The Schism (The Broken Prism Book 4) (15 page)

Hayden scowled.

“They can ask me all they want; I don’t plan on signing up for that death trap. I’ve jumped through enough hoops for them in the last four years; they can find someone else to kick around for a while,” he said bitterly.

“I’m not sure they’ll even scrape up the nerve to ask you, as you did just have to recently sue them for the return of your assets—after saving their sorry hides from those cages in the Forest of Illusions. Even some of the stupider Council members must realize that you won’t be in a hurry to do them any more favors after the way they’ve treated you.”

They sat in silence for a few moments while Hayden processed everything he had just learned about schisms. Finally he said, “Even if I wanted to go charging to my death, I’d need a void-instrument of some sort, and I definitely don’t have one of those on hand.”

He was surprised when Master Asher made a strange face and said, “Actually, you do, though I wouldn’t go bragging about it, for obvious reasons.”

“What? I
do
?” Hayden actually checked his belt for weapons he didn’t remember purchasing, but it was just his usual array of prisms, wands, and elixirs. He examined the wands minutely, because Kobi had told him that they were the most common void weapons to come from the Forest of Illusions.

“Do you remember the prism you brought me from the Frost manor at the beginning of last year?” Asher recaptured his attention.

“That onyx prism? The one that was so solid that light wouldn’t even pass through it?” Hayden’s eyebrows lifted as the information clicked into place. “You mean that was a void-prism?”

Asher nodded.

“Apparently so. I spent the better part of last year trying to figure out what the heck it was supposed to do—Aleric would never keep a worthless prism lying around the house—but I had no luck at all. When I was asked to see if I could withstand the distortion of the schism, I brought the prism with me on a whim and sure enough, it lit up like a torch as soon as it crossed through the opening.”

“You’d never seen a void-prism before then?” Hayden couldn’t help but ask the impertinent question, surprised that his mentor wouldn’t have recognized it on sight since he seemed to know everything there was to know about prisms.

Asher gave him a flat stare and said, “No, I haven’t. As far as I know, one hasn’t been seen in over a century—they’re extremely rare, even in the Forest of Illusions. Wands are much more common by far, and we only see a few of them every year as is.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Either Aleric got very lucky in finding this—not entirely impossible since he always did have uncanny luck—or he found a way to create his own void-instruments using the nefarious Black Prism.”

“I’ll bet he made his own,” Hayden scowled. “From everything I’ve heard about that stupid Black Prism of his, it was capable of pretty much anything.”

“Yes,” Asher agreed heavily. “It’s a shame it drives you nuts to use it, or that magic would be really handy.” Seguing into a slightly different topic, he added, “I assume you haven’t had any more insight into what Aleric was trying to do to you on the day he came to your mother’s house?”

This was a sore spot for Hayden, who had spent the last five years trying to remember what happened on the day his mother’s house exploded and his Foci became irreparably warped.

Frowning, he said, “Not since I drank that Mnemora last year and nearly bled to death. I’m beginning to think I’ll never really know what happened that day.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Asher winced minutely. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter what happened; Aleric is gone and you manage just fine around your handicap, so things could have been a lot worse.”

Yeah, tell that to my dead mother.

He didn’t voice that ugly thought out loud because he didn’t need to; he saw the realization hit Asher as soon as he’d finished speaking. The Master opened his mouth to apologize but Hayden waved him down.

“It’s fine, I know what you meant.”

“Anyway, we’ve dawdled long enough,” Asher changed the subject abruptly, leaning forward in his chair to peruse the papers that were strewn about haphazardly all around his side of the table. Hayden prided himself on keeping his side of the table neat and orderly, in the hope of shaming the Master into tidying up a bit. Of course, his effort failed spectacularly—if anything, it seemed to make Asher even less organized, like he was being willfully defiant.

“Did you ever make any headway with that inverse compound of blue-yellow-yellow?” he continued riffling through his papers, pausing long enough to crumple a few sheets he obviously didn’t care about anymore and toss them over his shoulder so that they bounced off of the wall and settled on the floor.

I think he does it deliberately to annoy me,
Hayden concluded. Doubtless, he would enter the room one day and find his mentor’s dried-up corpse buried beneath a stack of his own research notes.

Asher extracted a piece of moldy bologna from the heaps of notes, sniffed it with a grimace and said, “Holy arcana—how long has
this
been in here?” He glanced at Hayden. “I don’t think I’ve even eaten bologna this year…”

Behold, the man who taught me everything I know about prisms…

Hayden buried his head in his hands, not trusting himself to speak until Asher said, “Aha! Found it.” He opened his eyes to see the Master smoothing out several sheets of crumpled paper in the middle of the table so they could both see.

“I wasn’t getting anywhere with that inverse alignment, and after three days of banging my head against the wall and wondering why I was foolish enough to get into research in the first place, I think I might have figured it out.”

Clearly stunned to hear that he had an answer, Asher raised his eyebrows and said, “You made it work?”

“No, I abandoned it entirely and found a better alignment—or I
think
it’s better, at least.” He picked up his colored pencils and began sketching on a clean sheet of paper. “It’s still an inverse compound, but it’s two clicks over from the blue-yellow-yellow you had me start with. I think if we use this blue-green-yellow instead, it gets us around the issue of excess yellow but not enough blue, since the green will lend some extra…”

Asher studied his sketch for a moment, deep in thought. Then, without speaking, he pulled the eyepiece of his circlet forward so that his crystal prism was in front of his left eye, holding another prism backwards in front of it and tilting his head towards the light. Much faster than Hayden could have managed, he twisted both prisms simultaneously until he found the pattern Hayden had sketched out, and then sat like that for a full minute. Hayden wondered if his neck hurt from being tilted back for so long without moving.

Hayden, expecting to be told why his idea would never work, felt his mouth drop open when Asher said, “You know, I think you might be right. Good idea.”

“You do?” He couldn’t conceal the disbelief from his tone, and now the Prism Master lifted up his eyepiece so he could see Hayden properly.

“Why is that surprising to you?”

“I don’t know, I just assumed that if I was smart enough to find it that you would have already thought of it ages ago.” He shrugged.

“Why in the world would I have you assisting me if I was able to figure everything out for myself?” He raised a supercilious eyebrow. “Sure, I’m brilliant, but even I’m not arrogant enough to claim omniscience.”

Undeterred by the slightly patronizing tone, Hayden persisted. “I just assumed you let me do research with you as a favor to me—and because you like having a lackey to do all the awful work you’re too important for.”

Rather than take insult, Asher burst into laughter.

“It
is
true that I enjoy giving you all my more tedious assignments, but if I just wanted a lackey there are any number of useless children around here I could choose from. I don’t know why you’ve never believed it, but you
are
intelligent.”

Cheered by the fact that his mentor hadn’t lumped him into the ‘useless children’ category, he pointed to his notes from last night.

“I’m glad you think I’m smart, because now that I’ve found that other alignment, I have absolutely no idea what to do next and was hoping you could help me.”

Grinning, Asher began leafing through the mess of papers on his side of the table again.

“Sure, it’s simple—I’ve got the formula written down here somewhere…”

Hayden leaned back in his chair and sighed.

Barely a week later, Hayden received an unexpected piece of mail during lunch. Fully expecting it to be another mile-long accounting document from Fia Valay with highlighted suggestions in the marginalia, he opened the envelope right at the table, sliding Bonk’s plate of food out of the way (he’d finally caved in and given Bonk his own plate to prevent the dragonling from eating off of his all the time).

The letter was short, only a few lines long, and when he finished reading it his mouth hung open dumbly for such a long time that Zane finally said, “Hoping to catch flies?”

Tamon laughed and added, “That Fia must have really stumped you this time. Usually you don’t look quite so bowled over after you get his letters—a little glassy-eyed at worst.”

“It isn’t from Valay,” Hayden scanned the letter a few more times, though he had already memorized it by now so there was really no point. He glanced around the room and saw a couple of the Masters giving him strangely knowing looks, and tucked the letter into his bag to shrug off the attention.

“Is someone else writing you to beg you to invest in their new business venture?” Tess asked, holding her familiar, Mittens, in her lap and stroking his head once she finished eating. It seemed to make Bonk jealous, because he shuffled over to her and began fighting Mittens for space on her lap.

“No—thank heavens,” Hayden groaned, momentarily diverted. He was already annoyed with how many people suddenly wanted things from him now that he had money. If he wanted to continue growing the family fortunes, he knew he needed to begin investing in new businesses, but at the same time he didn’t want to get dragged into bad deals and squander the Frost fortune just because he wasn’t business-savvy enough to make smart decisions. It was a painful balancing act that he was trying to work through with smarter people—like Valay—who were being paid to keep his best financial interests in mind at the moment.

“Well, don’t leave us in suspense,” Zane pressed him doggedly. “Who wrote to you this time?”

“It’s from the Council of Mages,” Hayden said slowly. “It’s an invitation to their next meeting at the Crystal Tower.”

His friends gave him identical looks of shock.

“Why in the world would they invite
you
to one of their meetings?” Zane was the first to recover. “You’ve got to be crazy powerful or important for them to even pretend to care what you have to say, and there’s also the small issue of them hating you.”

“Well,” Conner interrupted, “he
is
in charge of a Great House, and a war hero to boot…I guess that makes him important enough.”

“But the Council despises you,” Tess reiterated Zane’s point with a pensive frown. “After what happened this winter, what could they possibly want from you?” She was giving him that look that let him know that she would box his ears if he tried to hide anything from her right now. For such a nice girl, she could be downright terrifying when she put her mind to it.

Hayden sighed.

“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because they want me to volunteer to dive into that giant schism out back. Maybe they think they can force me into it if they get me in front of all the notable mages of our time or something.”

His friends looked astounded.

“Why would they want to make you go into the schism for them?” Tess demanded hotly, cheeks flushed with fury at the Council, who she had developed a personal hatred of after hearing about how they frequently treated Hayden like garbage.

“Aside from the fact that they’d be thrilled to see me dead, I’m apparently well-equipped to withstand the distortion effects inside of the stupid thing, courtesy of my messed up Foci.” He held up his wrists so that his three-inch correctors were visible.

“What do you mean?” Zane asked curiously, which prompted Hayden to explain everything that Asher and Kobi had told him about schisms. When he was finished, Tess was eyeing him suspiciously.

“How long have you known that the Council is once again trying to rope you into something stupid and dangerous?” she asked in a very low, calm voice, which sent a chill up Hayden’s back because she only talked like that when she was pretty angry. He noticed that her fingers flexed towards the hunting knife she kept on her belt, as though she was itching to unsheathe it and knife him for withholding information from her.

Even the people that like me occasionally want to stab me.

“Uh, about a week. I would’ve mentioned it, but I wasn’t sure how serious they were about it and didn’t want to make you all worry for no reason…”

The look she gave him made it plain that she wasn’t buying it at all, but she let the matter drop for now, no longer inching dangerously close to her knife.

“So are you going to go?” Conner pressed him. “It’s not every day you get a chance to see the Crystal Tower. Heck, you’d probably have to find someone to translocate you there since it’s on the other end of the continent and you can’t move yourself yet with magic.” He chuckled at the thought of Hayden having to bum a ride to a high-level meeting.