Work Text:
Find a map of Illyria, and look to the top right corner of it.
To the east was the Rosa mountains, tall and reaching as jagged, broken bits of a knife, the distant alps of Mutenland visible through the small cracks. To the west was the Bezna forest, trees scattered across dark green grass, mist slinking like a lazy cat through the treetops, finally settling like a blanket around the woods. In the past sometimes a particularly eagle-eyed girl would see the faintest bit of dread hidden away within those cracks, but all the students of today saw was the moonlight seeping through the windows in their hallways, bedrooms, and washrooms as each girl got ready for bed.
The dread was really just a distant memory now, well as distant as a memory like that can be. Rather, peace was finding its way into the school for the first time in centuries, and settling down quite nicely with them.
Take tonight, for example. The school was finally quieting down, as girl after girl tucked herself into sheets and sent herself away to dreamland. The gas lamps had been turned off, replaced with soft candlelight flickering in the nearly-identical bedrooms, as not to disturb the resting and guide the awake to join them. The weariness of the day had lain itself onto the house, weighing onto the shoulders of the young sorceresses like wagons attached to oxen.
The magic they had used earlier in the day for lessons felt less like electric currents in their fingertips and now more like stones tied onto their arms and legs. Combined with the other loads girls were carrying, whether it’d be physical things like homework, assignments, or mental activities such as friendships, the fragile new bond between their families, etc. Each taxing to the body in their own way, so as girls drifted off to bed, either with ink-stained clothes or tear-stained faces, at least all of them shared one goal together.
All except one.
Marya Lupu sat in the library, head buried in a book, her eyes barely skimming the pages as the clock ticked. Instead of the peace that the rest of the school was finally feeling, like wind on a hot summers day, her body was still filled with the tenseness there was when the dread was still active. Her mother would say that her body looked “angry” but it had been almost a year since they last spoke, so who cared what she thought?
Her legs felt like they were glued to the chair, her arms strapped to the book until she finished it. It was almost closing time, but she still sat there like it was the middle of exam season and if she failed the test she was studying for instead of flunking out of school shed be fed to the giants in Mutenland.
Girls moved past her, some rarely taking a glance at her upright form and clucking to themselves, the heavy doors periodically slamming shut. Sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, they took quick glances at the librarian, wondering why they had to leave but this small second-year got to stay. Marya almost didn’t hear any of it. Yawns, sighs, groans as sore bodies left behind hours of studying were muted to her as she continued to ‘read’, really just trying to stay out of leaving for as long as possible.
She felt like a little mouse trapped in a little corner of a pantry with no way to get out, except all the food isn’t as usually inviting and instead is covered in rat-poison, and outside there’s a cat ready to pounce and kill her at any second. She pauses for a second to think about that metaphor, then quickly realizes she’s wasting time, and continues to read, trying to absorb as much knowledge as she could.
Except for this time it wasn’t for a dead count’s daughter, or a mystery plaguing the school, rather it made the other two seem like child’s play. Marya would honestly rather have a talk with her parents face to face than have to go through whatever- whatever this whole conundrum is.
Her stomach churned and her knees felt weak whenever she thought of getting up and leaving, not because of what would happen when she left, but who she would inevitably see.
Her.
Elana.
Elana Teitler, Marya’s best friend, Maryas other half, Maryas everything.
Lukas everything too.
She should be happy. Thats why she was in here, reading as many books on courting, romance, love as she could to parrot it back to Elana as best as she could, to help for once, instead of just being in the way like she always was. She and Elana had…grown apart since she had announced her crush on her brother, saving those caresses Mayra used to get (in friendship of course) for Luka whenever they thought nobody was looking. She was totally fine with that of course, she was only doing this to help, to bring more ideas to the table because if she saw that out of the corner of her eye while studying one more time her head would probably explode.
But really- it was just to help.
She felt that this is was Luka must’ve felt while studying for the count, they weren’t alike in any way of course, and Luka had a support system behind them while she never really did, but the stress and intensity she was feeling was what he probably felt a day before the sorcerers arrival.
She was supposed to help them, support them, like any good friend and sister would. besides, if they got together then Elana and Marya could be sister in laws, even if she knew that her parents would absolutely despise Elana.
But for some reason, her mouth got dry whenever she tried to stand up. Whenever she attempted to close the book her heart started pounding. Even the thought of telling Elana what she had read about made her feel like vomiting. It seemed wrong, to Mayra at least. It felt like it would only drive more of a wedge between them. Nothing in the book would ever work for the pair, she thought, as even she was shocked when Elana told her late one winter night about her, her feelings towards her brother. The two were like Fire and Water, they’d never mix, but shockingly, they seem to have managed to do so for the past month or so.
Not that anything was official yet, Marya did not understand at all the confusing rules of courting, but they seemed to steadily progressing. At least, thats what it sounded like whenever she talked about it to Ana Maria late at night, when both of them thought Marya was asleep in her bed. Why couldn’t she hear about it? She and Elana were close as twins, and they had shared almost everything with eachother before this entire thing happened.
Was it because they thought she’d tell Luka? Marya might’ve been not as well informed on the rules of courting as the other girls in school, as she had never really interacted with boys outside of her brother, but she wasn’t an idiot. She could help them, in her own way. Which was why she was here now.
Truth to be told, Marya was also in here to help herself. While it was nice to know that she wasn’t as troubled as she had been told her entire life she was, she knew that there was still some wrinkles she needed to iron out before she considered herself as fine as the other girls. It was something she had been told, along with that she was selfish, rude, demanding, usually all in the same sentence, her entire life.
Marya didn’t enjoy the company of the other sex as much as she was ‘supposed’ to.
As a child she never really had any friends, male or female, so maybe that had a part to play in it, and at Dragomir, as the booklet boasted, it was all girls, so she was leaving her formative years without as much male interaction as what was considered normal. But this wasn’t about friendship, no, this was about something that made Marya feel sick to think about. Love.
Maybe it was because she was young, but she could never imagine kissing a boy, talking to a boy, and god forbid, doing the things with a boy that some of the older girls giggled about when they thought the younger years weren’t around. It all seemed unseemly, the few boys she had met were loud and mean, unlike the girls she had been surrounded with for the past year. Girls were nice, they smelled good, and were understanding. Boys? Well…
The men they turned into seemed even more unappealing. She hated facial hair with a passion of a thousand storms, although it was all the rage in Illyria, men looked more like the giants of Mutenland then humans to her, and they never seemed to lose the mean streak they had as children- source, her father. There were some, mainly historical figures whos portraits she had seen in books, on tapestries, in paintings that she had liked, although it was purely for the aesthetics.
But that was part of her troubled past, even though she knew that the word had been twisted by the former officials of the school, she still knew it was true that she was broken some way in her past. But she was slowly starting to fix herself, first with getting her magic, now by smoothing out all the cracks to truly begin her new life. Even if that meant learning to love a different sex that felt like a whole other race of species in order to truly fix herself.
It was the one thing her mother was right about.
So she sat there, skimming through book after book, getting more confused, only to please the person that mattered most to her in her life. Because thats what friends did for eachother, even if every time she thought about Elana and Lukas courtship she got this strange dizziness and an overwhelmingly resentful feeling towards her brother. He wasn’t stealing her away from Marya, even so only men had those feelings. It’d be wrong if she starting thinking like the ‘enemy’ she was trying to love.
Like them, not embody them, but whenever she thought about Elana she felt like she was embodying a heartsick man.
That was Lukas job.
Not hers.
It would never be hers.