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Billie

Everything changed the next week and the only notice I had was the schedule that I kept on my desk rearranging itself. All classes were canceled and the words “Scrimmage Days” were written across the whole week. There was a small note to wear athletic clothing instead of robes and uniforms.

At first, I thought it was going to be some kind of sports day or spirit week, but I was wrong. There were no balls or equipment, no real rules, nobody tried out, and nobody sat on the bench by choice. Something that was made painfully clear to me when I showed up on the first day fully prepared to sit out and denied.

“But I have no Order, no control. What if I hurt someone?” I demanded of the instructor who was standing at the edge of the field.

“Don’t use your power and you won’t. No one sits out. End of discussion,” he said before shoving a scrap of green and white striped fabric at my chest and walking away like I’d just insulted his mother. It was a fake jersey and I realized that it was being used to denote one team from the other.

As I tugged the jersey on over my t-shirt and leggings I put together that a scrimmage was the academy’s word for a combat exercise run at the scale of a field. We had been split into two sides, stripes and solids, and were facing off against each other across the grass field behind the training yards. The idea was, apparently, to throw applied power at each other under live pressure. The instructors were spaced along the edges of the field, most of them standing like sentries with their hands behind their backs as they watched but said nothing and missed nothing.

What I realized as we all got into position was that it was the same as the assessment gallery but moved outdoors, where they got to see what a person actually did when something was coming at their face and there was no time left to perform.

As my side prepared for the match I was slowly and carefully shuffled to the left edge at the back. It was intentional, I realized, as other students glanced at me and moved to stand between me and the other side, forcing me back, where I could do the least damage to anybody’s afternoon. Nobody said it aloud and nobody looked at me for more than a second. The line of students simply assembled itself in front of me, and I ended up on the outside of it with a hundred yards of grass and mud between me and anything that mattered.

When I looked along the line I realized that Kit and Linden were both wearing striped jerseys, which was a relief. I knew even if things were rocky between us at the moment they wouldn’t let anything happen to me.

“Ready! Set! Cast!” One of the instructors called, before blowing a whistle and waving a magical flag in the air over the field. The bright light of it dazed me for a moment but the scent of ozone that came off lots of people casting their power all at once filled the air a second later and brought me back to my situation.

I wasn’t in danger since I was so far back, but I also didn’t want to cause any issues, not with how closely I was being monitored and reported on these days. There was nothing else I could do other than stand at the edge with my hands loose at my sides and count the students on the far line.

Kit was out front, because Kit was always out front, fire spilling off his hands in the long gold arcs he loved a little too much. He fought the way he did everything, which was beautifully and with about a third of himself kept back. He never threw the last of it, not in the yard and not in the drills, not ever. And then a Ward that had advanced on our side became his target. The Ward threw up a shield, bright blue and glittering in the light, and Kit’s strike lashed at it and scattered, wild tendrils of flame spitting sideways and back down the field toward our own line, toward the others in front of me, toward me.

I had my hands up before I’d decided to.

The channel or whatever it was that was in me caught it, and not because I touched it or him.

Without thinking I’d reached for the flavor of Kit’s magic, one I had become very familiar with over the last few weeks, and had caught it from a distance. The distance was the important part, because it was the longest distance I’d ever managed. The catching itself I’d been doing since the gallery, since Vivienne and her Force strike that I turned green. That had been right in front of me though, and Kit’s flames were still a good distance away.

The prickling sensation came up from my palms the same way it always did but stronger, and the scatter of flame seemed to fold back into a line and loop around to go where Kit had originally intended it to. His power ran through me across all that mud, hot and alive and in a hurry and so very Kit. It was his and then mine and then his again. Then it was gone and I was standing on the edge of a field with my hands out in front of me and no idea what I’d just done.

Kit’s head came round and his gaze locked onto me across the line of other students and I saw him say my name. “Billie.” That was all, just my name, and then a short disbelieving bark of a laugh I heard over everything else on that field.

“Again,” Linden said.

He’d come up next to me without me hearing him, the way he always did. The next strike Kit threw wide on purpose, so wide it was practically a question, and the spill came back down the line at me and I folded it and I sent it back to him.

“Again.”

The third lash of fire I caught before it had properly finished splitting around the Ward’s shield, and that was when the two of them rearranged the entire afternoon around me without saying more than nine words to each other.

Kit began to move forward. All the way forward, past our line and further out than anyone else was positioned, and he stopped keeping the third of himself in reserve, because the reason he’d kept it in reserve was no longer valid. At least, not with me standing behind him with my power doing its thing. He went from fighting carefully to simply fighting, and the far side gave ground without being told to.

I glanced to my side and saw that Linden had gone nowhere at all. He put himself square in front of me with his feet planted in the muddy ground and stayed there.

“Stay behind me,” he growled and for a split second I wondered if the wolf would make an appearance, but then I realized that Linden probably had far more control than to let something like that happen.

“I can move.”

“Don’t. Please.”

So I didn’t.

I stood just behind his shoulder with chaos out in front of us, catching what Kit spilled and sending it back in what was starting to feel like a never ending loop between the two of us. Suddenly I understood on a visceral level why there couldn’t be just two people in a bond. The powers would just loop and amplify each other until there was no way to control them. I could feel myself starting to amplify Kit’s power as I gave it back to him and had no idea how to stop it.

Linden took everything that came within range of me and didn’t once move his feet.

The other side came for me soon enough, because Kit being out front throwing everything he had was a problem the far side could only solve by going after whatever was making him brave, and it didn’t take them long to work out that it was me.