Dragonborn

by Toby Forward

  “You know. Let him see he’s here to help us, not to throw his weight around.”

  “Oh, he’s all right,” said Tim. “Knows what he’s doing, really.” He shook his wet foot. “Horrid smell that thing’s left, though. I’ll change my socks while we’re up there.”

  “Up there” was a dormitory right up at the top of the stairs, with little dormer windows that jutted out like mountain peaks on the roof. Sam felt silly in his new uniform. He didn’t like looking like everyone else.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Tim.

  Sam was.

  “If we wait here for a bit we can go straight to lunch and miss the end of Duddle’s class,” said Tim. He floated up to the roof and perched on a crossbeam.

  “We should go back,” said Smedge.

  “It’s boring,” said Tim.

  “I’m going back.”

  “If you go, we all have to go,” Tim complained.

  “That’s up to you,” he said. “I won’t tell.”

  “You won’t have to.” Tim floated sadly down and landed gently on his own bed, which was next to Sam’s. “What do you want to do, Sam?”

  “I don’t mind. I’m a bit nervous, so I wouldn’t mind waiting to go to my fist class.”

  “There you are,” said Tim. “We’ll wait till after lunch.”

  Smedge came and took Sam’s arm. “You have to go,” he said. “You don’t want to get into trouble on the first day, do you? Rules are here to help us. The sooner you get into the swing of things the easier it will be.”

  “I’ll do whatever I’m told to do,” said Sam.

  “Then you will do very well,” said Smedge.

  “We’ll see,” warned Tim. “We all start off like that.”

  Smedge gave Tim a friendly punch. “We don’t all end up being idiots,” he said.

  “What happens to people when they leave the College?” asked Sam.

  They were clattering back down the spiral staircase.

  “That’s what Duddle’s class is all about,” said Smedge.

  “You can be anything you want,” said Tim. “Court Wizard to a great prince. Local Wizard in a small town. Personal Wizard to a rich businessman. Set yourself up as a wizard and let people come to you and pay every time. You can stay here and teach. You can do anything you like.”

  “If you go to classes,” said Smedge. “Otherwise, you end up an idiot and have to take any job you can, and hope you don’t mess it up.”

  “You mean you can end up here in the kitchens? Or in the storeroom?”

  “Exactly,” said Smedge. “You don’t want to do that.”

  Tim looked embarrassed.

  As they passed one of the higher landings, Sam saw a half-open door and eyes watching them. As soon as he caught the glance of the one beyond the door, the eyes blinked, the door slammed, and he heard footsteps running away. Sam had a sense of fear on the other side of the door, and he felt that there was also something for him to fear there. He stopped, put his hand on the doorknob.

  “No,” said Smedge. “Leave it.”

  “What was it?”

  “Nothing,” said Smedge. “Come on.”

  “It was something,” said Sam. “And it was looking for me.”

  Tim took his arm, reassuringly. “It can’t have been. No one here knows who you are.”

  “What was it?” Sam repeated.

  “It was just Tamrin,” said Tim, giving Smedge a sideways look. “Forget it.”

  “Come on.” Smedge led them farther downstairs.

  “What do you mean, mess it up?” asked Sam, going back to their conversation.

  “If a carpenter makes a bad chair, you fall off it,” said Tim. “Not much harm done.”

  “But if an incompetent wizard, one who doesn’t know what he’s doing, makes a bad spell,” said Smedge, “there’s no knowing what the end of it will be.”

  “Magic that doesn’t stop when it should, that doesn’t get the job done properly, can go on and on getting more things wrong,” said Tim. “And then you need a really good wizard to put it right.”

  This sounded more like the sort of thing that Flaxfield said, and it comforted Sam.

  They were back in the classroom corridor, with its stinks and sounds.

  “Where did you come from?” asked Smedge.

  “Oh, a fair way off.”

  “You’re old to be starting here,” he said.

  Sam blushed.

  “Leave him alone,” said Tim. “It’s none of our business.”

  “Okay,” said Smedge. “How about your friends? Are you going to miss them?”

  Before Sam had the chance to reply, a bell rang.

  “Lunch,” said Tim. “Excellent.”

  “We’d better introduce Cartouche to Dr. Duddle,” said Smedge.

  “No way,” Tim argued. “We’re going to eat. Come on!”

  He grabbed Sam and whisked him off across the quad and into yet another part of the College. Sam felt he would need to be there for most of the rest of his life just to find his way around. Flaxfield’s cottage and the weaver’s house were the only other buildings he remembered ever being in.

  When he saw the dining hall he stopped still and gawped. It was enormous. Long wooden tables with benches ran along the sides and center. At the far end another table ran at a right angle to the rest. Boys and girls, dozens and dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, surged forward like marbles spilling out from a bag, carrying Tim and Sam before them until the two boys were rolled up near to the front of the room, and sat down.

  Lunch was soup and bread and roast lamb and mashed potatoes and mint sauce and gravy and runner beans and jam sponge and custard.

  Sam ate it all in as much silence as he could get away with. He knew there were lots of people in the world. All the books showed him that, and there had been a number of people coming to Flaxfield’s door for his help, but they never came in more than threes or fours. The wizards who had come when Flaxfield died, thirty or forty of them, were the most people that Sam had ever seen at one time. Now there were hundreds, all in the same room.

  And they talked. They talked all the time and to everyone. They talked to the person next to them. They shouted across to people three tables away.

  There was magic everywhere. No one asked for the mint sauce to be passed to them, they used magic to bring it. And they showed off. The ones who couldn’t be bothered just let it slide over the table to them. Others made it float. One had it up in the air and spinning, not spilling a drop, and then pouring itself over his lamb. Another, a joker, made the dish grow legs and waddle across the table to him, complaining that it had a sore knee.

  There was a time for letting off steam after lunch, before the bell rang for class, and Tim and Sam slid off their bench quickly and went into the garden, ignoring the others who preferred to go to the school yard to play Folop or Trangik.

  “Does everyone do magic all the time?” asked Sam.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Doesn’t it come back and harm them?”

  “Why would it?”

  Tim pulled the head off a blue and red painted daisy and started to strip it of its petals. As each one fell it turned into a tiny dragonfly and flew around Tim’s head.

  Sam wanted to talk, but didn’t know how much he could trust Tim. The roffle had made him ashamed of Flaxfield, and he didn’t want to seem like a country wizard, a figure of fun.

  “I was told never to use magic unless there was really no other way to do something.”

  “But,” said Tim, “that’s like saying don’t use a bucket when you can scoop up water in your hands. Or don’t dig with a spade when you can scrabble away the earth with your fingers.”

  Sam thought about this.

  “That’s not the same,” he said.

  “It is.”

  Sam brushed away a couple of dragonflies that had deserted Tim and seemed to prefer him.

  “Can you actually do any magic?” asked Tim.

  T
his was what Sam had been dreading. He already wondered what harm would come to him from showing off in front of Frosty, now Tim wanted him to do something. And soon, he would be in a class and be expected to do more. It was all so difficult.

  “Who was that we saw on the stairs?” he dodged.

  “But can you? Why are you here?”

  Tim’s open, honest face confronted Sam’s, and Sam knew that he looked shifty and dishonest by comparison. How could he not? He was carrying secrets. He wanted to trust Tim, but it was too soon.

  “I’ve never seen so many people before,” he said. “I don’t know what to say to them.”

  “What about your friends back home?”

  Sam shook his head. He thought of Starback, his only friend.

  “No friends?” Tim punched him gently. “We can’t have that.”

  Sam smiled.

  “Am I really your first friend?” Tim beamed with delight.

  “I’ve never seen another boy before,” Sam told him. It would seem too odd to say he’d had a dragon for a friend. The loss of Starback was a stone of sorrow in his chest.

  Tim whistled, and the tune turned into pink paper streamers that floated up out of sight.

  “Who was that on the stairs?”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll be your best friend, and I’ll tell you who it was, if you show me some magic. How’s that?”

  “Isn’t Smedge your best friend?”

  Tim thought for a second.

  “Smedge doesn’t really work like that. How about it?”

  Sam blew on the dragonflies that still danced around Tim. Each one of them turned into a tiny dragon, yellow with red stripes. They formed a perfect circle, all looking in toward Tim. Then they opened their mouths and blew smoke at him, making him cough and his eyes water.

  “That’s not friendly,” he said with a laugh, coughing away the smoke as the dragons flew off in a line and settled in the bushes. “But that was wonderful. We don’t do dragons for another year. They’re very tricky. You are good, aren’t you?”

  “Who was it?” asked Sam. The question had grown in his mind every time someone refused to answer it or dodged away from replying.

  “It was Tamrin,” said Tim.

  Sam waited for him to say more.

  “Who is Tamrin?” he asked at last.

  “She’s just a servant,” said Smedge.

  They hadn’t heard him approach, didn’t know how long he had been near, listening.

  “She cleans the dormitories and takes out the rubbish to the midden and washes up in the kitchen.”

  “I thought all the people who worked here were wizards.”

  Smedge linked arms with Sam and led him toward the College.

  “They are. Even Tamrin, in a way. But she never finished properly. Professor Frastfil took pity on her and gave her a job, even though it was bending the rules. He’s a really kind man.”

  “Time for Duddles,” said Tim.

  “Your first lesson,” said Smedge.

  Sam felt sick.

  Dragons have a skill

  to search a person and to see into them. Starback searched for Eloise, and found her by a riverbank, casting a spell to find Sam. She threw her shawl into the water, drew it out, and spread it on the grass. The threads glowed in the sunlight, drawing a map. Starback flew overhead and cast his shadow over her and the shawl. Eloise looked up and saw only a cloud. The threads arranged themselves again. Now they led to Boolat, where she would meet Khazib.

  Her perfume filled his nostrils, making him dizzy. He swept away as fast as he could, muddled by the memory of the woman’s mind. There is always an exchange in magic. The strangeness of Khazib’s magic had been less unsettling than the woman’s thoughts.

  People. What mysterious creatures Starback found them. A dragon mind is better.

  No one seemed very interested

  in Sam, which was a great relief to him. Even Dr. Duddle didn’t really seem bothered when Tim and Smedge introduced him.

  “It’s not usual,” he complained. “But I suppose we’ll have to let you stay. Catch up as you can, will you? Boys, you’ll have to keep an eye on him.”

  “We will,” Smedge and Tim agreed.

  It was very dull stuff. Sam could still hear the bangs and squawks and rumbling from other classrooms, but nothing like that went on in here.

  Dr. Duddle didn’t seem to like magic at all. All he wanted to talk about was how the pupils could make money from it when they left the College.

  “A wizard is no different from anyone else,” he said.

  Some of them groaned, but some of them seemed to like the idea.

  “Being a wizard is just a job,” said Duddle. “Like being a blacksmith or a farmer. A wizard has some special powers—that’s what you’re here for, to learn those special powers—but at the end of the day, you just go out there and do a job.”

  Sam knew that farmers were tired at the end of the day, and he knew that a blacksmith needed a strong arm and a steady hand and a good eye, but he had seen Flaxfield after working some strong magic, he had seen Eloise when she had been at Flaxfield’s Finishing, and he knew how he felt after he had worked at a new piece of magic and it had drained him of all the strength he had. He didn’t think that farmers and blacksmiths, hardworking and skillful though they were, took their work into themselves the way a wizard did. And he thought Duddle was either a fool or a cheat. There was a lot to understand about this College.

  A rap on his head brought him back to the classroom. Dr. Duddle stood over him, glaring down. Some of the other pupils were nudging each other and grinning.

  “I said,” Dr. Duddle said, “perhaps you could tell us how you think you might earn a living after you leave this academy. What are your ambitions, Mr. Cartouche?”

  No one had ever called Sam Mister before, and he didn’t know that Duddle was only doing it to mock him.

  “Oh, please,” he said. “There’s no need to call me Mister. You can call me”—he nearly said Sam and remembered just in time—“Cartouche.”

  Dr. Duddle was a rather strict teacher whose punishments were unpleasant, and he was not used to what sounded like impudence. He drew himself up to his full height, which was not very much, tugged at the lapels of his neat suit, and barked at Sam, “Don’t think you can come here and try to make a fool of me, young man.”

  “He was only trying to be polite, sir,” said Tim. “He’s not used to it here.”

  “Silence, Masrani. I’ll deal with you later. Let’s see, then. You must have impressed Professor Frastfil at your interview; show us what you can do and we’ll tell you where we think your talents lie. Then we can guide you to a proper occupation. A Court Wizard to a King, I’m sure, or the Official Wizard to a great city. A sharp and talented young man like you could do anything. Let us have a taste of your powers.”

  Sam stared ahead, refusing to look down in apology or to look up at the teacher.

  “Go on,” whispered Tim.

  Sam stared, silently.

  “Nothing?” asked Duddle. “Nothing at all?”

  The class began to giggle.

  “A beginner? In this class? Some mistake, I think. One last chance. Show us, please, Mr. Cartouche, what you can do.”

  Tim trod on Sam’s foot, but Sam still stared ahead. He would not use magic for a man like this.

  “Very well. I shall ask Professor Frastfil to remove you from this class and put you with the beginners. It will be best for you and for all of us. In the meantime, class, three minutes’ break. Make free with any demonstrations you wish for our new boy.”

  The air filled with flashes of color and light. Fireworks and fanfares. It was not like Duddle to give them a rest, and they took full advantage of it. Most of the class just enjoyed themselves with magic games, creating flying swords and fencing with each other above their heads, sending Folop balls flying across the room, or filling the air with grasshoppers and bats. But some of them decided to make fun of the new bo
y. A personal rain cloud appeared over Sam’s head and began to pour on him. Tim made him an umbrella. Frogs pushed their way out of his desk and flopped onto his lap. Tim turned them into hamsters.

  “Do something,” he said to Sam. “Protect yourself. You have to, or it will get worse.”

  Sam had never been bullied before. One of the good things about not being with many people is that there’s no one to be cruel to you. He let it happen, allowing Tim to do what he could to stop it.

  He looked at Duddle and waited for him to tell the others to leave him alone. Duddle looked away and wrote something on the blackboard.

  Sam’s desk turned into a tub of hot, soapy water with dirty washing in it that slopped over the sides and drenched his new clothes. Tim was distracted by a side attack on him by a swarm of wasps.

  Duddle finished writing on the board, and, with the chalk, he drew a circle in the air, then called out, “Finish, furnish, fly!” All the wasps and swords and balls and every other last piece of magic in the room swooped through the circle and disappeared. All except the washtub and the soapy water, which stayed in place.

  “Oh, dear,” said Duddle. “Never mind. Some magic always remains behind. Just your bad luck, I think. You pop off and find somewhere to dry yourself while we continue, Mr. Cartouche. We’ll manage without you. Off you go.”

  Sam and Tim stood up.

  “Not you, boy,” said Duddle.

  “Go to the dorm,” Tim whispered, sitting down again. “I’ll see you there later.”

  Sam unpacked his bag

  and spread out everything he owned on the narrow bed in the long dormitory.

  A bottle of lemonade, half a pasty, the clothes he got from Mrs. Martin, three spare handkerchiefs, two pairs of socks, the cloak from the weaver, a shirt that had been mended many times, a piece of string, a knife, and his notebook.

  Sam had made the notebook himself, on Flaxfield’s instructions. They made many books when Sam was just a small boy, and he colored in them and practiced his letters. Rough and ready things, they fell apart easily, the stitches not being tight enough or the glue not strong. They practiced making better glue, neater sewing, straighter cutting. The books lasted longer, fell apart less often.