The Iron Trial(36)

        

"I'm fine."

She gave him the once-over. "Is there something stuffed down your shirt?"

"My scarf," he replied, hoping she wouldn't remember he hadn't been wearing one.

She narrowed her brows. "Why would you do that?"

He shrugged. "I was cold."

"Call -"

But they had reached their rooms. With enormous gratitude, Call tapped the door with his wristband, letting himself and Tamara in. She was in the middle of waving good-bye to the others, when he slammed the door behind them and staggered toward his bedroom.

"Call!" Tamara said. "Don't you think we should - I don't know, talk? About Aaron?"

"Later," Call gasped, half falling into his bedroom and kicking the door shut. He collapsed onto his back, just as the wolf popped its head out of the collar of his jacket and looked around.

Freed, it seemed wildly excited to bound around his room, nails loud on the stone. Call prayed Tamara wouldn't hear as the wolf sniffed its way under Call's bed, around his wardrobe, and on top of the pajamas he'd tossed on the floor when he'd been woken up earlier.

"You need a bath," he told the wolf. It paused its rolling, legs in the air, and wagged its tail, tongue lolling from a corner of its mouth. As he looked down at its strange, shifting eyes, he remembered Jasper's words.

They don't have memories, or personality. They're  …  blank.

But the wolf had plenty of personality. Which meant that Jasper didn't understand as much about what it meant to be Chaos-ridden as he thought he did. Maybe that was how they were when the Enemy made them, maybe they even stayed blank throughout their lives, but the wolf pup had been born with chaos inside of it. It had grown up that way. It wasn't what they thought it was.

His father's words came back to him, making him shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

You don't know what you are.

Pushing that thought away, Call climbed into bed, kicked off his boots, and pressed his face against the pillow. The wolf jumped up next to him, smelling like pine needles and freshly turned earth. For a moment, Call wondered if the wolf was going to bite him. But then it settled next to him, circling twice before throwing its little body down against his stomach. With the warm weight of the Chaos-ridden wolf next to him, Call dropped immediately into sleep.





CALL DREAMED THAT he was trapped under the weight of an enormous fuzzy pillow. He woke up groggily, waving his arms, and almost thwacked the wolf pup, who was curled on his chest and staring at him with huge, entreating, fire-colored eyes. 

The full, crashing realization of what he had done hit Call, and he rolled out from under the wolf so fast that he slid off the bed and hit the floor. The pain of smacking his knees on the cold stone shocked him completely awake. He found he was kneeling, staring directly into the eyes of the wolf pup, who had crawled to the edge of the bed and was gazing at him.

"Mruf," the wolf pup said.

"Shhhh," Call hissed. His heart was racing. What had he done? Had he actually smuggled a Chaos-ridden animal into the Magisterium? He might as well have taken off all his clothes, covered himself in lichen, and run through the caves yelling, EXPEL ME! BIND MY MAGIC! SEND ME HOME!

The pup whimpered. Its eyes were spinning like pinwheels, fixed on Call. Its tongue darted out and then vanished again.

"Oh, man," Call muttered. "You're hungry, aren't you? Okay. Let me get you something to eat. Stay there. Yeah. Right there."

He stood up and blinked at the windup clock on the nightstand. Eleven in the morning and the alarm hadn't gone off yet. Weird. He opened his bedroom door quietly - and was instantly faced with Tamara, already in her uniform, eating breakfast at their common table. It was a spread of deliciously normal-looking food: toast and butter, sausages, bacon, scrambled eggs, and orange juice.

"Is Aaron back?" Call asked, carefully shutting the bedroom door behind him and leaning against it in what he hoped was a nonchalant pose.

Tamara swallowed a mouthful of toast and shook her head. "No. Celia came by before and said classes were canceled for today. I don't know what's going on."

"I guess I'd better change," Call said, reaching out to grab a sausage off the table.

Tamara stared at him. "Are you okay? You're acting kind of strange."

"I'm fine." Call grabbed another sausage. "Back in a minute."

He darted into his bedroom, where the wolf pup was lying on a pile of clothes, waving its paws in the air. It bounded to its feet as soon as it saw Call, and jogged over. Call held his breath as he offered it a sausage. The wolf inhaled the food, gulping it down in a single bite. He gave it the second sausage, watching with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as that disappeared just as fast. Licking its muzzle, the wolf waited expectantly.

"Uh," said Call, "I don't have any more. Just wait and I'll get you something else."

Throwing on a fresh uniform should have taken seconds, but not with the wolf bounding all over the room. Revitalized by sausages, it stole Call's boot and dragged it under the bed by the laces, chewing on the leather. Then, once he'd gotten his boot back, it grabbed hold of the hem of his pants and played tug-of-war.

"Stop," Call begged, pulling, but that only seemed to make the wolf more gleeful. He bounded in front of Call, eager to play.

"I'll be right back," Call promised. "Just be quiet. And then I'll sneak you out for a walk."

The wolf cocked its head and went back to rolling on its back. Call took that moment to leave the room, shutting the door quickly behind him.

"Ah, good," Master Rufus said, turning away from his perusal of the far wall to face Call. "You're ready. We have to go to a meeting."

Call nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of him. Tamara, brushing toast crumbs off her uniform, looked at Call oddly.

"But I didn't get to eat breakfast," Call protested, looking over at the remaining food. If he could just smuggle a few more fistfuls of sausage into his bedroom somehow, he could get enough to tide the wolf over until he got back from whatever this meeting was. At his other school, they were mostly hour-long lectures about how bad things could happen to you if you did bad stuff, or what was wrong about bullying, or, at least once, the horrors of bedbugs. He didn't think this was going to be like that, but he hoped it would be over fast. He was pretty sure the wolf would need to go for a walk really, really soon. Otherwise - well, Call was better off not even contemplating that.



       
         
       
        

"You ate two sausages before," Tamara said unhelpfully. "It's not like you're starving."

"Did you indeed," said Master Rufus drily. "In that case, come along, Callum. There will be some members of the Assembly of Mages in attendance. We don't want to be late, since I am sure you can guess what it will be about."

Call narrowed his eyes. "Where's Aaron?" he asked, but Master Rufus didn't answer, just led them out into the hallway where they joined the stream of people flooding through the caverns. Call didn't think he'd ever seen so many people in the halls of the school. Master Rufus fell in behind a group of older kids and their Masters, who were heading in a southerly direction.

"Do you know where we're going?" Call asked Tamara.

She shook her head. She looked more serious than she'd been in weeks. Call remembered her the night before, grabbing his arms and trying to drag him away from the Chaos-ridden wolf. She'd risked her life for his. He'd never had a friend like her before. Never had friends like her or Aaron. Now that he had them, he didn't know quite what to do with them.

They found themselves in a circular auditorium with stone benches rising up on all sides from a round stage. Along the far back, Call saw a group of men and women in olive green uniforms and guessed they were the Assembly members Master Rufus had been talking about. Rufus led them to a place down in front and there, finally, they saw Aaron.

He was in the front row, sitting next to Master North, just far enough away so that Call couldn't talk to him without shouting. He could really see only the back of Aaron's head, his feathery blond hair sticking up. He looked like he always did.

One of the Makaris. A Makar. It seemed like such an ominous title. Call thought of the way shadows had seemed to wrap around the wolf pack the night before and how horrified Aaron had looked after it was all over.

Chaos wants to devour.

It didn't seem like the kind of power someone like Aaron, whom everybody liked and who liked everybody, ought to have. It should belong to someone like Jasper, who would probably be super into bossing around the darkness and stuffing weird animals full of chaos magic.

Master Rufus got to his feet and ascended to the stage, moving to the center to stand at the podium. "Students of the Magisterium and members of the Assembly," he said. His dark eyes swept the room. Call felt as if his gaze lingered on Call and Tamara for a moment before it moved on. "You all know our history. There have been Magisteriums since the time of our founder, Phillippus Paracelsus. They exist to teach young mages to control their powers and to foster a community of learning, magic, and peace, as well as creating a force with which to defend our world.