The Other Prism (The Broken Prism) (31 page)

“Of course not.
I’ve got it under control,” Davis said with a hint of his usual swagger, but his eyes betrayed his lingering doubt. Hayden felt almost bad for his nemesis as he took the first seat available (next to Farrah from Creston), though a small part of his brain cheered at how much easier this trial might be if Davis was ill.

“Oh
good, I was saving this seat for you,” Farrah greeted him pleasantly as he sat down. She looked the same as the last time he saw her, from the brown hair in a ponytail to the wand tucked behind her ear, though Hayden couldn’t help but wonder if she had gotten even prettier since they last met.

“Really?” he asked in surprise. “Why’s that?”

“Because,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “you’re the only normal person here besides me.”

Hayden raised an eyebrow and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of being normal before.”

She laughed and explained, “Well, that Oliver boy thinks the sun shines out of his rear, that conjurer from Branx spits when he talks and smells weird, and Jax—the powder from Valhalla—leers at me and creeps me out.”

Hayden looked around at the people she identified in a new light.

“What about Marc? He’s the prism-user from your school, and your powder-user is here too. Don’t you want to sit with them?”

“Jon has the personality of a tuber, and Marc is my ex-boyfriend, so…no.”

Momentarily diverted from his next question, Hayden said, “You went out with a prism-user?”

“Yeah, why?
Is that weird?”

“No, it just made me think.”

“About what? Asking me out?” Farrah looked completely unabashed, but Hayden felt like his face was boiling with heat all of a sudden.

“What—no! I meant—”

“Wait, so you’re saying that the thought of asking me out is horrifying to you?” she interrupted, narrowing her eyebrows at him.

“No, that isn’t—!”

It took him a moment to realize that she was laughing, and he felt the air rush out of him as he tried to calm himself down.

“Sorry, I couldn’t help it. The look on your face was too good,” Farrah grinned, and Hayden couldn’t help but laugh at himself.

“You can’t just spring something like that on me and expect me not to freak out,” he mumbled.

“What, haven’t you ever had a girlfriend before?”

Hayden looked up at her. “Are you kidding me? I’m the son of the Dark Prism; people aren’t exactly knocking down the door to spend time with me.”

“Well that’s stupid. It’s not like you’re the same person as him; besides, you’re cute. If you were a couple years older I’d totally go out with you. Anyway, sorry for interrupting you before, what were you saying about my dating a prism-user?”

Hayden had absolutely no idea how to respond to her saying he was cute, or any of the rest of it, so he passed over it entirely and answered her question instead.

“When
you said you went out with Marc, it just made me wonder if, in a few years, two other people will be sitting here at the I.S.C., talking about the other competitors. I just imagined some girl telling a stranger, ‘No, I don’t want to sit by Hayden; I used to date that loser’. It was weird to think about.”

Farrah giggled and said, “What a strange thought. You’re not like most guys I know. That’s a good thing, by the way,” she added. “Well,
it looks like I’m up now. Wish me luck.”

Hayden had no idea what she was talking about until he realized he had missed the entirety of the Elixir trial while talking to her. Farrah made her way to the blank space of lawn (the cauldrons and flasks were nowhere in sight), along with her
remaining two competitors. Her seat was taken by the burly elixir-user from Creston, who Hayden would forever remember as ‘the boy with the personality of a tuber’ thanks to Farrah.

The Wand trials were pretty straightforward. The Master of Wands informed them that their task was to be the last one standing and in fighting condition, which meant that they had to do their best t
o incapacitate each other.

“Did the Masters of
Isenfall forget that they were hosting the third trial of the I.S.C.?” Hayden asked the boy sitting beside him. “Everywhere else had fancy arenas and thought-out events. These people just throw us on the lawn and tell us to fight each other til we get tired.”

The boy next to him simply shrugged, but Hayden was startled by a voice behind him that said, “I’m sorry you’re d
isappointed with our events, Frost. I’ll be sure to make things more interesting for you soon.”

Hayden turned in his seat and saw the Prism Master of
Isenfall standing right behind him, giving him an odd smirk that made him suspect he was about to regret his flippant remark.

“I didn’t realize you were there, sir,” he answered dumbly.

“Isn’t that the point of eavesdropping?” Master Kiresa looked mildly amused. “Anyway, there is much to be said for simple combat. It is the best way to truly assess a person’s skills, after all, as you’re much less likely to encounter a field of gravitic balls of pigment that you have to avoid contact with in real life.”

Hayden, reflecting back on his first trial, couldn’t help but grudgingly agree with that. He winced as one of Farrah’s opponents cast something that made a huge gash in her sleeve and drew blood.

“Open combat seems dangerous though, especially with mastery-level students who are determined to win. What if someone gets killed?”

“It happens, occasionally. While we go to some effort to ensure that the
competition is as safe as possible, there are too many random factors involved for us to ever really be certain. That is part of the risk of entering the competition, as in the real world. No one can protect you from everything.” He turned his eyes from the battle to look at Hayden. “I hope Asher didn’t give you the impression that this competition was safe?”

“No,” Hayden frowned. “But he did go to greater efforts to make sure that people didn’t accidentally die during the trial at Mizzenwald.”

“How noble of him.” The Prism Master looked like he was tempted to roll his eyes. “I think you’re going to find the world a very frightening place when you can’t hide behind his shiny red robes anymore. If he had given you to me for the summer as I asked him to, it would have done you some good.”

“What are you talking about?” Hayden raised his eyebrows in alarm.

“Didn’t he tell you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We had a discussion about you and Davis last term, comparing our curriculums and so forth, and I suggested that we switch pupils for the summer. I thought it would be an interesting change of pace, working with someone from another school, seeing how your education stacked up against what I would have taught you. Davis would have assisted Asher with his research, and you would have worked with me.”

Since Hayden thought that Master
Kiresa was the most unsettling teacher he’d ever met, his head nearly exploded at the thought of spending an entire summer with him, though a part of him wished for the chance to do real research and be useful.

“And he said no?”

“He said he wasn’t fond of Davis and had no desire to work with him professionally.” Master Kiresa shrugged as though that was unimportant. “I suspect he was mainly trying to keep you from me, for whatever reason.”

Maybe because you’re terrifying…

“Oh, well, I don’t know anything about it.” Hayden shrugged, turning his back on the Prism Master to finish watching the Wand trial. To his surprise, Reya from Mizzenwald had already been eliminated, which took her out of the competition entirely. A group of mastery-level students were working on reviving her now, while Farrah and the wand-user from Valhalla duked it out.

Farrah was bleeding from the nose and
both arms, her hair a tangled mess, but her opponent didn’t look any better and was favoring his wand arm. She sent a stream of spells flying at him from her elder wand, two of which he was unable to deflect, and he was thrown to the ground. Unfortunately, Farrah had used up all of her combat wands at this point, so she walked over to him, grabbed him by the hair, and slammed his head against the ground until he passed out.

Hayden watched with wide eyes, making a mental note never to make her angry, as a group of healers descended upon him while Farrah was declared the winner of the round.

He almost didn’t realize it was time for the Prism trial until Master Kiresa told him to stand up. Remembering his threat to make things interesting, Hayden swallowed a lump of fear and tried to look confident as he walked into the newly-vacated clearing. He turned to face the row of chairs he had just left, and bile rose in his throat as he caught Oliver’s intense gaze. The older boy had a remarkable way of communicating the threat,
You better win or I’ll knock your teeth out
, without saying a thing.

Dav
is and Marc stood beside Hayden and the former said, “I’m going to destroy you in the finals,” in greeting.

“Oh good, you finally realized that I’m going to make it to the finals. That only took about eight months,” Hayden replied.

“The Prism trial is going to be fairly straightforward,” Master Kiresa spoke loudly, addressing the crowd. “The only thing the competitors must do is stay on the platform.”

He said it with a note of amusement, and Hayden had no idea what platform he was talking about until the ground hardened beneath his feet and then shot up into the air. Hayden’s knees buckled from the pressure, and when the ground stopped moving, he climbed to his feet and discovered that he was standing on a circular, white-tiled platform, twenty-feet in diameter and at least that high in the air. There were no
guardrails on the side, nothing to stop him from dropping over the edge and breaking his neck in the fall.

“The last one standing will win the round,” Master
Kiresa said from below. “You may begin.”

No sooner had he said the words than the platform began to spin. It probably didn’t look like it was moving very fast from the ground, but it took Hayden less than ten seconds to make a full rotation on it, and he struggled to balance his footing and move towards the center. The only thing saving him right now was the fact that the others were struggling just as much as he was, and were all too busy stabilizing themselves to attack each other.

Then the platform began to rock ever-so-slightly back and forth as it spun, just enough to be terrifying. Hayden was sincerely regretting his wish for something more exciting than simple combat, and he was already getting dizzy and nauseous from the spinning.

Marc
sent a basic Push spell his way and Hayden narrowly dodged it, switching to his amber prism. He and Davis met each other’s gaze for a moment and, as if they had planned it all along, both of them turned and cast at Marc at the same time. The prism-user from Creston went flying over the edge of the platform, and since the platform was spinning, Hayden couldn’t see what happened to him. He hoped someone had caught him or at least slowed his fall.

He realized that his exchange with Davis at the base of the platform hadn’t been meaningless. They both wanted to face each other in the finals, both wanted to prove that they were the best prism-user in the end. Marc hadn’t stood a chance during this round.

Now Davis’s attention was focused wholly on him. Hayden couldn’t be sure if it was just his imagination, but he felt like the platform was moving faster now. Hayden held up his rose-tinted prism and cast Anchor, a spell he had never had occasion to use before, but it worked as intended and held his feet firmly against the platform. Unfortunately it did nothing for the rest of his body, so he was pitched back and forth while his legs remained locked in place, trying to hold his body upright.

Davis braced himself
better before anchoring his feet, and had an easier time remaining upright. Then he cast Push and Pull in rapid succession at Hayden, knowing that he couldn’t move his feet and apparently determined to snap his legs off at the knees by forcing the rest of his body to bend one way and then another. Hayden cast Repel, followed by Sleep from his blue prism. Davis blocked his spell and retaliated with Break, and Hayden felt his defensive charm burn as it absorbed some of the shock, which was probably the only thing that actually kept his left knee from breaking as Davis intended (though it still hurt terribly).

Furious, Hayden cast Dispel and managed to remove the Anchor spell Davis had cast on himself, and the older boy fell over and slid backwards towards the edge of the platform, catching himself before he could fly over the edge and re-anchoring in an awkward position. He cast Slow on Hayden, which made all of his movements glacial,
as though he was frozen in time. He followed with Heat, and Hayden felt like he’d been dipped in a volcano, but fortunately it broke the slowing spell.

Davis cast Heat several more times
in rapid succession, until Hayden’s robes burst into flames at the bottom hem and he had to cast Water to extinguish it. They exchanged spells back and forth until both of them nearly ran out of prisms, knowing there would be nothing to do but revert to hand-to-hand combat after that. Hayden, who didn’t have a lot of experience with fighting, didn’t like his chances; Davis probably pulverized someone every week.