by V. St. Clair
Surprised, Hayden raised his eyebrows and said, “You did?”
“Of course. I did promise to, didn’t I, on the eve of my departure from Mizzenwald?”
Hayden’s stomach clenched at the sudden memory. He had encountered Master Asher in the Pentagon last year and excitedly told him that there was an array he was mapping, and asked Asher to look at it during their next lesson, not knowing that his mentor was preparing to depart for a war zone and was simply trying to say farewell to him. When he’d realized his oversight, it was too late, and Asher was already gone.
“I—I’m surprised you remembered that.”
The Master gave him a funny look and said, “In this entire school, you’re my only protégé. What kind of mentor would I be if I forgot to actually mentor you every now and again?”
“I guess that’s true,” Hayden conceded. “So, does that mean I can help with your research now?”
Asher’s smile seemed tinged with evil delight for some reason. “Oh, sure.” He tapped Hayden on the shoulder as though knighting him. “Congratulations, you’re a proper apprentice now.”
It seemed a little anticlimactic, but that didn’t matter. He was finally going to get to do real work—discovering new things that nobody else knew about, maybe even getting published in one of their textbooks if he found something spectacular.
“I guess I should start by finishing up my project from last year?”
Asher shook his head.
“Alas, I was curious to see what you’d caught onto, so I finished mapping your work during the winter holiday. The good news is that you did indeed discover a new alignment—or at least, I couldn’t find any records of it anywhere.”
Hayden perked up immediately. “I did? Wow, but—wait, if that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?”
The Master gave him a commiserating look and explained, “It appears that you discovered a way to turn common objects into…mushrooms.”
Hayden stared at him for a long moment, waiting for him to explain the joke. Then he realized that Asher wasn’t joking.
“You mean…”
“I mean that whenever I cast your spell at anything—regardless of what it was—that thing turned into a mushroom. Believe me, I was as astounded as you are, and you can bet that I tried it on just about everything I could get my hands on—I do hate an unsolved mystery after all. Anyway, that happens sometimes with research; not all spells are useful. You should be proud that your first discovery did anything at all—my first one was a complete dud.”
Hayden had a hard time feeling proud of his accomplishment, and was still trying to salvage some positive aspect to make himself feel better about spending the better part of last year discovering mushrooms.
“Maybe it has food applications? It could keep people from starving during droughts or something?”
Asher chuckled and said, “Sorry kid, I forgot to mention that the mushrooms were poisonous. Took Razelle a week to cure me, which gave her plenty of time to chastise me for being an idiot while I was convalescing. I think she enjoys it.” He shuddered dramatically.
“Are you telling me that you turned something like a piece of firewood into a mushroom—using a brand new, untested spell, and your first thought was to eat it?”
Asher laughed again. “It was a candle, actually, and no, eating it was my fourth or fifth thought. You shouldn’t really be surprised to hear it; you know I’m curious to a fault.”
Hayden had always admired that the man could admit his faults without batting an eyelash, but he still thought his mentor was absolutely insane sometimes.
“Okay, so then if that project is finished, what should I start on?” he changed the subject.
“During your lessons in here we’ll be continuing your magical education, only this time I won’t be going easy on you.”
“You mean you’ve been going easy on me this whole time?” Hayden interrupted, aghast at the thought of how much more difficult things were going to become if Asher had been secretly holding back all this time. He remembered getting beaten to a pulp by his mentor on alternating days last year during combat practice.
“Sadly, yes. There are many arrays I still need to teach you—especially in the violet prism—and I get bored easily so I’ll likely be moving through material much faster than you’re comfortable with. Luckily, Mizzenwald doesn’t pay me to make you comfortable, it pays me to make you smart.”
“Are we still doing our combat practice then?”
There was that evil grin again.
“Yes, on alternating days. We still need to improve your combat skills with prisms, with and without other magical instruments, compounding, and with a handful of specialized mastery-level tinted prisms I have yet to acquaint you with. Then there’s your new research project, which I’ll figure out in the next day or so—you’ll be expected to spend a couple hours a night on that and review your progress with me a few times a week. Oh, and then there are your other mastery-level duties, now that I’ve officially accepted you as a student, which will take several hours a week as well.”
Now Hayden understood why the Master had looked evilly delighted when he’d so casually asked to be an apprentice. He had no idea what kind of workload he was volunteering for in addition to his normal studies.
Asher was still looking at him, clearly waiting to see whether he would balk and change his mind about accepting his new role.
I could just stay a normal student for a couple more years until I have more time, or until I graduate and leave school…
As appealing as it sounded, Hayden had a fundamental issue with turning down challenges. He blamed his Frost bloodlines.
“I guess we’d better get started then.”
Asher hadn’t been lying about the workload this year. By the end of class that day they had reviewed seventeen new alignments, including two that required compounding, all of which Hayden was expected to practice tonight in order to demonstrate mastery of them during class in two days.
“What if I don’t have them all sorted out by our next class?” Hayden asked tentatively.
“Then you’re going to fall behind, because during our next lesson we’ll be moving on to new arrays, so if you haven’t memorized the old ones and how to find them then you’ll just miss them.”
Hayden grimaced involuntarily and Asher added, “Welcome to your first mastery-level class. If you think that the other Masters are more forgiving of their top-level students, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise when you hit Willow’s class next year. Four of his students dropped out of school by the end of the first week last year, and we have bets on whether he can top that number this time around.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just getting used to it is all,” he assured Asher. “I’ll be able to keep up with everything once I get into a routine.” I hope.
“Good. Well, that’s the end of our lesson today. I’ll go easy on you and give you the night off, but tomorrow evening you’ll start assisting me with my research after dinner.”
Hayden thanked him and packed up his notes, head spinning with new alignments and wondering how in the world he was going to attempt to memorize seventeen of them in two days. It was the first time he had ever really found Prism class difficult.
By dinner he was exhausted, and wasted no time telling his friends the load he was expected to carry in Prisms now, as none of them were in a mastery-level class yet. Zane looked mildly ill and Tess frowned thoughtfully but remained silent while the others peppered him with questions and Bonk ate his way through Hayden’s ham loaf.
“Between homework, research, and your mastery-level duties, you’re not going to have much time off this year,” Zane said with a wince.
“At least they cancelled challenge arenas and the I.S.C. this year,” Conner put in helpfully.
“Yeah, but only because the grounds might not be safe anymore with a giant schism open, so they can’t risk the mastery students getting eaten while they’re trying to translo
cate us in and out of arenas anymore,” Tamon argued.
“That’s not even factoring in the time you’ll need to work with Fia Valay to get your estate and businesses in order,” Zane continued. “That could be a full-time job all on its own.”
Hayden groaned. He’d forgotten all about his duties as the head of the Frost House, and was now beginning to wonder whether he would have any spare time for eating and sleeping in the next year.
He glanced at Tess, a pang of guilt settling in his stomach, but she seemed to anticipate his apology before he could give it.
“I know, and it’s fine.” She smiled at him. “I’ll be busy too this year, but we’ll make time for each other when we can and manage it.”
Hayden nodded gratefully, relieved that she understood. He kept thinking that school should get easier every year and less time consuming, but the opposite kept proving true.
Well, at least I don’t have to prepare for arena challenges this year—or worse, the Inter-School Championship.
His goal was to make it through the entire first term without encountering one monster or engaging in any epic battles to the death. He reflected that it was a bit sad that this goal seemed like a stretch for him.
Conner must have read the look on his face because he said, “Hey, at least you’re popular this year.”
Bonk chose that particular moment to choke on a fragment of turnip he hadn’t chewed properly, and after pounding the dragonling on the back, the offending morsel flew into Hayden’s half-empty glass of milk, splashing his brand new shirt as it sank to the bottom.
“Yeah,” he rolled his eyes, “it’s pretty glamorous being me.”
7
The Schism
Hayden stayed up half the night doing homework, and after a nightmarish three page essay comparing the likelihood of splintering for laurel and elm wands, he only had the energy to study half of his prism alignments before collapsing into bed and falling asleep.
As a result, he spent the following morning reviewing his prism notes over breakfast, because he had to report to Asher’s office for research in the evening and had no idea how long he would insist on keeping him there before letting him finish his homework.
Trying to eat cereal with sliced strawberries was difficult with the eyepiece of his circlet pulled over his right eye, face tilted towards the window to catch the light. He kept missing his mouth with the spoon, and Bonk swooped in and stole slices of strawberry from the bowl every time he thought he could get away with it.
“You’ve been looking for that same spell for the last ten minutes,” Zane interrupted him at last, after Hayden finally succeeded in locating it and attempted to commit the array to memory. “How hard could it be to find? It’s your major, after all.”
Hayden frowned.
“It’s got thirteen different color bands, two of them inverted, and it looks a lot like the array for Haste if you’re not being careful. Add that to the fact that it’s bordered by about a thousand other arrays in the violet prism that keep catching my eye—some of them even sharing color bands—and it’s a lot to keep track of.”
“Yuck, sounds terrible,” Tamon summarized succinctly, scanning his own notes for one of his classes. Hayden felt better knowing that he wasn’t the only one who was overwhelmed at the very beginning of the year.
“It’s actually really interesting, and normally I wouldn’t have much trouble if we were only doing one or two big alignments every few days, but seventeen at a time is a bit much.”
Felix and Bonk began fighting over the last piece of toast on the table, drawing all attention to themselves. Bonk flapped his wings impressively, but Felix made a weird hissing noise and his fur stood up on end, and Bonk scampered backwards to hide behind Hayden’s arm.
Hayden’s friends laughed when he said, “Are you kidding me, Bonk? You’re a dragon for crying out loud, and you’re going to let a fox intimidate you?”
“Go easy on him,” Zane grinned. “Felix can be very scary when he wants to be.”
“Bonk has been battling monsters and fighting in wars for over half a century,” he said without taking his eyes off his familiar. Bonk gave him a sour look, turned around, and stuck his bottom up at Hayden.
“You get weirder by the day,” he sighed, standing up. “I’m going to Abnormal Magic. I know you don’t like the basement much, so you can go play at Torin’s until lunch if you want.”
Bonk took flight without hesitation, and Hayden walked to class alone, mentally preparing himself for another long day.
By the time lessons ended for the afternoon, Hayden was exhausted. It took every ounce of effort he possessed not to fall asleep in his soup bowl at dinner, though he did accidentally knock over his glass of tea, soaking the recently-acquired bandages that covered his right forearm.
“Whoa, who did you lose a fight against?” Zane greeted him when Hayden finally looked up from his food and blinked his eyes a few times, feeling slightly more alert after his meal.
“Asher,” he yawned, wincing because it hurt his jaw to open it that wide. Now that he gave it proper attention, most of his body ached in some way at the moment. “He isn’t taking it so easy on me anymore during our combat lessons.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” Zane whistled. “It looks like he’s been bludgeoning you with heavy objects for the last hour.”
“That’s about what it feels like,” Hayden concurred. “It’ll be good in the long run, because I doubt there’s anyone better for me to train with and I certainly want to be as good as possible—but it would be nice if I could go a single day without getting beaten up by someone.”
“As long as he doesn’t accidentally kill you during practice,” Tess sighed, removing a bottle of murky brown liquid from her belt. “Here, drink this. It should take away some of the pain and give you a little more energy—but I warn you, it tastes terrible.”
Hayden gulped it down without caring that it tasted like shoe leather, and felt the effects immediately.
“Wow, thanks. That is better.” He began to have hope for making it through the next few hours without passing out.
When he’d eaten all he could stomach, he forced himself to get up and walk back down the corridor to Master Asher’s office, which had been rebuilt since he’d last seen it. There weren’t nearly as many stacks of paper lying around on the floor as in previous years, the benefit of having the place blown up recently.
Asher was no longer wearing his Mastery robes, standing over the large desk he’d made of four tables pushed together, a ruler in one hand and a pencil in the other as he drew something Hayden couldn’t see onto an unusually large sheet of paper. He looked up when Hayden entered the room and said, “Come on in, I was just finishing up.”
He tucked the pencil behind one ear and rubbed his eyes, cursing when he smeared streaks of black from the pencil onto his face. After looking around the office for a towel and failing to find one, he used the bottom of his shirt to wipe the smudges off.
Hayden moved around the side of the table and looked down at what his mentor had been working on while the latter cleaned up. The large drawing that Asher had been adding to was over a meter-long, almost entirely covered in the most intricate sketches of prisms and alignments he had ever seen. Just looking at all the colors, orientations, and formulas made his eyes water, and he blinked a few times to clear his head.
“Whoa, how long have you been working on that project?” he asked in amazement, wondering how long it had taken to create that monstrosity of a document.
“On and off over the last ten years, and that’s just one of four sheets like it,” Asher replied, though there was something wooden about his tone, as though he didn’t really want to discuss it.
He carefully rolled up his work, along with a few other smaller sheets of calculations, and tucked them neatly into a wooden tube that was made to hold documents, storing it securely on a nearby shelf. Hayden had never really seen him treat paperwork so caref
ully; usually it was heaped around the room in disarray, where it was inevitably lost forever.
“Wow, a ten year project…it must be something huge,” Hayden continued in admiration. “Just at a glance, it looked like you had about fifteen compounded spells in a row on there…even one that looked like it might take three prisms to pull off, which I didn’t even know was possible….”
“It isn’t, which is part of the problem.” There was still something off about Asher’s tone, but Hayden was too curious to really think about it just yet. “If you attempt to compound through three prisms at once your brain will explode—quite literally. I’ve been trying to find a way around that particular alignment for years for that very reason.”
Hayden made a face at the thought of his brain exploding inside his skull and said, “Ick, thanks for the heads up about triple-compounds. But even if you figure out how to finish off your spell properly, could it ever really be used in the mainstream, even amongst natural prism-users? If it involves that many different alignments, all executed in a certain small amount of time, no one is going to be able to remember all that…plus, even if they did, it wouldn’t be a fast cast at all. And would a single prism even be able to take all of those alignments without being entirely consumed?”
He just realized that while he was rattling off questions, Master Asher had become uncharacteristically motionless and silent. His mentor’s dark mood finally registered with him, and he opened his mouth in surprise and said, “Sorry to question your work, I—”
“Believe me, I’ve considered every one of your questions and a thousand more,” he answered in a measured tone, exhaling and relaxing slightly upon seeing Hayden’s expression. “Luckily, it was never my intention to make this a mainstream spell…and as I have yet to complete it, I have no idea if a single prism could withstand the force of it. I’m not even sure it will work, but it’s been sort of a pet project of mine for a decade now, so I work on it when I have the time.”