Blowing Embers

Chapter 6

            Sitting in her usual spot, at the back and in the corner away from the windows, Kallai carefully set up her inkwell, notebook, quills, and school books around her. The room was filled with the sound of her classmates’ chatter which she ignored. Her attention was on her memories of the night before, and the stranger she’d met.

At least, she thought she’d met him. With the morning light had come doubts as to whether it’d actually happened or not. It was virtually impossible to get onto the school grounds without permission. Kallai knew the only foreign student attending was still in red and was a girl to boot, and since he hadn’t been wearing the robes of a Magi, Shuu had to have snuck on. But to get past the guards and protections… She shook her head. It had to have been a dream. Probably.

            Magi Rendan tapping his pointer against the chalkboard cut through both her musings and the talk of her fellow students. “Attention everyone,” he said, once they’d quieted. “Before class begins I have an announcement. It has come to our attention that someone, or someones, thought it would be funny to move the Smiling Man off Statue Hill. If the statue’s returned by the end of the day, no questions will be asked. If it’s not… Well, the perpetrators will find themselves on punishment duty until they graduate.”

            Whispers sprang up all around her, but Kallai could only stare straight ahead, her mouth sagging as her ears rang. The Smiling Man. How many hundreds of times had she seen his face? How many hundreds of times had she walked past him? And yet, she hadn’t noticed. Not until now.

            His thin nose and lips, his tall form, and his slender form were all the same. He’d looked familiar but she hadn’t been able to place why. Kallai swallowed hard. The Smiling Man was alive and his name was Shuu.

            Kallai closed her eyes, her hands squeezed tight. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. Statues didn’t come to life and no spell she’d ever heard of would have that kind of power. If she hadn’t seen his face, she’d have thought it was a trick, but even her tormentors couldn’t have changed their features that much. Not when disguise magic wasn’t taught until you were in Violet.

            If Shuu was the Smiling Man, if he really was a statue that’d somehow come to life, what was the war he’d been talking about? How could a statue be involved in a war? She shook her head. There were too many questions and not enough information. For all she knew, someone had just engineered the whole thing and shown her an illusion, maybe to make it look like she was involved in moving the statue.

            The screech of chalk against the blackboard drew Kallai’s attention back to Magi Rendan and the lesson she was supposed to be listening to. Belatedly, she flipped open her notebook and began copying down the information about combining growth spells with one to change the substance of the object.

            Her teacher lectured as he wrote, talking about the importance of harmonizing the symbols and components, especially when hybridizing the symbols wasn’t possible. Kallai’s quill flowed rapidly across her page, leaving neat information in its wake, even as her lips twisted into a frown of concentration.

            As she drew the symbols for turning stone into lead, she paused, the stone symbol finished. What if Shuu wasn’t really a statue? What if he’d been turned into one? She supposed to would be possible, with an incredibly powerful mage, though she’d never heard of anything both in class and outside of it that had hinted at something like that could happen.

            But if he was the Smiling Man, then he technically wasn’t a stranger, and she wouldn’t be forced to report him. Kallai felt her shoulders partially unknot. He hadn’t snuck in. He’d been there all along.

            With him free and busy with his war, Kallai doubted Shuu would have anything more to do with her. Even if he was looking for magic to help him, she would be the last choice for it. Nodding, Kallai resolved to shove all thoughts of the stranger out of her head, and focus back on her schoolwork.

            But even as she fought to pay attention to Magi Rendan’s words about components and focuses synchronizing properly, memories of Shuu’s voice hissing in her ear kept interrupting.