by Kailin Gow
Wirt thought. “You mean Llew? The dragon?”
Ms. Lake nodded. “Dragons tend to have good memories. He will be able to show you which branch to take. If you want.”
The last three words hung there, tempting, but also asking Wirt an important question. One he was not quite ready to answer.
“I thought you both had plans for me,” Wirt said.
“And what makes you think that?” Ender Paine asked. His voice was neutral, but there was just a hint of danger beneath the surface of it.
“Well, sir,” Wirt said, “you wouldn’t have let me into the school otherwise, would you? Not if there weren’t something in it for you.” He looked to Ms. Lake. “Neither of you would have.”
Ms. Lake looked a little hurt by that. For his part, Ender Paine laughed.
“True enough, boy. Ah, we will make a real wizard of you yet. If you stay, that is. As for letting you go, Vivaine has pointed out that, by helping recover the chalice, you have already done more than enough for me to be ahead on the deal. Also, she threatened to tell you how to get home whether I agreed or not, and this way I look like I’m being suitably altruistic.”
The Headmaster laughed like he had not just admitted to being utterly manipulative. Ms. Lake didn’t join in.
“You have a choice to make, Wirt. You can go home, or you can stay here.”
“If I went back,” Wirt said, “would I be able to come back here?”
“Possibly,” Ms. Lake said. “The entrance should work both ways, but it can be hard to tell sometimes.”
“And if I decided to stay here-”
“Yes, yes,” Ender Paine snapped, “you would be able to change your mind. We have just told you how to find the way back, haven’t we?”
Ms. Lake shook her head. “I am not sure that is helping, headmaster. Yes, Wirt, you could still change your mind. But you do have to decide, at least for now.”
And that, Wirt felt, was the hard part about the whole thing. He had to decide. That was not something he’d had to do much before. He hadn’t had any say in the various families he had lived with, for example, nor had he had any say about coming to the school in the first place. That had just been the magic sweeping him up. He had not really even had any say in joining the school, in his roommate, or even in joining in the quest for the chalice. Now though, they were expecting him to decide whether he wanted to stay in a magical world or go back…
…home. Was it home, though? Had any of the places Wirt had stayed really been his home? They had just been places. Usually ones without much in the way of friends to go with them. That brought a pang of pain with it as Wirt thought about Spencer and Alana holding hands. Was not it the fact that they had both managed to get so close to him that made it hurt so much? Maybe he would be better off somewhere where there weren’t people who would hurt him like that.
It would certainly be more normal. You could bet that the outskirts of Bicester would hardly ever feature people being turned into frogs, or magical cups, or ancient dragons who sounded like they might be more at home in Cardiff watching the rugby than in their caves. On the other hand, Wirt could see Ms. Lake watching him with something approaching hope.
“You want me to stay, don’t you?” he asked her. “You’ve still got this thing that you want me to do for you.”
Ms. Lake nodded. “I would like you to stay. I think it might be good for you, Wirt, and yes, the Headmaster and I have some horribly convoluted plots we’ll probably end up involving you in. You mustn’t let that influence your decision though. You need to do what you think is right for you.”
“Of course,” the Headmaster pointed out, “here you will receive an education that will prepare you for high office, give you magical power beyond your wildest dreams, and maybe even improve your dress sense.” He looked Wirt up and down. “Though I possibly wouldn’t hold out quite that much hope.”
This, Wirt thought, from a man dressed like he should be doing cheap card tricks. The trouble was, except about the clothes, Ender Paine had a point. The school could give him a lot. Certainly more opportunities than he would ever have anywhere else. Then there was Spencer, Alana, Priscilla and Robert. Despite the hurt, Wirt still couldn’t help feeling that having them around was a good thing. They had certainly made the past few days far better than they might have been otherwise, and even Alana and Spencer… well, Wirt was sure that he would get used to it in time.
Ender Paine sighed theatrically, absentmindedly conjuring small balls of energy into existence and rolling them back and forth across his knuckles.
“Are you going to make a decision at some point today, boy? Or should I pop home for the evening and leave you standing there all night?”
“Um…” Wirt hesitated only a second longer. “I think I want to stay, if that’s all right.”
Ender Paine nodded brusquely, signed a couple of pieces of paper and looked up at Wirt again. Ms. Lake smiled.
“I am glad you have decided to stay with us, Wirt. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.”
“Or at least very useful,” Ender Paine said, “now, are you still here? Run along boy. I am sure you have classes to get to. At least, you will when I work out where I am going to get my new charms and magical accountancy teachers from, though I suppose… Vivaine, do you think that we really need a magical accountancy teacher? The expense is horrendous, and it is not like anybody ever takes the class. Well, except for that Bentley boy, and there’s something very odd there…”
As the Headmaster continued to ramble, Ms. Lake nodded gently but firmly towards the door. Wirt took the hint. He left, shutting the door behind him and setting off down the corridor. After a few paces, on impulse more than anything, he stopped and tiptoed back, listening carefully.
“It seems you were right, Vivaine,” Ender Paine was saying. “He has a lot of magical potential. I can see that his talents might be very helpful in dealing with our problems.”
“I cannot help but feel,” Ms. Lake said, “that things might be easier if we just told him, though. He is a bright boy. I’m sure he would understand.”
“If you do,” the Headmaster snapped back, “I will have you tweeting in a golden cage before you can blink. We’re doing this my way, Vivaine.”
There was a pause, and somehow Wirt could just imagine Ms. Lake standing there, weighing up her options, and finally deciding that for now at least, it was better just to agree.
“As you say, Headmaster.”
“Finally, you are starting to get the idea. Now, if only everyone else would. Oh, and Vivaine?”
“Yes, Ender?”
“Whatever you have planned for the boy, ensure that it does not interfere with my plans for him.”
There was another pause, and it occurred to Wirt that when Ms. Lake left, she would walk straight into him. That didn’t seem like a good thing, especially given everything he had just overheard. It seemed better by far to get out of there as quickly as he could, so Wirt edged away from the door to Ender Paine’s office, before walking quickly down to the transport hole at the end of the hall.
It was still ringed by those odd, and slightly disturbing, statues that were supposed to represent the school’s governors. Wirt paused on the verge of stepping into the hole, staring at them. There was something very wrong about them. They were not moving, but there was very definitely a sense that they might the moment everyone’s backs were turned. It was more than that, though. There was something about them. Something on the edge of hearing. Wirt strained to listen.
“He has talent indeed.” This voice was rasping, and hardly sounded like the kind of thing that could have come from a human throat. The voice that answered was chattering and odd.
“Talent, but no direction yet.”
“That will come. It seems that old Merlin knew what he was talking about. Yes, I agree with the Headmaster. He will be useful.”
Wirt struggled to hear more, but somehow got the feeling that he didn’t really want to be able t
o. The voices faded, leaving him alone in the hallway. Wirt shook his head. The best thing he could do right then, he decided, was to head down to his room, pick an argument with Spencer over just how neat he insisted on keeping the place, and pretend very hard that about half the people in the school weren’t trying to use him for ends he didn’t know about yet.
With a final look back at Ender Paine’s office, Wirt stepped into the tube.
*****************
Wirt, Spencer, Alana, Priscilla, and Robert’s Adventures continue in:
SILVER TO GOLD
Alchemists Academy Book 2
EXCERPT FROM
RISE OF THE FIRE TAMER
Wordwick Games #1
by
kailin gow
Prologue
The deadline slipped past, as deadlines tend to. Around the world, hungry eyes pinned themselves to computer screens, waiting for news. When it came, it came in the form of a simple video file, which when opened showed the familiar head and shoulders of Henry Word, the owner of Wordwick Inc. As heads went, it was not too bad. Although he had hit forty, there weren’t any signs of gray in the sandy-blond hair, and the cleft chin was still as defined as ever. In the second or two before he started speaking, there was a twinkle in the green eyes that said that Henry Word was enjoying the suspense.
“Well,” he began, “you’re probably all waiting with baited breath for me to announce the winners of the Wordwick Games Contest, designed to find our ultimate fans. After all, you probably want to know who’s getting the prize of spending a week in the castle you all know and love from the game.” A mischievous smile flickered across his features for a moment. “Well, simply telling you would hardly be much fun, would it? Instead, I think I’ll keep you all in suspense just a little while longer, and our winners…” Henry Word raised a remarkably old-fashioned pocket watch to eye level and spun it like a carnival hypnotist. “Well, our winners should be finding out very soon indeed.”
Tumbleweed didn’t twist its way across the ranch, because that would have been too much like something happening. Stieg Sparks had learned many things in the past seventeen years, and one of them was that nothing much ever seemed to happen on days when you really wanted them to. Particularly not on his parents’ ranch. A few cattle, though not as many as there once had been, stood and stared at Sparks as he sat on the front porch, and he stared back, more for something to do than from any particular interest in them.
The cows were probably getting the better end of the deal, since underneath his sandy-blond hair Sparks had the casual good looks that came with being his school football team’s star quarterback, while cows were just cows.
Of course, Sparks knew could probably find something to do, if he set his mind to it. He could do most things once he set his mind to them. He could, for example, go and take a look at the broken crop sprayer that his father had sworn would never work again, before they ended up paying out more money the ranch didn’t have. He would probably find a way to get it working. Or he could go inside and log on to the Game, though his mother had started to say he was spending too much time on it.
He could even hurry over to football practice. It was certainly what he was supposed to be doing. He might even make it in time not to earn any extra laps from the coach, if he really rushed. Somehow, the thought didn’t spur him to action. In fact, put like that, even staring at cows seemed better.
It occurred to him that they weren’t staring back at him any more. Instead, they were busy watching a figure that had somehow managed to walk halfway up the drive to the house without Sparks noticing. Sparks couldn’t blame them. The figure wore what could only be described as a robe, the cowl up and obscuring their face. Sparks was so surprised by the arrival that he didn’t say anything until the figure was just a couple of feet away.
“Hi. Are you lost?”
In answer, the hooded figure held out a hand. It took Sparks a moment to notice that there was an envelope in it. Sparks took it without thinking. It was an odd kind of envelope, jet-black and sealed in a very old-fashioned way, with a blob of red wax that had a seal pressed into it. The seal formed a capital W. A very familiar capital W, since Sparks had seen it online practically every day for months now.
He ripped it open and read the contents in one go, then looked up to ask the hooded figure about it. Sparks found himself staring at empty space. Well, not exactly empty. There were still the cows. There were always cows. There just seemed to be a complete lack of any gray robed figures to go with them.
This apartment was a lot smaller than any ranch, and there certainly was not room for any cows, except possibly in the refrigerator. There was hardly space for Rio, his little brother and his grandmother. Sometimes, especially when his grandmother started saying things like “Riordan Roberts! What trouble have you got yourself into this time?” he thought that there might not even be enough room for all three of them.
Or at least not for him. The dark hair and olive skin he’d inherited from his mother were fine with his grandmother, but the piercing blue eyes he’d got from his father weren’t so ok. Not after what happened. It didn’t strike Rio as very fair that she’d bring it up whenever there was trouble, especially when it was never Rio’s fault. Well, not most of the time, anyway. It certainly was not down to him that practically everything in East LA seemed to be trouble in Nana’s opinion. As far as Rio could see, taking a few things for Nana and Tomas shouldn’t really count. He was only looking out for them.
Currently, he was sitting in front of about the only luxury the apartment had, a tiny computer that Nana had insisted the two of them should have for their schoolwork. For once, Rio was using it for just that, and not the Game. He looked up at the sound of soft footfalls behind him, expecting to see Tomas. It was not.
“Hey, who are you?”
The figure in gray didn’t say anything, and Rio lunged forward to try and wrench the hood of the robe back. If someone was going to break in, he wanted to see their face. He got a brief glimpse of a face almost completely hidden by wraparound sunglasses, before the robe pulled out of his hands, leaving Rio trying to keep his balance and failing. He looked up from the carpet, and the figure was gone. All that was left was a black envelope left precisely on the floor in front of him like the figure had known where he would fall.
It occurred to Rio that, in Grams’ book, this would definitely count as trouble.
Somewhere in the blare of music that was her bedroom, Kat was taking a lot of trouble over her appearance. Her hair was already right, or at least it was a chin length bob of dark hair with streaks of blue and red that her parents tried very carefully not to disapprove of, but the rest of it hadn’t been easy. There had been the red and black plaid to pick out to go with her combat boots, along with exactly the right amount of black makeup. It had taken ages to get right. The makeup aged her a year older than her sixteen years, but didn’t help fill out her slim figure. She had even cut short her session on the Game to work on it more.
Let’s see Them think I’m ordinary now, Kat thought. She always thought of her parents as Them, especially when they insisted on calling her Katherine instead of Kat, which they did a lot. They seemed to have evolved a policy of ignoring the more extreme things Kat did, in the hopes that eventually she would fit in, or that she would become the Katherine Kipling they wanted her to be. Well fat chance.
Kat surveyed the results of her efforts in her bedroom mirror. Despite her Dark Girl outfit, she still looked like a pixie or what people think pixies should look like, the child-like Tinker Bell version. An independent observer might have suspected that black eye shadow, and black nail polish, and black lipstick was probably overdoing things a bit, or was at least a look better suited to someone tall and brooding, not petite and, frankly, cute. Kat loved it.
She was so busy admiring it that she almost didn’t notice the reflection of the gray cloaked figure- the one who laid an envelope on the edge of the dressing table but vanished the mom
ent she looked round. It could almost have been a dream, except that the envelope was there, sitting rather smugly, Kat thought, as though it knew exactly how worrying its sudden appearance was.
Still, Kat recovered enough to think after a moment, at least the black went with her nail polish.
Up in Jackson Zusak’s home in Alaska, things were a little brighter, mostly because his parents insisted on filling the place with the color that the cold tended to leach away outside. Some days, he could hardly get to his computer for the brightly colored throws and coverings that his mom kept leaving around the place.
He was not at his computer now, for once. Instead, he was sitting in an armchair busy reading a book on the history of the Vikings. That had amused his mom and dad when they had seen it before heading off to the store to buy groceries.
“You could be a Viking yourself,” Jack’s mom had said. “You’ve got the red hair.”
They had all laughed at that, because even Jack knew that the image of his small, scrawny figure setting sail across vast oceans just didn’t work. Besides, they didn’t have glasses back then, and a Viking who wandered into things, as Jack tended to do when he lost his, probably wouldn’t do very well.
“You’re only fifteen,” his mom had said, hugging him. “You’ve still got time to grow to be Viking-sized.”
Jack hadn’t pointed out that, because people tended to be shorter in the past, he was probably already Viking-sized, for much the same reason that he didn’t tell his dad the answers to the crossword before he’d officially given up on it. Thinking of which…
Jack found the newspaper in its usual crumpled up heap, smoothed it out a little, and finished off the crossword in a couple of minutes before returning to his book. He’d forgotten to mark his place, and it had closed on the arm of the chair he’d been sitting in. He went to open it again, and almost dropped it when the black envelope fell out. Out of the window, Jack got a brief glimpse of a gray robed figure, hurrying away too quickly to catch.
