From a Distance

Chapter 16

For a minute, Jasper had acted like a normal human being, but apparently that minute was over. Celia glared at him.

Everyone launched into a discussion of their first lessons. Drew told them that Master Lemuel had been really tough during their lessons, and he wanted to know if everyone else’s Masters were like that. Everyone started talking at once, with a bunch of others describing lessons that sounded a lot less frustrating and more fun than Call’s had been.

“Master Milagros let us pilot the boats,” Jasper gloated. “There were little waterfalls. It was like white-water rafting. Awesome.”

“Great,” Tamara said, without enthusiasm.

“Jasper got us all lost,” Celia said, serenely munching a piece of lichen, and Jasper’s eyes flashed with annoyance.

“Only for a minute,” Jasper said. “It was fine.”

“Master Tanaka showed us how to make fireballs,” said a boy named Peter, and Call remembered that Tanaka was the name of the Master who had chosen after Milagros. “We held the fire and we didn’t even get burned.” His eyes sparkled.

“Master Lemuel threw rocks at us,” said Drew.

Everyone stared at him.

“What?” said Aaron.

“Drew,” hissed Laurel, another of Master Lemuel’s apprentices. “He did not. He was showing us how you can move rocks with your mind. Drew got in the way of a rock.”

That explains the big bruise on Drew’s collarbone, Call thought, feeling a little sick. He remembered his father’s warnings about how the Masters didn’t care about hurting students.

“Tomorrow it’s going to be metal,” said Drew. “I bet he throws knives at us.”

“I’d rather have knives thrown at me than spend all day in a pile of sand,” said Tamara, unsympathetic. “At least you can dodge knives.”

“Looks like Drew can’t,” said Jasper with a smirk. For once, he was picking on someone who wasn’t Call, but Call didn’t get any pleasure from it.

“It can’t be all lessons around here,” said Aaron, an edge to his usually peaceful voice. “Right? There’s got to be something fun. What was that place Master Rufus told us about?”

“We could go to the Gallery after dinner?” Celia said, speaking directly to Call. “There’s games.”

Jasper looked annoyed. Call knew he should go with Celia to the Gallery, whatever that was. Anything that made Jasper mad was worth doing, and besides, he needed to learn to navigate the Magisterium, make a map like you did in video games.

He needed an escape route.

Call shook his head and forked up a mouthful of lichen. It tasted like steak. He glanced down the table at Aaron, who looked weary, too. Call’s body felt leaden. He just wanted to go to sleep. He’d start looking for a way out of the Magisterium tomorrow.

“I don’t think I’m up for games,” he told Celia. “Another time.”

“Maybe today was a test,” Tamara said as they headed back to their rooms after dinner. “Like, of our patience or our ability to take orders. Maybe tomorrow we’ll get to do real training.”

Aaron, trailing one of his hands along the wall as he walked, took a moment to respond. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Call didn’t say anything. He was too tired.

Magic, he was finding, was hard work.

The next day, Tamara’s hopes were dashed when they returned to the place that Call had dubbed the Room of Sand and Boredom to finish sorting. They still had plenty of sand to go. Call felt guilty all over again.

“But when we’re done,” Aaron said to Master Rufus, “we can do other stuff, right?”

“Concentrate on the task at hand,” the mage replied enigmatically, walking out through the wall.

Heaving sighs, they sat down to work. Sand sorting went on for the rest of the week, with Tamara spending all her time after classes with her sister or Jasper or other expensive-looking legacy students, and Aaron spending his time with everyone, while Call sulked in their room. Then sand sorting went on for another week after that — the pile of sand to sort seemed to be getting bigger and bigger, as if someone didn’t want this test ever to end. Call had heard there was some kind of t*****e where a single drop of water hit a guy’s forehead over and over again until he went insane. He had never understood how that worked before, but he understood it now.

There’s got to be an easier way, he thought, but the scheming part of his mind must have been the same part used for magic, because he couldn’t think of anything.

“Look,” Call said finally, “you guys are good at this, right? The best mages in the tests. Top-ranked.”

The other two gazed at him, glassy-eyed. Aaron looked like maybe he’d been hit on the head by a falling boulder when no one was looking.

“I guess,” Tamara said. She didn’t sound too excited about it. “The best in our year, anyway.”

“Okay, well, I’m terrible. The worst. I was in last place and I’ve already messed things up for us, so obviously I don’t know anything. But there must be a faster way. Something we’re supposed to be doing. Some lesson we’re supposed to be learning. Is there anything you can think of? Anything?” A note of pleading had entered his voice.

Tamara hesitated. Aaron shook his head.

Call saw her expression. “What? Is there something?”

“Well, there are some magical principles, some … special ways of tapping into the elements,” she said, her black braids swinging as she moved into a different sitting position. “Stuff that Master Rufus probably doesn’t want us to know about.”

Aaron nodded eagerly, the hope of making it out of this room lighting his face.

“You know how Rufus was talking about feeling the power in the earth and all that?” Tamara wasn’t looking at them. She was staring at the piles of sand like she was focused on something far away. “Well, there’s a way to get more power, fast. But you have to open yourself up to the element … and, well, eat a grain of sand.”

“Eat the sand?” Call said. “You have to be kidding.”

“It’s kind of dangerous, because of that whole First Principle of Magic thing. But it works for the same reason. You’re closer to the element — like if you’re doing earth magic, you eat rocks or sand, fire mages can eat matches, air mages might consume blood for its oxygen. It’s not a good idea, but …”

Call thought of Jasper grinning around his b****y finger at the Trial. His heart started to pound. “How do you know this?”

Tamara looked at the wall. She took a deep breath. “My dad. He taught me how. For emergencies, he said, but he considers doing well on a test an emergency. I’ve never done it, though, because it scares me — if you get too much power and can’t control it, you could get drawn into an element. It burns away your soul and replaces it with fire, air, water, earth, or chaos. You become a creature of that element. Like an elemental.”

“One of those lizard things?” Aaron asked.

Call was relieved he hadn’t had to be the one to ask that exact same question.

Tamara shook her head. “Elementals come in all sizes. Small like those lizards, or big and bloated on magic, like wyverns and dragons and sea serpents. Or even human size. So we’d have to be careful.”

“I can be careful,” Call said. “How about you, Aaron?”

Aaron ran grainy hands through his blond hair and shrugged. “Anything is better than this. And if we finish faster than Master Rufus expects, he’ll have to give us something else to do.”

“Okay. Here goes nothing.” Tamara licked the tip of her finger and touched it to the pile of sand. A few grains stuck. Then she put her finger in her mouth.

Call and Aaron copied her. As Call jammed his wet finger into his mouth, he couldn’t help wondering what he would have thought if a week ago someone had told him he’d be sitting in an underground cavern eating sand. The sand didn’t taste bad — it didn’t taste like anything, really. He swallowed the rough grains down and waited.

“Now what?” he asked after a few seconds. He was starting to get a little nervous. Nothing had happened to Jasper at the Trial, he told himself. Nothing would happen to them.

“Now we concentrate,” Tamara said.

Call looked at the pile of sand. This time when he slid his thoughts toward it, he could sense each of the tiny grains. Minuscule pieces of shell sparkled in his mind, beside crystal pieces, and yellowish stones honeycombed with crags. He tried to imagine picking up the whole pile of sand in his hands. It would be heavy, and the sand would spill between his fingers and pool on the floor. He tried to blank out everything around him — Tamara and Aaron, the cold stone under him, the faint rush of wind in the room — and narrow his concentration down to the only two things that mattered: himself and the pile of sand. The sand felt completely solid and light, like Styrofoam. It would be easy to lift. He could lift it with one hand. With one finger. With one … thought. He imagined it rising and separating….

The sand pile lurched, spilling a few grains from the top, and then drifted upward. It hung over the three of them like a small storm cloud.

Tamara and Aaron both stared. Call fell back on his hands. His legs were prickling with pins and needles. He must have sat on them wrong. He’d been concentrating too hard to notice. “Your turn,” he said, and it seemed to him that the walls were closer, that he could feel the pulse of the earth underneath him. He wondered what it would be like to sink into the ground.

“Absolutely,” said Aaron. The cloud of sand broke apart into two halves, one composed of lighter sand, the other darker. Tamara raised her hand and drew a lazy spiral on the air. Call and Aaron watched in wonder as the sand swirled into different patterns above them.

The wall opened. Master Rufus stood on the threshold, his face a mask. Tamara made a little squeaking sound, and the hovering pile of sand crashed down, sending up puffs of dust that made Call choke.

“What have you done?” Master Rufus demanded.

Aaron looked pale. “I — we didn’t mean —”

Master Rufus gestured sharply toward them. “Aaron, be quiet. Callum, come with me.”

“What?” Call began. “But I — that’s not fair!”

“Come. With. Me,” Rufus repeated. “Now.”

Call rose gingerly to his feet, his weak leg stinging. He glanced at Aaron and Tamara, but they were looking down at their hands, not at him. So much for loyalty, he thought as he followed Master Rufus out of the room.

Rufus led him on a short walk through some twisting corridors to his office. It wasn’t what Call expected. The furnishings were modern. Steel bookcases filled one wall, and a sleek leather couch, big enough to nap on, stretched along the other. Tacked to one side of the room were pages and pages of what looked like scrawled equations, but with odd markings instead of numbers. They hung above a rough wooden workstation whose surface was blotched with stains and covered with knives, beakers, and the taxidermied bodies of weird-looking animals. Beside delicate, geared models that looked like mousetraps crossed with clocks, there was a live animal in a small barred cage — one of those lizards with blue flames running along its back. Rufus’s desk was tucked into a corner, an old rolltop that was at odds with the rest of the room. On top of it was a glass jar holding a tiny tornado spinning in place.

Call couldn’t take his eyes off it, expecting it to burst out of the jar at any moment.

“Callum, sit down,” said Master Rufus, indicating the couch. “I want to explain why I brought you to the Magisterium.”

CALL STARED. After two weeks of sand sorting, he’d given up on the idea that Rufus was ever going to be forward or direct with him. In fact, he realized, he’d given up on the idea that he’d ever really find out why he was at the Magisterium at all.

“Sit,” Rufus said again, and this time Call sat, wincing as his leg twinged. The couch was comfortable after hours of sitting on a cold stone floor, and he let himself sink into it. “What do you think of our school so far?”