Cantrip Mage B1 C46: The Exam Ends
~Chapter Forty-Six: The Exam Ends~
Their retreat from the third floor took them up and down stairwells, drawing ever closer to the exit gate without ever finding a connecting flight. Eola and Patrice both had to fight, but never more than a few stray feral books—for which both were grateful. Colin had to be half-carried every step of the way, and Eola was exhausted when they reached a crescent-shaped room. And as for Roth…
“We need to rest,” Patrice said. She groaned as she maneuvered Roth off her shoulders, then stretched her arms and sighed in relief as the blood began to flow into them again. “You’re heavy, Roth. It really jams your bones into my arms.”
“Sorry…” Roth didn’t say anything else. His eyes were squeezed shut, and his breathing was fast. He’d tried to insist that he could walk for a while, but Patrice hadn’t put him down since the apprentices had left the four-story floating room.
The stairs disappeared behind them as Eola helped Colin lean against a bookshelf. She took stock of the room. It was shaped like a waning moon, with only a bare sliver of floor jammed between two solid rows of books. No mana vines. No monsters. Not even enough space below them for a Dalyn/Davek pair to nest. As far as places to take a breather went, it was all but perfect. She looked over her shoulder as Patrice sat down beside Roth and ran her hand across the boy’s brow. Then she stretched just like Patrice had. Tension rushed from her shoulder, and she moaned as her spine cracked.
A second later, her entire side ached, and she lowered her arms slowly and gingerly. “My bruises probably have bruises. I’m going to walk around and check things out.”
“Great. I’ll be right here,” Patrice said. She closed her eyes, and Eola turned and started her exploration. Not that there was much to explore.
Eola relaxed a little more as she walked to the room’s far side—but she didn’t sheathe her smallsword, and her wand stayed ready to cast the whole way there. Atta followed, tail swishing behind her and body looking surprisingly chubby. A moment later, Eola stared down at the third floor’s exit. They were so close. So incredibly close. The crescent-shaped room drifted slightly, moving from one location to another, and Eola said a silent prayer to Y’aer that a stairwell would connect in time.
Even if it didn’t, though, they’d only need a handful more to make it out. A professor—or even better, a yew tree with Instructor Clearance’s name on it—would be waiting for them, and they’d be able to get Roth and Colin to the hospital. She touched her neck gingerly and winced; she’d probably end up there, too, for a check-in if nothing else. Then it would be…confronting their failure.
They still had two books to go. The Love Letters of Dame Brandwell and Duke Iverly, and…
“Wait…” Eola said. She looked around at the crescent-shaped room and at the entrance arches on either side. A grin spread across her face, and she started running her fingers across leather spines. This was the room that, according to their piece of parchment, The Water Wars was in. Finding it wouldn’t be enough to pass the Library Exam, but since she was here, and they couldn’t go anywhere without a stairwell, she was determined to do her best.
When she found it, to her surprise, it was a thin, pocket-sized book with a blue linen-over-softwood cover. She flipped to the first page, skimmed the dry, historical prose, and snapped it shut. The Water War had been a minor, three-day conflict between two rural nobles two hundred years ago, way down south, and Eola didn’t need to know more about it. She’d give the book to Colin when she returned to the others—he’d probably enjoy reading about it.
She was halfway across the crescent-shaped room when a stairwell thudded into place behind her, and another one slammed against the crescent right next to her friends.
Patrice already had Colin up and leaning against the bookshelf. He shook and wobbled, and as soon as Eola tucked the thin book into his satchel—getting a glare from both him and Patrice this time—she got her arm around him. He didn’t stop shaking the whole walk across the room, and he collapsed onto the floor just before the stairwell leading to the exit.
Eolo took a knee next to him. His lips moved, but if he was trying to talk, she couldn’t hear him. Patrice kept moving, and Eola didn’t blame her; the sooner she got Rth to the relative safety of the second floor, the better. “Come on, Colin. We’ve just got a little further to—“
“What in Y’aer’s name did you do to him, toddler?” A familiar—and very unwanted—voice asked.
◄▼►
Eola turned slowly, shoulders tensing right back up. Catrine was…
Shockingly, Catrine Andrese and her team were not the people she least wanted to see right now. They’d have a professor and librarian with them, and that’d be enough to guarantee Colin and Roth’s safety. This was fine. Compared to Eddarn, the book monster, and the third floor in general, the snobby noble was by far the lesser evil.
“Catrine, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad to see you. Where’s Madame Reyanna?”
Catrine only stared at Roth and Colin, eyes wide. Her cronies glanced at her, then at the two boys and their bright blue veins, then back at Eola.
There was no tiny red gnome. No librarian. Only four students with varying degrees of injuries and a surprisingly strong stink about them. Eola sniffed; it was like a mix of Magical Dueling’s practice armor after a class and too much expensive perfume. Then she sneezed.
“What happened?” Garreth Skaget asked. He broke ranks, dropping to his knees next to Eola and touching Roth’s arm. “Did they both have to use soul burning?”
“Yes,” Eola said quickly. “We ran into a cultist and a monster we couldn’t handle. We only made it out because—“
“This wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t—“
Patrice cut Catrine off before she could finish her insult. “Where’s Madame Reyanna? We need to get these two out of here, and fast.”
“She’s not here,” Catrine said.
One of her cronies snorted. “Obviously.”
Garreth sighed and glanced over his shoulder at Catrine. “We got attacked by the Scholar’s Cult, and she cast a red Bright Ball, then told the four of us to run. We fled, regrouped, and finished tracking down our list. It wasn’t easy, but it looks like the four of you had it worse. Come on. Let’s get moving.”
Eola nodded, but Colin was down, and she’d struggled to get him back on his feet. After a moment, Garreth pulled the satchel off the boy’s shoulder and handed it to Eola, then hoisted him up onto his own shoulders. Catrine sputtered, but he ignored her and walked to the stairwell. The steps were steep, single-file, and uneven, and the going was slow. Eola imagined the stairwell shifting under them. It’d move any second, throwing Patrice and Garreth off and taking Roth and Colin with them. That would be a disaster. An absolute nightmare.
Luckily, Garreth was a distraction. Eola focused on him—and on his decision to help them.
Yes, he’d teamed up with Catrine. And yes, Patrice said his family controlled a good stretch of Alemia’s west coast, and they played politics even dirtier than House Andrese did. But he’d been polite during Magical Dueling, and he was helping them now. That counted for something. For a lot of somethings, really. If they got out of this, it’d be at least partially because of him. She’d owe him.
Eola wasn’t sure how she felt about that. He and Catrine…well…
He’d never be Eola’s ally or friend, but he might not be an enemy—and with Catrine in the mix, having a not-enemy to keep her honest wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
They reached the bottom before the stairwell moved, and as they regrouped, Catrine asked the question Eola had been dreading. “Did you four find all of your books, then?”
Eola didn’t say anything. Her ears grew hot under her hair, and she stared at the floor.
“You didn’t, did you?” Catrine’s voice went triumphant. “You failed the Library Exam! This is amazing! I knew you were a toddler, Eola, but to see Patrice fail, too? Wow! What a Y’aer-blessed day!”
Eola balled one fist. Her other went for her wand, and never mind the fact that she didn’t have her anti-scent spell ready. Enough was enough; she was going to show Catrine once and for all, and she was going to do it without the ridiculous honor duel rules. Catrine’s eyes went wide. Garreth moved to get between them, dropping Colin to the gate-room’s floor as he did. He hit the tile like a bundle of sticks, and Eola flinched at the sound.
“What in Y’aer’s name is going on here?” Madame Reyanna’s voice echoed across the floating room.
“I was about to ask the same thing,” Instructor Tarik said.
The two professors landed in front of the door. “Where did you four go? I told you to—what happened to Mr. Gerr and Mr. Tremory?” Instructor Tarik asked. His face shifted from annoyance to concern to outright worry. “Never mind. You’ll fill me in later. We need to get them out of here.”
“I’ll do it,” Madame Reyanna said quickly. The tiny, red-skinned gnome started sketching, and both Roth and Colin hovered mid-air a moment later as her spell finished. “I have enough Mana to fly. Your soul’s tapped out, Lan.”
Tarik nodded curtly. “Thank you, Reyanna.”
The Mana Studies professor nodded back and disappeared through the gate, which opened silently for her. Eola’s friends floated silently behind her.
“Let’s move. We’ll debrief when you’re all safe,” Instructor Tarik said. He stepped through the open gate, and Eola followed. So did the other first-year students, and without any other problems, the Library Exam ended.
◄▼►
“I have to apologize,” Instructor Tarik said a few hours later, after a librarian had examined their injuries and pronounced Eola and Patrice’s non-threatening.
The three of them sat in his office. Tarik’s black rabbit familiar looked asleep at first glance, but when Eola watched for long enough, it opened its eyes every so often to keep track of Atta. The blue cat, for her part, had curled up on Eola’s lap and was conspicuously ignoring the other familiar as she purred. Eola scratched the cat’s ears whenever the purring stopped. The cat’s weight was comforting, even if she did seem a touch heavier than normal. Maybe a hair larger, too…
Colin was going to be fine. It’d be a tough couple of days for both boys, but neither had caused permanent damage to themselves, and they’d gotten out just in time. Eola shivered as the implication hit her; if she hadn’t figured out the Cutting mark when she had, Roth would have been in even more serious trouble. Every second had counted.
Tarik didn’t say anything. He looked lost in his thoughts, and neither Eola nor Patrice knew what to say.
“What for, sir?” Eola asked as the silence stretched.
Tarik steepled his fingers over the empty, perfectly clean desk. It had never been this clean in here, come to think of it. Eola desperately wanted to ask him why he’d decided to get organized—and to press him about all his absences over the last week. Instead, she waited for him to begin.
“We made a mistake in our preparations for the Library Exam. The third floor, as you’ve no doubt seen, is a labyrinth. It’s incredibly easy to get lost in it, and the only reason we’ve considered it safe in the past is that it’s as much a maze for the monsters and Scholar’s Cult as it is for professors and students. Something changed this time. The Scholar’s Cult was able to hide in one of the rooms—we’re not sure how—and we missed them in our pre-Exam sweep. We think they ensorcelled the entrance arches to disallow stairwells. That made all the other stairwells even less predictable, but not so much that we noticed right away.”
“So, they planned this? What is the Scholar’s Cult, anyway?” Patrice asked.
Eola stared at her. “You didn’t…pay attention in Introduction to Monsters, did you?”
“I was asleep.”
Instructor Tarik sighed. “The Scholar’s Cult hasn’t been a direct danger in the past. In fact, they’re as much a part of maintaining the library as the librarians are, in their own way. They guard their territory higher up pretty intensely, and their presence keeps most of the upper-floor monsters culled to an acceptable level. That’s why we don’t hand out fourth-floor keys to anyone under Journeymage, and absolutely never to first-year students. However, something has shifted in the last few years.”
His voice dropped to almost a whisper. “I believe it’s related to the problems we’ve discussed with Ordered Magic, but I can’t prove that.”
Eola took a deep breath. “We ran into Eddarn again. But I didn’t tell you about his familiar.”
“What about it?”
“Did Instructor Clearance tell you about the mysterious paper-and-book monster that attacked me before midterms? He said the cult was forging familiar bonds with books. And that the monster was his familiar.”
Instructor Tarik stiffened. His eyes locked onto Eola’s, and she felt the urge to look away, but powered through it. “You’re sure of this, Miss Lemiene?” he asked after a moment.
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
She broke eye contact, staring at the desk again. If she told Instructor Tarik…that’d be four people who knew what she could do, and a fifth in Eddarn who’d experienced it. Tarik had warned her about being too open with her way of doing magic, but had he been warning her against telling even him? She was his apprentice, after all. After a few seconds, she swallowed. “I analyzed the spell at the center of the monster. It was Call and Calm. The thing was a familiar.”
“That’s…that doesn’t seem possible.”
“It is, sir. The central rune was the same Old Alemic—“
“Ideogram,” Instructor Tarik interrupted impulsively.
“It was the same Old Alemic symbol, and the same four modifying marks were present. I…” The moment of truth. Eola breathed. “I used a new mark to override the Permanent modifying mark, or to cut it away. That caused the spell to—“
“Backlash,” Tarik finished automatically. He nodded, eyes closed and brow furrowed. “That fits a failed Call and Calm, but those spells don’t fail unless one partner or the other dies. And you haven’t told anyone about this, correct?”
Atta stopped purring for a moment, and Eola scratched her ears again until she started.
“No. Only my friends—and I suppose Eddarn knows. He escaped.”
“That will have to change, unfortunately. Headmaster Tomlish will need to be informed, as will Instructor Clearance. From there, it’ll spread across the staff. Everyone will know by tomorrow, and the noble houses will learn about it by the end of the term break. I was hoping for more time before outside eyes fell on us, but…we will press on with your education regardless.” The professor cleared his throat. “Now, about the Library Exam. Were you able to recover the full set of books?”
“No,” Eola said, heart dropping.
“We got four, though,” Patrice added, trying to be helpful but failing miserably. “If we hadn’t gotten ambushed, we probably could have tracked down The Love Letters of Dame Brandwell and Duke Iverly, but…”
Instructor Tarik went quiet. Then he nodded slowly. “Hand me the books you found. It won’t be enough, but at least you’ll earn a score. It’s a shame, Miss Clerk. I was hoping you’d make the combat track.”
Patrice sputtered and glared. Her face went red, and her hands balled into fists. Eola understood; she felt the same way. How could Instructor Tarik say that after what they’d accomplished? They’d fought off the Scholar’s Cult, Y’aer curse them! She slowly fished the four books they’d found out of Colin’s bag, then found the list and handed it over as well, feeling supremely defeated. Tarik stacked them on his desk without even looking at them.
“Now, as for your marks…expect them tomorrow morning. We’ll write over the term break to discuss the best classes for each of you four next year. And Miss Clerk?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let Miss Lemiene drink too much tonight. She’ll need to be functional tomorrow.”
Eola’s eyes narrowed as Patrice started to glance at Eola, then caught herself and quickly stood. “Yes, sir. I won’t let you down, sir.”