by Tim Susman
“I like it very much here,” Neddy said, and his gaze shifted beyond Kip to the paper again.
Kip grinned, reached out, and crumpled an old paper in his paw. He lofted it to Neddy, who tracked it, moved with surprising speed, and nabbed it in his mouth. It vanished in a puff of spark and flame, and the lizard brightened. “Another?” it said.
“Maybe later.” Kip lay back on the paper, because he was already filthy, closed his eyes, and basked in the warmth.
If Windsor had been disappointingly reserved in his praise, Emily more than made up for it. Though she was as clean as Kip was dirty, she hugged him and kissed his muzzle before the startled fox could react. “Oh, you clever man,” she said. “I knew you could do it. Why, this place is almost livable now. Can you feel the difference?” Before he could answer, she hurried back to her small room and then out again, standing before Neddy and shaking out her wet hair. “Well, it’s still frigid in there, but I suppose it will warm up in time.”
“We could create another binding spot just outside your room, there.” Kip pointed, his tail wagging from Emily’s delight. “Then he could warm your room and our bedrolls both.”
“It’s fine as it is for the moment.” Emily’s smile was as bright as Neddy’s eyes. “Thank you, Kip.”
Master Windsor cleared his throat. “Miss Carswell,” he said, “there is half an hour of my time remaining here, and although I am certain that the bath was of the utmost importance and that Master Argent has made it clear that sorcery is not a requirement for you to continue your studies here, should you wish to practice some of those talents, it would be best to begin now.”
She fixed him with an eye. “Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to not be horrid all the time?” she asked. “For you, I mean. For those around you, it goes without saying.”
“Undoubtedly it would be quite pleasant to cheerfully permit my students’ incompetence,” Windsor replied without hesitation. “It would be rather less pleasant to have to suffer from the consequences of that incompetence in many coming years. Consider my attitude a prophylactic to future misery.”
“But we’re not incompetent.” Warmth had evidently stoked Emily’s fire as well. Kip wanted to tell her to stop, but also wanted to see how far she would go.
Coppy dropped the three marbles he’d been levitating. Windsor didn’t notice, his attention focused on Emily. “No,” he said. “You three are among the least incompetent of the current group of students. That is true. And yet,” he said as she opened her mouth to retort, “simply rising to competence is the mark of a sorcerer who will work on roads his whole life. The ease with which you master spells, even Lutris, speaks to a potential that you have barely begun to tap. If I can impart to you discipline and if I can train your minds properly, you may reach a good deal more of that potential. That is my goal. That is why I do not allow you to rest after a triumph, or excuse a small mistake. In the world of sorcery, a small mistake may,” he gestured to Neddy, “burn up your entire living quarters, or may result in the destruction of your king. So yes, I am less pleasant than many other Masters. But my students have always excelled.”
The silence following this speech filled the room. Even Neddy stopped his rustling around and watched with glowing eyes, understanding the feelings, if not all of the words. None of them spoke until Windsor turned to Coppy and said, “Again.”
When Master Odden heard of Kip’s achievement, he did not react as stoically as Windsor had. “Three?” he said, with more enthusiasm than anything he’d said to Kip in the past. “I will resist the temptation to have you reproduce that feat here, but that is well done. A better test than holding fire in your paw, I daresay.”
His eyes twinkled a challenge, and Kip quelled the discomfort he felt at being reminded that he had not accomplished that. After all, Odden had said that what he had accomplished was more impressive. “Does that mean I can stop trying to do that?”
“No, no, I would still like to see you master it. But I see that what I had intended to be a somewhat easier path to respectability was not necessary.”
Easier? Kip felt as though there was something he was missing, but he didn’t dwell on it. Instead, he shifted his line of inquiry. “Is it required that every student perform some impressive feat before a Master will consider Selecting them?”
“Not at all.” Master Odden looked him up and down. And then, just as Kip’s spirits had risen slightly with some hope for Coppy, Odden went on. “In your case, however, Patris is so resistant to the idea of your apprenticeship that without that feat, it would be difficult for any Master to argue your case. I will tell you honestly that I might not be equal to the task, and that the reward for a few years of working with an exceptional student might not be worth the difficulty of living with Patris for those years.”
Left unspoken was the truth that although Patris did have a special dislike for Kip, he would hardly be generously inclined toward Coppy. So as they proceeded with Kip’s lesson, his concentration on the narrow focus of the fire spell was not at its best. He wanted to ask Master Odden what he thought Coppy might be able to do, while knowing full well that he could as easily answer that question himself. More easily, for he knew what Coppy had been studying and where he might impress a Master.
“Just look through the whole book,” he told Coppy that evening, pushing the otter’s copy of Altering the Fundamental toward him, “and see if any of the spells appeal to you. And try it with your translocation book as well.”
“I appreciate what you’re doin’,” the otter grinned. “And I’ll be sorry to leave you and the others. But if road-building is what God planned, then I’d be a fool to run counter to His word, would I not?”
“What if it’s not what He has planned?” Kip gestured to the books. “What if His plan lies in these pages and you fail to discover it because—”
He had been about to say, because you gave up, and then stopped himself. Coppy seemed to read his words, and the otter’s smile dimmed slightly. “I work as hard as you do,” he said.
“I know you do.” Kip reached out and grasped Coppy’s arm. “But you have this opportunity only for another week and a half. Why leave any path unexplored?”
“I suppose you make sense.” The otter’s whiskers twitched as his smile returned. “Give us the books, then. I’ll read until Windsor comes to make me lift dust again.”
“Add this one to the pile.” Malcolm had entered during the conversation and now held out a book that Kip hadn’t seen before. The title, Protection and Forbiddance, gleamed gold in the light of the torches.
“Where did you get that?” Kip demanded. He reached out reflexively, eager to see the book himself, then pulled his arm back and watched Coppy accept it.
Malcolm’s smile grew. “Ah, now, our Emily isn’t the only one with gifts to take her ’round the normal course of things.”
“I beg your pardon?” Emily put her hands on her hips.
Kip gauged Malcolm with more interest. “Which Master is interested in your gifts?”
The Irishman stared between the two of them. “I meant simply that my people may not have been blessed with a fair countenance, but with the gift of the gab, we call it.”
“Aye, that we’ve noticed,” Emily said.
Coppy held up the book. “You talked Florian into giving you this?”
Malcolm focused on the Calatians, perhaps giving Emily up as a lost cause. “In a manner of speaking. I spoke to Master Splint—the healer, aye?—and informed him of Farley’s little game with fire. I pointed out to him the benefits of allowing us to defend ourselves, the most pertinent one being that we should trouble him much less, and described the great benefits that could be obtained from such simple spells as the sealing of doors and the blocking of physical spells. I asked if he could make an exception on my behalf to allow me the use of one book of his choosing in the library.”
“He didn’t mind that you don’t live in the basement?” Kip asked.
“I was m
erely looking out for my dear friends, who are all preoccupied with their own Selection trials. He did ask whether this could wait two weeks, and I said gravely that there were many students quite desperate to see that a Calatian not be chosen as an apprentice, and that the next two weeks might well be our most perilous.”
Emily made a small “hmph” noise. “Did you actually say ‘perilous’?”
“Your living quarters were nearly immolated,” Malcolm said. “Would you not say ‘perilous’?”
She regarded him a moment and then said, “Gift of the gab indeed,” and picked up her spellbook, apparently uninterested in the rest of the story.
“So he was well convinced,” Malcolm went on, “and accompanied me to the library, where we procured the book from good Mr. Florian, and here we are.”
“Have you studied any of it?” Kip asked as Coppy flipped through the book.
“I went the night after the fire and been studying and working every spare hour since. D’you think I would have come to show you the book before I’d mastered one spell? Funny how it just seems to make sense, and then it’s easier once you understand what it’s doing.” Malcolm turned behind him and gathered magic. He pulled the door closed with a physical spell Kip recognized, and then uttered one more spell that Kip didn’t. “Go on,” the Irishman gestured. “Try to open it.”
Kip stepped across the paper on the floor and unlatched the door, then pushed. It wouldn’t budge. He tried again, and then gathered power and tried with a spell, but nothing could budge it. “Master Splint recommended that’s one of the easiest sort,” Malcolm said. “Cast a binding and it should last the night, you think?”
“You know how to use bindings?” Kip asked.
Malcolm shook his head, and the door came free in Kip’s paw. “I thought I might trade one spell for another.”
Coppy, to Kip’s delight, was most taken with the door-locking spell, but he did not practice it when Windsor came to supervise their exercises. “I’d rather not until I can do it properly,” he said when Kip asked.
Kip didn’t know when Coppy was going to practice otherwise, because the tents didn’t have doors, and he wasn’t allowed to cast unsupervised magic inside the Tower. He went back to his bedroll and paced back and forth, tail curled tightly behind him. Unless he crept up to the upper floors of the Tower to ask all the reclusive masters if they would take an otter apprentice, his options for saving Coppy from a life of laying roads were fast running out. He stopped facing the bookshelves and espied the bright red leather of Peter Cadno’s journal. With nowhere else to turn, he reached out and let it fall open.
Master Windsor came while Kip was reading, and did not remind Kip to practice sorcery. Nor did any of the others come tell Kip to open his spell books. When he put the journal down without having found anything of use, his frustration doubled when he saw the others practicing.
“You might have called me over,” he said, picking up some papers for fuel and walking past Emily to the cleared-away area they had begun to call the fireplace, where Neddy paced back and forth.
She blinked. “Oh, hallo,” she said. “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been right over there, reading.” He pointed to his bedroll.
“Better get to practicing before Master Windsor sees you,” she said.
“That’s what I’m doing.” But Kip hesitated. “Why didn’t you come get me, or at least call me?”
“Oh…” She cast the spell she was working on, and the paper in front of her disappeared. “Didn’t think of it, I suppose. Sorry, Kip.”
It was odd, but not remarkably so. He waited to ask Coppy until the lights had gone out and they lay side by side on their bedrolls. Then he did ask, “Coppy? When Master Windsor came down, did you see me over here?”
“I suppose,” Coppy said.
“Did you not think to tell me?”
“Well…” The otter seemed confused. “You can see Master Windsor well enough, aye? And you’ve as much as secured your Selection, so if you’ve no need to practice, then…”
“But we always warn each other. If Windsor catches us wasting his precious time simply reading a book, he gives us one of his speeches.”
“He didn’t, though.” Coppy yawned. “So why are you so stirred up?”
“I don’t know,” Kip said, and lay his head back. “It’s odd. It’s like you and Emily—and Windsor, too—forgot about me for a time.”
“That’s silly. We wouldn’t forget about you.”
“Not normally,” Kip said. “Only when I’m reading that book.”
But Coppy didn’t respond, and a moment later, his even breathing told Kip the otter had fallen asleep.
“If you’re going to impress a master,” Malcolm reasoned as they sat down to a lunch of apples and cheese, “you’ll have to do it here.”
They looked up at the ravens, five of them today. “You’ll never impress Windsor enough,” the Irishman continued, “and there’s no other master going to take you aside and look for a reason. So it has to be here.”
“I suppose,” Coppy said.
“How are those defensive spells coming?” Emily asked.
“Fair enough, without much practice.”
Kip watched the otter and kept quiet, crunching a sweet Westfield apple. He knew Coppy as a bold spirit, and this reluctance to try spells worried him. Was Coppy afraid of failure? The otter had come all the way from London to Massachusetts on his own, had worked his passage on a boat and then taken a job with a perfume shop. He was a quick study and had a bright wit about him, and he knew that. Was it Windsor’s harping that was having this effect on him?
When Coppy looked to him for support, Kip smiled and said, “I know you can do it. If not the first time, then the next.”
He didn’t know what else to say without saying, “Forget bloody Windsor,” and because the ravens could hear, he wouldn’t say anything like that. But Coppy knew Kip well too, and the fox thought his intention was clear enough, because the otter smiled. “Right, then. One of you want to attack me?”
Emily volunteered to do it on the theory that she would most easily get out of trouble if any occurred. Kip kept an eye on Farley and his table, but the stout boy did not appear to be sparing them any attention today. Adamson was engaging him, and while Victor did look Kip’s way from time to time, he had Farley and Carmichael well in check.
Quarrel, at the other table, watched them with some interest, but the rest of the tent ignored them. The crunch and smell of apples filled the air along with the sharp tang of cheese, and conversation formed a low background noise.
“All right,” Emily said. “Ready? I’m going to—”
“Don’t tell me.” Coppy waved at her with a turquoise-glowing paw as he gathered his magic. “I don’t want to be expecting it.”
“For the first time,” she started, but he waved her down again and she shrugged. “All right.”
You couldn’t gather magic and cast the spell all in the time it would take to notice something whizzing at your head; ducking was preferable and easier. But if you were in a fight and had magic ready, and wanted to re-aim the missile, then the deflection spell would allow you to take control of the magically animated object.
Emily held her hands in her lap. Kip, beside her, saw the glow of magic against the wood of the table. Then Coppy’s apple core shot upward from his plate.
The otter muttered the spell under his breath, but faltered midway through, and the core hung in the air at the apex of its arc, then dropped unimpeded to smack him between his ears.
A loud “Haw!” from the opposite corner told them that Farley had been watching after all. Carmichael, too, snickered, but Adamson just looked thoughtful. A moment later, they returned their attention to their lunch, with a considerably more jovial air.
“Let’s try again,” Emily said.
Coppy shook his head. “Let’s not. I need to practice more.”
“And where are you going to do that? It’s a
simple spell, the shield,” Malcolm said. “Come on, give it another go.”
“Now you sound like Master Windsor.” Kip spoke before he could censor himself.
“’Ere,” Malcolm said sharply. “Take that back.”
“No, he’s right,” Emily put in. “Don’t talk about how simple the spell is. If he doesn’t want to practice, he needn’t. Let’s finish our lunch.”
Malcolm stared at her, then slid around the table and very deliberately, very softly, spoke into Kip’s ear. “Selection’s in a week and a few days. When will he practice, if not now?”
“No secrets,” Emily snapped.
“It’s all right.” Kip put his paw on Malcolm’s arm. “I know you want to see the best for him. I do too.”
It wasn’t helping Coppy to have people talking about him behind his back. The otter lowered his head and finished his meal, then hurried out of the tent to sit in the classroom without waiting for the others.
They remained behind a bit anyway to talk about him. “We’ve got to build up his confidence,” Emily said.
“If words could lift stones, every house in Ireland would be a castle.”
“Words can lift stones, or haven’t you been paying attention the last month?” Emily asked.
Malcolm ignored her and leaned in. “Kip, you know him best. What can we do?”
“I’ve been trying to figure that out.” Kip shook his head. “If we could only find the thing he has an affinity for, we could convince someone it’s worth keeping him here to study.”
“If we could get him with someone other than Windsor,” Emily said, “he’d improve dramatically. There’s nothing so frustrating as someone whose expectations always exceed your abilities.”
“Windsor has a point, though,” Kip said, looking up nervously. The ravens had all left with the rest of the students. “I mean, he’s tough, but he’s helped all of us, hasn’t he? I wouldn’t be able to gather magic so quickly if he hadn’t pushed me to do it. Emily, you’re much better with your precision in the translocational spells because he wouldn’t let you get away with ‘good enough.’”