Cave of Nightmares (40 page)

20

Eleven

The five Masters of the major arcana were waiting for them by the time Hayden and Zane entered the room. Tess and Tucker were already sitting in chairs behind the long table that arena teams usually occupied while being scored for their performance.

Good grief, they
are
going to rank us!

Hayden thought back to his complete non-performance the night before, trying to find some redeeming argument for why he shouldn’t earn his team a zero.

Let’s see…I did some running, then I stopped…then there was more running…then I led my teammates down a series of tunnels to a dead-end where we were cornered by a warg…

Maybe he could argue that he acted as a diversion for the
warg’s attention to give his teammates enough time to sav
e them.

“Alright,” Master Kilgore opened the discussion without preamble. “One of you
tell us what in the world happened to you all last night after you were translocated to the warg den.”

Hayden opened his mouth and said, “A
den
? But we only saw one of them.”

Master Sark grimaced and said, “
Then you were fortunate. Asher and I encountered six of them in another tunnel that we had to fight our way out of.”

“I found an even doze
n, but got away without a fight,” Master Willow added.

Maybe I
chose the right dead-end path after all…

Hayden looked down the table at his teammates to give them the chance to talk. He didn’t particularly want to explain the horrors of last night unless he had to.

Thankfully, Tucker jumped in on his behalf.

“We started in the dark somewhere in the middle of the cave. I
lit my wand and we realized pretty quickly that we weren’t in the arena, because there were no instructions waiting for us and we felt the translocation go wrong.”

He frowned thoughtfully and continued. “We decided to stay put until someone came to find us because we didn’t want to get lost. Then we saw the
warg coming at us from the path leading upwards, so we did the only thing we could and ran along the path headed downwards.”

Zane
picked up the story from there. “We were running down that narrow tunnel but the monster was gaining on us, so Tucker used his wand to collapse the ceiling behind us. But then the stupid thing just started digging, so we kept running.”

The Masters were watching them with a quiet intensity that was a little disarming. Maybe that’s why
Zane was staring at the table in front of him rather than at their instructors.

“We
ended up in that dead-end room and tried to go back to pick another path, but we could hear the warg catching up with us again so we went back to the wide space to fight in. I was drawing the most powerful conjuring circle I could on the ground when it found us.”

“What were you hoping to summon?” Master Reede interjected softly, and
Zane blushed in embarrassment.

“I have no
idea, I just knew I needed something quick. Tucker’s wand was almost used up and Tess only had one elixir on hand and it was our last resort.”

“
I couldn’t think of what spell to cast, and the warg attacked us while Zane was finishing his drawing,” Tucker took over the story again. “That’s when my arm got scraped up. The second time it attacked it went for Hayden. Zane…well, quite frankly, Zane panicked and used a vague command to execute his summoning circle. I thought we were doomed.”

Zane
was staring very intently at the table in front of him now.

“What spell did you execute?” Master Reede asked mildly.

“I just asked for help,” Zane finally glanced up and met his eyes. “I didn’t even know what kind of help I wanted, just something to stop that warg from eating us all.”

The Masters were polite enough not to chastise him for such a horrible blunder at that critical moment. Hayden thought it was a miracle that the spell worked at all.

“Anyway, I somehow managed to pull Bonk out of the summoning circle…even though it shouldn’t have been powerful enough to transport a living creature,” Zane frowned thoughtfully.

“
Bonk being a dragon helped considerably; powerful magic, remember?” Master Asher pointed out.

“Well, Bonk flew at the
warg and Tess threw her elixir of Need at him,” Zane continued, with an admiring look at Tess. “Bonk grew about twenty feet long and kicked that warg’s a—well, he saved us. Then you all showed up.”

About two minutes too late.

Hayden kept that thought to himself. The Masters were silent for a long moment, though he caught more than one of them giving him strange looks. Finally Master Sark addressed them directly.

“So Tucker used his elder wand to great effect,
Zane executed a very good conjure—albeit accidentally—and Tess used her Need at the perfect moment.” He let the silence linger horribly for a moment before continuing. “Not to sound…
critical
…but where the heck was the great prism-wielder in all of this?”

He gave Hayden a
bemused look. He wasn’t the only one to do so.

“You had, arguably,
the broadest array of spells available in the entire group, and you didn’t think to use
any
of them when you were about to be eaten?”

Hayden could feel his cheeks
burning when he answered.

“I thought there was something wrong with my prism—that it was broken. I was afraid to use it in case I was right.”

Master Willow’s eyebrows went so high they disappeared into his hairline and Kilgore actually jumped to his feet and sent his chair toppling over to the floor behind him. Master Asher looked like he had been turned to stone.

“Wher
e would you have possibly acquired a broken prism?” It was Master Reede who spoke. “That’s a very serious accusation to level against a certified jeweler.”

Hayden shook his head. “It looked fine at the store, but I left it in my room all day and grabbed it just before the arena was set to start.” Now that he was no longer in the cave, doubt
began to creep into his thoughts. What if he was wrong about there being anything amiss with his prism and had just panicked and forgotten how to use it when it mattered?

“You think it was tampered with or replaced?” Master Willow asked stonily.

“I don’t know…I don’t know for sure that it’s broken…it just felt wrong, so…”

Master Asher finally came to life agai
n and stood up. “Let’s find out,” he approached Hayden and held out his hand.

Hayden pulled down the eyepiece and carefully unscrewed the
prism from its holder, passing it over to the Master, who turned towards the light and held it up in front of his left eye.

He rotated it slowly for about half a minute before lowering it and speaking again.

“You are correct, Hayden. This is an imperfect prism; mild distortion, but still broken.” He looked angry enough to murder someone over it, though fortunately Hayden was pretty sure that person wouldn’t be him.

“
Holy arcana,” Master Reede murmured. “You mean to tell me that someone actually gave the son of Aleric Frost an imperfect prism before a challenge?”

Hayden frowned thoughtfully.

“Whoever it was, they can’t have known we would end up in the wrong place…they were probably just trying to mess up our team’s final challenge scores once I realized I couldn’t use it. Or worse, if I had tried to use it and it didn’t work right.”

Master Asher returned to his seat, still carrying the broken prism in his hand. “This prism would
have worked quite well for you, I imagine.” His tone still suggested barely-concealed fury. “The skew of the distortion—it might have even amplified your power.”

“Do you know
who exchanged your prism for an imperfect one?” Master Willow’s features were oddly pale as he addressed Hayden.

“I…have a guess,” he admitted. “No evidence though.”

He met Master Asher’s gaze briefly, and the Prism Master’s stony frown let him know that his instructor understood perfectly.

“I’ll look into it,” Asher said ominously.

Hayden had no idea how he planned to get either Oliver or Jasper to confess to such a serious crime, but then he remembered that if there were any magical ways to extract the truth out of someone, Master Asher probably knew all of them. He suppressed a shudder at the memory of his own mind being briefly invaded by the Prism Master during class.

“You didn’t use the prism once during your entire time in the
warg den?” Master Sark was giving him a strange look now.

“No,” Hayden confirmed.

“Why not?”

The room was silent for a moment. “Because,” Hayden answered at last,
sure it was a trick question, “it’s a broken prism.”

“You were being chas
ed by a warg, about to be eaten, as evidenced by your injuries,” Master Reede interjected. “Even under threat of imminent death, you still didn’t use your prism?”

“No,” Hayden confirmed again, tersely.

“Why?” Master Kilgore leaned forward in his chair, elbows on the table as he scrutinized him.

Are they being deliberately stupid?

“Because I promised Master Asher on my first day here that I would never use a broken prism, no matter what. I’d rather die than follow in my father’s footsteps.”

This was met with a resounding silence. Finally, a
fter more than a minute elapsed, Master Willow said, “I believe a discussion is in order before we award points. Please wait outside and we’ll call you back when we’ve made our decision.”

Hayden’s team left the room as instructed and sat down on a bench in the hallway. No one spoke much, other than to ask what time it was or
to speculate on how their final tally would come out. It felt like they were waiting for a long time, but eventually Master Reede opened the door, leaned out, and told them to come back inside.

The four of them took their original seats and waited for the scoring to begin. It was Master Willow who spoke first.

“We have decided to score you individually on this—well, I suppose you could call it a challenge. The average of your scores will be used to determine your final position in the rankings among your peers.”

Uh oh…that must mean they want to give some of us really high scores and some of us really low scores…
he had no illusions about who would receive the lowest score in the group.

“
Zane,” Master Reede spoke now, “You managed an excellent bit of conjury. If not for the fact that you lost your head during the summoning and lucked into bringing Bonk forward, you would have scored a ten. As it is, you receive a nine.”

Zane
exhaled in visible relief, apparently having expected much worse.

“Tucker,” Master Willow went next. “You used your elder wand to great effect in the cave, though you admitted to panicking while the
warg was attacking and therefore did not fully utilize your weapon. Your score is also a nine.”

Tucker looked like he was torn between feeling pleased and disappointed.

“Theresa,” Master Kilgore gave Tess a gruff smile. “You were clever to bring such a versatile elixir with you, and you used it well. Ten.”

Tess nearly fe
ll out of her chair from shock. It was almost impossible to get a perfect ten out of the Masters during an arena challenge.

Finally, it was Hayden’s turn. His heart began to hammer and his stomach felt like it was flipping in circles when Master Asher addressed him.

“Hayden,” he began, “you did—quite frankly—
nothing
from a magical perspective last night.” He smirked at the look on Hayden’s face. “However, you bear no blame for that, as you were not equipped to act safely.” He paused and gave Hayden a thoughtful look. “It takes great courage to keep your promises when death is staring you in the face and drooling on your shirt. Your score is eleven points.”

For a horrible moment Hayden thought he had forgotten how to count to ten, because he had been certain that eleven came after. He blinked hard several times and asked, “Um, what?”

“Eleven, Hayden.” Master Asher gave him a crooked grin. “The number directly following ten but preceding twelve.”

“But—but that’s impossible!” Tucker said with wide eyes. “The scoring only goes to ten!”

“Yes it does,” Master Asher nodded agreeably, as though pleased with Tucker for catching on so quickly.

“But—” Hayden interrupted, confused about why he was getting extra credit, “I didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly,” the Prism Master gave him a deferential nod. “And that is why you deserve it.”