“Gennady, Charlus, Simon,” Fredrick said. “You’ll have this room.”
His eyebrows narrowed as only two boys stepped forward. “Charlus will be along shortly, I’m sure,” he said, in a tone that promised trouble for the absent Charlus. “You two can get inside. Dinner will be served when the bell rings.”
“Thank you, sir,” the other boy said. Simon, Gennady guessed. “I ...”
Fredrick pointed at the door. “In.”
Gennady was already pushing the door open. A faint tingle of magic flickered through the air as he stepped inside and looked around. The room was bigger than he’d dared expect, with three beds, three wardrobes, three bookshelves and a single small door in the rear of the chamber. There were no windows. Light was provided by a single glowing orb, drifting just below the ceiling. He inched forward, struck with wonder. It was his. It was all his.
“Excuse me,” Simon said. He had an accent that reminded Gennady of the shopkeepers in Dragon’s Den. “Can I come in?”
“Yes, sorry.” Gennady felt his face heat. “I’m ... I’m Gennady. Pleased to meet you.”
“Simon.” Simon stuck out a hand. “Glad to be here.”
Gennady nodded, studying Simon with interest. The young man—boy, really—couldn’t be any younger than Gennady himself, but he looked younger. His face was pale and unmarked, his brown hair long and floppy rather than cut close to his scalp ... he looked secure, as if he thought he had nothing to fear. Gennady felt envy, mingled with bitter regret. He could have been secure, if he’d grown up somewhere else. No one was truly secure in the Cairngorms, not even the aristocracy. You never knew when the other folk would reach out their hand and take you.
“I’m from Dragon’s Den,” Simon said, confirming Gennady’s earlier thought. “Where are you from?”
“The Cairngorms,” Gennady said. His village didn’t have a name. He’d never realised how strange that was until he’d discovered that every town and city outside the mountains did have a name. “That’s a long way away.”
“I’ve never been there,” Simon said. He had an infectious smile. “What’s it like?”
“Harsh.” Gennady turned away, trying to hide his jealously. Simon could talk freely about traveling ... of course he could. “I’m glad to be away.”
He opened the rear door and peered inside. A washbasin, a shower, a toilet ... he shuddered, remembering how hard it had been to use the toilets in the boarding house. He was too used to doing his business outside, converting his waste to night soil that would—eventually—be used to fertilise the fields. Indoor toilets struck him as dirty and disgusting and—worst of all—wasteful. He told himself, firmly, that he had no idea what happened after he did his business. For all he knew, Whitehall sold compost to the local farmers.
Simon kept chatting, telling Gennady more than he wanted to know about his merchant family, their life and a whole string of issues that made absolutely no sense at all to his captive audience. Gennady tried hard to keep his face under tight control, torn between the urge to tell Simon to shut up and the grim awareness that Simon was just trying to be friendly. The merchant boy was probably as nervous as Gennady himself. He listened quietly as he chose a bed and sat down, opening the drawer under the bed to see a selection of robes, underwear and towels. The tutors had told him that everything would be provided. He hadn’t really believed it until now.
“The beds look small,” Simon said. “We’re supposed to get bigger beds if we pass our first tests.”
“Are we?” Gennady looked at Simon, then at the bed, then back at Simon again. “It looks big enough for me.”
Simon shrugged. “It’s the principle of the thing.”
“I had to share a blanket with my siblings,” Gennady said, as he ran his finger over the duvet. It was easily big enough to cover him from head to toe. “This is so much better.”
The door burst open. A young man stamped into the room, looking pissed. Gennady glanced at him, then froze. His instincts recognised a threat when they saw one. The young man was wearing robes, just like them, but there was something fancy about the stitching that suggested they were customized. Gennady’s tutors had mumbled something about students who bought their own robes, rather than drawing them from the school’s stockpiles. He hadn’t understood what they meant until now.
He felt his fists clench as he stared at the newcomer. He—Charlus, Gennady assumed—was tall and haughty, with a face that was entirely too angular for Gennady’s peace of mind and a nose that was tailor-made for sneering. His eyes were sharp—and angry. Gennady saw a hint of loathing in the eyes ... no, not loathing. Charlus thought they were too lowly for him to loathe. Gennady was sure of it.
“I’m Simon,” Simon said. “You must be Charlus ...”
“That’s LordCharlus to you, peasant,” Charlus snapped. “Lord Charlus of House Ashworth!”
He lifted his hand, spread out his fingers and jabbed them towards the other two boys. Gennady felt ... something ... hit the back of his neck, a blow that wasn’t a blow. The world seemed to grow larger all of sudden, something dark landing on top of him as magic—alien magic—pulsed through his body. It took him longer than it should have done to realise that Charlus had cast a spell on him. The room went completely dark as something warm and soft brushed against his head. He reached up and felt cloth. It made no sense.
The ground shook. Gennady nearly panicked. Fear held him frozen as the warm object was pulled away. Light flowed into his eyes, almost blinding him. It was hard, so hard, to make sense of what he was seeing. Charlus had become a giant, looming over him. His face was so large that ... Gennady started back as he realised that Charlus hadn’t grown larger, not really. It was Gennady who’d been shrunk. The room was suddenly so immense that it would take far too long to reach the door. He glanced down and realised, to his horror, that he was naked. He clamped his hand over his manhood as Charlus laughed. Tears filled his eyes as he bowed his head in shame. Charlus was no better than Hogarth. He’d used magic rather than his fists, but otherwise ...
He looked at Simon, who’d also been shrunk. They were barely two metres apart, but it might as well have been a thousand miles. Charlus peered down at them, his face a cruel rictus of amusement. He continued to laugh at them. Gennady felt a surge of sudden hatred that burned through him, demanding an outlet. But there was nothing. There was nothing he could do. He was helpless ...
“They told me I couldn’t share a room with my friends.” Charlus spoke quietly, but it felt as if he were shouting. “They told me I had to ... expand my mind. They told me ...”
His voice rose. “Get this through your heads. I’m in charge. When I tell you to do something, you do it. Or else I’ll punish you like the vermin you are.”
Gennady clenched his fists, knowing it would be useless. Charlus had all the power. There was nothing he could do to fight back. Not yet, perhaps not ever ... no, he told himself, firmly, that he’d study hard and learn how to best Charlus at his own game. The aristocrat had cheated, but ... he wouldn’t win. Gennady was grimly determined to make him pay.
“You can’t do this to us,” Simon protested. “You can’t ...”
Charlus snapped his fingers. Simon’s tiny form fell to the ground. “Yes, I can. And I will.”
He tossed his carryall at one of the beds, then turned. “I’m in charge. Don’t you forget it.”
Gennady watched him walk out the door, staring in horror as he realised they were still about two inches high. The floor shook as Charlus closed the door behind him. Gennady swallowed hard, then tried to cast the cancellation spell he’d been taught. It didn’t work. He gritted his teeth and tried again, telling himself that Charlus was just a student. There was no reason to believe his magic would last for more than an hour or two, but ...
“Gennady!” Simon was running towards him. It looked as though he was running a race. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” Gennady lied. It was a mistake—it was always a mistak
e—to show weakness. The boys would see it as an invitation. The girls would laugh and mock. “You?”
“I’ve been better.” Simon looked pale. “What a toffee-nosed bastard!”
Gennady flinched, despite himself. Someone might be listening. Someone was always listening, back home. The village had few secrets. Here ... who knew? Someone might be watching them through magic. He’d heard enough stories from his tutors—tales of Lord Whitehall and Lord Alfred and Robin De Bold—to know there were few true limits to magic. And then he remembered he was naked, that they were both naked ...
Simon didn’t seem to care. “A year of him,” he said. “It’s going to feel like an eternity.”
“Yeah,” Gennady said. The thought was unbearable. Hogarth had been horrid, but at least Gennady hadn’t had to share a room with him. “We’re going to have to study hard. We’re going to have to beat him.”
“If we can,” Simon said, pessimistically. He sat down, resting his hands on his knees as he waited for the spell to wear off. “He’ll have been raised in a magical household. He’ll know more than us ...”
“People like that never stop, unless they run into someone hard enough to stop them,” Gennady said. He’d heard that bullies were always cowards, but it wasn’t true. Bullies were rarely cowards because they rarely ran into someone who could stop them. They’d never tasted defeat, let alone the humiliation of being a victim. He promised himself that Charlus would taste it for himself before he was done. “We have to study hard.”
But he knew, as he tried to cancel the spell once again, that it wouldn’t be easy.
Chapter 5
The spell proved to be very resistant. Gennady tried again and again to cancel it, but he finally had to admit defeat and wait for the spell to wear off. He found himself growing back to normal just as the dinner bell rang for the last time. They hurried to dinner, snatched a quick meal before the older students chased them out and returned to their room. There was no sign of Charlus until Lights Out, when he returned, showered and went straight to bed. If he noticed the rude gesture Gennady made at his back, he didn’t show it.
Gennady didn’t sleep well. The sense that—at any moment—he might be turned into a small hopping thing kept him awake. He tossed and turned for hours before he finally slept, only to be tormented by nightmares of a giant Hogarth—who blurred into Charlus—lifting a foot and crushing him under his clogs. The howling alarm didn’t seem to make any difference, or to go away ... it wasn’t until Simon shook him that he realised he needed to get up. He rolled over, clambered out of bed and stumbled into the shower. Charlus, mercifully, was nowhere to be seen. His bathroom supplies, on the other hand, dominated the washroom. Gennady resisted the urge to pour the bottles of sweet-smelling liquid down the toilet. The faint hint of magic in the air suggested that trying might prove fatal.
“I heard you cry out,” Simon said. “Were you dreaming?”
“Just a little,” Gennady lied. He thought Simon meant well, but he didn’t know.Revealing weakness to anyone could be very dangerous. He liked Simon, yet ... his life had taught him that true friends were few and far between. “Did you have a good sleep?”
“Once I managed to block out the snores,” Simon said. He pointed a finger at Charlus’s bed. “He snored so loudly I thought it was a thunderstorm.”
Gennady laughed as he donned his robe, then headed to the door. A handful of students were running up and down the corridor, including a couple of snooty-faced aristocrats who looked down their noses at him. He guessed they were Charlus’s friends. They probably were. The local aristocracy back home hated each other, yet they were friendly at the same time. It probably made sense to them, he reasoned, but to him it was just stupid. The aristocrats needed some real problems to keep them from fighting over trivialities.
“Gennady,” Simon said, as they entered the dining hall. “I’d like you to meet one of my friends.”
Gennady looked up and blinked in surprise as a red-headed girl made her way over to meet them. She wore a long robe that covered her curves—a decent woman, part of his mind noted—but her hair was uncovered, and her smile wide and welcoming. Gennady felt a confused mixture of emotions, a faint sense she might be interesting combined with the dull awareness that she hadn’t covered her hair. And ... he told himself, firmly, that it didn’t matter. The newcomer wasn’t Primrose. Gennady would stay loyal to his girl.
“Lyndred, Daughter of Milstein,” Simon said. “This is Gennady, my new friend.”
Lyndred dropped a curtsey. Gennady smiled, almost despite himself. No one, absolutely no one, had ever called him a friend before. He supposed Simon and he were friends, of a sort. They certainly had to work together against Charlus. He bowed in return, feeling oddly unsure. Lyndred was clearly neither a low-born village girl or a high-born aristocrat. He honestly wasn’t sure how to treat her.
They chatted as they ate breakfast, then collected their bags and made their way to their first classes. The Housemaster had set out their timetables, along with instructions for getting from the dining hall to the classrooms, but they were very nearly late by the time they reached the room. Gennady felt his heart skip a beat as he saw Charlus and a couple of other boys sitting at the rear of the room, sneering at all and sundry. It was hard to force himself to turn his back on them. He told himself, desperately, that it was an insult. But, in the classroom, Charlus was unlikely to notice.
And he might not know that turning your back on someone is an insult anyway, Gennady reflected, mournfully. He’s from a whole different world.
He looked up as the tutor, a middle-aged woman with a warm smile, strode into the chamber and looked around. It wasn’t easy to take a woman seriously as a person of authority, but ... Gennady was learning. Sorceresses had personal power as well as positional power. They were hardly as helpless as village girls, who could be bought and sold or stolen as the whim struck their menfolk. And ... he reminded himself, sharply, that he’d been in the same boat until his magic had emerged. He squared his shoulders and listened as the woman—she introduced herself as Mistress Irene—launched into a complicated lecture on charms. Gennady didn’t find it easy to follow.
His heart sank as she started to toss questions, and practical exercises, at the class. Charlus, damn him to the other folk, seemed to know everything. He answered each and every question that happened to be directed towards the rear of the class, showing off for the teacher. Gennady and the other students, the ones who didn’t come from magical stock, found it harder to handle the exercises. Simon had his hand rapped for mixing up his spellwork, creating something that—the tutor informed them—would have caused a disaster if it had actually been tried. The sniggering from the back of the room gnawed at Gennady’s mind. He promised himself, once again, that he’d do anything to shut the bastards up.
“This spell isn’t going to work,” Mistress Irene said, looking down at his slate. “Why not?”
Gennady scowled. He barely followed the notation. He wasn’t sure he understood the link between his diagram and actual magic. His head pounded as he tried to make sense of his work. Perhaps ... he tried to tell himself it didn’t make sense. But it was a straight line ...
Mistress Irene took pity on him. “You’re wasting energy,” she said. “Every step in the diagram costs your spellwork a little more magic. By the time it reaches the end of the line, there will be little power left. You need to compress your spellwork to conserve magic.”
The sniggering grew louder. Mistress Irene looked up. “Do you find something amusing?”
Charlus snickered. “I was merely reflecting on the absurdity of inviting unprepared imbeciles to Whitehall.”
“Indeed.” Mistress Irene’s voice turned cold. “I shall be sure to inform the Grandmaster of your opinion. I’m sure he will take it very seriously indeed. Until he sees fit to appoint you to the admissions committee, you can write me a short essay on the lives of Lord Brentwood, Lady Pelham and Lady Helen of House Ashworth.
I’m sure you will find them very interesting indeed.”
The snickering stopped, abruptly. Gennady blinked in surprise, an odd warm feeling flooding through his chest. Mistress Irene had punished them? He found it hard to believe. No one ever punished his tormentors, not ever. Maybe she was more annoyed at the sniggering than the target of their amusement. Or ... he clung to the thought that, perhaps, there was justice after all. Charlus wasn’t laughing any longer. Gennady shared a wink with Simon as the class came to an end. It wasn’t much, but they’d take what they could get.
He was quick to leave the classroom once the bell rang, trying to put as much distance as he could between Charlus and himself before it was too late. He’d known too many people like Charlus. The bastard would seek to make Gennady pay for his humiliation, even though he’d brought it on himself. Perhaps especially because he’d brought it on himself. Simon and Lyndred followed him, half-running to the next classroom. The corridors seemed jammed with students, ranging from boys only a year or so older than them to adults in fancy robes who looked ready to move on with their lives. Gennady felt a stab of envy as he saw a pair of students who were clearly in their final year. They looked so confident, so sure of themselves ... he’d be one of them soon, he promised himself. And then he could go home and be a big man. Everyone would respect him.
Their second class—alchemy—proved to be no better than the first. The alchemist gave them a long lecture on safety precautions, focusing on the importance of following instructions, then taught them how to prepare herbs for the cauldron. Gennady felt oddly unsure of himself as he julienned a plant with an unpronounceable name, torn between the sense that cooking was woman’s work and the grim awareness that alchemy wasn’t cooking. Charlus didn’t seem to have any hesitation in getting to work either. Gennady tried to tell himself that it was proof that Charlus wasn’t as masculine as the bastard would like to believe, even though he knew it wasn’t true. He had little else to cling to as he poured the ingredients into the boiling water and felt the magic surge ...
Fantastic Schools: Volume One (Fantastic Schools Anthologies Book 1) Page 37
