The Schism (The Broken Prism Book 4) (11 page)

Great. I’m really glad I got on their bad side last week…

There was nothing to be done about that now, and he knew it. He simply resolved to make sure he didn’t do anything that might look shady to the Council members, determined not to give them any reason to move against him.

“Moving on to the types of magic we
can
discuss in more detail,” Master Laurren caught his attention once more. “Conduits like fire, glass, and ice are more benign, and have varying degrees of power. Fire provides the most readily-available energy, which makes it the most powerful and the preferred media of the sorcerers when they can manage it. Channeling your Source power through a conduit other than your own Foci can be both a good and bad thing, depending on the strength of the conduit. For instance, if you have a weak Source, but are channeling through a large fire, the fire can act as an amplifier to your natural power. The down side of this is that the corollary is also true: if your conduit is weaker than your Source, it will act as a dampener.”

Given that he had been told that he had the largest Source that most people had ever encountered, it sounded like a terrible deal to Hayden—almost anything would act as a dampener on his power.

Well, maybe not a volcano…

He imagined trying to convince his enemies not to fight him until they could relocate to the nearest volcano so that he’d have unimpeded access to his magic and had to suppress a laugh.

He spent the rest of his time in class taking notes on the few things that Master Laurren was able to tell them about sorcery, all of which would have been good to know a year ago.

That seems to be my luck—I learn everything important in life about two months after I need it.

His next class was Elixirs. As much as he liked Master Kilgore, it only took him twenty minutes to realize that this would likely be his last year of studying his subject, as it was much more difficult than he remembered from previous years and he wasn’t able to produce a proper level-four Strength Elixir by the end of the lesson, despite his best efforts. This wasn’t terribly surprising news to him, since he had been struggling horribly on and off for the last year, and had already considered that he might be nearing the limits of his potential for the subject. He had really only signed up for it again out of defiance, not wanting to give up on a third subject in the major arcana unless he had to.

His level-five Healing class went much more smoothly, and Mistress Razelle even praised the wormwood-infused bandage he produced. Charms and Wands were difficult but manageable, as he had always proven fairly adept at both, and his last class of the day—and the one he looked forward to the most—was mastery-level Prisms.

Hayden entered the classroom with Bonk on his shoulder, though the dragonling quickly left him in favor of greeting his counterpart, Cinder, who spit fire into his face and then flew out the door towards the grounds to play.

“Dragons,” Hayden muttered, shaking his head as he took a seat at random in the middle of the room.

Master Asher was a few minutes late to class, and when he shut the door behind him he glanced at Hayden and then took a seat right next to him at one of the student desks.

“So, you’ve finally made it to my first ever mastery-level class. Congratulations, and all of that,” he greeted Hayden with a lazy wave of the hand to acknowledge this feat.

“Thanks. Before we start, there was something I wanted to ask you…” Hayden said without preamble, to keep himself from chickening out. If he didn’t ask now, he might never be brave enough to try again later. Then again, if the Master said ‘no’, the rest of this lesson could be very awkward…

“Fire away,” his mentor said, raising an eyebrow in interest.

“Well, I don’t know if you remember, but back in first year I asked if I could someday apprentice to you and help with your research, and you...um…”

Asher’s features momentarily darkened as he said, “And I grossly overreacted and terrified you? Yes, I remember.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Hayden was sure the Master knew what he was getting at, but he apparently wasn’t going to help him get there.

“Well, I was wondering if you’d changed your mind, or if you still don’t think it would be a good idea for us to work together,” he said as calmly as possible, drawing on his newfound skills from working with Magdalene Trout.

Asher considered him for a moment and then shrugged. “I suppose the situation has changed since then. You’ve more than proven yourself to be different from your father, and there’s no denying you have a good mind for research. After I recovered from having my Source bled dry for months on end, I got around to checking your work on the array you were plotting last year.”

Surprised, Hayden raised his eyebrows and said, “You did?”

“Of course. I did promise to, didn’t I, on the eve of my departure from Mizzenwald?”

Hayden’s stomach clenched at the sudden memory. He had encountered Master Asher in the Pentagon last year and excitedly told him that there was an array he was mapping, and asked Asher to look at it during their next lesson, not knowing that his mentor was preparing to depart for a war zone and was simply trying to say farewell to him. When he’d realized his oversight, it was too late, and Asher was already gone.

“I—I’m surprised you remembered that.”

The Master gave him a funny look and said, “In this entire school, you’re my only protégé. What kind of mentor would I be if I forgot to actually mentor you every now and again?”

“I guess that’s true,” Hayden conceded. “So, does that mean I can help with your research now?”

Asher’s smile seemed tinged with evil delight for some reason. “Oh, sure.” He tapped Hayden on the shoulder as though knighting him. “Congratulations, you’re a proper apprentice now.”

It seemed a little anticlimactic, but that didn’t matter. He was finally going to get to do real work—discovering new things that nobody else knew about, maybe even getting published in one of their textbooks if he found something spectacular.

“I guess I should start by finishing up my project from last year?”

Asher shook his head.

“Alas, I was curious to see what you’d caught onto, so I finished mapping your work during the winter holiday. The good news is that you did indeed discover a new alignment—or at least, I couldn’t find any records of it anywhere.”

Hayden perked up immediately. “I did? Wow, but—wait, if that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?”

The Master gave him a commiserating look and explained, “It appears that you discovered a way to turn common objects into…mushrooms.”

Hayden stared at him for a long moment, waiting for him to explain the joke. Then he realized that Asher wasn’t joking.

“You mean…”

“I mean that whenever I cast your spell at anything—regardless of what it was—that thing turned into a mushroom. Believe me, I was as astounded as you are, and you can bet that I tried it on just about everything I could get my hands on—I do hate an unsolved mystery after all. Anyway, that happens sometimes with research; not all spells are useful. You should be proud that your first discovery did anything at all—my first one was a complete dud.”

Hayden had a hard time feeling proud of his accomplishment, and was still trying to salvage some positive aspect to make himself feel better about spending the better part of last year discovering mushrooms.

“Maybe it has food applications? It could keep people from starving during droughts or something?”

Asher chuckled and said, “Sorry kid, I forgot to mention that the mushrooms were poisonous. Took Razelle a week to cure me, which gave her plenty of time to chastise me for being an idiot while I was convalescing. I think she enjoys it.” He shuddered dramatically.

“Are you telling me that you turned something like a piece of firewood into a mushroom—using a brand new, untested spell, and your first thought was to
eat it
?”

Asher laughed again. “It was a candle, actually, and no, eating it was my fourth or fifth thought. You shouldn’t really be surprised to hear it; you know I’m curious to a fault.”

Hayden had always admired that the man could admit his faults without batting an eyelash, but he still thought his mentor was absolutely insane sometimes.

“Okay, so then if that project is finished, what should I start on?” he changed the subject.

“During your lessons in here we’ll be continuing your magical education, only this time I won’t be going easy on you.”

“You mean you’ve been going
easy
on me this whole time?” Hayden interrupted, aghast at the thought of how much more difficult things were going to become if Asher had been secretly holding back all this time. He remembered getting beaten to a pulp by his mentor on alternating days last year during combat practice.

“Sadly, yes. There are many arrays I still need to teach you—especially in the violet prism—and I get bored easily so I’ll likely be moving through material much faster than you’re comfortable with. Luckily, Mizzenwald doesn’t pay me to make you comfortable, it pays me to make you smart.”

“Are we still doing our combat practice then?”

There was that evil grin again.

“Yes, on alternating days. We still need to improve your combat skills with prisms, with and without other magical instruments, compounding, and with a handful of specialized mastery-level tinted prisms I have yet to acquaint you with. Then there’s your new research project, which I’ll figure out in the next day or so—you’ll be expected to spend a couple hours a night on that and review your progress with me a few times a week. Oh, and then there are your other mastery-level duties, now that I’ve officially accepted you as a student, which will take several hours a week as well.”

Now Hayden understood why the Master had looked evilly delighted when he’d so casually asked to be an apprentice. He had no idea what kind of workload he was volunteering for in addition to his normal studies.

Asher was still looking at him, clearly waiting to see whether he would balk and change his mind about accepting his new role.

I could just stay a normal student for a couple more years until I have more time, or until I graduate and leave school…

As appealing as it sounded, Hayden had a fundamental issue with turning down challenges. He blamed his Frost bloodlines.

“I guess we’d better get started then.”

Asher hadn’t been lying about the workload this year. By the end of class that day they had reviewed seventeen new alignments, including two that required compounding, all of which Hayden was expected to practice tonight in order to demonstrate mastery of them during class in two days.

“What if I don’t have them all sorted out by our next class?” Hayden asked tentatively.

“Then you’re going to fall behind, because during our next lesson we’ll be moving on to new arrays, so if you haven’t memorized the old ones and how to find them then you’ll just miss them.”

Hayden grimaced involuntarily and Asher added, “Welcome to your first mastery-level class. If you think that the other Masters are more forgiving of their top-level students, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise when you hit Willow’s class next year. Four of his students dropped out of school by the end of the first week last year, and we have bets on whether he can top that number this time around.”

“No, it’s fine. I’m just getting used to it is all,” he assured Asher. “I’ll be able to keep up with everything once I get into a routine.”
I hope.

“Good. Well, that’s the end of our lesson today. I’ll go easy on you and give you the night off, but tomorrow evening you’ll start assisting me with my research after dinner.”

Hayden thanked him and packed up his notes, head spinning with new alignments and wondering how in the world he was going to attempt to memorize seventeen of them in two days. It was the first time he had ever really found Prism class difficult.

By dinner he was exhausted, and wasted no time telling his friends the load he was expected to carry in Prisms now, as none of them were in a mastery-level class yet. Zane looked mildly ill and Tess frowned thoughtfully but remained silent while the others peppered him with questions and Bonk ate his way through Hayden’s ham loaf.

“Between homework, research, and your mastery-level duties, you’re not going to have much time off this year,” Zane said with a wince.

“At least they cancelled challenge arenas and the I.S.C. this year,” Conner put in helpfully.

“Yeah, but only because the grounds might not be safe anymore with a giant schism open, so they can’t risk the mastery students getting eaten while they’re trying to translocate us in and out of arenas anymore,” Tamon argued.

“That’s not even factoring in the time you’ll need to work with Fia Valay to get your estate and businesses in order,” Zane continued. “That could be a full-time job all on its own.”

Hayden groaned. He’d forgotten all about his duties as the head of the Frost House, and was now beginning to wonder whether he would have any spare time for eating and sleeping in the next year.

He glanced at Tess, a pang of guilt settling in his stomach, but she seemed to anticipate his apology before he could give it.