"Look, Jasper," he said. "I didn't take your spot on purpose. You should at least be able to tell by now that I actually, really, didn't want it."
Jasper dropped his hand. His expensive haircut was growing out, his black hair falling over his eyes. "Don't you get it? That makes it worse."
Call blinked at him. "What?"
"You don't know," Jasper said, his hands curling into fists. "You just don't know what it's like. My family lost everything in the Second War. Money, reputation, everything."
"Jasper, stop." Celia reached for him, clearly trying to snap him out of his rant. It didn't work.
"And if I make something of myself," Jasper said, "if I'm the best - it could change all of that. But for you, being here means nothing." He slammed his hand down on the table. To Call's surprise, sparks flew up from around Jasper's fingers. Jasper jerked his hand back, staring at it.
"I guess you made it work," Call said. His voice sounded strange in the room, soft after all Jasper's yelling. For a second, the two boys looked at each other. Then Jasper turned away and Call, feeling awkward, started to back toward the door of the Library.
"I'm sorry, Call!" Celia called after him. "He'll be less crazy in the morning."
Call didn't reply. It wasn't fair, he thought - Aaron having no family and Tamara having her scary family and now Jasper. Soon, there would be no one left for him to hate without feeling bad about it.
He grabbed the cage and headed for the nearest passageway. "No more detours," he told the lizard.
"Warren knows the best way. Sometimes the best way isn't the fastest."
"Warren shouldn't talk about himself in the third person," Call said, but he let the elemental lead him the rest of way back to his room. As Call raised his cuff to open the door, the lizard spoke.
"Let me out," he said.
Call paused.
"You promised. Let me out." The lizard looked up at him imploringly with his burning eyes.
Call set the cage down on the stone floor outside of his door and knelt down next to it. As he reached for the latch, he realized that he had failed to ask the one question he should have asked from the start. "Uh, Warren, why did Master Rufus have you in a cage in his office?"
The eyebrows on the elemental went up. "Sneaky," he said.
Call shook his head, not sure which one of them Warren was talking about. "What does that mean?"
"Let me out," said the lizard, his raspy voice sounding more like a hiss. "You promised."
With a sigh, Call opened the cage. The lizard raced up the wall toward a spiderwebby alcove in the ceiling. Call could barely see the fire along his back. Call took the cage and stowed it behind a cluster of stalagmites, hoping he could get rid of it in a more permanent fashion the next morning.
"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.
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?"