“Hehe.”

  “How dare you laugh at me.”

  Grinning from ear to ear, Ty felt her lingering anger from reading the Headmistress’s message fizzling away. It had taken him the better part of an hour to wake up and notice she was there—during that time, she had gotten some studying in while making sure to also go back over her report notes in a much calmer demeanor.

  “I’m going to miss my evening class,” croaked Theo, eyeing her indignantly from his infirmary bed. Unable to do anything but utter threatening retorts, move his arms, and kick his feet.

  A bit more seriously now, Ty glanced at the card on the small table beside his bed that she had to sign. “The supervising physician told me you were severely dehydrated and delirious. You need to stay overnight.”

  “No,” growled Theo through clenched teeth, “Get. Me. Out.”

  Laying on the bed, he used his free arm to grab the slip off the table and pushed it in front of Ty’s face, the dark rings under his eyes even more pronounced on his deathly pale face.

  The tactician snapped up the card, pocketed it, and shook her head decisively. “No.”

  Theo bit his lower lip and shot her a dirty glare. “Come closer,” he spat, his arm that had held the card still extended. “Come closer so I can knock some sense into you.”

  She pushed her chair a bit further back, making a loud scraping noise on the floor that echoed throughout the empty hall. This is review time, she didn’t have the heart to scold the bedridden physician. People aren’t supposed to be in the infirmary.

  “Ty, please,” Theo started to beg now, taking a few pathetic, laborious breaths while covering his face with his hands. “I need to get to my class at 7. Please.”

  In truth, it was slightly effective. He looked far more undignified and pitiful than she had ever seen him—even for previous episodes, as long as he looked fairly alright, she’d give him an early pass at leaving. This, however…

  “You look like you’re going to collapse if I let you out,” Ty tried to say with as much understanding as she could for someone who understood far less than she should have by late adolescence.

  Upon hearing this, Theo perked up. He dropped his arms, and his eyes widened. “Really?” he whispered. “So, if I don’t look like death, you’ll let me out?”

  Not expecting that sort of reaction, Ty opened her mouth to speak.

  “Get my bag,” hissed the incapacitated physician, nodding his head to the office at the back. “They took it.”

  Not a few seconds after issuing his request, he saw that she was still deep in thought and kicked some sense into her instead. “Get my bag.”

  Flabbergasted, she stood up and frowned at her sickly classmate, her curiosity sufficiently piqued. “You’ve got some dangerous spell in there, don’t—”

  “Shhh!” hushed Theo, managing to kick her again and nodding again to the office. “Just get it.”

  Getting out of range from Theo’s attacks, Ty walked over to the end of his bed, staring at his hopeful eyes. “This next class, it’s with Nate, isn’t it?”

  Theo was peculiarly quiet as he turned his eyes to the ceiling. Maybe that was why he could miss the other class with Faris—that one didn’t matter as much. It was this night class that he had been preparing for.

  Then she remembered an important point. “Oh yeah,” she wondered aloud, “Faris was late 30 minutes to his casting class today. Would you happen to know why?”

  “No,” Theo immediately snapped, no longer uncooperative.

  That should have raised some suspicious flags in Ty’s mind, but she accepted it anyway, slowly making her way over to the supervising physician at the back of the hall.

  They looked a bit old, possibly the Headmistress’s age, but she couldn’t tell for sure as they were facing a dense book on the desk in front of them.

  “Hi there,” Ty started nervously, taking her pin off her collar and lowering it onto the table so that they would hopefully see it and notice her presence.

  “Yes, one moment,” he replied, putting a finger onto his place on the page and looking up with eye bags similar to those of Theo’s, pushing his glasses up to examine Ty’s pin. “Yes, tactician?”

  “U-uh,” she stuttered, turning around to point at Theo’s bed, hoping to do as little explanation as possible. “My classmate. Theo. I’m wondering if you could—if it was possible…”

  The supervising physician had returned to his reading while she had had her back turned.

  “…to retrieve his belongings, please,” she finished modestly, bashfully taking back her pin.

  After a long period of silence, the physician closed his book and got up from his seat, retreating into the office and producing a brown, well-worn bag.

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  Theo’s book bag.

  “Oh, yes,” Ty nodded, hurrying over to the office entrance and taking it from the physician. “Thank you very much.”

  “No problem,” he yawned, scratching the side of his face and turning around to go back into the office. “Between the work he does for me and actually getting admitted, Theo is a common sight in my halls. But I’m sure he’ll be fine. He is in good company.”

  Eager to return to her student, Ty nodded and did a quick bow. “Thank you again. I’ll be off.”

  “No problem—leave the slip and keep the door open for me, will you? I’m expecting a fellow professor later.”

  Unquestioning, the tactician quickly placed the slip on the desk before returning to Theo, who was waiting intently with his eyes completely lucid as he stretched his arm out to Ty like a child begging for candy.

  Stopping at the edge of his bed, knowing what he’d do out of desperation, she articulated slowly, “The only way you’re getting to your next class is me, so I’d think twice before kicking me again.”

  Theo retracted his hand immediately.

  Ty sat down and put Theo’s book bag on her lap. “Which spell is it?” she asked quietly, not wanting to rummage through his bag, but she also not wanting him doing something that would get them both in trouble.

  Swallowing, taking in a deep breath, he said slowly and quietly, “Listen, Ty. All I need is enough energy to make it to my class, cast a few spells, somehow win, and then I can rest. That’s it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Araise, Sustain, and then Par-meda.”

  “Araise?” Ty was the one now to exclaim.

  “Okay, listen,” he cried, his voice barely half the volume of Ty’s. “A full Sustain should be enough to get me up, and the Par-meda is just in case.”

  “Those spells aren’t the issue!” countered Ty wondrously at Theo’s blatant attempt to dodge the question. “The Araise is—it’s—why do you even own the spell?”

  “Listen,” Theo repeated for the umpteenth time, taking a few seconds to inhale and exhale. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve been working my ass off for this test, and I need to pass it.”

  “Why?”

  The question seemed so simple to Ty, who believed that any answer he would have given her would be nowhere close to reasonable, that when he finally summed up enough energy to sit up and grab her arms, looking her dead in the eye, she felt nothing but shame.

  “Because while you may not have something to prove, I do.”

  His hands that held onto her were cold, weak, and faintly trembling. He looked like he was about to fall apart, shatter into a thousand pieces. Yet his words did not waver. “You must have wondered why I didn’t go into offensive magic,” he whispered. “It’s because Emrys didn’t let me. He thought I was too sick and enrolled me in a non-combat discipline. But I can do this.” He lowered his hands and snatched his bag out of Ty’s lap before laying back down on the bed all winded.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?” she asked him quietly, feeling that dull ache again in her chest as she watched him go through his bag by feel while looking up at the ceiling, blinking his emotions away.

  “Yes.” His monotonous response was barely a whisper as he pulled a jet-black tome out of his bag and handed it to her. “Please. Just authorize it.”

  She remembered the book from when she was incapacitated herself—she had even used it. If only she had opened it up, checked the spells instead of acting brazenly, presumptuously. “You know…you know what this does, right?” she whispered, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear it from him herself.

  “Yes.”

  Opening the book to its first few pages, she saw all the prior authorizations the tome had seen. All the blood and script.

  Ty then flipped through the soft sheets, trying to be gentle with them, not even reading anything else until she arrived at a rough page covered in a messy black scrawl. She remembered Darius’s words from the other day, and her heart sank. The words were disfigured, dirty. Even worse, they were simple enough for a beginner to say. “I don’t want you to do this.”

  Theo continued to gaze up at the ceiling, focusing on breathing.

  “How many times have you cast this?” she whispered.

  He didn’t even pause. “More than ten.”

  “What?” Her heart stopped. The theoretical upper limit was ten. “You…you can’t have uncapped—”

  “I can’t.”

  Where there had been dread and grief was now numbness. Had she been lied to by Darius?

  “My anima can’t be uncapped. Please authorize it.”

  Against her better judgment, Ty looked at the page, noted down the spell code, and then turned the pages back to the front with shaky hands. She checked all the prior authorizations for the code and saw elegant, flowing red script that looked so perfectly copied down every time that whoever did it must have done it many times before. The seal beside the entries was circular, embossed with an image that almost looked like a giant tree—it looked nothing like the one MATS had issued her.

  “Did Emrys do all this?”

  Theo was quiet.

  “Did Emrys make you do this?” she prodded softly, desperately.

  “Do your job and authorize it, tactician.”

  For once, she wished Nate were here. He had said that he’d be around whenever there was trouble. This was trouble. And it was his fault. Did he want this for Theo? Is that what it was?

  There was no more right or wrong gut feeling in her chest anymore. It felt heavy, like something had swallowed up all her insides, leaving a giant pit. A pit that knew that no one was here to stop her.

  Silence.

  Slowly, the tactician got off her seat and knelt on the cold floor by his bedside, shakily taking out the small pen hidden in the inner pocket of her cloak. With a gentle, unsteady grip, she uncapped the pen and looked at the red ink already sitting in the nib. Her blood. Her worthless blood that would return to the Earth Mother one day.

  Taking in an unsteady breath, trying to stay calm, she first wrote down the spell code and whispered a few Ancient words. Then, as she signed her long name onto the field beside the code, she managed to get all the authorization words out for the spell. The tome glowed slightly as all tomes did when they received authorizations, and then she capped her pen, dropping it onto the bed as she squeezed her tactician’s ring until she felt a sharp sting.

  Carefully, she sealed the spell’s entry with the bloodied side of her embellished ring, and then she lowered herself from the bed, curling up with her knees to her chest, hands to her ears.

  Yet she could still feel him take the book. Hear the syllables being spoken, the cutting words that she could feel crawl under her skin, take away goodness and replace it with the evil that was power. Power and greed.

  Magic was a mistake. Darius was right; this was all a mistake.

  Then, a tap on her shoulder.

  She gingerly let go of her ears and looked up at Theo standing above her. Cloak on, bag over his shoulder. Tome in hand. Looking the same as ever, his cool expression the same as the one she had committed to memory because it reminded her of something.

  “Do you have any evening classes?” he asked curiously as if the past few minutes hadn’t happened.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “I’m sure Professor Moriya wouldn’t object to seeing you, if you’d like to come along.”

  Unwilling to meet her classmate’s eyes, she slowly held back her tears and got up, taking the pen that he held out to her, clutching it so hard in her hand that she lost all feeling, and then followed her physician out of the infirmary.