فصل 1

Chapter 1

CALLUM HUNT WAS a legend in his little North Carolina town, but not in a good way. Famous for driving off substitute teachers with sarcastic remarks, he also specialized in annoying principals, hall monitors, and lunch ladies. Guidance counselors, who always started out wanting to help him (the poor boy’s mother had died, after all) wound up hoping he’d never darken the doors of their offices again. There was nothing more embarrassing than not being able to come up with a snappy comeback to an angry twelve-year-old.

Call’s perpetual scowl, messy black hair, and suspicious gray eyes were well known to his neighbors. He liked to skateboard, although it had taken him a while to get the hang of it; several cars still bore dings from some of his earlier attempts. He was often seen lurking outside the windows of the comic book store, the arcade, and the video game store. Even the mayor knew him. It would have been hard to forget him after he’d snuck past the clerk at the local pet store during the May Day Parade and taken a naked mole rat destined to be fed to a boa constrictor. He’d felt sorry for the blind and wrinkly creature that seemed unable to help itself — and, in the name of fairness, he’d also released all the white mice who would have been next on the snake’s dinner menu.

He’d never expected the mice to run amok under the feet of the paraders, but mice aren’t very smart. He also hadn’t expected the onlookers to run from the mice, but people aren’t too smart either, as Call’s father had explained after it was all over. It wasn’t Call’s fault that the parade had been ruined, but everyone — especially the mayor — acted like it was. On top of that, his father had made Call give back the mole rat.

Call’s father didn’t approve of stealing.

As far as he was concerned, it was almost as bad as magic.

Callum fidgeted in the stiff chair in front of the principal’s office, wondering if he’d be back at school tomorrow and if anyone would miss him if he wasn’t. Again and again, he went over all the various ways he was supposed to mess up on the mage’s test — ideally, as spectacularly as possible. His dad had listed the options for failure again and again: Make your mind totally blank. Or concentrate on something that’s the opposite of what those monsters want. Or focus your mind on someone else’s test instead of your own. Call rubbed his calf, which had been stiff and painful in class that morning; it was that way sometimes. The taller he grew, the more it seemed to hurt. At least the physical part of the mage’s test — whatever it was — would be easy to fail.

Just down the hall, he could hear other kids in gym class, their sneakers squeaking on the shining wood of the floor, their voices raised as they shouted taunts to one another. He wished just once that he got to play. He might not have been as fast as other kids or as able to keep his balance, but he was full of restless energy. He was exempt from a gym requirement because of his leg; even in elementary school, when he’d tried to run or jump or climb at recess, one of the monitors would come over and remind him that he needed to slow down before he hurt himself. If he kept at it, they would make him come inside.

As though a couple of bruises were the most awful thing that could happen to someone. As though his leg was going to get worse.

Call sighed and stared out through the glass doors of the school to where his father would be pulling up soon. He owned the kind of car you couldn’t miss, a 1937 Rolls-Royce Phantom, painted bright silver. Nobody else in town had anything like it. Call’s father ran an antique store on Main Street called Now and Again; there was nothing he liked more than taking old broken things and making them look shiny and new. To keep the car running, he had to tinker with it almost every weekend. And he was constantly asking Call to wash it and put some kind of weird old car wax on it, to keep it from rusting.

The Rolls-Royce worked perfectly … unlike Call. He looked down at his sneakers as he tapped his feet against the floor. When he was wearing jeans like this, you couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with his leg, but you could sure tell the minute he stood up and started walking. He’d had surgery after surgery since he was a baby, and all sorts of physical therapy, but nothing had really helped. He still walked with a sliding limp, like he was trying to get his footing on a boat that was rolling from side to side.

When he was younger, he’d sometimes played that he was a pirate, or even just a brave sailor with a peg leg, going down with a sinking ship after a long cannon fight. He’d played pirates and ninjas, cowboys and alien explorers.

But not ever any game that involved magic.

Never that.

He heard the rumble of an engine and began to rise to his feet — only to return to the bench in annoyance. It wasn’t his dad, just an ordinary red Toyota. A moment later, Kylie Myles, one of the other students in his grade, hurried past him, a teacher beside her.

“Good luck at your ballet tryouts,” Ms. Kemal told her, and started back to her classroom.

“Right, thanks,” Kylie said, then looked over at Call oddly, as though she were evaluating him. Kylie never looked at Call. That was one of her defining characteristics, along with her shining blond hair and unicorn backpack. When they were in the halls together, her gaze slid past him like he was invisible.

With an even weirder and more surprising half wave, she headed out to the Toyota. He could see both her parents in the front seats, looking anxious.

She couldn’t be going where he was, could she? She couldn’t be going to the Iron Trial. But if she was … He pushed himself off the chair. If she was going, someone should warn her.

Lots of kids think it’s about being special, Call’s father had said, the disgust in his voice evident. Their parents do, too. Especially in families where magical ability dates back generations. And some families where the magic has mostly died out see a magical child as hope for a return to power. But it’s the children with no magical relatives you should pity most. They’re the ones who think it’s going to be like it is in the movies.

It’s nothing like the movies.

At that moment, Call’s dad pulled up to the school curb with a squeal of brakes, effectively cutting off Call’s view of Kylie. Call limped toward the doors and outside, but by the time he made it to the Rolls, the Myles’s Toyota was swerving around the corner and out of sight.

So much for warning her.

“Call.” His father had gotten out of the car and was leaning against the passenger-side door. His mop of black hair — the same tangly black hair Call had — was going gray at the sides, and he wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, despite the heat. Call often thought that his father looked like Sherlock Holmes in the old BBC show; sometimes people seemed surprised he didn’t speak with a British accent. “Are you ready?” Call shrugged. How could you be ready for something that had the potential to mess up your whole life if you got it wrong? Or right, in this case. “I guess so.” His father pulled the door open. “Good. Get in.”

The inside of the Rolls was as spotless as the outside. Call was surprised to find his old pair of crutches thrown into the backseat. He hadn’t needed them in years, not since he’d fallen off a jungle gym and twisted his ankle — the ankle on his good leg. As Call’s father slid into the car and started the engine, Call pointed to them and asked, “What’s with those?” “The worse off you look, the likelier they are to reject you,” his father said grimly, glancing behind him as they pulled out of the parking lot.

“That seems like cheating,” Call objected.

“Call, people cheat to win. You can’t cheat to lose.”

Call rolled his eyes, letting his dad believe what he wanted. All Call knew for sure was that there was no way he was going to use those crutches if he didn’t have to. He didn’t want to argue about it, though, not today, when Call’s father had already uncharacteristically burned the toast at breakfast and snapped at Call when he complained about having to go to school just to be removed a couple hours later.

Now his father crouched over the wheel, jaw set and the fingers of his right hand wrapped tightly around the gearshift, changing gears with ineffectual violence.

Call tried to focus his gaze on the trees outside, their leaves just starting to yellow, and to remember everything he knew about the Magisterium. The first time his father had said anything about the Masters and how they chose their apprentices, he’d sat Call down in one of the big leather chairs in his study. Call’s elbow had been bandaged and his lip was split from a fight at school, and he’d been in no mood for listening. Besides, his father had looked so serious that Call had gotten scared. And that’s the way his father spoke, too, as though he was going to tell Call he had a terrible disease. It turned out the sickness was a potential for magic.

Call had scrunched up in the chair while his father talked. He was used to getting picked on; other kids thought his leg made him an easy target. Usually, he was able to convince them he wasn’t. That time, however, there had been a bunch of older boys who’d cornered him behind the shed near the jungle gym on his way home from school. They’d pushed him around and come at him with the usual insults. Callum had learned most people backed down when he put up a fight, so he’d tried to hit the tallest boy. That had been his first mistake. Pretty soon, they had him on the ground, one of them sitting on his knees while another punched him in the face, trying to get him to apologize and admit to being a gimpy clown.

“Sorry for being awesome, losers,” Call had said, right before he blacked out.

He must have only been out for a minute, because when he opened his eyes, he could just see the retreating figures of the boys in the distance. They were running away. Call couldn’t believe his rejoinder had worked so well.

“That’s right,” he’d said, sitting up. “You better run!”

Then he’d looked around and seen that the concrete of the playground had cracked open. A long fissure ran from the swings all the way to the shed wall, splitting the small building in half.

He was lying directly in the path of what looked like a mini earthquake.

He’d thought it was the most awesome thing that had ever happened. His father disagreed.

“Magic runs in families,” Call’s father said. “Not everyone in a family will necessarily have it, but it looks like you might. Unfortunately. I am so sorry, Call.” “So the split in the ground — you’re saying I did that?” Call had felt torn between giddy glee and extreme horror, but the glee was winning out. He could feel the corners of his mouth turn up and tried to force them back down. “Is that what mages do?” “Mages draw on the elements — earth, air, water, fire, and even the void, which is the source of the most powerful and terrible magic of all, chaos magic. They can use magic for many things, including ripping apart the very earth, as you did.” His father had nodded to himself. “In the beginning, when magic first comes on, it is very intense. Raw power … but balance is what tempers magical ability. It takes a lot of study to have as much power as a newly woken mage. Young mages have little control. But, Call, you must fight it. And you must never use your magic again. If you do, the mages will take you away to their tunnels.” “That’s where the school is? The Magisterium is underground?” Call had asked.

“Buried under the earth where no one can find it,” his father told him grimly. “There’s no light down there. No windows. The place is a maze. You could get lost in the caverns and die and no one would ever know.” Call licked his suddenly dry lips. “But you’re a magician, aren’t you?” “I haven’t used my magic since your mother died. I’ll never use it again.” “And Mom went there? To the tunnels? Really?” Call was eager to hear anything about his mother. He didn’t have much. Some yellowed photographs in an old scrapbook, showing a pretty woman with Call’s ink-black hair and eyes a color Call couldn’t make out. He knew better than to ask his father too many questions about her. He never talked about Call’s mom unless he absolutely had to.

“Yes, she did,” Call’s father told him. “And it’s because of magic that she died. When mages go to war, which is often, they don’t care about the people who die because of it. Which is the other reason you must not attract their attention.” That night, Call woke up screaming, believing he was trapped underground, earth piling on him as if he were being buried alive. No matter how much he thrashed around, he couldn’t breathe. After that, he dreamed that he was running away from a monster made of smoke whose eyes swirled with a thousand different evil colors … only he couldn’t run fast enough because of his leg. In the dreams, it dragged behind him like a dead thing until he collapsed, with the monster’s hot breath on his neck.

Other kids in Call’s class were afraid of the dark, the monster under the bed, zombies, or murderers with giant axes. Call was afraid of magicians, and he was even more afraid he was one.

Now he was going to meet them. The same magicians who were the reason his mother was dead and his father hardly ever laughed and didn’t have any friends, sitting instead in the workroom he’d made out of the garage and fixing beat-up furniture and cars and jewelry. Call didn’t think it took a genius to figure out why his dad was obsessed with putting broken things back together.

They whizzed past a sign welcoming them to Virginia. Everything looked the same. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but he’d seldom been out of North Carolina before. Their trips beyond Asheville were infrequent, mostly to go to car-part swap meets and antique fairs, where Call would wander around among mounds of unpolished silverware, collections of baseball cards in plastic sleeves, and weird old taxidermied yak heads, while his dad bargained for something boring.

It occurred to Call that if he didn’t mess up this test, he might never go to one of those swap meets again. His stomach lurched and a cold shiver rattled his bones. He forced himself to think about the plan his father had drilled into him: Make your mind totally blank. Or focus on something that’s the opposite of what those monsters want. Or focus your mind on someone else’s test instead of your own.

He let out his breath. His father’s nerves were getting to him. It was going to be fine. It was easy to mess up tests.

The car swung off the highway onto a narrow road. The only sign had the symbol of an airplane on it, with the words AIRFIELD CLOSED FOR RENOVATION beneath it.

“Where are we going?” Call asked. “Are we flying somewhere?”

“Let’s hope not,” his dad muttered. The street had turned abruptly from asphalt to dirt. As they bumped over the next few hundred yards, Call grabbed on to the door frame to keep himself from flying up and whacking his head on the roof. Rolls-Royces were not made for dirt roads.

Suddenly, the lane widened and the trees parted. The Rolls was now in a huge cleared space. In the middle was an enormous hangar made out of corrugated steel. Parked around it were about a hundred cars, from beat-up pickup trucks to sedans almost as fancy as the Phantom and a lot newer. Call saw parents and their kids, all about his age, hurrying toward the hangar.

“I think we’re late,” Call said.

“Good.” His father sounded grimly pleased. He pulled the car to a stop and got out, gesturing for Call to follow. Call was glad to see that his father seemed to have forgotten about the crutches. It was a hot day, and the sun beat down on the back of Call’s gray T-shirt. He wiped his sweaty palms against his jeans as they walked across the lot and into the big black open space that was the hangar entrance.

Inside, everything was crazy. Kids milled around, their voices carrying in the vast space. Bleachers were set up along one metal wall; even though they could hold many more people than were present, they were dwarfed by the immensity of the room. Bright blue tape marked x’s and circles along the concrete floor.

Across the other side, in front of a set of hangar doors that would once have opened to let airplanes taxi out onto runways, were the mages.