my way back to my room, the pull of channeling magic took hold of the power around me. Someone was divining in the silver room.
It was an hour before supper. The sun was still up, burning through all the windows. Whoever it was gathered power like their life depended on it, channeling the midnight arts and noonday arts into their work, and it was too much. Even being near it made my teeth ache. I crept to the door.
Isabelle, awash in magic, sat bowed over the same silver bowl I’d used for her brother. She was ethereal, cloaked in ribbons of power that threaded through the air to her open hands. Thin strips of flesh peeled away from her hands where the magic poured from her body to her bowl. Instead of water, she’d used quicksilver to keep the artistry steady. Red smeared across the silver.
“Stop!” I rushed to her and yanked the bowl from her hands.
The skin touching it tore away. Isabelle didn’t even shriek. The bowl, solid silver, shattered against the floor, and I pulled Isabelle’s chair away from the table. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t drop her hands from where they’d held the magic. Her teeth chattered.
“Isabelle?” I knelt in front of her. The pieces of her skin the magic had worn down were raw and open, not so deep they made me shudder, but unnatural enough they gave me pause. Like a paper cutout made with fire, except her flesh was the paper and the cutouts a perfect view of the inside of her forearm. They weren’t even bleeding. Drops of quicksilver beaded up along her veins. “Isabelle, can you hear me?”
Sometimes, if an artist didn’t have the money to pay a physician and enough power had channeled through their skin, the wounds killed them. Too many common artists died from healable injuries like this.
“I saw a future,” she whispered. “I had to know if it came true.”
“You were killing yourself.” I pulled her handkerchief from her pocket and wrapped it around her hands. “Can you walk? We have to take you to Vivienne.”
“No!” She ripped her hands from me and fell back. “No, no, no, no, no. Vivienne can’t know. No one can know.”
Someone behind me cleared their throat, and I glanced back. Coline, arms crossed, stood in the doorway. Germaine and Gisèle peeked into the room from behind her. They were always together, Germaine on the left.
“If you want to get away with this, you have to move,” said Coline. “First rule of breaking the rules: Never stay in the same place too long.”
“Then help me carry her, Mademoiselle Crime.” I rose and wrapped the cloth back around Isabelle’s hands.
Tall, sturdy Gisèle with her wide smile and strong arms came forward instead and swept Isabelle up in her arms. “It is times like these, I am glad I don’t have the curse of magic.”
Coline, Isabelle, and I were the only first-year students who did.
“Thanks.” I gathered up the mess, Germaine helping me clean, and stared around the room. Most of the power had faded. “Well, that could’ve been worse.”
Germaine, Vivienne’s favorite student when it came to comportment, only hummed.
“What was she trying to do?” Coline asked.
I shook my head. “Divine her brother, but she wouldn’t say what about.”
“It must be bad, then, to wear herself down so much for one divination, yes?” Germaine asked. “I have never understood the appeal of knowing the future, but Isabelle talks of nothing except her brother.”
She was a good sister.
“They’re all each other have,” I said. “Their parents are dead, and she’s got something that’s supposed to help but doesn’t. It’s infuriating.”
“I’ll find another bowl.” Germaine dumped the shattered pieces into a decorative vase. “If she gets in trouble—”
I grinned. “I haven’t seen you since class.”
I left, saying goodbye and thanking Germaine again, and raced back to my room. She agreed to make our excuses at supper—Vivienne loved nothing more than us banding together to protect the others, so us keeping an indisposed Isabelle company would delight her. Upstanding ladies of Demeine didn’t let a bit of uncomfortableness affect them, even if it meant they were in too much pain to stand. It was more seemly to excuse yourself.
Couldn’t do it every day, and only for one hour. I’d already tried with household management.
“What were you thinking?” I said, shoving open the door to our room and looking round for Isabelle.
She’d been tucked into her bed, her hands wrapped in gauze, and Coline sat at the foot