The Final Season, page 14
“Okay,” I said finally. “So the Seasons are involved. And what, they’re going to show up to threaten the Family leaders?”
“Hopefully it will not come to that,” Alferon said. “Their first efforts will be to show how deadly the threat of Hell’s Colonies truly is, and that if the Family leaders do not stand a chance against the Seasons, they stand even less of one against the deeply entrenched Colonies unless they work together.”
“I’m… still not hearing a no in there.”
“Well, their second efforts will be by demonstrating that no one leaves the table until negotiations are concluded,” Alferon said, only a little apologetic about it.
“There we go.” I sighed. “Okay. There’s still a lot about this plan that seems like a strong wind would blow it over, but I’m guessing you haven’t given me all of the details.”
“That would take significantly longer than what we could cover in one meeting,” Alferon said. “Rest assured—we will not be calling for ceasefire negotiations to happen until we are absolutely certain that they will go the way we want them to.”
“And how long do you think it will be before that happens?” I asked. “Because it sounds like what you’re discussing isn’t something that can happen quickly.”
“We anticipate matters to proceed through to late summer, though that is an estimation at best. In the meantime, however….” Alferon’s eyes glinted. “I’m afraid you do have quite a lot of class indeed to catch up on, Mr. Hanson.”
I froze. “I… thought I was out of school right now.”
Alferon shook his head. “I’m not sure what put that notion in your mind, but you couldn’t be more wrong. I filed a leave of absence form to cover your, shall we say, ‘extracurricular activities’ over the past few months, but I’m afraid you have quite a few assignments to catch up on. Your professors insisted.”
I gulped. “So I wasn’t hallucinating the new pile of papers on my desk, huh.”
Alferon shook his head.
“Great.” I glanced at Tyler and Sam. “Any chance you have the time to help me with some cram studying later?”
“I’m out,” Sam said without hesitation. “Sorry, bud, but it’s my turn for the extracurricular excuse. As long as we’re helping the Dawn Revolution, I’m taking point.”
“I’ll try to help,” Tyler offered. “But I think I probably have a lot of work to do as well since I’m also technically entering the semester late for the spring.”
“Tell you what,” Sam said. “I’ll bring you both my supply of sticky notes and flash cards since I don’t need them right now, and then I’ll pretend you won’t both die from work anyway.” She nodded. “Yep. Feels good. No guilt here.”
“One last thing before you go,” Alferon said. “Feayr, I still expect you to meet with me every Tuesday and Thursday for personal training. We will continue to focus on Wards. You have a gift for them that I think can one day be developed into a beautiful specialty, even beyond our more immediate need to increase your proficiency.”
I could feel myself reddening. “Thanks, Speaker. I’ll be there.”
Alferon smiled at me. “Very good. Now I’m afraid I must discuss the more immediate parts of the plan, and I don’t wish to burden your time any more than is necessary. You are of course welcome to mingle as much as you please.” With that, he turned away from the three of us and strode over to where Professor Avery was apparently humoring a student’s attempts to ask her a question. Judging by the pained look on the student’s face, at least he knew he was doing a terrible job of it.
“So,” Sam said. “Wanna stick around until someone challenges you to a spar? I promise you can nominate me to fight for you.”
I twisted sharply to look at her. “Wait, I can do that?”
“Sure, why not? If you’re gonna be bothered by everyone who thinks too much of themselves, might as well have me as a warning sign.” She grinned, clearly excited at the prospect.
“Let me guess: ever since the Arena matches stopped being mandated, you and all the other fight-happy people at this place have been going stir-crazy.”
“Got it in one,” Sam said cheerfully. “Please please please let me fight everyone who challenges you.”
I stared at her. “Exactly how many people are you expecting to challenge me?”
“I bet at least ten, all of them fourth years.” Sam looked thrilled at the prospect. “Oh man, I’m gonna have so much fun with this.”
“You know you’ll probably lose at least a few of them, right?”
“That’s half the fun! Besides, even if I lose, none of them will ever beat me in the same way twice.”
I gave Sam an appraising look. “You know, you really have grown up, haven’t you?”
“Nah, I still wanna fight everything that moves.”
“Pretty sure that’s a you thing, not a maturity thing,” Tyler said, grinning.
Sam gave him a sideways look. “You know, you move….” Tyler took a step behind me. “Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. So, anyone you wanna talk to before we head out, or nah?”
“I went from only having Fall, a Season shaped like a person who didn’t always feel like talking, for three months, to suddenly having everyone pretending like they aren’t staring at me in the middle of a secret meeting.”
Sam winced. “So on a social anxiety scale, how high are we talking?”
“On a scale of one to ten? I’m hovering somewhere around an eleven.”
“Right, yep, time to go. C’mon, Tyler, you’re big enough. It’s battering ram time. Fay needs quiet.”
Tyler blinked. “I don’t think I can do the ‘walking into people’ thing like you do.”
“Coward. Fine, I’ll lead the way. Nerds, follow behind.”
I wondered why Sam wasn’t getting her fighting fix already just from how many people she must’ve been bumping into on a daily basis, but then I supposed the murder face kept them at bay. God, I’d missed her.
OVER THE next week, Tyler and I both started to get into the swing of life at the new Janus University, while Sam popped in and out of our lives depending on how often her mom needed her for revolutionary business. It was a little weird trying to go back to reading and studying while knowing that all around us a conspiracy was being plotted, but… I mean, I’d done the same last fall while being reasonably sure that Didas was planning to kill me. This really wasn’t all that different.
The actual differences, though, made themselves clear pretty damn fast. It was hard not to notice how many students were missing when I walked into my Infusion Basics II class and saw that it was only me, Professor Klyne, and Rhea, the quiet, friendly girl who was never without a copy of The Divine Comedy somewhere on her. I really had to ask about that at some point, but not while class was in session.
“As you might have noticed,” Professor Klyne said dryly, “we’re having a bit of an attendance problem at the moment. Infusion classes have always been the smallest at Janus, but this is really pushing us toward new lows. Now,” she said, turning her gaze back on me, “Headmaster Alferon has informed me that your absence was unavoidable, and that you need to understand as much about Infusion as you are able to comprehend. Do you understand what this means?”
I gulped. Rhea gave me a sympathetic pat on the arm. The professor must have noticed, but she didn’t comment past giving me a very, very faint smile and dropping about eighty pounds of books on my desk.
“I expect you to be prepared to give individual presentations on each chapter in the first two books over the next month,” Klyne said, a note of cheer in her voice that made me more than a little nervous. Rhea was still giving me big brown sympathy eyes, until Klyne turned her gaze back on her. “And once Fay here has finished catching up to our present course, I will be accelerating the course of study for both of you.” She dropped a stack of books on Rhea’s desk to emphasize her point. It was only about half as tall as mine, but that was still nearly as tall as she was. Rhea gave me a panicked look, and I did my best to mirror her look of sympathy.
The professor strode back up on the front and began writing on the chalkboard in large, sweeping strokes: BASICS OF MULTIPLE THREAT SELF-DEFENSE. She turned back to us. “Which of you can tell me what the first course of action should be if you find yourself in a dangerous situation where multiple enemies may be present?”
Rhea raised her hand. “Establish a multidirectional Ward and find the most defensible position?”
Klyne shook her head. “In certain circumstances you would be correct, but that should not be your first action.”
I raised my hand. “Run away?”
“Correct.” Klyne turned back to the board and wrote: FIND A WAY OUT OF THE SITUATION, and then turned back to us. “Fighting multiple enemies is not a course of action I would recommend to anyone, but especially not to Infusion specialists. There are two reasons for this. Rhea?”
“Standard Wards are weak to attacks coming from multiple directions,” Rhea said immediately. “They take more energy, and the response time is slowed. Multidirectional Wards are slightly better, but the amount of focus needed increases exponentially. Moreover, fighting defensively against a group of enemies often turns into a war of attrition against us. We can’t effectively target them while taking fire from all sides, and enemies trained to work as a team can take full advantage of that.”
“Very good response,” Klyne said approvingly. “Each point is correct. Infusion casters often do very well in one-on-one conflicts, but we only do well in larger scale conflicts if given the time to properly prepare for them. In battles fought on the scale of armies, our place is at the walls and siege engines, the forges and the tents. We reinforce and strengthen the defenses and equipment of our allies. We do not go out and fight multitudes on our own. If we find ourselves in a situation where multiple enemies are coming after us alone, our job is to find a swift way to escape the situation while expending minimal energy. That is how you survive.”
“What about other specialists?” I asked. “Is it only us who have to run in this kind of situation, or everyone?”
Professor Klyne gave me an assessing look. “I would imagine you might understand better than most that every fight one can avoid is a fight one should avoid. I would give the same advice to any of my students.”
“Well, yeah, I get it, but let’s say I had a friend who loves fighting and would never willingly run away from anything. What advice would you give her, then?”
Klyne sighed. “That was not subtle, Mr. Hanson. But if I were to play along with your entirely hypothetical question, I would say that there are two specialists who might be able to handle large groups of enemies, and a third who could if given sufficient time to prepare. Elementalists are, bar none, the most effective at dealing with large masses of enemies, because their spells often cover large areas rather than focusing on individuals. Summoners place second due to their ability to create reinforcements and turn the numbers advantage on its head, but only if they have the time to properly set up for their summonings. Evokers, like your hypothetical friend might be,” Klyne said, giving me a look, “do well, but only against small-to-medium groups. Three to eight would be the most I would ever suggest an Evoker handling alone, and only if they had sufficient experience in turning large numbers of enemies against each other. Groups of more than ten would almost certainly mean their death.”
I scribbled all that down. “Thanks, Professor.”
“As an Infusion specialist, I admire that your first instinct is to aid your friends,” Klyne said, her voice a little softer. “But as your professor, I must remind you that my duty here is to teach you. This is a lesson in self-defense, not protecting others, at least for today. Please keep that in mind.”
“Sorry,” I said, ducking my head. “It’s just… I don’t really know what to do with regards to self-defense now. You know about my, uh, situation, right?”
“Not as much as some,” Klyne said. Next to her, Rhea gave me a curious look. “Are you willing to discuss your unique abilities in a public setting?”
I shrugged. “If Rhea’s okay with it.”
“I’m fine with it,” Rhea said immediately. “I saw what you did back before you disappeared. It would be nice to have some context for it.” Her eyes were huge. “By it, I mean killing a god. I didn’t think that was possible.”
“Some tact please, Rhea dear,” Klyne reproached. Rhea hastily apologized.
“Well, in short,” I said, “I can personally do Infusion, and that’s what I’m good at and know the most about. But that doesn’t match up with my powers, which are a little more like….” I frowned. I’d never really thought about what category Winter would fall into before, but it was obvious once I actually stopped to consider it. “Well, Elemental, really.”
Klyne nodded. “That stands to reason. There are still parts of campus that are frozen over from the incident, I believe.”
“I think I’ve gotten them all over the past week, actually.”
“Ah. My mistake. Still, if you managed to cover more or less all of that area in an instant without funneling power through an incantation, then there is very little that an Elemental specialist could teach you. Their magic focuses on generating and converting energy into control or creation of the substance of their choice. Your powers allow you to skip that step entirely, and you have a virtually infinite supply of energy, if I have been informed correctly.” Klyne’s voice contained what sounded like a note of jealousy.
I gave an awkward nod. “Yeah, that’s about the half of it.”
“That is a very enviable position to be in, it’s true. But if what else I have heard is also true, then there is a reason these lessons are personally important for you. True, you might not struggle against a group of standard enemies. But what if that group fought you with five up front and obviously while sending a sixth under a cloak of Illusion magic to strike you from behind? Or an Elemental or Change user transformed the environment into something full of heat and fire to lessen your abilities? Or, most concerningly, what if you were facing a group of experts, all at the level of a Family leader? How then would you fare?”
“I….”
“From what Alferon has told me,” Klyne said, “one of the greatest dangers you face is yourself. Whenever you face immediate, unavoidable danger, your powers react without your consent, and usually with extreme results. I understand you have been training to lessen the threat of this—in your opinion, how would you now react if someone were successfully able to drive a blade into your back or blast a spell directly through your Wards?”
I cringed. I knew exactly how that would go down. My training had been about not losing control when summoning and directing massive amounts of power; it hadn’t been as much about what happens when something shatters my sense of safety. “It would… not go well. I don’t think I’d get hurt, but everyone else would. Probably in a very large radius.”
Klyne’s gaze was piercing. “And do you consider that to be an unacceptable result?”
“I… yeah.”
“Then I suggest you pay attention to these lessons with that frame of mind. You may not be facing personal harm from the situations I will be covering over the course of this month, but if you can think about them as ways to avoid losing control, then perhaps they might still be of use to you after all.”
“Yes, Professor,” I said, feeling properly chagrined.
Professor Klyne smiled. “Good. Now, Rhea—you mentioned a multidirectional Ward as a secondary choice if escape is not an option. Such Wards are notoriously tricky to maintain while being mobile. With that in mind, I’d like both of you to do your best to construct a Ward capable of withstanding assault from no fewer than five directions… while running laps around the classroom. You have one minute to discuss ideas.”
Rhea and I gave each other alarmed looks and then the preparations were underway. A thought occurred to me as I was ducking frantically and trying not to trip over the desk Professor Klyne had just shoved in front of me: I had, somehow, actually missed this. It was nice to have a reason to be learning again. I’d spent too long looking at the big picture of what was going on while training with Fall, and this? This made me feel a little more human.
UNLESS TYLER had learned how to masterfully hide his feelings in the last week, he was also enjoying himself immensely. I was lucky enough to have a really obvious barometer about how Tyler was doing, and it was called having lunch with him.
“So Professor Verost was telling us about the myth of the sphinx and its presence in multiple mythologies,” Tyler said to me excitedly, barely touching the pizza in front of him. “And I was really curious because, you know, it’s in the myth of Thebes and Oedipus in Greece but also it’s a giant statue in Egypt and they had a thing for cats and also—” His voice dropped, but not by much. “—also there’s Speaker Sekhmene if I’m not completely misremembering that she was called the Argent Sphinx or whatever. So anyway, it turns out that sphinxes have a separate taxonomy, and the ones who aren’t interested in integrating themselves into society actually follow specific migratory patterns that carry them from Greece to Egypt and back with the changing of the seasons!”
I blinked. “Wait, what? You mean like geese or something?”
“Exactly!” Tyler grinned at me. “Picture it—you’re a sailor in the ancient times of the Mediterranean, and you hear a noise above you that’s maybe birds, but it kind of sounded like yowling or something, and then you look up and see a flying V of giant cat-people.”
His grin was infectious. “That sounds somehow both terrifying and hilarious.”
“That might be a good way to describe, like, at least half of the stuff we’re covering in class,” Tyler said happily. “I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do when I get back to Tufts. I was thinking about maybe going with a classics major, but it would be really weird to have to write like I didn’t know about all the stuff I’m learning here.”
“Ooh, that does sound weird.” I tilted my head. “Please don’t think I’m saying this out of selfishness, though I might be a little bit, but do you think maybe Headmaster Alferon could make a classics major here or something? Or… I guess it wouldn’t really be classics with so many of the origins of the myths still floating around.” I frowned. “Would that be more like anthropology or something? Mythological anthropology?”
