Cave of Nightmares Page 3

  “She was a Cohen,” Hayden explained. “I heard that her family had mages in it, but I don’t think she ever could do magic herself. I think one of my cousins goes to Isenfall though.” He was certain of it, actually, because immediately following his mother’s death he’d expected to live with his uncle in Minir, only to learn that not even his mother’s family would take in the son of Aleric Frost.

  It was beginning to unsettle him, having these powerful mages in red focused on him so intently, like they expected him to do something spectacular.

  “Tell me then, Hayden Frost, how far are you in your study of the arcane?” the man with the crossed wands spoke again.

  Hayden felt his cheeks burning; he knew almost nothing about magic.

  “I didn’t know anything about it until my mom died…and then I wasn’t allowed to study or use magic after that. I had to wear lead bracelets called Binders until the Council of Mages told me I could take them off a few days ago. Then they sent me here.” Desperate to prove he wasn’t a complete lost cause, he added, “I know that there are five major arcana, so each of you must be the Master of one of them because you’re wearing the symbols from the foyer on your necklaces.”

  He was greeted by five identical looks of shock.

  “Good lord…” the Master of Wands muttered softly. “The boy knows nothing. He has the blood of the most powerful dark mage in the Nine Lands running through his veins, and he knows absolutely nothing.”

  Hayden was beginning to feel lightheaded from all the blood accumulating in his face. It was giving him a headache.

  “If the boy was forced into Binders and hidden from his father, it’s not surprising that he isn’t versed in the arcana,” the youngest Master spoke for the first time, giving Hayden an appraising look. His dark brown hair was messy and fell almost into his blue eyes. He wore the diamond symbol around his neck and a strange metal band around his head that was only partially visible beneath his curly hair.

  “Well, I suppose there’s no point in going through the oral exam if he doesn’t even know the basics,” the Master of Wands sighed. “We might as well go directly to the practical portion and see what the son of Aleric Frost is made of.”

  Hayden opened his mouth in surprise as the other Masters nodded agreement. Hadn’t he just explained to them that he knew nothing about magic? And now they were going to ask him to perform some?

  “This should be interesting,” one of the Masters mumbled, though Hayden wasn’t paying attention to who spoke. All five of them rose from their chairs and motioned for him to follow through a door at the back of the room that he hadn’t noticed until now.

  Hayden ended up walking behind the youngest Master and found himself asking, “What do I have to do in the practical test, sir?”

  The man looked down at him, not unkindly, and answered, “You’ll be placed in a room with different magical tools to determine your major here,” he explained gently. “Whichever you show the most aptitude for will become your primary area of study at Mizzenwald.”

  Hayden didn’t like the thought of his entire future relying on a test that he was utterly unprepared for, but it didn’t look like he had much choice in the matter. He didn’t think this would be a good time to mention that he didn’t even know what the five major arcana were.

  “What happens if I don’t know how to use any of the stuff in there?”

  The young Master gave him a sad smile as he said, “Then we’ll apologize for inconveniencing you and send you home.”

  Hayden was terrified by the time he got to the end of the hall and stood before the closed door. The Masters were all lining up in front of peep-holes carved into the wood-paneled wall, probably so they could watch him while he was inside without interfering.

  “Step inside and look around,” the young one told him. “If you feel a natural pull towards anything in the room, follow your intuition.”

  Hayden nodded in understanding, though he didn’t, and opened the door in front of him.

  The chamber was smaller than he expected, and cluttered. It looked more like a storage room than a testing area. Piles of different colored powders and grains were in the middle of the floor, and he had to walk carefully to avoid stepping in them, suppressing the urge to sneeze. There were tables littered with pieces of wood in various sizes and colors, along with some completed wands. Hayden drifted over to the table and stared down at them, but nothing about them made him feel magically-inclined, so he moved on.

  There were stacks of papers all over the room, though Hayden had no idea which of the arcana they were supposed to belong to. Perhaps this really was a storage room after all….

  He accidentally jostled the corner of a desk and sent a bottle of liquid crashing to the ground, where it shattered. Blue liquid seeped into the nearby stack of papers and Hayden winced and said, “Sorry,” to no one in particular as the paper began to smoke and curl at the edges.

  There were dozens of other phials and flasks of liquid nearby, but they frightened him more than they intrigued him and he hurried past. Charms and talismans dangled on strings from the ceiling, but he didn’t know what they were for and avoided them entirely; one of them looked like it had a human finger-bone in it. He recognized a pack of ordinary drawing chalk on a nearby table and examined it briefly, oddly comforted by the familiar object.

  Mom and I used to draw outside with chalk when it was sunny out.

  A glimmer of green light caught his eye near the room’s only window.

  Moving towards the light, he saw that it was coming from what looked like a large diamond sitting on a stool. Unlike everything else in the room, there was only one of these, and Hayden approached it cautiously, drawn by the multicolored bits of light it cast on the walls in the rays of the sun.

  He picked it up by the edges, surprised by how lightweight it was. Upon closer examination it seemed to be made out of glass instead of diamond, but it was mesmerizing all the same, filling the palm of his hand. Hayden noticed a strange metal band resting nearby and picked it up as well, inspecting the hinges on either side and noting that it made a circlet that was big enough to fit around his head.

  Maybe that’s what it’s meant for.

  Without really knowing why he was doing it, Hayden rested the circlet around his forehead and locked the hinges into place. It fit snuggly. There was a strange piece of metal that hung down over his right eye, forming a smaller circle that he was now looking through, like half a pair of glasses but without a lens.

  Why would anyone wear a metal headband like this?

  There didn’t seem to be anything magical about it, but Hayden suddenly became aware of the glass diamond in his hand. He held it up in front of his face, noting that one side was circular but flat, while the other tapered to a point. Without really thinking about it, he brought the diamond to his face and twisted it into the circular frame over his right eye, pointy-side facing out.

  The effect made him gasp in amazement. All he could see through his right eye was an array of colors, every color in the rainbow, scattered in front of him in the light of the sun. His left eye allowed him to see the room normally and kept him from getting queasy, and Hayden turned slightly to allow more of the sun’s light to strike his face through the strange diamond.

  The colors were mesmerizing, but there was something unsatisfying about them. Touching the frame of the eyepiece, he found that he could spin the entire thing around. The monocle made a satisfying clicking noise as he rotated the glass diamond slowly, watching the pattern of colors shift and change in front of his right eye. He stopped when he found an array that was pleasing to him, shivering from the coolness of the room, which was surprising given how warm it was outside.

  Just as he wished it was warmer in here, something sparked in front of him and he was suddenly facing a wall of fire that hadn’t been there a moment before, blocking the window as the room rapidly filled with smoke and he began to cough.

  He shouted as a stack of papers burne
d up to his left. The door banged open behind him and the Masters flooded in. The Master of Wands grabbed one of the wands from the table and pointed it at the flames, sending jets of water at the base of the fire. The young Master who spoke to him earlier was wearing the same metal headpiece that he was, and had a diamond of his own in the eyepiece that he must have pulled forward since he last saw him. He gave it a quick twist and the fire seemed to draw inwards like a cinched belt until it vanished entirely.

  Hayden coughed from the residual smoke and moved away from the window, pulling off the strange headpiece as he went and stumbling over a pile of pink sand.

  “Well, that was more exciting than usual,” the Master removed the diamond from his eyepiece and tucked it into a slotted belt around his waist, where Hayden saw half a dozen more of them lined up. It was then that Hayden realized his own glass diamond had vanished from the eyepiece entirely, though he had no idea where it went.

  “What in the blazes were you trying to do, boy?” the red-haired Master demanded indignantly, and one of the others smirked at his choice of words.

  “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Hayden haltingly explained. “I just thought the lights looked nice so I put it on, and then I felt cold and the fire just came from nowhere.”

  The Master of Wands gave him a strange look.

  “You were trying to summon heat and you made a wall of fire that large?” He frowned thoughtfully. “Your Focus must need adjustment.”

  Hayden had no idea what a Focus was or why it would need to be adjusted, so he remained silent.

  “Good thing we only keep weak prisms in here; he consumed that one entirely in one go,” the young Master looked more intrigued than upset about it.

  “Does that mean that my major is that—prism thing?” He looked around hopefully, relieved that he had shown any sign of magical prowess at all. Until now he had thought they made a horrible mistake in bringing him here.

  “Oh yes, you’re definitely a prism-user,” he nodded. “It looks like you’ll be seeing a lot more of me this year, so I suppose I should introduce myself properly. I’m Asher, the Master of Prisms at Mizzenwald.”

  “Let’s not be hasty now,” the Master of the piles of colored-sand frowned. “Maybe it would be best to try him on some of the other arcana first.”

  Master Asher scowled.

  “Did you have your eyes closed just now? The boy is a natural prism. Without even knowing what it was he picked it up and assembled the head piece, turned it to the right setting for creating heat, and started an inferno. Burned up half the stacks of scriptures without even trying—I suppose we’ll need to replace those.”

  “And you’re not worried about the obvious repercussions of empowering him with prisms?”

  Asher gave his colleague a flat stare.

  “Are you suggesting that I’m incapable of teaching the boy proper technique?” A long moment of tense silence followed, and Asher eventually ignored the other Master and turned back to Hayden. “Find me tomorrow and we’ll get you fitted for a headpiece of your own. Better get your Foci tested while we’re at it.”

  And with that the Master of Prisms left the room.

  The others followed more slowly, beginning a muttered conversation that Hayden wasn’t close enough to hear. He tried to stay a respectable distance behind them, not knowing where to go from here. It wasn’t until they made it back into the first testing room that the Master of Wands turned to him and said, “Wait here. Ella will show you to the second-year dorms.”

  Hayden assumed that Ella had been sent back to her duties while he was being tested, but she was only waiting around the corner. She spoke briefly with the Master of Wands and then approached him.

  “So you’re a prism,” she greeted him, motioning for him to follow her back down the hall. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. What’s your major?” he asked, relieved that she seemed a little more composed around him than before.

  Maybe she just needed time to get used to my last name.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if everyone was able to adjust to him so quickly.

  “Wands. That’s why Master Willow was talking to me just now; I’ve got work to do in the carving shop tonight.”

  Hayden wasn’t sure if she was teasing him or not.

  “Sorry, but the Master of Wands is named Willow?”

  Ella pursed her lips at him. “Yes, and you’re not the first person to find it funny. I’d advise not joking about it in Master Willow’s hearing unless you want to serve detention chopping wood in the Forest of Illusions.”

  Hayden grimaced at the thought and they began climbing a stairwell to the third floor.

  “What are the other Master’s names? The only one who introduced himself so far is Master Asher.”

  Ella raised an eyebrow in surprise.

  “Most people don’t need to be introduced to the Masters of Mizzenwald…they’re kind of well-known throughout the Nine Lands.” She seemed to grow more comfortable with him the longer they talked, and Hayden was eager to keep her at it as long as possible.

  “Kilgore is the Master of Elixirs, Willow is Wands, Asher is the Prism Master, of course, Sark has Powders, and Reede is the Master of Conjury,” she explained easily. “That’s just the major arcana though; there are other Masters here for the minor arcana as well.”

  Hayden was just thrilled that she had identified the five major arcana for him without having to be asked. Now he wouldn’t feel so stupid trying to ask people about things like ‘piles of colored-sand’.

  He wasn’t keeping track of how many stairs they climbed, but his legs were beginning to ache from the strain. He looked down at the dark-purple velvet runner that had been tamped flat by so many people walking on it over the years.

  “Where are you taking me?” He changed the subject, trying not to slow down or sound winded.

  “Oh, sorry, we’re going to the second-year dorms. Whoever built the school decided that the youngest students should have to climb the most stairs, so be glad you’re being granted second-year status or you’d be on the seventh floor.”

  Hayden’s lips parted in surprise.

  “Does that mean I’ll start in second-year classes?”

  Ella gave him a funny little smile.

  “I keep forgetting how much you don’t know.” She ignored the flush of color that tinged his cheeks. “If you’re twelve, then it makes sense to house you with the other eleven and twelve year olds. Classes are a different story though; you’ve got to be recommended by a Master before you can promote to a higher level, so everyone starts at the beginning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for instance, my major is Wands, so I’m taking the sixth-level class for that even though I’m only in my fifth year. I’m okay with elixirs so I’m in the level-five class for that, but I’m only in the level-three group for Conjury. I never even made it out of Introductory Prisms.”

  Hayden relaxed slightly upon hearing that he wouldn’t be expected to jump right into advanced classes. He was actually relieved to learn that it was a merit-based system, because as long as he worked hard and did his best he should end up in the classes he belonged in.

  “Of course, you’ll be ace in Prisms without even trying, I bet. Oliver has been working his tail off for years at it, and he’s still only in the level-three class. Oh crickets, I’ll bet he hates you right away for being a natural at it,” Ella rambled, turning onto the sixth floor and leading him past a series of doors with little name placards stuck to the outside. It looked like there were four people to a room, and Hayden just hoped they were big rooms or it would be awfully crowded.

  “Why would anyone hate me for being good with prisms? I don’t hate you for being good at wands…” he remarked in alarm.

  Ella chuckled.

  “Natural prisms are extremely rare. There are only a few in all of Junir right now, and it’s super-hard to get the hang of prisms if you aren’t born to it because it’s all to do
with patterns of light,” she explained. “I guess that’s a good thing though, because prisms usually have the most powerful magic, and it would be bad if there were lots of them running around the place.”

  They passed a common area halfway down the hall that was occupied by about a dozen people, and stopped in front of a door with only three name placards on the outside, with little characters depicting each boy’s major beside their names.

  “Well, this is you. The others might not be back from classes until later tonight, but I’ll leave you here to get settled.” Ella turned and looked at him full-on for the first time since they began walking, and a glimpse of worry crossed her features as she remembered who he was.

  “Thanks for showing me to the dorms,” Hayden said awkwardly, reaching for the doorknob, desperate for a moment alone to collect his thoughts.

  “Sure. I’ll see you around.”

  Hayden let out a breath of relief when he closed the door behind him, leaning back against it with his eyes shut as his mind grappled with everything it had absorbed today. He didn’t realize he wasn’t alone until someone said, “You probably don’t want to block the doorway. Kayce is due back soon and he’ll bowl you over.”

  Hayden jumped in surprise and opened his eyes, seeing the room for the first time. It was small but not cramped, with twin sets of bunk beds on opposite walls. Two writing desks were beside each other on each end of the room, one of which was completely clean. There were no windows, but it was well-lit by gas lamps and hand-held orbs of light, and seemed cozy, certainly much nicer than the orphanage.

  A boy about his age was sitting on the bottom bunk bed to his right, leaning against the wall. He had short, sand-colored hair and hazel eyes. It took Hayden a moment to realize that he was stroking the back of a red fox that was curled up beside him.

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was in here.” Hayden took a step away from the door, feeling like an idiot.

  “That’s not surprising since you came in with your eyes shut,” the boy said with good-natured humor. “So I guess you’re our new roommate?”