4.30: The Initiates

I tried not to be nervous as I walked out onto the shore of Agreabla Insulo, and into biggest group of witches I’d ever seen in my life.

Everyone else was already there. Kylie and Talbot and Hua, of course, and Cheryl had managed to arrange to come, which was great. And three new kids dressed in monochrome initiate robes.

It wasn’t hard to put names to faces. Jamil was the youngest at twelve; he had to be the short, brown kid with shoulder-length black hair who was watching Cheryl in awe as she did something with her hands. Fourteen-year-old Helen was easily recogniseable as the only girl, a plump, brown-eyed kid who hung back on the edge of the group and looked kind of uncomfortable being there. Which meant that the tall blond was Alan.

“Oh, Kayden’s here! Great, that’s everyone!” Cheryl waved me over. “Kayden, I was just showing these guys my magic.”

The three newcomers stared at me, wide-eyed. Oh… right. They were all Australian. And I was infamous in Australia. I’d kind of forgotten about that.

I ignored the stares. They’d get over it. “What can you do?” I asked Cheryl. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Nothing hugely impressive.” She held up a small stone so that I could see it, then wrapped her hands around it and kind of… squished it, like plasticine. She kneaded and rolled it a bit, then handed it to me. It was a different shape, but as hard as one would expect a stone to be.

“That’s pretty cool, actually. No locked door can stop you.”

“It only works on stone.”

“No locked door can stop you, provided the walls are stone.” I flashed the newcomers what I hoped was a friendly smile. “So, then. You’re our new witchnitiates.”

“Cursed,” Helen mumbled into her crossed arms.

“I’m sorry?”

“We’re cursed. It’s not our fault. ‘Witches’ makes it sound like something we picked.”

Oh, right. I remembered when I was like that. “Of course. Sorry.”

“Didn’t they find out that you actually weren’t cursed, though?” Alan asked me. “It was a whole thing.”

I laughed. “I wish. No; I’m cursed. It’s just dormant. Very effectively bound, so far as we can tell.”

I immediately had the full attention of all three initiates.

“How?” Helen asked. “What method did you use?”

“It’s… complicated. We’re not completely certain how it works yet. But I am looking into it, and if I do figure it out, you guys will be the first to know.”

Thety all nodded, looking a little disappointed.

“So you were cursed this whole time?” Alan asked.

“Yeah, since he was a baby,” Jamil said. “Didn’t you watch the news?”

“The news was saying a lot of weird stuff! I didn’t know what to believe!”

“The news also said he was some kind of urban explorer who literally got stuck in a well once and had to be dug out,” Helen said.

“Um,” I said, “that part actually did happen. Well, it was a storm drain, not a well. Anyway, yes, I’m cursed. And even if it had turned out I hadn’t been, well, I still would be now. I’ve been through the Initiation.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Alan asked.

Us older witches all exchanged glances. They didn’t know about curses being spells yet.

Probably best not to spring that on them today, I thought. I hadn’t taken the revelation well, and there was no need to upset –

“Alright,” Kylie said. She spoke slowly, hesitantly, as if talking herself into speaking every word. “Let me explain how curses work real quick.”

The explanation took a good half an hour. Not because there was a lot of information to impart (there wasn’t), but because we didn’t want to overwhelm them with too much information at once. We went through what spells were, and how curses were spells (this part took the longest, since only Kylie and I would explain anything and we kept wanting to change the subject), and about how the Pit captured and stored spells. (We left out the part about the tunnels themselves leading students to walk out the shapes of giant runes to power things and entrap their spells, or the mental influence preventing people from explaining curses to outsiders. I wasn’t sure how Cheryl, Talbot and Hua would handle that, let alone the initiates.)

“So let me get this straight,” Jamil said, bouncing on the balls of his feet in annoyed unease, “Mr Cooper lured us here to steal our magic?”

“Sort of,” Hua said. “But to be clear, nobody’s going to try to take anything from you. When you die, your curse will go and infect somebody else. The school is designed so that the curse will be safely trapped here instead. If it’s safe enough to wield, it’ll be used in initiations and sold to another student; if it’s not safe, it’ll be safely locked away. But all of that is after you’re dead. For you, it’s just a free magical education.”

“They still should’ve told us,” Helen said. “They should’ve told us we were mages right away, when we were cursed.”

“Why would they do that?” Talbot asked. “That would make it so much harder to manipulate your desperation and bring you here.”

I shot him a glare. No need to spook the initiates. (Then I felt stupid for shooting a glare at someone who couldn’t see.) “It’s a dick move, for sure,” I said. “But the point is, you being here is mutually beneficial. You get six months’ free education in curse control, they get to try to market the place to you as a long-term school, offering you a place in mage society and maybe getting your curse after you die. Whether you think that’s a good deal or not is up to you.”

“Y’know, Talbot,” Hua said, “you have a surprising amount of resentment towards Refujeyo, given that they saved you from your old master.”

“They picked my old master in the first place,” he pointed out. “They get no brownie points for that.”

“What do you mean, your old master?” Alan asked.

“Ah,” Cheryl said. “Nobody’s told you about your other option. Let me explain how apprenticeships work.”

The apprenticeship explanation took longer, mostly because Cheryl and Talbot kept hijacking the explanation from each other whenever they felt that the other one was being too pro- or anti-apprenticeship. Then Alan asked if the Refujeyo education level of apprentice was the same as being an apprentice, and a brief history lesson was added, and by the time that was over the sun was going down and clouds were gathering in the sky.

“We should wrap this up before it starts to rain,” I pointed out. “Any more urgent questions, before we get a chance to meet up again?”

The three initiates all looked at each other and shrugged.

“So our choices are the Initiation or an apprenticeship?” Helen asked.

I shook my head. “Nope. There’s also the third, most important choice – go home. If you decide to take the Initiation, Skolala Refujeyo owns you the moment you walk into the Pit, but if you don’t do that then there’s not a damn thing they can do. You’re fully justified in learning everything you can about magical control over this six months and then just going home. If you want to.”

“Six months isn’t enough time,” Jamil said. “I don’t know what this does. I need to make sure I can control it.”

“That’s your choice,” Cheryl said. “If you do decide to go home – or end up anywhere you’re allowed a phone, really – I’ll give you my number. We can still help.”

“Do you know how to bind a curse and make sure it won’t wake up ever?”

“… No.”

“Thanks anyway. But I can’t take chances.”

As the meeting broke up, I made a silent promise to myself. Whoever had bound my curse, I was going to find them. I was going to learn exactly what they did, and how.

I had to, for the initiates.

“So,” Kylie said as we wandered back into the school, “do you reckon they’ll be okay?”

I shrugged. “We were okay.”

“We’re… not a great example.”

“Exactly. They’re not going to fuck up anything worse than we did, right? And their spells haven’t even done anything horribly dangerous to get them landed here, so that’s probably helpful, in terms of adapting.” Mine hadn’t either, of course, but we’d all thought it had, so. Same thing.

“We need to figure out how to bind spells,” Kylie said. “We need to at least be able to give them the option, before they have to decide whether to stay or not.”

“I know. I’m working on it.” But there wasn’t much to work on, really, was there? Someone had bound my spell. I didn’t remember who, and I didn’t remember it happening. There was no one who could tell me. How was I supposed to track down who’d done it? We could just hope that Max’s study of the ancient runes let him replicate the perfect curse binding, maybe, but that was a long shot. In that time frame? For something so important? How would he test it? Just start cutting into students and wait to see if it worked?

Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. The runic language that my curse had been bound in was all over Duniyasar, woven into the tapestries and etched into the wells. It had been etched into that skeleton among the junk under the empowered lake. It clearly wasn’t in use, since it was inferior to the language we did use when it came to making magic actually do things, but it wasn’t like it was completely unknown. Plenty of old runic languages had faded into obscurity but they usually had a few scholars around. And whoever had bound my curse clearly knew the language, so.  Finding people who knew it was a place to start. Historians, maybe. Had Max looked around for historians who might know it? He must have, right? Trying to find experts to learn from would’ve been his first step. So where could I look that he wouldn’t?

“Hey,” Kylie said.

“Mmm?”

“You’ve been quiet for awhile. What are you thinking about?”

“Not much. Just how we’ve got a lot to figure out and probably not much time and it doesn’t feel like we’re making much progress.”

She shot me a puzzled look. “We’re making tons of progress.”

“How, exactly? I feel like all the mysteries we’re facing are just things we don’t have enough information to even begin to tackle.”

“Yeah. I know. But we’ve felt that way about everything we’ve solved so far, too, right?”

I wanted to protest, but… she was right. Trying to catch Alania’s attempted killer had felt like it was going nowhere. So had protecting Saina from assassins. Figuring out who the Hero and the Child of the prophecy even were had had us in the wrong track for the longest time. Who was to say that we couldn’t figure out how to destroy the Pit? And who was to say that I wouldn’t find whoever had bound my curse? We just had to keep plugging at it.

And hope we hadn’t entirely run out of luck.