by Jane Yolen
“The Ram,” one group of stars said. “The Hunter,” whispered another.
He sat up.
Someone had taken off his boots and tucked them side by side under his bed. He reached over, picked them up, and drew them back on. They were freshly polished. He could almost see his face in them. Sitting on his bed, he began to wonder if all the magicks he had seen were tricks—or real.
Real! he decided at last and stood.
“The Bear,” answered the stars.
When he opened the door of his room, he saw a long hall. Out of many similar doors poured boys his own age. Some were tall, some short, some weighty, and some as slim as he. None of them seemed to have combed their hair, though one—a boy with a bright yellow cock’s comb—was intent on slicking his hair back with hasty fingers. All the boys were wearing long black scholastic gowns and carrying books.
“New boy?” called one as he raced by, going right to left. He was tall, with flaming red hair and a network of freckles like a map over his nose and cheeks.
Before Thornmallow could answer, the boy and his companions were gone. Not disappeared this time, but gone around a corner of the building. Thornmallow hurried after them and found himself in another long hall, this one filled with rushing girls in black scholar’s robes running toward the right.
“Last bell!” one girl cried. She had a face the color of old wood, and her black hair was caught up in three plaits of equal weight: one on each side of her head and one standing straight up from it. She was short, with the eager look of certain small dogs.
“What bell?” Thornmallow ventured, but his words were immediately drowned out by three enormous and quite unmelodious bongs.
Even as the third bong sounded, the girls disappeared, funneling into separate rooms.
Standing in the middle of the now-empty hall, Thornmallow stared about him. His gooseberry eyes were wide, and his heart skiproped in his chest.
“What next?” he whispered. Being a wizard had so far been full of rushings about, of comings and goings, appearances and disappearances, not at all what he’d expected. But—as his dear ma was fond of saying—Expectations always disappoint.
Something touched his elbow. He jumped and turned to see Magister Briar Rose. There was something rather like strawberry jam on her right sleeve.
“About your classes,” she said. “Close your eyes.”
He obeyed. When she told him to open his eyes again, they were in another room, this one filled floor-to-ceiling with books. Or at least he and Magister Briar Rose were in the room. His stomach, he was sure, had been left behind.
“Don’t worry,” the old woman said. “You’ll soon get used to it. Sit!”
He did as she commanded, collapsing onto the floor.
“Wherever did you learn your manners?” Magister Briar Rose asked. “Sit in the chair.” She pointed. “Over there.” She sat herself behind a book-littered table and poured herself a cup of black tea. Then she snatched a cracker from a nearby basket.
Red-faced, Thornmallow stood and walked over to the perfectly respectable high-backed wooden chair she had pointed at and lowered himself carefully onto its plump purple cushion.
There was a long silence while she seemed to be examining Thornmallow and the cracker alternately and with equal attention.
“Please, ma’am,” he said at last, “may I ask a question?”
“Of course,” she said. “But just the one. We have a great deal of business to get on with, now that you are finally here.” As she spoke, she dipped the cracker into the tea.
“Then, ma’am, what is a magister?”
“Why—a teacher,” she said and took a small bite of the now soggy cracker.
“Then …” He paused a minute, screwing up his courage, as he wasn’t sure if this was a second question he was asking or part of the first.
“Then what, child? We haven’t got all day.” She brushed cracker crumbs off her chest.
“Then … why not just say teacher?”
“Ah.” She leaned back and smiled at him, and he knew it was all right. “There’s nothing magical about the word teacher, is there? Everyone knows it, and therefore it’s common and not fraught with magic. And we are about the business of magic here. There is this to remember: magic is tough and sometimes dangerous, and the words you use are always important.”
Thornmallow was not sure he understood it all, but as she did not seem to want to elaborate, he had to be content. He was sure she would not tolerate another question.
“Now next time,” Briar Rose said, “you must wear a scholar’s robe.”
He nodded, not even daring to ask where such a robe might be found.
“Why, in the wardrobe of course,” she answered as if he had spoken aloud. “And now to your studies.” She put the half-eaten cracker down. It jumped back into the basket.
Thornmallow gulped.
“Can you spell?”
Catching his breath, Thornmallow said in a voice that sounded rather as if it had suddenly ripped on a nail, “C-A-T spells cat?”
Magister Briar Rose chuckled, but it was not meant meanly at all. In fact it sounded as if she were laughing at herself instead of at Thornmallow. “No, child, not that kind of spelling. This kind. C-A-T …” She waved her hand in a decidedly odd manner and pointed at the floor.
A calico cat, hardly more than a kitten, materialized. It looked up with but a moment’s surprise in its green eyes, then settled at once into cleaning its back leg, ignoring them both.
“No,” Thornmallow whispered. “Not at all like that.”
The cat stopped cleaning itself, stood, and stalked out of the room.
“Elementary Spelling, then,” Magister Briar Rose said, nodding her head and making a note of it on a piece of parchment. “What about Names?”
“Thornmallow,” Thornmallow whispered. “Or Henry.”
“Andrew-John-Bruce-David-Bob,” intoned Magister Briar Rose, staring at him.
Thornmallow felt himself growing smaller and smaller and smaller still—until he sat at the edge of a vast purple meadow that seemed to stretch behind him forever.
“No names,” he said, his voice as tiny as he.
“Bob-Divad-Ecurb-Nhoj-Werdna,” came a booming from above him. Magister Briar Rose was reciting the names backward.
Slowly Thornmallow expanded, as if he were steadily being pumped full of air. When the names stopped, he was his right size again.
“First Year Names, then,” Magister Briar Rose added to her list, “though I thought that your arrival heralded something more exacting than that. How you can possibly help as a First Year is beyond me.” She shrugged and cocked her head to one side. “Any Transformations?”
“None—none at all,” Thornmallow squeaked quickly.
“Ah. Ah,” she agreed. “I didn’t expect so. Though I did hope …” A third line was added to the growing list. “Curses?”
He shook his head, afraid to make a sound.
She scratched the last of it onto the parchment and signed her name on the bottom with a flourish that, especially upside-down, looked nothing like Briar Rose. Then she dropped a bit of red wax onto the parchment from a burning taper and took a great seal shaped rather like the handle of a butter churn. With it she set her mark into the wax.
Just then, the room went dark, the light blinking off and leaving Thornmallow with an awful feeling, as if pins and needles were sticking all over his body. A moment later the lights went on again.
“Was that a Curse, ma’am?” he asked. “Or a Transformation?”
Magister Briar Rose had an odd look on her face, and there were white spots on her cheek. “That,” she said finally, “is a failure of power. You do not need to know more.” She took a deep breath. “And this is for you.” She handed him the list. “Now you are ready. And I hope—I truly hope—that you will do.”
“Do what?” he began to ask, but the moment his hand touched the parchment, he found himself in a classroom. An elderl
y gentleman with thick drooping mustaches tied over his chest in a gray bow was sitting at the front on a high stool. He looked like some kind of long-legged bird on a nest. Before him, at small, compact desks, twenty boys and girls were chanting a rhyme.
Thornmallow no longer marveled at how he had gotten there. He only wondered if his stomach would ever catch up.
4
FIRST SPELL
“Thornmallow, is it?” asked the gentleman with the mustaches. His voice was harsh and storklike. “Here at last to answer our need. Are you prickly on the outside?”
“Not really, sir,” Thornmallow answered.
The man looked at him very sternly for a moment more, then checked something off on a paper that had suddenly materialized in his hand. “Yes, definitely prickly, I’d say, though I shall have to take that inside squishy on faith.” He crumpled the paper, and it flared with a blue light and disappeared. “I am Magister Beechvale. Fifth row, fourth seat, if you please.”
Thornmallow looked at the fifth row, fourth seat. It was occupied.
“Sir—” he began.
“Between Tansy and Willoweed. They will keep an eye on you these first days. First days are always difficult.” He lifted his hand in a languid manner, as if pointing to the row, but his fingers wiggled mysteriously.
Thornmallow looked again. An empty school desk now stood ahead of the final desk. It was the fourth seat in the fifth row.
“Well—go ahead, boy,” Magister Beechvale said in his stork voice.
Thornmallow walked to the desk and stared at it for a minute.
“Sit!” came the teacher’s command.
He sat.
“Told you it was last bell,” whispered the girl in the desk just ahead of his. She turned as she spoke and smiled at him. Her three black plaits seemed to wave a greeting.
Tansy, Thornmallow thought. How odd. Tansy is a bright yellow flower, and she is a dark brown girl. If names are supposed to mean something, why isn’t she called Bark or Earth.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. When he looked, he saw it was the redheaded boy with the freckle map on his face.
“Well come to Wizard’s Hall, Thornmallow,” he said, “and welcome as well. I’m Willoweed. Your expert guide. Guardians, we call them.”
Thornmallow nodded. “Hello, Willoweed.”
“We just call him Will,” Tansy said. “And I am your other guardian. Everyone gets two guardians the first days. That’s because first days are—”
“Always difficult,” Will cut in.
Thornmallow was about to explain that his real name was not Thornmallow at all, and they could call him Henry, when the sharp clearing of a throat made him look up. Standing on his long bird legs, Magister Beechvale was pointing to the blackboard with a thin wand. Three words glowed at the tip:
PUNCTUALITY!
PRACTICALITY!
PERSONALITY!
The wand tapped three times, and all the students recited as one. “Punctuality! Practicality! Personality!” Their voices were bell-like.
Thornmallow thought he’d better join in, and by the second round he’d added his voice to theirs, but somehow he was a whole tone off.
Someone in a nearby seat giggled. Thornmallow closed his mouth.
“Clear, round, perfect tones if you please,” called out Magister Beechvale, “on these three important beginning words of wizardry wisdom.” He hummed a note, and the class hummed after him. They began again on the first word.
Thornmallow tried once more. This time he was off by a tone and a half.
A blond girl in the front row raised her hand.
Magister Beechvale lifted the wand from the board. “Yes, Gorse?”
“Please, sir, but the new boy is tone-deaf.”
“Nonsense!” Magister Beechvale replied. “No one admitted to Wizard’s Hall is tone-deaf. Dr. Mo would sense it right away and send him packing. A wizard cannot be tone-deaf. And why is that, class?”
Together they sang, “A spell must be chanted on the dominant, or it will fail.”
Thornmallow rose reluctantly to his feet. He had no idea what a dominant was, but he did know something else. “Please, sir, if you mean by tone-deaf that I cannot sing on key, well I am afraid that Mistress—er—Gorse is right. My dear ma always said, Can’t carry a tune in a brass bucket! And on holidays old Master Robyn, the choirmaster, always cautioned me to just mouth the words when we sang the hymns. Tone-deaf—that’s me!”
“Nonsense!” Magister Beechvale said again, only this time he sounded more like a screech owl than a stork. His mustaches waggled furiously. “You are just not trying hard enough. Sit down, young Thorn-apple.”
“Thornmallow, sir,” Thornmallow whispered.
“Prickly indeed,” muttered the magister, raising his stick to the board once more. “And we don’t encourage prickly in my class. See to it you do not answer back again.”
Thornmallow sat down and mouthed the rest of the recitation without a sound while the others sang joyfully around him. Hearing no rough edges on the notes, Magister Beechvale actually smiled.
Eventually they moved on from the wizard’s wisdoms to a spell about roses in the snow, then one about dresses made of paper, and finally one about letting milk down from a dry cow. Thornmallow thought that the last might be something his dear ma could use. But this time, when he tried to join the chanting, he was at least two full tones wrong, and everyone in row four turned round to stare at him.
“To the front!” Magister Beechvale called three times.
At first Thornmallow didn’t think the call was meant for him. Next he tried to pretend it wasn’t for him. But the third time Magister Beechvale summoned, he added a couple of finger waggles, and without meaning to, Thornmallow leaped from his seat and trotted up to the front of the room. When, at Magister Beechvale’s request, he turned and faced the other boys and girls, twenty pairs of eyes were staring at him, coldly waiting.
“You will sing each note with me,” Magister Beechvale said, putting his hands over Thornmallow’s ears. “And this time, you must really try.” He hummed a note.
Thornmallow closed his eyes and thought for a moment about his dear ma. He would, he really would try. When he opened them again, though he couldn’t actually hear the note Magister Beechvale was humming, the teacher’s hands being clean over his ears, something else was happening. It was as if a quiet heat were radiating from those hands, spreading around and then into his ears, like some sort of little animal finding its wintering in a cave. The heat sought out the twisting tunnels of his ears and burrowed right down into his brain. And when it hit his brain, a tone sprang into it. He opened his mouth, and the heat—and the tone—came out.
The first note was not nearly close enough, but the second warm note was closer. By the third, he was right smack on pitch, and all the students applauded.
“I can feel it!” he cried out. “I can feel the note.” It seemed to be going directly from Magister Beechvale’s hands into his ears and out his mouth.
He was so excited, he called out the first spell they’d tried, surprised that he remembered it:
Red against white,
Day into night,
Let the winds blow,
Roses in snow.
It was so wonderful to sing in tune and to remember without trying that Thornmallow waved his hand in time to the chant. Only when Magister Beechvale’s hands suddenly slipped off his ears, and he heard the sharp intake of breath from the class, did Thornmallow realize that something had gone wrong.
“Oooooh, the new boy’s gonna get it!” cried blond Gorse, staring at the window.
Everyone followed her gaze, and then Thornmallow heard the thud-thud-thud as twenty bodies hit the floor and hid under their desks.
That sound was quickly swallowed up by another, louder noise as the windows all snapped open. The sky turned black. And an avalanche of snow bore down on the classroom, caving in the wall and covering Magister Beechvale and his stool.
“Perhaps,” Magister Beechvale said as he emerged from the drift, “perhaps …” His voice was suddenly soft and not at all storklike. He hesitated, dusting off great gobs of snow from his black robe. “Perhaps you needn’t try quite so hard, Thornmarrow.”
“Mallow, sir,” Thornmallow whispered, swallowing hard. There were tears in his eyes, and he wanted to explain that he hadn’t actually meant an avalanche, hadn’t meant to ruin the classroom wall, hadn’t meant to scare anyone, certainly hadn’t meant to get Magister Beechvale wet. But no words came out, only a weak and embarrassing moan.
With a wave of his hand, Magister Beechvale muttered something under his breath. Immediately the snow disappeared inch by inch, until all that was left was a large damp stain on the floor. The wall rebuilt itself. And the rosebush became potted in a green stone urn with bright pink flamingos painted on the side.
Magister Beechvale gave Thornmallow a careful, quick pat on the head. This time there was no heat emanating from his hand. “Squishy indeed, Thornmallow,” he said. “Squishy indeed.”
5
RULES
“I didn’t mean that to happen,” Thornmallow said when the students were all seated in the dining commons. Tansy sat on one side of him, and Will sat facing him across the table. As they explained it, “Guardians stick tight, like cockleburs to clothes.”
“I didn’t mean all the snow to come and break down the wall and …” He suddenly ran out of words and stared glumly into the bowl in front of him. It was full of an earthy brown soup. Cautiously he stuck his spoon in and took a taste. It tasted brown.
“My da says nothing happens by accident,” said Gorse, who was sitting on the other side of him. “And he’d know. He’s a bush wizard. Of course you meant it.”