Lili Crow - Wayfarer

Mithrus Christ . Ellie’s mouth was dry as baked charmglass. Her arms cramped, she was holding herself so tightly.

The Strep’s Potential flashed, and for a moment Ell was sure she was going to have one of her raging fits. A Sigiled charmer was nobody to mess with, and Mrs. Laurissa V. Choquefort-Sinder was at the top of her field even if she was an outsider in New Haven, a high-priced haute couturière amulette with taloned fingernails and enough Potential to burn down a house.

Even if she did have Ellie doing most of the work that made her famous, now.

If Laurissa did snap a curse at Mother Heloise, maybe the school’s defenses—built to keep nasty nonhuman or barely human things away from vulnerable Potential-carrying adolescent girls, as well as to keep said girls from relentlessly pranking teachers and each other—would wake, and turn even a Sigiled charmer into a pile of ash.

Wouldn’t that be a sight. Ellen’s breath came high and short. Oh, please. Please.

The office, its dark scarred wainscoting and tired chipped paint comfortable instead of shabby, grew still and oppressively close. The lightbulb overhead fizzled a little, despite the damper on it. Potential was funny around electricity; even the Great Tesla hadn’t figured out why the two things, seemingly so similar, had such weird effects on each other.

When Laurissa finally spoke, each word was chipped from a block of ice. “What. Are you. Saying?” Dangerously calm.

Ellie waited for the ancient file cabinets to start shivering and Mother Heloise’s heavy desk to shift itself a fraction or two. Her throat was full of scorching-hot liquid, even though she hadn’t had anything but an apple for lunch.

The overhead fixture swung slightly, the air turned hard as glass, and the Strep dropped back into her chair, one beribboned, high-heeled van Clif shoe slipping almost off her bony foot despite a carefully applied stickcharm. She frankly stared at Mother Heloise, who appeared not to notice her sudden movement.

“Bruises and scrapes, yes.” The Mithrus nun nodded, mumbling a little. Then her sharp little eyes focused on Ellie again. “We must watch our Juno girls carefully in this dangerous world. Miss Sinder, you run along to High Charm Calculus now. Wouldn’t do to miss the rest of class.”

Her joints creaking, Ellie stood up. Slowly, she shuffled for the door, her skirt moving just above her knees, wool scratching. Her blazer was threadbare, but at least she had the luckcharms and the super-thin hairbands that were in this year. Her maryjanes were gloss-shining, too, because Ellie charmed them herself.

“She’s normally so shy,” Mother Heloise continued, pitilessly. “Doesn’t say a word about home, dear little girl that she is. But teachers, especially we Sisters, bless us in Mithrus’s name, notice things. Little things, Mrs. Sinder.”

Ellie twisted the chunk of crystal glass laden with suppressive charms that served as a doorknob and ducked her head as she went through. Sister Amalia Peace-of-Ages, spare and bone-thin in her habit, was nodding over an ancient typewriter, a Babbage screen glowing at eye level on her scarred, ancient wooden desk. More frowning wooden file cabinets and an ancient milkglass window separated her from the hallway, and Ellie almost managed to get past before Sister Amalia croaked, “Hall pass, Miss Sinder.”

“Y-yes.” She wiped at her cheeks, hitching her bag’s knotted strap higher on her shoulder. “High Charm Calc. Lower sixth—”

“—form, yes.” The typewriter clacked, and the deathly silence from behind the Mother’s heavy door wasn’t helping anything at all. What else was Mother Hel saying? What would Laurissa do? Smooth it over, she was good at that. Really good, at least with adults.

She’s going to kill me. Ellie wiped at her cheeks again. Probably as soon as I get home today.

“Fifteen minutes,” Sister Amalia said, finally, tearing the pink slip viciously from the typewriter and tapping it with one bony finger. The crackle of a small anti-alteration charm popped off her nail and settled into the thin rosy paper. “Class ends in twenty, dearie. Use the water closet in Third Hall.” She turned back to the Babbage’s glowing screen, and Ellie’s throat closed. She wiped at her cheeks again, and the urge to kick the Sister’s desk rattled around inside her like the buckle of the Strep’s special oiled belt tapping against the workroom door.

The Sisters meant well, sure. But Mithrus Christ , was there going to be a single day in Ellen Sinder’s life when she wasn’t someone’s fucking charity case?

It didn’t help that Sister Amalia was right, and Ellie needed ten minutes in the bathroom in Third Hall before she could march, head high and cheeks dry, back into the droning of High Charm Calculus with the tide of whispers following her.

“Seriously?” Ruby’s glory of coppery curls caught the sun and threw it back with a vengeance. She leaned against the black Semprena, her blazer already shucked and the sleeves of her white button-down rolled up to show a clutch of twisted hemp bracelets and smoothly muscled forearms, dusted with gold in the fluid shadow-sunshine. The parking lot around them resounded with chaos as those girls lucky enough to drive home jammed the lanes and honked at each other.

St. Juno’s was paranoid about safety. No riding public transport or walking allowed. You drove or took the small, luxurious buses to your gate—provided you were one of the charm or financial aristocracy attending Juno or the other private schools. Ruby was on file as Cami and Ellie’s driver, and for such a flighty girl she was remarkably consistent when it came to ferrying them to and fro. She even habitually parked underneath the huge willow in the southeast corner of the parking lot, far away from the school but in the shade, so that Cami wouldn’t have to sit in the sun while they waited for the traffic to clear.

Not that it mattered, but it made Cami more comfortable. She had drawn her legs up and sat tailor-fashion on the Semprena’s glossy black hood, her folded hands weighing her skirt decorously down. Her long black hair cloaked her shoulders, and her wide blue eyes were dark and troubled as she studied Ellie for a long moment.

Ruby let out a long, aggrieved sigh, but it was Cami’s turn to talk now, and she liked to have things straight in her head before she let them out into the world. She used to stutter, but ever since winter the words had come more smoothly.

Ellie suppressed a shudder, as if that just-finished winter had returned. Seeing Cami get increasingly nervous and distant, being able to do nothing about it, and, finally, finding out about Cami’s birth family—the Biel’y , an ancient evil with a cracked-up inhuman queen who survived by eating hearts—reaching out to try and steal her away had been pretty goddamn awful. Snow everywhere, the Strep’s increasing violence, the sense of impending doom, and the tunnels under the city, alive with nasty misshapen Potential and hanging with pale lichen—and Cami, lying so still and pale in her hospital bed after they had rescued her.

In the middle of all that, the knock on the door and the news that Dad’s train, bringing him back from another inter-province negotiating session, had derailed out in the Waste. At first, Ellie hadn’t really understood. She’d stupidly, wrongly thought him being gone on business trips every few months was the worst it could get.

It was barely Marus, Marchmonth, but it felt like a lifetime had passed since then. Cami was due for summer school, too, just to catch up. That would be fun for her.

“Mother Hel means well,” Cami finally murmured. “But it’s going to make it h-hell f-for you.”