“I’m not looking for a new guild.” He tossed the paper on the coffee table and rose to his feet. “I want to give Tori and Sin a tour of the academy.”
“Of course.” Her bright smile returned, a sharp contrast to Aaron’s scowl. “Dinner is at seven, and I also had the chef prepare a light snack.”
She waved to the bar—or maybe it was a sideboard?—where dainty sandwiches, cut into quarters, were heaped on silver platters. I also spotted fruit, little dessert squares, and a covered dish I assumed contained soup, based on the bowls stacked beside it and the steam escaping from beneath the lid.
“I should get back to work myself,” she added. “Ladies, please make yourselves at home. Anything you need, ask Aaron, myself, or any of the house staff.”
As Valerie swept from the room in a swirl of peach fabric and vanilla-rose perfume, Aaron and Kai approached the sideboard thing with a predatory gleam in their eyes. They didn’t seem to notice or care that those little sandwiches were the fanciest things I’d ever seen as they started eating.
Curious, I picked up Aaron’s itinerary and scanned it. Whoa. He hadn’t been kidding about the lack of free time. Interviews, meetings, lunches …
Sin peered over my shoulder. “Aaron, are you teaching this week?”
“Does it say I am?” he asked grumpily as he shoved a sandwich triangle in his mouth. “Then yeah.”
“You’re giving a lecture on”—she squinted—“advanced cognitive visualization on Wednesday afternoon.”
He took the bowl of soup Kai offered him. “I tell them every year I just want to visit and relax.”
Sin and I stared at him, and I figured she was stuck on the same idea as I was: that of rambunctious, troublemaking Aaron as a teacher. I tried to imagine him wearing glasses, which seemed like a prerequisite for anyone giving a lecture with “advanced” in the title.
“What’s cognitive visualization?” I asked.
“It’s an important part of switch training,” he answered, referring to the tools mages used to refine their magic. He blew on a spoonful of soup. “You visualize what you want to do with your magic while making a specific gesture with your switch. It’s about training your brain to associate the simple motion with a complex actualization of your magic.”
My jaw hung open. Maybe it was unfair of me to be so surprised, but “complex actualization” wasn’t part of his everyday vocabulary.
“It’s like muscle memory, but trickier.” He gulped down his soup. “We’ll go to the arenas first so you can see for yourself. At least one class will be working with switches, guaranteed.”
Oozing impatience, he set his bowl on the sideboard and waved at us to follow him. As he vanished through the door, Kai snorted wordlessly and continued eating.
Noticing my worried look, he added, “He’ll wait for us. Come eat.”
I handed the itinerary to Sin and selected a mini sandwich. The white bread was so fluffy it might’ve been a bread-shaped cloud.
“Jeez,” Sin muttered, reading the schedule more carefully. “Olympus, Ursa Major, Tales of Aether, Azalea Inc., MerlinQuest … these are all really famous guilds. Is Aaron interviewing with all of them?”
“Most of them,” Kai said with a shrug. “They’ll make an offer, he’ll politely turn it down, and he’ll disappear into obscurity for another year.”
“Look.” She pointed at the page. “On Boxing Day, he’s supposed to fly to Los Angeles to meet with Maximus Productions about a—”
“I’m not going.” Aaron stuck his head back into the room. “I told Mom I wasn’t leaving the grounds this time. The whole point is to visit with my family, not fly all over the damn planet. Are you slowpokes ready?”
We each stuffed our faces with one more sandwich triangle, then filed after him. As he led the way through the grand castle, I had to admit his childhood home didn’t intimidate me as much as the realization he was being headhunted by famous guilds from across the worldwide mythic community. With so many one-in-a-million opportunities, why had he chosen a small, unknown band of misfits to call his guild?
Chapter Five
The Sinclair Academy split its students’ time across three areas of study—training their magic, training their bodies, and training their minds. The first one was obvious—of course they learned how to wield their elemental powers—but they spent an equal amount of time learning how to weaponize their bodies.
Magery was the most physically demanding class of magic. Intense magic use rapidly exhausted mages, and the only counter was boosting their physical endurance. That’s why Aaron, Kai, and Ezra trained so hard and were so ridiculously fit. And had insane stamina. And were all deliciously hard muscle literally everywhere.
From daily workouts to classes dedicated to fitness and proper diet, the school hammered the lessons in. Other classroom time was devoted to Elementaria theory, technique, and history, as well as a basic but thorough understanding of the other magical classes.
And last but not least: practicing their magic.
I sat against a hard concrete wall, my butt planted on an equally hard concrete floor. Sin and Ezra sat on either side of me. Across the barren arena, ten fifteen-year-old mages waited in a quiet line, watching the small group of adults in the center.
Aaron and Kai stood with a tall older man, his copper hair streaked with silver and his eyes electric blue behind stately wire-rimmed glasses. Tobias Sinclair. Aaron’s father, the headmaster of the academy, and instructor of this class.
As Tobias described something to his students, an assistant passed two simple steel swords to Aaron and Kai. Looked like they’d be giving another demonstration.
“I don’t get it,” I whispered to Ezra. “Why does every class want Aaron and Kai to help with the lesson?”
I could get why Tobias would invite his son to participate, but this was the third time since we’d begun our tour of the academy. At least it would be the last of the day—the small windows, set high up on the walls, glowed orange as the sun sank below the tree line.
“They’re academy legends,” Ezra murmured. “Best of their year, and among the most talented alumni to ever graduate.”
I scrunched my nose. “Are they really that good?”
“They were the first mages you saw in combat, so your perspective is skewed. Yes, they’re that good. Watch this.”
Tobias finished his explanation and gestured to his assistant, a middle-aged woman with her brown hair pulled into a sleek ponytail. She gathered five plain ceramic discs from a bin beside her. As Aaron and Kai moved to opposite ends of the room, the assistant tossed the first disc into the open space between them. As it fell, she flicked the narrow silver stick she held in her other hand.
The disc stopped mid-fall, hovering three feet above the floor.
Ezra sighed. “I’ve never been able to do that. I can’t make the air dense enough.”
Oh, so the assistant was an aeromage? Interesting. She threw the next four discs and, with the same flick of her wand-like switch, caught each one in the air until all five floated motionlessly above the floor between Aaron and Kai.