FALL TERM - October 7th
Fuck it. I'm not doing this tonight.
FALL TERM - October 8th
So, last night was the full moon.
I could have done more in the days leading up to it. I see that now. I could have talked to Marblebrook. I was in her office two days ago and should have brought it up, but I hadn't. I'd been too preoccupied with everything happening back home that it hardly seemed relevant that I might be a werewolf.
Before last night, I'd thought it was a possibility, because it had only been a possibility. I didn't know for sure.
But now, I know. Fuck.
Yesterday was difficult from the start. I woke up irritable. My skin itched. The mark of Orendell seared like a blister. Call it a sign of what was to come if you must, but I'd been feeling this way for weeks. This wasn't that unusual. I wrapped it in gauze hoping that applying pressure would help. It didn't.
Only Kelyn's poultice had ever made a difference, but I didn't have time before classes started to put it on. Every wrong move sent the wolf in my head into a frenzy. My Divination and Sigils lectures were marginally bearable. Combat lessons involved more review of conjured frost for the few remaining students (ahem, Aries…) who still hadn't managed to get the hang of it. I mostly just wanted to bang my head against the desk.
I felt like a powder keg waiting for a spark. I passed time with gritted teeth, feeling the minutes in my bones. Aries, for once, seemed to take the hint and gather that I really wasn't in the mood for more of his shit today.
He didn't so much as mention the full moon until early evening. It was after dinner and Aries and I were hanging around the coffee urns filling up fresh mugs. This was a common enough occurrence. I'd long since given up on trying to ditch Aries. He always found me, usually with Noodle trailing behind him. Sometimes alone. Tonight, he was alone. I'd expected us to hang around the dining hall for a half hour - drink coffee, read quietly, then retire for a night of independent study. Aries was in the middle of heaping sugar into his coffee mug, when I'd asked, "So what time do you want me to help you shadow step into the Sanctum?"
"You can't be serious, Zeph," he said.
"So, you learned shadow step?" I knew he hadn't.
Aries grumbled, raised his mug to his lips. "As though you're actually planning on going to the coven meeting tonight."
"We're all expected to go, aren't we?" I didn't have a reason not to go, I hoped.
Aries slowly sipped his coffee. His eyes searched my face as though he'd expected to find the word werewolf inked across my forehead. If only it were that easy.
I told myself I wasn't a werewolf and was willing it to be true. There was a process for becoming a werewolf and as strange as things had been the last few weeks, I was missing a few of the more distinct prerequisites. For one thing, to be a werewolf, you needed to have been bitten by a fully shifted werewolf on a full moon.
Orendell had bit me, yes, but did that count? Had he even really been a wolf? He was a stag at first. He'd still had antlers even when he looked like a wolf. But more than that, I couldn't even be sure that he'd even been there in the flesh. Moments of that night felt like a dream. Orendell was the first werewolf - a mage turned werewolf turned god, the father of shape-changing magic. It was hard to say any of the regular rules for werewolves really applied to him. And since we're getting into technicalities, it was the summer solstice, not a full moon. And all of this had happened months ago. If I was waiting for a full moon, why this one?
Because this is the cost of doing magic. I knew this answer innately. I had arrived at the Court only days after the first full moon of the season. I had only just begun running my tab.
Everyone pays up eventually.
Aries sipped his coffee, considering his answer. "Would you maybe be up for going over there a little early? Maybe you show me the casting gesture for shadow step once or twice again too?"
He was pushing his luck. He had to know it.
But ever since I'd let him sit with me in the library the other day, when he'd set his head against my shoulder and read along from Folk Tales of Caburh, something within me had softened to him. It wasn't intentional. He was still annoying. Too loud. Unrelenting. But he was always hanging around me. Grabbing my horns. Throwing an arm across my back.
It made me keenly aware of just how long it had been since anyone else had touched me.
"Fine." I was thinking about him and his stupid brown eyes. Not the moon. "But I'm bringing my coffee."
I didn't yet know how to cast it one-handed as Marblebrook had, so I passed my mug to Aries.
"Oh, you mean to go now," he chirped.
Marblebrook was able to bring me just by setting a hand on my shoulder. I didn't know how close Aries needed to be for me to drag him through the shadows. Just starting out, I figured close made the most sense. I brought him to my side.
Aries watched me uneasily, the two coffee mugs clinking between his hands. I slipped one arm around his waist. His stomach tensed at my touch.
"Are you sure you can do this?"
"How hard could it be?" It hadn't even crossed my mind that this might be difficult. I didn't think Marblebrook would have suggested it to me had it not been something easy enough, but Aries was clearly second guessing. He was staring off into the middle distance, breath shallow.
"Don't spill the coffee," I said. He momentarily snapped out of it. "It's going to be fine."
He twisted where he stood so that we were standing face to face. His nose brushed against my cheek. "Can we please just do this quickly?"
I adjusted my arm at his back, the crook of my elbow secure around him. It was the only way I could think to have both hands free to continue casting. I was nearly embracing him, but tried not to overthink it. "Magic is more will than gesture," I said. These words weren't my own, but Marblebrook's. I said them not just for Aries's benefit, but my own. "Shadow step is willing yourself to follow me into darkness. You know how it feels when you resist. Try not to resist."
I could feel Aries's eyes drift up my face, even as I was too busy looking at my hands to get the gesture right. I summoned the shadows in and thought of the Sanctum. Let them wrap up around us both and pull us into blackness.
And then, we were there. In the familiar dark of the Sanctum. How quickly it had gone from ominous to comfortable.
"Not so hard," I said. I'd had two weeks of practice and it showed. The uneasiness I'd felt slipping through the shadows had faded into nothing. I'd learned to trust my magic, at least this far.
Aries slowly unclenched, first with a few terse breaths and then a sigh. He suddenly was very warm at the juncture where our bodies met. His hands were full holding both coffee mugs, so instead of grabbing onto me, he'd desperately backed up against my flank. I suspected if he'd had a hand free, it'd be clutched tightly anywhere to keep hold of me.
"You alright?" I bent my head slightly to him. He was standing so close I could feel his breath on my neck.
"Good," he croaked. His eyes were still locked on mine, though his expression was unsure. I knew he would have said as much even if he was feeling sick, but this time, he seemed alright. A little shaken, but he still hadn't drawn his gaze away from me. A hint of pink blush crept up under the collar of his shirt and up the side of his neck.
I took my coffee back from him and led him back through the Sanctum. In the main chamber, there was better lighting. It would be better to help him to review shadow step there. Plus the short walk through the winding stone corridors might give him a moment to quit blushing. Nothing happened.
We were a few hours early, so the Sanctum was empty. I walked Aries through the gesture for shadow step again. I could admit he was getting less bad at casting on the whole. Watching me move through the gestures even just twice he had started to get the hang of it. We were going to have more than enough time to kill before the coven meeting began. The first time Aries managed to snap the shadows around him and reappear at my side, he almost collapsed. I put out my arm and he took it, a little worse for wear. "Was that…?"
"That was it," I said. "It took me a few days of practice to feel like I got it down. Don't make yourself sick trying to get it down tonight."
Aries righted himself. He took the cup of coffee I was holding and sipped it. His own had vanished somewhere in the dark of the Sanctum. "You say that like I'm not already behind in everything."
"I say that because you'll faint again if you keep going," I said. "It took me a week of me using it to get in and out of here before I stopped feeling queasy."
Aries grumbled into my coffee, but gave up on casting practice. He sat down on one of the low violet couches and made a show of stewing over his incompetence. It wasn't as though I hadn't seen him just about every day since arriving at the Court. I had some sympathy. It had to feel pretty shitty.
I had only just gotten my hands on the Vodalysa beginner's grimoire. It was still tucked under my arm when I sat down next to Aries.
"You're getting better," I said. "At casting. You're not completely hopeless."
"Ha! Great pep talk, Zeph. That's exactly what I needed to hear."
"That's not- we've been here for a little over a month. A few weeks. And sure, it's been a bit of a rocky start, but you're learning. You and me - we didn't grow up with magic. This is all new. Some of the students are from families of mages. Some were literally born with magic. That's not us. You can't compare what you can do to what they can do. It's a losing battle every time."
On the new moon, Marblebrook had set a hand on Aries's shoulder and said, there's more to being a mage than casting spells. I suspected even if he never emerged as a master spellcaster, he'd be fine.
Aries sat there for a moment, finished my coffee. "You're still better at casting than I am," he grumbled. My pep-talk had worked, but he wasn't done sulking for the night. I'd let him sulk.
"A bit of natural talent," I said. And though that might have been true, it was also true that I'd spent almost every minute I could practicing spellcasting gestures. I wasn't sleeping enough, my hands were sore, and my mind was always racing with the latest casting choreography I was still trying to master. Aries had spent enough time with me that he had to know this.
I went back to flipping through the beginner's grimoire, still searching for combat spells. When nothing in particular caught my eye, I settled on practicing a spell for invisibility.
"They have other books in the Sanctum we can read, right? Outside of that grimoire?" Aries asked.
"Plenty. Though most of them are kind of disorganized."
"Anything on beginner's sigils?" Aries asked.
I cocked my head. I didn't know. "Probably?" I guessed. I directed Aries over to the shelf where the Vodalysa beginner's grimoire belonged and Aries returned a few minutes later with three other tomes clutched to his chest. Marblebrook had asked that we get shadow step down before moving on to start the beginner's grimoire, but she hadn't said anything about the other books. I didn't see anything wrong with Aries making use of the loophole.
Later, as the other Vodalysa mages began pouring into the Sanctum, Aries looked up from one of the tomes. "Is it alright if I try something on you?"
"Is it gonna hurt?" With him, it was a genuine question.
Aries rolled his eyes. "Worst case it doesn't work at all." He pushed the tome aside and shifted closer to me on the couch. "Just let me -" he grabbed my jaw. There was a dark bruise there - one he'd given me. I squirmed away involuntarily when his hand grazed it, only to feel his grip tighten. I could have pulled away, but I didn't.
Whatever it was, just in the way he'd asked, I trusted him.
With his free hand, he ran a feather-light finger over my cheek. It was the ghost of touch over the bruise. The way the air moved around his hand, I could tell he was drawing something.
"There," he said. I didn't feel anything, but I could tell from the look on Aries's face that it'd worked. I ran a hand over my cheek, rubbing hard.
"What'd you do?"
"You can't tell? That bruise is gone," Aries said.
I was still rubbing at my cheek. It hadn't even occurred to me that the previously tender spot was no longer sore. It wasn't there at all. I felt fine. "Oh. It is gone. Did you cast that?"
"I drew a sigil. I didn't know if it would work. The book called for it to be drawn in oil, but I thought it might still be worth a try," Aries mumbled. "I figured if it didn't work this time, I could try again with coffee… if you'd let me. Some sigils are a little more mutable though and don't even really need ink."
So, Aries wasn't entirely shit at magic… I knew we had other classes, other lectures to attend, other fields of study, but following combat lessons, I hadn't really seen the appeal or potential in any of them. We didn't learn how to wield magic in quite the same way that I'd hoped, but suddenly, there was Aries, who on a bad day could hardly manage to cast shield, suddenly whipping out something shockingly useful.
"Thanks for that…" I heard myself say. He could tell I was a little impressed. I knew because he was beaming at me like an idiot. And because I couldn't help myself, I said, "You should fix that split lip of yours next." I'd given it to him when I shoved his face into the gravel in the courtyard. It was ugly and scabbed.
"Nah, it makes me look kind of tough. Don't you think?"
I rolled my eyes and reached across him for the tome. He wrenched it aside and used the opportunity to shove me off balance and grapple me into the couch cushions. This was the kind of thing he'd been doing all week. It was the reason I'd had a bruise on my face to begin with. And it would have been no different, if not for the full moon.
He was shoving my face into a tasseled purple pillow when I felt the wolf lurch through me. My mind was momentarily hazy again. A low growl rang out from the back of my throat.
To his credit, Aries dropped his hold on me.
"Zeph?"