Aldwyn's Academy (8 page)

Now all she felt was a cold, empty fear.

“Oh, Mordenkainen,” she whispered.

Her eyes darted frantically around her room and finally fell on a sheet of vellum tacked to her wall next to the broken window.

She reached out and her fingers trembled.

She realized what was holding the note in place and jerked her hand back in horror.

It was a blackened finger bone. She could feel the magic radiating off of it.

“Mordenkainen,” she whispered again.

She reached out with one hand and pulled the bone from out of the wood and pulled the vellum document down.

At the top of the paper there was an etching of a snake coiled with its tail in its mouth. She scanned the note, recognizing the writing instantly from the earlier note.

She shuddered, remembering the rotting hand as it slid back through her ring gate.

Helene crumpled the note, making an angry fist out of her hand.

She felt ready to scream, but then she thought about Mordenkainen in the grip of that awful hand, and all her strength leaked from her body.

Her first thought was to run to Lowadar or Professor Fife, but she realized immediately that whoever had Mordenkainen obviously had spies within the school watching her every move.

It was because of exactly this threat that she had worked so hard to keep her secret. In the end it hadn’t mattered, she realized. Someone had found out and taken Mordenkainen.

She thought about using her crystal ball to contact her mother, then instantly discounted it. She knew exactly what her mother would say: “Anika never lost her familiar. Why can’t you be more like your sister?”

Tears formed in her eyes and she angrily blinked them away.

She would take care of this herself.

She didn’t need her mother—or Anika. She could take any risk, dare any danger to see to Mordenkainen’s safety. Angrily, she brushed her arm across her face, drying her tears.

She knew she was walking into a trap, but she was willing to bargain if it meant securing the falcon’s freedom.

For now the life of her familiar turned on her ability to keep a secret. Dinner was coming soon and she would have to alert the academy’s seneschal to her broken window before her roommate came in and became alarmed. She would make up a lie easily enough.

Then, after the meal, while the school slept unaware, she would slip out and make her way through the Alchemical Gardens.

Winterlike weather had effectively cut the separate areas of the gardens off from each other, making movement there less obtrusive than it might have been during spring.

The dryads and pixies would each be sticking close to the magical enclaves of temperate weather they had created for their habitats, and most of the wild animals, such as deer and other peaceful forest denizens, had already retreated for the season.

Her movements would go unobserved unless the school dragon, Old Whiskers, was roused among the crags that formed a natural barrier between the school and the Dark Forest.

It was a risk she would have to take.

If there was one small spot of good news in all of this, then it was that at least she wouldn’t be forced to see that idiot Dorian tonight.

Despite herself, Helene smirked. Professor Fife had given him enough extra spellwork to last a month.

She grabbed her haversack off the shelf in her closet and started stuffing it with supplies.

“I’m coming, Mordenkainen,” Helene promised.

Her night had just begun.

D
orian came awake with a jerk, heart racing.

“Are you alright?” Caleb asked from the bottom bunk.

The half-orc looked up from reading
A Practical Guide to Wizardry
. He had copies of the other practical guides strewn across his bedspread.

Embarrassed, Dorian turned back to his desk, where he’d drifted off doing his punishment studies.

“Yes,” he muttered. “I just had a nightmare.”

He was too ashamed to say anymore, to tell of the twisted snakes and dire wolves tearing his limbs.

“Fife can do that to you,” Caleb said without looking up.

“You got that right. For a moment, when she first opened the door, I was more frightened of her than I was of the wolves this morning.”

“After throwing Stench Stones at Fife, it was probably only the fact those dires attacked you that kept you from
being expelled,” Caleb pointed out. “Bit embarrassing for the academy.” The half-orc changed his voice into a mock soothing parody of a carnival huckster selling fake potions. “Come to Aldwyns, learn magic, get eaten by monsters.” Caleb chuckled. “Not exactly the slogan Lowadar’s looking for.”

“The fact you switched out our haversacks so the professor didn’t find the rest of the banned items from Maverick’s helped a lot too,” Dorian said. “Thanks, again.”

Caleb blushed, turning his olive-tinged skin a mottled color. He pretended to study his book.

Fife’s punishment was severe, and now Dorian realized how impossible his life at the academy was going to be with Helene as his mentor.

“I wish I could take it back,” he continued. “The way I wish I could take back my lame attempt at a Magic Missile that spoiled my mother’s spell.” He let out a heavy breath. “She always says I do things without thinking. And I always pay the price for it.”

Once, three days after his father had left to run down a particularly odious band of goblin insurgents on the borderlands, Dorian used his skill at rock throwing to shatter every window in the mill house just outside the castle.

He didn’t know why he’d done it, just that all that breaking glass had made him feel better.

“Yeah, well throwing those stones was pretty stupid,” Caleb agreed. “But seeing the look on Helene’s face as the Stench Stones sprayed her …”

Dorian grinned in spite of himself. “Yeah,” he nodded. “I guess it was pretty funny.”

“Funny?” Caleb began to giggle. “It was hysterical!”

The two boys burst out laughing.

Dorian glanced back at his desk and his smile faded.

“I guess that look was about the only thing that was good about today. Here I am, spending my first evening at school in my dorm room copying one spell after another from this school book until my hand cramps, while everyone else is stuffing themselves in the dining hall and playing games.”

“That reminds me,” Caleb said. “I brought you something back from dinner.” He reached into his haversack and pulled out a miniature chocolate dragon. “They had these on top of the cakes for dessert. I swiped one for you.”

“It looks just like the statue in the courtyard!”

Dorian eagerly reached for the chocolate. As he did so he saw how thick and strong the half-orc’s fingers seemed against the chocolate. The hand looked so inhuman it almost killed his appetite.

He caught himself and took the candy. There was an obvious reason Caleb was in here with him instead of in the Great Hall mixing with the other students, he realized.

“Thanks,” he said in a quieter voice.

He quickly tucked into the dessert, but Dorian realized it couldn’t make up for seeing the disapproval in Lowadar’s eyes during his lecture.

It was still only his first day and he had already gotten himself into serious trouble.

I will show him, he vowed to himself. I do belong here. I am my mother’s son.

He went back to his homework, and Caleb continued his reading.

His hand began to cramp again after awhile from copying spells, but that was the least of his concerns, he knew. He stopped writing and shook his hand out.

He noticed something odd.

He was
getting
the magic. It was coming to him and even in his stubbornness he couldn’t deny it. The runes and script danced and blazed in his mind as he copied out the incantations.

He wrote a spell and knew the spell. He had the talent and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t anymore.

But there was something else that he noticed as well.

Of all the different kinds of spells he was forced to copy, a few seemed excitingly easy, and they were not the ones from the information branch either.

Fire, ice, and stone casting—the elemental spells of destruction magic flowed the most uninhibited into his mind.

He couldn’t help but wonder what his mother would say if she knew, and he realized as scared as Professor Fife had made him, he still didn’t want to see his mother’s reaction if he told her he didn’t think he was destined to follow in her specialty.

He sat up in his chair and stretched until his spine made little popping sounds. He twisted slowly around in his chair and regarded the room. On the bunk above where Caleb sat reading, Dorian’s school supplies were spilled out across his covers.

Next to Dorian’s pillow lay a pair of black slippers with somewhat eerie icons of silver spiders embroidered on them. Slippers of Spider Climbing would allow him to run up walls as nimbly as any arachnid. And the Boots of Speed sitting next to them, the leather new and soft, would let him cover vast distances in moments.

Beside his footwear lay his belt, the useable leather strap adorned with a functional buckle and several folds of light chain to hang accoutrements from.

His wand lay there as well, sitting next to some exotic-looking spectacles. The card attached identified them as Goggles of Minute Seeing.

Caleb stirred on his bed, shifting his reading material.

It was chilly in the room. Dorian had the window open a crack despite the cold because he needed the fresh air to help him keep his focus.

“Do you think they were after your mother?” Caleb asked out of the blue.

“What?”

“The dire wolves,” Caleb clarified. He set his open scroll down. “You and your mother weren’t the only ones to arrive along that road. Your mother is an important woman. I’m just saying coincidence is something that doesn’t happen often in magic.”

“What?” Dorian demanded. “You think someone was trying to get my mother?”

“Does she have enemies?”

Dorian didn’t know what to say.

The truth was, she did have enemies. Plenty in fact.

Father and she had spoiled more than one evil plot against the kingdom. There were also the insurgents on the borderlands, and the politics of court could be scary all on their own.

“I guess.…” his voice trailed off as he remembered the dark figure in the woods, the one that had moved upright and stayed beyond the trees. “Can someone control dire wolves like that? Get them to attack?”

“Sure,” Caleb admitted. “Anyone evil, I guess. A sorcerer maybe. Dires are trainable and respect anything stronger than them.”

Again Dorian recalled the image of the shadowy figure he had seen in the forrest during the attack. He didn’t know why but he couldn’t bring himself
to mention it. It was all too confusing to share at the moment.

He sighed.

Right now a panoply of spell components he’d been instructed to catalog lay spread across his desk. It was deadly dull work, though he felt like he’d already learned how to mix a dozen practical magic applications.

He went back to work

Aldwyns grew quiet as the night grew later.

Outside his window, the moon rose, shedding a cold, pale light that draped the academy grounds in thick, impenetrable shadows.

The ancient stone building was so still it felt like he and Caleb could have been the only ones alive for miles in any direction.

He inhaled some of the bitter chill air and felt his heart beat faster in response to the frigid oxygen. Just as suddenly his heart stopped cold, lurching so hard in the cage of his chest that it hurt.

The howl of a wolf rang out, the lone note climbing and climbing then hanging in the dark night for an impossible moment, shrill and mournful.

The hair on the back of Dorian’s neck rose and goose bumps lifted on the skin of his arms. He was instantly back in his sleigh carriage and seeing the darting forms, hearing their snarls, seeing the blood on the snow.

The long, lonesome howl echoed out of the dark forest surrounding Aldwyns and a chorus of howls answered it from every point of the compass across the plateau. Dorian felt a tightness in his chest as he realized the academy, the village even, was surrounded.

He rose, almost unwillingly, from his seat and leaned in toward the open window.

The fear of what he was going to see when he looked out was so thick and heavy it seemed tangible, like he was pushing his way through cold, murky water.

He remembered his nightmare of just an hour ago. Then the twisted, wailing face of the ghost on the battlements flashed in his mind and he knew if the undead thing appeared here, now, there was no Lowadar to dispel it.

He reached the edge of the mullioned window and looked out toward the dark shadows of the Alchemical Gardens behind the dormitory.