The Iron Trial Page 19

  The gates were open. They passed under the words Knowledge and Action Are One and the Same and into the caverns of the Magisterium, where a gust of warm air hit Call in the face, presenting him with another problem. Outside, he’d been freezing. In here, as they trudged along toward their rooms, with his jacket zipped to his chin, he was rapidly overheating.

  “So what did Constantine want?” asked Rafe.

  “What?” Jasper sounded distracted.

  “In your story. You said ‘it wasn’t what he wanted.’ The Chaos-ridden. Why not?”

  “Because he wanted his brother back,” Call said. He couldn’t believe Rafe was being so dense. “Not some … zombie.”

  “They’re not like zombies,” Jasper said. “They don’t eat people, the Chaos-ridden. They just don’t have memories or personality. They’re … blank.”

  They were nearly at the Iron Years’ rooms now, and there were braziers spaced out along the corridors, full of fiery glowing stones. Having a huge furry bundle stuffed down his front was making Call’s temperature soar. Also, the wolf was breathing hotly on his neck. In fact, he thought it might be asleep.

  “How do you know so much about the Enemy of Death?” Rafe asked, a flinty edge to his voice.

  Call didn’t hear Jasper’s reply because Tamara was hissing in his ear. “Are you okay?” she demanded. “You’re turning kind of purple.”

  “I’m fine.”

  She gave him the once-over. “Is there something stuffed down your shirt?”

  “My scarf,” he replied, hoping she wouldn’t remember he hadn’t been wearing one.

  She narrowed her brows. “Why would you do that?”

  He shrugged. “I was cold.”

  “Call —”

  But they had reached their rooms. With enormous gratitude, Call tapped the door with his wristband, letting himself and Tamara in. She was in the middle of waving good-bye to the others, when he slammed the door behind them and staggered toward his bedroom.

  “Call!” Tamara said. “Don’t you think we should — I don’t know, talk? About Aaron?”

  “Later,” Call gasped, half falling into his bedroom and kicking the door shut. He collapsed onto his back, just as the wolf popped its head out of the collar of his jacket and looked around.

  Freed, it seemed wildly excited to bound around his room, nails loud on the stone. Call prayed Tamara wouldn’t hear as the wolf sniffed its way under Call’s bed, around his wardrobe, and on top of the pajamas he’d tossed on the floor when he’d been woken up earlier.

  “You need a bath,” he told the wolf. It paused its rolling, legs in the air, and wagged its tail, tongue lolling from a corner of its mouth. As he looked down at its strange, shifting eyes, he remembered Jasper’s words.

  They don’t have memories, or personality. They’re … blank.

  But the wolf had plenty of personality. Which meant that Jasper didn’t understand as much about what it meant to be Chaos-ridden as he thought he did. Maybe that was how they were when the Enemy made them, maybe they even stayed blank throughout their lives, but the wolf pup had been born with chaos inside of it. It had grown up that way. It wasn’t what they thought it was.

  His father’s words came back to him, making him shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

  You don’t know what you are.

  Pushing that thought away, Call climbed into bed, kicked off his boots, and pressed his face against the pillow. The wolf jumped up next to him, smelling like pine needles and freshly turned earth. For a moment, Call wondered if the wolf was going to bite him. But then it settled next to him, circling twice before throwing its little body down against his stomach. With the warm weight of the Chaos-ridden wolf next to him, Call dropped immediately into sleep.

  CALL DREAMED THAT he was trapped under the weight of an enormous fuzzy pillow. He woke up groggily, waving his arms, and almost thwacked the wolf pup, who was curled on his chest and staring at him with huge, entreating, fire-colored eyes.

  The full, crashing realization of what he had done hit Call, and he rolled out from under the wolf so fast that he slid off the bed and hit the floor. The pain of smacking his knees on the cold stone shocked him completely awake. He found he was kneeling, staring directly into the eyes of the wolf pup, who had crawled to the edge of the bed and was gazing at him.

  “Mruf,” the wolf pup said.

  “Shhhh,” Call hissed. His heart was racing. What had he done? Had he actually smuggled a Chaos-ridden animal into the Magisterium? He might as well have taken off all his clothes, covered himself in lichen, and run through the caves yelling, EXPEL ME! BIND MY MAGIC! SEND ME HOME!

  The pup whimpered. Its eyes were spinning like pinwheels, fixed on Call. Its tongue darted out and then vanished again.

  “Oh, man,” Call muttered. “You’re hungry, aren’t you? Okay. Let me get you something to eat. Stay there. Yeah. Right there.”

  He stood up and blinked at the windup clock on the nightstand. Eleven in the morning and the alarm hadn’t gone off yet. Weird. He opened his bedroom door quietly — and was instantly faced with Tamara, already in her uniform, eating breakfast at their common table. It was a spread of deliciously normal-looking food: toast and butter, sausages, bacon, scrambled eggs, and orange juice.

  “Is Aaron back?” Call asked, carefully shutting the bedroom door behind him and leaning against it in what he hoped was a nonchalant pose.

  Tamara swallowed a mouthful of toast and shook her head. “No. Celia came by before and said classes were canceled for today. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “I guess I’d better change,” Call said, reaching out to grab a sausage off the table.

  Tamara stared at him. “Are you okay? You’re acting kind of strange.”

  “I’m fine.” Call grabbed another sausage. “Back in a minute.”

  He darted into his bedroom, where the wolf pup was lying on a pile of clothes, waving its paws in the air. It bounded to its feet as soon as it saw Call, and jogged over. Call held his breath as he offered it a sausage. The wolf inhaled the food, gulping it down in a single bite. He gave it the second sausage, watching with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as that disappeared just as fast. Licking its muzzle, the wolf waited expectantly.

  “Uh,” said Call, “I don’t have any more. Just wait and I’ll get you something else.”

  Throwing on a fresh uniform should have taken seconds, but not with the wolf bounding all over the room. Revitalized by sausages, it stole Call’s boot and dragged it under the bed by the laces, chewing on the leather. Then, once he’d gotten his boot back, it grabbed hold of the hem of his pants and played tug-of-war.

  “Stop,” Call begged, pulling, but that only seemed to make the wolf more gleeful. He bounded in front of Call, eager to play.

  “I’ll be right back,” Call promised. “Just be quiet. And then I’ll sneak you out for a walk.”

  The wolf cocked its head and went back to rolling on its back. Call took that moment to leave the room, shutting the door quickly behind him.

  “Ah, good,” Master Rufus said, turning away from his perusal of the far wall to face Call. “You’re ready. We have to go to a meeting.”

  Call nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of him. Tamara, brushing toast crumbs off her uniform, looked at Call oddly.

  “But I didn’t get to eat breakfast,” Call protested, looking over at the remaining food. If he could just smuggle a few more fistfuls of sausage into his bedroom somehow, he could get enough to tide the wolf over until he got back from whatever this meeting was. At his other school, they were mostly hour-long lectures about how bad things could happen to you if you did bad stuff, or what was wrong about bullying, or, at least once, the horrors of bedbugs. He didn’t think this was going to be like that, but he hoped it would be over fast. He was pretty sure the wolf would need to go for a walk really, really soon. Otherwise — well, Call was better off not even contemplating that.

  “Yo
u ate two sausages before,” Tamara said unhelpfully. “It’s not like you’re starving.”

  “Did you indeed,” said Master Rufus drily. “In that case, come along, Callum. There will be some members of the Assembly of Mages in attendance. We don’t want to be late, since I am sure you can guess what it will be about.”

  Call narrowed his eyes. “Where’s Aaron?” he asked, but Master Rufus didn’t answer, just led them out into the hallway where they joined the stream of people flooding through the caverns. Call didn’t think he’d ever seen so many people in the halls of the school. Master Rufus fell in behind a group of older kids and their Masters, who were heading in a southerly direction.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Call asked Tamara.

  She shook her head. She looked more serious than she’d been in weeks. Call remembered her the night before, grabbing his arms and trying to drag him away from the Chaos-ridden wolf. She’d risked her life for his. He’d never had a friend like her before. Never had friends like her or Aaron. Now that he had them, he didn’t know quite what to do with them.

  They found themselves in a circular auditorium with stone benches rising up on all sides from a round stage. Along the far back, Call saw a group of men and women in olive green uniforms and guessed they were the Assembly members Master Rufus had been talking about. Rufus led them to a place down in front and there, finally, they saw Aaron.

  He was in the front row, sitting next to Master North, just far enough away so that Call couldn’t talk to him without shouting. He could really see only the back of Aaron’s head, his feathery blond hair sticking up. He looked like he always did.

  One of the Makaris. A Makar. It seemed like such an ominous title. Call thought of the way shadows had seemed to wrap around the wolf pack the night before and how horrified Aaron had looked after it was all over.

  Chaos wants to devour.

  It didn’t seem like the kind of power someone like Aaron, whom everybody liked and who liked everybody, ought to have. It should belong to someone like Jasper, who would probably be super into bossing around the darkness and stuffing weird animals full of chaos magic.

  Master Rufus got to his feet and ascended to the stage, moving to the center to stand at the podium. “Students of the Magisterium and members of the Assembly,” he said. His dark eyes swept the room. Call felt as if his gaze lingered on Call and Tamara for a moment before it moved on. “You all know our history. There have been Magisteriums since the time of our founder, Phillippus Paracelsus. They exist to teach young mages to control their powers and to foster a community of learning, magic, and peace, as well as creating a force with which to defend our world.

  “You all know the story of the Enemy of Death. Many of you lost family members in the Great Battle or in the Cold Massacre. You all know of the Treaty as well — the agreement between the Assembly and Constantine Madden, which ensures that if we do not attack him or his forces, he will not attack us.

  “Many of you,” Master Rufus added, his dark eyes sweeping the room, “also believe that the Treaty is wrong.”

  Murmuring began in the audience. Tamara’s gaze snapped toward where the Assembly members sat, her expression anxious, and Call realized suddenly that two of the Assembly members were Tamara’s parents. He’d seen them before at the Iron Trial. Now they sat ramrod straight, their expressions stony as they regarded Rufus. Call could feel the disapproval rolling off them in waves.

  “The Treaty means that we must trust the Enemy of Death — trust that he will not attack us, that he will not use this hiatus from battle to build up his forces. But the Enemy cannot be trusted.”

  There was a hum of noise among the Assembly members. Tamara’s mother had her hand on her husband’s arm; he was trying to rise to his feet. Tamara looked frozen.

  Master Rufus raised his voice. “We cannot trust the Enemy. I say this as one who knew Constantine Madden when he was a student at the Magisterium. We have turned a blind eye to the increase in attacks by elementals — one last night, barely a few feet from the Magisterium’s own doors — and to the attacks on our supply lines and safe houses. We have turned this blind eye not because we believe in Constantine Madden’s promises, but because the Enemy is a Makar — one of the few among our kind ever born to control the magic of the void. On the field of battle, his Chaos-ridden defeated the only other Makar of our time. We have always known that without a Makar, we are vulnerable to the Enemy, and since the death of Verity Torres, we have been waiting for another to be born.”

  A lot of the other students were sitting forward now. It was clear that while some of them had heard what had happened the previous night outside the gates, or knew because they had been there, a lot of them were just starting to guess at what Rufus was about to say. Call could see a bunch of Silver Year students leaning over toward Alex, one of them tugging on his sleeve, mouthing, Do you know what this is about? He shook his head at them. The Assembly members, meanwhile, were buzzing among themselves. Tamara’s father was sitting back down, but his expression was thunderous.

  “I am happy to announce,” Rufus said, “that we have discovered the existence of a Makar, here at the Magisterium. Aaron Stewart, will you please rise?”

  Aaron stood. He was dressed in his black uniform, and the skin under his eyes looked bruised with exhaustion. Call wondered if they’d let him sleep at all. He thought about how small Aaron had seemed the night before, being led away from the hill. He looked slight now, even though he was one of the taller kids in Iron Year.

  There were several audible gasps in the audience and a lot of whispering. After looking around nervously for a moment, Aaron started to sit back down, but Master North shook his head and made a gesture indicating that Aaron was to remain standing.

  Tamara had her hands in fists in her lap and was looking worriedly between Master Rufus and her parents, silent and thin-lipped. Call had never been so glad not to be the center of attention. It was like all the people in the room were devouring Aaron with their eyes. Only Tamara seemed distracted, probably worried that her family looked about ready to run up onstage and beat Master Rufus with a stalactite.

  One of the Assembly members had come down from the top bench. He led Aaron up onto the stage. When Aaron spotted Tamara and Call, he grinned a little, raising his eyebrows as if to say This is crazy.

  Call felt the corners of his mouth lift in response.

  Master Rufus left the stage, going to sit beside Master North in the space Aaron left. Master North leaned over and whispered something to Master Rufus. Rufus nodded. Of all the people in the room, Master North seemed to be the only one who didn’t look at all surprised by Master Rufus’s speech.

  “The Assembly of Mages would like to formally acknowledge Aaron Stewart as having an affinity with chaos magic. He is our Makar!” The Assembly member smiled, but Call could tell his smile was strained. Probably he was biting back whatever he wanted to say to Master Rufus; none of them seemed to have liked his speech. Applause broke out at his words, though, led by Tamara and Call, who stamped their feet and whistled like they were at a hockey game. The applause went on until the Assembly member gestured them to silence.

  “Now,” he said, “it is to be hoped that all of you understand the importance of the Makaris. Aaron has a responsibility to the larger world. He alone can undo the damage that the self-styled Enemy of Death has wrought, free the land from the threat of Chaos-ridden animals, and protect us from the shadows. He must make certain that the Treaty continues to be upheld so that peace can prevail.” At this, the Assembly member allowed himself a dark look in Master Rufus’s direction.

  Aaron swallowed visibly. “Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.”

  “But no difficult path is walked alone,” the Assembly member went on, looking out at the rest of them. “It’s going to be the responsibility of all of your fellow students to look out for you, to support you, and to defend you. It can be a heavy burden to be a Makar, but he won’t have to bear it alone,
will he?” On the final two words, the Assembly member’s voice rose.

  The audience applauded again, this time for themselves, as a promise. Call clapped as hard as he could.

  Reaching into one of the pockets of his uniform, the Assembly member took out a dark stone, holding it before Aaron. “We’ve been hanging on to this for more than a decade, and it is my great honor to be the one to give it to you. You will recognize this as an affinity stone, one you earn when you gain Mastery of an element. Yours is black onyx, for the void.”

  Call leaned forward to get a better look, and his heart began to thud dully. Because there, cupped in the Assembly member’s palm, was a stone that was the twin of the one in the wristband his father had sent to Master Rufus. Which meant that the wristband had once belonged to a Makar. There had been only two born in his father’s lifetime, only two possible Makaris that the wristband might have belonged to — Verity Torres or Constantine Madden.

  He stopped clapping. His hands fell into his lap.

  AFTER THE CEREMONY, Aaron was swept quickly away by the Assembly. Master Rufus rose again to announce that they were going to have the day off. Everyone seemed even more excited about this than they were about Aaron being a Makar. The students immediately scattered, most heading for the Gallery, leaving Call and Tamara to walk back alone toward their rooms, along twisting caverns lit by glowing crystals.

  Tamara chatted excitedly most of the way back, clearly relieved that her parents hadn’t gotten into a visible disagreement with Master Rufus, not seeming to notice at first that Call was responding mostly with grunts and noncommittal noises. She clearly believed that having Aaron be the Makar was going to be amazing for all three of them. She said they shouldn’t worry about politics, they should think of how they were going to get loads of special treatment and all the best missions. She was halfway through telling Call how she was going to get to fire-walk a volcano someday when she finally broke off and put her hands on her hips. “Why are you being such a lump?” she demanded.