxed, and she moved into a lighter, almost playful stance, letting her guard drop. In response, Mini Lily glowed with white flame. She looked awkward and hesitant, but she stood her ground, the fire shaking a little. The two small figures stood side by side under the butterflies, their posture showing a quiet truce and growing acceptance.
Lily heard, dimly, a strangled sound from one of the students that might have been delight or might have been disbelief.
Marris let them have exactly two heartbeats of it.
"Oh, for pity's sake," she said.
The words cracked across the court with enough force to splinter the mood. Lily opened her eyes at last.
Instructor Marris was standing a few paces away with both arms folded and an expression caught in the uneasy territory between irritation and secondhand embarrassment.
The rest of the class was staring openly.
Samantha, across from Lily, had gone a little pink in the ears.
Lily suspected she might have been about the same.
"That," Marris said, with immense precision, "is enough theatrics for one morning." Her gaze cut from the miniature girls to the butterflies to the actual students responsible. "I assigned an interference drill, not whatever highly symbolic nonsense the two of you have just inflicted on my class."
One of the boys snorted helplessly and then pretended to cough when Marris's head turned half an inch in his direction.
The instructor closed her eyes for a brief moment, suffering. When she opened them again, she pointed, not at the dishes, but away from the centre entirely.
"You. Both of you. Stop." She exhaled through her nose. "Immediately, before this became even more embarrassing for everyone within sight of it."
The miniatures dissolved reluctantly, butterflies last of all.
For one absurd instant, the air-butterfly on mini Lily's head remained perched there after everything else had gone. Then it too unwound into a harmless current and disappeared.
Silence hung over the court.
Marris looked at Samantha. Then Lily. Then, at the rest of the students, all of whom were now trying and failing not to look delighted.
"New plan," she said, her voice flat. "Valois and Harmin are done demonstrating. I've seen enough of their way of working with the elements." A bit of color showed under the instructor's scar, making her sound even more upset. "Pair up at the nearest station. Pick a construct that doesn't seem to have any emotional agenda, and this time, remember you're here to study control, not to create a dramatic story."
The students scrambled to obey before she could change her mind.
Lily lowered her hand. Across from her, Samantha did the same.
For one suspended beat, neither of them spoke.
Then Samantha's mouth curved, small and unwilling and real.
Lily answered with a smile of her own, equally slight, equally impossible to stop.
Marris pointed sharply toward the side of the court without looking at them. "Out of the middle," she said. "Before I assign you both to separate corners and a lecture on shame."
That almost made Samantha laugh.
Lily, mortified beyond language and lighter than she had been the entire week, stepped back from the ward-circle at the same time Samantha did.
This time, when their eyes met, the distance between them felt less like punishment.
For the rest of class, Lily was useless.
Not visibly. Not in any way Instructor Marris could punish, at least.
When ordered into a pair with the poor braided girl from earlier, Lily produced a sequence of perfectly acceptable flame shapes at exactly the level of competence expected from a talented first-year who was trying very hard not to become a public incident for the second time in one day. A ring. A dart. A small fox with slightly too many tails that she immediately corrected before Marris could notice.
It should have required attention.
Instead, some traitorous, buoyant thing had taken up residence under Lily's ribs and would not stop glowing.
Every time she remembered the tiny air-butterfly settling on mini Lily's head, her mouth tried to curve upward again.
Every time she remembered Samantha's real face across the ward-circle, pink at the ears and smiling despite herself, Lily had to lower her eyes to the brass dish and pretend she was concentrating on flame density rather than trying very hard not to look delighted in public.
This was intolerable.
Worse, Marris noticed.
The instructor passed behind Lily's station once, watched her maintain an elegant little spiral of white fire for several long seconds, and said in a voice pitched for Lily alone, "If you grin at your own construct any harder, Harmin, I will assign you something ugly on principle."
Lily nearly dropped it.
"I am not grinning," she said automatically.
Marris looked at her face.
Lily extinguished the spiral with rather more force than necessary.
Around them, the rest of the class recovered slowly from the earlier disaster. The students were trying, with varying degrees of success, to behave as though they had not just witnessed a tiny magical reconciliation complete with emotional subtext thick enough to trip over. They failed whenever they thought Lily was not looking.
Whispers continued to move through the court like small drafts.
"Did you see the butterfly on her head?"
"I thought Marris was going to explode."
"Were they apologising?"
"At each other? In elemental constructs?"
"That cannot possibly count as proper technique."
"It was excellent technique," someone else muttered. "That was the problem."
Lily would have liked to vanish.
Unfortunately, vanishing would have required moving, and moving would have increased the risk of accidentally looking toward Samantha.
That risk proved impossible to eliminate entirely.
Once, while adjusting the shape of a small flame-bird, Lily glanced up without meaning to and found Samantha already looking at her from two stations over. Samantha's expression was composed enough to pass at a distance, but there was a light in her eyes that had not been there that morning. Something amused. Something warmer than amused.
Lily immediately looked back at the bird.
The bird lost its head.
By the time Marris dismissed them, Lily had reached the firm conclusion that relief was in some ways more dangerous than despair.
Despair, at least, tended to sit still.
Relief made a fool smile into brass dishes and think dangerous thoughts, like perhaps everything was not ruined.
The final exercise ended. Marris gave the class a sharp lecture on restraint, symbolism, and the absolute inadvisability of turning future control drills into "a serialised courtship ritual," which made half the room choke and the other half look studiously at the floor. Then she waved them off with the expression of a woman reconsidering her profession.
The moment permission existed, Lily snatched up her bag and left.
Not walking.
Certainly not fleeing.
Merely moving with determination away from the centre of the court, away from the delighted witnesses, and away from the possibility of Samantha saying her name while twenty people pretended not to listen.
Behind her voices began at once. Marris was already snapping at someone for smiling. The ordinary noise of class reasserting itself with indecent speed.
Lily did not look back.
Relief was a dangerous thing.
At present, it was also the only thing carrying her out of the chamber.
53Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡA54XbaPBuX
53Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡuAL2vx0Pkp
and then Add to home screen.