Tessili Academy (4 page)

Straph spent another moment looking at her
through his narrowed eyes. Then he turned and moved away, walking
like a cat on his quick feet.

Cat.
The word had appeared in her
mind, unbidden. And now, like the path, she couldn’t seem to attach
it to anything.
What is a cat?

She had only a moment to wonder. Straph
reset his grip on the staff and whirled it towards her head.

Jey left the washroom and joined the ranks
of girls drifting towards the dining hall. She watched the other
students. They all seemed to wander rather than walk, moving with a
strange, dreamy lack of purpose Jey tried to emulate.

Phril rode on the ledge of her collarbone,
looking around with his bright, dewdrop eyes. She could feel he was
excited. She could also feel the weaving of her spell on him. It
was still in place. Over the course of the day, it had grown easier
to leave it there, easier not to think about it. It occupied a
corner of her mind, but it grew more comfortable as the time
passed.

And time did pass. Time passed, and Jey
could remember. Classes had been dismissed for the day. All the
girls were being shepherded towards the dining hall. Orderlies
moved among them in tan robes, encouraging the flow with soft words
or light touches on shoulders or backs.

For the girls did not move with any sort of
purpose. Every now and then one of them stopped, going still to
look vaguely out over the green expanse of the quad. The younger
girls, in their blue gowns, did this the most often. The older
girls, in silver, moved with more confidence.

Up ahead, Jey could make out two white
gowns, bright against the tones of blue and silver around them.
Elle and Kae moved like the others, drifting along with the general
flow.

Ahead of them, girls filed through the doors
to the dining hall. Jey was near the end of the group. She and a
few other girls, one blue, two silver, were passing below a column
when the flashnode at its top went off.

Jey froze, but she did so out of reflex.
Around her, the other girls reacted as well. The one in blue
faltered, her steps lagging. The orderly at their elbow guided her
forward and through the doors.

The two in silver stopped walking entirely.
There were only two orderlies outside now. They stood next to the
doors, waiting to close them. Jey glanced at the blank, vacant
looks on the other girls’ faces and tried to imitate it. She stood
in place like they did, eyes wide and glassy.

One of the two orderlies released an annoyed
sigh. “For the love of Priam.” The orderly’s tone was low and quick
with frustration. “This is a ridiculous place for one of those
rotting things. And today with a senior right next to it.”

The other orderly didn’t reply, only gave a
small, nonchalant shrug. He moved forward to one of the silver
girls, speaking to her in a low tone, nudging her shoulder to
encourage her forward. She seemed stuck for a moment. At last, she
moved. The other girl in silver went with her.

Jey hesitated, uncertain how quickly she
should pretend to recover.
They do something.
The thought
raced through her head in a frantic effort to understand.
The
flashnodes do something to our minds.

The other orderly approached Jey, gripping
her wrist to try to pull her forward. She resisted more out of
reflex than a decisive desire not to move.

“Too much force.” These words were spoken by
the orderly who’d shrugged. He was a smooth faced man, with thin
limbs and the hint of belly beneath his robes. He turned from
shepherding the two silver girls into the dining hall. With
surprising dexterity, he took a few quick steps forward and rapped
the other orderly on the wrist. The first orderly gave a sharp
grunt and released his grip.

Jey let her head list to one side to get a
better look at him. Where the other orderly had a soft look to him,
this one was different. He had a rugged look to his face. His palm
had been rough against her wrist. He was young, his shoulders
square with muscle.

The older orderly spoke. “You must be soft,
smooth, gentle at all times, most especially if you touch one and
her tessila is on her person”

Phril had indeed bridled at the orderly’s
behavior. Jey could see the red smudge of his form out of the
corner of her eye. He’d raised his head and had his small, beaked
mouth open, his wings flared, as if he could somehow drive the
orderly away.

The younger orderly looked at Phril with a
look of distaste. In fact, he looked angry. Some fierce spark
burned deep within his eyes.

The older orderly saw this too. He took a
step closer to the young man, so close their shoulders almost
touched. He spoke in a low whisper, but his tone was firm and
menacing. “Listen to me, man. One of these girls is a thousand
times more valuable than you. Get one of them rattled and I promise
you they’ll have removed you by morning. I don’t know how you
arrived here, but I assure you we all followed the same path. Some
of us live with what happened. Some get angry. If you choose anger,
you choose your own end.”

With these words, the older orderly turned
back to Jey. For a moment, she felt a vague bloom of recognition.
She seemed to recall his face, a younger version, smiling at
her.

“Come now, Jey,” he said. She took a
tottering, uncertain step towards him. He set a gentle hand on her
shoulder. “That’s right. It’s dinner time.” His voice was smooth
and soothing. She understood she knew this man – had known him for
a long time. But she didn’t know his name.

Jey let herself be guided into the dining
hall as the younger man, seething with quiet anger, closed the
large doors.

It was dark and quiet in the senior’s dorm.
The windows were open. A night breeze sighed through the large
space. Jey lay in her bed, listening to the cadence of Elle and Kae
breathing as they slept.

Phril was on one of the brillbane bushes
that grew in large, earthenware pots set about the room. He’d
burrowed his way into a husk and was gnawing his way through the
sweet rind on a seed sack. Jey could feel his simple pleasure with
the undertaking.

Jey was not as relaxed as her tessila. She
had emulated Elle and Kae as they’d brushed out their hair, donned
their night dresses, and climbed into their plush beds. But Jey had
not been able to get to sleep. She’d been lying awake for hours
now.

The only light in the room came from the
flashnode set into the domed ceiling. As she lay in tense
wakefulness, she watched it fill slowly with light, then flare in a
sudden, silent detonation. It did this, on average, twice an hour –
though sometimes it seemed to fill a little slower or more quickly
than usual.

Jey had followed Professor Liam’s
instructions. The spell she’d cast on Phril still clung to him, an
invisible weave of protective magic. The strange thing was Jey now
couldn’t understand
how
she’d done it. She could remember
Professor Liam telling her to cast the spell – could remember doing
so without any particular confusion or difficulty. But now, if she
tried to cast the same spell on anything else it was impossible. It
was like trying to remember how to fly.

Somewhere out in the night, an owl hooted.
Owl.
The word popped into her head like “cat” had earlier in
the day, but both words were the same, devoid of attachment to any
meaning.

There was a soft click. The door to their
room opened on silent hinges. Jey felt her heart begin to race. She
forced her eyes closed, forced her face into a smooth mask, forced
her body to go slack and still.

An orderly padded into the room. He moved on
soft feet. First, he stepped into the alcove where Elle’s bed was
tucked against the wall. A moment later, he emerged and went into
Kae’s. At last, his soft feet approached Jey’s bed.

It was so difficult not to move – yet
somehow Jey knew betraying the fact she was awake could be
disastrous.

She heard the rustle of robes as the orderly
approached her bedside. A moment later, a smooth, cool palm rested
briefly against her forehead. It sat there for a moment, gentle on
her skin.

Jey focused on the muscles in her face, on
keeping them relaxed, preventing her eyelashes from fluttering. The
hand was removed from her forehead. There was a clink and a puff of
air. A fine mist drifted down over Jey’s face. She breathed in the
familiar mist produced by a spritzer.

The orderly lingered a moment longer, then
he moved on. She heard him set the spritzer bottle down, heard him
pin their schedules to the boards above their desks. A moment
later, the soft click of the closing door suggested he was
gone.

It was the third time an orderly had checked
on them in the night. Jey hadn’t known anyone came into their room
when they slept. But then, up until yesterday she hadn’t known
anything.

“Back straighter, V567. E236, to flow
through the turn you need more energy in that preparatory step.
Orderly Cam, relax your arm. She’s a girl, not a tiger.”

Professor Tucram provided these instructions
in an endless litany, directing them at various couples as he moved
among them in the dance hall. A narrow, spindly man, he walked on
light, delicate feet. He carried a short cane with him as he wove
through the dancers, executing his own elaborate series of steps to
stay out of everyone’s way.

He used the cane at intervals to touch a
shoulder, lift a hand on a back, or otherwise correct something
about the posture or movement of his students.

A light sheen of sweat had broken out on
Jey’s forehead. It was a warm, bright morning, and her head was
fuzzy from her sleepless night. It was extra hard, she was finding,
to emulate the blank, passive behavior of her classmates when her
mind felt dull with fatigue.

The dance they were practicing was an
intricate variation of one that had been popular last season. Jey
had stumbled several times as her orderly dance partner led her
through the steps. She felt clumsy and thick-headed. Every time she
deviated from the pattern, she felt conspicuous.

Phril was dozing. He sat with the other
tessili. They occupied the holdstones that sat in a line on a slim
table at the top of the hall. Phril didn’t care much for the dance
classes. He disliked the orderly touching Jey for so long and
resented that sometimes she got quite far away from him, as the
hall was long. He was not allowed to follow because he needed to
remain on the holdstone.

The dance class was nearly over. Jey felt as
exhausted as if she’d spent the entire hour executing sprints. She
knew the dance, somehow. Judging from what Professor Tucram said,
she’d learned it last year, as had all the other girls. She moved
through the steps easily enough, but she could not remember
learning it, couldn’t say how she knew to move her feet or lean her
body this way or that, responding to the light pressure of the
orderly’s hand on her palm or waist.

Jey had spent much of the night trying to
fit the pieces together, trying to understand how she could have
cast a spell she didn’t know how to cast. Now, dancing a dance she
had no memory of learning, she thought she understood.

The dance lesson had 13 students, all of
them in white or silver. Elle and Kae were there, moving with fluid
grace through the elaborate steps. Their tessili sat in line on the
stones with Phril.

Increasingly, over the course of the hour,
it was the holdstones that preoccupied Jey. They were unremarkable
at a glance. Dull and gray, smooth all over, they varied in size
and shape. But they were all the right size for a tessila to settle
onto and relax. It seemed to Jey, based on the undercurrent of
Phril’s thoughts, that they were also warm.

And, Jey was beginning to suspect, Phril’s
presence on one of those stones enabled her to remember how to
dance.

As she let herself be swept through the
turns again and again, listening to the soft rustle of the skirts
of her classmates and the repetitive drone of the single orderly
playing his violin at the top of the hall, Jey felt as she was in
color and everyone else in the room was a pale shade. Every time
Professor Tucram’s glittering eyes swept over her she felt certain
he would stop, do a double-take, and call a halt so he could accuse
her of remembering.

But that did not happen. Jey danced until
the violin stopped. The couples swayed to a halt. Orderlies bowed.
Jey curtsied in time with the other girls. Silence fell on the
hall.

Professor Tucram’s cane made a brisk tapping
on the stone floor as he turned on his heel and headed for the
door. “Class dismissed. Collect your tessili.”

Jey stood for a moment as the orderly who
had been her partner turned from her and began to move with the
others towards the door, checking his timepiece with an expression
of mild worry. Although they’d spent nearly an hour in close
proximity, he didn’t say anything to her as he left – no parting
words, no comment on what they had or had not accomplished. The
orderlies flowed out of the hall. The girls drifted towards the
table where their tessili sat curled on the holdstones. Soon, the
only orderlies left in the room were the two observers. They were
packing up their notebooks and inkpots, speaking to one another in
low tones.

Jey followed the tide of silver and white
dresses, letting the other girls get ahead of her. The girls were
quiet, not speaking as they filed up to the holdstones and
encouraged their tessili to step back onto their hands. Most of the
tessili seemed reluctant to come. Some needed to be stroked on
their jaws or coaxed with wheedling words.

Jey approached Phril. He regarded her with
his sharp, bright eye. She expected him to be one of those who
resisted leaving his stone, but he was not. He stepped onto her
hand the instant she presented it. He did this as the two orderlies
who had observed the dance class walked by. She noticed one of them
witness the ease with which she collected her tessila. He paused to
look at her, brow furrowed. She pretended not to notice him. He
moved forward again a moment later, taking a few quick steps to
catch up with his companion.