Magic University Book One: The Siren and the Sword (7 page)

When class was over, Kyle wondered what Frost was going to have to say. But Frost just packed up his books and marched out quickly at the end, as if he didn’t even see Kyle standing there by the door.

The professor, however, did. “Well, Kyle, that was a bold stroke today. Nicely done. Have you read much of Eliot’s other poems?”

Kyle had to think. “Um, the Prufrock one, in English class last year. That was before I knew he was magical, though.”

The professor nodded. “You might want to read
The Wasteland
, as well. Perhaps I’ll assign it to you at the end of the semester for your final paper? Have a look at it anyway, and perhaps it’ll resonate with you as this one did.” He pulled on his leather jacket, then took a pair of dark sunglasses from the pocket. He slipped them on as the class exited the building and walked away without saying another word to Kyle.

Kyle wondered what the hell had just happened, exactly. But even if his sudden insight into the poem had seemed, well, sort of miraculous, he was afraid Frost was right. The ability to interpret a poem probably didn’t stand up to being able to foretell the future. Or even conjure flowers.

* * * *

Kyle dragged himself up the stairs of Gladius House, wondering why his bag now seemed to weigh twice as much as usual. He hadn’t slept very well the night before, but being sleepy and feeling like he could barely get his legs up the steps to the front door was something else entirely.

He pulled open the door into the vestibule, and it closed behind him as he was pulling open the inner door. The two doors created some kind of a vacuum and he couldn’t get the inner door to open until the outer door had shut completely.
That’s backwards
, he thought. It should be the other way around, right? He realized he didn’t know enough about the science of air pressure and buildings to determine if it was that, or if some kind of magic was at work.

He finally pulled the door open enough to get through. The Gladius House doors opened directly into their common room, a high-ceilinged space with a fireplace on either side, tall windows, several bookshelves and chairs and couches scattered around. Above one of the fireplaces was a painting of a ship at sea, being tossed by a dark storm. Kyle had no idea if it was supposed to be a good painting, or if some alumnus of Gladius House had painted it and given a donation large enough for it to be hung.

He sat down by the fire, contemplating the climb up to his room. He was all the way up in what they called the “tower,” though really it was just the cramped, rarely assigned room under the slant of the roof. The disadvantage of barely being able to stand up straight right at the center of the room was outweighed by the fact that he had the room to himself.
Just think, you could have been stuck rooming with Frost.

Right now, though, climbing four flights of stairs seemed out of the question. Maybe he was sleepy? Maybe he should just close his eyes for a few moments and nap.

“Wadsworth.”

He started. Callendra Brandish, the master of Gladius House, was standing in front of him, her arms crossed, a piece of her long brown hair loose from her ponytail and hanging down one side of her face.

Had he really fallen asleep? He hadn’t heard her approach. She was dressed as if she were on her way to the faculty
club for dinner—a nice dress and pearls—but somehow her raincoat over it all gave her the look of someone in priest’s robes.

“Um, yes, Master Brandish?” His brain did a little flip at calling a woman “master,” as it always did, even if she was as tall as most men. He supposed he would get used to it eventually.

“You don’t look well,” she said, narrowing her eyes as if she were examining a lab specimen.

“Oh, just tired,” Kyle said and got to his feet, as if to prove he could. “I was just...taking a little nap before dinner.”

She looked at her watch. “I think you need to eat as soon as possible. The dining hall doesn’t open for another hour.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s...”

“I know that sounded like a suggestion, Wadsworth, but it wasn’t.” She huffed impatiently, then dug in her purse for something. “Here. Eat this. Now.”

Kyle took what she offered. A protein bar in shiny mylar, one he could get from any convenience store. “Um, thanks, but...”

“That is an order, Wadsworth. I don’t know what kind of hijinks you were up to today, but your energy is badly drained and if you don’t replenish it quickly, the consequences can be quite serious.” She glared until he tore the package open, then seemed to relax some. “If you’re prone to this kind of energy drop, you may want to start carrying some of those bars yourself. They sell them at the drugstore in the Square.”

He took a bite. It was crisped rice with a chocolate coating. The rest of it seemed to be something sort of like wall plaster, but it was surprisingly edible. “Um, thank you. Really. I feel better already.”

Her look said:
No, you don’t, but I’m polite enough that I won’t call you on lying to me. This time.
“Give it a few minutes, and make sure you don’t skip dinner either.”

“Master, are you also, um, prone to energy drops?”

“No, I just have a tendency to get wrapped up in my work and forget to eat. Then I get cranky. And nobody likes me when I’m cranky.”

“Er, no, of course not. Well, thank you again.”

She nodded to him this time and walked out, the door to the vestibule making a gentle whooshing sound as she pushed it.

Kyle sat back down and finished the rest of the bar. He’d never been much prone to his blood sugar crashing before, but maybe he just hadn’t really paid attention. Maybe he was going through a growth spurt. He hoped not. Having to replace all his pants again would be an expense he couldn’t afford.

He took out his phone and text-messaged his Camella list. “Dinner at Scip in an hour? Starved. Meet me there.”

Then he went upstairs to put his books away.

* * * *

An hour later he had already devoured a bourbon glazed pork loin, made a trip to the salad bar, and was just eyeing the make-your-own ice cream sundae stand when Alex and Jess strolled in together. They waved and got trays, getting food first before making their way over to him.

Jess kissed him on the cheek before settling down next to him. “Howdy, stranger,” she said. “I haven’t seen you all day.”

“Nice to see you, too,” he said. It wasn’t at all unusual for them to go a day or even two without seeing anything of each other. They lived in different houses, they had no classes in common, and Kyle had been admonished already that he was expected to at least eat half his meals in his own dining hall.

What Kyle could not quite figure out was how often Jess expected to see him, or wanted to. She hadn’t come out and said anything, but the way things had gone, they only went on a “date” on Fridays or Saturdays, and they only fooled around if they had had a date. He supposed it made sense; if they didn’t limit themselves somehow, he could see how he could easily be convinced to just stay in bed all the time and only leave to go to class and meals.

When Alex had sat down, too, Kyle let out a long breath. “I need you guys to tell me everything about...about getting expelled or failed or whatever, and the Geas. I still don’t understand what the Geas is.”

Alex and Jess shared a look. Alex spoke first. “Why? I mean, sure, we’ll tell you, but are you worried about something? You look worried, Kyle.”

“Just something Frost said,” he answered, his jaw clenching.

Alex made a dismissive noise. “You know better than to listen to him.”

Jess put a hand on Kyle’s forearm, although she kept eating her salad with the other hand. “The Geas is serious stuff. I mean, getting banished from the magical world, that’s...that’s pretty serious, but you have to take it seriously, too. There was a guy who was banished last year.”

“There was?” Kyle felt a chill go through him.

“Yeah, we didn’t know much about him. He was in Nummus, a grad student, wasn’t he?” Alex frowned as he tried to remember. “Bah. We’re even forgetting him already ourselves. It wasn’t for academic failure, though. He’d breached secrecy somehow, right?”

Jess thought for a moment. “Something like that. Kyle, the thing is, the Geas is a really powerful spell that not only causes the person to forget all about us, but we start to forget them. It’s really like they stop existing. Someone with the
power to Judge, that’s what they do. They change the fabric of our reality in some way. The only reason we remember anything at all about him is that we weren’t really involved with him. The closer your connections to the person, the more quickly the forgetting reaches you. Only the Judges themselves remember.”

Kyle wished he had gotten some more food before they had sat down. He settled for stealing cherry tomatoes out of Jess’s salad. “So how does it work? I mean, is there a trial or something? And then they, what, wave a wand over you?”

Alex gave Jess a look, deferring to her. “It only takes one Judge to do it, but usually they get three together before making a decision,” she said. “It’s not like a normal court, though. The whole jury idea becomes useless when they can tell magically whether you are lying or not. It’s not done in public, either. Just the accused, the accuser if there is one, and one to three judges.”

Kyle shivered. “Do people know who the Judges are? Or is that a secret, too?”

Alex rolled his eyes. “If people didn’t know who the Judges were, they couldn’t accuse, could they? The main Judge for Veritas, of course is dean of the college, Dunster himself.”

Jess snorted. “If he’d even deign to come down out of his ivory tower.”

Kyle interrupted them. “You mean Quilian Bell isn’t the dean?”

“Assistant dean,” Alex said, his voice sharp with derision. “He runs everything because Dunster is supposedly in meditation most of the time. Handy that Bell’s a Judge, too, so Dunster really never has to dirty his hands.”

“Yeah. People see him maybe twice a year. Convocation and Commencement.” She giggled. “Maybe he’s a zombie.”

Kyle’s eyes were wide. “Are zombies real?”

Alex snorted. “No, they’re not. Someone here’s been watching too many bad movies lately.”

“Sorry,” Jess said with a last laugh behind her hand. “But seriously, how old is Dunster? Who was dean before him?”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“But I do.” Kyle pushed his tray back. “About the Geas, I mean. So seriously all it would take is for some pissant like Frost to go to Bell and say ‘Wadsworth’s worthless and broke secrecy’ and Bell could just zap me, like that?”

“Hey, hey, that’s not what we said,” Alex said, at the same time Jess said, “Oh, Kyle, it’s not like that.”

She continued. “You forget, the Judge wouldn’t just be taking Frost’s or whoever’s word for it. They’d be able to test if he was lying. And bringing false accusation is nearly as bad a crime as breaking secrecy.”

Alex stabbed at his pork loin. “
Did
Frost accuse you of something?”

Kyle shook his head. “No. But I’m really starting to worry about this not having an aptitude thing.”

Jess patted his arm. “You’ve only been here a month, and you’re cramming a million new things into your head. Give it time. No one is about to revoke your Magician’s License.”

“Li—?”

“She’s kidding,” Alex said pointedly. “I have something much more important to talk about.”

“Which is?” asked Jess and Kyle at the same time.

“The Halloween Ball. What are you going to go as? I’m fresh out of ideas.”

Jess shrugged. “Go to the costume place over by MIT and see if you like anything.”

“Wait, are we supposed to dress up for this?” Kyle asked.

They both looked at him like he had just spoken ancient Aramaic. “It’s Halloween, of course you’re supposed to dress up,” Alex said.

“But I would have thought that’s mostly for...for the mundanes, right? Is all the stuff about the veil between worlds being thin really true, or is that just another story?”

“It is true,” Jess said. “That’s why you dress up. So if there’s a ghost trying to haunt you, they won’t find you.”

“So...ghosts are real?” Kyle’s voice was tentative this time.

“Of course ghosts are real,” Jess said, annoyed.

“Well, how am I supposed to know?” Kyle got to his feet. “Ghost, zombies, werewolves, vampires...how the hell am I supposed to know the difference?”

He stomped off to the make-your-own-sundae bar, and immersed himself for several minutes in constructing a rather large thing with bananas around the edge, and chocolate and caramel sauce drizzled just so, and whipped cream, and jimmies.

When he got back to the table neither of them had moved. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be so...cranky.” He thought of Master Brandish as he said that.

Maybe he’d feel better after the ice cream.

Jess’s black eyes were fixed on him. “It’s all right,” she finally said. “It’s just...it’s hard for us to get used to how...um...clueless you are.”

“Tactful, Jess, real tactful,” Alex said with an amused air.