Autumn Rose

I thought fast and scanned the sheet. ‘Disease imagery.’ My pen hovered above the paper. ‘There.’

‘I don’t need help,’ she insisted, despite her blank-looking page.

My eyebrows lowered a fraction. ‘He said analyze in pairs.’

She bowed her head and hid behind a curtain of hair and began scribbling across the page.

So she’s not going to share, then? Fine.

I adopted the same tactic.

She said very little once we had finished with the soliloquies, only answering questions when she was picked on. As the bell sounded, she repeated her ritual of slowly, even sluggishly, packing her bag, as though very tired – or in the hope I would leave before her. But I did not leave (I did not fancy throwing myself to the hordes), hovering beside the door as Mr. Sylaeia called her over to his desk. She dragged her feet, hand clutched so tightly around the strap of her bag that her knuckles whitened. She seemed to know what was coming.

‘Precocious. Presumptuous. Insulting.’ He handed her back what looked like an essay. Her head drooped. ‘Not to mention the fact it was far below your usual standard.’ He glanced towards me, still hanging beside the door of the classroom that was now empty except for us. I pretended to become very interested in an explanation of adverbs on the wall. ‘Autumn, I’m disappointed. I’m the one person in this school that can truly understand your predicament – do you really think it is any different amongst the staff? – yet you repay me with such rudeness.’ I raised my eyebrows to the wall, wondering what on earth that essay contained to affect him to such a degree.

‘Sorry, sir,’ I heard her mumble.

‘You will be sorry after a detention on Thursday evening.’

She inhaled sharply and I thought it safe enough to turn back. ‘No, sir, please! I have work that evening and that’s following a twilight textiles lesson anyway.’ Her face was aghast and panicky, her eyes wide and shaped like almonds. I was aghast for a different reason. She has a job?!

‘Then your detention will take place after textiles, and you will have to miss work.’

‘Please, sir, any other evening, lunchtime even. Please, they are already threatening to sack me!’

‘Because of poor attendance?’

Her head drooped again.

‘As I thought. I wonder, Fallon, would you mind staying behind on Thursday, too? There’s a lot of summer work for you to catch up on, and Autumn will very quickly get you up to speed.’

I didn’t answer immediately. She wanted to protest, that much was clear, but her manners prevented her mouth from ruining the perfect straight line her lips created. I felt a tiny pang of resentment – what have I done? – but nodded. ‘Sure.’

That resentment increased a notch when the room went silent as they conversed with their minds, leaving me out. Yet it shattered when I caught a glimpse of her lips quivering as she turned away, her hand rushing to her face.

‘Fallon, would you mind stepping out of the room for a moment, please?’

I didn’t want to. But then I remembered the pained expression she had worn when holding the sword to my neck. I did as I was told.

Outside the door, which slammed on its self-closing hinge, I tried to demystify what had happened that morning. Yet the deeper I dug, the less it seemed to make sense. We had been friends as children! We played kiss chase and staged play weddings and bossed each other about. Now it seemed like she hated me?

A few minutes later, the door opened and a blonde blur passed without pausing. She had already shot past before I had prised myself away from the wall I was leaning on. I hurried after her down the stairs. She glanced back towards me and her pace doubled, as she half-jumped the remaining steps.

‘Autumn!’ She didn’t stop. ‘Autumn, I was just wondering if you want a lift home on Thursday? It’ll be late—’

I never got to finish my sentence as she whirled around, mouth agape; lips rolled back slightly; red, puffy eyes narrowed so that they slanted. She didn’t say a word, but her expression said more than words could. She remained like that for a few seconds before she turned back around and left; her movements slow and sluggish once more.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_fdd042c2-f8cb-59e8-92e3-00fa199d9045)

Autumn (#ulink_fdd042c2-f8cb-59e8-92e3-00fa199d9045)

How all occasions do inform against me indeed.

Fallon appeared in my history class. The whole A2 class appeared in my history class. The explanation was simple: the usual history teacher was off on maternity leave, and the current unit for our class and the A2 class was Sagean history, so Mr. Sylaeia would teach both classes together in addition to English. I knew that my look when he entered the room was one of stewed fury and betrayal, firm in the belief that he could not have thought of a crueller punishment than detention with the prince. When the latter entered I urged Christy and Tammy to sit either side of me, walling me in. They didn’t seem too pleased that we had used up all the seats in our row, leaving no room for the prince, but it didn’t matter. He chose to sit on the other side of the room, squeezing in at the far corner of a desk with some of the other A2 students. I was surprised, but relieved. Yet the horseshoe arrangement of the desks still meant that we faced him. I inched my chair around to the left, to face the board.

It would be an understatement to say that Sagean history was not a popular topic. A groan circulated the room when it was announced and I felt my cheeks flare up in shame. Even the prince’s cheeks tinted pink. He hid it well, resting his head in his hands, his elbows on the desk.

My eyes bounced back towards the desk, cursing myself for looking. There they rested until a textbook arrived. I flicked it open, finding paragraphs dedicated to customs that were second nature to me, yet so alien to those around the room. I closed it, knowing that as a child, I had studied books at my previous school that mirrored these in every way, except that they were about humanity. Looking up, the Prince caught my eye, a grin on his lips as his eyes darted down to the book and back up. He thought it amusing. I thought it a tragedy.

Mr. Sylaeia started with the same rhetoric about the prince as he had used in registration, and when he talked about the Extermino, he was greeted with the same fearful silence … and my heart went just as cold.

Mr. Sylaeia wrote three words on the board: ‘The Dark-Beings’. ‘I know you all hate this topic, but it’s compulsory! So let’s start with something simple. Can anybody explain a little about the dimensions, and name the nine different types of dark-beings and the powers they possess?’ Mr. Sylaeia asked.

Even though everybody had to know the answer, nobody spoke up until tentatively, I lifted my hand.

‘There are nine dimensions, and humans in every one. Each dimension is a rough parallel of the rest. We all share a cultural memory, because whatever happens to the humans in one dimension happens in another, because the nine parallels of a country are one state, not nine different states. The humans and dark-beings co-operate through the Inter-Dimensional council …’

I trailed off to seek approval from Mr. Sylaeia, unsure whether I was explaining it clearly. Even though I was trying to ignore him, I glanced back to the prince, suddenly embarrassed that I was explaining something he probably understood better than me.

Mr. Sylaeia nodded for me to continue.

‘We live in the first dimension, and it is the domain of the Sage. There isn’t a hierarchy amongst the beings, but we have the strongest, most versatile magic. There isn’t much we can’t do, so long as it doesn’t drain nature too much, which is where we take our magic from if we need more than what is in our blood. We’re ruled by … by the Athenea, from a small country of the same name, at the northern end of Vancouver Island.’

Now I really was blushing. He should be explaining this!

‘Then there are the vampires in the second dimension, ruled by the Varns in England. And yes, they are the ones who kidnapped Violet Lee. The vampires rely on consuming blood for energy and to top up their magic, which is what keeps them alive. The Damned in the third dimension are magic users too, but they have to make a blood sacrifice to use it … but by returning blood to the earth, they can use very powerful magic.’

Finally, the prince chipped in. ‘The fourth dimension is host to the shifters, who can shift between their human forms and spirit animals. They look a lot like ghosts when they do, and they live mostly in the mountains of central Asia … before they revealed themselves a few centuries ago, people used to think they were demons.’ His eyes lit up as people turned their attention to him and his more exciting explanation.

‘The fifth and sixth dimensions are very similar, because more forests have been preserved compared to here. That’s where the winged people and the elven fae live … they are both very beautiful beings, and nomadic. They don’t have a monarchy, and they don’t use modern technology. They are so at one with nature they don’t need it.’

‘The wolves in the seventh dimension can transform into human-like creatures at will, and the maengu in the eighth are water creatures, who can also transform to come onto land. And then in the ninth … well, we call them the phoenixes, and they can only take on a human form for one month in every nine.’

He left it at that.

Like actors in a play, the prince and I only spoke when directed by Mr. Sylaeia. The rest of the class was infuriatingly silent. They knew nothing, even when Mr. Sylaeia asked them for the basics that would have been obvious to any human elsewhere.

Eventually, he gave up, turning to me, his tone much softened now. ‘The fas, or basic principles, if you will, Autumn.’

‘The wielding of energy, preservation of the balance of nature, courtesy in respect to rank, loyalty to Athenea, and strict adherence to the Terra Treaties.’

Though Sagean was a tongue stifled beneath the other, it still felt strange to speak those words in English, when I had repeated them as a mantra in my native language as a child. They did not belong in this language. This tongue could not convey the beauty and binding power of those words.

Mr. Sylaeia pulled out the board marker that lived in his shirt pocket, scribbling out each of the fas. ‘The first four are quite self-explanatory: magic; a respect for nature, especially concerning diet and more recently, climate change; etiquette; and loyalty to the Sagean royalty. Does anybody know what the Terra Treaties are?’

I could see Fallon perk up, gazing around the room as his eyes became wider and wider. His lips parted.

‘Nobody?’ Mr. Sylaeia clicked the lid of his pen shut with the palm of his hand. ‘Nobody at all?’