I, fangirl

I returned to the academy a little shattered, a familiar feeling after a tiring journey. Seventeen days of incessant jolting had separated my bones from each other and jumbled my brains. Leaving the carriage in the small paved square in front of the castle, where carriages were noisily crowded, I went with a small valise of personal belongings to the secretariat. There, I had to report my arrival and get permission to check in. The last days of August were burning up in the blue cloudless sky, and the generous heat of the still summer sun. Gold and scarlet cauterized the foliage along the edges of the dense crowns. The sparse curled leaves that had dried and fallen off crunched under the soles of my shoes at times. The slopes of the mountains fumed of herbs in full bloom. The honeyed tartness of alyssum and late astilbe filled the air driving bees into a frenzy. They scurried through the air, tiny bodies jingling, trying to stay ahead of the other nectar-hungry hunters. I was patient with the formalities, so I was prepared for a long wait. Judging by the number of carriages arrived on the last day before the year start, there were a lot of latecomers. I had intended to show up two days earlier, but a broken wheel and robbers on the road had taken up the time I planned to save. Now I couldn’t rest in the silence of the room for a couple of days, but I wasn’t too worried about that. As expected there was no place to light a fire in the room in front of the reception area. After asking who I should get in line behind, I set my hand luggage aside, away from the feet of the others, and took a vacant corner. All the benches were occupied by students from different years of study, so I was quite happy to find a place to rest my back with both shoulders fixed. Having exhaled, I closed my eyes and lowered my head falling into a light half-slumber. Conversations crackled around me. Here and there, they flared up suddenly, burned brightly for a few minutes, and then died out just as suddenly. The hearth moved on and flared up in a new place. The words of one of them caught the ear. ‘There’s no way a girl could win a contest,’ I heard a thin girl’s voice say. I opened my eyes, squinted, and found its owner to my left. There were two girls sitting on a narrow sofa, just behind a low filing cabinet. They looked to be no more than twenty. Judging by the prim bonnets and the blank stares with which they groped the room, they must have been freshmen. The brunette, who’d raised her voice and caught my attention, folded her arms stubbornly across her chest and pressed her lips together in a bow. Her neighbor scowled and excused herself, ‘That’s what my brother told me. He’s a third-year senior. He knows for sure.’ ‘Did he see it with his own eyes? ’ ‘No,’ she admitted grudgingly, adjusting her large horn-rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose. ‘He left the academy before the competition as parents insistence. It was our grandfather’s anniversary.’ ‘He got it all wrong then. Girls never win the competition, everyone knows that.’ The girl in glasses fidgeted, clearly annoyed that she couldn’t defend the truth of her own words. The guy came to her rescue. He was standing beside her, propping his shoulder against the wall, and until that moment had looked engrossed in a small book in his hands. ‘It was true. The competition was won by a fourth-year female firebender.’ ‘A fourth-year firebender? ’ The brunette’s blue eyes widened in amazement, then she regained her composure and snorted derisively, ‘And you expect anyone to believe that? ’ ‘The capital’s been buzzing about it all summer. I would hazard a guess that you came from some dullsville, and that is the reason you haven’t heard anything.’ The girl blushed lifting her chin resentfully. ‘How am I supposed to believe such nonsense? A girl of the fourth year won the competition. That sounds like natural nonsense! The guy shrugged his shoulders smiling venomously: ‘Then you’re unlikely to believe that she’s a master-mage either.’ The girl gasped at such an obvious joke, wanted to parry it, but seemed to choke on her words. ‘If’ she finally calmed down enough to answer, ‘…I’m from afar,’ aha, the guy hit in the bull’s eye with his assumption, accurately recognising her as a provincial and thus quite vulnerable, ‘…it doesn’t mean that I am so naive to listen to tall tales.’ A door opened at the opposite end of the room. An anxious assistant with a pile of papers in his hand emerged from the secretarial room. ‘New arrivals,’ he addressed everyone. ‘Who just came in, names? ’ From across the room the names of the students flew in. It was a common practice. The assistant wrote a list of those personal files that were to end up on the secretaries' desk before the student was in front of them — it saved a lot of time. I called out my name. It became noticeably quieter. ‘Oh,’ he took his eyes off the papers and looked up over the heads, searching for me. ‘Would you be so kind to follow me, please? Being a master-mage, you will have to fill up extra papers. There was complete silence in the room as everyone looked at me. If to exclude the first year, who had crossed the threshold of the academy for the first time, everyone else had the opportunity to see me earlier. But hardly anyone was interested in my person before the competition and other related circumstances. So I moved forward being pelted with the heat of mute curiosity. There was a little commotion in the secretary’s room. The clerks were also interested, since I was the only master-mage in the walls of the castle. While they were doing my paperwork, I thought back to the time I’d got in trouble for revealing my magical level. Father was furious. The letter sent by the rector arrived a few days before my appearance. When I found myself on the doorstep, my father was on the rampage. First I had to endure the fiery rage accompanied by lava flows of words raining down on my empty head. Then I was scorched by my father’s annoyance and regret. He thought I would not let him down, and now he was severely disappointed. Afterward I had an opportunity to justify myself. Sitting in a massive chair with a high back, my father looked at me keeping his palms finger to finger, his usual gesture in moments of extreme tension, and waited for an answer. I had prepared for this conversation, and this was what he eventually heard. I had an enemy who needed to be punished, and it had to be done in public, because that was how I could benefit the most. How the bender had become my enemy, and how I had benefited from his ostentatious destruction, during which I had revealed an important secret of myself, I flatly refused to answer citing my own motives. My father didn’t expect me to be secretive and snapped into another fit of rage. We fought for about three days. We both fell right in the middle of a field burned to the ground and then didn’t talk for a long time… As soon as I left the shelter of the bureaucratic apparatus, the conversations in the waiting room died out. I walked along with burning gazes. I encountered them in the passages having been recognized. As I crossed the threshold into the common living room of the fifth-year girl’s wing, all attention was immediately drawn to me. I managed to make a few steps forward, and quiet, uncertain greetings touched my ears. I nodded back until I reached the end of the hallway. Apparently a new year of study, like the previous one, will introduce some variety to my monotonous student life. *** The first day of classes began with breakfast. I ignored the trail of intrusive attention that followed me down the long aisles all the way to the lunchroom. It was harder to ignore the crowd that parted in front of the common tables. I had to accept the fact that the dress of invisible bender had burned with the real one back then, in the arena. Now I’m the first girl winning the competition and a master-mage. Master-mages were mostly old wizards, even if they managed to keep a youthful appearance with the help of charms. They had an unquestionable status in the magical world, usually held an impressive position in the council or ministry, and, of course, expected to be treated in a certain way. Many of the young people around me had never dreamed of facing a master-mage face-to-face, and therefore hardly knew what was appropriate in this case, but they all felt the unbridgeable gap between us. What they hardly realized was that it was the same gulf as before. They were simply ignorant of the nature of the feeling that had overcome them before mistaking it for contempt and rejection of an unaccepted being. Now they saw me in a new light, but this glow didn’t imply a shrinking distance, only a slightly different treatment. I was still an outcast, but now it would be more accurate to call me an outcast with privilege, or the academy’s strongest bender. I brought these thoughts along with the stares that clung to my back and three syrniki to my corner. A familiar table was still at my full disposal. I started my breakfast keeping an impenetrable expression of aloofness on my face, as if my thoughts were far away. It was no accident that I’d shown up early. I expected some reaction, and hoped that the sooner it flared up, the sooner it would subside. There was another purpose as well — I hoped to see him as soon as possible. Phillip entered the dining room accompanied by Maxim and Kirill. He looked just as I remembered him from the day of competition. Almost the same. Stately, supple, he seemed taller. Perhaps he had grown out a little over the summer, or was it his hair? The locks had grown back and curled at the ends. His face had become more mature, his cheekbones seemed more prominent, cheeks slightly sunken. Gray eyes looking like stormy skies prominently defined his face. He had become even more handsome. Was that possible? But there he was, in his uniform dark camisole and pants, a short cloak pinned over his shoulders. Barely tanned, his hands and forehead looked as graceful as never, dimples got more distinct having been hardly noticable before. Phillip remained the most beautiful creation of magic. He glanced in my direction as he made his way to his table. Our gazes met, and then he turned away, staring before himself again. For just a moment I felt his inner fire flickered with indignation. It was fine. I understood and accepted the inevitable. I’d had a couple months to prepare. Still, the encounter hit harder than I’d expected. It was hard to imagine that I had been considered the mistress of this perfection for almost six months — fate had been too generous to me. And now I was paying for that generosity with full understanding that my time with him was over. I suppressed a sigh. The guys sat down at the table and started talking about something. I was glad that they had managed to make peace with Phillip. It would have been unfair to punish them for their willingness to help and my decisions. Gregory appeared in the dining hall. He was moving toward the boys with his tray when I caught a strange expression on his tensed face. He was frowning. The guys noticed him, their conversation broke off as they watched him approach. Gregory walked past and moved on. He stopped next to me. He put the tray down, and sat near. ‘Hi,’ he said, clearly in a bad mood. ‘Hi.’ ‘Could I sit down here? ’ I glanced over at the large figure already occupying the chair. ‘Sure.’ He started eating shoveling chops and salads into his mouth. ‘How’s it going? ’ I asked after a while. ‘Disgusting.’ Gregory didn’t like to wriggle and dodge, but didn’t explain further. ‘You? ’ ‘ Feels like a freshly buried bride,’ I smiled strainedly. Gregory grunted choking on his tea. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what you look like,’ he thought aloud but without any desire to offend. Yeah, a summer spent pining for Phillip hadn’t made my face look fresh. The friction with my father squeezed out the last flashes of strength, and only magic remained. I was pulling it from the outside without conscience, just to keep moving, talking, and thinking. I shrugged, feeling the ice cracked between us. ‘Martha,’ the guy said, and I knew from the tone of his low, bassy voice that the question wasn’t idle. ‘I’m going to ask you,’ he turned his chair toward me, and then pushed so that the legs squeaked against the floor — he didn’t want to be overheard, so he shortened the distance between us, ‘to teach me.’ I stared at him incomprehensibly. ‘I want to be a master-mage.’