Forest of Illusions (The Broken Prism) (28 page)

“Good,” Hayden said bitterly, hating the sorcerers for invading their territory and bringing all of this
nastiness upon them.

“What happened after the last crystal went down?”

“This stupid monkey kept trying to get my attention, wanting me to follow it into the woods. I was completely exhausted—even my Source was mostly drained—and all I wanted to do was rest for a few minutes, but I finally let it lead me away.” He frowned thoughtfully. “It brought me to the beach, and I saw the Magistra in the water, bringing her three warships full of sorcerers in faster.”

“It figures that the reinforcements were due in that day,” Kilgore grimaced. “How many did she have?”

“I guessed somewhere between three-and-six-hundred,” Hayden shrugged. “Enough to destroy us all and wreck the mainland if they docked, at least. There was no time to get anyone, and even though my correctors were gone I wanted to try starting a fire on the boats to sink them and slow down the sorcerers until I could go get help.”

“There wasn’t a lot of help to be had at that point,” Kilgore grunted. “Fresh troops outnumbering us ten-to-one, we’d have been lucky to escape with our lives.”

Hayden shrugged and said, “The first two times I tried casting nothing happened. Then the Magistra saw me, and she was furious. I knew she was going to kill me, and she raised her hand to cast something so I panicked and tried to burn the middle boat again.”

“Let me guess, third time was the charm?” Asher asked dryly.

“There was a huge surge from my Source, and then the whole boat just exploded. It deafened me and blinded me, and then the two boats beside it got caught up in it and they blew up too. Then I don’t remember much, except for a reindeer and an otter dragging me through some foul water and trying to drown me…”

“Foul water?” Asher cocked a skeptical eyebrow at him. “Why would magical creatures be trying to drown you?
They hate the sorcerers as much as we do for invading their home and torturing them to death for their magic.”

“I don’t know, but it made all my wounds burn except for my hands. They just felt cold.”

“Ah, clever.” Asher tilted his head in admiration. “They must have been dragging you through Mystkelp, a rare but powerful substance that is probably one of the only things that would remove the siglas from your hands. If they hadn’t done that for you, you’d likely be branded with them forever.”

Hayden shuddered and looked down at his unblemished hands, suddenly okay with the near-drowning experience.

“Well, now we know who caused the Forest to move locations,” Kilgore sighed. “I believe Reede owes me fifty credits for betting against it.”

“You think it was me that made the whole Forest of Illusions move?” Hayden asked incredulously.

Asher snorted. “Hayden, the Forest isn’t stable on the best of days—you’ve seen how time and space are fluid inside of it. It moves every ten years or so just as a matter of practice.” He focused his gaze on him. “You created an enormous magical explosion, inside of a magically-unstable forest, full of magical creatures and beings who were dueling with magic at the time…and you’re surprised that you rendered the place unstable enough to jump locations?”

Hayden reddened in embarrassment.

“Well, that certainly clears that up.” Kilgore pushed away from the wall. “I’m going to collect my money from Reede before we get back to Mizzenwald and he can claim he’s forgotten our bet.”

“Oh, right, speaking of Mizzenwald…” Hayden brightened suddenly. “Am I still expelled and under arrest?”

The three Masters looked collectively alarmed and Asher said, “Sorry, what was that about being expelled and arrested?”

“Um…didn’t you hear about that?” Hayden winced. “My face has been all over wanted posters throughout at least
Junir and Amvale; I’m not sure about the other lands.”

“What in the world are you under arrest for?” Asher demanded.

“Let’s see…I think theft, destruction of school property, punching a Fia in the face, attempted murder on another Fia, and fleeing arrest…” he caught the aghast looks on their faces and said, “It sounds worse than it really was.”

“It sounds pretty bad…” Master Willow countered dryly.

Asher rubbed his temples and said, “Didn’t I specifically tell you not to start trouble with the Fias? And you strike one and attempt to murder another?”

“I wasn’t trying to kill him!” Hayden protested loudly. “I didn’t mean to blow up that part of the school while he was standing there, but luckily he ducked…”

“You
blew up part of the school?
” Master Willow said through clenched teeth, face reddening.

“Never mind that, which
Fia were you foolish enough to hit in the face?” Kilgore interrupted.

“Um, Eldridge, sir.”

Asher closed his eyes like he was praying for strength and Master Kilgore leaned back against the wall and said, “When you decide to start trouble, you really go for the grand effect.”

“Are you sure you couldn’t think of any worse crimes to commit?” Asher asked sardonically. “I suppose it’s lucky you weren’t standing near the hearth or you might have lit him on fire, or perhaps burgled his house, drowned some local orphans…”

“He was—”

Master Willow raised a hand to cut off Hayden’s furious protests and said, “I suppose you’d better go back to the beginning on that as well, so we know just how big of a hole you’ve dug yourself into and whether it’s possibly to pry you back out of it.”

Hayden scowled.

“
The Fias showed up and immediately put a ban on materials unless you filled out their stupid forms. They took all the fun out of Mizzenwald, but I was following your orders and being good—until Bonk fell ill. He started having nightmares and stopped eating properly; he never wanted to play anymore. I took him to Torin but he didn’t know what was wrong—he said a lot of familiars were feeling off because of the war in the Forest of Illusions. The Fias started telling us how there’d been word from the front, and that you all were winning again, and everyone was cheering up at school.”

Master Willow raised his eyebrows and said, “That’s a bold move on the part of the High Mayor. He must have been hoping to buy time until he figured out for certain whether the war was won or lost.”

“We all believed them, but then Bonk got even sicker and one day he fell out of the sky. I rushed him to Torin again and he realized that Bonk was feeling Cinder’s pain through some shared magical bond they have because they’re friends. He said Cinder must be in agony if Bonk was feeling it clear back at Mizzenwald. I thought…Cinder’s much stronger than any of us, and if he was suffering, then you all must be dead.”

“There were times I
felt dead,” Kilgore grumbled.

“I knew Bonk would die of exhaustion if things kept up the way they were, and that the
Fias had been lying to us, so I confronted them in the middle of dinner.”

Asher rolled his eyes an
d said, “Of course you did, in front of a maximum number of witnesses. I believe I can see why this went downhill fast…”

“Didn’t you make a resolution this year to be less volatile to
wards authority figures?” Master Willow reminded him dryly.

“Well yeah, but I mostly meant with you all, and apparently I’m a work in progress.” He shrugged unrepentantly.

“I suppose you strolled into the dining hall and called them bold-faced liars?” Asher sighed in exasperation when Hayden nodded agreement. “I need to talk to my father about when he tells you bad news. He should know better than to let you run off after you learn all your teachers are dead.”

“He was a wreck because
he
thought you were dead too,” Hayden argued, which shut Asher up and made him look somber once more. “Anyway, I yelled at them until Eldridge had his friends put me in Binders and drag me off.”

“I’m surprised you let them
Bind you again,” Willow commented. “I would think you’d be much more likely to fight at that point.”

Hayden stared down at his hands and said, “I would have,
but Sark yelled at me not to, and for some reason I listened to him. They dragged me off into a room on the ground floor with no furniture or windows and left me alone to stew for a while. If it makes you feel any better, I had time to think through all of the lectures each of you would have given me if you had been there.”

Asher snorted and said, “Did the words ‘colossal idiocy’ come to mind at any point?”

“Yes, more than once.” Hayden scowled.

“Good, then you about summed up my lecture.”

“Then Eldridge came in to expel me and mock me, and I got pretty mouthy with him,” Hayden continued, not bothering to look at their faces because he knew what expressions they’d be gracing him with. “He threatened to send my friends off to the Forest to die—”

“At which
point you punched him in the face, because you have never been able to abide having your friends threatened,” Asher supplied helpfully, and Hayden nodded.

“If he truly threatened to send children off to die out of spite, we can use that in our case against him,” Master Willow said pragmatically.
“At least Kirius had the good sense to prevent Hayden from fighting in the dining hall.”

“Then he left me alone again, until Tess and Zane broke into the room to see me. They knew I was planning to go to the Forest to see if I could at least save Cinder and Bonk, and they wanted to come with me. Then Oliver showed up and demanded to come along too, since he had been named
as head of the Trout estate, except he refused to open the letter so he didn’t have to admit his mom was dead. He wanted to find out what happened to her, so the four of us broke out and left school. I stopped by Laurren’s weapons cache to load up before we went, and I grabbed the Absorber with my power in it on the way out because I didn’t want them to have anything of mine.

“One of the
Fias tried to grab me and I swung the Absorber at him without thinking, but luckily he ducked and it hit the wall instead. It blew up and I got away in all the confusion, and the four of us started walking towards the Forest.”

Kilgore sighed and said, “I believe i
t’s time to call in some favors. Excuse me.” Then he walked off.

Master Willow followed him out the door with only a, “Perhaps they need to be reminded that Hayden is a war hero who saved us from falling under northern rule.”

A war hero,
Hayden thought glumly to himself, at first pleased but then grim, thinking of what it had cost in lives to attain that title.

17

Zane Wins a Bet

For several minutes after the other Masters left, Hayden and Asher sat in total silence, each lost in their own thoughts. If not for the door creaking open and Cinder walking in, they might have stayed that way for the rest of the day.

“Cinder—there you are,” Hayden brightened marginally, eyeing the dark purple dragonling as it approached him. “I’ve been worried about you ever since Bonk got sick.”

Given that he’d been tormented for months, Cinder actually looked pretty
good, almost fully healed. He was obviously still tired or he would have flown instead of walking, but otherwise he seemed alright. The dragonling acknowledged Hayden’s words with a gentle head-bump to his leg—a rare sign of affection from the typically-haughty familiar.

Bonk cuffed his friend lightly with one wing, and C
inder stood on the edge of Hayden’s mattress, as it was the only bit of furniture in the room that he could attempt to perch regally on.

“How are you feeling?” Master Asher addressed Hayden gently, still sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out in front of him.

“I’m still pretty sore, and my arms hurt a bit where they’re bandaged, but otherwise not bad.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” the Prism Master corrected him mildly.

Hayden shrugged noncommittally and said, “I don’t know.” Another long minute of silence passed before he added, “Willow called me a war hero.”

“And so you are,” Asher agreed sympathetically
, clearly knowing why that title weighed on his conscience.

“I don’t feel like one,” Hayden admitted. “I feel like an idiot who almost led his friends into total disaster after screwing things up
royally at Mizzenwald. I feel like a killer—like my father, even though I’m trying so hard not to be like him.”

Asher didn’t look surprised by this revelation in the slightest.

“You’re no different than any of the old heroes you’ve heard about in school. Althea the Bold, Garin the Mighty, they also stumbled through to success with a combination of dumb luck and favorable circumstances.”

“It sounded a lot cooler when it was happening to them though,” Hayden mumbled dispiritedly.
“Reading about all the people who died helping them…it somehow meant less than when it happened to me, like they’re less real or something.”

“If it’s any consolation, your intentions
for entering the fight were undoubtedly much better than your father’s ever were, which counts for quite a bit.”

Hayden picked moodily at the edge of one
of his bandages. “I know, but it doesn’t feel that way right now. I didn’t really want to kill anyone, and I wiped out hundreds of people with a single spell. Dead is dead, whether or not I killed them out of malice or self-defense.”

“That’s why we Masters were trying so hard to keep all of you students away from the fighting,” Asher sighed. “No child or young adult should have to bear that burden—the burden of deciding whether to kill or be killed.” He paused for a moment. “I suppose there’s always the miniscule chance that some of them survived.”

“No,” Hayden said without hesitation, shaking his head. “I know they’re all gone, except for maybe the Magistra. Some part of me knew it was going to happen since before we even got to the campsite.”

“Oh?” Asher raised his eyebrows with interest.

“I saw it happen before it did—only I didn’t understand it at the time,” Hayden explained. “There was an illusion that came to me while Oliver and I were walking through the woods; I was sitting on a huge heap of corpses like it was a throne, but I was also crying.” He frowned. “It was showing me the future. At the time I didn’t understand how it was possible to be victorious and miserable at the same time. Now I do.”

Bonk cuffed Hayden lightly with one wing, over and over again, almost like he was trying to pat him consolingly.

“Yes, there is rarely glory in such a victory,” Asher agreed heavily.

Hayden changed the subject. “Has there been any sign of the
Magistra in the Forest since then? What about other sorcerers—are they all gone from our continent now?”

“It’s been kind of hard to verify, as the Forest has moved us all away from the coastline—though I believe we’ve rounded up most of the sorcerers
who were still in the Forest of Illusions with us. If the Magistra is still taking refuge somewhere in there, I believe the magical creatures within will remedy the problem for us; they didn’t appreciate being enslaved and having the magic drained out of them any more than the rest of us.”

Hayden was all too familiar with the power and intellige
nce of the magical creatures that dwelt in the Forest of Illusions, and almost pitied the Magistra if she was still alive.

“Do you think they’ll send more boats over
to fight us?”

“I doubt it—or if they do, certainly not for a long time. They have to bring up a new
Magistra and rebuild their numbers before they’d attempt another attack on us, and now that we know to expect their trick with the Suppressors, they’ll need to develop a new plan if they hope to defeat us on our home turf. Add that to the fact that the Forest is no longer easily accessible from the coast—they’d have to make it hundreds of miles inland to even reach it—and I think we’re safe for a while.”

Hayden nodded gratefully.
That’s something, at least.

“Assuming the Schisms work themselves out, things should go back to normal fairly soon,” Master Asher continued.

“Schisms?” Hayden looked up to meet his gaze with a frown. He had only one brief experience with Schisms thus far: last year when an oculus opened in the lawns of Mizzenwald and he had seen his first sorcerer. The force of their magic fighting against each other had caused a momentary crack in the space between their world and the strange realm of anti-magic, and two Schism-wargs had popped out and nearly eaten them all.

Asher nodded and continued quickly, as though delivering the bad news faster would lessen the impact of it.

“The sheer force of the magical explosion is still having repercussions throughout the Forest of Illusions—and to some extent, the rest of the Nine Lands—while the world attempts to absorb the magical aftershock. Schisms have been opening and closing throughout the continent as we struggle to regain balance. So far there haven’t been very many—mostly confined to the Forest—and they’ve closed themselves, so we must hope that things settle down before they get worse.”

Hayden winced and asked, “I don’t suppose Schisms are easy to
force closed if they don’t do it on their own?”

Asher smirked and said, “Of course not; that would be much too simple. It’s quite a challenge to close a Schism without going insane or being eaten by whatever is inside.” He shuddered at some private thought. “But anyway, that’s a problem for another day.
For now we can only hope that the world rebalances itself soon, rather than remaining in flux.”

Hayden rest
ed his head in his hands and moaned, “Why can’t I catch a lucky break? I save us from sorcerers only to endanger us with Schism-creatures.”

“Oh you have an extraordinary amount of luck,” Asher corrected cheerfully. “It’s a shame most of it is bad.”

Hayden snorted in wry amusement and threw his empty cup at the Master, who caught it deftly in one hand and set it to the side.

“Do you think you all will be able to get me out from under all the arrest charges out there against me?” he changed the subject again.

“It’ll certainly take some effort, but I imagine we’ll be able to sort it out. We’ll take the long way back from Minir to make sure our messages have time to make it to their intended destinations before we return to Mizzenwald. Hopefully Sark will lay the groundwork for us there before the Fias know what hit them. It will be best if we can catch them completely off guard and snowball them before they can get their bearings and drum up legal arguments.”

“Uh, not to be a naysayer, but Sark still hates you and me both. Why would he do me any favors
to get me back into school?” He distinctly remembered the Master of Powders recommending him for expulsion at least three times in as many years.

Asher chuckled and said, “Yes, but he likely hates being surrounded by
snotty, money-pinching Fias even more than he hates you. Besides, if the rest of us are on board he won’t go against the will of the pack.”

Hayden would have to take his word for it, because he still wasn’t entirely convinced that Sark wouldn’t
cheerfully endure a horde of Fias for the joy of seeing Hayden hauled off to a dark jail cell in Binders for the rest of his life.

“Well, I’d
best be off. Your friends have probably been lurking outside the door for the past hour, same as every day thus far, and they’ll want to see you.” Master Asher stood up and picked a few stray pieces of straw off of his pants. He had made it all the way to the door before he turned around and said, “Thanks for ignoring all common sense and coming to get us out of the Forest.”

Hayden nodded and said, “You all would have come to get me.”

One corner of Asher’s mouth twisted upwards into a smile. “And so we would have.”

Then he opened the door and was gone. Before Hayden could do much more
than adjust his position against the wall, Tess and Zane hurried into the room with identical worried looks on their faces. Zane stopped as soon as he saw Hayden sitting upright in bed and said, “Oh cool, you’re alive.”

“So they tell me,” Hayden chuckled darkly. “How are you two holding up?”

Tess took a seat beside his bed and opened her arms reflexively as Bonk hopped into them.

“We’re fine. I wasn’t
really hurt, and Zane got the splint off of his leg yesterday.” She waved a dismissive hand at him and gestured to Hayden’s bandages. “How do your arms feel?”

“They still hurt, but they’re a lot better than before. Hopefully I didn’t manage to warp my Foci any worse from breaking those Suppressors
, or they won’t be able to make big enough Focus-correctors to let me still use magic.” He tried to imagine how awful it would be if he needed correctors longer than his arms.

“Those crystal things?”
Zane sat down beside Tess and watched his fox make a circuit around the room. “Those were horrible. I don’t know how the Masters and everyone else survived all that time in those cages, having their magic drained to feed those awful things.” He shuddered sympathetically.

“Yeah, I guess if we hadn’t gone to help out they’d still be there, unless the
Magistra didn’t need them anymore once her main invasion party showed up.” Hayden frowned at the possibility.

If we had showed up just one day later, everything might be different…

“Speaking of which…” Zane pursed his lips. “I can’t believe you left us behind in Amvale for the joy of storming a magical forest with no one but Oliver Trout for company.”

Hayden was wondering when the subject of their separation would come up. He looked between his two friends and tried to think of what to say that would make it sound alright.

“I wanted to bust you guys out, but Oliver convinced me that we’d make too much of a scene and then we’d be in even more trouble. Besides, I knew we were walking into a deathtrap and I didn’t want you two to be stuck there with me.”

Tess frowned and said, “We managed to escape on our own before our transport to
Kargath showed up. After that it wasn’t hard to have Felix and Mittens track you all, but we had to make up for lost time because we were at least a day behind you, so we didn’t get to stop and rest much.”

“Is there any particular reason why you two charged into that clearing with weapons blazing when you couldn’t use magic properly and were outnumbered by about a gazillion-to-one?”

“We got close enough to see what they were doing to people—and to the animals,” Tess explained. “Then we saw you and Oliver walking with them, and we were trying to decide whether to do something or not when Bonk caught my eye and gave me a nod. I figured he was telling us to go for it, so we did.”

Hayden gave Bonk the evil eye and said, “You trusted
Bonk?
That’s not always the smartest thing to do, since I think most of the time he’s just making it up as he goes along. Most whimsical dragon I’ve ever seen.”

Bonk yawned widely and flopped onto his back so that Tess could scratch his belly.

“Anyway, enough of the stupid war,” Hayden changed the subject abruptly. “Where are we exactly—other than somewhere in Minir? What is this place we’re staying in?”

Zane made a face and said, “It’s an abandoned farmhouse we found once everyone got out of the Forest, and since we had so many wounded or dead the Council decided to stop here and set up camp for a while. People have been coming and going as they become strong enough—mostly to get word to all the capitals that the war is over and to bring in other healers. I think the Masters have just been waiting for you to wake up before we head back to school again, now that they’ve taken care of Master Ferule’s body.”