Trial By Fire (Schooled in Magic Book 7)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “No,” she said. “Aurelius” - she played with the bracelet instinctively - “was trying to seduce me, but I wasn’t tempted.”

  Frieda shuddered. “But he was old!”

  “I don’t think that would have mattered,” Emily said. The hell of it was that Aurelius had tried to seduce her with knowledge, rather than anything more physical. It might have worked if she hadn’t understood what he was trying to do. The idea of disappearing into Mountaintop and forgetting about the rest of the world was very attractive. “He wanted me for my mind.”

  Frieda looked at her. “No one else?”

  “Not until recently,” Emily said. And her feelings for Caleb had surprised her, more than she cared to admit. She’d liked him without truly recognizing she liked him. “My life was very different.”

  She gave Frieda a tight hug. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I will always be your friend.”

  “And sister,” Frieda agreed.

  They walked slowly back to Whitehall. The sound of people playing games echoed in the distance; Emily glanced at Frieda, wondering if she should ask what had happened when - if - Frieda had gone to play, then decided to leave it until later. Alassa would be furious if Frieda had skipped the practice, even if she wasn’t there. But then, Imaiqah and Song had also missed the practice; they’d had detention, thanks to the midnight feast. It was unlikely the remaining Upstarts had been able to do more than bounce around the playing fields a little.

  “Caleb should probably still be in the workroom,” Emily said, as they walked into the school and headed up the stairs. “I have no idea where to find Johan.”

  Frieda hesitated. “Do I have to talk to them?”

  “Yes,” Emily said, flatly. “You need to say something before the tutors hear about it.”

  They stopped outside the workroom door. “I’ll go in,” Frieda promised. “Please, can you wait outside?”

  Emily nodded. Frieda threw a nervous look at her, then opened the door and stepped into the workroom, closing it behind her. Emily glanced at her watch, mentally noting the time, and waited. It was nearly twenty minutes before Frieda stepped out of the room, looking upset but composed.

  “He said I owed him a favor,” Frieda said. “And that Johan probably owes me a black eye.”

  “I think he’d get in trouble for hitting you outside Martial Magic,” Emily said, dryly. Seniors picking on juniors was banned at Whitehall, although a junior starting the fights was tacitly permitted. The Nameless World might never have heard of Darwin, but its inhabitants believed that natural selection was an excellent way of weeding out the weak. “This isn’t Mountaintop.”

  “I know,” Frieda said. “He said...he said he understood, but I was not to do it again.”

  “Good advice,” Emily said. It would have been a great deal worse, she was sure, if Caleb had lost the fight. If he’d blacked Johan’s eye, well...the older student wouldn’t be very pleased with the person who’d gotten him into the fight. “Just make sure you take it.”

  Frieda nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said, again. “I won’t let it happen a second time.”

  “Good,” Emily said.

  She led Frieda along the corridor towards the kitchens. Her stomach was rumbling unpleasantly, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything apart from a snack with Alassa. Two students were standing at the top of the stairs, staring down the railings as if they were contemplating climbing over the banisters and letting themselves fall. Emily cleared her throat, unsure if she should try to stop them with a spell; they started, and ran down the stairs as if the devil himself were after them.

  “They’ve heard of you,” Frieda giggled.

  Emily scowled at her. That wasn’t funny.

  The kitchens seemed half-deserted, but there were a number of sandwiches under a preservation charm for older students. Emily took a handful, passed some to Frieda and they ate quickly at a small table before heading back to the dorms.

  “I’m sorry,” Frieda said, one final time.

  “You’d better say that to Alassa, too,” Emily said. Something was twitching at the back of her mind, a suggestion that something was very wrong. She tensed automatically, looking around for the threat. If nothing else, Master Grey’s lessons had done wonders for her reflexes. “I...”

  Frieda frowned. “Emily?”

  Emily tapped her lips. There was nothing...nothing she could see. She cast a revealing spell, then two more, but saw nothing. And yet the sense of unease was growing stronger...

  “Go back to your room,” Emily ordered. The wrongness seemed to grow even stronger as she approached the door that led into the Fourth Year dorms. “Now!”

  Frieda nodded and hurried off. Emily held up one hand in a casting stance, and stepped through the door. The sense of wrongness snapped out of existence, as if someone had flicked a switch. Puzzled, Emily looked around and saw...nothing. It was almost as if she’d imagined the whole thing. She lowered her hand and stepped into her bedroom...

  ...And froze in horror at the sight that greeted her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ALASSA STOOD IN FRONT OF THE mirror, her body so still she was either petrified or entranced. But it wasn’t Alassa who caught Emily’s attention. Imaiqah sat on her bed, chewing her fingernails so hard that blood was dripping from her mouth and staining her shirt. Emily felt her mouth fall open - she knew how hard it was to force herself to cut her skin - and ran forward. Up close, Imaiqah’s teeth were stained with her own blood, her eyes totally fixed on the mess she of her fingernails.

  “Stop!” Emily shouted, trying to pull Imaiqah’s hand out of her mouth. There was so much blood lying around that Imaiqah would be in very real danger, if someone took advantage of the opportunity to steal some and use it against her. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  Imaiqah ignored her. Emily tugged at her hand, but it only made matters worse; Imaiqah didn’t even seem to be aware of her presence.

  Bracing herself, Emily lifted her hand and slapped Imaiqah across the face.

  If she’d been under a spell, a compulsion to hurt herself, the slap should have shocked her out of it. But she didn’t even seem aware she’d been hit. A nasty red mark appeared on her skin, but she didn’t cry out or break free of the spell.

  Emily shook her, then looked deeply into her eyes. There was nothing there, no spark of life. Imaiqah might as well have been a puppet. Emily stumbled backwards, then cast a freeze spell. Mercifully, it worked; Imaiqah’s body froze. Her teeth were still digging into her flesh, but she wouldn’t lose any more blood before the Healers could see to her.

  She turned to Alassa and realized that whatever had affected Imaiqah had targeted her, too. Her friend stared into the mirror as if she were enraptured by her own beauty. Emily jumped in front of her, but there was no change until she actually caught hold of Alassa’s arm. The moment she touched her friend’s bare skin, her body crumpled like a sack of potatoes and hit the ground. Emily ruthlessly forced down panic - maybe this was another of Master Grey’s insane tests - and checked her breathing before trying to use magic to jerk Alassa awake. The spell worked, as far as she could tell, but Alassa remained motionless. Her breathing was so shallow it was almost impossible to detect.

  Shit, Emily thought, stunned.

  She turned and ran towards the door. Madame Beauregard tended to move between the Third and Fourth Year dorms, but she’d explained to the girls when they first moved in that anyone who rang the bell outside her Fourth Year office would summon her, no matter where she was. Outside, everything was eerily quiet, a strange sense of...anticipation...hanging in the air that sent chills down her spine. She closed the door behind her, and ran down towards the office. The bell was hanging from a hook just outside the door. Emily thumped the door - there was no answer - then rang the bell. Magic tingled around the wards, summoning the Dorm Mother...

  “The key to the future is finding the way,” a voice said. It was so distorted that it took Emily a moment to realize
that it was Pandora who spoke as she walked down the corridor. “The future lies open to the one who opens the lock to the future.”

  “Pandora,” Emily called. She didn’t know Pandora that well, but she needed help. “What are you...”

  Pandora turned to look at her. Emily shivered. Pandora’s eyes were as dead and cold as Imaiqah’s or Alassa’s had been, as if someone had reached inside the girl and drained her of everything that made her what she was. It was like staring into the face of a statue, or worse, a zombie, rather than a warm and breathing body.

  “Troubled, I waited; a prisoner, I waited,” Pandora said. Emily couldn’t help wondering if she was trying to talk like a man, or if something else was speaking through her. “Released, I fed; free, I hunt.”

  Her hand snapped up. Emily threw herself to one side as a hex sizzled past her and struck the walls, then tossed back a freeze spell of her own. Pandora caught it with a technique Emily didn’t recognize - where the hell had she learned that? - and fired off two more of her own hexes. The spells twisted in midair as Emily dodged, one slamming into her wards and knocking her off her feet, the other throwing her down the corridor towards the stone wall. Emily hastily recast her protective charms a second before she hit the wall -- and bounced.

  Pandora wasn’t this powerful. Not on her own. The only student Emily could think of who could do something like this was Aloha - and why would she want to?

  She gritted her teeth, and threw back the strongest freeze spell she could. Pandora froze, for a second, but freed herself; there was, again, something strange about the technique she used, something impossible. Her entire body seemed to shimmer through the spell. Emily hastily scrambled for something she could do that wouldn’t seriously injure the girl, but any prank spell she might use would be easy to deflect. Pandora, seemingly unconcerned about the danger, kept walking towards her.

  “Today, I roam free; tomorrow, I return,” she said. “I bring...”

  A flash of light struck Pandora from the side and she keeled over, her face snapping back to normal a moment before she struck the floor. Emily let out a sigh of relief as she saw the Gorgon, but felt her skin crawl as the Gorgon turned to look at her. Her friend had always seemed inhuman - she wasn’t fully human - but now she seemed creepy, too creepy to even look at. And her green eyes were flat and cold.

  “No,” Emily said. It had to be a nightmare, not a test. Even Master Grey wouldn’t deliberately injure other students just to teach her a lesson. “Gorgon...”

  The Gorgon advanced, her snakes twisting around her head in a manner that was almost hypnotic. No, it was hypnotic; Emily found it impossible, despite her fear, to look away from the snakes and the glowing green eyes. Her entire body felt drained; her hands dropped to her sides, her legs buckled as she was caught by the Gorgon’s spell. She’d known Gorgons could turn people to stone, and that their magic was terrifyingly hard to undo, but this was different. She wanted to surrender her will to the Gorgon.

  I will not, she thought, somehow clenching her fist hard enough to hurt. The pain jarred her awake; she mustered a spell and fired it at the Gorgon before she could be caught up again in her hypnotic gaze. The Gorgon stumbled forward, then fell to the floor, stunned.

  Emily caught herself before she fell too, then staggered towards her friend. The Gorgon was stunned, completely out of it. Emily checked her pulse - the Gorgon’s heartbeat had always been faster than hers - and sighed in relief. It looked as though the Gorgon would recover, even if no one used magic to wake her ahead of time.

  It was impossible to believe the school’s wards wouldn’t have noticed the spells Pandora had hurled at her, or the Gorgon’s attempt to overwhelm her. If she could get into trouble for practicing Martial Magic spells in a dedicated spellchamber, surely the wards would have sounded the alert if the spells were used in a dorm.

  Someone should have come by now, she thought, as she checked Pandora’s body. Where are they?

  She pinched herself, then walked slowly to the door and peered into the main corridor. A frog was jumped around on the floor, trying to evade a mean-looking rat. Two students had been casting spells on each other...Emily moved to free them, but thought better of it. God alone knew what had gotten into them. She listened, trying to tune out the pleading sounds from the two animals, and heard faint noises in the distance. They sounded very much like screams, which cut off abruptly. What was happening?

  How had everything gone to hell so quickly?

  The sound of running footsteps caught her attention and she ducked back into the dorms, ready to cast a spell or slam the doors closed. Madame Beauregard came into view, followed by a middle-aged man Emily didn’t know. The Dorm Mother looked tired, her eyes filled with horror, but at least she was alive. Emily stepped into view, holding up her hands to signify that she was harmless. If everyone was jumpy after whatever had happened, it was quite likely someone would be hexed by accident.

  “Emily,” Madame Beauregard said. She sounded relieved. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, but Alassa, Imaiqah, Pandora and the Gorgon are not,” Emily said. “What’s happening?”

  “A handful of students seem to have gone mad,” Madame Beauregard said, as she brushed past Emily and strode along the corridor towards Pandora. “What did you do to her?”

  “The Gorgon stunned her,” Emily said. Clearly, none of them had been in their right mind...but had whatever controlled Pandora moved to the Gorgon when the former was stunned? Or had the Gorgon retained control long enough to stun Pandora? “She’s just down the corridor.”

  Madame Beauregard nodded, and stepped into Emily’s room. “What happened here?”

  Emily’s eyes narrowed. Why not tend to the Gorgon first?

  “I had to freeze Imaiqah; Alassa fainted,” Emily said. “What about the Gorgon?”

  “I’ll deal with her in a moment,” Madame Beauregard said. She cast a spell; Alassa and Imaiqah rose into the air, then drifted out of the room into the corridor. Moments later, both Pandora and the Gorgon joined them. “They will all have to be taken to the infirmary.”

  “I’ll take them,” the man said.

  “I’ll go down to check on Frieda,” Emily said. If she’d walked into hell, what had the younger girl encountered in the Second Year dorms? “Or do you want me to stay here?”

  Madame Beauregard frowned. “Go check on your friend,” she said. She waved a hand at the two animals, transforming them back into First Years who immediately started to babble about being attacked by an older girl. Madame Beauregard ignored them and kept speaking to Emily. “Come straight back here once you’re done.”

  Emily watched her start to check the other rooms before she turned and hurried back down the corridor. The sense of overwhelming wrongness seemed to grow stronger around her, then fade away before she could do more than realize it was there. She stayed alert, watching for possible threats, but saw nothing. The corridors seemed deserted, yet...

  She paused outside the entrance to the Second Year dorms before she pushed open the door. The Second Year girls - all of them, apart from Frieda - stood in front of the wall, just staring at it. Madame Razz lay on the ground, her body frozen solid. Emily stared - she would never have been able to overpower a tutor as a Second Year - then hastily checked her former Dorm Mother. Her body was covered in ice. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, an unfreezing charm would do. Emily had the nasty feeling that freezing a living human would cause cell damage only a Healer could fix.

  The girls didn’t move, not even once. Emily looked at them, then hastily cast a freeze spell of her own over Madame Razz. Time would stop for her until the Healers could take a look at her and do what they could to save her life. She cursed under her breath, and tapped on the door to Frieda’s room. It opened, revealing the younger girl lying on her bed, looking depressed. She stared in surprise as Emily entered the room.

  “Emily?” Frieda asked. “What are you doing here?”

  Emily stared bac
k, equally surprised. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course,” Frieda said. “What happened to you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Emily said, as Frieda stood. “Come and look at your friends.”

  Frieda followed her out the door, then stopped and stared in horror. “What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. The Second Year girls, the same ones who’d had identical injuries, were still standing there, motionless. Even their eyes didn’t blink. “I think something is very badly wrong.”

  She led Frieda past the silent girls, then out into the corridor. Professor Lombardi was coming towards them, carrying a wand in one hand and a device she didn’t recognize in the other. It ticked unpleasantly as he stopped in front of them, his stern eyes inspecting their faces in minute detail. Emily hesitated, then started to explain what she’d seen when she entered the Second Year dorms.

  “A third of the school seems to have gone mad,” Professor Lombardi said. The Charms Master sounded very tired. “I’ll take them up to the Healers...”

  “Be careful of Madame Razz,” Emily said. “She was literally frozen, sir, with ice. There might be cellular damage...”

  Her voice trailed off as Professor Lombardi glared at her. Emily realized, too late, that he knew the dangers...and didn’t like her pointing out what he already knew. She flushed, then braced herself. She’d done the right thing by telling him, just in case he didn’t know. And, no matter what he said, he couldn’t change the facts.

  “Go back to your room, young lady,” he said, finally. He looked at Frieda. “Are you the only unaffected student in Second Year?”

  “I think so,” Frieda said. “I don’t know about the boys.”

  “I’ll check on them in a moment,” Professor Lombardi said. “Go with Emily, for the moment. You’ll be told what to do later.”

  “Yes, sir,” Frieda said.

  Emily sighed inwardly - sharing a room with Frieda again was going to be embarrassing - but nodded and led the way back to the Fourth Year dorms. Silence seemed to have fallen over the school, broken only by strange echoes and the weirdest sense of someone - or something - laughing at her. She shuddered at the sensation, but forced herself to keep going. It hadn’t felt so uncomfortable since the Mimic had been on the loose within the wards.