Page 4 of A Door in the Dark

The steadiness of her voice acted as a salve. She saw the tension riding her mother’s shoulders shake loose. She turned back around, fussing over her cup of tea. Ren needed to go. She wanted to have at least an hour to go over her notes on House Shiverian and their various business concerns, but she hated the idea of leaving her mother here in the lonely morning light. It helped to remember she’d be returning with Timmons for break in a few days.

“Why were you sleeping in my room?”

Her mother glanced back. “I don’t know.” The two of them looked at each other, quiet for a moment. Then her mother spoke the begrudging truth. “There’s less of his ghost in there, I guess.”

In the first few years after his death, Ren would have walked over and cupped her mother’s face. She would have pulled her close and whispered what her mother had always whispered to her when she’d had nightmares as a child. No darkness lasts for long. But now they stood ten years in the shadow of Roland Monroe’s passing. The clouds still hung thick over both of them. Ren knew this darkness would exist until she dragged them out from beneath it.

When her mother turned back to her tea, Ren strode over and wrapped her in a hug from behind. Her mother’s hand settled half on her wrist, half on the iron bracelet that she’d once worn.

“I am a Monroe,” Ren whispered her father’s words. “And a Monroe stands tall.”

Her mother squeezed her forearm. Ren left her there, sipping tea.

Outside, the city of Kathor was stretching tired limbs, rising to the glittering invitation of another day. It wasn’t until she reached the public waxway portal that she felt sunlight on her neck. Ren savored the warmth before tucking her shirt into her trousers and turning her bracelet over. She traded the plain brown cardigan for a fashionable plaid jacket, then she removed a forest-green tie from her bag and knotted it artfully under her shirt’s collar. All the minor adjustments that would have made her look like a snob down in the Lower Quarter, but without which she’d look out of place up at Balmerick. After glancing at herself in a storefront window, Ren turned.

Her eyes drifted once more to the Heights. How bright the buildings looked in that empty sky. It helped to see it from down here. Sometimes as she walked around campus, talking with friends or sitting in on lectures, it was easy to feel like Balmerick was actually her home. The school had that effect. Slowly luring a person into comfort. But from below it was easier to see the truth of where she belonged, even after four years of navigating their politics and climbing up their ranks.

It didn’t matter how calmly she went about her business. No mantra or meditation could fully tamp down the panic she felt whenever she thought about her true situation at the school.

She was a mouse.

Balmerick, the hawk.

3

Ren’s classmates could hire charmed chariots to take them up to the Heights. Others had personal portals built into their high-rise villas. A few families even owned wyverns. The people who were waiting in line with Ren for the public waxways were far more industrious. Shop runners making special deliveries and hired hands attending to less glamorous tasks.

The inner room of the waxway station divided into four sections. There were stone recesses—each one about twice as wide as an average person—with identical paintings nailed into the mortar at eye level. Each painting was of the great fountain in the main square of the Heights, just outside Balmerick’s front gates.

For visualization. If you cannot see yourself somewhere, you cannot possibly travel there.

Ren knew the safest method for travel magic involved carrying a physical piece of the location. As a nervous sophomore, she had collected blades of grass from the main quad just to make sure she didn’t end up becoming a story of warning for the rest of the Lower Quarter. It turned out that repetition and familiarity were more than enough to shield her from the negative consequences of teleportation. Ren had taken this portal a hundred times now.

Beneath each painting sat a row of waxway candles. All of them flickered with ready flame, running lowest to highest. The thickness of the candle determined how far a person could travel. Long-distance traveling might call for a candle to burn for two or three hours. A jump to the Heights required no more than a few minutes of dancing flame and focused meditation.

The priestess tasked with refreshing the travel stations stood on the other side of the room, helping an elderly gentleman. A box of extra candles had been abandoned on the floor beside Ren. She glanced over a shoulder—no one was there—and let a hand reach down. The borrowed candle vanished into her satchel. Some supplies weren’t covered by her scholarship. Every little bit helped.

Ren refocused. In the recess there was a half-burned match. She raised it to the wick of the second-shortest candle, mimicking the priestess who had lit it in the first place. The preferred method was to light the candle herself, but Ren—and most modern wizards—knew the echoed motion was more than enough to establish a magical link.

Next she looked at the painting. Traveling required visualization. Her eyes combed the bright streams of the fountain and the perfect circle of stones and all those flanking trees.

The final step to the spell had always been her favorite part. With that image fixed in her mind, Ren calmly set her forefingers to the chosen candle. Some people preferred to let the candle burn itself out—which was the safest way to initiate the spell. Others liked to lean down and blow it out with a quick breath. But Ren’s father had done it this way, so she did it this way.

Her fingers pinched together. She felt that brief and satisfying burn, then the flame vanished. Before the scent of that curling smoke could even reach her nostrils, Ren was snatched into the waiting nothing. She could never get fully used to the sudden absence. Traveling the waxways always made her feel small, as if she were standing at the mouth of a cave with no end.

Her mind shoved into darkness, through the sprawling labyrinths. Plenty of wizards had vanished as they traveled the waxways over the centuries. Some had attempted to travel too far. Others had been distracted in the moment before the spell began. Ren knew it was best to empty her mind completely. Best to allow the magic to forge its own path.

After all, it knew the way.

Her feet set down in the square. There was a wide lane flanked by narrow villas in the distance. The Heights wasn’t completely unlike the city below. Here, the buildings pressed together, tall and lean, each spaced the exact same distance from the next. The main difference was that, up here, an entire building belonged to one family. Ren still remembered the first time she’d visited a friend’s home for a study session. Learning the entire place belonged to the same family—and that they used the place only occasionally—had been the second shock to her system.

Balmerick had been the first.

A series of coal-black castles sliced through the clouds on her right, their slanting spires unadorned. Perfectly manicured lawns separated the scattered buildings. Imported oaks cast shade over the crisscrossing paths. Pockets of students drifted between classes. She’d been here for four years now and still felt like she was entering contested territory every time she stood at these gates.

Ren settled into the version of herself that Balmerick wanted to see. When she felt mentally ready, she started through the yawning gates and headed to her interview.

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