sure if I should hope that was true.
On the one hand, I completely shared Arcturus's opinion of the Redbriars. I’d love it if he could smite them into oblivion for me, which he clearly wanted to do.
On the other, he just might smite me alongside them as collateral damage. That had definitely been a threat.
Chapter 11
“You look terrible,” was the first thing Darshan said to me when we found his table in the library.
I rolled my eyes as I sat down beside him. “You too.”
“Seriously, though.” Darshan’s grimace crinkled the band-aid he bore on one cheek, no doubt from the latest round of Practical Education. “You look terrible.”
I supposed I did look especially bad today. Arcturus's magic-enhanced strength had left an arc of prominent, bruising fingerprints across the side of my face, and they were progressing through the particularly unpleasant purple-black stage of healing.
Still, I was more concerned about what would happen when they faded.
Acubens really hadn’t sought me out for dueling practice last time. The training pairs at Practical Education had mysteriously re-sorted themselves, leaving me to face a timid, battered-looking no-name girl whom I’d tried to defeat as gently as possible, while Acubens spent the class whaling on some other Great House kid who’d had too much bloodline pride to stay down. There’d been blood smeared all over the magical walls by the time they were done. I supposed the other kid could heal back, being a Great House mage, but still, Acubens had clearly demonstrated his dislike of Arcturus's decision.
But if Acubens was going to abide by it anyway, and stop going after me, that removed one of Cly’s main reasons for letting me take her place at school. The depressing fact was that not getting beaten up on a regular basis could end up worse for me than the alternative.
I’d given a lot of thought over the past few days on where I was supposed to go from here.
Darshan sighed at my obvious distraction. “I know, I know, this is all for some Great House scheme of yours, and it’s not the place of a no-name to hear about any of it or offer his opinion. Just… from one nerd to another, I really hope you know what you’re doing. Worrying about your ass is taking important time away from worrying about my own ass.”
I blinked. Was Darshan worried for me? I wasn’t used to that coming from anyone besides my mom, and I had no idea how to respond.
“Thanks,” I said at last, awkwardly, and changed the subject. “Anyway, what are you thinking for the project?” The pair research project from Higher Magic class was worth fifty percent of our overall grade, and we were meeting up outside of class to decide what topic to do it on.
“Well, you know me,” said Darshan, shrugging. “I’d be up for anything to do with inscriptions or magic circles. But that’s a pretty broad field of study. To keep things within the scope of the project, we’d have to pick a smaller subfield. Summoning, maybe. Shaping.”
“Abjuration?” I kept my tone of voice casual for Aegis's sake. “We touched on that briefly in class.”
Darshan nodded. “Sure, we can do abjuration. I have a couple designs on the backburner that would benefit from doing more research.”
That was a small win for me. Abjuration was the magic of negating other magic, a topic that covered shields, barriers, and suppression. I hoped to learn more about how the suppression shackles being used on me worked—and, just maybe, learn how to negate them. It was a long shot, but at least it was something.
The library looked even bigger and more imposing on the inside than on the outside. A forest of towering shelves stretched out in every direction, illuminated by natural light from windows set into the domed roof. Sprawling murals covered the ceiling, depicting various scenes of demon-slaying and divine inspiration from mage history.
The place was so huge that the front desk provided navigational devices. They were about the size of my palm, and looked like compasses, with a brass casing covered in small dials. The inside of the flip top was engraved with a reference table, matching book subjects with a numeric code representing their location.
“Mage society needs to learn about modern ergonomics,” I muttered, squinting at the tiny reference table for the entry corresponding to Abjuration, then fiddling with the finicky little dials. “An app would be so much easier.”
“Hey, it works just fine,” said Darshan, shrugging. “I’ll enter the