Fantastic Schools: Volume 2 Read online

  “Everyone underestimates the power of the kitchen,” said the dark-skinned lady who said her name was Yazmin. (That’s with a ‘Y’ —don’t even think it with a ‘J’ or I’ll know.) “You ever want to learn real magic, you just stick by Agnes, and she’ll teach it to you.”

  “She’s just making lunch.”

  “And they’re all eating it, aren’t they?” Yazmin nodded significantly.

  “But don’t they test for poisons or whatever?” Kelsey asked as she and the other ladies set up large metal trays and pots along the serving line. Agnes came along to inspect their work, adjusting the placement of a large metal pot full of porridge.

  “Agnes doesn’t poison anyone,” Yazmin said once the woman in question had moved on. “She helps them. She’s got recipes for alertness in the morning and relaxation in the evening. There’s some for sharpness and kindness and obedience…”

  “Obedience?” Kelsey shuddered as the thought of one particularly foul foster mom’s notion of obedience. It seemed to involve changing personalities and speech patterns and at least claiming to share her religious beliefs. She’d been slapped for “backtalk” and “taking the Lord’s name in vain” and shut in a closet the day she’d been caught making out with one of the other foster girls.

  “Oh, the kids here are very well-behaved,” Yazmin said proudly. “Dedicated to their studies and to one another. It’s one of the things that makes Lyonhall the best school of magic in the world.”

  Kelsey considered Yazmin’s words as she placed ladles beside each pot of stew. There were etchings on the handles similar to those around the rim of the metal servingware. More magic? A rune of some kind, perhaps? Or simply a decoration? Without learning a lot more about magic, she’d never know.

  But it was true that the students treated the cafeteria ladies with a lot more respect than Kelsey had ever seen at any school she’d ever attended. Some of the students even smiled and said “thank you” as if such politeness always applied to the hired help. At first, Kelsey had seen that as a cultural thing, something charming and unique about this world, but now she wondered…

  The students placed a lot of trust in the kitchen staff, didn’t they? Had any of them ever questioned that level of trust?

  After lunch that day, Kelsey risked doing something she’d yearned to do from the first day. She took off her fringed white apron, smoothed down her drab gray skirt, and began to explore the school. Hopefully, none of the students in their burgundy uniforms would notice, or if they did, hopefully the kindness potion would protect her.

  Leaving the kitchen and entering the school turned out to be easier than she expected. Once she’d done her fair share of cleaning the lunch dishes, she had about two hours of free time before dinner prep. Most of the line servers spent that time quietly reading or taking a nap. Where they got the books, she had no idea. The only book Kelsey owned was a copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe so tattered it had lost both front and back cover. Mom used to read it to her, before Dad left and everything went to hell.

  The castle corridors were eerily empty when Kelsey emerged into the castle proper. A few other servants nodded politely at her before hurrying to their tasks; they probably thought she was similarly occupied. There were no students in sight, however, meaning they must all be tucked away in a classroom somewhere.

  I’d give anything to sit in on one of those classes. Kelsey thought, not for the first time. But this time she had another thought. So what’s stopping you?

  She halted in the middle of a corridor lined with suits of armor that all seemed to be looking at her, demanding that she figure it out. How hard would it be, really, to slip down to the laundry room, borrow a uniform, and settle into a class?

  The first part turned out to be ridiculously easy. The laundresses were taking a break in the heat of the afternoon too, leaving lines and lines of unattended clothes drying in the breeze. Kelsey snatched a tunic and pair of loose-fitting trousers, grateful that the billowy styles would make it hard for anyone to notice an improper fit. Then she slipped inside a restroom and changed hurriedly, hiding her own gray dress in a cabinet under the sinks.

  A bell rang five times, signaling the start of a passing period. Heart racing, palms sweating, Kelsey joined the throngs of students now filling the corridors to overflowing. Spotting some of the younger ones and assuming they’d be going to a beginner class, she followed them into a wood-paneled classroom reminiscent of an auditorium. Bleacher-style seating rose to two stories high and provided enough room for at least two hundred students.

  Perfect. No one will notice one more or less in here.

  Still, she climbed to the very back, doing her best to seem invisible. Her lack of books or parchment made her feel slightly out of place, but only a few of the students eyed her curiously as they took their seats. Most were preoccupied with thoughts of their own, and even the few who did notice her dismissed her as easily.

  Exhaling a long sigh of relief, Kelsey closed her eyes. And opened them again when a gruff voice at the front of the class called everyone to order.

  “Settle down, settle down. We’ve got a lot of work today and no time to waste.”

  Kelsey only just managed to stifle a gasp when she got a good look at the…individual…leading the class. He was pink and utterly hairless, and had a single eye in the middle of his forehead like a cyclops. Maybe he was a cyclops.

  Something in her unintended surprise must have caught his attention because that single eye zeroed in on her, narrowing slightly. “You. Come down here and show me what you’ve learned about shielding so far.”

  I could show you what I’ve learned about shielding so far from right here, she thought frantically. But her legs moved, almost of their own accord, first standing her upright and then guiding her down the side stairs to the front of the room where every pair of eyes was fixed upon her.

  So much for being invisible. Can I learn that next?

  “Someone tell me the four types of shielding,” the cyclops said to the room at large.

  “Physical, mental, spiritual, and complex,” a girl intoned.

  “Correct,” the cyclops replied. “We start with physical because it’s easy, and because it helps you get the basics down, but few magicians use physical attacks for that very reason. So learn, but don’t get too comfortable.”

  With that, the cyclops turned his single eye on Kelsey. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I like your honesty.” He smiled, then raised his hands in a threatening sort of way. Bluish energy appeared there, and as it shot from his fingertips she ducked, feeling the force of the attack lift the hair on top of her head.

  Most of the class laughed. The cyclops joined in, good-naturedly.

  “Yes,” he said, “ducking is always a valid option. But let’s see if you’ve actually learned anything about shielding, okay? Don’t worry—if you fail, the blue energy won’t hurt. Much.”

  Standing awkwardly, Kelsey nodded and wished she hadn’t been so foolish as to come into this classroom. What had she been thinking? She should have stayed in the kitchen like everyone else, keeping her head low and cleaning out pots until she was as old and gray as the other women. And then…

  Maybe I’m not destined for practicality after all, Kelsey thought.

  She faced the cyclops and watched as he generated the blue energy at his fingertips once again. He paused, clearly giving her time to prepare; the whole thing was a learning exercise, after all. He was intentionally giving her warning, and intentionally using magic that wouldn’t cause permanent harm.

  Drawing in a deep breath, Kelsey tried to imagine holding the energy at bay. It was, quite simply, the only thing she could think of.

  The blue energy shot from his fingers and hit her in the solar plexus, pushing her backwards a step. She let out a slight oomph more in surprise than pain. The biggest hurt was to her ego. She could feel her cheeks heating as she stood upright once again.
/>   “Not bad,” the cyclops said.

  She made a noise of disbelief.

  “I felt your magic stir,” he continued, “the focus was just wrong.”

  You felt what? Kelsey thought.

  “Next time, try to get out of your head and into your heart like we discussed last week.” He turned to the class. “Where is the magic?”

  “In the blood,” they chorused.

  “That’s right.” The cyclops smiled encouragingly. “So, third time’s the charm, then we’ll call someone else. Are you ready?”

  This time, Kelsey didn’t reply at all. She was too busy thinking about her cardiovascular system, picturing a poster on the wall of one of her many different high school’s science classrooms. She even thought she felt, faintly, a sort of hum she’d never noticed before.

  Had crossing into a different world awakened something inside her? Was it possible…

  The cyclops created his blue light for the third time. Kelsey stopped thinking, stopped trying to control the situation at all, and instead let that gentle hum grow louder and louder until it filled her ears.

  Blue light exploded all around her, but it did not push her back.

  “Well done!” the cyclops said as the class erupted into cheers. “Now, who’s next?”

  The next few weeks were like a dream. Kelsey could do magic. Magic!

  For the first time in as long as Kelsey remembered—maybe the first time in her life—she knew hope and joy. Yes, she still had to work in the kitchen. Sometimes, she considered going to the school administration and asking for a place with the students, but she feared that any action she took might ruin everything. So she worked her three shifts at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and she snuck off during her mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks to go to classes.

  Her favorite was Defensive Magic with the cyclops, whose name turned out to be spelled Frank and pronounced Farank. He might only have one eye, but he saw everything. He was the first person to tell her to “hurry back to the kitchen” after class one day, though with a gleam in his eye that suggested he wasn’t mad. He just wanted her to know he knew.

  Between ten hours a day at work in the kitchen and three hours a day in class, there wasn’t a lot of time leftover for actual magical study. In order to keep up with her classes, she began to stay up late at night. This was a challenge at first, until she remembered what Yazmin had said about the helpful effects of breakfast and dinner. After that, Kelsey set aside some of the porridge from breakfast every day and reheated it for her evening meal in place of the more soporific offerings. The results were immediate and marked—she began to need only four or five hours of sleep. This gave her a chance to sneak into the library too, and check out books on every magical subject she could.

  First year classes contained more theory than magic, which was partly why she enjoyed Defensive Magic so much. It was one of the few classes where she got to work actual magic. By the time a month had passed, she could create a physical shield instantly and effortlessly. Not a strong shield—that would come with practice—but a quick shield. And as Frank pointed out, in a battle, speed is often more important than strength.

  The biggest challenge Kelsey faced, aside from time, was an inability to make friends with any of the students or even get involved in study groups. They were sort of polite to her, in that they didn’t overtly bully her with magic or words. But they did shun her, especially as word began to spread that a kitchen girl was attending classes.

  “Has she even had her destiny read?” asked more than one student loudly as they passed through her serving line, intending for her to hear. “I had my destiny read by the Great Oracles at Mount Verde who told me I was marked by fate.”

  That usually began a debate over which oracles were actually the greatest—the ones at Mount Verde or a slew of others—all of which seemed to have settled at the top of a mountain. It also struck Kelsey, as she listened to them boast and brag in a blatant attempt to put her down, that “marked by fate” might be some kind of form response.

  “You can’t live in two worlds forever,” Yazmin said to Kelsey one day as they filled trays with porridge and fruit for the fated students. “You don’t belong there, but you think you’re too good for us here?”

  “I don’t think I’m too good for you,” Kelsey protested. She could almost feel the magic of breakfast now, pulsing every time she dipped the ladle into the metal pot and came up with a scoop full of porridge that she then handed to a student.

  “That’s what the other girls think,” Yazmin said. “You never spend time with us.”

  Girls? Kelsey knew better than to call them out for their age, but that was definitely part of the problem. What did she have in common with a bunch of old ladies?

  “The students might be amused by you right now,” Yazmin said, “but they won’t accept you. And look at the strain it’s causing!”

  “What strain?” Kelsey asked.

  Yazmin reached forward and tugged at a lock of hair that had come free from Kelsey’s perpetual ponytail. “It’s gray.”

  Kelsey stared at the lock of gray hair, an odd contrast to her usual dark brown. She hadn’t noticed…hadn’t realized. Could lack of sleep be causing it? Or the strain of using magic?

  Maybe she didn’t have enough magic to be a real student here. She was feeling more and more tired each time she went to class. It had come upon her so gradually that she had dismissed it, but the not-so-small voice of doubt inside her worried that her fairy tale was about to come to an end.

  There was no one moment of revelation. No instant of understanding. Just a gradual shift to knowing something was wrong.

  It started in the library the night after Yazmin pointed out the streak of gray hair. Kelsey started looking for glamour or illusion magic to hide it, but at the last minute took out a book on aging too. The aging book was pretty boring except for a chapter called “Premature Aging” which suggested that some magical effects could cause twenty-year-olds to look fifty. It just didn’t say why or how.

  The next day on a whim, Kelsey decided to ask Yazmin her age. She fully expected the older woman to say she was being rude, or to tell her a woman never reveals her age. But instead…

  “Twenty-six,” Yazmin replied.

  Kelsey was shocked for a moment, then she remembered her grandmother saying she was celebrating her twenty-ninth birthday…two years in a row. It seemed to be the sort of thing old people joked about.

  Only, was it a joke? Kelsey returned to her book on aging but found little more information. She tried to find a reference book mentioned in the “Premature Aging” chapter, but it wasn’t on the shelves and when she asked a librarian for help she got the closest thing to an evil glare she’d gotten from anyone in the castle.

  “So I’m free to study magic as long as I don’t bother anyone about it?” Kelsey demanded. “Is that it?”

  “No, that’s not it,” said the librarian, a middle-aged woman who could definitely use some of the books on glamours Kelsey had checked out. “That’s a restricted book, full of black magic.”

  Which of course made Kelsey desperate to get her hands on it. She backed slowly away from the reference counter, then paced a circuit of the two-story library, trying to figure out where a restricted section would even be. But unlike in many stories she’d read growing up, this school seemed to realize that the first way to keep students away from restricted books was to hide them.

  If she were a student, that would be a real problem. But she wasn’t a student. She was kitchen help, adjacent to custodial staff and a rung below “worthy of notice.”

  Servants knew everything. She just had to find the right one to approach. Some resented her, as Yazmin had noted, but at least a few had been silently cheering her on for weeks, through smiles and sly nods. When she put the word out among the friendlier custodians that she needed a restricted book, she got results in less than a day—the book in question turned up on her pillow one evening after dinner.
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  Gasping in wonder, Kelsey first clutched the book to her chest then glanced around, trying to figure out who had gifted it to her. Then she set to work, reading by candlelight well into the night.

  Her roommates came in to go to sleep, giving her disapproving looks as they suggested she go to bed. Instead, she went to the staff lounge at the end of the hall, now empty for the night. Settling into the coziest armchair by the fire, she continued to read until morning sunlight slanted in through an east-facing window.

  There, in the final pages, was the answer to all Kelsey’s doubts and worries. All her suspicions that fate was about to turn on her, and that if something seemed to good to be true, it definitely was.

  Staring back at her from the pages of an innocent-looking book were depictions of the precise runes etched into the metal servingware and ladles she used every single day.

  She felt numb at breakfast, too exhausted to think and too horrified to act. So she served as she always served, feeling the hum of magic with every scoop of porridge. Only this time, she knew what was happening. Knew she was transferring tiny pieces of her own magic to the students each time she passed them a bowl.

  “Are you all right?” Yazmin asked as they cleaned up. “Did you ever go to bed last night?”

  Kelsey shook her head mutely.

  “You should take a nap instead of going to class today,” Yazmin said.

  I should run away instead of going to class today, Kelsey thought. But run where? She had no way of getting back to her own world without help, and she knew nothing about this world beyond the walls of the castle.

  For that matter, she was coming to understand how little she knew about the castle, too.

  There was a village nearby. Agnes had told her she’d be allowed to go there to spend pocket money, but she’d spent her days off studying instead. Now, Kelsey decided it was time to see that village. Collecting all her pocket money—she didn’t have a good understanding of how much it was since she hadn’t bought anything here—she left the castle to head to the village.