The Tower Read online

  Vale shrugged, then dramatically sniffed the air as though she could smell dinner from here. “Food,” she said, waving over her shoulder as she left.

  Royal looked disgruntled, like he wanted to try again to convince Brom to spend his evening mucking out horse stalls. Then he shrugged. “Good night, Brom.” And he also left the practice room.

  Usually, seeing them all so invigorated at the thought of their evening activities would have invigorated Brom, too, but an unaccountable malaise had fallen over him these past weeks. He’d tried to shake it but couldn’t. He was failing, and his Quad mates were doing so well that no one had noticed.

  He’d stopped seeing Caila months back because he wanted all of his attention focused on the Quad. Breaking the rules could put his Quad at risk, and that was the last thing he wanted. He hadn’t cared about hurting the Quad when they were abjectly failing in their first year, but now the masters took a great interest in Quad Brilliant. Everywhere Brom went, he felt the masters’ eyes on him, watching, waiting.

  So as the summer wound down and lessons began, he saw Caila less and less, and then not at all. She didn’t seem to mind. To Caila, life was like a flower garden where she plucked whatever flower caught her interest. It had taken her a total of three days to find someone else to play with. And then someone else. Today he’d seen her smiling, sitting next to a muscle-bound third-year Impetu on Quadron Garden. Caila would be just fine.

  But Brom’s cessation of all sexual activities and his rededication to the purpose of his Quad didn’t have the effect he’d wanted. Instead of filling him with a fiery drive to succeed, he’d languished.

  He strolled over to the Gauntlet. The contraption had been designed to test an Anima’s proficiency in connecting not just to one’s own soul or to the soul of another, but to the Soul of the World. It was third-year magic, and Brom didn’t know how to do it yet. He fingered one of the pine spars that held the Gauntlet together, then lightly touched one of the blades settled into its catch.

  “Her Royal Highness told you not to touch that,” Vale said from the doorway.

  Brom turned to see Vale leaning against the doorjamb. She’d changed clothes. Instead of the academy tunic and leggings—red for a Motus, with silver piping to denote a second-year student—she wore the skirt instead. Men at the academy only had the one uniform, but the women could choose leggings or a skirt. Or, if you were Oriana, the gown-like dresses that had been specially made and sent to her from the Keltan palace.

  Brom had never seen Vale wear a skirt before.

  “I thought you were hungry,” he said.

  “I am hungry.” She went to bench where the Invisible Ones usually were and sat down, crossed her legs. The orange evening sunlight slanted through the windows, turning dust into sparkles and illuminating Vale like she was posing for a painting.

  He desperately wanted to look at her soul, but he didn’t. They’d made a rule in the Quad that they wouldn’t use their magic on each other unless they asked first.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked.

  “You’re faltering,” she said.

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re working on second-year spells,” she said.

  “I’m a second-year student,” he said defensively. He’d thought no one had noticed he was having trouble.

  “Oriana is working on third-year spells.”

  “Well, she’s Oriana. She’s—”

  “So am I. And Royal is nearly there.”

  “Well...”

  “Cut the shit, Brom,” she said. “You’re the most talented among us, but you’re falling behind.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “It is true.”

  “Will you let me finish a sentence?” he asked.

  “If you stop saying stupid things.”

  Self-loathing rose inside him. She was right, and he knew it. He’d been stuck on the external aspect of the Anima, reading other people, seeing their souls, but he hadn’t been able to move past it. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the internal aspect that he’d learned last year was starting to slip away: his clarity, his confidence. He’d hoped something would come along to break him out of his stagnation, but nothing he’d tried had worked.

  “I...don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’m more dedicated to the Quad than ever. I’ve been following the rules. I’ve even...” He trailed off, about to say something about Caila, but he decided against it. “I’m doing everything I can, but it’s having the opposite effect. I’m not getting better. I’m getting worse.”

  “You stopped seeing Caila,” she said.

  He looked at her sharply. “You know about her?”

  Vale laughed. “We all know about her.”

  “Gods...”

  “Okay, Royal doesn’t know,” she corrected. “But that’s because Royal thinks everyone is just like him. But Oriana’s not stupid. She’s the opposite of stupid, in fact. And I read emotions. Of course we know about Caila.”

  “You read my emotions about Caila?”

  “In general, Brom. Come on. We practice magic on each other. You think your emotions don’t spill over from one moment to the next?”

  “Well, it’s not a problem—”

  “It is a problem,” she countered.

  “No,” he said. “I stopped months ago. I didn’t want to endanger the Quad. I wanted all of my focus here, with all of you.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s sweet. For a man who sleeps around all over the academy, you’re actually really sweet.”

  “I don’t sleep around all over the academy.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I don’t— What?” He looked at her, thinking he’d misheard. Her eyes narrowed and her smile suddenly looked fiendish.

  “You’ve been faltering for months,” she said. “You stopped seeing Caila months ago. Did you ever think the two were connected?” She stood up and walked toward him. He was keenly aware of the way the skirt hugged her hips, of how shapely her legs were.

  Brom suddenly felt his mouth go dry. Was she using magic on him?

  “I’m here to help,” she said, stopping half a foot from him, looking up at him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked breathlessly.

  She reached out, put light fingers on his chest, and a crackle of lightning went through his whole body. “You’re the Anima,” she murmured. “It’s your job to bring wisdom, to unveil secrets we can’t get from books. And you’re not doing your job.”

  “Vale—”

  “You’re holding back.”

  “I’m not holding back.”

  “The Quad doesn’t need you to follow the rules, Brom. It needs you to break them. It needs you to be fearless and step beyond the lines others draw. You think Royal or Oriana are going to break the rules?”

  “What are you saying?”

  She chuckled. “I really thought you were better at this. You keep asking ‘what are you saying’ and ‘what are you doing’. Do I need to be more obvious?”

  Brom swallowed.

  She came closer, her hands on his chest. “I’ve wanted you since the first moment I saw you,” she murmured. “But I held back for...a number of reasons. That was a mistake.”

  “We’re in a Quad,” he said, his mouth suddenly dry. He could barely speak. It felt like he was on a floor that kept tilting one way and then another. First, she’d attacked him for his failures, then suddenly she was so close he could smell her hair. By the gods, he wanted to pull her compact little body to him, run his hand over the curve of her hip until it passed the edge of the skirt, then run it back up, underneath...

  She pulled him into a kiss. Her lips were soft and warm. Her tongue touched his, and he almost lost control. With every ounce of his willpower, he forced himself to pull away. She let him go, but not far. Their faces hovered an inch away from each other, and she looked at him with a smoldering gaze.

  Lightning crackled through him.

  “It’s aga
inst the rules,” he whispered. “We could lose the Quad. They’ll expel us. Oriana would—”

  “I know,” she said. “But that’s what we missed, you and I. We need to break the rules. It lights you up. I can feel it.”

  The lightning crackling frantically between them. It was like they both suddenly had twenty Soulblocks.

  “What about the Quad?” he gasped.

  “It’s what’s best for the Quad.”

  “The rules...”

  “Let Oriana and Royal have the rules. We’ll take this.” She pulled him to the floor.

  “Gods,” he murmured.

  “They can stay out of it, too.”

  He kissed her, and this time he plunged his fingers into her hair, let his hand slide over her curves, under the skirt. She moaned into his ear and wrapped herself around him.

  The lightning raced through both of them, and they lost themselves to it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Brom

  Brom stood in the quiet practice room after midnight, kept awake by a strange foreboding. Of course, he wasn’t supposed to be here after curfew, but he didn’t care. The window on the west wall had a loose latch—because Brom had loosened it months ago—and he broke into the practice room whenever he wanted. These days, he felt more and more inclined to break the rules. Vale had been right, and Brom’s education had vaulted forward the moment he’d begun racing along the edge of his life, poised to fall at any moment.

  The room was dark, but he didn’t need light anymore. Not here. He knew the practice room like he knew his own body. He knew the world like he knew his own body. The months had flown by, and his second year at the academy was almost over. He’d regained all of his earlier breakthroughs and surged past them, into new territory.

  He raised his sword and faced the Gauntlet, the elaborate combination of mechanisms that would chew, beat, slice, or poison anyone who dared to step inside. Blades whirled, gears ground, and poison flung—either on the tip of a dart or rigged to drop from a reservoir overhead—trying to bring down any student who braved the machine. To traverse from the east side to the west side required preternatural reflexes and acrobatics.

  Or the skills of an Anima.

  Brom had recently tapped into the Soul of the World. This new magic allowed him to feel his environment and the patterns of nature so intimately it bordered on precognition.

  He readied himself to step in, but his troubled thoughts harried him and he stepped back. Best not tempt the Gauntlet without full focus. He took a deep breath.

  His thoughts from the past several months washed over him.

  On the outside, everything seemed natural, fluid. Quad Brilliant’s list of accomplishments continued to grow, and this time he was a part of it. He was holding up his end. The bond between them was stronger than ever, so why this uneasiness, like he was missing something?

  At first, he’d thought it was because the exams for their second-year writs of passage were coming; they were only a month away. But that couldn’t be it. None of them were afraid of passing this time. The writs of passage were a formality.

  Of course, he had wondered if this foreboding stemmed from his and Vale’s secret love affair. It was like an axe about to fall, every day, but each time he thought of her, the foreboding vanished. Like she was the cure, not the cause. Vale had been right about Brom’s magical progress. He needed to feel on the edge. He needed to break the rules. From the moment they took up with one another, the wall between him and his magic had shattered.

  He’d considered Quad Brilliant itself as the reason for this foreboding. Had they blossomed too quickly, succeeded too thoroughly? Were they poised to fall?

  And what was the alternative? To intentionally slow their progress? Royal, Oriana, and Vale would never agree to hold back. And neither would Brom.

  So what was it? He’d tried to dismiss it again and again as ghosts in his head. Doubts and worries, but maybe it wasn’t simply in his head. He was an Anima now, connected to a greater sense of the lands, able to see the nature of people and the lands themselves. What if he was beginning to tap into something even greater? What if this foreboding was his power taking him farther? What if he was sensing something coming from a distant future?

  He stood there in the dark and silence for long minutes, chasing it down, trying to find its source, but he couldn’t. Nothing fit, and his fears grew. An unknown threat was far more dangerous than a known threat...

  Enough, he thought angrily. He chopped his hand down through the empty air.

  Whatever this foreboding was, he wasn’t going to pierce its secrets tonight. If his intuition was trying to talk to him, it would have to speak louder.

  He was going to run the Gauntlet. And who knew? Perhaps going through this exercise, sinking deep into the Soul of the World, would trigger something, reveal something that was missing.

  He let his thoughts go and opened his first Soulblock.

  Lightning crackled, striking inside his body. He channeled the magic, reached out with his senses, and became a part of everything around him.

  The Soul of the World was different from seeing the soul of an individual. Instead of showing a person’s desires and their intended direction, it showed the way the wind would blow, the exact path a leaf would randomly drift to the ground.

  Brom could feel the intention of the elements, and as long as the lightning crackled through him, it lent him a kind of precognition. He couldn’t predict what would happen to him tomorrow or five years from now, but he could sense what was going to happen in the next second.

  The Gauntlet was expressly designed to test this skill. It created a random pattern with its deadly components, and an Anima should be able to dance through it by trusting in his magic. The Soul of the World would tell Brom when to duck, when to leap, when to block with his sword.

  He walked calmly into the Gauntlet. He kept his eyes open but half-lidded. Seeing wasn’t nearly as important as feeling.

  The metal and wood of the Gauntlet—the very air itself—warned Brom of its attacks a second before they struck. He moved, spun, ducked, jumped, dove. Steel-tipped clubs whispered past his head, darts flew by him, missing by inches. He was faintly aware of deflecting a blade with his sword like he would have been aware of his mother calling him for dinner—distant but important. The magic crackled through him, tendrils of lightning connecting him to the dangers like they were parts of his own body.

  Then, so quickly, it was over. He stood, breathing hard and sweating, on the other side of the Gauntlet. The wheels and gears of the machine whirred as they re-set, spinning into their caches, waiting for the next challenger, then they went silent. Brom seemed to float in the darkness.

  As he came back to his normal awareness, the foreboding seeped into him again. He had hoped to flee it or plunge into some new understanding of it, but it settled on him again like a thick cloak.

  No, he wasn’t just jumping at shadows. The foreboding was real. Something was coming. Something horrible. He just didn’t know from which direction. He blinked, and the drain of having used almost an entire Soulblock pulled heavily at him.

  Then, suddenly, the lightning within him surged, crackling to life again.

  “Heavy heart. Heavy fears,” Vale said from behind him.

  Brom spun.

  She sat in the wide windowsill where he’d entered and, though the sill was only four feet across, she lounged on it like a couch. Only someone as small as Vale could “lounge” on that shelf of marble.

  “Are you using magic on me, Motus?” he asked. His fatigue vanished as her nearness invigorated him. It was like that with all of his Quad mates now.

  Being with just one Quad mate didn’t double his Soulblocks, like being with all three of them did, but it was like a deep breath of fresh air and a splash of cold water on the face.

  “I had half of a Soulblock lingering about,” she said. “I didn’t feel like waking up soul-sick, so I thought I’d find you.”

  “S
oul-sick” was the word they used for the hangover of an unused Soulblock. If a student opened a Soulblock but didn’t use it all, the lightning wreaked havoc inside the body. Sometimes there was vomiting.

  “Royal says beer quells soul-sick,” he said.

  “I went to your room,” she said. “When I didn’t find you, I thought I’d have to search every woman’s bed in the academy.”

  “Can I watch?” he joked.

  “Would you like that?”

  “I’m glad you came here instead,” he said. “You give me this...tingle inside.”

  “Is it like lightning?” she asked wryly.

  She dropped from the window and sauntered to him. He suspected she had never sauntered in her life before bonding with the Quad. But the powers of a Motus brought a heightened presence and a magical glamour that played on others’ emotions. When she used her magic, she could make a person enthralled with her. Once she’d discovered this, the sauntering had come naturally.

  She used her magic on Brom now. He could feel it. His heart beat faster. Her tumbling hair bounced, begging to be touched. Her eyes glimmered in the dark. He became aware of how her clothes stretched tightly over her curves.

  “I know of another way to quell soul-sick,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around his waist. She smelled like rain and Lavulin flowers. He leaned down and kissed her.

  “That’s better than beer,” he murmured.

  “Come on.” She led him toward the empty bench where the Invisible Ones sat during the day.

  He tugged her back toward him, and she curled up in his arm like they were dancing.

  “I have a better idea,” he said.

  “Better?”

  “On how to use up that Soulblock. I want to try something.”

  “Oh really?” She ran a finger up his belly, chest, neck, and flicked it off the tip of his chin. “You sure?”

  “You’re going to like it.”

  “I bet I will.” She was always game for something new.

  He stole a moment to simply drink in the sight of her. She’d blossomed from a spiteful little rat into a breathtaking legend. They’d all changed, but her transformation was astonishing. She kept turning like a diamond in the sun, new facets flashing into view every week, surprising them all. She was sexy, competent, brilliant. He found it impossible to get enough of her. Those glimmering, mischievous eyes, that cocky stance and her smile. Oh, that smile. It was a sultry invitation and a challenge at the same time. It pulled him to her like the sea pulled a river.