Elana had lost her grip on the concept of time seconds, minutes, hours ago—all she knew was every moment of consciousness was pure agony from which blacking out was a welcome reprieve. But Antoine didn't give her that luxury. When he pushed it too far, and he did, he didn’t let her stay down. Every time her lungs filled with water and her body began to fail, he would pull her back from the brink.
“Heal,” Antoine cast the spell as he pulled her up from the water.
Her body filled with warmth, her waterlogged lungs returned to normal, and her clarity along with it—and she glared up at Antoine, wishing death upon him. The first she’d heard him recite that spell, she’d been as grateful as she was filled with spite—by the tenth she’d decided that the word “heal” needed to be wiped off the plane of existence. Because all it meant was that the torture was going to start all over again, from the beginning.
She was proven right when he, without notice, shoved her face-first back into the trough. She was shoulders-deep now, but she didn’t fight it, because she had come to understand several things:
1) The banished heir apparent was a psychopath beyond measure—and she had no doubt that he was the responsible for his own estrangement from the family
2) Screaming was ineffective, and a waste of precious breath.
3) Thrashing, scratching, kicking—all equally ineffective. It raised her heart rate, burning too quickly through her oxygen supply.
The inevitable conclusion she came to was that it was better to let go, to let her body become dead weight, taking small comfort in the knowledge that Antoine had proven at least a dozen times over that he wasn’t going to let her actually die. He was just hellbent on simulating it, over and over and over again.
Elana surrendered to the process. In the moments that she was awake, when her lungs were freshly filled with oxygen, when her head was first dunked under, before she was robbed of her ability to, she thought. If she could just figure out what he was after, if she could just find a goal in this madness, she could make it stop.
She held onto that goal every time he brought her back.
Unless he really was an irredeemable sadist, which Elana had yet to rule out but was trying not to consider, there was a point to this. He’d told her to hurry up and grasp the lesson, but a lesson in what, exactly? How to drown? She could think of only one option that made sense. An archaic and barbaric, albeit effective practice to awaken a mage’s hidden potential. There were cases of people with low to no magical ability suddenly manifesting abilities after undergoing intense stress. But if that was what he was after, he was going to be doing this until the end of time.
Elana clenched her jaw, trying to hold on to that thought, and save enough breath to get this out. She needed to time this right, to maintain consciousness and spit the words out before he shoved her under again. She felt his arm tense against the back of her neck and squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the urge to inhale the second he pulled her up from the water.
“I don’t have any—” she sputtered, trying to get the words out before she gasped for breath—because the second she took a deep breath, Antoine was going to shove her back under. It worked. He paused. “—any mana—to awaken!”
Antoine looked down at her, his yellow eyes—the same unsettling color as Gerard’s, and hers—narrowing. But she’d bought herself some time, because he hadn’t shoved her under just yet. He hadn’t released his grip, but he was listening.
“It’s no use,” Elana coughed, holding her throat as she alternated between hacking up water and gasping for air. She shook her head, eyes still watering as her throat burned. “It won’t happen.”
There was more commotion on the sidelines, but she registered it only distantly. Her eyes were fixed on Antoine’s expression, searching it for a hint, for a clue as to what he was thinking.
“I'd figured that out already, but at least you're putting your mind to work,” he said, lowering himself to meet her gaze. “If you want to survive at the Academy,” he began, calm and matter of fact, “you need to do better than this.”
He released his grip on her, watching her collapse on all fours. He watched her struggle to catch her breath, his eyes hard. His eyes were hard, even as he released his grip.
“You need to be able to maintain your composure and think critically under pressure,” he said, squatting down to follow as she collapsed to all fours. He made no effort to help her up, continuing to speak in that clear, detached voice. “And you need to be desperate. You need both, without compromise. I'm disappointed."
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