by Kailin Gow
“Without resorting to horrible tortures or rendering down anyone’s brain,” Ms. Burns muttered, and held her ground as Ender Paine glared at her. “I’m just thinking of the school, Headmaster. The king wouldn’t be pleased if you did that kind of thing to his daughter.”
The headmaster was silent for a moment, but then nodded. “You are correct, of course, and in any case, I suspect that there isn’t much to render.” Wirt noted that Priscilla didn’t dare to protest at that point. Ender Paine looked at Ms. Burns. “You have an alternative solution?”
“The mirror,” Ms. Burns said. “It will be able to show what happened, and they do not lie.”
“A simple approach, but an effective one, I suppose.” The headmaster seemed faintly disappointed that he couldn’t try his ones, but he moved over to the mirror anyway. “Show me,” he commanded.
It shouldn’t have worked. Wirt had have enough experience with that particular mirror to know that it only worked when you rhymed, and the magical spirit animating it usually complained bitterly even then. For Ender Paine, though, the magical device worked perfectly. It showed the door to the room opening, admitting Wirt, Alana, Spencer and Roland. It showed the next few minutes too, in perfect detail.
Finally, the headmaster waved a hand in front of it. “Enough.”
The mirror went back to just showing his reflection. Ender Paine took a moment to adjust the gloves he always wore. “The device is clear,” he said. “The girl, Alana, was responsible for finding the princess through her thinking. As such, she will receive full marks for this test. The others in her team helped, and will receive lower scores. Thomas and his team will receive less again.”
Nobody argued. Wirt suspected that nobody dared. Ender Paine, Ms. Burns, Robert, Thomas and the rest filed out of the room, leaving only Wirt, Spencer, Roland, Priscilla and Alana. Priscilla seemed pleased by the way things had gone, moving over to hug her friend.
“There! I knew you would do brilliantly. Your working out was almost as good as my disguise.”
“Yes, Priscilla,” Alana said, going along with it.
Wirt’s eyes weren’t on her in that moment though. Instead, he was busy watching Roland. The jealousy on his face was plain to see. Apparently, the other boy thought he should have gotten the top mark, despite Alana’s work. Wirt knew they would have to watch him. Somehow, he didn’t think Roland was going to let anything get between him and making it through to the next year.
Chapter 14
The next few weeks were busy ones for Wirt. There were lessons to deal with; endless lessons on everything from the proper way to deal with an infestation of griffons to how to wrap different elements around yourself as a shield and how to avoid attention from unpleasant Things while transporting yourself between spots.
Perhaps more importantly, there were more tests, and plenty of them, until Wirt started to suspect that Ender Paine was right. Everything was a test there. There were written quizzes in classes and sudden requirements for practical demonstrations, large scale problems to be solved in teams the way the search for Priscilla had gone and informal things where the only warning you got that you might be being tested was that the teacher was watching you a bit more closely than usual.
Not all the tests were even magical. Ms. Lake lined them all up on the bank of her home one morning, declaring that they would all have to swim to the other side. Wirt had pulled himself from the water long minutes later, well behind the likes of Alana, who had outpaced almost everyone.
On another occasion, Sir Percival had them fighting with wooden swords. Wirt had barely used a sword before in his life, and had found himself roundly beaten by Priscilla, who wasn’t actually taking the test, being merely a continued royal presence at the school, but who decided to join in anyway. Spencer had laughed at Wirt losing like that, right up to the point where the princess beat him too.
A few of the tests seemed strange even by the standards of the school. At one point, Ms. Lake told Wirt to walk down a corridor to a notice board and bring her back a note pinned to it. Wirt did it. It seemed to take a little longer than he would have thought, but other than that, there didn’t seem to be any problems. It was only when Ms. Lake invited a first year student to do the same thing that Wirt understood. The student got halfway, and suddenly appeared a few feet from them, walking in the wrong direction.
“Generally, only those with good transportation skills make it down here,” Ms. Lake said.
Wirt nodded then, though there was one thing that puzzled him. “This seems quite an individual kind of test, Ms. Lake,” he said. “I mean, I can pass it, but what about everyone else?”
“Oh, they won’t take this test. It was designed for you. Remember, Wirt, that we like to use many, many tests here, so that we get a full picture of what you can do. As the headmaster explained, the third year is all about nurturing your individual talents, so we need to know what those talents are.”
At that point, Ms. Lake transported him to a point a little way from the school, and Wirt had to jump himself back.
Wirt wasn’t sure that he liked the constant testing. Not just because of the time and effort it took, or even because at the end of it there was the prospect of having to leave the school if he didn’t do well. No, what Wirt didn’t like was that the whole process seemed to be bringing out the worst in his friends.
Alana wasn’t talking to Spencer anymore, for example, after the argument they’d had in the test with Priscilla. When they ended up in the same team for tasks, Wirt ended up relaying messages between them and trying to keep the peace while they bickered. Spencer, meanwhile, had gone almost completely into study mode without Wirt there to bring him out of it. He spent hours in his room, reading until he emerged bleary eyed for his next lesson. And as for Roland…
Wirt hadn’t seen any more oddness like him talking to boxes, but that certainly didn’t make sharing a room with him any easier. Roland was competitive to the extent that he put down Wirt’s best efforts and bludgeoned him during anything physical. Not to mention Roland’s attempts to put off those around him. When Ms. Burns had them throwing rocks at targets in a test of simple coordination, for example, Wirt had found that the other boy always had something to say just as he was about to throw, or an urgent need to cough, or even a sudden nervous twitch that sent his elbow into Wirt. Eventually, of course, Ms. Burns had told Roland to stand well away from Wirt, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that, while openly friendly enough, Roland obviously intended to do whatever he could to get one of those fourteen places, up to and including cheating. Wirt thought about complaining about that, but he could just see the headmaster smiling at the thought and congratulating Roland on his ruthlessness.
Wirt found himself mentioning all that to Robert one morning, out on the fields before the school where the young prince was practicing jousting, while juggling to himself when he thought no one was looking. Wirt hadn’t seen that much of Robert in his first year, but now it seemed that he was the perfect person to talk to. After all, he was one of the few people who wasn’t involved in any of the tests, and so wouldn’t think that Wirt was trying to gain some kind of advantage.
“It can be hard, succeeding with so much pressure on you,” Robert observed, trying, and failing, to mount the huge horse in front of him. “Of course, in my case, the pressure comes from knowing that I will succeed no matter what I try.”
“That’s very-”
“Succeed my father, I mean,” Robert said. “You couldn’t give me a leg up, could you?”
Wirt helped to haul him onto the horse, where Robert sat in a kind of heavily armored slump.
“So you don’t want to be king one day?” Wirt asked.
Robert shrugged. “What I want has very little to do with it. I guess it’s not really such a bad thing. I just think that, of all the people who could do the job, I’m maybe not the best choice. That’s monarchy for you, I’m afraid. You get who you get, not whoever is likely to
be good at it.”
Wirt shrugged. “Didn’t there used to be tests for that too?”
“You mean the old sword in the stone routine?” Robert asked. “That hasn’t been tried in centuries. A pity, really, because it has plenty of comic potential, when you think about it.”
“I hadn’t really looked at it that way,” Wirt said.
Robert sighed. “Hardly anyone seems to. I guess I shouldn’t, really. I mean, I know what my father says is right. I should be focusing on the knightly arts and so on. People don’t want a ruler whose main interest is in where his next pratfall is coming from. It’s just difficult sometimes, you know?”
Wirt obviously didn’t know what it was like to be a jesting-obsessed prince, but he knew what the pressure of expectation was like. He was, after all, meant to be someone with special talents.
“Yes,” he said. “I know. I just hope this testing stuff is over soon, so things can go back to normal.”
Robert shook his head. “That’s not the way it works though, is it? If you don’t get in, then you’re out completely, and if you do, then things still change, because you’ve got the whole ‘placement with a master wizard’ thing to deal with. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about all that, at least.”
Wirt hadn’t thought of it that way. Whatever happened at the school, his life was going to change irrevocably. Given that his time at the academy was the longest Wirt had stayed in a single place to date, he wasn’t sure he liked the idea.
“From what I hear, people are already dropping out,” Robert said. “When I was having my last lesson with the headmaster, a couple of students came to his office, saying that they would be leaving the school.”
“Just like that?” Wirt asked.
Robert shrugged. “I imagine if they knew that they had no hope of passing, they would want to get into a new school as quickly as possible. After all, there will be far more people looking once the results are announced.”
“How are the glamour lessons?” Wirt asked, wanting to know what it would be like, learning from the headmaster directly, and definitely not wanting to focus on the thought of maybe having to look for somewhere else to live once the exam results came out.
“Not bad.” Robert held out his hand, and for a moment, it seemed that a much larger, more impressive knight was sitting on his horse. Of course, the effect was spoiled a bit when the creature reared and Robert nearly fell off, but Wirt suspected that the prince couldn’t help himself on that front. “I find that you just have to get on with things.”
Just get on with things. It was such a simple approach, yet Wirt resolved to try it. After all, it couldn’t be any worse than agonizing over the way that things were going at the school, could it?
Just that thought carried him through much of the rest of the day. There was an elemental magic lesson with Ms. Burns, followed by an alchemy class with Mr. Fowler. Whatever they demanded of him, Wirt just kept going, getting on with the work in front of him and trying to get through it, barely even minding that the concoction he was working on in Mr. Fowler’s class blew up far earlier than anyone else’s.
Wirt kept going like that, in fact, through most of the rest of the week. He forced himself not to worry about the tests, because he knew that wouldn’t do any good, focusing instead on just doing the best he could in each one. He pushed through tests on making magical staffs, and using basic glamours, on Ms. Genovia’s toad spell and on aspects of the history of the Hundred Kingdoms that Wirt had never heard of. He just had to hope that, as tests on things he was better at came up, they would make up for his other performances.
Yet, as the week went on, Wirt began to suspect that he was falling behind. Roland was constantly coming back to their room, saying how well he had done on whatever the latest test had been. Alana seemed pleased with her results too, and if Spencer seemed a little less happy, that was probably just that he was such a perfectionist that anything less than full marks wasn’t good enough for him. By the end of the week, Wirt was convinced of one thing. If he didn’t do better, he would be leaving the Alchemists Academy.
Chapter 15
Wirt’s worries about the ongoing testing continued, but at least he got a couple of decent results to balance out all the problems. Ms. Burns appeared one morning throwing snowballs at him for no apparent reason, and Wirt melted them automatically by drawing heat around himself. From the soaked look of some of the other students at breakfast that morning, not everyone had done so well.
More people drifted away from the school, apparently deciding to get out before they were told to leave. Wirt started to wonder if that was entirely down to wanting to get into other schools, or if there might be more to it. Could the headmaster’s announcement about the Quantum Games have anything to do with it? Not everyone would want to be caught in a position where they had to fight for that fourteenth place in potentially lethal games. In fact, no one in their right mind would want to do something like that.
That wasn’t the only announcement of the headmaster’s causing trouble though. After lunch, he summoned the remaining second year students into the solarium, leaving them to stand around until Ender Paine was ready to speak. By now, Wirt was used to it. After all, how many quests and assignments had they undertaken in the past few weeks? Enough that Wirt could think the words oh, another quest, with a certain amount of resignation, certainly.
“Quiet,” the headmaster said, and the familiar ghostly hand appeared behind him, ready to write down notes. Wirt and the others looked at him, waiting for Ender Paine to explain what he wanted them to do this time. “It seems that we have a potentially dangerous situation, students.”
Wirt wasn’t sure why the headmaster bothered with that. After all, by this point, who would believe him? Priscilla’s “disappearance” had been just the start of the situations that were supposedly emergencies, yet every one had turned out to be nothing more than another test. Emphasizing the danger wasn’t going to fool anybody.
Except that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to get too complacent. After all, the school wasn’t the safest of places even at the best of times. Deciding that nothing could hurt him would probably be a good way for Wirt to get himself killed in the middle of a test. Maybe he should listen to what the headmaster had to say after all.
“It seems,” Ender Paine went on, and it occurred to Wirt that he did it exactly when Wirt finally started paying attention, “that some of the items from the school’s collection of artifacts have gone missing.”
Wirt froze, trying to take in the implications of that. Things had been bad enough last year when the cup of life had gone missing from the collection. Anything powerful enough to be under lock and key in the academy’s stores surely wasn’t the kind of thing that they would want to lose. So was this a test or wasn’t it?
“The items in question are a collection of magical ropes, which were on display.” The headmaster paused. “Ms. Lake is reviewing the security involved, but we currently believe that the thieves targeted the ropes precisely because they were the one point in the collection that might be stolen, in spite of our defenses.”
Wirt heard the annoyance there, and again, he found himself wondering if this was real. After all, Ender Paine had been angry enough last year, when someone had gotten through security. Ms. Lake had been embarrassed by it too, since she was supposedly responsible for looking after the school’s magical items.
“It is vital that these ropes be returned. As such, you will form yourselves into your usual teams and prepare to search. Do so swiftly.”
That made it sound more like it was simply a test, so Wirt gathered together with the others. It was probably just as well that the headmaster had specified their usual teams, rather than just teams, because Spencer and Alana still looked uncomfortable around one another, while Roland wasn’t someone Wirt would have looked to spend any more time than necessary around these days.
“Another day, another test,” the other boy said.
&nbs
p; “Assuming that’s what it is,” Wirt shot back.
“What do you mean?”
“I just can’t see Ms. Lake losing some important magical item just for a test.”
Alana shook her head. “That’s exactly why this has to be a test, Wirt. You know that Ms. Lake tightened security, so who else would have been able to remove the ropes? And it’s not like Ms. Lake would steal from the school; she has access to everything anyway. So this has to be a test.”
Wirt nodded. It made sense. Except that something gnawed at the back of his mind. Something that wouldn’t let him quite believe that none of this was real.
“It’s not like it really matters either way,” Spencer pointed out. “We still have to find the ropes.”
Wirt nodded. “So where do we start?”
The answer to that turned out to be with Ms. Lake. Alana thought it was important to get a better sense of exactly what was missing, while Spencer wanted to try the possibility that Ms. Lake would simply tell them where the ropes were if they asked her outright. He called it the direct approach. Roland, and even Alana, called it something a lot less complimentary, but they went along anyway.
“No,” Ms. Lake said when Spencer asked her, “I don’t know where they are, and I’m not sure I would be allowed to tell you if I did now, would I? As it is though, I’m not sure what has happened to the ropes. They could be anywhere.”
Wirt saw Alana shake her head. “Not anywhere. That wouldn’t make sense. It’s like when Priscilla went missing. Finding her was just a question of logic.”
“Can you tell us anything about the ropes, Ms. Lake?” Wirt asked.
Ms. Lake shrugged. “Such as?”
“Well, what were they for?” Alana asked. “What do they do? If we know that, we might know what someone might try to use them for, and so where they might take them.”
