March 15, 2037 — Beginning of Fall Term
First, I should say that these stables are themselves strange structures built to house all manner of beasts—both magical and not—and, as such, the exact layout of the school’s stables changes from semester to semester or even from day to day, depending on what creatures are housed within the stone walls. When I arrived one dusty afternoon after a three-week trek from my hometown of El Alto, Bolivia, to the Macha’cuay School of Magic in Cusco, Peru, the stables were squat, and yet sprawling, five buildings angled around the courtyard in a pentagon to allow four- and six-legged familiars ample space to prowl without becoming restless or activating one another’s abilities (or feeding on the smaller animals like the foxes and toads). My llama Kipa was assigned a stall next to a puma. I protested, but the caretaker, Señor Huaman, assured me that the puma was just a newborn, barely able to articulate its claws around the body of a toy mouse, and in rare cases of emergency, protective wards had been installed in and around the stables to prevent bloodshed. Still, I saw fit to check on Kipa the following day and discovered the walls had shifted overnight, the stables towering some six stories overhead to accommodate roosts for several Andean condor familiars who had arrived shortly after midnight. A fresh carcass had been laid out in the courtyard as the day’s meal, but the birds, for whatever reason, had refused it.
March 18 — Midday Meal
At half past noon a terrible shriek could be heard emanating from the part of the stables where all primate familiars were housed. Overgrown and stinking of rotten fruit and feces, the stables had become a kind of proving ground, a gauntlet through which all the urban students of Macha’cuay dared each other to pass during the midday meal, when a majority of us gathered in the courtyard with our familiars to eat and practice spells. Fourth-years at a table beside mine were practicing a form of conjuring based on images: take a sketch of the Tityus crassicauda, a species of scorpion recently discovered in the Andes, and make it crawl off the page up someone’s arm. Though it may seem vicious, it cannot hurt you. It has no internal organs to produce venom. It is only an illusion. I could conjure the image of a well full of water, but my people would still dehydrate in three days. Only water is water. Only food is food.
Not one student from the mountain villages bothered to look up from their meal when they heard that high-pitched shriek or the peal of laughter proceeding it. A trio of first-years had ventured into the primate stables and one had been so affrighted he emerged gasping, pointing behind him. “It talked! The tufted capuchin—it can talk!”
“Of course it can,” I said. “All familiars can talk.” I had thought this common knowledge (one of many abilities that marked one capable of magic), but all eyes turned to me—half in wonder, half fear—and I realized: I was alone in this. Or, not quite alone, but nearly so, for the boy who heard the tufted capuchin speak looked as if he might vomit at the thought of it happening again. When the monkey emerged from the stables, the boy shrunk back until his body pressed against a wall.
Everyone turned to me again. Someone hissed, “Ask it what it wants.”
The monkey’s tail snapped menacingly as he said: “That boy doesn’t belong here.”
This made perfect sense to the part of me that thought little of the boy’s potion-making skills, but I thought better of saying this aloud. “All invitations to this school are sent by the Brujx Council. Do you think they have made some mistake?”
“That,” he said—ignoring the warning tone of his human, who called his name once, firmly—“is the wrong question.” Before I could ask what the right one was, the belfry in the towers overhead rang us back for afternoon classes, and that sound seemed to break a spell for my fellow students (or perhaps cast a new one, because they gathered up their books without hesitation, fear forgotten like shed hair in the grass). I’ll never forget the look of disdain on the tufted capuchin’s wrinkled face as he watched that courtyard thin and empty. “Go to your class, human. You know where to find me.” Only, when I returned later that night, he was gone and the other primates did not know where to. Disappeared, they said. Just: Disappeared.
March 21 — The Equinox
On special occasions such as this, our familiars, who are otherwise confined to the stables during daylight classes, have freedom to roam school grounds at leisure and may accompany students to all but the most delicate or arcane rituals. In so-called dark-hour classes, such as astronomical divination and lunar projection, familiars may even be of benefit to students, providing a learning aide for identifying the yana phuyu, the dark constellations like Lluthu the partridge or Hamp'atu the toad. During the ritual spreading of seeds, the flighted ones lift off with pouches of seeds tied around their necks and distribute them to surrounding farmlands in honour of Pachamama, mother of all things on Earth. And during the dances, the hooved ones allow us to ride on horseback with our regalia and play the pan flute, its haunting melody echoing off the eaves of the residence hall while riders pass through the stone arches. As first-years, my class was last to join the dances. By the time I reached the stables, the black flame torches should have been lit and Kipa fitted with a saddle, but the courtyard was dark. “Señor Huaman?”
Only when I drew closer could I discern the outlines of a darkened figure: pointed ears like horns padded with fluff, elongated neck tilted back at an uncomfortable angle due to a gash like a hinge opening the throat. Kipa. Someone had slid a knife through her skin, but no blood had dripped on the stones or stained her fur. What was it Señor Huaman said? That the wards prevent bloodshed. I had thought it somewhat less literal.
She was still alive; that was the important thing. To fend off further attacks, I spun a shield out of sand and grit that had collected between cobblestones in the courtyard. It formed into a dome, whirling around us like the glitter inside a snow globe, obscuring us from view. We stayed inside until I heard a voice call over the whoosh of the sand, “Lower your shield!”
“How do I know you’re not the one who did this?”
“Because I’m responsible for the safety of everyone at this school.”
“You don’t sound like any of my professors. Where’s Señor Huaman?”
On the other side of the shield, I could hear muttering, reasoning, someone shouting, “Enough!”
All at once, the dome receded, revealing Headmistress Maldonado flanked by half the professors. Her black lips pinched as she considered me. “What are you wearing?”
My sequined purple suit was made of velvet and lined with bells that jingled rhythmically when I danced. Traditionally, only Bolivian men wore the suit, while women wore skirts so short special underwear had to be sewn into the lining of the costume for decency’s sake, but I had not donned a skirt since my sixth birthday, and I was not about to start because a bruja in an ivory blazer and pencil skirt stared down her nose at me. “I could ask you the same thing.”
Professor Viteri, Macha’cuay’s best healer, rushed to my side. “Are you injured?”
“No. But my llama—” When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw them: all the familiars in the dirt, their throats slit, mouths failing to form words.
“I know. I know,” Professor Viteri said. “We’ll fix it. But first you must go to your dorm.”
At my quizzical look of protest, the Headmistress stepped forward. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a predator currently loose on school grounds. Your safety and that of your fellow students is paramount and must be seen to before there is further violence. Now, if you please.” She lifted her right hand toward the residence halls, turning her body as if it had been a door preventing me from going to my room. I walked past her, but not without looking over my shoulder once to watch as Professor Viteri knelt and stroked Kipa’s soft neck. In the morning, it would be as if nothing happened, the wound sealed so thoroughly it left no scar, but Kipa still remembered the blade on her neck, the hand covering her eyes. She never saw the assailant. None of them did.
April 2 — Morning, Before Dawn
My shift at the stables began just as the stars winked out of the sky. We students had taken it upon ourselves, since the equinox, to stand guard over the stables of Macha’cuay and install additional wards around its perimeter to protect all our beloved familiars. In Señor Huaman’s absence, Professor Viteri had been filling in as caretaker, but we found him too inattentive, too focused on the physical health of the familiars in the wake of the attack when it seemed to us their emotional well-being should be a priority, so we supplemented his work accordingly. When Professor Viteri was not around, we whispered to each other about Señor Huaman and where he could have gone. The timing of his disappearance was curious, but even so, no one thought he was the culprit or believed him capable of harming the familiars. Perhaps he was on a quest, I told the others. Or perhaps he too had fallen victim to the assassin. Every shift, we developed a new theory.
I arrived that night with four others (one for each building in the pentagon) to relieve our compatriots on the midnight shift, many of them vampires who prowled the air as bats, as well as one werewolf who rallied the maned wolves in the stables to form a pack of protectors. Together, the pack sniffed us replacement guards, gifting us their approval yet again.
Mornings had grown cold, that dry highland air creating a frisson of static in my clothes and hair. When I checked on Kipa, my fingers shocked her, a little jolt of electricity coursing into her skin. “Ouch,” she hissed. “Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry. Did you sleep well?”
“As well as one can with a pack of wolves baying at the moon every fifteen seconds.”
“I’ll talk to them about that,” I said, picking up a pitchfork to dish up fresh grass and flowers.
“No, no. It’s just their nature.” She nibbled pensively. “Besides—it might actually be helping.”
“It’s been almost two weeks since the attacks. Have you noticed anything strange? Or anyone?”
“Besides all the brujx muttering magical theorems under their breath in the courtyard?” Both ears twitched with mischief, and she shifted the wad of cud into one cheek to whisper, “Have you met the puma next door? His human is here every night, but not for a shift.”
I pretended I was stroking her head and whispered, “You know I’m the only one here who knows how to talk to animals, right?”
“Are you sure about that?” She snapped the wet cud in her cheek, then pointedly dipped her head into the trough to finish her breakfast. In the next stall, a girl was cradling her infant puma, which had grown in the last weeks to the size of a human toddler. His limbs had bunched up awkwardly, paws flopping against the bruja’s ears as she pressed her nose to his chest and cooed in baby talk about how cute the puma was, how soft his fur was. I cleared my throat to say, “Hello.”
Her head popped up. “Oh. Hi. Didn’t see you there. Manuyla, right?”
“No one calls me that. I go by Manny. And you’re Bonificia? I didn’t think you were on duty.”
“Oh, no, my shift isn’t until evening. I’m just here because Laka’s still having trouble sleeping.”
I knelt beside the puma, touching one of his little paws. “Has Laka spoken to you about the attacks?” No, just as I suspected. That was not one of Bonificia’s gifts, and Laka was still a babe, yet to learn the words that could describe what frightened him, what caused his eyes to snap wide open and fix on the air behind us. He squirmed out of Bonificia’s arms, still uncoordinated limbs flailing as he righted himself midair and dropped onto the stall’s grassy floor in a crouch. Already the claws were out, mouth open to reveal little fangs barely the size of corn kernels. He pounced, and when he hung in the air for the briefest of moments, clinging to something invisible that then yanked him away and sent him sprawling to the ground, I knew: our enemy was among us.
April 6 — Just After Midnight
We could not trust our own eyes. Invisibility was not a charm traditionally taught at Macha’cuay, not because our professors did not know but because this power could be abused in all manner of ways disallowed by the school’s Codices of Magical Comportment, and without base knowledge of the charm’s functions we could not be taught to countermand it or to enchant artifacts with the ability to detect invisibility. Instead, we installed a series of magical tripwires designed to trigger automatically whenever unauthorized individuals passed through them. Once tripped, magic nets would ensnare the individual, preventing them from moving until a guard on duty could respond. On the first night, this resulted in several false alarms as the traps caught mosquitoes and later an entire family of eared doves visiting the stables to scavenge for free food, but by the second night, we refined them enough to snare an unexpected visitor: the tufted capuchin.
Half-asleep and swaddled in wool, I followed the guard sent to rouse me from my slumber. “And you’re sure this tufted capuchin is the familiar? Not just a monkey who wandered in during the night?”
“Definitely. It keeps looking at us with disdain.”
When I arrived, the tufted capuchin was telling the werewolf on guard, “You smell like someone rolled you in feces and set you on fire.” I elected not to translate that for my classmate and asked, instead, why the familiar had returned. He shook his head in disappointment. “Poor thing; always asking the wrong questions.”
“I’m not playing that game. Either tell me why you’re here or I’m taking you to Maldonado.”
“Go ahead. You’ll have to do that anyway to confirm our little arrangement with her.”
Headmistress Maldonado had in the short weeks since my arrival at Macha’cuay struck me as the kind of woman who understands precisely what it costs to deal with the devil you know—or take a risk on the devil you don’t—and thus, I was not the least bit surprised to glimpse one rock in the mountain of concessions required to maintain her position of power. My only question was about the terms of her arrangement with the familiar. “Have you been on school grounds this whole time?”
“We both have.” A cloaked figure materialized out of the shadows, revealing herself as the tufted capuchin’s human, whose face I vaguely recalled from the first week of class. “Headmistress Maldonado allowed us to remain on campus after the incident and continue our studies, provided we concealed ourselves.” That word—incident—confused me, which in turn confused her. “You were there. At the midday meal.” Only then did it dawn on her: “You don’t know who that boy is, do you?”
“That little cobarde who screamed his head off in the stables?”
“That coward is Generalissimo Carbajal’s son.” Meaning: the firstborn and only surviving son of Peru’s top military official, a rumored double-agent trained by the CIA to destabilize democracy in Latin America. The Generalissimo had been especially erratic since the death of his youngest, a novice mountaineer who did not respect the weather on Aconcagua and was swallowed by it. “El Generalissimo demanded that I be expelled for disrespecting his son, but the headmistress took pity on me.”
Still trapped, the tufted capuchin said, “I told you he doesn’t belong here.”
“In retrospect, this does explain why he can’t even do a simple firestarter spell.”
Everyone snorted, recalling that time Carbajal’s son confused huitlacoche and bat guano during a potion-making lesson and gave himself histoplasmosis. Or when he attempted to levitate a single glass of water in class and nearly siphoned all the fluid from his body. Our laughter turned rueful once we considered how dangerous his incompetence was, the destruction he could rain upon the school if we so much as laughed at him the wrong way. I was the one to ask the obvious: “Do we think he was the one who attacked the familiars?”
“Of course he was,” the tufted capuchin sneered, even as a voice from the shadows insisted, “We have found no hard proof of that.”
Headmistress Maldonado emerged from the gloom bundled in no less than four wool mantas, the topmost of which was dyed black and draped over her shoulders such that it obscured the various patterns of the colorful shawls peeking out beneath it. Despite the late hour, her lips were painted black and her hair slicked back, each strand glittering, as if with frost. Her breath was a pale wisp when she said, “I’m afraid I must ask you all to refrain from making baseless accusations against your fellow students.”
General grumbling ensued, voicing grievances and misgivings about Carbajal’s son, who was not just incompetent but cruel, as like to steal a magical pendant forged in Introductory Gemsmithing & Enchantment as to toss it into a furnace just to watch Bonificia burst into tears. He had already proven himself unworthy of Macha’cuay—and yet he remained, thanks no doubt to his father. Of Headmistress Maldonado, I asked, “And what will El Generalissimo do if we don’t?”
Her head tilted as if to say, Come now. You’re smart enough to know what will happen. What she said aloud was this: “El Generalissimo fears only one power: the Brujx Council. It alone matches his might, and it alone enshrines our Codices, which bind our students and their guardians—even generals. If the Council were so inclined, it could expel any student.” Her delicate fingers danced on the air, as if touching the threads of magic in our snare. “It could even prohibit the installation of such traps on school grounds.” With a single snap of her fingers, she disarmed the magic nets around the tufted capuchin.
Under his breath, the werewolf muttered, “How did she do that?”
The smirk on her lips said, You’ll learn soon enough. “I trust that we can keep the matter of Miss Moya’s invisibility a secret amongst ourselves? Where Generalissimo Carbajal is concerned, it is best to remain unseen and unheard.” Our frightened nods satisfied her.
Before she could drift back into the shadows, I said, “Headmistress? One more thing.”
“Yes, Manny?”
“Where’s Señor Huaman?”
“Finally,” the tufted capuchin said, shaking his limbs free, “she asks the right question.”
Headmistress Maldonado evidently thought so too, because she studied me with renewed interest of the kind that told me I had been right to believe she did not think much of me—the dirty llama herder from El Alto with my wide-brimmed hat and dust-caked boots, my grimy fingernails best-suited to Earth-magic—until that moment, when she realized I deserved an answer, even if it was a circumspect one. “I can truthfully say I have no idea,” she said, in a tone indicating this was a secret we were all better off not knowing, at least for now.
April 15 — An Afternoon Lesson
When our perimeter alarm went off, I was in the middle of transforming into a llama. All us first-years had gathered in the courtyard to practice a series of spells that would temporarily enable us to switch places with our familiars, the logic being that if we experienced the world through each other’s bodies, we would be better able to work as a team, should a situation arise. I had prepared myself for the sweaty fur, the taste of grass, a sharp uptick in volume, but in all my training I had not anticipated how strange it would be for my eyes to be in a different spot. I did not trust what I was seeing: a six-legged stallion coming through the gate, limbs longer than the tallest among us. On its back I recognized the familiar profile of Señor Huaman.
In the chaos of the moment, most students got stuck mid-transformation with half-formed hooves and patchwork fur on their faces, and by the time Professor Viteri sorted us back into our original bodies and disposed of any lingering tails, the headmistress had come to meet Señor Huaman and inspect the contents of the sack he dragged behind him. This was what set off the alarm: a man—a soldier—who was bruised and bloodied from his long journey inside the sack. He kept saying the words, “El Generalissimo. Call El Generalissimo.”
With two fingers, the headmistress mimed pinching the soldier’s lips shut. He struggled against a silencing as she called to Bonificia and her familiar. Of the puma, she asked, “Is this the man you saw the night of the attacks?” I could hear the answer from across the courtyard: yes.
“Liar!” Carbajal’s son shouted, pushing forward, his skin still dimpled where it had been plucked of feathers after his failed transformation into a condor. “I vouch for this man’s innocence.”
Headmistress Maldonado smiled at him the way I imagine lawyers do when they catch witnesses in a lie. “You admit to knowing him, then? And to being with him during the attacks?”
Young Carbajal squared his shoulders. “He was bringing a gift from my father.”
“But strangers aren’t allowed on school grounds,” Bonificia cried. “It’s in The Codices.”
He scoffed, “I didn’t read those—no one does.” Macha’cuay’s Codices of Magical Comportment comprised six books and some 7,000 pages of text. I admit I had yet to finish them.
“Even so,” Headmistress Maldonado said, “you are bound by The Codices, to which you swore a blood oath, and The Codices are very clear on this matter: all students expecting visitors must get approval from the head of the school and are responsible for their visitors’ infractions while here. And do you know what punishment the Brujx Council demands for these violent infractions, Mr. Carbajal?” As she said this, she circled him, putting herself in perfect position, when he blustered and attempted to brush off the harm, to lift her arms and intone, “Expulsion.”
A great wind blew through the courtyard and knocked the general’s son off his feet, blowing him and the soldier out of the stables and through the school gates. When young Carbajal stood, dazed and dusted, he attempted to regain entry but was thwarted by the wards. He tried again and again, to no avail, then shouted to his familiar, an Andean condor, “Peck out their eyes! Now!”
But the condor, who had lost a few feathers during the transformation and looked repulsed by her human, said, “Why should I listen to you? Your henchman slit my throat because I dared suggest you study for your exams, then attacked the others to cover his tracks and prevent them from leading back to you. You’re a pitiful excuse for a brujo.” Her great wings unfolded, the full breadth of her ten-foot wingspan on display as all the familiars pressed forward, surrounding him and the soldier. What they said to him I will not repeat. I will share only that they ran (faster than I have seen any human run, before or since) and that we have heard nothing from young Carbajal or his father, who, the rumor goes, received a letter from the Brujx Council that left him pale and shaken for the better part of a week.
Our classes now continue uninterrupted. But sometimes I still see that condor soaring high above Macha’cuay’s stables, her wings cutting a striking silhouette against the bright, cloudless sky.
