But it was hours before he did.
CHAPTER SIX
CALL WOKE UP to a sound like someone screaming in his ear. He threw himself sideways and fell off the bed, landing in a crouch and banging his knee against the cavern floor. The horrible sounds went on and on, echoing through the walls.
The door of his room flew open as the screams began to die away. Aaron appeared, and then Tamara. They were both wearing first-year uniforms: gray cotton tunics over loose-fitting pants made of the same material. Both of them had their iron cuffs clamped around their wrists: Tamara’s on her right wrist, Aaron’s on his left. Tamara had done her long hair in two dark braids on either side of her head.
“Ow,” Call said, sitting back on his heels.
“It was just the bell,” Aaron told him. “It means it’s time for breakfast.”
Call had never been woken up for school by an alarm before. His father had always come in and woken him by shaking his shoulder gently until Call rolled over, sleepy-eyed and grumbling. Call swallowed hard, missing home fiercely.
Tamara pointed behind Call, her perfectly tweezed eyebrows raised. “Did you sleep with your knife?”
A glance back at the bed showed that the knife his father had given him had been knocked off his bedside table — probably struck by one of his flailing arms — and onto his pillow. He felt his cheeks get hot.
“Some people have stuffed animals,” Aaron said with a shrug. “Other people have knives.”
Tamara crossed the room to sit on his bed, picking up the blade as Call pulled himself to his feet. He didn’t hang on to the post of the bed to keep his balance, even though he wanted to. With his clothes crumpled from sleeping and his hair sticking up everywhere, he was conscious of them watching him and of how slowly he had to move to avoid twisting his already hurting leg.
“What does it say?” Tamara asked, holding the knife up and turning it at an angle. “Down the side. Semi … ram … mis?”
Upright, Call said, “I bet you’re pronouncing it wrong.”
“And I bet you don’t even know what the name means,” Tamara smirked.
It hadn’t even occurred to Call that the word on the blade was the knife’s name. He didn’t really think of knives as things that had names. Though he supposed King Arthur had Excalibur and in The Hobbit, Bilbo had Sting.
“You should call her Miri for short,” Tamara said, handing it back to him. “She’s a nice knife. Really well made.”
Call searched her expression to see if she was mocking him, but she seemed serious. Apparently, she respected a good weapon. “Miri,” he repeated, turning the knife over in his hand so that light sparked off the blade.
“Come on, Tamara,” said Aaron, tugging on her sleeve. “Let Call get dressed.”
“I don’t have a uniform,” Call admitted.
“Sure you do. It’s right there.” Tamara pointed to the foot of the bed as Aaron pulled her out of the room. “We all got them. They must have been brought by air elementals.”
Tamara was right. Someone had left a neatly folded uniform, exactly Call’s size, on top of his blanket, along with a leather school bag. When had that happened? When he was asleep? Or had he really not noticed it the night before? He put it on warily, shaking it out first in case there were any sharp bits or buttons that might stick him. The material was smooth and soft and completely comfortable. The boots he found resting beside the bed were heavy and held Call’s weak ankle in a vise grip, steadying it. The only problem was that there was no pocket to put Miri in. Eventually, he wrapped the knife in his old sock and stuck it in the top of his boot. Then he pulled the strap of the leather bag over his head and went out into the common room, where Tamara and Aaron were sitting while a glowering Master Rufus stood over them with his arms folded.
“The three of you are late,” he said. “The morning alarm is a call to breakfast in the Refectory. It’s not your personal alarm clock. This had better not happen again or you will miss breakfast entirely.”
“But we —” Tamara began, starting to look toward Call.
Master Rufus swung his gaze to her, pinning her in place. “Are you going to tell me that you were ready and someone else made you late, Tamara? Because then I would tell you that it is the responsibility of my apprentices to look after one another, and the failure of one is the failure of all. Now what was it you were about to say?”
Tamara lowered her head, braids swinging. “Nothing, Master Rufus,” she said.
He nodded once, opened the door, and swept out into the hall, leaving them to follow him. Call limped toward the door, hoping fervently that this wouldn’t be a long walk and hoping even more fervently that he could avoid getting in more trouble before he got something to eat.
Suddenly, Aaron appeared next to him. Call almost yelped in surprise. Aaron had an amazing habit of doing that, he thought, clicking into place beside him like a determined blond magnet. He bumped Call’s shoulder and looked meaningfully down at his hand. Call followed his gaze and saw that there was something dangling from Aaron’s fingers. It was Call’s wristband. “Put it on,” Aaron whispered. “Before Rufus sees. You’re supposed to wear them all the time.”
Call groaned, but he took the band and clicked it on to his wrist, where it glinted, gunmetal gray, like a handcuff.
That makes sense, Call thought. After all, I’m a prisoner here.
As Call had hoped, the Refectory wasn’t far away. It didn’t sound that different from his school cafeteria from a distance: the din of kids talking, the clatter of cutlery.
The Refectory was in another large cavern with more of the giant pillars that looked like melted ice cream turned to stone. Chips of mica sparkled in the rock, and the roof of the cave disappeared into shadow above their heads. It was too early in the morning for Call to be overly awed by the grandeur, though. He really just wanted to go back to sleep and pretend yesterday had never happened and that he was home with his father, waiting for the bus to take him to his regular school, where they let him wear regular clothes and sleep in a regular bed and eat regular food.
It certainly wasn’t regular food that waited for him at the front of the Refectory. Steaming stone cauldrons along one side held an assortment of bizarre-looking food: stewed purple tubers, greens so dark they were almost black, fuzzy lichen, and a red speckled mushroom cap as large as a pizza and sliced up like a pie. Brown tea floating with pieces of bark steamed in a nearby bowl. Kids in uniforms of blue, green, white, red, and gray, each color denoting a different Magisterium year, were ladling it into carved wooden cups. Their wristbands flashed in gold and silver and copper and bronze, many with various colored stones attached. Call wasn’t sure what the stones signified, but they looked pretty cool.
Tamara was already putting a scoop of the green stuff onto her plate. Aaron, however, was staring at the selection with the same expression of horror that Call felt.
“Please tell me that Master Rufus is going to turn this into something else,” Aaron said.
Tamara bit back a laugh and looked almost guilty. Call got the feeling she didn’t come from a family where people laughed very much. “You’ll see,” she said.
“Will we?” Drew squeaked. He seemed a little lost without his pony T-shirt, now dressed plainly in the high-necked gray tunic and pants that was the uniform of the Iron Year students. He reached dubiously for a bowl of lichen, knocked it over, and then edged away, pretending it hadn’t been him.