Foretold Read online

  “Literally you're the worst,” Regan says.

  “I don’t think you know what the word ‘literally’ means. Maybe ask your human dictionary friend.”

  “I know what it means,” Regan seethes.

  “You’re upset because I asked if you ever come up for air when you were telling a story earlier. That was me being concerned for your health!”

  Regan turns her nose up and pretends to remove a speck of something from her top.

  Griffin laughs. “We’re going to end up married, and this will be our cute little ‘how we met’ story. I already saw it in a vision.”

  “I’d rather die,” she says.

  “I saw that, too.” He laughs again and nods to someone calling his name. A few guys from the group I saw him standing with earlier are shouting out to him. “Gotta run. Nice meeting you, Dictionary. Hey, for short I could call you Dic—”

  “My name is Cassie.”

  “Less fun. See you, Remus.”

  “Regan!”

  His silly grin flashes again, and he jogs off to catch up to his friends. Regan glares after him, her eyes narrowed to the point I’m surprised she can see.

  “He wasn’t telling the truth about the marrying thing…?” I ask.

  “No.” Regan sniffs. “He’s not my type. I like humans.”

  I laugh in spite of myself.

  “Besides,” she continues, trudging ahead, “I already told you I’m going to marry Jordan Welborne. Since you’re Sebastian Welborne catnip, and you’re totally going to marry him, I’ll be your mother-in-law.”

  I roll my eyes. “I’m not. And even if I were, I’m not interested.”

  “How is that possible? Oh my God, you already have a boyfriend, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t have a boyfriend.” I feel myself blushing.

  “You're lying! Look at your face! You can’t see your face. You’re holding out on me. Dish immediately. I need details. What’s he like? Is he cute? What’s his name? Does he have a brother? A hotter, richer brother?”

  I can’t help it. I laugh again. “Alright! There’s a boy…” Regan’s eyes light up, so I hurry to finish. “But he’s not my boyfriend. He’s my neighbor. His name is Colin.”

  The name alone sends Regan into raptures. “Colin is such a cute name! Colin.” Regan does that with names: runs them over her tongue, savoring and testing. “I approve.” A girl directs us to one of the copper cage elevators. We enter. “Can you hit the button, Cassie?”

  I hesitate, imagining thousands of fingers touching that little round white cesspool. Who cleans them? Does anyone ever think to? Before it becomes weird, I force myself to press it with a knuckle. The doors slam shut and the lift speeds upward.

  I don’t want to see Pict again. Another interaction with him is more than I can deal with right now. I pull at my contaminated knuckle. It’s spreading like gangrene from my knuckle up through the rest of my index finger. It’s moved to the rest of my hand. I grit my teeth. Come on. Not now. Not now. Not in front of a maybe-new-friend. I grip my bag tightly to keep from doing anything stupid.

  “So spill. Tell me every—Cassie, are you okay? Your face went white.”

  The doors open on the same dizzying floor Aunt Bree brought me to, and I force myself to step off the elevator. I quickly wipe my brow on my arm.

  “Are you okay?” Regan repeats. “I swear, I thought there might be something off about that smoked salmon platter. Oh no, am I okay?”

  “I’m fine. This day has been a lot and… just stressing about seeing Pict again.” You’re okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.

  Regan smiles reassuringly. “It’ll be great, Cassie. Really. Mentors are there to help. He decided you had what it takes to be here. Now that you’re officially a Theban initiate, I’m sure it’ll be better.” She looks down at her paper and pauses in front of a door. “This is me. Wish me luck!” She gives me a quick half-hug and knocks a rhythmic beat on the wood.

  “Come in,” a man’s voice calls, and Regan opens the door to blaring classical music. She steps inside and excitedly waves at me she closes the door behind her.

  “It’ll be fine!” she says before she shuts it entirely.

  I drag myself to Pict’s pink door and bite at my thumbnail before working up the courage to knock. When I hear him call out, I open the door, carefully this time. Pict is standing in the center of the room holding a paper. He waves it at me.

  “I’m reviewing your training schedule for the Agon, Ms. Morai. Rituals. They have you down for Astromancy and Geomancy. Good, good. Salt-Seeing. Fine. Nua. Hmm, okay. Du Lac for Hydromancy. Yes.” He stiffens. “Palmistry. They still teach that rot?” He holds out the paper, and I accept it. “It is a solid curriculum. Between your coursework and the work we’ll engage in here, you’ll be well prepared.

  I open my mouth, hesitate.

  “Out with it.”

  “It’s… this is a lot. I guess I’m still trying to process it all.”

  “All you need to know at the moment is that scrying is akin to a muscle, albeit one made of mystical energy instead of tissue and powered by the arcane rather than biochemicals. Abilities must be rigorously exercised. That is what your training here is designed to do.”

  “But with that ICARUSS thing, isn’t scrying—” I almost feel ridiculous saying the word. “—supposed to be easier now?”

  Pict glowers at me. At least, I think he does. It’s a matter of a quarter-inch dip of his already forever-scowling brows.

  “Welborne’s bloody toy does not enhance abilities. It speeds interpretation times and conjures up rituals for changes to the future. If you are a weak scryer, you’ll produce scarce wood for that particular hearth. Further, when you receive your own device, you are never to bring it to my chambers, is that understood? Others can leverage that crutch. You will train the way scryers have since time immemorial, reading your own omens and signs.”

  I stare at the ground—even more uncomfortable than before—a stand-in for his dislike of the device and Welborne’s tech. There are others who think like Pict here, I guess. The old man who bolted from the assembly and Welborne’s mocking comments when he left come to mind. Welborne’s speech was a little confrontational, too, when I think about it. I shake my head. No. I’m not going to scratch at this gold coin until I hit imaginary iron.

  “Now then, on to your studies.” Pict shepherds me to the alcove. “Did you read this?” He gestures to a book, identical to the one he gave me a few weeks back, on the end table between us as we take our seats. Oh no. Twardowski.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Tell me, Ms. Morai, what are the Four Tenets of Foretelling?

  “I think… there was… focus…”

  “Yes?”

  I reach and open the book, only to have it slammed shut, nipping my fingertips. Pict is leaning forward, glaring at me.

  “I don’t exactly remember…”

  “F.A.T.E. Focus, ability, tool, environment. What is the Canon of Thought Singularity?”

  “Something with explosions? I… I don’t know.” I read every other book he gave me, some more than once. I read everything I could find on the internet. But Twardowski was just so damn tinder-dry, and… there was a lot of sighing over Colin keeping me busy the past few weeks, too, if I’m being honest. And in fairness, I didn’t realize I’d be getting a pop quiz on day one.

  “‘The more densely you repress thought, the more violent the explosion of prophesy.’ Stop playing with your hair. What about the best resource for interpreting omen symbolism since we will decidedly not be using Welborne’s silver claptrap? Recite for me the Principles of Premonition?”

  “I don’t…”

  “You don’t know. Funny that. This is your first warning, Ms. Morai. I may have been given a lame horse for my first race, but you will not embarrass me. You’ve wasted my time enough for one day. Goodbye.” Pict abruptly gestures for me to leave. I fidget in my seat, then stand, sending a heavy pile of books to my left toppl
ing over like a tsunami of words.

  Pict looks at the mess dispassionately and then back at me. “Shall I draw you a map to guide you out of my office, Ms. Morai? Or would you neglect to study that as well?”

  I’m proud the tears don’t come until I’ve closed the pink door behind me.

  Chapter 11

  “What do you think?” Regan asks, loitering in the doorway to my dorm room. She’s positively beaming.

  “It’s… nice?” I say, taking in my depressingly Spartan home for the summer.

  “Think about what you wish it looked like.”

  I scrunch my brow.

  “Seriously! Think about what you wish it looked like. Humor me.”

  I turn back to the bare walls and bland furniture, and mentally picture a place I’d much rather be at the moment. The walls ripple. “Did you see that?”

  Regan laughs. “Of course I did. Come on, concentrate. Really picture it.”

  I do what she says, and when I open my eyes, I’m standing back in my bedroom at home. I grab at Regan’s arm, warily eying my white writer’s desk—complete with its blue spill of nail polish—tucked up against my bed. “What is this?”

  Regan laughs.

  I run to the desk and pull open drawers. Everything is the same. Even the industrial-sized bag of M&Ms that Mrs. O gave me a few weeks back is in my bottom drawer. I pull it out.

  “Oh, don’t eat those. I mean you’ll feel full, but it’s not real. The second you leave the dorms, it’ll be like you didn’t eat at all. They told us to avoid picturing food or drinks here because peeps can get confused. I heard one guy last year ended up on fluids because he was barely eating outside the stuff he imagined, and his body wasn’t getting any nutrients.”

  I drop the bag of candy in my drawer and run my hands over my face. What is happening?

  “Is this your bedroom at home? I did something from Marrying the Melancholy Marquis. Ever read it? The heroine had this sick cabin on a ship.” She pulls me down the hall to her room, which does, in fact, look like the captain’s cabin of an eighteenth-century ship. Or at least what I guess one might look like. “Look out my window!”

  I move farther into her room and stare out the little porthole window. At the gentle swells of an ocean. “How?” I say. It emerges as a squeak.

  “You’ve heard of the Celidon Coil, right?”

  “I read about it. Pict mentioned it, too. Like a labyrinth somewhere deep inside this place. And we need to walk through it at the end of our training?”

  “Yep!” Regan chirps. “My grandma said it’s so intense to walk through because the Coil absorbs and reflects back thoughts and memories and worries. And not just your own thoughts, either. It’s got, like, thousands of years of scryer brainbox insanity to draw on.” She leans forward, like someone about to tell a campfire ghost story, and blows a curl away from her mouth. “Only, the Coil isn’t as deep inside this place as you think. It’s here. The dorms, the halls downstairs—you noticed the halls on the way to Orientation looked all trippy? It’s because they were ripped away from the Coil when the Grims beat it back to stabilize some space for Theban Group to operate. Everything downstairs is frozen in whatever the Coil was reflecting a second before the Grims pushed it back. Kind of like stuff left close to shore at low tide.”

  “Grims…?”

  “Grimoire Council. That’s what everyone calls the scryer leadership.”

  I can’t sustain drinking from this firehose of information. “That sounds…” I hold up a hand, trying to process it all.

  Regan grins. “Literally insane, I know. But you’re here to learn how to see the future. Is it that crazy if the building you’re in is basically a mind-reading chameleon jungle?”

  “Yes. It is.” I give her a wry look and then straighten, alarmed. “Wait. If the Coil reflects back fears and our dorms are—”

  “Oh God, no! No negative thoughts can be reflected here, and there are other rules. Can’t even frigging picture alcohol or money or any other fun stuff. The dorms are technically semi-culled from the Coil, but the Grims did a binding ritual to let us play around a bit. The halls are all static, though. I heard there are places in the Coil that are stable, too. You can tell because anything that’s changeable does that ripplely-pulse thingy.”

  As if on cue, an almost imperceptible shiver runs up the walls of her captain’s cabin around us. She makes a face that says, See?

  I nod, satisfied—for now. Of course, who knows what my mind will do with that information the next time I spiral?

  We head off to the Rhodes Rotunda for supplies, and Regan shares more of her Grandma’s mix of gossip and lore about the Coil along the way—about it allegedly growing from a seed planted by the Grims whenever they settle in a new location (“Old scryer mystical stuff handed down for like a gabillion generations. They say the seeds come from a vine that sprouted out of the grave of the very first Oracle, or maybe a tree that grew in the dark of Daedalus’s labyrinth.”) and the whole Theban Group building growing out of one of those seeds (“They, like, slap a façade around the thing and move in”), with the Coil forever tunneling farther down like roots (“I wonder how far the Coil reaches now. I heard Theban Group’s had to abandon places when they lose control of it. But, like, without any scryers to draw energy from, it eventually shrivels up and dies—not pretty though”). It all sounds like a grandma-spun yarn. But at this point, who knows?

  The kaleidoscopic light of the Rhodes Rotunda’s dome illuminates a mob; lunch and Magpie trading are apparently competitive sports. Regan runs off to talk to another initiate, and I look down at my shopping list for my classes. My stomach grumbles. I wasn’t planning on braving the meat pie line, but I end up following my nose like a bloodhound for savory, buttery goodness and queue up.

  The boy in front of me turns and reveals a familiar face. “They’re fresh off the griddle,” Noah says. Ah, my fellow big-word lover and awkward Orientation conversationalist. He’s changed into a light green sweatshirt and a blue and white baseball cap devoid of any logos or marks; nothing to proclaim team fandom or anything interesting. Much like the boy and his narrow, everyman face.

  “You ninja’d away during the reception,” I attempt to joke.

  He smiles, looking a little abashed. “No, your friend is just a one-woman distraction.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, that's Regan.”

  We place our orders and wait silently for our pies until the Magpie woman hands Noah two tall paper cups. He hands one to me. Startled, I accept.

  “Ginger cider. It’s the best. This is my fourth today.” His small grin reveals a shy and endearing sweetness. “They say not to drink too much or you’ll be feeling pretty crapulous later, but I feel…” He looks sheepish. “That’s another great-grandma word. I’m going to shut up now.”

  “It’s a good word,” I say, looking down at the cup with interest. I take a sip. It’s surprisingly refreshing, a cool fizz that curls around my tongue. “It’s really good! Thank you.”

  He beams, and the same warmth I felt on my way here with Regan, like hot chocolate on a snowy day, spreads through me again. That feeling of finding your people. That even though I’m a puzzle piece from a completely different box, I’ve miraculously wedged myself into a picture I don’t belong in but refuse to give up.

  The Magpie hands over Noah’s meat pies. He holds up his cup, and I tap mine against his. “Cheers,” he says. “See you later, Cassie.”

  I thank him again and sloppily scarf my food the second his back is turned. Aunt Bree’s “year on the hips” speech only gives me a momentary unease as I move to wash my hands in the fountain.

  Stuffed and satisfied, I approach the rest of the colorful Magpie caravans. I silently thank Aunt Bree’s assistant Martha for the heads-up that I should bring things to barter with as I shop around, reminding myself of where I am since it all has the feel of a weird pop-up Christmas market in July.

  First stop is a denim-blue wagon dripping in winking crystal pend
ulums that catch the light as they dance on the ends of their strings. I trade a bunch of dented canned goods from Mrs. O’s shop for an onyx unicorn horn-shaped pendulum. The little boy working the wagon strings it through a long black braided cord for me, and I tie it around my neck. It’s a testament to how weird I am that Mrs. O only warned me of the dangers of botulism when I asked for the cans the other day, not even questioning why I might want them.

  An old pair of sneakers scores me a rune-casting board, and a candy cane candle gets me a pouch of hand-whittled stones. At another cart, a smuggled bottle of whiskey from Dad’s liquor cabinet gets me a ceremonial scrycasting bone-handled dagger.

  I move on, checking items off my list before coming to a sunshine-yellow wagon laden with mirrors and topped by a green and white canopy. A short, flame-haired man with an equally red pointed goatee is lecturing a taciturn no-necked man.

  “You’re hammered! Foxed! Cocked! Smashed! Three sheets to the wind! I could go on. I received a thesaurus for my birthday. Who gives somebody a thesaurus? Pendragon, cheap bugger. If it wasn’t a re-gift, it will be soon, that’s for sure. Pendragon’s turned me into a crap gift giver! Anyway, you’re drunk is the point, and you’ve traded away one of our most valuable mirrors for a tortoise and some leaves.”

  “Her name is Betsy,” the other man says.

  “Heavens. What has that to do with anything? You aren’t to drink on the job. Or if you do, you need to make sure it’s in moderation. I’m not big on rules, you know, but for the love of Pete—”

  “Who’s Pete?” the no-necked man asks.

  I laugh. The man with the red hair scowls at me. “Hi,” I say tentatively. “Is now a bad time or…?”

  “Of course it is, but why should we let that get in the way of business? What’s your name? You look like you could use a mirror, and I don’t mean that as an insult. I just sell them. Or maybe I could interest you in a tortoise?” The no-necked man slinks off, taking the distraction I’ve created as an opening to flee.