But we did scrape together good enough reasons to say yes to Jowani, and when we got to our table, Aadhya pulled him aside and asked him, and after that all three of our alliances were firmed up, and everyone agreed we’d go for the first run the very next morning. Even Orion. He was clearly not even bothering to think up any kind of plan for getting to the doors beyond Kill things until there aren’t any more, but he overheard us discussing the merits or lack thereof for going first thing, and how we’d have to keep a sharp eye out for any real maleficaria that had crept into the gym overnight and hidden in the course. At which he perked up and said, “Oh hey, do you mind if I come down with you?” It will shock you to hear that nobody minded.
So we all trooped down after breakfast the next morning. I hadn’t been back to the gym myself since Field Day. I was braced, but not enough. The place had got even worse. Some birdwitted freshmen—it could only have been freshmen—had replanted the big planters along the walls with seeds out of the alchemy supplies, and the spell machinery had worked them in, currently as hedges, so now you couldn’t even tell where the walls met the floor, and it was an even more perfect illusion of being outdoors. The big trees in the distance had let their leaves fall, and there was a feathery dusting of snow on their wet dark branches, broken by the occasional red huddle of a tiny bird, and every delicate blade of the grass underfoot was crisp with frost. Our breath fogged.
“What,” Jowani said, and stopped there, which actually did pretty well to encapsulate all our feelings, I think.
Well, not all our feelings. “It’s so nice, El,” Orion said to me, almost dreamily, arms outstretched and his face turned up to the artful flurry that the sky allowed to fall to greet us. “I can’t even tell we’re not outside.” I think he meant to be complimentary.
You could pick out the boundaries of the obstacle course with a good squint: there was a low wooden fence running down the halfway mark dividing the obstacle-course area off from the rest of the gym. But apart from that, the illusion artifice had integrated the obstacles fully into the environment: bristling thornbushes, trees with grabby-looking limbs, a steep hill covered with snow; a thin grey fog lying over a wide black slick of icy river ready to break into jagged shards and an ominous handful of ways to cross: a thin rickety board, a scattering of slippery rocks poking up above the ice, a healthier-looking narrow stone bridge that was undoubtedly the most dangerous option. If you looked up at the inside of the gym doors, they seemed to be two enormous iron gates set in the wall of a mysterious and alluring stone tower.
We’d already started wrong. The best way to use the obstacle course is to just throw yourself at it instantly, the first time you see it, without taking time to look it over. After you come out bruised and limping—assuming you do come out—that’s when you go over all the things you did wrong, and try new things the rest of the week, and then the new course comes out on Monday and you do it all over again. And if you’re lucky, every week you get better at doing it the first time, with no planning. You don’t get any planning time at graduation. But in our defense: What.
“Let’s get going before the next teams show up,” I said. Then I realized that everyone else was waiting for me, which was both obvious and terrifying. I stared out at the perfectly lovely expanse of winter-touched wilderness. Any mals out there were in hiding, except for the faint dancing lights visible on the other side of the river, glowing in colors through the fog, exactly as if will-o’-wisps had moved in to take up residence, only those are largely decorative constructs and not much use for the purposes of practice. They might have been some variety of soul-eater, but real soul-eaters that close to one another would have merged into one very hungry soul-eater, so a pack of them wasn’t much use for practice, either. But that would be useless in a more dangerous and unpleasant direction, and therefore more likely. The fake mals the course produces are very much like the ones that get put on display in Maleficaria Studies—just because they’re not real doesn’t mean they can’t kill you, and sometimes the real ones sneak in and pretend to be fake just long enough to get hold of you. But we weren’t doing ourselves any favors by waiting to find out which these were. I took a deep breath, nodded to Liu, who started playing the lute, and I sang out the mana-amplification spell in a slightly squeaky voice and ran straight in.
The snow burst open all around us before we were more than a stride away from the doors, jagged scything blades curving out with the tips lunging for our guts, and after that I couldn’t tell you what order any of it came in. We had to cross the river both ways, both going and coming, but I don’t remember whether I turned it to lava on the way out or the way back. We didn’t actually make contact with the wall, since the gym illusion was trying very hard to convince us there wasn’t one: when we got close, a sudden blizzard came howling into our faces with quavery ghost voices, telling us to turn back.