Page 134 of The Alchemists

In the seconds it took him to process what was happening, he got hit by Danielson’s spitting orange fireball. Instinctively, he tried to block it with his foil, but it was empty. He threw up his arms to protect his face, and the inferno, given weight and substance without fuel, crashed into him. It scalded his face raw. He heard his eyebrows singe. Dry, suffocating heat roared into his mouth, devouring his oxygen.

It was as he hit the ground, rolling in the sand like an idiot to avoid the physical charge that Danielson followed it with, that Raf’s voice came back to him from the other night.

“Is that Hawleyhurst? Who’s he with?” Asher said, swiveling, to no one in particular.

“That’s Evan Danielson,” Rafael craned to follow Asher’s gaze. “Dunmoody.”

“What the hell are they doing together?”

What the hell indeed.

Well, Seb knew now.

He scrambled back into a physical zone, his brain moving so fast that it could hardly be called thinking at all.

He had no magic.

He was in the quarterfinals of the National Collegiate Cantrèjeux Championships, three bouts between him and victory, with at least one broken rib, on the second match of the day, and he had no magic.

It was almost funny, in another light. If he weren’t ten points down seconds into the bout, and if he didn’t really, really want to win, he might have even enjoyed the challenge. Herculean was Seb’s favorite kind of task, the only kind worth doing, really. He thrived on long odds and slim margins. Solve an impossible riddle? Done. Get into an impossible graduate program? Fine. Break an unbearable curse? Hold my drink.

But Cantrèa wasn’t meant to be played without magic, and staring down the next minutes of his life made him want to smash his own Orb against the sand.

As he dodged and spiraled out of Danielson’s furious attacks, it became easier to push the anxiety aside, to study Danielson’s new patterns and formulate new strategies. Most of what he’d observed the day before was useless, but not all of it.

Even without magic, he was playing Cantrèa, and he loved Cantrèa. And, he reminded himself as he dove headfirst and came up on his feet, blood thrumming, you’re fucking good at it.

His avenue toward victory was thin and fraught with danger. Step off the path once, and it would be over. But there was a path, and it was straightforward. Stay close and force Danielson into physical play. Exhaust his spells until they were on even ground. Seb would find the stamina to make it work. Once Danielson was out of spells, this match would be his.

He smiled thinly as Danielson lunged.

LILY

“What the hell is happening?” Asher hissed frantically in her ear as he wrung her arm.

“His magic is gone,” Lily hissed back.

She had known something was wrong as he stepped into the ring, giving his foil a strange little half-glance, seen it in the way his eyes raked over Hawleyhurst hugging his mother, in the tension of his shoulders.

She’d known specifically what was wrong as she watched her boyfriend get hit in the face with a fireball that he would have otherwise easily deflected. He emerged singed, smoking, and resolute. She saw, quite literally, the change happen in his face as he assessed his new reality and decided to run with it.

After diving out of the way of another blow, he feigned retreat, jumping out of range, then spiraling furiously around from behind to push Danielson into a physical zone. She knew what he was doing—anyone who really knew Cantrèa would be able to see—because it was his only option. Stay right up in Danielson’s space—too close for spells—and force physical combat.

Quickly, Seb scored three touches, bringing him up to six points against Danielson’s ten. But Danielson wised up, springing back into a spell-play zone where physical attacks were useless. He toed the line of the zones, taunting Seb.

Seb didn’t fall for it. He moved like a cyclone, in tight circular fashion, constantly pulling Danielson into and out of the two zones to face him. Their foils hissed through the air as they thrust, parried, feinted, and hit. Seb gained two more hits, and Danielson one, staying just ahead.

Seb took a step back, then slipped to the left, exposing his Orb. As Danielson went for the opening, Seb lunged. It was a Tokugawan⁠* gambit, ridiculously difficult to execute on the grounds of having to get your body to tell your opponent one thing, while actually doing another, and leaving your Orb blatantly vulnerable. But Seb did it—or Lily thought he had—until he was thrown backward across the ring, having to roll across the sand to keep from smashing his Orb.

Danielson had charged Pax Per Potestatem⁠* as one of his two defensive spells. Players almost never loaded defensive spells that protected against melee attacks, choosing instead shields and absorption auras that would shelter the Orb against powerful magic. If Lily had harbored any doubts about Danielson colluding with Hawleyhurst, they would have died then.

While Seb was getting up Danielson hit him with a scintillating burst of Ætheric energy, sending him to twenty-two points against Seb’s ten. Danielson had two attacks, a defense, and an environmental spell left. Lily did the math. For every spell hit, Seb would have to land five touches, assuming Danielson got in none of his own.

She knew Seb was doing this same arithmetic as he fought for his life. Danielson had come prepared. Even as he met Seb for clash after clash, she knew he was waiting. The longer Danielson held out on spells, the more likely he was to land hits on an exhausted target. The gap between their scores tightened, widened, as they moved in an ever-flowing gyre of deepening intensity. The minutes ticked by, the colors of their uniforms darkening as they soaked with sweat.

Then Danielson turned the ground around Sebastian into a quagmire. Immediately, he sank past his ankles in sucking mud. His shoulders lost their tension. Across the ring, Danielson’s eyes glinted.

* Named for Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康), the first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, who managed to get the opposing Takeda forces to retreat despite a crushing defeat at the Battle of Mikatagahara through a clever ruse.