The Other Prism (The Broken Prism) (34 page)

He sh
outed the last word at Master Laurren, hands balled into fists and face flushed with emotion. To his surprise, the Master of Abnormal Magic was smiling benignly at him.

“And if I tell you that I can’t answer a single one of those questions for you, and that learning from me will bring you no closer to the truth than you are now?”

“You’re not me. You don’t know what I’ll learn.”

Master
Laurren looked like he was suppressing a smile, which nettled Hayden even more when he was already annoyed.

“You believe that you’ll see something I missed? That you are smarter than me?” the Master prodded him gently.

“I believe I
will
be, yes.”

“Then I will see you at the start of term next year. Now that you’ve learned how to answer questions truthfully, make it a habit in my class; I don’t have patience for liars.”

Hayden turned and walked out of the room without speaking, his ears still ringing from the blood pounding in his head. He didn’t like feeling exposed, especially in front of his teachers, and he had a feeling that he had just signed up for a whole lot more of it next year.

It doesn’t matter. If I have to do this to answer my questions, then I’ll do it. I’
ll be the best student Master Laurren has ever seen. I’ll be so good that I can teach the class to him by the time I’m done here, because I’m Hayden Frost!

It was the first time he had ever really taken pride in his name or his identity before, and he burned with the feeling as he walked out onto the grounds to find Bonk. He passed Lorn, who was headed back to the school with a bandage on one ear, and ignored the other boy’s threats against him as he searched for his familiar.

Bonk and Cinder were both waiting for him in front of Torin’s cabin, sitting on identical wooden posts that faced him like miniature gargoyles. Hayden stopped in front of them and said, “I’m going to dig into my past, and my father’s, until I remember everything. If I know what happened, then I can figure out why. It might be dangerous, and it might be unpleasant, but I need to know. Are you two with me?”

The two dragons took flight in unison and perched on either shoulder. Hayden smiled, his emotions abating.

“Good, then let’s go play ‘fetch.’”

19

The Arc of Branx

H
ayden wasn’t sure what he was more nervous about: finals week, or the championship round of the I.S.C. The only thought sustaining him in the days leading to both was that if he could just survive the next week or so, he would be able to enjoy a nice long break before the start of his third year. Even better, since the I.S.C. only occurred every-other year, he knew that no matter what else happened next term, he wouldn’t have the competition to contend with.

Tess was helping him do some last-minute studying before his first exam, which was Charms. She was able to give him quite a lot of helpful tips and insight, being in the level-two class, so Hayden sat down to his first test of the day in good spirits.

Master Dirqua entered the room in the same way as usual, by appearing from thin air in the center of their circle of desks. Today the desks had raised dividers between them, so Hayden was unable to see the people on either side of him. A few of his classmates shifted nervously in their seats, though he had no idea why they would be surprised by the anti-cheating measures.

“Alright, class.
Time to see how well I’ve done my job this year. Turn over your papers and begin; you have two hours to complete the exam,” Master Dirqua informed them.

Hayden flipped over the packet of papers in front of him and began. Obviously the Charms Master had chosen to start simple, because question one said:
Name the three basic components required for a successful charm.

Since they had learned the answer on their first day of class and had been using that knowledge every day since, Hayden would have to be an absolute idiot to get that question wrong.

Gradually the questions became more difficult, asking him to draw what emblem he would use for different spells and to justify his decision. There were also questions about how Source magic differed from magic cast through the Foci, which were tricky because there were exact formulas and calculations to remember. He thought he got most of them right (or right enough to get partial credit) and moved on to the section on binders.

He finished the exam with time to spare, and
used the intervening minutes to review his Elixirs notes one more time before his next test.

The exam for Elixirs was difficult, but with any luck he managed a passing grade, and as his next test after lunch was Prisms, Hayden was able to breathe a sigh of relief for the day.

His friends exchanged stories of botched test questions over their ham-and-bean casserole, while Bonk darted around the table picking food off of their plates.

“…accidentally confused orange scripting ink with ochre,” Zane told them. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize it until after I walked out too—now Master Ferule is going to wonder why I was trying to summon a cobra to help me climb a wall.”

Hayden laughed but Conner said, “That’s nothing. I was so hopeless at Elixirs that I eventually gave up on the test and drew a picture of Master Kilgore being eaten by an ox on the back of the paper. Then I realized I had to hand in my test to Master Kilgore…” He grimaced as they all burst into laughter.

“Did he see it?” Tamon asked around a mouthful of
mashed potatoes.

“Yes, unfortunately,” Conner groaned. “He complimented my artistic ability, and then he wondered out loud whether the Masters had made a mistake about me having any magical ability when I was ten. He suggested I might make a good stable boy.”

Hayden laughed so hard that ham casserole almost came out of his nose.  Tess passed him a napkin and shooed Mittens away from her chocolate pie.

“What about you, Hayden?” Zane turned to him. “Did you botch anything major, or were you annoyingly perfect?”

Hayden pursed his lips and the gibe and said, “I have no idea. If I mixed something up, it’s not like I’d know about it, or else I wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

“What, you don’t look up all the ones you weren’t sure about afterwards to see if you got them right?” Conner raised an eyebrow.

“Living through it once is bad enough. Besides, it’s not like I can go back and fix it, so there’s no point in trying to figure out my grades before I get them.”

“I guess that’s true,” Tamon conceded. “What do you have after lunch?”

“Prisms,” Hayden answered, shying away from Tamon’s boa constrictor because it made him nervous. He didn’t care for snakes much, and was always worried about being throttled in his sleep by his friend’s familiar.

“Well that’ll be a cinch, for you at least,” Zane grinned. “I’ll bet Oliver tries to copy off of you.”

“Not if he’s smart, he won’t,” Hayden countered. “Master Asher takes that stuff seriously; he’s promised to revoke permission to use blue prisms for anyone who he catches cheating.”

They went their separate ways as lunch concluded, and Hayden turned off at the Prisms classroom. As there were only five of them, Asher had their desks spaced out so far that one of them was in each corner of the room, with the fifth in the center.

Hayden got a seat in the back corner, while Oliver was forced to take the one in the middle since he came in just before the bell. Hayden flipped over his packet as soon as Master Asher signaled them to begin and started writing.

One good thing about the I.S.C. this year was that Hayden had a lot more opportunities to use his prisms in combat than last year, so he was able to give a much better accounting of how it worked. Even though the questions were much harder on this year’s exam, he was confident that he’d answered them even better than he had at the end of his first year, and was absolutely certain that he would qualify for the level-four class.

I’ll be the first one to make it into the next level since Asher has started teaching here.

He wondered vaguely whether Master Asher even had a lesson plan for his level-f
our class, or if he would just make it up as he went along. Knowing the Prism Master, Hayden suspected the latter.

His classmates had a much more difficult time than he did. Cindy actually burst into tears halfway through the test and had to step into the hallway until she calmed down. Master Asher largely ignored them all in favor of working on one of his research projects. All Hayden could see from where he was sitting were a lot of angles drawn on his paper and lots of scribbles that were probably equations he would never understand.

When the exam was over, Hayden stretched his legs and handed in his paper to the Prism Master, who glanced at it briefly and then smiled. Kevin turned in his test next, and Master Asher scanned it briefly and grimaced.

As much as Hayden wanted to spend the night relaxing, he had Conjury first thing in the morning, and he needed all the help he could get to prepare for that one. Despite the fact that he intended to drop the class at the end of the year, he didn’t like the thought of leaving with a failing grade, and was determined to try his best.
After that was Healing, and finally, Wands.

Asking Zane for help studying Conjury was difficult, since his friend tended to brood at the thought of him dropping his favorite subject, but in the end, Zane agreed to help him.

“I’m only doing this so that you don’t make me look bad,” he explained, sharpening a pencil for Hayden to practice drawing circles with.

“Why would
me failing Conjury make
you
look bad?”

“Because Reede knows I’ve been helping you, and if you do badly enough, he might think that means that I was too incompetent to tutor you properly. With my luck, he’ll dock my test score for it.”

Hayden rolled his eyes and went to work, drawing everything Zane asked him to while answering questions about crosshatching, braiding, and inscribing.

“You’re actually not half-bad at the learning part of Conjury,” his friend said bracingly. “If you could draw better than a caveman, you’d make the level-three class no problem.”

“Well, since about ninety percent of Conjury has to do with drawing, that’s probably not going to happen.” Hayden sighed and set his pencil down, wadding up the last of his practice papers and tossing them into the trash can. “Thanks for helping me with this though; I appreciate it.”

“Don’t sweat it, we’re friends,” Zane replied, while struggling to remove Felix the fox from his head. His familiar had curled up there like a fox-tailed hat, and refused to be budged. “Anyway, you’re the only one I know who will be in Abnormal Magic next year, so you’ll have to tell me anything interesting you learn from it.”

“It’s a deal,” Hayden nodded. “Do you know how many people will be in the level-one class?”

“I don’t know, maybe ten or fifteen?” Zane shrugged. “
There’s only three levels in Abnormal Magic, so it’s not like our other lessons. Besides, Laurren doesn’t take anyone into his class that he doesn’t want to teach, so it’s usually a pretty small group.”

“Apparently he likes being shouted at, because that’s how I got in.”

Zane snorted in amusement.

“You yell at our teachers a lot. I keep waiting for one of them to get tired of it and punch you in the face or something.”

Hayden grimaced and said, “Well, to be fair, Asher did fight me with his prisms in the hallway that one time.”

“I’m just saying
, you’re not very good at following orders from your superiors.”

“Well what am I supposed to do, just blindly accept whatever they hand down without asking any questions?” Hayden raised his eyebrows.

“Uh, yeah, I think that’s the point. They’re important, powerful mages, and we’re teenagers.”

Hayden frowned and said, “I guess I spent so much of the last few years dealing with adults who hate me because
of who I am, that it’s hard to see myself as being inferior to them. I’ve spent more time with the Council of Mages than most adult mages ever have a chance to, and I’m the son of the Dark Prism. I’ve been arrested, and somewhere inside my mind, I’ve got memories of watching my mom die.”

“Yeah, I guess when you put it like that, I can see why you’re not put off by a little thing like questioning authority,” Zane conceded. “Do you think you’ll ever remember what happened that day at your mom’s house?”

Hayden frowned seriously and said, “I know it’s in there, and I’m going to find a way to piece together what happened. I got fragments of it during that arena challenge last year, the one with the stupid mirror room. If that part was still in my mind, then the rest of it should be too.”

“Maybe…” Zane began gently, looking nervous. “Maybe there’s a reason you can’t remember. Like, what if it’s your brain trying to protect itself from how horrible it was? What if remembering drives you nuts somehow?”

That was a new and disturbing thought. Hayden glanced at his friend and said, “You think it might make me crazy like my father?”

“I don’t know, I’m just saying it’s possible. People forget really bad things to protect themselves, so that they don’t go nuts or get really depressed. We already know that what happened to you was terrible, and here you want to go digging it up.”

Hayden swallowed hard and glanced at Bonk. His familiar was perched on the edge of his bed, looking down at them all with an unusual amount of poise and stillness, as though he was deeply interested in their conversation.

“Well, yes, I know it’ll be bad…but my father wasn’t driven mad by memories; he was driven mad by broken prisms.” He sighed. “Anyway, you don’t know what it’s like, feeling like
a freak. Every time I do magic people spaz out because I have too much Source power, or I need massive Focus-correctors, or I get odd flashes of memories I don’t understand. Clearly something weird happened to me that day, and until I know what happened, I’ll never be able to know why I am this way or what to expect in the future.”

“I know, and I agree it’s weird. And if you want to figure things out, then I’ll help you any way that I can.” Zane finally succeeded in removing Felix from his head, and now he turned to face Hayden seriously. “I mean it, Hayden. If you decide to go haring off somewhere dangerous,
you’d better bring me with you or I’ll be furious.”

“You’re willing to waltz into whatever dangerous, stupid place I want to visit?” Hayden was genuinely surprised by this.

“Of course, idiot. I told you, we’re friends. And if you even think of doing something dangerous without taking me with you, you’d better hope you die doing it, because if you come back alive then I’m going to kick you into next week.”

“Alright, I get the point. I’ll make sure I bring you along whenever I’m doing something that might kill me,” Hayden agreed, and the two of them shared a chuckle over that.

“Good. Now that that’s settled, let’s go raid the common area for cookies and cakes before bed.”

“We just ate dinner,” Hayden pointed out.

“So what? There’s always room for dessert—I’m pretty sure it goes into a separate compartment or something.”

Hayden laughed and said, “I’m not sure that’s how it works…”

“Listen to your elders and accept my words of wisdom,” Zane cut him off, jumping to his feet and tugging on his shoes.