Tristan made to follow Leila from the room, but Alldusk said, “Tristan. Would you and the young lady stay a moment?”
When Tristan touched Amber’s shoulder to keep her from leaving, she gave him a startled look. “This is Amber Ashton, Professor.”
Alldusk nodded. “Good to meet you, Amber.” He waited until the last of the students had cleared the room before saying, “I will be speaking to the headmaster about you two. Professor Drakewell was interested to learn who had a special talent with magic.”
Alldusk looked from Tristan to Amber, his expression becoming grave.
“There is a special...job at this school that one of you may be asked to fill someday. Professor Drakewell will wish to discuss this with you at some point.”
At this they were dismissed.
Tristan fell into step beside Amber as they made their way to the next class. “Can you see auras around everything?” he asked.
She glanced at him. “Yours is pale green, like new aspen leaves.”
Tristan blinked in surprise. He didn’t know what to say to this, so they continued to their next class in silence.
After that, the only class remaining was Professor Merridy’s. Her lesson came with yet another textbook, Earth Science and Environmental Studies, and a convoluted explanation that had something to do with plate tectonics. Tristan couldn’t concentrate, his thoughts still on Alldusk’s lesson.
He was startled from his daze when Leila hit Zeke very hard with her new textbook.
“Ow!” Zeke howled. “Damn it, Leila, I’ll—”
“Enough!” Merridy called.
Tristan blinked at Leila. It appeared that Zeke had been digging surreptitiously through Leila’s bag; when she had noticed, she had slammed her textbook onto his head to make him stop.
“Leila, please, this is not a detention center,” Merridy said, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses. “Zeke, are you quite all right?”
Zeke got to his feet, massaging his head. “I’ll survive,” he said sourly, aiming a kick at Leila’s ankle.
“An hour of punishment for you, Leila,” Merridy snapped. “And you too, Zeke. Class dismissed.”
After dinner, Tristan piled up his textbooks and stared at them for a while, exhausted just thinking about how much homework he had. When Leila curled up on her pillow and started working doggedly through a set of notes on the Discrete Elementals introduction, Rusty and Eli went around the room complaining loudly.
“Will you idiots shut up?” Damian finally shouted across the room.
Leila slammed her textbook shut. “This is hopeless. I can’t concentrate.”
Rusty quieted, looking guilty. Tristan still hadn’t opened his first textbook.
At Hayley’s suggestion, everyone abandoned their books and began rearranging the bunkroom so it looked less like a junkyard. After a heated debate, Tristan and Damian came to the decision that the room should be divided in half by the assorted furniture that was currently pushed against the far wall. Damian and his friends would take the right side, while Tristan and the others claimed the left.
While Cassidy and Zeke stood to the side, making scathing comments instead of helping move furniture, the other students from both groups worked together to create the makeshift wall. Tristan had a bad feeling about the bunkroom division—he was afraid that his side and Damian’s side would never quite be friendly after this.
To the left of the wall, Tristan, Leila, and Rusty were joined by most of the kids that Tristan had spoken to: Eli and Trey, Hayley and Cailyn, and Amber.
Damian, Zeke, and Cassidy—the three who seemed intent on antagonizing Tristan and his new friends—were joined by a tall girl Tristan thought was called Stacy Walden, along with two boys he didn’t know.
After standing near the door for a long time, biting her lip and shifting from foot to foot, Evangeline chose a bunk on Tristan’s side of the room. He had difficulty hiding his triumph at that.
Eventually Tristan showered and went to bed, warm and content and with none of his homework done. He fell asleep quickly...
...and slipped into a nightmare. The darkness resolved into a flash of brilliant light, the sudden illumination of a curve in the highway...why hadn’t he turned? The wheel was cold in his grasp, and everything was sluggish...a terrified scream and a thud, and Marcus was splayed beside him on the seat, hair limp and damp with sweat. Tristan’s eyes burned.
See what you’ve done, the darkness hissed.
Tristan threw his arms over his head, cheeks wet with tears, and tried to stifle the vision. Go away. Leave me alone. I hate you.
There was a hand on his shoulder, shaking him, and he knew it wasn’t part of the dream because the hand was warm. Swallowing fiercely, he forced his eyes open.
Leila stood on the corner of Rusty’s bed, bending over him. “Are you all right?” she whispered. “You were talking in your sleep.”
Tristan realized that his eyes were wet—he really had been crying. Embarrassed, he threw his covers over his head. “I’m fine,” he said, his voice muffled. In the silence that followed, he knew Leila was still watching him. “Thank you,” he whispered at last.
Leila squeezed his shoulder gently and then retreated.
After that he was afraid to sleep. He rolled onto his stomach and stared at the single ball of light that glowed dimly beside the door. It was the only way he could keep from falling back into darkness.
When Leila’s breathing had slowed once again, Tristan shrugged off his covers and climbed down the ladder. He could lie still no longer; his bed felt like a pool of cement that was slowly hardening around him. Maybe a cool drink would settle his nerves.
The hallway was wreathed in shadows. The glowing orbs had been dimmed until each one held only a tiny spot of light. Curling his toes against the cold stone, Tristan tiptoed forward—
He froze. He’d just seen something strange—beneath the nearest orb was a thin silver line that glowed in the darkness, long and scaly like an eel. In fact, it was an eel, the outline etched deep into the wall. Eyes widening, Tristan crept closer. The silver eel seemed almost to be moving, swimming sinuously through a field of silver stars, its eye fixed on a fleeing wolf. As his gaze moved along the wall, he saw that the wolf bounded after its howling pack, which had escaped to the shelter of a forest.
From afar, Tristan thought he heard the echo of a wolf’s howl winding through the tunnels of the Lair. His breath caught in his throat.
Whirling, Tristan was faced with even more glowing silver; the opposite wall was thronged with monsters, horned and fork-tongued and bloodthirsty. Forgetting his drink of water, he turned and ran back to the safety of the bunkroom.
Huddling under his bedclothes, Tristan could not close his eyes. Was he going crazy? Nothing made sense. Of course there was no such thing as magic. The teachers were just testing who would lose their grasp on sanity the quickest, and Tristan’s so-called ‘affinity for magic’ meant he would be the first to go.
He wouldn’t let them poison his mind. He had to remember what was true, to sort out the facts from the distortions.
I won’t go mad. Tristan’s feet were still icy, but his palms itched with sweat.
This isn’t real. I won’t go mad.
Chapter 5: Zeke’s Reward
In the morning Tristan was exhausted. As soon as his classmates began to stir, he stumbled to the boys’ bathroom and stood in the shower for ages, as though he could wash away the memory of his nightmares.
None of the other boys were up yet. When Tristan had finished his shower and pulled on his clothes, he stood in front of the mirror and studied his reflection, pulling his hair back from his face to examine the scars.
Even months after the crash, his face had hardly improved. The gashes across his left cheek and through his eyebrow were healing badly—the scars were red and mottled, his skin coming together in raised contours as though something evil was trying to take root there.
With a grimace, Tristan dragg
ed his hair violently back into place.
On his way up to the ballroom, he paused and stared at the patch of wall where he’d seen the outline of the eel the night before. Not a trace remained; had he dreamed it all?
In their medicine class that day, Professor Grindlethorn called forward Finley Glenn, who was one of the boys Tristan hadn’t known the day before, to participate in a demonstration. Finley Glenn, squat and bespectacled, looked very confused when his name was called. His jacket was inside out.
“Glenn. Have you ever experienced a major injury?”
Finley bobbed his head and almost walked into a desk.
“When I was twelve, I fractured my radius and tore the ligaments. I still have the scar.” He folded up the cuff of his left sleeve and showed Grindlethorn his wrist.
A thrill of excitement ran through Tristan—could Grindlethorn heal the scars on his face?
“Shoddy work,” Grindlethorn said. “With proper care, this scar should have disappeared entirely.”
He scratched at his beard, frown deepening, and then turned to the other students. “In my class, you will learn to heal without using modern medicine. Our work will partly involve magic, though we will also cover basic care techniques that have largely been forgotten these days.”
Grindlethorn continued to grip Finley’s wrist with his stout fingers. “The bone is still weak,” he muttered. “Try eating less for a few weeks, Glenn. With so much fat around the bone, strengthening its structure will prove challenging.”
Finley turned bright red and tugged his arm away from Grindlethorn’s probing fingers.
Tristan’s excitement faded. He wasn’t going to ask anyone to heal his scars if it meant public humiliation.
That night, after struggling through two days’ worth of homework, Tristan was so exhausted that he slept dreamlessly. He saw Leila watching him carefully at breakfast the next morning, so he smiled and said, “I’m fine.”
When they climbed the stairs for botany after lunch, the students were awarded their first real view of the school’s surroundings. At first Tristan didn’t know what was happening when he found himself at the back of a holdup on the stairs; there was a great deal of shoving and cursing, and Zeke shouted, “Move it, spotty!” at Leila.
She didn’t seem to hear him. She and Eli had frozen in the doorway, staring at something just out of sight; shoving past Damian and Cassidy, Tristan edged his way to the top of the stairs...and stopped.
The mist had lifted, and in its absence their world had grown a hundred times larger. What had appeared to be an endless pine forest enveloping the school was nothing more than a tree-filled valley, beyond which loomed craggy, glacier-draped mountains. The midday sunlight glinted off every peak, smoothing out their crevices in a blinding sheen of white.
For a heartbeat Tristan thought he could see the aura of the mountains, a faint turquoise shimmer that swirled and flared in the wind. When he blinked, the color vanished, and he shook his head in irritation. His mind was playing tricks on him again.
“That’s something,” Leila said quietly.
Rusty blundered into Leila from behind. “Whoops—sorry, Leila, I didn’t see you.”
She rolled her eyes.
“There you are,” an amused voice remarked. Turning, Tristan saw Gracewright making her way towards the students, her face lost in the shadows of her wide-brimmed sunhat. “It’s a real beauty, isn’t it?” Today her wispy white hair shone almost silver in the sun. “After a time you forget how it is to live anywhere else.”
When Gracewright stopped in front of round-faced Hayley Christiansen and stubby little Finley Glenn, she was beaming. “Well, I can see you kids won’t be much use in a sit-down lesson today,” she said. “I hope you have your textbooks—we’re going to do a bit of a scavenger hunt.”
From a pocket in her heavy leather apron, Gracewright produced a stack of papers, which she handed to Finley. “Pass those around,” she prompted Finley, who had been squinting at the top of the stack. “You’ll each receive a list of important magical and medicinal plants; each specimen on this list can be found within a mile of this school. Whoever manages to find the most plants from this list will be excused from tonight’s homework.”
Tristan took a sheet of paper and frowned down at the list. There were two columns running down the page—one was headed “Magical Specimens,” the other “Medicinal Plants.” He sighed.
“I don’t recognize any of these,” Leila said. “Look—spotted jewelweed? Hooked crowfoot? Gnome plant? These sound ridiculous.”
Rusty laughed. “Gnome plant? What’s that supposed to be?”
Tristan scowled and let his copy of Beyond the Basics: Magical and Medicinal Herbs fall open to the center. “Is it magical or medicinal?” he asked.
“Magical,” Rusty said. “But maybe it’s in the Encyclopedia of Botany, too. That’ll mean it’s real.”
Tristan flipped to the index of his textbook while Rusty started thumbing through his Encyclopedia.
“Of course it’s real,” Leila said impatiently. “How are we supposed to hunt for it otherwise? We just need a picture.”
“You know what I meant,” Rusty said. “Aha—I found it!”
Tristan looked up from his own book as Rusty read aloud the passage he’d found.
“‘Gnome Plant, or Hemitomes congestum, is a small, extremely rare flower limited to the northwest coastal region of North America.’”
Leila snorted. “That’s really helpful. What does the other book say, Tristan?”
After a moment, he found the right page. “It says, ‘Apart from its high-volume production of congealed magic,’—I think that means those golden orbs—‘the gnome plant may also be used to slow or cease magical reactions.’” The passage continued for the remainder of the page, though Tristan didn’t understand a word of it.
Tristan slammed the book shut. “Why don’t we start with something less rare?” He scanned the list of plants again. “Wild ginger, for instance—that’s something I’ve heard of before.”
Once Tristan, Leila, and Rusty had studied the picture of the wild ginger plant until Tristan was sure he could recognize the dark, heart-shaped leaves, they set off into the trees, heading in three different directions.
“How do you think we’re supposed to tell the difference between magical and normal plants?” Tristan asked Rusty, scanning the ground.
It was not Rusty who answered. “You have to look at their auras,” said a soft female voice.
Tristan whirled. Amber was kneeling beside a tree and easing a small plant from the soil, its roots intact. She looked up briefly, blinked at Tristan, and returned her gaze to the earth. “The radiance of any object’s aura indicates the strength of its magic. Plants with a higher concentration of magic will glow brighter.”
“Thank you?” Tristan said, somewhat bewildered.
Amber straightened, clutching the plant in her pale fingers. “When you learn to see auras, the world gives you its secrets.” Tilting her head, she turned away. A moment later she was gone.
When Amber was out of sight, Tristan dropped to the ground where she’d knelt, trying to see which plant she’d unearthed. There were several tiny leaves hugging the base of the pine, along with a clump of moss—though none of the leaves belonged to the wild ginger plant, Tristan plucked a bit of each plant just to be safe.
By the end of the hour, everyone began straggling back—Rusty first, empty-handed and covered in mud; followed by petite Cailyn Tyler, clutching an armful of pine boughs and long grasses; and then Leila, who looked as though she’d actually managed to find a clump of wild ginger.
“What’d you find?” Leila demanded of Tristan, eyeing his handful of leaves.
“No idea.”
When Zeke and Amber finally returned, Gracewright told the students to sit in a circle in the clearing. “Come up here, one at a time, and we’ll see what you have,” she said. “You first, Miss Ashton.”
“There’s no chan
ce we’re getting out of homework,” Tristan grumbled, noting the odd variety of plants that Amber laid out before Professor Gracewright.
“Excellent work,” Gracewright said, checking each plant off her list as Amber laid them on the grass before her. “That’s over half of the specimens I assigned—quite impressive.” She smiled at Amber. “Mr. Elwood, you’re next.”
When Zeke deposited his plants on the grass, Gracewright started laughing. “You don’t know a thing about botany, young man,” she said, “but you’ve spotted the loophole.”
Still chuckling to herself, Gracewright turned to the other students. “You may have guessed this already, but your assignment wasn’t terribly specific. Half of the species on these lists won’t grow around here.” She shook her head in amusement. “Luckily we have our greenhouse for the less adaptable specimens, which Mr. Elwood here managed to break into. Homework—sketch each of the plants that you didn’t manage to find. Mr. Elwood and Miss Ashton are both exempt from this—well done, you two.”
Zeke smirked at Leila.
“What?” Rusty protested loudly. “How’s that fair?”
Tristan shared his indignation. Was Gracewright trying to encourage them to be criminals?
Gracewright turned to Rusty. “One of the first things you should know about magic is that it can’t be restricted by human laws or ethical codes. The only rules that matter are those of nature and magic. If you have something to show me, Mr. Lennox, I’d be happy to look. Otherwise, class dismissed.”
Rusty scowled. “Clovers look a lot like wild ginger, okay?” he said, frowning at Gracewright.
“No, they really don’t,” Leila said.
“Is she actually going to let Zeke get away with that?” Tristan muttered, dropping his armful of plants.
Shaking her head, Leila threw a dark look at Zeke. “Hasn’t Juvie taught you anything? Life isn’t fair.”
“Duh.” Tristan ground the moss he’d collected to bits with one toe. “I just didn’t think our teachers would encourage that sort of thing.”
“How come you were in Juvie, anyway?” Rusty asked, distracted.
Metal and Magic: A Fantasy Journey Page 37
