“Okay, well, good night,” said Call before he went inside. As the door opened, the elemental raced in ahead of him.
Call tried to shoo him back out, but Warren followed him into his bedroom and curled up against one of the glowing rocks on the wall, becoming nearly invisible.
“Staying over?” Call asked.
The lizard remained as still as stone, his red eyes at half-mast, his tongue poking slightly out of the side of his mouth.
Call was too exhausted to worry about whether having an elemental, even a sleeping elemental, hanging around was safe. Pushing the box and all the stuff his father sent onto the floor, he curled up on his bed, one hand clasped on his dad’s wristband, fingers tracing the smooth stones as he slipped into slumber. His last thought before he dropped off was of the spiraling bright eyes of the Chaos-ridden.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CALL WOKE THE next day scared that Master Rufus would say something about the scattered papers, wrecked model, and missing envelope in his office … and even more scared that he would say something about the missing elemental. He dragged his heels all the way to the Refectory, but when he got there, he overheard a heated argument between Master Rufus and Master Milagros.
“For the last time, Rufus,” she was saying in the tone of someone much aggrieved, “I don’t have your lizard!”
Call didn’t know whether to feel bad or laugh.
After breakfast, Rufus led them down to the river, where he instructed them to practice picking up water, tossing it into the air, and catching it without getting wet. Pretty soon Call, Tamara, and Aaron were breathless, laughing, and soaked. By the time the day was over, Call was exhausted, so exhausted that what had happened the day before seemed distant and unreal. He headed back to his room to puzzle over his father’s letter and the wristband but was sidetracked by the fact that Warren had eaten one of his shoelaces, slurping it up like a noodle.
“Dumb lizard,” he muttered, hiding the armband he’d worn in the wyvern exercise, and the crumpled letter from his father, in the bottom drawer of his desk and shoving it closed so the elemental wouldn’t eat them, too.
Warren said nothing. His eyes had gone a grayish color; Call suspected the shoelace was disagreeing with him.
The biggest distraction from trying to puzzle out what his dad had meant turned out, to Call’s surprise, to be his classes. There was no more Room of Sand and Boredom; instead, there was a roster of new exercises that made the next few weeks go by quickly. The training was still hard and frustrating, but as Master Rufus revealed more of the magical world, Call found himself growing increasingly fascinated.
Master Rufus taught them to feel their affinity with the elements and to better understand the meaning behind what he called the Cinquain, which, along with the rest of the Five Principles of Magic, Call could now recite in his sleep.
Fire wants to burn.
Water wants to flow.
Air wants to rise.
Earth wants to bind.
Chaos wants to devour.
They learned how to kindle small fires and to make flames dance on their palms. They learned to make waves in the cave pools and call over the pale fish (although not to operate the boats, which continued to annoy Call to no end). They even began to learn Call’s favorite thing — levitating.
“Focus and practice,” Master Rufus said, leading them to a room covered with bouncy mats stuffed with moss and pine needles from the trees outside the Magisterium. “There are no shortcuts, mages. There’s only focus and practice. So get to it!”
They took turns trying to draw energy from the air around them and use it to push themselves upward from the soles of their feet. It was much harder to balance than Call would have thought. Over and over, they fell giggling onto the mats, on top of one another. Aaron wound up with one of Tamara’s pigtails in his mouth, and Call with Tamara’s foot on his neck.
Finally, almost at the end of the lesson, something clicked for Call, and he was able to hover in the air, a foot above the ground, without wobbling at all. There was no gravity pushing down on his leg, nothing that might keep him from soaring sideways through the air except his own lack of practice. Dreams of the day that he could fly through the halls of the Magisterium far faster than he could ever have run exploded through his head. It would be like skateboarding, only better, faster, higher, and with even crazier stunts.
Then Tamara crossed her eyes at him and he lost his concentration and thumped back to the mat. He lay there for a second, just breathing.
For those moments that he’d hung in the air, his leg hadn’t hurt, not even a little.
Neither Tamara nor Aaron had managed to get really airborne before the end of the lesson, but Master Rufus seemed delighted with their lack of progress. Several times, he declared it to be the funniest thing he’d seen in a long while.
Master Rufus promised them that by the end of the year, they’d be able to call up a blast of each element, walk through fire, and breathe underwater. In their Silver Year, they would be able to call on the less evident powers of the elements — to shape air into illusions, fire into prophecies, earth into bindings, and water into healing. The thought of being able to do those things thrilled Call, but whenever he thought of the end of the year, he recalled the words of his father’s note to Rufus.
You must bind Callum’s magic before the end of the year.
Earth magic. If he made it to his Silver Year, maybe he’d learn what binding things entailed.
In one of the Friday lectures, Master Lemuel taught them more about counterweights, warning them that if they overextended themselves and felt themselves being drawn into an element, they should reach for its opposite, just as they had reached for earth when battling an air elemental.
Call asked how you were supposed to reach for soul, since that was the counterweight of chaos. Master Lemuel snapped that if Call were battling a chaos mage, it wouldn’t matter what he reached for, because he’d be about to die. Drew gave him a sympathetic look. “It’s okay,” he said, under his breath.
“Stop that, Andrew,” said Master Lemuel in a frozen voice. “You know, there was a time when apprentices who failed to show respect to their Masters were whipped with saplings.”
“Lemuel,” said Master Milagros anxiously, noting the horrified looks on the faces of her own students, “I don’t think —”
“Unfortunately, that was centuries ago,” said Master Lemuel. “But I can assure you, Andrew, that if you keep whispering behind my back, you’ll be sorry you ever came to the Magisterium.” His thin lips curled into a smile. “Now come up here and demonstrate how you reach for water when you’re using fire. Gwenda, if you would come up to assist him with the counterweight?”
Gwenda walked to the front; after hesitating, Drew shuffled up beside her, his shoulders hunched. He endured twenty minutes of merciless teasing from Lemuel when he couldn’t extinguish the flame in his hand, even though Gwenda was holding out a bowl of water to him with so much hopeful enthusiasm that some of it slopped onto his sneakers. “Come on, Drew!” she kept whispering until, eventually, Master Lemuel told her to be quiet.
It made Call appreciate Master Rufus more, even when he gave them a lecture about the duties of mages, most of which seemed really obvious, like keeping magic a secret, not using magic for personal gain or evil ends, and sharing all knowledge gleaned from magical study with the rest of the mage community. Apparently, mages who’d achieved mastery in their study of the elements were required to take apprentices as part of that “sharing all knowledge” thing — meaning there were different Masters at the Magisterium at different times, though those who’d found their vocation as teachers were there permanently.