“I didn’t mean to hit him.”

  “As you keep saying,” said Field, standing authoritatively and facing out of the tall windows behind her desk. “I can believe it too. I’m surprised you did hit him from that distance. Right on the head. Like you’d been trained to do it.”

  “Don’t go there.” The memory had only emerged as I’d sat in abject silence for the rest of the class, with Stack assisted to the nurse’s office… As the last war ended, they’d given us trainees shrapnel-bombs: tight clusters of metal shavings, screws, pins, twisted around a core that would explode under shock. They had us practice with rocks, but when the final days came, the bombs killed as many of the throwers as they did targets. I’d never tried to hit a creature with anything before that. Realised I’d never tried again since. Till now. “How much longer is this gonna take?”

  “Your detention? As long as I decide. And if I wanted to go and appreciate my freedom this fine Hesserday afternoon, I’d send you to Professor Ad Ingrotto for extended time. You do understand you’ve committed a mortally serious breach of conduct, don’t you?”

  “Yes, professor. I understand.” I couldn’t avoid the nagging image of never being allowed back to this place once they’d decided what to do with me. And in a sickening way, I think I felt more relief than anguish. At least it would be over, finally over. At least I’d be free to breathe again.

  “Is the door shut?”

  I looked left. “Yeah.”

  “Good. Then I’ll let you out in a few more minutes once we’ve both agreed you’ve had a very stern talking to. Haven’t I been so very stern?”

  “Uh… Yeah? Yes – incredibly so. I won’t do it again.”

  “Good.” She left her desk, up on the dais at the top of the room, descending mightily to me at the far lower end, and she spoke in a sharply earnest voice: “Oakley, I mean this very genuinely: you cannot do anything like that again. You have potential and talent, I think much more than you realise, and you could achieve many remarkable things in your future. I’d be willing to say there are professors at this Institute who wished they had an ounce of your promise at your age, because I count myself among their number. Do you wish yourself disbarred? Do you want to lose the chance to make something monumental of yourself?”

  I didn’t want to hear any of that, and I huffed. “What’s it even worth? That’s so many years away! There’s tents taking up squares in the city filled with the barely-alive shipped out of the war fields and we’re ensconced in our thick walls and worrying ourselves over making rocks appear, memorising ancient history, devising weird little magical tricks to impress each other – and thinking ourselves great for doing it! What does it do?” I hit my fist on the desk a little harder than I meant to.

  “That war, ghastly as it is, is not ours to solve. Can I do anything to stop it? No. Can you?” I couldn’t say anything. I raised the fist to my forehead and rubbed at it. My hood wasn’t even up. Why bother anymore? “You seem to care a lot, but you need to focus it where it can actually help you. If you fail the exam, you won’t be sitting the next semester, and I’m sure the war effort will be all too eager to collect you from the streets. They do still hold conscription in Forest towns, indeed?” I pressed my knuckles into the skin and let it hurt. “So you’ll do well to practise, to learn, and to make the most of your amply apparent aptitude. The more you try in lessons, the safer your place here will become. You don’t want the alternative, despite your flagrant attempt today to end up there. Do feel free to rebuke me, but I’d say I’m more invested in you being here right now than you are.”

  “Cos you don’t see how hard it is for me!” I shot back. “Every day I turn up to classes and every day I get stared at like some mutated rodent in a cage. I get called awful names, have things shouted at me, and you stand right there and let it happen! It’s not just this classroom either – I feel like an outsider in every room I go in this blasted place! It’s like everyone’s holding their breath around me, waiting for me to fuck off back to the Forest – or better yet, to the war, where even you yourself have implied I, as who I am, very clearly belong.”

  I expected her to shout. I wanted her to shout. I wanted to argue the sheer spirits out of this until it was all done and I could finally be free of this whole thing. I didn’t expect her to half-sit on the desk, thumbing at the bracelet on her other wrist, and speak very quietly indeed. “Oakley, I’m going to acknowledge your frustrations and not respond to them, because when I let you leave in a moment, I’m going to make my way to the Chancellors’ chambers before the report on your behaviour reaches them, once the nurses’ office have written it up which I can guarantee is presently underway. I’m going to do my best to explain to them why a student who assaulted a classmate should be allowed to continue his education here. I’m on good terms with a few of the Chancellors and I think they’ll trust me if I vouch for you, but understand this: I consider myself very honoured to hold this position, and I worked immensely hard to achieve it for myself and for those whom I would teach, and I do not have to put my neck on the line for you. And if you do it again?”

  She left the question hanging in the air like she’d kicked the trapdoor out from under its noose. “I respect you a lot,” she said, “and I don’t think you respect me. I don’t even think you trust me, quite frankly.”

  “Because you’re not doing anything about Stack or the others when they –”

  “Oakley. Please. Trust me.”

  Tears pricked my eyes. “But I don’t understand why you’re just letting it happen!”

  “Sometimes you have to trust things you don’t understand. It’s not pleasant, nor is it easy. But it is a lot easier than trying to break it all down and do everything with your own hands. Understand?” I nodded mutely, because what else could I do? “You may leave. I have Chancellors to attend to. And if you’ll hear my advice, take some good time off this weekend. You act like you need it.”

  *

  I stuffed myself onto my bed and yanked the curtain across. I could do what I needed to do, I swore it. Just not when there was so much claustrophobic demand placed on me, and even if I did it, I’d get a banal compliment from Field and an immediate insult from Stack’s direction. We shared other classes but it happened mostly in conjury, at least once a week, so why did the professor do nothing whatsoever about it? Sure, she supported my abilities and invested in the learning and kept a constant energy for anyone constitute enough to listen for more than a few minutes at a time, but it really didn’t feel like she understood this problem at all. Because she wasn’t going to stop him. Doubted sending him to the nurse would stop him either. So I either keep his constant jibes on the very long list of stuff I had to cope with, or I get myself disbarred from the only thing keeping me safe from being hauled off to some field filled with mud that would very soon be filled with blood. I fell back on my bed and swore and kicked out, my heel clipping the edge of my wardrobe and I cursed again.

  “Are you okay?” asked a voice. I hadn’t heard anyone come in and I didn’t need Holly mollycoddling me right now, but it wasn’t her. Had it been her, I probably wouldn’t have replied.

  “...No,” I admitted. “It’s getting to me again.” Footsteps gentle on the floorboards. Grove’s presence on the other side of the curtain. “This one guy in my class is a fucking asshole to me, constantly, and I hate it. The professor’s really good in general but she does nothing about this, and earlier, I snapped, and I…” I huffed. “I don’t even know what I’m meant to do anymore.”

  “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “Right now? Half of me wants to pack my bag and go see out the deepfrost in a little cottage I found out in the woods. Half of me wants to find my professor and demand something be done about that guy. Another half wants to go find his dorm, set all his shit on fire, and then head to the nurse’s office and see if I can’t finish what I started in class. And half of me wants to stop fighting my fate, and let myself be shipped off to the war front where clearly the whole world is telling me I always should have gone.”

  “That’s a lot of halves.”

  “No wonder it’s difficult to hold them all together.”

  They paused a moment, and a floorboard squeaked. “I really think you should let this guy pay for your semester fees if he’s offered to do so. It’s a financially responsible decision. My grandma says we should make the most of opportunities because we don’t know how many chances we’ll get to take them.”

  I hissed tiredly through my teeth. “And what if we argue and fall out and I feel bad forever for taking all that money?”

  “Then don’t do that?” they said lightly. “Pragmatically, it doesn’t sound like he would miss it, from how much he’s bought you already.”

  “That’s… true. I just don’t want to feel like I owe him.”

  “So don’t feel it. There’s no shame in needing help sometimes.”

  “That’s not how I was raised,” I said. I pushed myself up, drew the curtain back halfway, and let them sit on the edge of my covers. “I guess it solves one problem, but I still have to face that asshole nine times a week. Assuming I’m not thrown out over the weekend. Which I may still be very easily.”

  They picked expertly at a loose thread, running it between their fingers. “Why do you think he’s so mean to you? You seem like a nice person.”

  “You have looked at me, right?” I craned my head forwards, held my hands out. “Horns? Fangs? Claws? Not very Clearlander. My skin? My eyes? I have a tail for spirits’ sake – he hasn’t even started on that yet.”

  “So you’re different,” they said. “And…?”

  “...And a century ago, everyone who became different was ostracised from the valley’s towns and cities. The lie that it could be caught by skin contact, or even breathing the same air? I’m pretty sure some people here still believe that. While the Clearlanders developed their cities, evolved their technologies, studied sciences, and a load of them harnessed the arcane, we were left to fend for ourselves with nothing except what we could carry and what the Stygewald provided us. We learn we have to fight to survive. We develop a social honour in being the toughest, the strongest, the fiercest, the bravest. You look down on us for being barbaric and belligerent; we look down on you for being meek and exclusionary. Divisions grow. Because we split a century ago and now we’re fundamentally different.”

  “Being different can be a good thing,” they said. “I heard from my uncle that Foresters might have a deeper connection to the arcane because of whatever caused the changes. It flows stronger but it may be less stable or predictable.”

  “Even if that was true, it doesn’t help me here!” I stated. “Doesn’t make a difference to how I’ve been treated. By the time I was old enough to trek down to the apothecaries in Baronbridge and fetch medicines, I’m greeted with cold stares and raised noses and terse words and snide whispers. You see the truth in what they tell you: ‘the Clearlanders hate you for who you are’. And even if some of them aren’t brave enough to say it, you can sure tell they’re thinking it.”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Grove sat quiet for a moment, picking at the threads. “I think you’re wrong,” they started. “On that last bit. They hate you for what you are, not who you are. They don’t have a clue who you are, because if they did, they’d have no choice but to like you.”

  “So how does that make anything better?”

  “I don’t know,” they said. “But I think it’s not about you. It’s about what the asshole was told by his parents and other people. It’s about how he learned the mentality to hate.” They picked a little more at the corner of my covers. “My friend Blossom's parents aren’t great people, and they taught their dog to bark when anyone knocked at the door, so whenever I came over, the dog always barked. It doesn’t matter that I’m a friend, because the dog doesn’t know why it’s barking or care who it’s barking at. It was taught to bark at anyone at the door, so it does that.” Found another thread, twirled it between their fingers. “I’m sorry it’s happening to you. I guess I thought seeing him as a dumb dog barking mindlessly since he was raised wrong, might help it hurt a bit less for you.”

  “It… kinda does.” The imagery of Stack as a mistrained guard dog, chained to his post, growling and barking impotently at me from across the room… I could use it. “I still don’t like him.”

  “He’s an idiot blinded by his prejudices. He sounds very unlikeable.”

  “So, uh, how come you aren’t, like…”

  Grove sat a little straighter. “The family business makes connections all across the continent. It’s still very artisan as it’s still a very niche product line but we have many ventures and stores, and it means you have to understand a wide range of people, understand what they want and how they can get it. I don’t think it’s possible to hate mindlessly once you’ve put in the effort to understand where someone’s coming from. And if you understand people across the continent, how are you supposed to hate anyone living right next to you?”

  I sighed softly, wistfully. “I wish the world worked like that. May I admit something, but you can’t tell Holly?” They nodded, so I went on. “I really thought she was gonna be like that too. I was so sorely tempted to shut her out and be entirely on my own the whole three years.”

  “She’s learning,” Grove said. “Or, I guess, un-learning. It’s really uncomfortable considering stuff we’ve believed for so long might not be true. I guess some people shy away from the discomfort and double down on believing it. When I talked to people I knew about changing how they referred to me, most of them seemed a little uncomfortable at first. But they tried, and I had some discussions over some things, and I think when they understood how I felt, that’s when it became easier for them. I think they cared about me enough to put in that effort, to work through the discomfort and opening up their beliefs. I’m really grateful for those who did. And as much as there’ll always be judgemental people sticking to their ways, there’ll always be people who want to care for you as well, and who want to show it.”

  “Are you sure you wanna go into business? You’re too nice to be a business… uh, business-person? I think a lot of people ought to listen to what you say.”

  They lifted their head, smiling. “Maybe someday. Right now, I’m happy with this. My older sisters have projects they’re trying to market, and I’m working on the Ooh and I hope I can take it the same way.”

  “I’ll be your first customer if you do,” I said. “It’s a really fun thing and I already know I’m gonna miss it when you graduate. Actually…” I drew the curtain all the way back and hopped off the bed, stretching out my cramped back and shaking the pins and needles out of my tail. “Do you think Holly has any marshmallows left? I’ll get her some more when I’m in the city tomorrow…”

  *

  Despite having a good evening toasting over the Ooh and chatting and practicing the playing-card predictions from diviny and the water-swaying from elemancy and even turning a patch of the rug a slightly different colour like we were taught in transmutation, I still slept abysmally. Despite all three of us gathering round and trying to match the patch of rug back to the same green as the rest of it, none of us getting it exactly right, bickering in jest and falling about laughing over it, my dreams were still filled with terrible things. Professor Field as a storybook pirate declaring I had to walk the plank, Stack the squawking little parrot on her shoulder, but instead of landing in the water I fell onto a dusty, misty, scorched pasture of azure grass and crimson mist, the soil pure black, the sky pure white, and Captain Oldfield marched towards me, three times as tall as his accompanying commanders. Threw me into a trench pit filled with hundreds of those beds from the tent hospital. Flashes of black lighting cleaved the sky. Omen laid in one of the hospital beds, reaching out to me, pulling me down into what I hoped was a bear hug and what I dreaded was a suffocating headlock. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. Spots flashed in my vision and I was going to die in this hospital bed and I –

  Woke up gasping for breath. Way too early to be awake. The room still dark, moons behind clouds, I peeled the sticky clothes from my body and shivered as I washed the cold sweat off in the stinging frigid sink water, then pulled on something warm and shoved my feet into my boots. Wasn’t going to risk sleeping again. Hunting blade in my pocket, bag over my shoulder, I headed for the woods. I couldn’t stay in a place that was aching to be rid of me.

  I heard something many years ago, that the Clearlanders were near totally blind at night, even if both moons were out. How the spirits did they do things outside daylight hours? Did they have to rely on candles and torches all through the endless deepfrost nights? I picked my way through the fresh snow on the road, the world around me unfolding in rough outlines and shades of deep grey. The odd little cottage still stood between the tall firs, the perfect foxgloves almost buried in white, and I caught an errant flicker of amber through one of the windows. Someone already lived there? Maybe I’d have to call by during the daytime. I tracked up and up, the odd set of small animal prints zipping across the snow here and there, but I wasn’t looking for them. I kept walking, the new robe and gloves keeping me perfectly warm, my ears alert to every slightest sound. I kept walking…

  The path veered right here, up to the Glade. I took the leftwards route. Hadn’t been this way before. On and on through the silent dark. Every so often, a breath of wind. Every so often, the swoop of an owl or the caw of a crow. The creak of a tree. The pad of my boots. And the beat of my heart louder than all of them.

  There! A dull red, barely visible. A fair way down the steep, steep hillside. I dug my heels in and lowered myself down, snow crisp and crumbling under my hands. One boot slipped and a shock of cold stabbed my face. Spitting my mouth clean. I ventured down, tentatively treading a narrow ridge. Far below, the ravine disappeared into a pure and inky shadow. But here on the ridge, the snow glowed red.

  I dug, using my blade as a shovel and then with my hands instead, shifting heaps of snow enough to fill a bathtub. Patting the gloves dry on my robe. The glow grew brighter. My heart beat harder. I almost lost my footing in the slippery slope again and almost stabbed myself grabbing out to keep my balance, but I whirled and breathed and forced myself to slow. Here it was. The ugliest knot of bubbling red, protruding out of the dirt like a compound fracture. The sight of it alone was enough to churn the stomach, even if you held your nose against its stench of rotting flesh. Smuggler’s root. An extremely rare fungus that glowed in the night and only grew to fruition on the brains of intelligent animals. Something like a wolf or bear or smarter, but I didn’t want to disturb the rest of the snow anyway. I didn’t know what I could be treading on. Didn’t know who I could be treading on.

  But enough smuggler’s root was said to cure any illness under the sky.

  By this point, the first drips of light were leaking through the canopy, and I didn’t have anywhere better to put this than my bag, so I cut all of the glowing red out of the ground, really didn’t like the way it throbbed in my hand like the heartbeat of whatever it had grown from, and stuffed it in the bottom and packed it with a layer of snow. A little further up the path, I found a gripweed frozen to ice and felt almost a little sorry for it as I chopped away enough of the static tendrils to fill the rest of the bag. And by early morning, I was heading back down the hill.

  *

  “Some of it is a little… squashed,” Robin said, picking through my gatherings on the counter. The apothecary had barely opened for the day. “Oh – not that it’s any issue of course – I was simply noting that it, uh…”

  I couldn’t look at him. The one person I knew who actually seemed to look up to me. The one Forester I was currently on speaking terms with. “I slipped and fell on my fucking ass coming down the Hill Road,” I muttered with pink on my cheeks, abandoning the last decent reputation I still had.

  “I’ve fallen lots of times too!” he said immediately. “I totally lost it right by my doorstep last night! Here –” He was already at my side, sleeve rolled up, showing me his bare arm and the impressive bruise halfway down it.

  I don’t know what motivated me to hold his arm, but I did. He was so warm, the fine hairs on his arm raised, a patch of goosebumps lifting. “Looks like it hurt.”

  “It still does!” he said like it was a badge of merit.

  As he rolled the sleeve back, I plucked some more of the frozen gripweed from the bag and fished through the packed snow at the bottom. “Want something that could cure it in a flash?” I asked in the smoothest, most effortless tone manageable for someone who, not five minutes ago, was on the receiving end of an ignominious impact with some of Baronbridge’s foremost cobblestones. I pulled the chunks of smuggler’s root out and laid them on the counter. Robin’s eyes grew beyond belief. “It was a swine to dig out,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve gathered any of that since before I lost my brother.”

  “You lost a brother?”

  “I –” I glanced away. “I was elsewhere for a moment. Apologies. I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “I understand,” he said, laying his hand out softly. “I lost my entire family.”

  “Spirits, your whole family?”

  “Well… No. They lost me, I suppose. They’re still alive, I think. I left them in the Forest over a year ago. I’m never going back.”

  “...May I ask why?”

  He scrunched up his face in thought, then lifted a hand to his flat hood and let it fall back. I did my best not to gasp, but I don’t think I managed. Two ragged, brutal stumps sat atop his head. “I didn’t want to be part of it anymore. I have to keep cutting them back every month – my claws too – because I –”

  The door chimed and his hood instantly covered his head again. I backed away to a display case, pretended I was looking at something while Robin entertained a customer I wished had never entered. I wanted to know about him. I wanted to know who dared hurt him, and I wanted him to know all the ways I’d hurt them back in return.

  *

  For a Felday, it was annoyingly busy. I’d pretty much memorised half the shop before I got a chance to talk to him again, and even then it was only fleeting moments. Sterling herself wouldn’t be in today, due to ailing health. She took more and more time off, and seemed to be handing it over more and more to Robin. Which, aside from his weird system of tally strikes and unique symbols on the bottles instead of numbers and reading the medicine names, I could totally agree with. When he spoke to the customers, it felt like he had a genuine care for each of them. From the painful carbuncle complaints to the groaning over swollen ankles to one concerned parent trying to remedy her daughter’s chronic absent-mindedness, for which they bought a mineral tonic, he seemed to invest in everyone with a level of patience I couldn’t even dream of matching. Half of them wanted herbal solutions to a sniffle going round their family or workplace which they worried was a precursor to the seasonal wave of goat flu, and even after an entire morning of that, not once did his temper grow short. I hung around hoping to talk with him, but through having to watch and listen, I think I learned perhaps more. He’d clearly found no love in the Forest, yet here, people wanted him. People needed him. They listened to him, and he listened to them, and he helped them out. Whatever he’d lacked in his previous life, I was glad he’d found it here.

  With my payment for the delivery, I headed out and bought some skewers of roasted vegetables from the market down the street, wrapped in flatbread. Ate half of them on my way back, offered the rest to Robin and insisted he take a halfhundred to sit and rest. “Most of it’s the same stuff I’ve been listening to all morning,” I said. “Let me do it for a while. You’re still here if I need correcting.” I basically had to push him into the chair, but in the end he did sit. And eat. And he even mumbled a begrudging thanks for it as well.

  I pointed all the snifflers to the same batch of purpley liniment Robin had, and the ones with sore joints to the pinkish pasty ointment tubes, and the ones with headaches to the golden syrup bottles. He spoke up a few times on the more unusual issues, showed the customers to the right medicaments for their needs. Together we finished off the afternoon and when the time came to flip the door sign to closed, a wave of real achievement washed over me. Cut short by him bringing out the handcart to restock again.

  And again I found myself helping him. How could I not? We rattled through his mental list, him pointing me to the supplies and issuing how many, and then to a crate in the corner he’d ordered specifically and kept aside unopened for the last few days. “They have fields of lipwort down near Est Rise. It’s, uh, supposed to be really good stuff. So I invested. You’re still coming tomorrow morning right?”

  And I said yes, because again, how could I not? The way he looked at me, a reverent hope in his gaze that had the shakiness of a hope that’d been crushed before, and didn’t know how many more times it could keep rebuilding. A hope that captivated my heart. The nurses needed help, the injured needed healing, and no one else was stepping up. Someone needed to support him. Someone needed to support everyone there, the Foresters in the beds, like the large one in the corner always silent and always encased in bandages.

  The kiss pulled me out of the memory. A quick peck on my cheek, a jolt, a spark, and Robin slapped a hand over his mouth. “Oh my spirits, I did not mean to do that,” he said. “Oops. When you said yes, I think I got carried away with, uh…”

  “Is that my payment?” I asked, trying to keep my heart from leaping through my throat. The blush was spreading too quick.

  “It… Why? Was it good?”

  “Hmm. Try it a few more times and I’ll see."