Cave of Nightmares (23 page)

Hayden wished he’d
never thought to come outside, or perhaps that he had never been born at all. If only his mother had lived he would never know who his father was, nor would the rest of the Nine Lands. He would be at home with his friends, in a normal school, training to be a butcher or a carpenter, not knowing anything about Mizzenwald or magic or the sheer number of complete strangers who absolutely hated him.

Feeling miserable, he
continued walking around the eastern side of the castle, thinking only of escape from the watchful eyes of others: others who had families that loved them and came to visit, others who had care-packages sent from home with hand-knitted blankets for their beds and paintings to hang up on the walls…

He was nearly to
Torin’s cabin when he realized where he was walking, and stopped abruptly when he saw the man sitting with Master Asher on the grass out front, watching the latter’s purple dragon and brown hawk fly around overhead. Once again Asher wasn’t wearing his Master’s robes, his normal clothes having the effect of making him look like a student.

Before Hayden
could turn around and walk back the way he came, Torin caught sight of him and hailed him with a wave.

Of course, it’s family day…they would be spending time together.

At least the two of them could look at Hayden without getting violently angry or wincing, which was the best he could hope for at a time like this. He approached them slowly, trying to swallow a lump of emotion in his throat at seeing the two of them there, father and son, enjoying the sunny day together.

I wonder what it would be like if I had a father…a real one. Would we be like this, sitting in the grass, having a heart-to-heart?

He didn’t even know what boys talked about with their fathers, and likely never would.

“Hello there
, Hayden, what brings you out to see us today?” Torin asked kindly, stretching his legs out in front of him to straighten his knees.

“I thought to play
‘fetch’ with Bonk for a while…” Hayden began, “but I didn’t expect so many people outside, so I came this way to get away from the crowds.”

Neither of them asked why he hadn’t been expecting hordes of people on family day, or why no one had come to see him.

“Well, why don’t you sit down with us for a bit?” Torin patted the ground on his other side. “Let Bonk fly around with Cinder and Horace for a while.”

Hayden did as he was told and sat down in the damp grass beside Torin, telling Bonk to play with the other familiars. He felt a moment of pre
ssure on his arm as the mottled-brown dragon took flight and soared through the air to catch up with the others.

“Well, you’ve officially survived
your first month at Mizzenwald,” Torin smiled at him. “How do you like it so far?”

“
Pretty well, except for Powders,” Hayden said truthfully.

“Is this boy of mine teaching you everything he knows about prisms?”

Asher gave him a mock-grimace. “Good heavens, no, it would take a decade for me to teach him everything I know. I’m extremely intelligent.” He smiled pleasantly, and Torin rolled his eyes.

“I do enjoy Prism
s class,” Hayden added sincerely. “It’s the easiest subject for me to understand, and I like learning about all the different light arrays and configurations.”

Torin snorted in amusement. “You and Ash are the only people I know who would ever claim that Prisms was your easiest subject.” He gave his son a sideways glance. “I always thought you were full of it until you blew up the dining hall.”

Hayden’s eyes widened dramatically as he looked at the Prism Master. “You blew up the dining hall?”

Asher grinned wickedly. “In my fifth year, and not on purpose, though no one seems to believe me when I say that.” He shrugged. “The cooks had served tuna fish sandwiches for four days in a row, and I
absolutely hate tuna.” He scowled at the memory. “I told my best friend that if I saw one more tuna sandwich that week I was going to explode, and of course…”

“You blew up the dining hall
over a tuna fish sandwich?” Hayden raised an eyebrow, impressed. He was beginning to understand why Master Asher didn’t scold him for punching Lorn in the face.

“I didn’t mean to,” h
e sighed. “I may have accidentally gotten on the bad side of the cooks a few weeks prior and they were deliberately trying to make me unhappy, hence all the tuna. Anyway, I saw that accursed sandwich for the fifth day in a row and something in me just snapped. Next thing I know, most of the walls are gone and everyone was trying to pull themselves out of the rubble.”

Hayden was willing to bet that that was the last time anyone tried to feed Asher a tuna sandwich.

“So, how is your day going?” the Prism Master changed the subject, watching Hayden with interest.

“Um, fine,” h
e lied.

Asher didn’t look like he believed that one bit.
“Really? I would have thought it was dreadful, given all the extra people here who want to stare at you rudely.”

Surprised, Hayden gulped and nodded. Asher and Torin both frowned at this confirmation, and the latter suddenly stood up.

“I’ve just remembered something I need to do inside. You two carry on without me and I’ll be back in a minute.” He turned away and walked into his log cabin, shutting the door securely behind him.

Hayden was su
rprised by the abrupt departure and suspected that there was some other motive for it that he didn’t understand, but Asher didn’t look bothered by it, staring out at the empty space in front of him.

“Family day must be a
n unpleasant experience for you,” the Prism Master said after a long minute of silence.

“It’s…not fun,
” Hayden admitted, swallowing another lump of emotion.

“I wish I could tell you it will get better
with time, but it likely won’t,” Asher sighed, still not looking at him.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if people didn’t keep blam
ing me for things my father did,” Hayden mumbled, bringing his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “Complete strangers hate me for no reason, and it’s no use telling them that I didn’t do anything wrong because they’re all convinced I’m going to be just like him.”

Master Asher spared him a brief glance. “Have you encountered any unpleasantness today in that regard?”

Hayden frowned at the memory.

“Just before I
came here…Tess’s father,” he mumbled into his knees, almost too softly to hear. “He threatened to hunt me down like a dog, saying I can’t have Tess in my challenge group and that I need to stay away from her.”

Asher frowned.

“It is disappointing that some people can’t see past their own prejudices, and will take out their anger on a blameless child.” He frowned, moving a hand through his shaggy brown hair. “If it is of any consolation, no one has the power to remove someone from your challenge group except for me and my peers, no matter how much Tess’s father bleats on about it.”

“He seemed determined to find a way…”

“The best he can do is remove her from Mizzenwald entirely, which I doubt he’ll do, as the entrance exams cost a small fortune to take and he would be forced to send her to a less-affluent school after shelling out all that money to get her in here.”

Hayden rested his chin on his knees.

“He said that my father did something to Tess’s mom…but I don’t know what.”

Asher frowned. “Lisa Wesley died fighting Aleri
c, or more likely, his minions. I’m not certain that she ever met your father in person, but certainly she is dead because of him.” He didn’t look happy about it. “I’m sorry to say that there are many people at this school and in the Nine Lands who have similar tales of loss.”

“G
reat, so I can’t escape him no matter where I go,” Hayden grumbled, trying to conceive of a place where no one knew his name or his father’s and he could start his life over.

“No, you probably can’t,
” Asher sighed. “About the only solace I can offer is that the longer you’re here and the more people see that you are not trying to follow in his footsteps, the more you will distance yourself from him in the minds of others. Time is a great healer.”

Hayden tried to take comfort from that, but it was hard to feel better when it would take such a long time for any relief to come, if it was coming at all.

“I didn’t think about it too much when I was young…not having a father, that is.” He had no idea why he was telling the Prism Master this, but the words seemed to come forth against his bidding. “Sometimes at night I would lie awake and wonder what it would be like to have him in my life, but my mom worked hard to try and fill the gap while she was alive, and she never talked about him so I learned not to ask.”

He wasn’t looking at Asher; he couldn’t look at him right now or else he might lose the nerve to continue sharing these private thoughts of his.

If it wasn’t family day I wouldn’t be so lonely, and I wouldn’t be bothering Master Asher with this right now.

“But being here, seeing all of these fathers with their sons today…seeing Torin with you…” he paused to make sure that he had control of his emotions. “I haven’t been able to do any
thing but feel sorry for myself and wonder what could have been. I don’t even know what fathers and sons talk about, but I wish I did.”

He finally met Asher’s gaze. T
he Prism Master was looking at him with a mixture of pity and something else he couldn’t quite identify but made his heart hurt.

“Why did Torin go inside
?” Hayden changed the subject abruptly, not wanting to depress himself further.

“No idea,” Asher answered immediately, though Hayden suspected he wasn’t
being entirely truthful. “I believe you have your next arena challenge in a couple of days?”

The segue
threw Hayden for a loop, but he recovered quickly.

“Oh, yes, that’s right.”

“I wanted to have a talk with you about prisms before you went in, given the results of your expedition in the lake.”

Hayden glanced over at him, wondering if he was about to be reprimanded.

“Oh?”

“
You seem to have a lot of natural power, despite your worryingly-large Focus-correctors—which I notice you took care to hide today, along with your prisms. You may have more latent power than even your father possessed at your age.”

Hayden listened anxiously
, wondering where this was going.

“It makes some of the Masters—understandably—nervous. Have you wondered yet why I haven’t
just bumped you into my sixth-year class and shown you every wonder of the prism discovered by mankind? Why I make you study low-level theory that you could likely grasp without cracking the cover of your textbook?”

“I…I
had
wondered…but I didn’t think it polite to ask…”

Asher smirked. “Magically-speaking, you are ready for almost anything I could throw at you. I could probably hand you my mastery-level diamond or crystal prisms and you would figure out how to wield them within the span of
an hour. Why then do I make you wait?”

Hayden shook his head, not knowing the answer.

“Because while you are magically-powerful enough, your mind is not developed sufficiently to withstand the repercussions of such power. Would you ever hand a small child an explosive, even if they knew how to light it and throw it?”

“Of course not, because they aren’t experienced enough to fully understand what they’re doing and—oh…” H
ayden trailed off, grasping the point at last.

“Exactly.
Your mind needs time and experience to catch up to your latent ability. You are studying theory because you need to understand it perfectly before you begin practicing some of the more difficult and dangerous arrays. You are fortunate that your mind locked onto something relatively benign—like Air—when you compounded your prisms in the lake. Even low-level prisms, when compounded, can yield terrible power, which I would have warned you against if I imagined you ever being capable of doing that at your age.”

“I didn’t understand most of what I saw in the prisms…I just had a lot of feelings about the patterns, like they were familiar but I didn’t know their names.
I don’t know why I could see the Air alignment so clearly; maybe because I was suffocating.”

“In fact, Air is a simple command, and you would have seen it in your amber prism alone. W
hen you look through two prisms you see both of their normal arrays, plus any combinations they form together. If you had just cast Air through your amber prism it would have worked as designed; your compounding merely amplified your natural power—hugely. But as I said, you were lucky. You could have just as easily picked the alignment for Vacuum and imploded from the effects.”

Hayden shuddered in horror at the thought.

“This is why I’m telling you that you are not permitted to compound your prisms unless you are in danger of imminent death, and I don’t mean in the arena. You may use any array that comes to mind from either your amber or clear prism, but that is all.” He gave Hayden a sympathetic look. “I know it’s frustrating, but you know better than anyone that people are waiting for a reason to hate you; Sark and Mr. Wesley should be enough to convince you of that. You must be very careful not to give them a reason to fear you, because fear is the driver of many extreme, irrational consequences.”