true-life, that earring was now a lightning bolt of beaten gold, a gift from his family after he’d passed his gold-level bozhk exams.
Feeling Gerrit’s attention, Hana and Branislav turned from the sky. Gerrit pointed at his mouth and made a face.
Hana smirked and nodded, eyes bright with excitement beneath the brim of her uniform cap.
Branislav’s laugh exploded with bottled tension. “I thought it was just me. I forgot to brush my teeth this morning.”
“You can feel it?” Filip tore his gaze from the sky, scrutinizing Gerrit. Filip was merely storm-touched; he could use magic, but not see sousednia or create new imbuements—apart from the strazh weaves that he’d trained with over the last three years. Strazh weaves didn’t form into imbuements per se, but rather soaked up uncontrolled storm energy if an imbuement mage made a mistake beneath a bozhskyeh storm. With a strazh at their back, an imbuement mage could survive mistakes that would otherwise kill them. Not that Gerrit planned to make mistakes.
“Not feel it, taste it.” Hana pulled a face, but her smile ruined the effect.
Jolana, Branislav’s strazh, nodded in a pleased sort of way but said nothing, returning to her vigil of the sky. Only Darina, Hana’s strazh, seemed unamused.
“Boots too tight?” Gerrit asked, annoyed that Darina would grim up the morning.
They weren’t headed out on boring field exercises today. This bozhskyeh storm would change everything. After today, they’d be important—critical to the regime.
Darina gave him a sour look. Her short black hair barely jutted out beneath her uniform cap, and worry flickered a violet protection nuzhda through her wavery sousedni-shape.
“Hey.” Hana elbowed her in the ribs. “No one’s going storm-mad today.”
Gerrit smirked and focused back on the sky. Storm-madness was the sniper over the ridge for an imbuement mage, the threat lurking in every flash of Gods’ Breath. A storm-blessed bozhk pulled magical lightning down from a bozhskyeh storm, channeling the Gods’ Breath through themselves and into the object they wanted to imbue. The storm energy would crystalize magic inside the object like a kiln firing a pot to hold its shape.
A mistake could dump that storm energy into the imbuement mage instead of the object, tearing them from true-life. Enough storm energy could permanently shatter a mage’s true-life grounding, leaving them storm-mad.
But Gerrit refused to let anything go wrong. Not now. Not when he was so close to getting everything he wanted.
Tense with waiting, Gerrit focused on his friends. “Any word on last night’s bozhskyeh storm?” Captain Vrana had kept them late in practicum, and he hadn’t been able to ask around.
“They had three mages in place.” Filip’s dark brown eyes danced between them, asking the question that Gerrit couldn’t help but voice out loud.
“And?” Gerrit tried to sound only academically interested.
“They didn’t imbue anything stable,” Hana said. “We’ll still be the first.”
“Gerrit will be the first,” Branislav said, serious beneath his excitement.
Gerrit allowed himself the luxury of a smile, glad his friends had his back. He didn’t doubt that Captain Vrana did, too; she knew how much it meant to him, a chance to finally prove his worth.
His enthusiasm darkened. When he’d begun imbuement training, his father had been disgusted. Gerrit couldn’t hold true-life without the strenuous exercises that taught him to control sousednia, and Supreme-General Kladivo, the great Stormhawk and all-powerful leader of Bourshkanya, viewed that as weakness. One of Gerrit’s many.
Back then, no one had expected the bozhskyeh storms to return in their lifetime. The storms followed a regular pattern: fifty years on-cycle, when Gods’ Breath arced through the clouds and storm-blessed bozhki could create new magic; one hundred and fifty years off-cycle, when lightning sparked only electricity. When Gerrit had first fallen into sousednia, the world had been only seventy years into the off-cycle. Off-cycle imbuement mages became academics, their only purpose to keep knowledge alive for future generations. For one of the Stormhawk’s children to stay cloistered behind the Storm Guard Academy’s walls, teaching techniques even his students would never use... Gerrit may as well never have been born.
Instead, the bozhskyeh storms had returned decades early and with little enough warning that Gerrit was amongst only a handful of trained imbuement mages. And so far, none had successfully imbued.
The Stormhawk valued strength—and Gerrit scored consistently in the middle of his class at the Storm Guard Academy. The Stormhawk valued obedience—and Gerrit couldn’t help challenging stupid orders. The Stormhawk valued mastery—and Gerrit lacked the force of will that made a prisoner spill their secrets at the first twist of a