academy of cards (preview)
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Lito ran, footsteps crunching on white sand, breath pounding in and out of his chest. “Breathe the wave like it’s your breath,” he panted to the rhythm of his footsteps. “Feel the wave like it’s your skin.”
To his right the ocean roared, another massive wave breaking against hidden shoals. “Hear the wave like it’s your voice,” he recited, trying to call his master’s stern gaze into his mind. To marshal the concentration running always brought. “Taste it like it’s your tongue.”
He pulled a card from his bag as he ran. It was blank, but that was the whole point. He needed to fill it with one of these waves. With the essence of the waves.
“See it like it is your eyes,” he chanted, pulling the worn paintbrush from his leather kit, footsteps slowing. He dipped it in the surf, then rubbed it against his inkstone. “Capture it like it is already yours.”
Lito put the brush to page, heart still hammering, letting his hands take over. This was the easy part—painting was like breathing, and always had been.
It was getting the painting to come alive that felt hard.
He exhaled hard, seeing the wave take shape on the card. Not today. Feel the water like it is your skin. Paint cut across the rough paper, bluish-black strokes tracing the curl of the incoming breaker, ink bleeding down the crest, quick lines tracing the energy roiling up its long spine.
Something tingled, like a silk moth brushing his wrist, and Lito caught his breath. This was it. Finally. He painted faster, fleshing in the outlines, tracing the swelling trough as this wave broke and the next formed behind the shoals. It didn’t matter—he wasn’t here to paint a singular wave. He was here to catch the essence of every wave that broke on this beach. To become their summoner. Their master.
Sparks tingled up his arm, like new circulation through the limb. Taste it like it’s your tongue. See it like it is your eyes. Yes. It was happening.
He ran his brush once over the horizon, tying the painting together, hardly seeing what he was doing as he focused inside. Feeling for that connection.
“Capture it,” he whispered, sparks curling up his neck, “like it is already yours. Because it is!”
He dropped the brush and looked up, pulling through the connection. Demanding the wave become his own.
The tingle faded. The wave broke. And whatever that tickle had been, that brush with the power he so desperately needed, it disappeared.
Like it always did.
“Fuck,” he cursed, looking down at the cardstock in his hand. Still just a painting. Even after everything he’d done. An expensive painting, with this quality of cardstock, and tuition was coming due. If he could just summon, just one tiny wave, even a ripple, the school would take his bills over.
If he couldn’t, he would leave the academy a pauper, not to mention the political amnesty that had kept him alive this long.
Worst of all, though, he would leave a failure.
“No,” he whispered, rejecting the fears like he had so many times. Centering his breath. Renewing his intention. He let the card fall to the sand, the fifth today. Headmaster Sadaru had recommended the running, to focus him internally. His legs were exhausted from running all morning in the deep sand, but he set his feet again, not ready to give up. Never ready. “Hear the water like it’s your voice,” he said, replacing his brush and checking the cardstock in his kit. “Taste it like it’s—”
Tinkling laughter cut through the roar of surf, and he slowed. It wasn’t so unusual for other students to be out here—a lot of summoners tried to capture the island’s famous breakers—but he knew that laugh.
His stomach twisted. Saika.
He turned and saw her stumble past the edge of the forest, still laughing, pulling someone along by the wrist. One of her friends—Keila or Tamani, maybe? They’d both come as modesty chaperones on his string of dates with Saika, though her friends changed so quickly he wouldn’t be surprised if--
A beefy boy stumbled out after her, grinning, his eyes glazed, hand caught in hers.
Nope. Not a friend. Lito’s stomach tightened. It’d been two months since Saika had been anything more than a friend to him, either—two months since they’d talked, really. Which was fine. Obaa never liked her anyway.
Saika saw him a moment later, ever the observant one. “Lito,” she said, some of the humor dropping from her voice. “What are you doing out here?”
The boy’s grin just widened. “Painting his pretty pictures, probably. Summon anything yet, Lito?” he called, as if they were too far away to hear the first part. As if Lito didn’t already know the whole school laughed at him because, for all his skill at painting, he couldn’t capture what most students managed in their first semester.
So much potential, they had said at the beginning. So little skill, they added now.
“Close,” he said, owning the insult like he had learned to, living under five older brothers. “Saika. Good to see you.”
“Totally,” she said. “You know Jiime?” She flashed a half-smile as if to say you knew this was coming, right? And he had, it just—wasn’t going to make concentrating any easier.
“Jiime. We had Nomenclature together last year, right?” He was being polite. Better that than slog this guy in the face.
“Think so. With your master, right? Heard from him lately?”
“He’s at the front.” Easier to say than no, that the one master at the school who believed in him—who’d paid his tuition, after the scholarship ran out—was gone, with no word since.
Jiime smirked, as if that said it all. “C’mon, Saika. Want to fume another bee?”
Lito bit back jealous words at that. A lot of summoners used their subjects to boost their mood, or outright get high, by consuming their vital energy. It was one of the only fun things to do, on an island that held just the academy and one small village.
It was just a thing he’d never been able to do. Which meant there was nothing he could say here, nothing he could do, that wouldn’t just make him look stupid.
Including punching Jiime in the face.
“Sure,” she said, and glanced his way. “See you round, Li—”
Her voice trailed off, and Lito frowned. Say what you would about Saika, she wasn’t one to lose her train of thought. He turned, following her eyes to the water, where a wave was just breaking into white surf.
Something was in the surf—a black stone, where none had been before. A stone that was getting bigger--
“What the fuck?” Jiime said.
No, not a stone—a sodden black cowl, thrown over a head. Two more emerged pushed from the waves behind it.
Lito’s stomach clenched. Summoners. Sealembs fell from the first one’s mouth and nose, revealing thin lips and a full beard. Summoners powerful enough to call the oxygen-filtering deep sea creatures to their will.
What did they want here? His gut twisted. Had his brother finally sent assassins, despite the academy’s protection?
A wolf rose from the waves next to the head man, sealemb falling from its snout. Whatever they wanted, it wasn’t peaceful. And there was also no point in running, if they had wolves with them. Especially if they were here for him.
“Fuck,” Jiime said again behind him. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
“It’s all right,” Lito called, holding up a hand, all rivalry forgotten. He had been trained in talking down people who intended violence. He’d been trained in countering it, too, if it came to that. Though he’d be no match for mages able to summon wolves. Volicists.
He set his feet in the sand. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
The mage in front looked up, and Lito felt his gaze despite the cowl’s shadow. The man didn’t slow, nor did the other figures rising from the waves behind him—five in all, a fresh wave breaking around them like they were boulders rather than men.
He didn’t answer, either, just kept striding from the waves. Crows circled in the air above—one of them was likely a lexcast, too.
“What do you want with us?” he called again, as the lead summoner stepped onto dry sand. Behind him, Jiime’s curses had become a kind of mantra, and he could hear Saika’s fast, shallow breathing.
That’s right—she didn’t do well in duels, because her nerves always got to her. My attacks, she called them.
But Jiime! He was a swarmcast, able to summon bees. Not a match for wolves by themselves, but a swarm could be a deadly force indeed. And what was Master Linzi always saying? It’s not about what you control, but how you control it.
“Jiime!” he called, glancing to his right. “Call your bees! Maybe we can distract them! Get Saika to safety!”
Jiime didn’t seem to hear—he was still staring at the mages, face pale as a novice who’d just taken his first punch. He wasn’t going to be any help.
Lito exhaled deeply, slipping the stone bracelets from his wrists and catching them in his hands. Fine. There was more than one way to stop a mage, even if you didn’t have cards at your disposal.
“What do you want with this island,” Lito tried one last time, wrapping the heavy bracelets around his fists in a practiced motion. Moving his weight to the balls of his feet like he had so many times, when it had been cold stone instead of sand under them. “We mean you no harm, but I will not let you hurt my friends.”
Jiime goggled at him, this of all things seeming to break through his fear. He grabbed Saika and ran for the trees.
Good. He was a coward, but good. Maybe Lito could buy them enough time to get away. To get help.
And to save them from dying, if these men were here for him.
The lead figure held up a hand, and for a moment Lito thought it might not actually come to blows. He turned, gesturing to one of the figures behind, who swept its head from left to right, like it was searching the beach for something.
The sunlight caught in its cowl as it did, and Lito sucked in a breath. He knew that face. “Master Linzi?”
The figure only shook its head, and the lead mage scowled. “Keep looking. And get rid of him,” he said, nodding at Lito.
Lito ran, but not toward the trees. This, too, had been drilled into him over long years: do not wait for the enemy to engage. Meet them on your own terms.
And if you are to die, do it on your feet.
The wolf lunged out of the waves, snarling. Lito leapt over its back, landing on one foot in the wet sand and pivoting, channeling his momentum into his left hand, swinging it at the mage’s skull.
It was like punching solid rock. His fist stopped on impact, one of the stones shattering, the sudden lurch causing him to stumble in the surf.
The mage brushed at him casually, like one would shoo a fly.
Lito tumbled backward in air, chest screaming, as though struck by a hundred fists. His face scraped sand, then momentum flipped him over to land painfully on his back.
He struggled up. This, too, he had trained for a million times. To embrace the pain. To get up, even if you felt broken. To find what advantages you had and use them, even if you were losing. Even if the next breath might bring your death. Face it on your feet.
He got his legs under him, clutching his weighted bracelets despite a spear of pain in his left hand, ready to fend off wolf or mage or some new summoned creature. Instead, he found the lead mage sniffing, water rushing around his ankles, for all the world like he were the wolf instead of its master.
“Miasmacast,” he said, then louder, “Let’s go! It’s not here. Quickly!” He waved at the men behind him. A card glowed and sealembs appeared, rising from the waves.
“And you,” the head mage said, levelling a finger at Lito. “You will say nothing of this, you understand? I could kill you where you stand, and I could kill you from a thousand miles away. But you have pluck, so you might be useful. If a wolf calls, you answer, got it? Answer or get hunted down.”
He turned on the last word, grabbing a sealemb from the waves and following the other mages down. His wolf did the same, moving with the unnatural intelligence of an animal bonded to a human mind. In a few seconds they were gone, a breaking wave swallowing their cowls and leaving nothing but white foam.
To his right the ocean roared, another massive wave breaking against hidden shoals. “Hear the wave like it’s your voice,” he recited, trying to call his master’s stern gaze into his mind. To marshal the concentration running always brought. “Taste it like it’s your tongue.”
He pulled a card from his bag as he ran. It was blank, but that was the whole point. He needed to fill it with one of these waves. With the essence of the waves.
“See it like it is your eyes,” he chanted, pulling the worn paintbrush from his leather kit, footsteps slowing. He dipped it in the surf, then rubbed it against his inkstone. “Capture it like it is already yours.”
Lito put the brush to page, heart still hammering, letting his hands take over. This was the easy part—painting was like breathing, and always had been.
It was getting the painting to come alive that felt hard.
He exhaled hard, seeing the wave take shape on the card. Not today. Feel the water like it is your skin. Paint cut across the rough paper, bluish-black strokes tracing the curl of the incoming breaker, ink bleeding down the crest, quick lines tracing the energy roiling up its long spine.
Something tingled, like a silk moth brushing his wrist, and Lito caught his breath. This was it. Finally. He painted faster, fleshing in the outlines, tracing the swelling trough as this wave broke and the next formed behind the shoals. It didn’t matter—he wasn’t here to paint a singular wave. He was here to catch the essence of every wave that broke on this beach. To become their summoner. Their master.
Sparks tingled up his arm, like new circulation through the limb. Taste it like it’s your tongue. See it like it is your eyes. Yes. It was happening.
He ran his brush once over the horizon, tying the painting together, hardly seeing what he was doing as he focused inside. Feeling for that connection.
“Capture it,” he whispered, sparks curling up his neck, “like it is already yours. Because it is!”
He dropped the brush and looked up, pulling through the connection. Demanding the wave become his own.
The tingle faded. The wave broke. And whatever that tickle had been, that brush with the power he so desperately needed, it disappeared.
Like it always did.
“Fuck,” he cursed, looking down at the cardstock in his hand. Still just a painting. Even after everything he’d done. An expensive painting, with this quality of cardstock, and tuition was coming due. If he could just summon, just one tiny wave, even a ripple, the school would take his bills over.
If he couldn’t, he would leave the academy a pauper, not to mention the political amnesty that had kept him alive this long.
Worst of all, though, he would leave a failure.
“No,” he whispered, rejecting the fears like he had so many times. Centering his breath. Renewing his intention. He let the card fall to the sand, the fifth today. Headmaster Sadaru had recommended the running, to focus him internally. His legs were exhausted from running all morning in the deep sand, but he set his feet again, not ready to give up. Never ready. “Hear the water like it’s your voice,” he said, replacing his brush and checking the cardstock in his kit. “Taste it like it’s—”
Tinkling laughter cut through the roar of surf, and he slowed. It wasn’t so unusual for other students to be out here—a lot of summoners tried to capture the island’s famous breakers—but he knew that laugh.
His stomach twisted. Saika.
He turned and saw her stumble past the edge of the forest, still laughing, pulling someone along by the wrist. One of her friends—Keila or Tamani, maybe? They’d both come as modesty chaperones on his string of dates with Saika, though her friends changed so quickly he wouldn’t be surprised if--
A beefy boy stumbled out after her, grinning, his eyes glazed, hand caught in hers.
Nope. Not a friend. Lito’s stomach tightened. It’d been two months since Saika had been anything more than a friend to him, either—two months since they’d talked, really. Which was fine. Obaa never liked her anyway.
Saika saw him a moment later, ever the observant one. “Lito,” she said, some of the humor dropping from her voice. “What are you doing out here?”
The boy’s grin just widened. “Painting his pretty pictures, probably. Summon anything yet, Lito?” he called, as if they were too far away to hear the first part. As if Lito didn’t already know the whole school laughed at him because, for all his skill at painting, he couldn’t capture what most students managed in their first semester.
So much potential, they had said at the beginning. So little skill, they added now.
“Close,” he said, owning the insult like he had learned to, living under five older brothers. “Saika. Good to see you.”
“Totally,” she said. “You know Jiime?” She flashed a half-smile as if to say you knew this was coming, right? And he had, it just—wasn’t going to make concentrating any easier.
“Jiime. We had Nomenclature together last year, right?” He was being polite. Better that than slog this guy in the face.
“Think so. With your master, right? Heard from him lately?”
“He’s at the front.” Easier to say than no, that the one master at the school who believed in him—who’d paid his tuition, after the scholarship ran out—was gone, with no word since.
Jiime smirked, as if that said it all. “C’mon, Saika. Want to fume another bee?”
Lito bit back jealous words at that. A lot of summoners used their subjects to boost their mood, or outright get high, by consuming their vital energy. It was one of the only fun things to do, on an island that held just the academy and one small village.
It was just a thing he’d never been able to do. Which meant there was nothing he could say here, nothing he could do, that wouldn’t just make him look stupid.
Including punching Jiime in the face.
“Sure,” she said, and glanced his way. “See you round, Li—”
Her voice trailed off, and Lito frowned. Say what you would about Saika, she wasn’t one to lose her train of thought. He turned, following her eyes to the water, where a wave was just breaking into white surf.
Something was in the surf—a black stone, where none had been before. A stone that was getting bigger--
“What the fuck?” Jiime said.
No, not a stone—a sodden black cowl, thrown over a head. Two more emerged pushed from the waves behind it.
Lito’s stomach clenched. Summoners. Sealembs fell from the first one’s mouth and nose, revealing thin lips and a full beard. Summoners powerful enough to call the oxygen-filtering deep sea creatures to their will.
What did they want here? His gut twisted. Had his brother finally sent assassins, despite the academy’s protection?
A wolf rose from the waves next to the head man, sealemb falling from its snout. Whatever they wanted, it wasn’t peaceful. And there was also no point in running, if they had wolves with them. Especially if they were here for him.
“Fuck,” Jiime said again behind him. “Fuck fuck fuck.”
“It’s all right,” Lito called, holding up a hand, all rivalry forgotten. He had been trained in talking down people who intended violence. He’d been trained in countering it, too, if it came to that. Though he’d be no match for mages able to summon wolves. Volicists.
He set his feet in the sand. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
The mage in front looked up, and Lito felt his gaze despite the cowl’s shadow. The man didn’t slow, nor did the other figures rising from the waves behind him—five in all, a fresh wave breaking around them like they were boulders rather than men.
He didn’t answer, either, just kept striding from the waves. Crows circled in the air above—one of them was likely a lexcast, too.
“What do you want with us?” he called again, as the lead summoner stepped onto dry sand. Behind him, Jiime’s curses had become a kind of mantra, and he could hear Saika’s fast, shallow breathing.
That’s right—she didn’t do well in duels, because her nerves always got to her. My attacks, she called them.
But Jiime! He was a swarmcast, able to summon bees. Not a match for wolves by themselves, but a swarm could be a deadly force indeed. And what was Master Linzi always saying? It’s not about what you control, but how you control it.
“Jiime!” he called, glancing to his right. “Call your bees! Maybe we can distract them! Get Saika to safety!”
Jiime didn’t seem to hear—he was still staring at the mages, face pale as a novice who’d just taken his first punch. He wasn’t going to be any help.
Lito exhaled deeply, slipping the stone bracelets from his wrists and catching them in his hands. Fine. There was more than one way to stop a mage, even if you didn’t have cards at your disposal.
“What do you want with this island,” Lito tried one last time, wrapping the heavy bracelets around his fists in a practiced motion. Moving his weight to the balls of his feet like he had so many times, when it had been cold stone instead of sand under them. “We mean you no harm, but I will not let you hurt my friends.”
Jiime goggled at him, this of all things seeming to break through his fear. He grabbed Saika and ran for the trees.
Good. He was a coward, but good. Maybe Lito could buy them enough time to get away. To get help.
And to save them from dying, if these men were here for him.
The lead figure held up a hand, and for a moment Lito thought it might not actually come to blows. He turned, gesturing to one of the figures behind, who swept its head from left to right, like it was searching the beach for something.
The sunlight caught in its cowl as it did, and Lito sucked in a breath. He knew that face. “Master Linzi?”
The figure only shook its head, and the lead mage scowled. “Keep looking. And get rid of him,” he said, nodding at Lito.
Lito ran, but not toward the trees. This, too, had been drilled into him over long years: do not wait for the enemy to engage. Meet them on your own terms.
And if you are to die, do it on your feet.
The wolf lunged out of the waves, snarling. Lito leapt over its back, landing on one foot in the wet sand and pivoting, channeling his momentum into his left hand, swinging it at the mage’s skull.
It was like punching solid rock. His fist stopped on impact, one of the stones shattering, the sudden lurch causing him to stumble in the surf.
The mage brushed at him casually, like one would shoo a fly.
Lito tumbled backward in air, chest screaming, as though struck by a hundred fists. His face scraped sand, then momentum flipped him over to land painfully on his back.
He struggled up. This, too, he had trained for a million times. To embrace the pain. To get up, even if you felt broken. To find what advantages you had and use them, even if you were losing. Even if the next breath might bring your death. Face it on your feet.
He got his legs under him, clutching his weighted bracelets despite a spear of pain in his left hand, ready to fend off wolf or mage or some new summoned creature. Instead, he found the lead mage sniffing, water rushing around his ankles, for all the world like he were the wolf instead of its master.
“Miasmacast,” he said, then louder, “Let’s go! It’s not here. Quickly!” He waved at the men behind him. A card glowed and sealembs appeared, rising from the waves.
“And you,” the head mage said, levelling a finger at Lito. “You will say nothing of this, you understand? I could kill you where you stand, and I could kill you from a thousand miles away. But you have pluck, so you might be useful. If a wolf calls, you answer, got it? Answer or get hunted down.”
He turned on the last word, grabbing a sealemb from the waves and following the other mages down. His wolf did the same, moving with the unnatural intelligence of an animal bonded to a human mind. In a few seconds they were gone, a breaking wave swallowing their cowls and leaving nothing but white foam.