Summer Without a Break

Mistake hid in the lower branches of a tree and waited. The only other movement in the morning stillness was a line of ants carrying treasures back to their colony.
She’d spent most of the summer with her friends - at the beach, playing pranks, having contests. It felt almost like nothing had changed. That she was the same Mistake she’d always been. In another week, that would end. She’d return to Strixhaven, to projects and exams and death threats. With more company than expected.
Voices snapped her back to the present. Rezzy approached with Hammer, Aranais, Temerity, Sekori, and other colleagues. Someone’s joke made the group laugh as they headed to the tool shed (a ramshackle closet made of whatever spare lumber they’d had at the time), and right into Mistake’s trap.
She leaned forward as Rezzy unlocked the door. She couldn’t see the inside from her hiding spot, but she was more interested in their reactions when they saw the inside.
Rezzy pulled open the door and stopped, his smile replaced with surprise. Hammer – a large blue tiefling – leaned over his shoulder to see what gave him pause. The much-smaller Temerity poked his head around her side.
Hammer laughed and ducked into the shed. Purple blueberry juice dripped from her chin when she came out peeling a banana. Temerity and Sekori slipped inside after her and soon everyone was sharing the stash of fruit they’d found in place of their tools. Even the older tieflings, more wary of the gift, eventually accepted it.
It would have been perfect, were it not for Rezzy. He’d stepped away from the door and scoured the area.
“Is this from your–” Aranais began to ask him, but thought better of it and retreated.
Mistake didn’t hide from Rezzy’s glare. Not that the still-green leaves hid her red skin very well anyways. He spotted her and she hopped down from the branches to meet him halfway.
“Good morning, Rezzy,” she said. “Hope you’re hungry. I thought it’d be funny, bananas instead of hammers, berries in place of nails…”
He folded his arms and continued to stare her down. She’d thought he’d be less upset about this one, but well, her name was Mistake.
“I didn’t know what apples were similar to so…” she said, putting off the inevitable argument. “I sort of just… put them–”
“This is what you’ve been doing instead of what I asked you to do?” he asked.
Mistake winced. Joy had been acting oddly since winter, but only Mistake and Rezzy had noticed. He’d spent the spring trying to find answers and asked for Mistake’s help when he’d found none. He wanted it solved by the end of summer, but Mistake needed Strixhaven’s library to research possibilities. Rezzy didn’t like that response last time she gave it.
“I can do more than one thing at once,” she said, frustration already cutting into her voice. “Before you accuse me, I paid fairly while disguised as a human. They have no idea they sold fruit to a tiefling, and if it’s all eaten, there’ll be no evidence left behind.”
“And when they see through your disguise? We’ll all be paying, then.” He sighed and rubbed his temples. “If they question who you are, can you answer them? Can you even talk in their accent?”
“They don’t notice me, they don’t talk to me, none of that matters!” she yelled.
“It does, Mistake!” he yelled back.
They’d had this argument so many times, they both had the words memorized, but neither felt like performing for their audience. They fell silent, refusing to budge on their stances, until Rezzy took a step closer.
“I know you’re trying to help,” he said in a tone of practiced patience, “but you can’t keep risking yourself on this nonsense. Now where are our tools?”
Mistake stared at him for too many seconds before pointing to the bushes behind the shed. She dropped the silent image and the bushes disappeared, revealing the boxes of tools hidden in plain sight.
Rezzy took one last look at Mistake and left her. She knew to expect this from him, but made the mistake of thinking this time might be different. In a way, it was. He’d always worried about risks to the community, never the risks to herself. It was almost like Joy, expressing a degree of care and support she never had before. Her ailment was spreading, which meant Mistake was running out of time.
The crunch of an apple alerted her to Sekori snacking nearby.
“I thought it was funny,” he said with a full mouth.
She couldn’t help but smile. “Thanks, Seki,” she said.
He went back to work and Mistake soon left to do the same. This argument proved what she already knew: she couldn’t tell Rezzy her plans. She had a theory that connected Joy’s ailment with the Conflict from 200 years ago, and fixing it would be far riskier than buying some fruit.

---

A week later, Mistake packed her bag. Though she carried more this time, it still all fit in one bag. She’d just pulled a bundle of weapons from under a floorboard when she heard a knock behind her.
Joy stood in the doorway and Mistake cursed herself for forgetting to close the door.
“Hi,” Joy said. “Do you mind if I…?” she gestured inside the room.
“Um, sure.” Mistake sat on the pile of straw that was her bed and hid the bundle behind her back.
Joy took a deliberate step inside and looked around. Though the room never changed, Mistake guessed it’d been years since Joy saw it. She looked at the wall by the dresser, trying to read the charcoal messages Mistake’s friends had left during the school year. Then her eyes drifted down and her curiosity gave way to confusion.
“You have… a pile of rocks?” she asked.
“Oh, right.” Mistake had forgotten those. “Spell component. Nothing dangerous.” Though she was certain Phoenix could be dangerous if she wanted.
“Of course.” Joy inched away from the rocks. “How is school? King’s going with you this time, right? That’s…nice.”
“Um, yeah. It’s good.”
Silence regained control of the room. Joy stood as if afraid to touch anything and both of them avoided eye contact. Mistake thumbed through the slightly-singed copy of Rival Vol 4 she’d “borrowed”.
“So…” Joy said finally. “Fruit?”
Mistake let the book cover drop closed. “Rezzy already lectured me, I don’t need it from you, too.”
“N-no, um… Rezz–your father brought some to me. Strawberries were always my favorite.” There it was again. Only the healers’ notes referred to Rezzy as her father, yet now Joy insisted on it. Having ruled out an imposter posing as Joy, the only possible explanation for the change was magical manipulation. Something messed with Joy’s mind.
“He worries about you.” Joy said, pulling her tail free of her ankle.
A flare of anger pushed away all of Mistake's other thoughts. “He worries I’ll mess up and get other people hurt. The whole point of going to Strixhaven is to learn things to help everyone, but he just–” Mistake cut herself off. Venting to an ailing Joy wasn’t going to help anything. She shoved her book into her bag and took a breath to calm down.
“‘No one will give you the education you need to overthrow them.’ Something my mother said when someone else went to Strixhaven years ago. We never saw him again.” Because he’s now a professor, Mistake thought. “The school won’t teach the sort of things that are needed to fix Redfell.”
“It’s not like they offer classes on it, but I’m still learning spells and meeting people. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
Joy walked to the window and rested her hands on the sill. “Sometimes you have to learn to be happy with what you have.”
“Are you?” Mistake asked.
Joy turned to her as if surprised by the question. Before she could answer, the clock tower chimed from the city center. Mistake and King had a caravan to meet at the gates.
“I should get going,” Mistake said. She strapped the weapon bundle to her bag and puller on her boots.
“You have a way past the gates?” Joy asked.
“King hates that I’m smuggling him out, but yes.” Mistake did a final check for everything she needed. There was one thing missing.
“We’ll talk more in the winter, then,” Joy said. She held out the travel cloak she’d made for Mistake last year.
Mistake took the cloak and left without responding. Joy had given a similar cloak to King, so there clearly was no additional meaning to the gift. Still, it was the closest she'd gotten to approval for her choices, and she wouldn’t have left without it.
Four months. That’s all the time she had to figure out what manipulated Joy and everyone else in Redfell. In Griev, she would bring an end to it, or die trying.

These events occur over summer 4466, during the break between Mistake's first and second years at Strixhaven.

Cast

Resilience (Rezzy)

Mistake's father, though more of a disgrunted and reluctant guardian

Sekori

One of Mistake's close friends, works with Rezzy

Joy

Mistake's mother, a less-disgruntled-but-still-reluctant guardian

King

Mistake's closest friend, winner of a scholarship

Locations

Redfell

A mostly-human city known for being exceptionally anti-tiefling

Related Content

The Forgotten Past

Mistake's paper on the Conflict that segregated Redfell