by Kailin Gow
“I don’t think Vivaine plans to do you any harm. After everything, she takes the safety of the students very seriously.”
“You see,” Wirt complained, stepping away from the books, “there you go again. After what? All that business of her being part of putting Merlin to sleep?”
“Exactly,” Ms. Burns said. “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s as much as I think she’d like me to say. I have to respect some of my roommate’s privacy.”
That was another thing Wirt wouldn’t get used to in a hurry. The fact that not just one, but two of the teachers could live quite comfortably in an apartment on the bottom of the school lake. Like most things about the school, it was something he had to get used to in this world.
“Can I go now?” he asked instead.
Ms. Burns sighed. “Yes, Wirt, you can go. This will actually be our last class for a while. The new term is starting soon, and the other pupils will be starting back, so I will be busy with a whole new class of would be magic users.”
That was enough to bring out a small spark of gratitude in Wirt. “Thank you for helping me so much. I think I’ve learned a lot.”
Ms. Burns nodded. “You have. It might even be enough to offset the advantages that Spencer and Roland have by learning these things their whole lives, given what I’ve seen of you. Ideally, of course, the headmaster would do the fair thing and give us more time…”
“But that isn’t going to happen,” Wirt finished for her. “He doesn’t exactly believe in fairness.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Ms. Burns said. She looked almost like she was remembering something then. “You should hurry back to your room,” she suggested. “And use the tubes. You know you shouldn’t transport yourself too much on school property.”
Wirt nodded, stepping out into the corridor just in time to run into another student, running in with a suitcase. The collision sent the other student sprawling, the suitcase falling open.
“Wirt!”
It was Alana. In the next few seconds, his eyes took her all in. How could a girl get prettier in just a few weeks? Alana’s face was flushed, and her long dark silky hair had fallen over her face, partly obscuring it, but she was still more beautiful than ever. Her big, dark eyes stared up at him while Wirt saw that she had grown taller and slenderer over the vacation. She was dressed in a light colored dress worked with darker patterns around the edges. It was a lot more old fashioned than the kind of thing she’d worn before the vacation, but it suited her. So did the scarf for the elite class she wore around her neck.
Wirt didn’t even realize how much he was staring until she spoke again.
“Wirt, it’s great to see you! Can you help me up? And maybe help me with this suitcase?”
Wirt reached out a hand to pull her up, and he must have pulled harder than he thought, because in an instant she was pressed close to him, his arm sliding around her waist automatically. This close, he could smell the sweet jasmine and citrus scent of her, while her dark hair tickled his features. Wirt saw her smile, and remembered the times they’d been that close before. Those times they’d kissed.
A pointed cough came from behind them, and Wirt turned, seeing another familiar face.
“Spencer, it’s good to see you.”
His former roommate was dressed in black, partly because it was a serious, uncompromising color, but mostly because it was one of the many things his father insisted on. His blond hair and blue eyes didn’t really go with it, but the serious, almost angry expression on his face did. Wirt was used to Spencer looking serious; he normally didn’t look any other way, but the anger was new. It seemed to give his friend a harder edge, one that Wirt wasn’t sure he liked.
“Alana,” Spencer said, holding out a hand to her. Alana pulled back from Wirt and looked over at him, hurrying over to take Spencer’s hand. While she did that, Spencer shot Wirt a look that was even less friendly than the last one had been. What had happened over the mid-term break to make him look like that? Was it the Quantum Games? They were meant to be competing against each other for the same place, but Wirt couldn’t see how that would make Spencer hate him.
What happened next made even less sense. Alana took Spencer’s hand and Spencer pulled her too him, enveloping her in a kiss. It wasn’t a gentle kiss. Instead, it was full, and passionate, and deep, going on for a long time while Spencer pulled Alana tightly to him. His hand was on the back of her head, taking control of the kiss completely, and Alana showed every sign of enjoying that. At least, she didn’t make any move to pull back from him.
They kept kissing, like there wasn’t anyone else around. Like they didn’t care that there was. Spencer kissed Alana like he didn’t intend to stop before the end of the semester at least, and Alana seemed to almost melt into his arms as he held her to him. It seemed that a lot of things had happened over the vacation that Wirt didn’t know about. Between the look Spencer had given him, and the kiss, which was clearly designed to show that Spencer and Alana were together, Wirt wasn’t sure that he wanted to know most of it.
Chapter 2
It was hard standing there while his two closest friends kissed so extravagantly nearby. It wasn’t just the embarrassment of having to wait while they did so, either. Instead, it felt like they’d left him out of some kind of secret, or changed completely over the vacation.
Of course, Wirt knew that was stupid. He ought to be happy for them. He’d known that Spencer and Alana had liked one another since before he even showed up at the school. If Spencer had finally gotten Alana away from Roland, then that had to be a good thing, for both him and her. Especially given some of the dangerous things Roland was involved in.
Yet somehow, he couldn’t be, and it wasn’t just the fact that they hadn’t told him. He felt almost angry about seeing them together, so that the anger bubbled up inside him. Was it jealousy? In those moments when they’d been alone, Wirt had occasionally thought that he and Alana had something pretty special, but now, it looked like he’d been wrong.
He coughed, a little louder than he needed to, and the two of them broke apart from one another. Spencer gave him a look that still wasn’t friendly, before looking over at where Alana’s things had fallen on the floor. He moved over to them without saying a word, starting to pack them back into Alana’s suitcase for her.
“Spencer,” Wirt said, “it’s good to see you now you’re back from the break. How was it?”
“Hmm?” Spencer said, his eyes firmly on Alana rather than Wirt. He seemed so completely distracted by her presence that he didn’t pay Wirt any attention at all. That, or he was deliberately ignoring him. He straightened up, handing Alana her suitcase very gently.
“How was your break?” Wirt repeated, unable to keep a hint of annoyance out of his voice.
Spencer still didn’t answer, but Alana did it for him. “Spencer and I went back home to his parents’ house.”
Her mother worked for the Bentleys. It was one of the reasons Alana was able to go to such an exclusive school as the Alchemists Academy. It was also the reason why they’d had to hide what they felt about one another. Spencer’s father, in particular, wasn’t the kind of man to accept his son dating the daughter of one of his employees.
“Spencer told his father how he felt about me,” Alana continued. “He actually stood up to him over it. It was such a brave, sweet thing for him to do.”
She took Spencer’s hand then, and Spencer started to move in to kiss her again. Wirt decided to interrupt before things could end up as another marathon kiss.
“Does this mean that things went well with Spencer’s father? He was okay with the two of you being together in the end?”
Alana shook her head, while Spencer placed a kiss on her neck. “Not really. He didn’t like it much at all.”
Wirt waited for Spencer to say something, but he kept ignoring Wirt, concentrating in running his hands through Alana’s hair instead. He wouldn’t so much as look at Wirt.
“We should get on wi
th getting settled back in our rooms,” Spencer murmured to Alana. “Then I’ll meet you back at your room before our first class?”
“All right, Spencer,” Alana agreed. She gave Wirt an apologetic look. “We’ll see you at lunch, Wirt. Maybe we can catch up then.”
She and Spencer walked off arm in arm. Spencer still didn’t look Wirt’s way.
“Ouch, that has to hurt worse than a prat-fall off a very tall step ladder.”
Wirt turned at that voice and saw its owner standing not far from him. His highness, Prince Robert, was a boy the same age as Wirt, with reasonably good looks, albeit with a certain lack of strength and definition, sandy blonde hair that wasn’t quite the brilliant sheen of his sister’s, and a generally casual air that extended to the disheveled state of the royal tunic and hose he wore. It was at least better than when he was dressed in full jesting gear.
“What is up with Spencer?” Wirt asked the other boy. “I mean, it’s one thing that he’s with Alana, but it’s another thing for him to completely ignore me like that.”
“I’ve had audiences like that occasionally,” Robert said. He persisted in jesting whenever he could get away with it, despite his father’s insistence that he should learn to be a proper prince, and the fact that he wasn’t particularly good at it. Robert shrugged. “Maybe he’s jealous because you’re close to Alana when his father doesn’t want him to be. I know that fathers can be very frustrating.”
“Yours still wants you to be his idea of a ruler?”
“Oh, that’s not too bad,” Robert said, waving a hand dismissively. “Of course, the problem with Spencer could be that he thinks you’re too much of a friend to him.”
“Too much of a friend?” Wirt repeated. “That doesn’t make any sense, Robert.”
“It makes perfect sense,” the prince insisted, “at least when contrasted with, for example, the lyrics of the average folk song. Do you know, some of my subjects insisted on a full performance for…”
“Robert.”
“Oh, he’s probably just worried that if he’s too friendly towards you, he won’t be able to do whatever he needs to do to get that last place in the Quantum Games. I know my father and some of the teachers around here don’t have much of a problem with it, but I think normal people find it kind of hard to go around killing their friends.”
“Nobody’s normal around here,” Wirt said, but he didn’t feel as casual as he made himself sound. He looked down. He’d known that the Quantum Games would change things when he signed up for them. He’d known what they would involve, yet everything today seemed to be conspiring to remind him. First Ms. Burns’ lesson, now Spencer.
If he wanted things to go back to how they were with Spencer, then what could he do? Pull out of the games? That wasn’t an option. The Alchemists Academy was the closest thing to a home he’d ever known. So much so that he’d long since given up on making it back to his world. It wasn’t like there was anything there for him. The academy offered the only chance he had of really understanding the powers he possessed.
Then there was the destiny that seemed to be stalking him the same way he’d stalked the deer out in the forest. He was still having the dreams; the ones about Merlin and Arthur, seeming to show moments featuring the two that he didn’t know anything about. If he left the Academy, he would never know what that meant.
“If it’s any consolation,” Robert said, “Spencer is probably under a lot of pressure from his father to win. Trust me, I know what pressures from fathers can be like.”
“You know,” Wirt said, “for a would be Fool, you’re doing a pretty good job of being wise.”
Robert shrugged, took a couple of balls out of a pocket and started to juggle them one handed. “Don’t tell anybody that. It would be terrible for my reputation. Besides, I just got most of it from Priscilla.”
That made sense. His sister was officially advised by Alana, and they were very close friends. Alana was almost certain now to end up as Priscilla’s full time advisor once they graduated.
“What did your sister say?” Wirt asked. He thought about Priscilla, and her tendency to say whatever was on her mind, no matter how inconsequential. “The short version, though.”
“Well, she thinks that when Spencer told his father that he was with Alana, old man Bentley was furious. Spencer stood up to him though, and told him that if he was going to go with something potentially fatal like the Quantum Games, then he was going to do what he liked. He said that he was going to be with Alana, and that there wasn’t anything his father could do about it.” Robert stopped juggling abruptly. “I must say that he’s a lot braver than I would have been. Then again, I guess Spencer’s father doesn’t generally behead people who upset him. You quickly learn not to argue in our house.”
Wirt wasn’t sure what to say to that, but he could understand what Robert was trying to say. Well, more or less. It was natural that something as dangerous as the Quantum Games would make people a little harder around the edges, and he guessed that Spencer would want to take his chance with Alana while he could, yet it still wasn’t good to think of his friend reacting to him like that.
His former friend, by the looks of it. They’d been as close as anybody in the first year and a half, yet now it seemed that counted for nothing. Could Spencer really do that? Could he just turn off their friendship like a light switch, and all because of a contest? Well, if he could, then maybe Wirt should do the same. After all, Ms. Burns had warned him that he might need to be tougher.
Of course, she’d also warned him that he needed to use his magic more responsibly.
Wirt was still thinking about that when another figure rolled into the corridor, trailing a suitcase behind him that rolled along without him doing anything, the way an obedient dog might follow its master. The boy leading it was taller than Wirt, despite Wirt’s recent spurt of growth. He had high cheekbones, a strong jaw, and spiky blond hair with dark stripes running through it. He was athletically built, wearing dark jeans, a t-shirt featuring a band Wirt had never heard of, and heavily customized sneakers. He took off a pair of sunglasses as he approached.
“If it isn’t my ex-roomie!” Roland Black said. His suitcase wheeled to a stop behind him.
“Ex-roomie?” Wirt asked.
“Trust me, I’m every bit as happy about it as you are.” Roland smiled as he said that. “With everyone who has been dropping out, plenty of rooms have become free, and my name was first on the list. So I don’t have to spend any longer sharing with the likes of you.”
Making it far easier, no doubt, to talk to strange things in boxes. Wirt didn’t say that aloud though. He didn’t want Roland to know what he knew about him. He didn’t want the other boy to know that he knew what he had planned, either. Whoever was commanding Roland, they wanted to take over the school pretty desperately.
“What do you want, Roland?”
“Mostly just to savor the look on your face.”
“At finding out that you’ve moved into a new room?” Wirt shrugged. “If you want to see me looking joyful, why don’t you just go away?”
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how you look now that you know that Bentley has the beautiful Alana all to himself.”
Wirt twitched slightly at that; not much, but enough for Roland to laugh.
“Yes, that’s it. That’s the look right there.”
Chapter 3
“Good to see you, too,” Wirt said, the sarcasm dripping from his voice. “I would have thought you’d want to stay roommates so that you can sabotage me for the Quantum Games. It’s the kind of thing you’d do.”
Roland stared at him with obvious anger, but then regained enough control to smile. “Like I’d need to do anything like that to beat you. Not that it would cause any problems if I did, here.”
He had a point there. With Ender Paine in charge of the school, cheating on Roland’s part probably wouldn’t get him into trouble unless he did it incompetently. Which meant that Wir
t would have to spend most of the rest of the year on his guard around Roland. That was fine. It wasn’t like he’d ever trusted him, anyway.
Roland stretched. “Plus I need my space. Unlike some people, I actually have stuff with me.”
The dig at Wirt’s lack of wealth was obvious. Wirt didn’t rise to it. Picking a fight wasn’t the answer. Beating Roland in the Quantum Games was.
“Anyway,” Roland said, “I can’t stand around here talking to you all day. I have to get my stuff into my room and start preparing for lessons. Hopefully, I won’t be seeing much of you or Spencer this term, because if I do…”
“Should you really be making threats?” Robert asked him.
Roland bowed, but he exaggerated it, making it clear that he didn’t mean it. “Of course not, Your Highness. You probably have a lot of ruling to be doing… wait, that’s not you, is it? It will never be, either.”
With that, he stalked off, his suitcase following along behind him. Wirt and Robert watched him go.
“What a monumental idiot,” Wirt said once the other boy was gone.
“He just wants to win too,” Robert replied. “Though I’d guess that the way things have turned out with Alana have something to do with his bitterness. “A whole term with her wrapped around his finger, yet now she knows what he is and has gone back to Spencer. She’s far too sensible to fall for the likes of Roland again. It’s one of the reasons she makes such a good advisor for my sister.”
There were plenty of other good reasons, Wirt suspected, starting with Alana’s willingness to put up with the state Priscilla left their shared room in, working up through her ability to help the princess with her unfortunate tendency to attract fairy-tale creatures, and going all the way up to the part where Alana was just about the only person Priscilla would actually listen to when she was in the middle of doing something stupid.
“Alana’s special,” Wirt began. “She’s…”
He couldn’t find the words, because any words he could think of seemed to sell her short. Alana was perfect, but not in the kind of way that made so many girls completely untouchable and unapproachable. She was perfect, but there was something invitingly normal about her too. Something that made Wirt wish that he’d made more of an effort after the first time they’d kissed to be with her.
