Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s a dark and stormy night, but only an ordinary storm this time, and Dragomir Academy’s walls are more than enough to keep it out.  The Dread is gone, now; gone, after Elana and Katya used their magic to protect them from its wrath.

Elana and Katya used magic to protect them.  Magic, because they are sorcerers, and it comes naturally to them.  Magic which would have been stolen from them, if none of this had ever happened.  Magic that Simona would have helped the academy steal, if it came to that, insofar as she had a role to play at all.

A process she did help start, with Elana; a process her classmates and teachers started with her.  A terrible cycle, rippling through the generations, which has—hopefully—been broken, now.

Elana and Katya have magic.  They will grow up to be sorceresses.

Simona does not.  Simona will not.

Not anymore.

She forces herself to sit with that knowledge, turning it over in her mind, in the days following the Dread coming to Dragomir and the revelation that everything she learned here—everything she thought she knew—is a lie.  It’s not pleasant; she doesn’t want to do it.  Her classmates aren’t back yet, so she at least doesn’t have to confront them just yet.

Once upon a time, Simona herself was an awkward twelve-year-old girl, newly come to Dragomir.  Once upon a time, she learned to act the way they wanted her to, how to fit in the mold she was handed.  It helped, of course, that she started off fairly well-versed in etiquette, manners, and basic education—but her current comportment is very much a thing that she learned.  It is not who she would have been without this school.

This academy has taken so many girls, would-have-been sorceresses and those who had potential that never manifested alike, and turned them to a one into Good Illyrian Women, supporting the men from the background—never seen, never heard, never acknowledged for their importance.  Capitalization like she’s imagining isn’t part of Good And Proper Illyrian Writing, of course, but Simona finds she can’t be bothered to care about that right now.

She’s done her best as hall adviser for the new girls this year, she thinks, but… did she really?  There’s something simultaneously frustrating and painfully, terribly guilt-inducing about how this all ended.  How it took the first-year girls to break this awful cycle.  Because—well.

Simona isn’t fully grown yet, she knows that.  And yet.  And yet.  She’s seventeen; she’s the hall adviser.  It’s her job to protect and support the girls of Rose Hall, not the other way around.

But it was Elana and Katya who protected them from the Dread, and before that it was Elana and Marya who walked back into danger when by all rights they should have run—Simona herself would have told them to run, had she been there—and before that it was Marya who came so close to figuring everything out nearly on her own.

They did all that because there was no one else around either able or willing, not even Simona herself; they did it because they had to.

Simona is not, will never be a sorceress.  When the Dread came, her bones ached in memory, but even now with the echoes under her skin of the writhing magic she once felt there—it is only a memory.  Nothing more.  She wonders, absently, if it was some of her own magic that became the Dread that came upon them, before pushing the thought aside.  The answer to that question is unknown, quite possibly unknowable.  Dwelling on it will do her little good.

She takes a deep breath.  The lies the academy is founded on, the rot that sits at the heart of their country—they have already hurt her, deeply, in a way she has yet to fully comprehend.  They have hurt so many who came before, and some who came after, who she could not protect.

She couldn’t help against the Dread, for that required magic.  She couldn’t help against the school, for that required bravery and imagination and the perspective of someone who had yet to accept its claims.

But the task they have before them now is not one for children.  The rebuilding, the change… it is delicate.  It is political.

It is not so far from what she’s been trained to do by this very school.

The evening before the other girls are set to start returning to Dragomir—those of them who want to, at least, and not all of them do—she goes to talk to Madame Rosetti.

“We all want this school to be better than it was,” she says.  “We want this country to be better than it was.  I know how to act, with politicians, but you know more about the actual politics than me.”  She takes a deep breath, and the slight smile that crosses her face isn’t even forced.  “Can you help me with that?”

And Madame Rosetti smiles, though it’s a fragile thing.  “Of course,” she says, and begins Simona’s first, informal lesson right then and there.

She can’t do magic.  She couldn’t uncover the school’s secrets.  But the work they are doing now is just as important, if they are to make these changes stick, and this—this is something that she can do.

Simona’s generation of girls will be the last to lose their magic to the men of this land.  That is the promise she makes to herself.

She intends to see it through.