by V. St. Clair
He gasped as a latch clicked and the wooden slat floated up and shifted out of the way, revealing a cache of magical weaponry hidden beneath the floor. There were mastery level prisms of every color, buckets of conjury chalk, rows and rows of elixirs and powders, charms, scriptures, healing infusions, even dried herbs.
“What is this?” Hayden asked in awe.
“Each of us Masters has a similar arsenal hidden away somewhere in the castle, in case we find ourselves in a materials shortage or Mizzenwald is under siege. I expect the accountants are going to restrict access to materials to save money, and this is only to be used in a dire emergency…but I wanted someone trustworthy to have access to my cache, just in case the worst happens.”
He replaced the floor tile and Hayden tucked the key into the pocket of his pajamas.
“Tell no one about this, not even your friends,” Laurren continued. “We’ve been siphoning off materials for years to keep them off the accounting ledgers, but your new Masters are going to try and track down every last grain of powder if they can. I don’t envy Kirius Sark the task of dealing with them while we’re gone.” He shuddered.
He clapped Hayden on the shoulder and grasped his Mastery Charm, preparing to depart.
“But what if none of you ever come back?” Hayden blurted out desperately, unable to believe that all of his mentors could be gone forever in a single evening.
Master Laurren gave him a sad smile and said, “Then they’ll eventually nominate new people to our posts and the world will carry on as it always has.” His expression brightened slightly and he added, “Take heart, Hayden, I expect at least some of us will make it back to Mizzenwald. We’re actually quite good at magic.”
And with that he was gone.
“So was Magdalene Trout,” Hayden said to the empty air, standing there in the basement of the school for several long minutes until Bonk nudged him in the head to get him moving. Then there was nothing to do but to creep back through the castle to bed and try to sleep.
9
The Changing Times
It didn’t take long for the rest of the school to discover that almost all of their teachers had disappeared overnight. They had barely sat down to breakfast on the following morning when the doors to the dining hall opened and nine strangers in official-looking blue suits walked in. The noise in the hall fell to a hushed whisper as the visitors moved to the far end of the room and called for everyone’s attention.
“Who are they?” Zane nudged Hayden before falling silent.
“The High Mayor’s accountants,” he grumbled in response, spooning some porridge into his bowl and setting some salmon aside for Bonk.
The others looked at him in surprise but didn’t have time to question him further, as one of the accountants had begun speaking.
“Good morning. I am Fia Eldridge, and my colleagues and I have been appointed by the High Mayor of Junir to oversee the operation of Mizzenwald while most of the normal faculty are away.”
A fifth-year boy near the front of the room blurted out, “Where did the Masters go?”
Master Sark was leaning against the wall near the entrance to the kitchen, the look on his face making it perfectly clear that he wasn’t even remotely hungry right now. Looking tired and a little nauseous, he stepped forward and said, “The others were called on to assist with the effort against the northern sorcerers. I will be ensuring that the school continues to function as intended, with as little interruption to your studies as possible. The Fia and his colleagues have…graciously agreed to come here and ensure the continued fiscal solvency of the school during that time.”
There was an outbreak of muttering at the news that nearly all of their teachers were gone and might never be coming back.
Fia Eldridge thanked Master Sark and made a few more bland comments about how they intended to keep things running as normally as possible, and then the nine of them left the dining hall without eating anything. A torrent of discussion broke out in their absence.
“Why in the world would nearly all of the Masters leave at the same time?” Zane ranted. “That’s the dumbest plan I’ve ever heard, and now they’re leaving us to the mercy of some stuffed suits from Kargath that know nothing about magic.”
Hayden frowned and said, “Because it was them or us.”
The others fell silent for a moment until finally Tamon said, “Why do I get the feeling that this announcement didn’t come as a surprise to you?”
Hayden sighed. “Laurren called me to his office at midnight to warn me to be a good boy while they’re gone. He said that a lot of the Masters from the Great Nine offered to go fight in order to avoid a draft on us students, though I guess if they fail then eventually it will come down to us anyway.”
Conner raised his eyebrows and said, “They were getting ready to declare a draft? Things must be going terribly if they’re willing to force sixth-and-seventh year students to fight.”
“And not just the older students, either,” Hayden continued. “Anyone they judged to have the skills required could be sent. Apparently my name came up early in that discussion.”
Tess looked horrified. “But you’re only fourteen!”
“Tell that to the High Mayor. Last time we met he wasn’t horribly impressed with me,” Hayden said mulishly.
“So why was Laurren warning you to behave for our new Masters?” Tamon frowned.
“He said things are going to get tough with them in charge, and that we need to keep a low profile to avoid getting drafted in case there ever is one.”
“Never mind getting drafted,” Conner looked aghast. “If a Fia for the High Mayor can scrape up the justification, he could have you sold off to the highest bidder—including the sorcerers. He could have you arrested on some trumped-up charge, maybe even killed if it was something bad enough. Especially you, Hayden—with the Masters gone there’s no one to speak for you until you’re an adult.”
“So I’ll do my best to avoid Eldridge,” Hayden shrugged, but Conner rolled his eyes and said, “Didn’t you notice the other eight Fias with them? Don’t tell me you plan on avoiding all of them…”
Zane made a face and asked, “Don’t tell me all those accountants have the same first name. How are we supposed to tell them apart?”
“Fia isn’t their name, dolt, it’s their title,” Tamon explained. “And it’s an important one too, like ‘Your Majesty’. Only very high-ranking accountants get the title, and it’s given by the High Mayor himself. They’re smug about it, which is why you always address them as Fia and never as ‘sir’ or ‘mister.’ ”
Zane looked chastened for his ignorance, and the rest of them filed away the knowledge for future use.
“I’m not very hungry,” Hayden said at last, rising to his feet. “I’ll see you all later.”
He grabbed his bag and went to sit on the front lawns before class, waiting for Bonk to finish ravaging the large slab of salmon he’d brought with him so that they could play ‘fetch’ for a few minutes. Hayden was getting better at vanishing the rubber squirrel with magic these days, but it felt more satisfying to throw it by hand and watch his familiar soar after it. For a moment he wondered if Cinder would turn up to play, but then he remembered that Cinder was with Asher and Horace, probably fighting sorcerers at this very moment while he sat idly beneath a cherry-blossom, contemplating the new regime.
“Asher beats me in battle every time, and doesn’t even break a sweat,” he assured himself. “He can top anything those sorcerers throw at him.”
Elixirs was being taught by one of Kilgore’s mastery-level students, who looked nervous at being watched by the Fia that sat at the back of the room, making notes in a large red notebook that he carried around with him. Hayden thought the class went pretty well, all things considered. Kilgore’s apprentice obviously knew what he was talking about, and with the Master’s lesson plans was able to walk them through the material without any difficulties, though he lacked Kilgore’s natural confidence.<
br />
Abnormal Magic was slightly more problematic, as it was a class without a definite set of right and wrong answers. Hayden had no idea where they scraped up the mastery-level student who was teaching it, but it seemed that Master Laurren had scribbled down some notes on what to cover with the level-one class, because they resumed their previous lesson about magical siphons with barely a hiccup. A different Fia attended this class, and he frowned skeptically as he took notes on the lesson. Hayden suspected that to someone who appreciated solid facts and figures, a class as vague as Abnormal Magic must be giving him a colossal headache.
Their instructor in Charms was terribly nervous, which left the door open for the Fia to interject commentary. He asked lots of questions about the structure of the class, how emblems were made, and the different types of binders that were used. Hayden wished that the mastery-student would get a backbone and tell the man to shut his mouth so that they could get on with their lesson for the day, but that never happened, and Hayden went off to lunch feeling thoroughly annoyed with the waste of time.
His friends had similar experiences in their classes, which they discussed at length during their meal in hushed voices. Most of the Fias were apparently content to take notes from the back of the room, but some of them interrupted classes to ask questions when they saw a chance, like in Charms.
Bonk picked at the food on Hayden’s plate grudgingly, only eating a few bites and staying unusually still and silent.
“You alright, little guy?” Hayden asked his familiar, patting him on the head. “You haven’t eaten much.”
Bonk hopped onto the bench beside him and laid down with his head in Hayden’s lap, looking disconsolate.
Frowning, Hayden said, “You must be missing Cinder. I miss him too, but we have to try and think positive. He’ll be back soon, along with Horace and Asher and all the others.”
Bonk did nothing to acknowledge his words, and Hayden sighed and left him alone, turning back to his friends. “I don’t like to see him so mopey. It isn’t like him to be quiet and well-behaved.”
Tess looked sympathetic and said, “Maybe Mittens can keep him company while you’re in Prisms. They seem to be friends, so it might cheer him up a little.”
“It’s worth a try, thanks.”
Tess loaned him her cat after lunch, and Hayden made his way to Prisms with Bonk and Mittens in tow. His familiar did seem slightly more animated with a friend to play with, so he told the two of them to play in an empty classroom until his class was finished.
Hayden entered the Prisms classroom to find the Fia already waiting for him. Feeling slightly awkward, Hayden introduced himself. “Hello. I’m Hayden.”
The Fia nodded and said, “I’m Fia Valay. The roster shows that you’re the only student in the level-four class this term.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Hayden confirmed, setting his things down on the desk as a new thought occurred to him. “Who’s been teaching the low-level classes with Master Asher gone?” Now that he considered it, he supposed he was the next-most qualified person at Mizzenwald with prisms after Asher, but the Master had never said anything to him about teaching in his absence.
“Oliver Trout did his best with the level-one, two, and three classes, though your instructor left no lesson plans or notes of any kind from what I can see, which did not make for a smooth transition.”
Hayden fought to suppress a smile and said, “That’s not surprising. Asher’s not one for making detailed lesson plans.”
Fia Valay pursed his lips in displeasure and said, “I hope you are far enough in your studies to know what to do, because there is apparently no one left at this school who is qualified to teach you.”
Hayden nodded and said, “We’ve been doing math—trigonometry and geometry and stuff—so that I can start trying to map new arrays.”
To his surprise, the Fia brightened immediately and said, “Excellent. And do you like math?”
Hayden grimaced and answered, “Not really. I’m not very good at it; I never have been.”
“Then you’re in luck, because this is something I can teach you,” Fia Valay continued pleasantly. It was the first time Hayden had seen a Fia smile since they arrived at Mizzenwald, though he supposed that all the magic was strange and confusing to them. They were probably much more sociable when they were in their natural element.
“Um, do you actually know a lot about angles and such? I thought you did finance math.”
Valay chuckled and said, “You don’t think I got my title by knowing only addition and subtraction, do you? No,” he answered his own question, “people of my ilk are required to learn all sorts of math to maintain our credentials.”
Hayden took out his notes from last class, where he was struggling to triangulate an array of orange-yellow-blue-violet based on cosines for the new array he found.
“If you think you can help with this, then by all means, teach me math.” He sighed in frustration. “I need to figure out if these four bands of color are forming a partial array, so I need to know if their cosines are inverses of the green-yellow band beside them summed together.”
To his surprise, the Fia smiled and said, “Oh yes, I see what you’re doing. How refreshing to learn that magic has some sense of order and logic after all; I’d always thought it was just a bunch of mystic chaos.”
Hayden smirked. “I used to think so too, but it’s actually all logic-based, it just takes a while sometimes to figure out what the logic is behind it.”
“But then why do some people possess the ability to use magic and some do not? That doesn’t suggest a methodical system to me.”
“All people have the capability to do magic,” Hayden countered lightly. “Well, all people have Sources at least. We learned in Abnormal Magic that what most people lack is the Foci—the channels we use to get magic from our Source into the world, so their magic is basically just stuck inside of them.”
The Fia looked vastly interested and examined his own hands carefully as though looking for signs of a Focus.
“Hmm, I never knew that before. It seems I’m receiving quite the education here as well.” He nodded towards Hayden’s notes. “Your first problem is that you actually took the secant of that first angle, not the cosine.” He pointed to the paper. “There’s an easy way to remember the difference so you don’t get them confused.”
He opened his notebook to a blank sheet and drew a simple triangle, labeling the sides with letters and teaching Hayden an acronym to remember them all by. As much as Hayden hated to admit it, Valay was much better at teaching math than Asher was, and he actually felt slightly less hopeless about the subject by the time class was over, which was annoying because he wanted to hate Valay out of solidarity to his mentor.
The rest of his classes were uneventful, and by the time Hayden went to bed that night he began to think that maybe Master Laurren had been too hard on the Fias in his assessment the night before, and that things would be alright until the Masters got back from the Forest of Illusions.
He was proven wrong almost immediately the following day. No sooner had he sat down to breakfast with his friends, when Fia Eldridge addressed them from the high table at the back of the hall (the Fias didn’t want to mingle with students and had their own special table set up the night before).
“If I could have everyone’s attention, there are a few notices I would like to make before classes commence for the day,” he said in a raised voice, and gradually the room fell silent.
Tess frowned as though bracing herself for the worst, and Bonk picked listlessly at a cube of beef that Hayden had laid out for him.
“First, I would like you all to make note of a change in the way that materials are requisitioned for your classes. Each of your instructors will be given a stack of these Material Request Forms.” He held up a sheet of paper that none of them could read from where they were sitting. “My colleagues and I have noticed an appalling waste of magical instruments and materials as a result of s
tudents being permitted to acquire them without justification. This waste of resources is costing the school an astonishing amount of money, as we are only beginning to discover through our preliminary auditing.”
For some reason he threw Master Sark a fleeting glare of displeasure, and Hayden was tempted to smile.
Sark must be doing like Master Laurren said he would, making things harder on the accountants and lying through his teeth whenever he can.
If so, he’d never appreciated his least-favorite Master as much as in this moment.
“Magical materials are only to be requisitioned for necessary classroom assignments and demonstrations, and will not be dispensed without proper justification,” Fia Eldridge continued amidst surprised whispers from the students. “If you have need of something, you will fill out one of these MRFs and get it signed by your instructor before bringing it to the dispensaries outside of the school.”
Zane leaned over and mumbled, “We won’t be able to have our combat practice anymore if they won’t give us supplies to practice with!”
Hayden nodded grimly in understanding. Looks like Laurren pegged them right after all.
“Secondly, we feel that there is an excess of untapped potential amongst the student body, as only a small number of higher-level students are accepted as apprentices to each of the Masters of the ten major and minor arcana. Since research into new expressions of magic is the single largest revenue-generator for the school, we would like all students who are in a level-four or higher class to choose a research topic for the year.”
The grumbling from the students was slightly louder now, and Hayden glanced at his friends to gauge their reactions. Zane looked appalled, Tess was grim, and Conner didn’t even notice Tamon’s boa constrictor wrapping around his legs.
