Blog Tour: Higher Magic Excerpt
Hello, all!
Don't you think autumn is the perfect time for dark academia? I'm thrilled to be part of the blog tour for Higher Magic by Courtney Floyd. Big thanks to the publisher for having me!
 |
| Pub Date: 10-7-25 Adult - Fantasy |
Dorothe Bartleby is a struggling mage student who suffers from severe anxiety. After freezing during her first attempt at her program’s qualifying exam, she has one more chance to show that magic in classic literature changed the world, and if she fails, she’ll be kicked out of the university.
You should be writing. hexing people who tell you that you should be writing.
—NOTE ON THE BLACKBOARD IN THE MAGE STUDENT COPY ROOM, EDITED IN ANOTHER HAND
THE CLASSROOM DOOR SHIMMERED, AND I SCOWLED AT IT. Twenty minutes ago, the door had been normal. Mundane, even. A steel slab with a hydraulic hinge that had a nasty habit of seeming to swing slowly shut before slamming all at once. It opened onto a fluorescent-lit room overstuffed with motley desks and accessorized with a decrepit whiteboard. Inside, I’d drawn my containment circle using a piece of chalk pilfered from the lecture hall down the way and cast my working. Then, I’d stepped out for a coffee.
Now, two minutes late to my own class, I pressed my palm to the door and felt a frizzle of static ghost its way up my arm and into my hair. My bangs went blowsy. I swatted them out of my eyes and shook the sting from my hand.
So much for making a professional first impression.
Of all the ill-starred winter terms I’d experienced in this program, this one was already well on its way to being the worst, and it was only day one. If I was being fair, it wasn’t the door’s fault. Someone else teaching in this room had thrown up a ward to penalize late students. I was going to have to take it down, or spend the next ten weeks fighting with it. But I wasn’t in the mood to be fair. Not with an 8 a.m. class to teach and a meeting with my advisor immediately after.
Sighing, I levered the door handle down and pushed through the field of prickling magic. Thirty-five
heads—according to my course roster—swiveled in my direction as I stalked toward the front of the room. I pretended not to notice them, smoothing my bangs with my fingertips in an effort to compose myself.
“Hey! The professor’s going to be here any minute, dude. Stop messing around,” someone called out.
As a young, femme, and heavily tattooed instructor who habitually dressed in faded jeans and the nicest clean top I could find in the laundry basket—today’s wasn’t wrinkled . . . much—I was used to that reaction. Instead of replying, I set my satchel on the long table that served as the room’s makeshift lectern and fished out a dry-erase marker.
Concerned whispers soughed through the room. I ignored them, scrawling information on the board:
Spell Composition I
Under that, I added:
Ms. Dorothe Bartleby (she/her)
As I wrote, the whispers quieted until the only sounds were the squeaking of my marker and the high-pitched flickering of the fluorescent lights.
When both my nerves and the room were well and truly calm, I turned back around with a flourishing bow that triggered the working I’d cast earlier.
Students gasped and giggled as syllabi winked into existence above each occupied desk and slowly fluttered into place. They wouldn’t be as impressed if they knew my housemate, Cy, had given me his spell for the working just a couple days earlier. Still, their delighted bafflement was almost enough to make me smile, despite the morning’s irritations.
“My name is Dorothe Bartleby, but you can call me Ms. B.”
I paused to gesture at the board. “I teach Spell Composition I. If you’re here for another class, this is your cue to exit.”
A couple of students scurried out of the room as inconspicuously as possible. Which of course meant that the sound of their packing, bags zipping, and sneakered tiptoeing on the waxed vinyl flooring was so loud it was pointless to continue until the capricious classroom door swung shut behind them.
The remaining thirty-three or so students watched me warily. Smiling, I reached for my heavily annotated copy of the syllabus.
“This course is part of a learning community with Ms. Darya
Watkins’s Herbalism 101. The work you do in Spell Composition I will complement your work in that class. By the end of the term, you will have drafted and revised two academic-quality spells.”
The corresponding groan came from nowhere and everywhere at once, an overwhelming expression of sentiment that shuddered me back into freshman year. My shoulders tensed with the sense-memory of panicked drafting, late-night grappling with the arcane rules of the Mage Language Coven’s style guide, the growing certainty I’d never be a real practitioner because I couldn’t even format my grimoire citations correctly on the battered electric typewriter I used for my assignments.
I took a breath and dropped my shoulders, forcing myself to focus on the students in front of me. Someone had helped me, and I would help them. They might still hate the class at the end. Hec, most of them probably would. It was a gen-ed, designed for gatekeeping and consequently loathed by the student population. But they’d make it through. I’d see them through.
Quiet settled in as I regarded them.
Tangled auras, pained grimaces, sleep-crusted eyes . . . This group was so starkly different from last term’s Spell Composition I students that I couldn’t help a sudden rush of sympathy. There was something special about the off-cycle students, the unwieldy or unlucky or un . . .something few who’d fallen out of the campus’s natural rhythm. And it wasn’t just that I had recently become one of them.
Students who took this course in fall term, as admin recommended, tended to be bright eyed and happy-go-lucky, brimming with the magic of sun-dappled October days and pumpkin-flavored beverages. But it was January, skies glowering with rain clouds, and these students were in for a bumpier ride. They knew it. And they’d persist, despite it.
I looked at them and they looked back at me, wearily expectant.
“Most of my students come to class with a very specific preconceived notion,” I told them. “Maybe it’s self-imposed, or maybe it’s something you were told again and again until it stuck.”
I stalked back to the board and scrawled a giant number across it.
“According to our preclass survey, eighty-five percent of you self-identify as ‘bad spell writers.’ That’s bullshit.”
The class gasped and tittered.
“You’ve been hexed, or hexed yourselves, into believing one of the biggest lies in academia—that there’s only one kind of ‘good spell writing,’ or that only certain kinds of practitioners can be good spell writers. Bull. Shit.”
Fewer titters this time, because I’d gotten their attention. Hexing was a serious accusation—workings intended to cause harm violated the student code—and right about now they’d be trying to sort out whether I meant it literally or metaphorically. The thing was, it didn’t matter whether someone had literally hexed them to think of themselves as bad spell writers. The only thing that signified was that 85 percent of them did. It was part of the story they’d learned to tell about themselves. And reality reshapes itself around stories.
“Does anyone have a hunch about why I’d say that?”
Silence. Stillness. As though I was a predator who could only hunt when prey was in motion or making sound. I folded my arms and waited, even though the approximately seven seconds that went by felt like an eternity.
Finally, a hand climbed skyward.
“Yes? You in the striped shirt. What’s your name?”
“Alse. Um, Alse Hathorne.”
“Hi, Alse. Any thoughts?”
“Well . . .” Alse fidgeted with their glasses and scrunched their face, as if uncertain whether their thoughts were worth sharing. “It’s okay to speculate. Take a wild guess.”
Alse huffed. “Okay, thanks. It’s just . . . When you said spell writing isn’t just one thing, it made me wonder what actually counts. Like, am I writing when I’m flipping through old grimoires for research? Does daydreaming about what I want my spell to do count?”
Their tone was half-sincere, half-sarcastic, but I could work with that. I smiled, waiting to see if any of their classmates had a response before sharing mine.
A blonde in a pink tie-dye T-shirt waved, excited.
“Um, yeah, Reed here. Like, are we writing when we select spell ingredients?”
More hands flew up, and for a little while I forgot it was an ill-starred term. I lost myself in discussion.
Comments
Post a Comment