by Tim Susman
“Aye, but will Coppy have enough time to improve?” Malcolm tapped the table.
“He’ll have to—”
Kip broke off mid-sentence, staring at the tent flap. Malcolm turned, and the three of them watched as a slender white-robed figure stepped inside with the careful grace of a white-tailed deer. He saw them, but didn’t stop, only crossed to the table opposite them and picked up a lump of cheese.
“Who is that?” Malcolm whispered. “Why’s his robe stained?”
In the diffuse tent light, Kip only saw white cloth, but the young man’s odor and the dirt that clung to him came clearly to his nose. The tanned features and unruly shock of blond hair atop them made him think that someone had taken Victor Adamson and abandoned him in the woods for months. But this youth’s nose was short and round, and anyway, Kip was sure that even abandoned in the woods, Adamson would somehow emerge confident and perfectly coiffed. “I think,” he said slowly, “I saw him in the orchard. We thought he was a ghost.”
“Ho!” Malcolm called across the tent, so loudly that Kip jumped. “You! White Robe. Are you a ghost?”
The blond youth continued chewing, ignoring them. “Maybe he’s a ghost and can’t hear us,” Kip said.
“A ghost that eats cheese?” Emily scoffed. “He’s someone who wishes to be left alone.”
“Is he one of our mysterious masters, then? Jaeger or Barrett?”
Kip shook his head. “They eat in the Tower.”
“He’s not in our class.” Malcolm stood. “I’m going to talk to him.”
The Irishman got up and crossed the tent. Kip and Emily exchanged glances and then hurried to flank him as he approached the white-robed youth. “Ho,” he said, standing right in front of the weathered face. The youth’s eyes were grey and distant as the sky, and still he didn’t acknowledge Malcolm, but ate the last of his cheese.
“Can you hear me at all? Are you a student or a master?”
The youth stood. Grey eyes turned on Malcolm, seeming to struggle to focus. “No,” he whispered, and then he walked quickly around them and out of the tent.
They followed, but only in time to see him walking directly to the orchard through the frosting of snow on the grass. “Caretaker, maybe. Gardener.” Malcolm crossed his arms.
“Odd fellow,” Kip said.
“Damaged in the head.” Emily tapped the side of her head. “We’d get them in Boston. They could spread fertilizer and some of them could weed, but more often than not they would pull up your dahlias with your dandelions.”
“They’re so particular about who they let into the college, is the thing,” the fox replied, still watching the white shape drift across the lawn.
“And where’s he live? Built a shack by the orchard?” Malcolm rubbed his hands together.
“No, there’s nothing like that there that I can see,” Emily said. “Let’s go inside and worry about it later.”
Kip followed them, but he cast another glance toward the orchard as he stepped through the door into the Great Hall. He’d expected the mysteries of the Tower to be more like old books, spells he could decipher and learn, or records of ancient magicks cast. He hadn’t expected voices in his head, or books that made his friends forget about him, or an unsettling wild man who lived on the college’s lawn.
Malcolm was right, though: Selection was just over a week away. There would be plenty of time to think about all the other things after that, or else they would not be in a position to worry about it.
14
Last Resorts
They practiced all their spells most of the day Saturday and Sunday. The four of them held a short prayer session Sunday morning, as they’d grown accustomed to, and then suffered through a cold, clear day in the practice tent. Kip had to remind Emily several times that he could not bring Neddy out to the tent even if he wanted to risk sending the whole canvas and wood structure up in flames. She and Malcolm ran back to the Great Hall fireplace periodically, but Kip and Coppy stayed out in the tent, warm enough when out of the wind.
In classes, meanwhile, they were learning physical magic and the theory of alchemical magic. Had they only learned the spells they were taught, they would have no chance of being Selected, Malcolm pointed out as they sat in a semicircle before their fireplace Monday evening, waiting for Master Windsor. Neddy lay peacefully stretched out across the stone, watching the four of them in turn, and occasionally asked for a piece of paper to eat. “Like half the class,” he said. “They’re struggling just to keep up.”
“Lucky we’re so talented,” Emily said.
“Luck helps,” he replied, “I don’t deny it. But in our case, ’tis more than that. We share a common passion, a need to prove ourselves. Me da always said, hire an Englishman and you get a reliable worker; hire an Irishman and you get someone who works twice as hard to prove you wrong about him.”
Kip expected a sharp retort from Emily, but she only nodded and said, “You may have the right of it there.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m lagging behind.” Coppy stared at the phosphorus elemental’s shimmering form.
“Give us a page?” Neddy asked, and Coppy reached behind him, picked up an accounting sheet from a hundred years ago, and threw it to the lizard.
Kip watched the play of the firelight over Coppy’s sleek brown fur. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” Coppy spoke slowly. “I never much cared what people thought of me. Growin’ up on the Isle, you know, it becomes your world and you make the best of it. It don’t matter if someone’s right or wrong about you. Matters what you do, and what you are inside.”
“Matters if the fellow wanting to hire you thinks you’ll spend all your money on drink,” Malcolm said.
“Or will run off to pursue quilting,” Emily put in.
Kip curled his tail back to lie over Coppy’s thicker one. “Or can’t be trusted because you have fur.”
“But see,” Coppy said, “on the Isle, it was all Calatians. We knew what the outsiders thought and we didn’t care. Much. We did for ourselves. So in the end, I don’t really care if Patris or Windsor doesn’t think I can do sorcery. I know I’m doing my best.”
“I really think Windsor is trying to help,” Kip said, just as the door opened and the dour sorcerer stepped through. The fox’s ears went down, but Windsor did not appear to have overheard their conversation.
By unanimous agreement, Kip, Emily, and Malcolm told Master Windsor that he should spend all the study time with Coppy, and though the otter did not enjoy that announcement, he didn’t protest it. Master Windsor, in his usual backhanded way, said that it was their prerogative to waste his time with the candidate least likely to be Selected, and when Emily pointed out that he could be using his time more productively by telling Coppy what to do to get Selected, he turned an icy eye on her and said, “The gap between knowing and doing is not mine to bridge.”
“If he performed a difficult spell,” Kip said, but Windsor cut him off.
“The likelihood of that, as faint and remote as it is, grows ever smaller the longer you delay the beginning of his practice.”
Coppy did not like being talked about anyway, so Kip shut up and went to sit near Neddy and practice his control of fire, while Malcolm looked over his defensive spells and Emily moved papers to the dining tent, the practice tent, and the fireplace upstairs—she hoped.
In only two months, Kip reflected, he had already become used to this company, to practicing sorcery in the evenings and taking classes in the day, to being on alert for Farley—well, that last had been a fixture of his life and was unlikely to change. It was a pleasant change, though, to have Farley too occupied to harass Kip every day, even if Kip had the uneasy feeling that Farley was only applying himself to his studies in order to perfect new and more deadly attacks. As much as Adamson might wish to take credit for restraining the bully, Kip thought that either Adamson was not doing as complete a job as he claimed, or overestimated his power.
When Master
Windsor left, his final words to Coppy were, “Perhaps your future is not entirely hopeless.”
“That’s as near as he’ll get to a compliment,” Emily said when the door had closed.
“What did you do?” Kip stood and walked over to Coppy.
The otter smiled around at them. “Kept my focus though he was berating me. I kept the rocks in the air for fifteen seconds, didn’t wobble a bit. Unlike me knees.”
“There you go.” Malcolm clapped Coppy on the back from the other side, while Kip clasped his paw. “Knew you had it in you.”
“It’s only one step,” the otter protested, but they would not let him downplay the achievement and encouraged him to give the deflection spell another try. He asked whether something more visible might be better, but Malcolm pointed out that when Coppy was expecting an attack, he was quite good at casting the deflection. Even when he wasn’t, he got it to work about half the time.
“Tomorrow,” Kip said, “you’ll try that spell again at lunch.”
The next day, Kip and Emily spent the morning trying not to let on how nervous they were. When Coppy got up for a break during class, the fox and woman met each other’s eyes and saw their worry reflected. “He’ll do fine,” Kip said.
“He’d best.” Emily brought one of her bangs around and twisted it around a finger. “He’s not got much time left.”
At lunchtime, they hurried out to the tent, noting six ravens crowded onto the perch above them. At their usual table, the four of them ate slowly, and as they finished the simple meal of bread and cheese, all of them gathered magic. The ravens above, perhaps noticing the glowing hands and paws, paid them close attention.
The silence in the tent felt unusual to Kip. He didn’t want to take his attention from Coppy, but he risked a look over at Farley. The large boy was chewing on a piece of bread—Kip knew it was bread because a crust protruded from his wide red lips. Both of his hands were under the table, which was suspicious enough without seeing whether they were glowing, but the quiet focus with which everyone at that table ate made Kip’s fur prickle. Of course, he thought, they would be as anxious to prove their worth for Selection, and would have arrived at the same conclusion as he and his friends about when to do so.
They were a little more than halfway done with their food when a piece of cheese rind rose from Emily’s plate into the air over Coppy’s head. Kip turned his attention to Coppy and as a result, nearly missed the gleam of the knife that came arrowing through the air at him.
He had magic gathered and a short levitation spell at hand, second nature now. He seized his plate and lifted it as he ducked. The knife hit the plate with a clatter, but sharp pain lanced through his shoulder.
“Kip!” Emily cried as his plate fell to the table.
“I’m fine,” he yelped automatically. This scenario was familiar and his reactions almost as scripted as a spell: let your friends know how badly you’re hurt (his shoulder did hurt but he could still move it), identify whether they are in danger (he stared toward Farley’s table, where like a winter storm, an array of forks and plates were rising), then decide whether to fight or run.
With a quick reapplication of the spell, he yanked Farley’s table upward, catching many of the intended missiles. At the other tables, students dove for cover under their tables; above, the ravens muttered among themselves. Kip had an eye on two forks and a tankard that were headed their way, but in seconds, the tankard winked out of existence, one fork dropped to the floor, and the other halted in mid-air.
Emily, Malcolm, and Coppy had all focused their attention on the projectiles, and then Coppy turned to Kip, but only managed to get the fox’s name out before the tent flap burst open. The white-robed stranger entered, robes billowing about him, and Kip felt the hissing of wind all around. He tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat as though something were pushing them back down.
“Stop!” the young man cried, unnecessarily, because everything in the room had already frozen. Kip tried to keep his grip on the table, but it was pulled downward despite his spell. The air had grown thick, making it hard for the fox to breathe.
“No…no fighting!” The young man’s voice was high, desperate as a child witnessing his parents coming to blows. “The branches of…a great tree…must sway together.”
He appeared to have trouble breathing as well. In the silences between his words, Kip caught not only the rustle of a breeze, but also the faintest sounds of a conversation going on just beyond his hearing. He stared up at the ravens, but they appeared as transfixed as everyone else.
The youth’s eyes met Kip’s, grey so pale they were almost white, blond hair still unkempt and dotted with leaves and twigs. He smelled rank, as though he hadn’t bathed in months, but also earthy, and the smells came and went in a manner that gave Kip a headache: one moment they were there, the next they weren’t. He couldn’t even smell the blood from his shoulder one second, and the next its odor filled his nose and he wanted to sneeze. There was no order to it, no design; by turns he smelled cheese and students and nothing and Emily and Coppy and ravens and nothing again, as though his nose were under the effect of some sort of spell.
And still nobody spoke. Kip sat cautiously upright, and the youth’s eyes dropped to his shoulder. “You are bleeding,” he said.
Kip nodded slowly.
“Go.”
As Kip stood, air rushed past his ears. Emily’s hair rustled and she looked startled, and then the heaviness was gone and Kip’s nose worked again.
He made his way to the front of the tent as the young man reached over to a table and grabbed a piece of bread. Kip had reached the tent flap, the cold outside air on his paw, when a voice above said, “That was unnecessary, Forrest.”
It was the voice of the raven who’d spoken to him atop the Tower. Kip whirled, but the six ravens looked all alike, none with a beak open.
“They were fighting,” Forrest—if that was the young man’s name—said.
Kip waited, but the ravens did not speak again. Emily made a shooing gesture at him, and with reluctance, he went off to see the healer.
He passed time talking to the elementals in the Great Hall when Splint had healed him, keeping an eye on the doors. When Emily and Coppy arrived, he fairly pounced them with questions. They told him nothing further of interest had happened; Forrest had eaten and then left, and scarcely another word had been spoken by anyone else. “Is your shoulder better?” Coppy asked.
“Good as new.” He beckoned them closer. “I asked Master Splint who Forrest is, and he told me he’s Master Jaeger’s apprentice. Only apprentice to survive the attack, but he’s lived in the orchard since then and nobody can get sense out of him.” This information had also told Kip which master had been speaking to him through a raven, a fact he’d filed away for himself.
“Poor fellow,” Emily said. “I want to go see to him now. Make sure he’s warm and has enough food.”
“He comes to the dining tent to eat,” Kip pointed out.
“Did it hurt?” Coppy asked, laying a paw on Kip’s shoulder. “When Splint mended it, I mean.”
Kip shook his head. “It was warm and then the aching stopped. Did none of the ravens comment on your spell?”
“Nay.” Coppy quieted after that, making Kip’s ears fall, not only because the otter’s spell had gone unnoticed—twice—but because he’d reminded his friend of that fact. He turned to his desk, staring at the small marble cubes there. This afternoon, more boring Physical magic exercises, when he wanted nothing more than to speed through time to his lesson with Master Odden the next day.
At the end of the afternoon’s lesson, Master Patris called Kip aside. “Penfold,” he said. “For your role in the fight at lunch, you will fetch the day’s food from the Inn tomorrow morning.”
“My role?” Kip yelped, and then controlled himself as two of the nearest students looked up from gathering their books. “Sir, Farley threw a knife at me. He wounded my shoulder.”
&nbs
p; “And had you not imposed your presence on the other students here, there would have been no fight. Can you deny that?” He glared while Kip stood mute, furious. “The punishment of other students is not your domain. If you would like to continue arguing, you may leave the school altogether. Believe me, if I did not feel certain you will be gone within the month anyway, I’d be delighted to send you on your way.”
Snickers greeted this pronouncement from those students still listening. Kip snapped his muzzle and sense of injustice shut and carried the words he wanted to shout back down to the basement, where he kicked papers at Neddy and stomped about until Emily told him to leave off raising dust.
He breathed, coughed, and thought of the rushing air. Forrest had been able to control the wind somehow; another advanced magic, another secret that Kip would not be able to discover if Patris stopped his Selection the way he was threatening to. Fire he could control, but what good was fire in the face of people determined to stop him from learning? He reached out fluidly, brought magic and flame to the air, wondering for a moment whether dust in the air was the answer to holding fire in his paw, but the dust particles snapped and popped like little falling stars and then went out, leaving filaments of smoke in their wake.
“Kip!” Emily stomped over to him.
His ears lowered; he turned away and stared at Neddy. “Sorry.”
“First off,” she said, up close to him, “if you use magic here unsupervised again, you’ll get in further trouble.”
“I know.” Past her shoulder, he saw Coppy staring at him.
“Second, if you just start casting fire spells—”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He raised his paws. “I was frustrated. Patris—”
“Would expel you in a moment if he had reason to.”
He curled his paws into fists. To one side, Neddy said, “Does ‘expel’ mean he’d send you back to the fox world?”
The lizard had his head raised inquisitively, ember eyes glowing bright. “Sort of,” Kip said, and stalked back to the bedroll. He knew one way to make everyone leave him alone, and indeed, as he picked up the little red-bound leather book, Emily paused in her walk across the room and then asked Coppy if any Masters had commented on his defensive spell casting after their lesson.