by Holly Black
“I don’t think I’m up for games,” he told Celia. “Another time.”
“Maybe today was a test,” Tamara said as they headed back to their rooms after dinner. “Like, of our patience or our ability to take orders. Maybe tomorrow we’ll get to do real training.”
Aaron, trailing one of his hands along the wall as he walked, took a moment to respond. “Yeah. Maybe.”
Call didn’t say anything. He was too tired.
Magic, he was finding, was hard work.
The next day, Tamara’s hopes were dashed when they returned to the place that Call had dubbed the Room of Sand and Boredom to finish sorting. They still had plenty of sand to go. Call felt guilty all over again.
“But when we’re done,” Aaron said to Master Rufus, “we can do other stuff, right?”
“Concentrate on the task at hand,” the mage replied enigmatically, walking out through the wall.
Heaving sighs, they sat down to work. Sand sorting went on for the rest of the week, with Tamara spending all her time after classes with her sister or Jasper or other expensive-looking legacy students, and Aaron spending his time with everyone, while Call sulked in their room. Then sand sorting went on for another week after that — the pile of sand to sort seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, as if someone didn’t want this test ever to end. Call had heard there was some kind of torture where a single drop of water hit a guy’s forehead over and over again until he went insane. He had never understood how that worked before, but he understood it now.
There’s got to be an easier way, he thought, but the scheming part of his mind must have been the same part used for magic, because he couldn’t think of anything.
“Look,” Call said finally, “you guys are good at this, right? The best mages in the tests. Top-ranked.”
The other two gazed at him, glassy-eyed. Aaron looked like maybe he’d been hit on the head by a falling boulder when no one was looking.
“I guess,” Tamara said. She didn’t sound too excited about it. “The best in our year, anyway.”
“Okay, well, I’m terrible. The worst. I was in last place and I’ve already messed things up for us, so obviously I don’t know anything. But there must be a faster way. Something we’re supposed to be doing. Some lesson we’re supposed to be learning. Is there anything you can think of? Anything?” A note of pleading had entered his voice.
Tamara hesitated. Aaron shook his head.
Call saw her expression. “What? Is there something?”
“Well, there are some magical principles, some … special ways of tapping into the elements,” she said, her black braids swinging as she moved into a different sitting position. “Stuff that Master Rufus probably doesn’t want us to know about.”
Aaron nodded eagerly, the hope of making it out of this room lighting his face.
“You know how Rufus was talking about feeling the power in the earth and all that?” Tamara wasn’t looking at them. She was staring at the piles of sand like she was focused on something far away. “Well, there’s a way to get more power, fast. But you have to open yourself up to the element … and, well, eat a grain of sand.”
“Eat the sand?” Call said. “You have to be kidding.”
“It’s kind of dangerous, because of that whole First Principle of Magic thing. But it works for the same reason. You’re closer to the element — like if you’re doing earth magic, you eat rocks or sand, fire mages can eat matches, air mages might consume blood for its oxygen. It’s not a good idea, but …”
Call thought of Jasper grinning around his bloody finger at the Trial. His heart started to pound. “How do you know this?”
Tamara looked at the wall. She took a deep breath. “My dad. He taught me how. For emergencies, he said, but he considers doing well on a test an emergency. I’ve never done it, though, because it scares me — if you get too much power and can’t control it, you could get drawn into an element. It burns away your soul and replaces it with fire, air, water, earth, or chaos. You become a creature of that element. Like an elemental.”
“One of those lizard things?” Aaron asked.
Call was relieved he hadn’t had to be the one to ask that exact same question.
Tamara shook her head. “Elementals come in all sizes. Small like those lizards, or big and bloated on magic, like wyverns and dragons and sea serpents. Or even human size. So we’d have to be careful.”
“I can be careful,” Call said. “How about you, Aaron?”
Aaron ran grainy hands through his blond hair and shrugged. “Anything is better than this. And if we finish faster than Master Rufus expects, he’ll have to give us something else to do.”
“Okay. Here goes nothing.” Tamara licked the tip of her finger and touched it to the pile of sand. A few grains stuck. Then she put her finger in her mouth.
Call and Aaron copied her. As Call jammed his wet finger into his mouth, he couldn’t help wondering what he would have thought if a week ago someone had told him he’d be sitting in an underground cavern eating sand. The sand didn’t taste bad — it didn’t taste like anything, really. He swallowed the rough grains down and waited.
“Now what?” he asked after a few seconds. He was starting to get a little nervous. Nothing had happened to Jasper at the Trial, he told himself. Nothing would happen to them.
“Now we concentrate,” Tamara said.
Call looked at the pile of sand. This time when he slid his thoughts toward it, he could sense each of the tiny grains. Minuscule pieces of shell sparkled in his mind, beside crystal pieces, and yellowish stones honeycombed with crags. He tried to imagine picking up the whole pile of sand in his hands. It would be heavy, and the sand would spill between his fingers and pool on the floor. He tried to blank out everything around him — Tamara and Aaron, the cold stone under him, the faint rush of wind in the room — and narrow his concentration down to the only two things that mattered: himself and the pile of sand. The sand felt completely solid and light, like Styrofoam. It would be easy to lift. He could lift it with one hand. With one finger. With one … thought. He imagined it rising and separating….
The sand pile lurched, spilling a few grains from the top, and then drifted upward. It hung over the three of them like a small storm cloud.
Tamara and Aaron both stared. Call fell back on his hands. His legs were prickling with pins and needles. He must have sat on them wrong. He’d been concentrating too hard to notice. “Your turn,” he said, and it seemed to him that the walls were closer, that he could feel the pulse of the earth underneath him. He wondered what it would be like to sink into the ground.
“Absolutely,” said Aaron. The cloud of sand broke apart into two halves, one composed of lighter sand, the other darker. Tamara raised her hand and drew a lazy spiral on the air. Call and Aaron watched in wonder as the sand swirled into different patterns above them.
The wall opened. Master Rufus stood on the threshold, his face a mask. Tamara made a little squeaking sound, and the hovering pile of sand crashed down, sending up puffs of dust that made Call choke.
“What have you done?” Master Rufus demanded.
Aaron looked pale. “I — we didn’t mean —”
Master Rufus gestured sharply toward them. “Aaron, be quiet. Callum, come with me.”
“What?” Call began. “But I — that’s not fair!”
“Come. With. Me,” Rufus repeated. “Now.”
Call rose gingerly to his feet, his weak leg stinging. He glanced at Aaron and Tamara, but they were looking down at their hands, not at him. So much for loyalty, he thought as he followed Master Rufus out of the room.
Rufus led him on a short walk through some twisting corridors to his office. It wasn’t what Call expected. The furnishings were modern. Steel bookcases filled one wall, and a sleek leather couch, big enough to nap on, stretched along the other. Tacked to one side of the room were pages and pages of what looked like scrawled equations, but with odd markings instead of numbers. They hung a
bove a rough wooden workstation whose surface was blotched with stains and covered with knives, beakers, and the taxidermied bodies of weird-looking animals. Beside delicate, geared models that looked like mousetraps crossed with clocks, there was a live animal in a small barred cage — one of those lizards with blue flames running along its back. Rufus’s desk was tucked into a corner, an old rolltop that was at odds with the rest of the room. On top of it was a glass jar holding a tiny tornado spinning in place.
Call couldn’t take his eyes off it, expecting it to burst out of the jar at any moment.
“Callum, sit down,” said Master Rufus, indicating the couch. “I want to explain why I brought you to the Magisterium.”
CALL STARED. After two weeks of sand sorting, he’d given up on the idea that Rufus was ever going to be forward or direct with him. In fact, he realized, he’d given up on the idea that he’d ever really find out why he was at the Magisterium at all.
“Sit,” Rufus said again, and this time Call sat, wincing as his leg twinged. The couch was comfortable after hours of sitting on a cold stone floor, and he let himself sink into it. “What do you think of our school so far?”
Before Call could answer, there was the sound of rushing wind. He blinked, and realized it was coming from the jar on Master Rufus’s desk. The small tornado inside it was darkening and condensing into a shape. A moment later, it had taken the form of a miniature olive-green-uniformed Assembly member. It was a man with very dark hair. He blinked around.
“Rufus?” he said. “Rufus, are you there?”
Rufus made an impatient noise and flipped the jar over. “Not now,” he said to it, and the image inside became a tornado again.
“Is that like a telephone?” Call asked, awed.
“Something like a telephone,” said Rufus. “As I said before, the concentration of elemental magic in the Magisterium interferes with most technology. Besides, we prefer to do things our own way.”
“My dad is probaby really worried, not having heard from me in so —” Call started.
Master Rufus leaned against his desk, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “First,” he said, “I want to know what you think of the Magisterium and your training.”
“It’s easy,” Call said. “Boring and pointless, but easy.”
Rufus gave a thin smile. “What you did in there was very clever,” he said. “You want to make me angry because you think that if you do, I’ll send you home. And you believe you want to be sent home.”
Call had actually given up on that plan. Saying obnoxious things just came naturally to him. He shrugged.
“You must wonder why I chose you,” Rufus said. “You, the last of all those ranked. The least competent of all the potential mages. I suppose you imagine that it is because I saw something in you. Some potential the other Masters had missed. Some untapped well of skill. Maybe even something that reminded me of myself.”
His tone was lightly mocking. Call was silent.
“I took you on,” Rufus continued, “because you do have skill and power, but you also have a great deal of anger. And you have almost no control at all. I did not want you to be a burden on one of the other mages. Nor did I want one of them to choose you for the wrong reasons.” His eyes flicked toward the tornado, spinning in its upside-down jar. “Many years ago, I made a mistake with a student. A mistake that had grave consequences. Taking you on is my penance.”
Call’s stomach felt as if it wanted to curl up inside him like a kicked puppy. It hurt, being told that he was so unpleasant he was someone’s punishment.
“So send me home,” he burst out. “If you just took me because you don’t feel like one of the other mages should have to teach me, send me home.”
Rufus shook his head. “You still don’t understand,” he said. “Uncontrolled magic like yours is a danger. Sending you home to your small town would be the equivalent of dropping a bomb on them. But make no mistake, Callum. If you persist in disobedience, if you refuse to learn to control your magic, then I will send you home. But I will bind your magic first.”
“Bind my magic?”
“Yes. Until a mage passes through the First Gate at the end of his Iron Year, his or her magic can be bound by one of the Masters. You would be unable to access the elements, unable to use your power. And we would take your memories of magic, too, so that all you would know was that you were missing something, some essential part of yourself, but you would no longer know what it was. You would spend your life tormented by the loss of something you didn’t remember losing. Is that what you want?”
“No,” Call whispered.
“If I believe that you’re holding back the others or that you’re untrainable, you’re done here. But if you make it through this whole year and pass through the First Gate, then no one can ever take your magic away. Make it through this year and you can drop out of the Magisterium if you want. You’ll have learned enough to no longer be a danger to the world. Think on that, Callum Hunt, as you sort your sand the way I instructed you to. Grain by grain.” Master Rufus paused, and then made a dismissive gesture, indicating that Call could go. “Think on that and make your choice.”
Concentrating on moving the sand was as grueling as ever, more so because of how pleased Call had been with their cleverness in coming up with a better solution. For once, he’d felt that maybe they could really be a team, maybe even friends.
Now Aaron and Tamara concentrated quietly, and when he looked over at them, they wouldn’t meet his gaze. They were probably mad at him, Call thought. He’d been the one who’d insisted that someone come up with a better way of doing the exercise. And even though he was the one who’d been dragged into Rufus’s office, they were all going to be in trouble. Maybe Tamara even thought he’d finked on her. Plus, it was his magic that had scattered their piles that first day. He was a burden on the group, and they all knew it.
Fine, Call thought. All Master Rufus said I had to do was get through this year, so I’m going to do it. And I’m going to be the best mage here, just because no one thinks I can be. I never really tried before, but I’m going to try now. I’m going to be better than you both and then, when I’ve impressed you and you really want me to be your friend, I’m going to turn around and tell you how much I don’t need you or the Magisterium. As soon as I pass through the First Gate and they can’t bind my magic anymore, I’m going home and no one can stop me.
That’s what I’m going to tell Dad, too, as soon as I get to that tornado phone.
He spent the rest of the day moving sand with his mind, but instead of doing it the way he had the first day, straining to capture each grain, pushing it with all the desperate effort of his brain, today he let himself experiment. He tried a lighter and lighter touch, tried rolling the sand instead of lifting it into the air. Then he tried to move more than one bit of sand at once. He’d done it before, after all. The trick was that he’d thought of it as one thing — a sand cloud — instead of as three hundred individual grains.
Maybe he could do the same thing now, thinking of all the dark grains as one thing.
He tried, pulling with his mind, but there were too many and he lost focus. He gave up on that idea and concentrated on five grains of dark sand. These he was able to move, rolling them together toward the pile.
He slumped back, amazed, feeling he’d done something incredible. He wanted to say something to Aaron, but instead, he kept his mouth shut and practiced his new technique, getting better and better at it, until he was moving twenty grains at a time. He couldn’t do better than that, though, no matter how hard he struggled. Aaron and Tamara saw what he was doing, but neither one of them said anything, nor did they try to imitate him.
That night, Call dreamed of sand. He was sitting on a beach, trying to build a castle for a naked mole rat caught in a storm, but the wind kept blowing the sand away as the water grew closer and closer. Finally, frustrated, he stood up and kicked at the castle until it came apart and became a huge monster with e
normous sand arms and legs. It chased him down the beach, always about to grab him but never quite close enough, as it shouted at him in Master Rufus’s voice, Remember what your father said about magic, boy. It’ll cost you everything.
The next day, Master Rufus didn’t drop them off and leave as usual. Instead, he sat down in a far corner of the Room of Sand and Boredom, took out a book and a waxed paper packet, and started to read. After about two hours, he unwrapped the packet. It was a ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye bread.
He appeared to be indifferent to Callum’s method of moving more than one grain at a time, so Aaron and Tamara started doing it, too. Things moved faster then.
That day, they actually managed to sort all the sand before dinnertime. Master Rufus looked over what they’d done, nodded in satisfaction, and kicked it all back into one big pile again. “Tomorrow, you’re going to sort by five gradations of color,” he said.
The three of them groaned in unison.
Things went on like that for another week and a half. Outside of class, Tamara and Aaron ignored Call, and Call ignored them right back. But they got better at moving sand — better, more precise, and more able to concentrate on multiple grains at once.
Meanwhile, at meals, they heard about the lessons the other apprentices were receiving, which all sounded more interesting than sand — especially when those lessons backfired. Like when Drew set himself on fire and managed to burn up one of the boats and singe Rafe’s hair before he was able to put himself out. Or when Milagros’s and Tanaka’s students were practicing together and Kai Hale dropped a lizard elemental down the back of Jasper’s shirt. (Call thought Kai might deserve a medal.) Or when Gwenda decided she liked one of the mushroom cap pizza things so much that she wanted more of it and inflated the mushroom so large that it pushed everyone — even the Masters — out of the Refectory for several days until its growth could be tamed and they could hack their way back in.