He said it like they were in a race and he’d given them the green light, but Call, Tamara, and Aaron just stared at him in horror. Tamara was the first to find her voice.
“Separate out the sand?” she said. “But shouldn’t we be learning something more useful? Like fighting rogue elementals or piloting the boat or —”
“Two piles,” said Rufus. “One light, one dark. Start now.”
He turned around and walked away. The wall became transparent again as he approached it, then turned back to stone as he passed through.
“Don’t we even get a tool kit?” Tamara called sadly after him.
The three of them were alone in a room with no windows and no doors. Call was glad he didn’t have claustrophobia or he’d be chewing off his own arm.
“Well,” said Aaron, “I guess we should start.”
Even he didn’t manage to say it with any enthusiasm.
The floor was cold when Call sat and he wondered how long it would be before the dampness made his leg ache. He tried to ignore this thought as Tamara and Aaron sat down, making a triangle around the sand pile. They all stared at it. Finally, Tamara stuck out her hand, and some sand rose into the air. “Light,” she said, sending a grain spinning toward the floor. “Dark.” She sent that one on the floor, too, a little distance away. “Light. Dark. Dark. Light.”
“I can’t believe I was worried magic school was going to be dangerous,” Call said, squinting at the sand pile.
“You could die of boredom,” said Aaron. Call snickered.
Tamara looked up at them miserably. “The thought of that is the only thing that’s going to keep me going.”
As difficult as Call had imagined it to be to move tiny grains of sand with his mind, it was even harder than that. He remembered the times he’d moved things before, how he’d accidentally broken the bowl during his exam with Master Rufus and how it had felt like a buzzing in his mind. He concentrated on that buzzing while he stared at the sand, and it started to move. It felt a little like he was operating a device with a remote control — it wasn’t his fingers picking up the sand, but he was still making it happen. His hands felt clammy and his neck strained — making a single grain hover in the air for long enough to see whether it was light or dark was tricky. Even worse was setting it down without messing up the pile already there. More than once, his concentration slipped and he dropped a grain into the wrong pile. Then he had to find it and pull it back out, which took time and even more concentration.
There were no clocks in the sand room, and neither Call nor Aaron nor Tamara were wearing watches, so Call had no idea how much time was passing. Finally, another student showed up — he was tall and lanky, dressed in blue, with a bronze wristband that indicated he’d been at the Magisterium three years. Call thought he might have been sitting with Tamara’s sister and Master Rockmaple in the Refectory that morning.
Call squinted at him to see if he looked particularly sinister, but he just grinned from under a tangle of messy brown hair and dropped a burlap bag of lichen and cheese sandwiches, along with an earthenware pitcher of water, at their feet. “Eat up, kids,” he said, and headed out the way he’d come.
Call realized he was starving. He’d been concentrating for hours and his brain felt fuzzy. He was exhausted, much too tired to make conversation as he ate. Worse, as he studied the remaining sand, they’d made it only a small part of the way through the pile. The heap that remained seemed enormous.
This was not flying. This wasn’t what he’d pictured when he’d imagined doing magic. This stank.
“Come on,” Aaron said. “Or we’re going to have to eat dinner down here.”
Call tried to concentrate, focusing his attention on a single grain, but then his mind slipped sideways into anger. The sand exploded, all the piles flying sideways, grains splashing the walls and settling into a giant, unsorted mess. All of their hard work was undone.
Tamara sucked in her breath in horror. “What — what did you do?”
Even Aaron looked at Call like he was going to strangle him. It was the first time Call had ever seen Aaron look angry.
“I — I —” Call wanted to say he was sorry, but he bit down on the words. He knew they wouldn’t matter. “It just happened.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Tamara said very calmly. “I am going to sort your guts into piles.”
“Uh,” said Call. He kind of believed her.
“Okay,” Aaron said, taking big calming breaths, hands in his hair, like he was trying to press all that rage back into his skull. “Okay, we’re just going to have to do it all over again.”
Tamara kicked the sand, then crouched down and began the tedious work of moving single grains with her mind. She didn’t even look in Call’s direction.
Call tried to concentrate again, eyes burning. By the time Master Rufus came and told them they were free to go to dinner and then back to their rooms, Call’s head was pounding and he’d decided he never wanted to go to the beach ever again. Aaron and Tamara wouldn’t look at him as they made their way through the corridors.
The Refectory was full of kids chatting away amicably, a lot of them giggling and laughing. Call, Tamara, and Aaron stood in the doorway behind Master Rufus and stared blearily ahead of them. All of them had sand in their hair and dirt streaks on their faces. “I will be eating with the other Masters,” Master Rufus said. “Do as you like with the rest of your evening.”
Moving like robots, Call and the others gathered up food — mushroom soup, more piles of different-colored lichen, and an odd opalescent pudding for dessert — and went over to sit at a table with another clump of Iron Year students. Call recognized a few of them, like Drew, Jasper, and Celia. He sat down across from Celia, and she didn’t immediately dump her soup on his head — a thing that had actually happened at his last school — so that seemed like a good sign.
The Masters sat together at a round table across the room, probably brainstorming new tortures for the students. Call was sure he could see several of them smiling in a sinister way. While he was watching, three people in olive green uniforms — two women and a man — came through the doorway. They bowed shallowly to the table of Masters.
“They’re Assembly members,” Celia informed Call. “It’s our governing body, set up after the Second Mage War. They’re hoping one of the older kids turns out to be a chaos mage.”
“Like that Enemy of Death guy?” Call asked. “What happens if they find chaos mages? Do they kill them, or what?”
Celia lowered her voice. “No, of course not! They want to find a chaos mage. They say it takes a Makar to stop a Makar. As long as the Enemy is the only one of the Makaris alive, he has the advantage over us.”
“If they even think someone here has that power, they’ll check it out,” said Jasper, moving down so he was closer to the discussion. “They’re desperate.”
“No one believes that the Treaty will last,” said Gwenda. “And if the war starts up again …”
“Well, what makes them think anyone here could be what they’re looking for?” Call asked.
“Like I said,” Jasper told him, “they’re desperate. But don’t worry — your scores are way too lousy. Chaos mages have to actually be good at magic.”