This also meant parting ways with our diligent maid. Servants weren’t allowed on campus. Even the nobleborn had to get by in Belmesion on their own. But going to school didn’t mean goodbye for life. We’d see each other again soon enough. No reason to make the occasion so dramatic.
But…
“Do your best and take care of yourself. Never lose courage, no matter how bleak it may get!”
“Thanks, I will! You take care of yourself too…!”
Emily had really hit it off with the maid in these weeks she’d stayed with us, and both were holding back tears. I could only sigh at the irony. Each kept more secrets from the other than they'd ever exchanged honest words. Suppose the truth was a needless ornamentation if the chemistry was there.
“I’ll write letters,” Emily promised the maid, eyes glistening, and blew her runny nose on a handkerchief.
“I shall look forward to them,” Charlotte replied with a soft smile and then glanced less tenderly my way. “I'll be expecting letters from you too, Ms Hope. Regularly.”
“If inspiration hits me,” I answered and turned to the automobile.
My letters were only going to be status reports, though. I was duty-bound to inform the authorities of my progress.
What a pain. Why did the suits need to have everything on paper?
The three of us crammed into the vehicle and took off under clear skies. Halfway through September, it wasn’t nearly so sultry anymore, and the winds sweeping the city streets bore a biting northern edge. We bid a wordless farewell to the face of the capital as we passed through, unsure when we’d see it again, and passed then out under the west gate and were cruising the familiar, dusty highway.
Trees all over the land were gradually taking on a brassy coat, and flocks of birds glided high, high over the short-cropped fields in their southbound migratory formations. Farmers and field hands collected hay in bales, knitting through the country one grueling lane after another. The lush vibrancy of summer receded reluctantly but incapable of holding on, pushed back by slow autumnal death. It was the season that most felt like mine.
I was lost in reflections, and then we were already there.
Our chauffeur left us at the academy's grand gate, and there we said goodbye to Nicholas, who’d been courteously driving us here and there all summer. Watching the automobile shrink downhill and out of view, the realization hit us that there’d be no more escape for us, come whatever may. We were in a foreign territory, and it wasn’t necessarily friendly.
We followed the straight school road to the wide front yard facing the main building. Tall boards had been set up in the yard, featuring the class rosters for each course in clear capital print. Every department was divided into three classes, creatively titled A, B, and C, based on the exam scores. The bright talents of class A received lectures on advanced topics and trickier tests, while the C-class had a more remedial approach, B being something in between. Depending on the student’s performance over the year, it was possible to move up or down a class next year.
The roster was the first thing to check out, since it told us which schedule to follow for the first week.
The other two found my name much faster than I did, as unused to its spelling as I was.
“Oi, Hope, look at you!” Ms Asia nudged me with her elbow and pointed up.
“Hehe. As expected, Boss.”
My name was fourth from the top under class B. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but not that.
Maybe I landed a little too high? People would naturally pay more attention to the top side of the list than the bottom, whatever the class. As I stood there without a reaction, Ms Asia poked my cheek.
“... You're allowed to celebrate, you know?”
“Right. Yaay.”
Nothing worth a parade about that. I would've ended up in class C without cheating in the corridor and taking the bonus points from the golem. My mana readings and general-ed scores were so poor, the other parts failed to fully negate the damage. On the other hand, the headmaster had considerable sway over the final result, based on how he scored my “interview.” He seemed to have been more generous than I thought.
Well, I had to be somewhere.
Ms Asia resumed the search. “Let's see. Emi is…”
It took a while for us to spot Emily’s ranking in the jungle of names. Finally, the maestro herself shyly pointed out her listing, faster found when starting from the bottom.
- TROYARD, EMILY ANNE
She was in class C. Low down, but not dead last. The headmaster did keep his word and let her in, but I guess he didn't want to make the manipulation too blatant.
“Your second name is Anne?” I observed. “You never mentioned that.”
“Because I never use it!” Emily cried, flushing. “It only shows in official documents! But really, is that all you have to say?”
“Too bad we’re in separate classes.”
“I totally flunked! Sorry. This is so embarrassing...If only I’d known then what I know now…”
“Hey, it's still huge,” Ms Asia said, patting the girl's back. “You’re among the ninety best mages of your generation. Think about all the kids who couldn't get in. You should be proud of yourself.”
“That's right,” I concurred. “This is just the starting point. The real work comes from here.”
“Thanks, you two,” Emily said and brushed the corner of her eye, looking a little easier. “Yeah. This is where it all begins, for real!”
Our crew was again reduced by one. Ms Asia headed on into the main building, where the faculty had their rooms, far above the peons. Meanwhile, the dedicated dormitory of the Magic course was the newer-looking apartment rising on the east side of the front yard, the Sword course dorm as its mirror reflection.
Inside, the four floors were split into males’ side in the west and females’ in the east, the halves connected only at the airy atrium at the entrance. Otherwise, the place felt more like a high-class hotel than a plain boarding school dormitory. Money well spent.
We checked in at the front desk with the dorm manager, who was a dwarf woman named Ruby. Dwarves were a rare sight outside their own tight-knit communities, and I could count the times I’d seen one, even from a distance, on one hand fingers.
Against a popular rumor, dwarf women didn’t grow beards. Manager Ruby was short and ginger, but looked like she could fold copper with her bare hands and had a grim countenance you didn’t want to argue with. She made the terms clear for us.
“No casting spells in the premises. None. There are dedicated training rooms for that. ‘You break it, you buy it’ applies to all things in here, including but not limited to the building as a whole. And no sneaking to the boys’ rooms at night. We have a curfew, and it starts at ten. Break the rules and you can find yourself somewhere else to stay. Understood?”
So other than sleeping in the wrong dorm or breaking property, everything else was allowed?
After signing the terms of service and getting our keys, Emily and I went to look for our rooms. With almost two hundred and fifty students, there couldn’t be single rooms for everyone. As a rule, four students had to share one. An array of doors lined the long ground-floor hallway reserved for first-years, divided by a glass door into two sides in the middle. We weren’t neighbors. Emily’s address came up first. Upon that door, our shared road, started from that coincidental meeting in July, met its conclusion, at least for now. Being in different classes with different schedules, we probably wouldn’t be seeing each other much over the term.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Still, it felt unfitting to say goodbye.
“Emily,” I said. “I have a request for you.”
“Oh? What do I do?”
I faced her and pointed up at the ceiling.
“Aim for the top. Seek greater heights. Stand out as much as you can—so I won’t.”
Emily sighed at me. “Another outlandish task, like always…”
“You can do it,” I said and went on. “The foundation is laid right. The rest is up to your hunger.”
That’s all. There was no need for long-winded speeches.
“Hope.” Emily’s voice spoke behind my back with unusual seriousness. “I will get stronger. I’ll get stronger and catch up with you! And then, when it’s all over, I’ll have you tell me what this was all about. All of it. Every last secret. That’s a promise, you hear!”
“Hm.”
I didn't answer. Neither did I stop walking, or look back.
Making promises was easy. Keeping them was not. But I would look forward to it, Emily Troyard.
Catch up with me, and exceed me. For once, I’d like to try to chase after somebody else, instead of always looking back and waiting. Come to think of it, when was the last time I’d been this excited about the future?
And then there was only one. In silence, I followed the dimly lit hallway, looking for a room number matching the one on my key. I tried to imagine what my roommates were going to be like and was slightly uneasy. I had to operate with colorful personalities in the army too, but those people usually knew who I was, and I didn’t have the absurd condition of secrecy forced on me. But it was going to be difficult to hide things from those who lived in the same small room with you.
The right door was near the far end of the passage.
Taking a short, quiet breath to steel myself, I stuck the key in the lock and entered. The room was deeper than it was wide, with two bunk beds by the walls, set between narrow wardrobes. In the back was a narrow window opening to an inner courtyard, under the window a wide study desk with two seats. It was a room not so different from army barracks, save that everything was more expensive and less worn, with designs to match the price tag.
But there was nobody inside. The beds had no sheets on, only bare mattresses on naked boards.
Either I was the first one to arrive, or…
On the study desk under the window, my gaze spotted a letter. I went and picked up the clean-white envelope missing both the sender and recipient. A blob of red wax stamped with the school emblem closed the missive, but there was more than that on it. I took off my glasses and frowned.
“An encrypted seal…?”
Did the sender want their message read or not?
I'd rather not have bothered with it, but it was painfully obvious this letter was for me, and probably contained information I couldn’t miss. It had to be opened. But if the seal was forced, the contents would be destroyed.
Quietly fuming, I started to crack the unwanted puzzle.
The glyph was smaller than the ones on the trial doors, more elaborate, the cause-effect relations better disguised. I could tell right away it had no elemental charge, so it was likely not an energy-based seal that could be opened just by identifying and injecting the correct attribute.
Around the central sealing gylph were two smaller subnodes with decorative triangles, the purpose of which wasn't immediately clear. The subnodes were lined with dense data, which probably explained the mechanism to unseal the ltter, if only I analyzed the data. But the seal being encrypted meant that the formula was covered by a camouflage effect. Like a doodle drawn over an image to prevent you from seeing what was in it.
A proficient ritebreaker would analyze the noise format and draw a doodle of the opposite type to neutralize the protection and gain access to the information below. But I was never trained how to do that. There was another, harder way too. Hard for most others, but easy for me, when I was at full power. But being no longer at full power meant it was hard now for me too.
Using Third Eye to peer through the encryption and consciously separating the noise data from the contents through real-time comparison. Thanks to the rings, I had effectively two layers of noise to shift through. It was going to be an agony and a half, but what else could I?
I bravely got to work. It was like staring through a foggy window into a sandstorm, trying to see a house on the other side of the desert. My view was flooded with foreign gibberish that made my eyes throb, and lashed at my brain with hot razor blades. But it was only phantom pain, and I persisted, and as I kept on denoising the seal, bit by bit, I eventually began to make out understandable patterns. Fragments of meaning emerging from the haze.
Clouds? Negative sign? Positive. Degrees. Dates and timings? A raindrop symbol?
Then I had an epiphany. Compressed into the nodes was a weather forecast. One for this week and the other for next week. It was misdirection, not a clue. This puzzle had no answer. How could I solve it then?
Because it wasn’t a puzzle at all.
I held the letter back and realized my mistake. The mechanism was touch-based, not data-based. The triangles were actually meant to be arrows to show the direction. I pressed my thumbs on the nodes and pulled them outward. The wax seal faded away, the envelope quietly opened, and I could practically hear the Archmage lecturing in my ears.
Don't overthink and miss the forest for the trees.
“Damn old coot! Go to Hell!”
It seems I didn’t scare him enough.
I masterfully regained self-control and shrugged off the urge to rip the paper to shreds. Inside the envelope was a straightforward message.
Dear Ms Ruthford,
I bid you welcome to the Royal Academy of Belmesion. Congratulations on your entry into the prestigious Magic course, which has given rise to many great names in the field of arcane arts over the six centuries of this school.
I have been asked to regard you the same as any other student of mine, and so I shall endeavor to do. I expect that you uphold the common rules of the academy, respect our staff and Mrs Ruby’s authority in the dorms, and keep your fellow students safe from harm.
However, even if it’s something of a pity, you are not precisely the same as any other student, and fully rejecting this fact would be too reckless, I feel. Which is why I have found it necessary to establish certain precautions.
For one, the dorm room assigned to you is purely for your personal use only. I imagine you would prefer it this way, since it lowers the risk of unrelated individuals learning classified state secrets, for which they could lose their lives.
I am not sure what orders you have been given, but I can somewhat imagine, as one of the Seven. Allow me to make this humble plea here now: please, refrain from killing any students, by any means. Naturally, I would rather you didn’t kill my staff either, even if some approach retirement age and dream of finding peace already.
There are certain to arise conflicts wherever young and passionate people gather and butt heads, and accidents are an unavoidable part of the learning process, but our school is not a warzone. No temporary lapse in judgment should earn anyone the capital sentence.
I am confident our healers can treat most injuries, but alas, the dead cannot be brought back to life. Should you cross this line, even if to uphold your noble duty, I am prepared to stake my own life and authority to see you removed from the premises.
This is a matter on which I refuse to compromise, as a civilized person.
You have been taught and trained to think nothing of the lives of others, and I understand blaming you solely for this mentality would be barking up the wrong tree. But it is my personal wish that during your stay here, you could come to recognize the priceless beauty of life, and view it as a phenomenon to be treasured at all costs, never to be lightly claimed.
Should you feel like venting, training room number four has been reserved exclusively for your use. Enclosed in this letter is the key to it. There is also my personal badge included, which authorizes you to move freely in and out of the school, even in the nightly curfew hours, should need be. If only you show the badge to any patrols you may come across, you shall not be apprehended or penalized, and the poor staff members and prefects attempting to apprehend or penalize you need not be savaged. I expect that you are professional with the use of this rare privilege.
In case any problems arise, please come see me directly.
I wish you good luck with your studies. May your days be filled with joyful, harmonious discoveries.
Sincerely yours,
Gerald Konoron
Headmaster of Belmesion
I shook the envelope to extract the small, flat, gilded badge featuring a dancing griffin, and the key with the numeral IV on the linked steel plaque, and put them in my pocket. Then I folded the letter and incinerated it together with the envelope.
I’ve heard your wishes, old man. But if you thought your opinion meant anything to me in a professional context, you thought wrong. What is the appropriate action in a given situation, I’ll be the judge of that. And a coward with clean hands isn’t qualified to preach to me about the weight of life.