Natural Magic
Table of Contents
Matsias Ayan Tilli Matsias Miriam Tilli Matsias Tilli Key Ayan Key Miriam Tilli Ayan Key Tilli Key Matsias Ayan Matsias Tilli Miriam Ayan TIlli Key Matsias Key Miriam Matsias Key Miiram Ayan Tilli Matsias Tilli Matsias Key Matsias Tilli Ayan Matsias Miriam Matsias Ayan Matsias Ayan Miriam Ayan Key Miriam Matsias Tilli Ayan Key Matsias TilliTilli
Breakfast the next morning consisted of more traditional Nefralean foods, namely a type of porridge made from rice and topped with shredded coconut, alongside a variety of fruits. When Tilli and Key arrived in the cafeteria, Ayan and Miriam waved to them. Key paused, but Mat arrived a moment later, his crutch in one hand and his tray in the other, making a beeline for the table. Key sighed and followed her brother. Tilli saw that Mat's clothes looked pressed, but his face had the same look Tilli got whenever she transported from Agrona to Nefrale. "Trouble sleeping?"
Mat glanced at her, and then at Key. Tilli had noticed the previous night that Mat used Key as his sounding board if he could. She wasn't sure if this was because his Shugbo was weak or because he didn't much like talking in any language. When Key stared back at Mat, but said nothing, Tilli settled on the latter.
"I... sometimes don't sleep well in a new place." He spoke slowly, his tongue feeling out the syllables of what was surely an unfamiliar language. Based on his accent, Mat sounded like one of those students who had learned Shugbo specifically because he had been accepted into Faraday.
"Did you dream about the fire?" Key asked Mat softly in Zhohu. Key had spoken to Mat in Zhohu a couple of times the night before, and it baffled Tilli that the siblings didn't use Thisizha, especially if they were trying to be private. Though classes at Faraday were taught in Shugbo, Zhohu was a relatively common language in Nideon. Privacy might not have been the purpose though, as Mat always responded in Shugbo. It was possible they had different linguistic strengths, which could have explained the difference Tilli noticed in their accents. Like many new speakers of a language, Mat mixed up his vowels, but his consonants tended to be clean and crisp. Key's accent was lighter, but completely different. She said her k's further back in her mouth and her p's and b's often sounded the same.
Instead of answering Key's question, Mat turned to the other girls and said, "is anyone else nervous about their first day?"
Miriam, already halfway through her porridge, swallowed and said, "I don't know if nervous is the right word, but I haven't been to school since I was ten."
Ayan choked on her juice. "Really?"
Tilli touched a hand to her necklace. "Well, I only started going to school last year."
Ayan rolled her eyes. "Of course not, you're rich."
"What does that mean?"
Ayan paused before answering, probably catching Miriam's defensive tone. "In my experience, wealthy kids don't go to public school." She pointed to Tilli. "And her mother is Melody Nightwind."
"Who's Melody Nightwind?"
This time, Tilli answered Miriam's question. She should have known Ayan had guessed her parentage from the moment they met. "She's and Agronan diplomat. She's been on Nefrale's Council of Races twice."
Mat interrupted the conversation by nudging his hand upward, as if they were already in class. "What's the Council of Races?"
"It's the Nefralean king's advisory council. The point is, my mom's really important in the sprite community. Since dad's a diplomat too, I spent a lot of my time traveling with them, so me and my siblings were privately tutored. I had to convince them to let me go to a real school last year."
"I was privately tutored too," Miriam looked at Ayan as she said it. "Of course, most schools in Alaj are closed now."
As stunned as Ayan was, Mat looked as if school closing was a personal affront. "Why?"
Since Tilli had first met her, Miriam had been quick to say whatever was on her mind, but now she hesitated, looking at the table again. "It's... the conflict."
"Your country's at war?" Mat asked.
Miriam stabbed the rest of her porridge with her spoon. "Sort of. The provincial leaders are fighting. Uncle says it's all politics, but in some areas, it's probably safer to stay at home."
Tilli was actually surprised to hear this. Despite growing up mired in politics, she'd heard little news of Alaj. The king must have spend a lot of resources keeping the knowledge secret from other countries. "How long has it been going on?" she asked Miriam.
"All my life."
After a moment of silence, Ayan turned to Key and Mat. "What about you two?" she asked, "you travel all year, right? So, how do you go to school?"
"Most of the time we get taught by family," Key explained. "But it depends on where we are. Xye has pretty strict laws about what qualifies as proper schooling. And Virarona has schools now that are meant for Thisaazhou kids--or anyone who's not going to be there long. But I bet those schools are different than most."
Tilli imagined Sam warning her not to, but she couldn't hold back the question any longer. "When did you start learning Shugbo?" Mat's head jerked up at the question, and he looked around the table as if he didn't know who Tilli was talking to. But Ayan had already mentioned how she had learned Shugbo under the watchful eye of the Antaran princess, and Miriam was clearly a native speaker. Tilli could have let the issue drop there, but she didn't. She pointed to Mat. "Yeah. You. When did you start learning Shugbo?"
Key practically snorted. "When he was nine."
"Really?"
"Well, Mat's wanted to go to Faraday ever since..." she paused. "Ever since he found out it existed, I guess."
"But I didn't... practice a lot..." Mat said. Miriam scrunched up her face as if her orange juice was actually lemon juice.
Tilli tried to compare this with that she knew about Thisaazhou trade routes. "So, you didn't learn it when you were traveling through Atlinthaia? Or Xye?"
This time, Key didn't have to wait for Mat's unsure look to jump in. "I did. But Mat didn't go out as much as I did. He mostly stayed in the trailer with dad. Thisaazhou gender roles..."
"You're lying." Miriam sat rigid in her chair, as if trying to best Ayan for height. She gave Key a stare as intense as the barrel of a gun, as if to say she could spot a lie at twenty paces, which, Tilli supposed, she probably could. Key herself looked like a rabbit trapped in Miriam's gaze.
Mat broke the silence. "I'm adopted." The words were quiet, but clear. He did not stumble over them, nor the words that followed. "My parents were friends with Key's, so they took me in when my family died. But I haven't traveled as much as she has."
As the table fell silent once again, Tilli could hear Cadolina's voice telling her that knowing more languages didn't give her the right to say whatever came to mind. You have a knack for digging out the worst parts of people's lives, don't you? she would say, At this rate, the whole school will hate you by the end of the month. Tilli put a hand to her necklace and wondered if she had been so reckless with her questions in her past lives. Then she downed the rest of her breakfast and stood up. "I had better get going. I have windcasting this morning, and I don't want to miss it."
Miriam cocked her head at Tilli, as if confused that she was leaving so early, though Ayan nodded as if it made perfect sense. To her horror, Mat hefted himself up with his crutch. "Windcasting? With Mrs. Theelnin? I have that class too. I'll go with you."
"Really?" Tilli pulled her crumpled schedule out of the pocket of her denims and looked at it again, as if she could magically make it change. But from what she had heard, she would need Mat's ability for that. "I thought you manipulated luck."
"And you said you were here to study language." Was it her imagination, or was he smirking at her?
"Yeah, but I'm half sprite, so I do wind magic too... I thought that was obvious." She felt a trickle of sweat roll down her body underneath her shirt.
Mat shrugged and maneuvered around Key's chair. "And we're all here to learn how to use magic in new ways."
Tilli looked at Miriam, half hoping she could call him out on another lie, but Mat hadn't actually said anything they didn't already know. There was no way of getting rid of him. And Tilli didn't actually know what upset her more--that she had failed to back out of the conversation, or that Mat was already good enough to study something other than his natural gift. She gave up. "All right. Let's go."
They put up their food trays and headed to the main building. Mrs. Theelnin's class was in room 301B, so they took the stairs to the third floor, but soon were wandering in circles unable to locate the mysterious room. On the bright side, now that they had a common problem, Tilli didn't have to worry as much about having made a fool of herself at breakfast.
The hallway had filled with students, and emptied out again. They caught one of the upper classmen and asked, but he shook his head. "I don't do weather magic, but I think it's over by the balcony, right?"
So they now stood in front of the door to the balcony picnic area. Tilli took of her glasses and polished them on her shirt, as if their only problem in finding the room was smudged lenses. "Okay. There's room 301. So it would make sense that room 301B would be nearby."
Mat looked down at his schedule again. "But why is there a room 301 at all? Shouldn't there be like... a 301A and a 301B? It's not logical."
"Right. Logically, it would make sense for 301B to be... there." She pointed to the next door down. But it wasn't 301B. It was 302. And they already knew that.
Mat examined the strange, sideways staircase shape of the hallway. "Could it be invisible? Or..."
"Hidden?" The strange jut in the wall could easily be the size of a room.
"And we... have to find it..." He slowed down as he said it, perhaps unsure of his own words.
"Great," Tilli said, "a test on our first day." But she wouldn't have put it past Faraday to do something like that. "Maybe you could use your luck to help us find it?"
Mat twisted his hands around his crutch. "I don't know if I'm allowed to that kind of thing outside of class."
As she considered their predicament, they heard a door open, and Tilli wondered if Mat had used his luck anyway. That was, until she realized the person had come from the balcony. Tilli recognized Antony, one of the student heads of Victoria House. He stopped just inside the door. "Are you looking for Mrs. Theelnin's windcasting class?"
"Yes!" Tilli almost leapt at him when he asked the question.
"It's this way." Anthony indicated the balcony with his head.
"On the balcony?" Tilli asked. She looked at her schedule again, though she had consulted it so many times in the last ten minutes, she had committed it to memory.
"The building has a few classrooms with doors to the outside. They're ideal for studies of weather. Did you not wonder why the hallway was such a weird shape?"
As Antony led them to the room, Mat proved once again that he was clearly smarter than Tilli. "Oh! The B is for balcony! The rooms out here are across from the ones inside. So they have the same numbers." He pointed to the open door of 301B. Unfortunately, Mat's sudden insight had interrupted the class.
As they entered the room from the balcony, Tilli noticed a group of nine students seated in the desks and a small, elderly woman at the front of the room. She turned sharp eyes and pursed lips on them. The expression reminded Tilli of her grandmother when she caught people poaching in the Taend Forest. "Very astute Mr..."
"Truuit," Mat practically squeaked. Truuit thought she saw him flinch.
"Truuit." Mrs. Theelnin said the name as if she had already made up her mind about him, and though she stood several inches shorter than Mat, he looked like he was trying to shrink down until she could no longer see him.
Anger flooded through Tilli. Mat may have already been infuriatingly intelligent, but he clearly couldn't defend himself, which wasn't fair. "Really?" she snapped at Mrs. Theelnin. "You're going to condescend to him because the people at this school were too lazy to make it clear on the schedules where classes were? It's out first day! We're supposed to just have the whole school memorized already? Put up a freaking sign!"
Mat snapped his head toward Tilli. His eyes were wide, and he looked ready to bolt, maybe all the way back to the Southern Continent.
"Interesting opinion Miss..."
"Todetse." Tilli drew herself up to her full five foot ten inch height. She could feel a slight breeze whipping through her bright red hair. "Tilitsitane Todetse."
"Miss Todetse." Mrs. Theelnin said her name the same was she had said Mat's. "It's an interesting opinion... aside from the fact that your classmates all seem to have found their way on time."
Tilli scanned the classroom again, not about to give up on the battle. She knew she shouldn't be fighting with a teacher, but she also knew that Mrs. Theelnin was a bully. Of the other nine students aside from her and Mat, four of them were freshmen. The other five had the ties and jackets that marked them as belonging to houses.
Tilli put her hands on her hips. "I see your point, Mrs. Theelnin, but respectfully disagree." Tilli was aware that she didn't sound in any way respectful, but she didn't really care. She was good enough at manipulating wind that she could have stolen Mrs. Theelnin's breath from her, so she felt that letting the woman speak was restraint enough.
The other students were tittering. Two students in purple ties seemed particularly entertained by the argument. But Tilli didn't let up. "When one third of your first year students gets lost, I think that's a sign there's a problem with the facility itself. Now, if you're done blaming us for the faults of the school, I was hoping I might actually learn something today." She glanced behind her at Mat, who still looked ready to run, so she grabbed his hand and pulled him along behind her, stomping her way to the nearest two desks.
Even as she took her seat, she half expected Mrs. Theelnin to turn her out, and if she hadn't been fuming, she might have cared. But to her surprise, Mrs. Theelnin only said, "your comments will be taken under consideration, Miss Todetse." The she turned to direct the class as a whole. The upper classmen seemed barely to have noticed that Mrs. Theelnin had failed to punish Tilli, though the freshmen in front of her and Mat exchanged glances and whispers. Mrs. Theelnin did give a glance in their direction and added, "when nearly half my class is distracted by the interruptions of one student, Miss Todetse, I think there's a problem with the student."
Tilli knew she was supposed to shrink like Mat had, but she was still too angry. Mat, on the other hand, who had been attending to every word with a slight tremor, tapped his crutch against the chair of the girl in front of him, and she snapped to attention.
"Thank you," Mrs. Theelnin said, and that was the end of the matter.
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