I was the first to swear, of course. Indigo glared at me for it.
“Good,” said Mint. “I’ve invited five of you here.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Where are the others?”
“They came on time. You’re—” he checked a watch that was not, per se, visible “—late. But it doesn’t matter. I will tell you what I told the others: All of you want magic. I’m here to give it to you.”
This time it wasn’t relief that washed through me—it was pride. I had done it. I had found magic and it had welcomed me. I was wanted by the very thing I had spent all these years searching for.
“Why us?” Indigo asked.
“Each of you witnessed a death that wasn’t supposed to happen,” Mint told him.
A breeze slid across my cheekbone as silence settled over us.
There are few ways to make a conversation more uncomfortable than that sentence.
Indigo and I glanced at each other. This was a new sort of bond, one we had not wanted or expected.
“It might have been your friend who died,” said Mint. “Or your sibling, your cousin, or your worst enemy.”
I knew he meant me with the last phrase. I didn’t think of Vivi as my worst enemy anymore, but that was probably because she was dead, and she had died when we were eight, and it’s hard to hate people who died in front of you when you were eight, no matter how much you hated each other before then.
“Robin College needs new scholars,” he said. “And you all want answers. We’ll help you find them, but magicians only help their own. If you want our assistance—our very vital assistance—this is your only route. You’re all eighteen, of age to enter college. More importantly, you two and the other three I spoke to earlier are all connected by death. Connections made through death are blood magic, and it’s like I always say: nothing makes a stronger bond than blood magic.”
“Great slogan,” Indigo quipped. “‘Nothing makes a stronger bond than blood magic.’ Put it on a T-shirt.”
I laughed because I couldn’t do anything else. Mint turned his gaze to me. He hadn’t blinked the entire time. I had started to expect him not to, but now he finally blinked at me, slowly and with purpose.
“This test only happens once every ten years,” he told us. “So take it seriously. You’ll undergo five tests. If you play your cards right, none of them will be fatal.”
“Damn good elevator pitch,” I mumbled.
“Tomorrow, here, ten p.m.,” said Mint, his many voices merging for a moment and then veering apart again. “The tests will be administered over the next three weeks. If one of you does not show up, all of you will fail.”
He knelt and the earth began to cluster around him, climbing up his jeans, but he glanced up one last time before his torso was completely pulled under.
Indigo sat down as soon as Mint was gone. His breath filled the air, fogging against the chill. He was panting—hard. Too hard.
“What’s seven times seven?” I asked, my voice gentle.
“Forty-two,” he said, his eyes on the dirt.
He was wrong. It didn’t matter. “Four times four.”
“Sixteen.”
“Twenty times eight.”
“A hundred and sixty.”
I didn’t step closer to him, for fear that a stranger’s approach would make the whole thing worse, but I waited for his breathing to slow. Too many questions would overwhelm him, even if they were basic arithmetic.
Indigo put his head between his knees and his back to a redwood. He didn’t talk for what felt like ages, but he finally spoke once the panic attack had passed.
“What the hell was that?” he said at last, his voice so quiet, it could have been the breeze.
“I don’t know,” I said, “But if you don’t show up tomorrow, I’ll kick your ass.”
He laughed, although his tone was anything but amused, and stood to go. In the night, framed between the trees, he was the outline of a mystery. I cursed myself for thinking that; I’ve always been partial to mysteries and peculiarities.
I was too distracted by the instructions Mint had given us to notice the smoke as it rose into the sky beyond the redwoods. Indigo spotted it first, in fact, and shouted and pointed in such a sudden change of attitude that I was more focused on what was wrong with him than the sudden burning smell that filled the air.
“Where?” I demanded, meeting him in the middle of the clearing, as far away from the trees as possible. He pointed back the way he had entered from, and with effort, I noted the faint gleam of orange between two trees on his side of the clearing. A steep slope downward lay just beyond the blackened trunks, and beyond that, a forest stretched out as far as the eye could see, fire gobbling it up.
Shit.
The smoke thickened, the air warming as if the door of an oven had cracked open.
“I’ve got to get home,” he said, quiet and mesmerized. Fire crept up the horizon between the two trees, their burned trunks a reminder of what would happen to us if the flames got this far.
Smoke flooded the air, washing over us in waves. He stared for a long, long moment at the horizon, and I couldn’t help but join him.
Indigo took a small step toward the gap between the trees, as if he was about to start running. The faint snap of a trunk cracking under the heat spurred me into action.
I grabbed his wrist.
“Come on,” I hissed, unthinking, and dragged him across the moss and fallen leaves. He coughed, once, twice, and finally focused properly, struggling through his panic and disorientation to wrench his arm from my grasp,. He led the way through the trees, back in the direction I had come from.
As soon as we passed through the burned trees, the sea air of my hometown yanked the smoke from my lungs and tossed it
