Professor Bram Graves, the earth Magick dueling professor, raises his hand. “Begin.”
Vihar doesn’t wait. A surge of wind bursts through the grove, flattening herbs, snapping stalks, tossing petals like confetti. Beatrice braces low, sliding backward as the first wave of wind hits. But she doesn’t panic—she moves with purpose, trailing her fingers through the sand.
A mound of earth rises to meet the next blast. It doesn’t stop the wind, but it bends it—sending it sideways in a burst of thyme and dust.
Vihar scowls, lip curling in disgust. “I thought Whittaker trained warriors. All I see is a gardener.”
Beatrice shifts left, toward the cracked herb bed. Her fingers curl, and beneath the sand, root systems begin to stir.
Vihar strikes again, wind slicing a clean arc toward her torso. But Beatrice drops—and the ground drops with her. A hidden trench splits open beneath him. He stumbles mid-lunge and crashes sideways, half his momentum lost.
Gasps echo from the students lining the grove’s stone walls.
Beatrice rises slowly, the earth closing behind her. “You’re loud, like the wind you control. You’re used to everything bending to you,” she says. “But you aren’t careful. There is a time for action and a time for patience.”
Vihar sneers, cold, calculating. “Let’s see how careful you are after I destroy youandyour garden.”
He lifts both arms—and the wind howls. It tears across the grove like an invisible beast, shredding leaves, snapping vinesoff their trellises. One blast shatters a large glass pane in the greenhouse. Another sends a raised bed crashing sideways.
The glass.
A cruel gust sends the broken shards slicing through the air, hurling them around like wild knives, uncontrolled and indiscriminate.
Beatrice barely has time to react. A wall of stone surges between her and the attack, the wind exploding against it. The glass flings sideways.
And then?—
A scream.
My heart stops.
Because I know, even before I turn to look, who it is.
Amelia.
She was standing near the aqueduct edge. Too close. The wind slammed her against a lattice frame, crumpling her like a broken doll. Shards of glass piercing her body, her limbs flailing at different angles, a sick image of a marionette with strings tangled around her in violence.
Beatrice cries out, running to her. Vihar sees but doesn’t care. His hands rise again, wind already spiraling for another blow.
Time seems to freeze.
And something inside mesnaps.
The broken aqueduct’s runoff swirls around my boots.
I don’t think. The water obeys me before I even tell it to.
It licks upward, coiling into the air like breath made liquid, wrapping my arms in a shimmer that catches the sun and fractures it.
The next strike isn’t wind. It’s water.
The current screams as it moves, a whip of heated water that hisses through the broken grove and slams into Vihar, knocking him off his feet. He catches himself in midair—but I don’t give him time to recover.
I raise my arms, the water following—coiling upward, lashing forward like something hunting.
He throws a gale toward me. I don’t even try to move.
The water swallows it and him completely. It wraps his arms, his chest. Freezing to ice in a single breath.
