Lies

  The Headmistress laughed. She chortled at first, then covered her face with her hands and swiveled around in her seat to face away from Ty as she kept laughing and laughing into her hands.

  Eventually, she turned back around to face her daughter with wet eyes, wiping her tears on a handkerchief she pulled out of her jet-black cloak. Her voice was a whisper, her gaze despondent. “To think you’d say that to me one day.”

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” replied Ty tersely, a bit hurt.

  “No, no, I’m sorry.” Sitting upright and clearing her throat, the Headmistress took a deep breath. “I apologize for my outburst. That was inappropriate.”

  Ty did not respond.

  “No,” the Headmistress continued to repeat, pulling out a pen and scribbling something onto a piece of paper in front of her. “The person I am is exactly that. I am a weapon, and I pride myself on being one. At the end of the day, we are all weapons; to serve a purpose, to be used by one another. What changes is where you’re standing. Who you’re talking to, and what they mean to you. Perspective. Now—shall we have Faris suspended or expelled?”

  Ty stared at the Headmistress, watching her continue to scribble, remembering Nate’s words even though it felt like forever ago.

  I wonder who taught him to reply that way. Why he thought that.

  “Neither.”

  The Headmistress stopped writing and looked up.

  “You’re going to give Faris the same punishment as Cyril and Theo if you want me to play your little game.”

  “Or I can expel Faris, and then you’ll be alone and left with nothing. Not even your little classmates, because you know what happens if you don’t follow my orders.”

  “That’s right.” Ty kept staring coldly into the Headmistress’s eyes. “So if you love me as much as you say you do, if you need me to do this, and the only way I will is if you give him the lightest punishment, then you’ll listen to me.”

  “You’d do it anyway to save them, even if you lose Faris.”

  “You can make good guesses, but you can’t predict the future. Do you really want to take that risk?”

  Silence.

  Slowly, the Headmistress lowered her pen. Her gaze broke from Ty’s, and then she reached into the drawer of her desk, pulling out a bound package she set in front of the tactician.

  And then, just as Ty was about to pick it up and excuse herself from this awful exchange, the Headmistress let out a weary sigh. “You’re right. You may not acknowledge me as your mother, but you will always be my daughter. You will always be a person to me, and I will always see myself as your weapon.” Her smile was forced, even though there wasn’t anyone to put on a show for other than herself and Ty. “Which means I’ll do what I need to do to protect you and keep you alive, even if it goes against MATS’s wishes.”

  It took Ty a moment to try to understand the deeper meaning behind her words. “You’re saying it like you’re on my side, but saving me is what you want—you’re trying to fulfill your goal, not mine.”

  “No, no, no, Ty,” the Headmistress maintained, the air of melancholy now dispelled as she adopted a patronizing tone. “I know you better than you know yourself, remember? I know what you want. I just want more.”

  “You want me to live.”

  “Yes, but I also made a promise to cleanse this world, like Darius no doubt has told you. We’re going to carry out the will of the Ancients, just with extra steps.”

  “But what if this world can’t be cleansed if I don’t die?”

  The Headmistress did not have to think hard. “Well, then the heads of MATS and I will just reverse time again, like we’ve been doing for the past few decades.”

  “So even if we all succeed in the end, if I die, you’re going to just undo everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to run out of time one day, and then everything you’ve done will be for nothing,” she spat, not even trying to hide her disgust.

  Her acrid words were only met with a peaceful smile. “It’s already given me so much more time with you. I don’t care if I fail. At least I’ll know I tried.”

  “So what? Sacrifice the world for one person? Is that what you’re going to do? Is that what you’ve been doing this entire time?”

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  The Headmistress shot her a bewildered look. “You speak as if the responsibility rests solely on my shoulders—I’m not the only one who has something to lose.” She leaned forward. “Chloris’s ties to magic lie far deeper than just me, Tyche. I am not your final enemy. Me and everyone else who can reset all this progress and doom us all are just the ones who have stakes in this battle.”

  Some things fell into place, one by one, the thoughts in Ty’s head racing as she gazed into the Headmistress’s threatening, delirious eyes. “You’re telling me that…that we have to destroy everything.”

  “Everything.”

  “The Academy. MATS. Magic.”

  “Yes.”

  “That…will save everyone.”

  “Well, my colleagues will have to die, of course, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

  “Both you and Darius—how do you expect me to believe that carrying out all this destruction will save the world?” she finally asked, already knowing that this was not a battle she could win. “Am I expected to blindly follow what you tell me?”

  The triumphant look on the Headmistress’s face instilled a bit of hope into Ty for a moment, but only that. “Yes, because if you don’t, your friends will suffer. You’ve seen it in your dreams, and it’s all been recorded.” She gestured to the black volumes behind her. “Defending MATS will do absolutely nothing. It and the Academy are not meant to be saved; we’ve tried going down that path far too many times.”

  Ty buried her face in her hands, wishing there was a way out of all this. Wishing she knew more, wishing she could tell the future, wishing that she could have come up with an answer the Headmistress hadn’t considered yet.

  I’ve lived my entire life as a puppet, preened to perfection—

  “I have to leave no matter what, then,” she mumbled into her hands.

  “Yes, to carry out the Ancients’ will—which is against MATS’s wishes, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Where does that leave you?”

  “When everything is over, we can all be happy together. We can all live in harmony. No war, no magic. It’ll be the world as the Earth Mother intended it.”

  What if we just let the world burn?

  You can’t, scolded Theo in her mind.

  I know. I know.

  The tactician let her hands fall to the side and looked up impassively. “Tell me what I have to do.”

  * * *

  In a daze, the Headmistress’s instructions tucked into her breast pocket, Ty left the office. She had no idea what had just happened, or what would happen from then on, but she now had a tangible, proper mission she had to carry out.

  The will of the Ancients…

  Going against MATS, the whole institution? Her classmates, the other students, they would have to go up against that? No wonder all her visions had been filled with blood and death. Trained armies versus a bunch of kids who hadn’t even graduated yet—anyone with half a mind knew who would be more likely to win.

  “Ty?”

  Live, she had been told to live before. She could not forget that. Keep on going. Be patient. This was something only she could do. All her classmates were with her. All her classmates depended on her. She couldn’t shut down, couldn’t pretend that her world was the only one that mattered. Time and time again, she had been taught this lesson. When was she going to listen, change instead of uttering empty promises?

  “Ty!”

  She stopped dead in her tracks, not having realized she had walked about halfway down the hallway already.

  “Oh,” she said simply, staring at Theo beside her dumbly.

  He tilted his head curiously to get a good look at her. “I’d ask if you were okay, but from the looks of it, you’re not.”

  “You were waiting for me?” Ty asked stupidly, blinking and trying to figure out an end to her earlier train of thought.

  “Figured I’d stay anyway, considering you’d be getting our packages,” smiled Theo. “Earlier, I really only went back to the dorms because Luci dragged me there.”

  It made her feel better to see a genuine smile after all her charades with the Headmistress. “Ah, I see. Yes, I have them here.” She looked down at the three thick booklets in her hands.

  “Need any help?”

  “Oh—no, thank you.” The weight was something that her mind could focus on, and without it she would have probably started wringing her hands out of anxiety.

  “Well, let’s head back, then,” offered her physician, turning back to the front before realizing that he had left out a slightly important point. “Oh yeah, where’s Faris? He came back. Last I saw him, he was by the study tables.”

  As he jogged up to check, Ty continued walking forward, looking out the windows to the rest of the Academy.

  How much she must have seen from up here.

  Maybe she saw that first courtyard practice.

  I wonder if she saw my Starshower. Her Starshower.

  More thoughts from the conversation came rushing back to her—her mother. Joanie, the Headmistress had called her. Aside from when she had done the Starshower to find her in the night, there had never been any talk before of any best friend, or of her time at the Academy. But the way the Headmistress spoke about her made it seem like the two had been in love. Before Ty happened. They had been in love.

  The pain her mother must have gone through to take care of the child born of the love of her life and a stranger. To wake up every day and see Ty, see the shadow of the person she had been abandoned by.

  She hadn’t even been given the name of her father.

  “Ah, you’re drifting away again, Ty,” noted Theo once he had finished fetching Faris. “I’ve got him now, so we should be good to go.”

  “Sounds g—”

  When she turned back to her classmates, something had changed.

  “Faris, what happened?” she whispered, staring at the fresh bandage running from his forehead down to where his right eye began. “What did you do?”

  He looked unperturbed. “Nothing, I tripped, hit something. Theo fixed me up.”

  “Mhm, wasn’t anything major. Should heal nicely in a day or two,” reassured Theo, turning to the stairs once again when Ty spoke.

  “Is that the truth?”

  Faris didn’t miss a heartbeat. “Of course it is.”

  She could see it. She could see it in his violet eyes, what the truth really was.

  “So, how about that punishment?” he asked now, shifting his eyes ever so slightly to the side.

  We can expel him.

  “I got you the same as Cyril and Theo,” she spoke quietly, slightly lifting the books in her hands for him to see. “That’s it.”

  Wordlessly, he stared at her.

  “Won’t go on your record, as promised,” she maintained.

  And then the caster finally found his voice. “That’s it, huh? For all I did? She was pretty livid.”

  “That’s all there is,” she lied, emphatically nodding her head once. “Ask Theo—she has a soft spot for me.”

  Silence.

  “Is that the truth?”

  She smiled. “Of course it is.”

  There was no doubt; he could see it in her eyes, what lies had been exchanged that day. What she had given up to keep her promise—that, he did not find out for a long time. A very, very long time, when she would be far, far away. Too far to hear the apologies he wished he could say, the ones he’d once promised never to say, because at least wasting time was better than no time at all.