Chosen (9781742844657) (22 page)

‘I'm sorry,' I said, and it was true. I'd never felt sorrier for somebody else in my life. It was a strange feeling, to pity her instead of myself. Hiroko smiled.

‘There is nothing to be sorry for,' she said, getting up and beginning to walk again. I did the same and fell into step. ‘Life can still be happy without a person I love. I can still have my father; you can still have your sister.'

I thought over the wisdom of her words. She was basically telling me to be grateful for what I still had. In truth, I realised that Angela and I would not be as close as sisters had we not lost everything else. I imagined that Hiroko and her father, too, would have come together following the death of the late Mrs Sasaki.

Even though I already liked Hiroko, and already felt a connection with her, I felt another level of closeness form. We had so much more in common than I could have imagined a week ago.

Before my scrying lesson, I spent half an hour practising with my candle. I'd spent every moment of my weekend alone-time staring into that stupid candle, staring and concentrating and straining until my head ached and my normal vision was swimming.

Qasim was staying at Morrissey House for much of this week, so we were to have a scrying lesson almost every day, except Wednesday, when apparently too many other classes were running for him to be able to have an uninterrupted lesson. I couldn't wait to get into this week, to get better and to show Qasim how good I could be at his subject.

Trying to ignore the dull ache in the back of my head, I sat down in the scrying classroom with Xanthe. Hopefully we'd leave this lesson on better terms than we had the last.

Did you do the exercises?
I heard Qasim's voice clearly in my head. I looked at him, but he carried on with preparing his lesson. I tried to think affirmative thoughts. I felt his mental fingers probing my recent memories and witnessing my candle burning out, minutes before, from overuse. I felt his surprise.

I'm glad you didn't shirk this
, he said.
I worried that without this work, you might have regressed. Another few good tugs and it should be free of its blocks
.

‘To begin, we will continue with last week's exercise,' Qasim said to the group. He began to hand out candles, lighting them as he went. ‘One partner stands behind the seat of another, holding up a number of fingers. The seated partner scries themselves and their own surroundings, and counts their partner's fingers. Please begin.'

I stood as soon as I had my lit candle, allowing Xanthe the first turn at scrying. I positioned myself behind her where she couldn't see my hand behind her head and held my open hand up – five.

When it was my turn to scry, I got it within seconds – three fingers. Xanthe smiled, a small smile but a smile nonetheless, and we swapped places. After five minutes, Qasim stopped us. My head was swimming again.

‘As promised, today we will begin working towards scrying without tools,' the Scrier said, taking a seat in an armchair. ‘Put out the candles.' We did. ‘This next step requires a great deal of mental strain and effort. The jump from tool to unaided scrying is a difficult one, but I am confident that you will all show progress very quickly, and with the potential contained within the people in this room, I don't want to waste time teaching you different ways to tool-scry when you have the ability to take the next step. Knowing how to tool-scry is useless when you can't light a flame or have no access to crystals or mirrors or water.'

He paused, and we were silent, considering this truth. Qasim looked around at us.

‘Please close your eyes and regulate your breathing,' he said. I did as I was told, although I felt disappointment – I
hated
meditation. ‘You must turn your attention inward. You must locate your talent and try to exercise it in the same way as when you have a candle. It is difficult to receive the images without a tool at first, but the methodology is the same.'

He continued to speak and give instructions, but I couldn't listen to him
and
follow his instructions at the same time. I couldn't concentrate like that. Instead, I blocked out his voice and began searching the back of my mind for my scrying talent. I knew exactly where to find it, hidden at the back, throbbing dully with overuse. I tried to think of exactly how I had used it only minutes before with the candle flame, but it wasn't something I could really explain to myself, let alone anyone else. It was like making a fist. You don't know exactly how you do it – there's some unconscious nerve and muscle involvement, certainly – you just
do
. When I had been practising scrying, I'd just
done
it. I tried to break it down, but all I could really identify was a stretching and straining sensation that didn't really answer my question. That was how it
felt
, not how it was
done
.

Overwhelmed by the impossibility, I opened my eyes. All seven of my peers were sitting silently, concentrating madly. Qasim met my eyes.

If you think it's impossible, then it is
, he said.
Just give up
.

It sounded like a taunt or a challenge, and I resisted the urge to glare at him. I worked to keep my expression neutral. I would
not
give up. This subject was my dream. I was going to try, and I was going to
succeed
, regardless of what the Scrier believed or said.

It took all week for me to show any signs of progress. Why did my dream subject have to be so difficult? I practised every morning and night and any moment I had to myself, but nothing changed. One by one, throughout the week, my classmates announced that they had started to see things, and with each person's success I felt more deeply panicked. What was wrong with me? My friends reported almost daily of their adventures in their preferred areas of magic – Hiroko was teleporting herself all over the place, apparently, and Sterling had foreseen something I hadn't cared to listen to – so why wasn't I getting any better at mine?

‘You will,' Hiroko assured me optimistically at dinner on Friday when I quietly voiced my concerns. ‘It will only take time.'

In my memory, the days of that week all blurred together, one big blob of time filled with fuzzy everyday motions, lots of attempts at scrying and an ever-worsening headache. Each successive lesson was every bit just a repeat of the previous day's feelings of frustration and failure. Qasim's scrying lessons were getting steadily more intensive and I didn't seem to be improving at the same rate as everyone else. After a full seven days of nothing – bringing me into my third week at the Academy – the White Elm councillor asked me to stay back after the other seven students had left. I sat back down in my seat, ignoring Xanthe's curious backward glance.

‘Aristea, you have a lot of potential in this discipline,' he began, sitting down in his armchair. ‘I understand that you have an interest in the art of scrying. Are you motivated to learn what I can teach you?'

‘Yes,' I said honestly, wondering why he couldn't tell how tired I was, how achy I felt.

‘Are you practising?'

‘Aye, all the time.' I tried to sit a little straighter, wanting to be taken more seriously. But no matter how I sat, it wouldn't change the fact that I sucked at the one thing I wanted to be good at. I slumped down again. ‘I don't know what I'm doing wrong.'

‘Here,' Qasim said suddenly, handing me a fresh candle and lighting it with his hand. ‘Look into it and scry. Expect an image. Think of nothing. Do not scry yourself.'

I did as he said, staring into the flame and willing an image to magically present itself. Was it so easy?

‘Yes, it is that easy,' Qasim said, reading my thoughts. ‘With an aid, you should find this simple and natural. It is the jump between aided and unaided scrying that is difficult.'

Some time passed, maybe as much as ten minutes. Qasim said nothing. Very slowly, a bubble appeared to me in the middle of the flame, and expanded into a moving image. A vision.

‘I can see a beach, a stony beach,' I told him, trying not to allow my excitement to destroy the image. ‘There are a lot of birds flying around. There's something in the water, in the shallows, that they're after.'

I paused, paying closer attention. The birds were hungry, I knew that much. The bulky thing in the low surf looked like a rock, black and wet, but was shifting a little with the tide.

‘It's not a rock,' I said, still trying to decipher this vision. ‘It's something dead. Maybe a seal or something? Although…'

Qasim had gone very still. His eyes were burning with intense interest.

‘Don't look at the seal, Aristea,' he instructed firmly. ‘Look around the beach. Where is it? Can you see any signs or buildings?'

I drew my attention away from the dead thing drifting in the water and tried to sort of zoom out. It turned out that I could. I looked around and saw a small, hand-painted wooden sign.

‘“Smithy's beach”,' I read. ‘“Private property. Keep out”. It's a cold beach, and there're no people. There's a small house a few hundred metres up the beach, but there's no one living there. Maybe it's a holiday home? It has a garden and all the flowers are full-bloom.'

‘Have you seen this beach before?' Qasim asked quietly, and I, stupidly, shook my head, breaking my eye contact with my scried image. ‘Is there anything else? The birds?'

‘The birds were black-headed gulls,' I told him, though I was uncertain as to what else he wanted to know. ‘We used to see them a lot when we lived near the beach near Coleraine. I think they're all over the UK and Europe, though.'

Qasim abruptly put out my candle with a click of his fingers and took the candlestick.

‘I am glad to see improvement, Aristea, but scrying with a flame is something all of your class can already do,' he said bluntly. I deflated rather quickly. ‘You have potential to be great. Is that what you want?'

‘Yes. Every day.'

‘Good,' he said, itching a spot on his chin. His fingernail running across the bristles of his beard made a scratchy sound. ‘I'll see some improvement by Thursday morning, then?'

I nodded and left, worried. What if the work I'd been putting in wasn't enough? What would happen if, come Thursday, I still hadn't shown any improvement? Would I be given more homework? Moved into a different class? Asked to leave the school for not being good enough?

I didn't even attend dinner that night, so busy was I with my scrying practice. I lay on my bed in the silence, my eyes closed, trying
so, so
hard to envision myself in third-person and then to actually scry myself. Just to scry
anything
, like that beach, would be fine. But nothing was happening. I wasn't even getting a flicker or a momentary change of focus, like I had with the candle when I'd first started.
Nothing
was happening, except that my headache was steadily worsening with each passing half hour that I wasted achieving nothing.

Was this what life was going to be like at the Academy from now on? A constant headache, literally?

The next day we played a hot potato-style game with a round, smooth quartz in Jadon's class. Each person in the circle would hold the quartz for five seconds, imbuing it with as much energy as the person could transfer in that amount of time, as pass it on. As the game progressed, the time in each hand was reduced to four seconds, then three and then two. The idea was for the crystal to never lose its glow, and to glow more brightly as it was passed between students – to hold the energy we gave it – and for us to learn how to transfer energy quicker as the game became faster. The lesson was fun (minus the write-up) and took my mind off my scrying concerns for a while. When it ended, though, I had the rest of the day free from classes to spend stressing. At dinner, Sophia commented on how pale I looked.

‘No subject is worth this,' she chastised when I explained. ‘You shouldn't be hurting yourself.'

‘I'm not,' I insisted quickly. ‘I'm just working really hard.'

‘There might be a really good reason why you can't scry yet,' Sophia warned. ‘I've read about cases where sorcerers have discovered gifts they never knew about because they were buried by the mind, like trauma and suppressed memories. The mind is a pretty amazing thing. You shouldn't mess with it too much.'

From what Qasim had said in my first class, I suspected that what Sophia had read applied to me, but I didn't say anything. She sighed and put down her fork.

‘Can I try something?' she asked, offering a hand. ‘I need your permission.'

‘For what?' I slowly lowered my own hand towards hers, unsure what she wanted me to do.

‘Sometimes, when our mom gets a headache, she has me try to soothe it.'

‘She's really good at it,' Kendra added before I could refuse. ‘She
is
a Healer.'

I shrugged and nodded, figuring that Sophia couldn't exactly make it any worse. I let my hand fall into hers and she closed her fingers.

‘Just relax,' she suggested. I tried to do as she asked, closing my eyes and wondering how much good she could do with a pain that wasn't even physical. At first I detected no change, but I soon noticed her presence, silky and insubstantial, inside my aura. She brushed past my thoughts and I resisted the urge to shut down. She was going to help me.

When she found the source of the pain she worked quickly, and I felt the relief straightaway. I couldn't tell exactly what she was doing, because there was no injury per se and hence nothing to really
heal
. Regardless, my overwhelmed mind quickly quietened and calmed. The strained feeling faded. My worries fell away.

When Sophia removed herself, I opened my eyes and smiled at her. I felt blissfully calmer, and ten times more aware. My head was still throbbing lightly but it felt less intense.

‘Better?' she asked. I grinned back.