The Schism (The Broken Prism Book 4) Read online

  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 as
tounded.

  “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.

  “I’m not sure yet,” he admitted. “I think I’d like to get a second opinion before I get myself involved in politics, especially with people who want me dead.”

  Looking around the room for someone reasonable to talk to, he finally spotted Master Willow sitting with a group of first-year students. Without bothering to say goodbye to his friends, he grabbed his book bag and made his way across the dining hall to the Master of Wands, abandoning Bonk to Tess’s care for the moment.

  Bonk won’t mind—half the time I think he prefers her to me anyway.

  Approaching the table a little awkwardly, he said, “Excuse me, Master Willow. Could I talk to you for a moment?”

  The Master of Wands had already finished eating, and he stood up without hesitation, as though he had been waiting for Hayden to come see him ever since he got the letter.

  “Of course. Perhaps in the hallway, where it is a bit quieter,” he suggested, leading the way out of the dining hall. Masters Asher and Laurren were sitting together, discussing some dangerous piece of magic no doubt, and both looked up briefly as he passed their table, though they either knew what Hayden was asking Willow about or they didn’t care, because they immediately returned to their discussion.

  Master Willow spared his colleagues a wary glance and muttered, “It always concerns me when those two are working on a project together.”

  Hayden didn’t bother suppressing his laugh, because he often felt the same way when he saw Laurren and Asher talking. They were both intelligent enough and crazy enough to blow up the school on accident with one of their experiments, and would probably shrug it off as an innocent mistake that could happen to anyone after the fact.

  There’s a narrow line between brilliance and insanity, Hayden reflected grimly, remembering what he had been told last year by Master Laurren about how prism-users danced on that line more than mages in any other major. Heck, Laurren himself used to be a natural prism-user before he experienced the backlash of one of his new spells and became colorblind.

  They entered the relative quiet of the corridor outside the dining hall, and Master Willow stepped up to one of the large, windowless cutouts in the stone wall that let in a fresh breeze from the grounds. He rested his hands on the ledge at waist-level and peered out across the front lawns.

  “Is it safe to assume that this is about the invitation you received from the Council of Mages?”

  “How did you know what it was?” Hayden asked, wondering if his mail was being read before it came to him.

  The Master of Wands reached into a pocket of his metallic red robes and pulled out an identical letter.

  “We got ours today as well; it seemed like a safe enough guess.” He looked at Hayden. “Do you know why you were invited?”

  Hayden frowned thoughtfully. “Master Asher said that the Council wants to rope me into this whole schism ordeal for revenge. I thought that maybe they were hoping to get me into a meeting with a bunch of important people so they could put me on the spot and I’d have to volunteer, but I don’t know…maybe it’s just because I control a Great House now?” he tilted his inflection upwards optimistically.

  “Your first guess is likely the more accurate,” Willow sighed, crushing any strands of hope he had for an innocent invitation to a meeting that might prove interesting.

  “Should I go?” he asked bluntly.

  Master Willow considered it for a long moment in silence. After almost a full minute he said, “I would advise against it. I don’t see anything good that can come from it.”

  “In that case, let me know if I miss anything worth knowing,” Hayden snickered, not at all sorry to pass up the opportunity to pit himself against the Council of Mages once again, though it would have been nice to get a look at the legendary Crystal Tower for himself.

  “Out of curiosity, why did you ask me for advice instead of Asher?” Willow called out to him as Hayden turned to walk back into the dining hall to collect Bonk.

  “He’s not always interested in taking the path of least conflict,” Hayden explained carefully. “Contrary to popular belief, I’m not actually trying to pick a fight with the Council right now, so I thought I’d talk to someone more…”

  “Pragmatic?” Willow supplied helpfully, giving him an appraising look when he nodded. “Well, it’s good to know that you can appreciate your mentor’s limitations.” He sounded sincerely relieved that Hayden wasn’t prepared to just blindly do whatever the Prism Master told him.

  “Do I need to send a note back to them or anything? Or is not showing up enough of a response?”

  Master Willow made an airy gesture with one hand and said, “I’ll convey your deepest regrets for you when I arrive.”

  Thinking that something had finally gone right for a change, Hayden thanked the Master and went back into the dining hall to retrieve Bonk.

  “Shame you won’t get to see the Crystal Tower though,” Zane lamented as they got ready for bed that night. “Lorn’s always bragging like he owns the place personally—but I’ve heard it is pretty neat looking.”

  “Maybe I’m important enough to ask for a tour sometime…” Hayden mused out loud. “I’ll just have to make sure that it’s sometime when the Council is far, far away. Wouldn’t want to accidentally run into anyone I’m supposed to be avoiding.”

  Zane snorted in amusement and turned off the lights.

  9

  Delauria

  Another three weeks passed without Hayden hearing anything more from the Council of Mages, and he began to entertain the hope that they might have finally gotten the message that he wanted to be left alone and had taken it to heart.

  He was even improving in his combat lessons against Master Asher now, and was usually able to leave their lessons with nothing worse than a few bumps and bruises. There were even times when the Prism Master had to speed up his own casting to block Hayden’s attacks, and a few times when he got lucky enough to connect against him. He gave Asher a black eye earlier in the week, and out of respect for his achievement, the Prism Master hadn’t bothered healing it with magic so that he could gloat for a while.

  In all, things were taking a definite upturn in Hayden’s life, whi
ch was probably why he should have known it wouldn’t last.

  He and Kobi were manning their usual posts near the schism after lunch on Vadin, the latter pacing a wide circle around the aperture while Hayden worked on his homework on the ground nearby. They had an agreement that whenever their guard duty fell during daylight, one of them would patrol the schism while the other worked on homework for an hour and a half, and then they would switch.

  While Hayden crossed out a sentence in the essay he was writing for Wands, Kobi made a strange noise all of a sudden—like a mouse being trodden on, and Hayden dropped his pencil and leapt to his feet, equipping a prism in seconds and turning to face whatever monster had finally broken through the defensive spells with a surge of adrenaline.

  There was nothing to fight. Heart still hammering in his chest from the moment of panic, Hayden looked at his partner in confusion. Rather than stare at the opening, Kobi was looking at something behind Hayden with an almost awestruck expression. Turning back towards the school, Hayden vented a groan as he finally understood what had surprised his schoolmate.

  A group of mages was approaching them at a walk. Four of them wore the black and gold robes of the Council of Mages, though Calahan wasn’t a part of the group, and they were accompanied by an equal number of Masters from Mizzenwald. Strangely, there was also a group of five people that Hayden didn’t recognize as anyone important; a tall, willowy girl with red hair who might be about twenty years old appeared to be the only mage in the group—the four heavily-armed men accompanying her seemed to just be regular people.

  Hayden was still standing there with his circlet pulled down in front of one eye when they approached, trying to gather his wits and wondering what in the world was supposed to be happening right now.

  To his surprise, it was Master Graus—the new Scriptures teacher—that spoke to him first. Hayden noted passively that the man was still wearing those flesh-colored gloves over both hands, but still didn’t have the time to really wonder why.