The Other Prism (The Broken Prism) (16 page)

The arena had obviously been made with magic, because there was no way to dig a hole that deep otherwise, with perfectly-aligned rows of stone benches ringing the circumference. There was enough seating to accommodate hundreds of people, and the stands began to fill as people descended the columns of stairs to claim prime seats. The arena itself looked a lot like a racing track, with seven wide lanes marked in paint
in an oval. Hayden had no idea what the wand majors were going to do on it until he saw Master Mandra wave his wand. With a startled gasp that made the people around him laugh, he watched the entire floor of the arena flip over along some invisible axis in the center, as though it were a revolving door.

Now the ground was barren and
ash-grey, and the five Wand majors filed into the arena and stood in the center of the dismal space. Hayden managed to push his way through the crowds of Valhallans and make it to the floating platform before it took flight, though most of the good chairs were taken so he was forced to sit near the very edge, dangerously close to toppling over the side.

Oliv
er was sitting nearby, the right half of his face covered in a thick green paste and a few healing scriptures stuck to his arm. He glanced over at Hayden and shot him a menacing scowl in greeting.

“You might want to save your dirty looks for when your face isn’t covered in green paste,” Hayden frowned back at him. “It makes you look even dumber than usual.”

Oliver took the insult in stride.

“We’ll see how nice
you
look once the other Prisms are done tearing you to pieces.”

Hayden tried not to betray any sign of his worry on that front, but wasn’t sure he was successful.

“Where’s Griff? I didn’t see how he did in the Elixir battle since I was watching you and that guy from Isenfall beat each other senseless.”

Oliver looked disgusted when he said, “
Griff lost. He’s probably crying in a dark corner somewhere, imagining the ridicule he’s going to get for failing out of the first round when we get back to school.”

Hayden winced in sympathy for his teammate, wondering if he was also going to be returning home in disgrace that night. O
liver either sensed his concern or else he just chose that moment to add, “So help me Frost, I will not have Mizzenwald be a laughingstock of the I.S.C. when I’m competing in it. If you don’t make it through this round I’m going to make your life very unpleasant.”

Hayden felt distinctly nauseous once more.

“Gee, I wonder what it would be like to have an unpleasant life.”

Oliver didn’t laugh. “I will bring an entirely new definition to the word,” he explained coldly. “You beat me at Mizzenwald and wormed your way onto the team, and I do
not like losing to losers. So you’d better earn your keep in this tournament, or I’m going to bloody you so badly your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”

Hayden’s blood boiled at the way Oliver carelessly mentioned his dead mother, and before he knew what he was doing he was on his feet. Oliver looked like he was dying for Hayden to give him a chance to annihilate him, and Hayden was too angry to care that he was probably about to get his butt kicked.

“Don’t you ever talk about my mother again, you son of a—”

Hayden drew back his fist and swung as hard as he could at Oliver’s face, but someone stuck their hand in the way and the blow made a meaty smack as it landed on the meddler’s palm. He looked up into the eyes of the Master
Mandra, who had returned to the platform and was preparing to begin the Wand trial.

Hayden felt his face blanch in horror; he’d punched a Master at a school he was guesting at.

“Well now, we don’t typically see members of the same team throwing punches at each other during the Championship,” the Master glanced between Hayden and Oliver in amusement, shaking out the hand that had caught the former’s hit.

“I’m sorry, sir.
” Hayden sat back down immediately. “We just don’t like each other very much.”

“Understatement of the year.
” Oliver rolled his eyes. “The next time you throw a punch at me I’ll rearrange your face.”

“Feel free to fight to your hearts’ content, but don’t do it at Valhalla. Your own Masters can sort you two out when you return to Mizzenwald,” Master
Mandra said with finality, turning away from them to face the crowd and begin the Wand trial.

Hayden was careful to keep his eyes focused on the competition in front of him, but he was still seething with anger at Oliver and didn’t take in most of what was happening in the arena until the first person was out. The challengers were supposed to hit each other with a simple freezing spell, which sounded easy enough except that the arena was constantly changing the environment
around them.

The ground looked solid
, but it was constantly in flux. Rocks, trees, or shards of crystal would shoot out of it at random, which the competitors took advantage of for hiding places, but the formations could disappear as suddenly as they came. Occasionally something would shoot out of the ground right where a person was standing and would push them up into the air unless they jumped off in time. The boy from Isenfall was unlucky enough to have a rock formation materialize beneath him, and a jutting piece of stone snapped his ankle as it sprang upwards from the ground.

The crowd groaned in sympathy and the competitor from Creston hurried forward and hit him with the freezing spell, taking him out of the competition for good. The ground began to change progressively faster and produ
ced more dangerous things as time progressed, including jagged shards of glass and obsidian, one of which came so close to Reya that it ripped her robes as it shot out of the ground.

In the end
a girl from Branx won the wand round, with Reya in second place. The crowd applauded and began discussing the results, while the others who were watching the Conjury trials began to filter into the arena. Hayden was suddenly aware of the fact that it was his turn to compete in front of the entire school, and he wasn’t looking forward to it one bit.

He quickly located the Prism Master of Valhalla and made his way
down the steps of the arena to join the others, heart pounding with every step he took. The floor flipped over once more, and had now become a uniform, non-threatening layer of dried dirt. Hayden joined the other prism-users around the Master, who was giving them final instructions.

“Your goal in this task is
to avoid being hit with the orbs of colored pigment for as long as possible,” he explained once Hayden arrived. “They’ll come from the walls in increasing numbers as time progresses, so the faster you can knock your opponents into them the better. You may use any spells that you know within your four prisms to accomplish this. Understood?”

He waited until the
y all nodded before turning to walk up the stairs and join the other Masters on the floating platforms, both of which were now hovering around the arena.

Hayden stumbled a little on the hem of his robes as he stepped out into the arena, his ears burning as the laughter from the crowd reached him. Frustrated, he bent
down and tore the bottom three inches off of his robes with a loud rip, leaving the edges frayed and uneven as he continued towards the middle of the combat space.

At least now I won’t trip over my own feet.

It was strange how, as an observer, there hadn’t seemed to be a lot of people watching. Now, on this end of the spectrum, Hayden felt like it was the largest crowd he had ever seen amassed in one place, and was beginning to wonder whether students from the other schools had snuck into the stands to augment the crowd.

The Prism Master was
standing on the floating platform nearest them, explaining the process to the observers while Hayden and the other competitors spaced themselves out as much as possible.

“Prisms
…begin!”

Hayden equipped his clear prism just as the first three fist-sized balls of pigment burst out of the low wall that circled the arena
, looking like giant balls of candy. The pigment was obviously magicked to remain in the air, because the balls zoomed around the arena without any visible means of propulsion, and Hayden had to dodge out of the way when Davis from Isenfall cast Pull and sent one of the orbs flying at him.

It took everyone a minute or two to get their bearings, and by then more balls of pigment had launched and
were chasing them around. Hayden cast Slow on one just before it could smack him in the face and ducked beneath it, switching to his rose-tinted prism and casting Push to send it at one of his opponents, who dodged in the nick of time.

It was impossible to keep track of what everyone else was doing, especially as more and more balls of pigment entered the arena. By the time there were twenty
orbs in play it was all Hayden could do to avoid them, like one giant magical game of dodge-ball. Something cast a shadow over him and he looked up in time to see a ball of green pigment the size of a boulder hurtling down at him from above. Panicking, he cast Break and it exploded before it could hit him, and he looked around and saw the boy from Isenfall grinning at him in a maniacal, terrifying way as he advanced.

“What’s the matter, Frost?” his opponent called out as he cast Grow on another ball of pigment—pink
this time—and sent it flying towards him. “Daddy didn’t teach you any magic?”

Furious, Hayden cast Repel and sent the ball hurtling back at Davis, sucking in his stomach to avoid a purpl
e one that zoomed past him, launched by another of the competitors. It was getting hard to take more than two steps without running into anything by now, and he dodged two more orbs by the time Davis recovered and came after him again.

It seemed that the
older boy was determined to take him out of the running as soon as possible, because he had the perfect opportunity to eliminate the boy from Creston and passed it up in favor of pursuing Hayden. Of all the people to hunt him, the only other natural prism in the competition—who happened to have years more experience than him—would not be his first choice.

Davis jumped over four projectiles at once and cast Suspend on himself to catch up to Hayden, who was now trying to run and dodge as fast as possible to put some
distance between them. It was nearly impossible to watch where he was going and keep track of all the objects zooming around the arena and the other contestants, who were all still in the running as well.

I’m the worst at this. The others are all holding their own, and I’m just running away…why did anyone think I could do this?

He held up his blue prism and cast Sleep as Davis touched down to the ground, but the older boy repelled it with lightning speed and Hayden was forced to duck to avoid being hit by his own spell. Davis seemed to be casting a spell Hayden didn’t know yet, because the orbs nearest him were drawn to him like magnets, until there were a dozen of them circling Davis like planets orbiting the sun. Hayden had no idea what he was doing until the older boy gave him a crazy grin, compounded his rose and clear prisms, and cast Push at him.

Hayden didn’t have time to equip his rose prism and instead just held it in front of his right eye and thought
,
Push!
as hard as he could. It felt like a wall of bricks had slammed into him as the force of Davis’s magic met his, and the twenty orbs of pigment came to a halt halfway between them. He had never been on the receiving end of a compounded spell before, and it knocked the air from his lungs as he fought it with every ounce of will he possessed. The rose-tinted prism was actually shaking in his hand from the strain of his casting, but he was determined not to back off for even a second or he would get hammered with all those different pigments and lose.

Davis frowned and gripped the charm around his neck, and the wall of magic pushing against Hayden’
s Foci was amplified painfully. Hayden didn’t know much about charms yet, but since Davis’s emblem was an axe he had a pretty good idea that it was an offensive amplifying charm of some kind.

Hayden was barely holding out now, and the balls of pigment were inching slowly closer to him, forcing him to take a step backwards so that his back was pressed against the wall of the arena. Davis looked both stunned and furious that his
compounded spell and amplified power wasn’t annihilating him, but Hayden knew he wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. His rose prism was being rapidly consumed as he forced more and more power through it, and Davis was still compounding against him through his own quickly-diminishing prisms.

The rose-tinted prism reached its smallest, least-stable form and then turned to gritty dust. Hayden closed his eyes and covered his head as twenty solid orbs of pigm
ent slammed into his body at high speed, exploding upon impact and knocking the breath from his lungs as they covered him in multi-colored splatters of dust, bruising his skin upon impact.

I lost.

The realization almost hit him harder than all the balls of pigment combined. He would have to return to Mizzenwald tonight and explain to Master Asher how he’d failed at the outset for the first time in thirty years, would have to endure the ridicule of his peers, Oliver pummeling him, and the disappointed look on Zane and Tess’s faces…