First Year by Rachel E. Carter Page A

myself about half of the time, and I was a little more secure in my footing after I had grown accustomed to the darkness.
    “You may now take a seat and remove your blindfolds,” Master Cedric announced.
    Relieved, I tossed the sweat-stained rag aside and took a place beside my latest staffing partner. We both looked to Cedric for the speech we knew was coming, the reason we had just spent thirty minutes hitting sticks blindly.
    “Forgot about the other senses before today, didn’t you?” Piers asked us wickedly.
    Master Cedric expanded: “The reason I had you blindfolded was so that each of you could properly identify the other senses that are so often forgotten in one’s general conduct. You’ve spent two days drilling with staffs, but it has been my observation that most of you have only been using sight to tell you where to block, where to strike, how to proceed.
    “The truth is that every action requires more than vision for a performance to be completely vested. The best soldiers and mages alike embrace their senses. Just now, all of you were forced to recognize other ways of predicting an opponent’s actions when you couldn’t use your sight to answer the question for you. Heightened listening, body heat, smell, and an increased understanding to the different points of pressure in a blow should have all helped contribute to your knowledge of staff fighting.
    “If you were to engage in a casting, these types of observations would increase the potency of your magic. Your spells are derivatives of the information, experience, and desire you put forth. I’m sure all of you have desire—it’s why you are here—but the amount of information and experience you put into your castings will be important indicators as well. You may want more than anything to produce an effective sleeping draught, but if you can’t build up the proper projection within your mind, it will not be very effective. You need to consider all aspects, not just the image or obvious sense of the action or thing you are trying to create.”
    I strained to listen, but the pounding in my head was so much that his words were coming out as an endless drone.
    “The irony of your training here at the Academy is that while we require you to ignore your physical senses in meditation and acute focus, we ask you to embrace them in your mental casting. You are not allowed to feel what is physically going on around you during the moment of your spell, but you are expected to cast an image evocative of all those physical senses in your mind. I admit that the practice of these two things is not easy. It is not something you can master in a day, or even years. All I can advise is that the more you practice, the more you dedicate yourself to exploring these two states, the better your chances will be at succeeding within your own magical faction.”
    The end of Master Cedric’s lecture was spent in silence. Most of us were still trying to take in everything as we followed him out to the field to continue yesterday’s meditative exercise. I hoped it would make sense after a long night’s rest.
    At the end of our session, we were informed that this would be the pattern for the rest of the month—half of the class practicing a heightened awareness to the senses, the others learning to block them out. Supposedly with enough practice we would be able to transfer easily between the two states.
    Of course, to be “competent” we’d have to continue the practice on our own during any “free time” we were lucky enough to acquire. Knowing how much free time I actually had at my disposal, it was obvious that the highborn students had a huge advantage.
    Those that had grown up with a mage tutor advising them didn’t have to be worried about the lack of free time they had now. The nonheir’s group wouldn’t falter under our intense workload. I, on the other hand, would be struggling for any free moment I could find in