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he cauldron was huge.
Bigger than any vial Aram had ever seen. Witch Betula was standing behind it,
watching the class with her big green eyes. She had branches growing on her head, which were so long and
thick it looked like a piece of the Wildwood had stepped into the Magical
Creatures’ chamber. She was willowy and slender, her face flat and devoid of
any mimicry, with neither eyebrows nor eyelashes, and were she a human she
would be called weird and ugly, but with all the strangeness of her face Wch
Betula was otherworldly. Ethereal. She was a dryad. Moreover, she was of royal
blood—a first cousin to the prince of Celebtaur—the
silver forest. Her classroom was a forest too, but not the Wildwood around the
Academy. She had her own house, a vast arbor of entangled oaks and birches,
with a needlework of leaves over the walls and a narrow but deep stream gushing
from the underground and crossing the chamber with a soft babble.
“Today we shall talk of races,” Wch Betula said.
Her voice was deep, velvety, and Aram thought he could listen to her speak
forever and never tire. Gracefully swaying her slim hand, she summoned a long
string of water from the stream into her enormous cauldron. With another suave
gesture she woke the fire under the cauldron. “The majority of humans, we call
them Edain, have pushed us all into
one single category—enemies. But we do not agree.” Betula’s green lips curved
into a reserved smile, and the branches on her head, already thick with birch
leaves, bloomed with petite colorful flowers. “She plucked one flower from her
branch and threw it into the cauldron. A violet steam coiled and danced above
the cauldron, slowly becoming a human figure.
“Adan,”
Wch Betula said. “A human. Humans don’t like us very much, but some of them,
the least prejudiced, have become a part of our world.” She plucked a blue
flower from her branch and tossed it into the cauldron. The violet steam turned
blue and changed into many silhouettes circling above the cauldron. “The highborn,” Betula said. “Dryads,
elves, nymphs, faes, dwarves, fauns, centaurs, merpeople.” She plucked a yellow
flower and the yellow steam presented another group of creatures, although not
as beautifully shaped. “The lowborn:
trolls, goblins, ogres, giants, boggarts.” A red flower landed into the
seething cauldron and new shapes circled in front of the class. “The transformed: vampires, werewolves, lychans.
Stay away from them. All of them.” As the leaves on Betula’s branches withered,
she plucked a dead leaf and sent it into the cauldron. “The dead: phantoms, ghosts, spooks, sylphs, specters, poltergeists.
The race lists grow, new creatures come into existence every once in a while.
Scholars study them and categorize. I will teach you who are dangerous, who
cannot be trusted, and who can be your best friends.”
Aram squinted at the shapes spinning slowly
inside the now gray steam. They all had looked menacing, especially the dead
and the transformed. And the lowborn, too. And many of the highborn. He looked
covertly around the classroom lost in the steam. There were a few highborns in
his class, two dwarves and a girl who was said to be a nymph, but the rest
seemed to be humans.
“Today I want to talk about a creature of the lowborns
race, the Bizarres.” Betula swept her hand over the cauldron and the spinning
shapes broke into fragments of steam. She plucked a single acorn growing on the
top of her branch and let it fall into the boiling cauldron. The shape that
grew from the steam was much bigger and more menacing. To Aram its elongated
skull and arms longer than the legs reminded of an ape, and the clawed fingers
and scaled body of a Komodo dragon.
“The Academy’s, as well as Amonshire’s security,
is high, but Bizarres dwell in the mountains, outside of the town borders. They
are fast, deft, and always hungry. It is strictly prohibited to go into the
mountains, as well as staying outside after ten o’clock in the evening.
Remember, Bizarres possess reason and are one of the deadliest carnivores of
our world.”
After Magical Beings, it was hard to sit through
two boring classes that were Grammar and Literature. And Mg Pilloy wasn’t as
mesmerizing as Wch Betula. Skinny and almost seven-feet tall, he sat behind his
desk for two long classes, simply reaching out his hand whenever he needed a
book from the top shelf, or beckoning a book from the bookcases under the walls
with a sway of his hand. Aram tried to stay alert during the classes, but very
often his mind snuck out of the classroom filled with books from wall to wall
and wandered in the Academy grounds.
The thirty minute break was long-awaited. Aram,
Theodore, and Nick gathered their books and headed to the Refectory after
snacks. Literature and Grammar house was near the arena, and passing by, all
three couldn't miss the riders atop stallions trotting across the field.
“Cillian and his cronies,” Theodore said. “I’ve
heard they are in the Pixie Polo team. There’ll be a game in November.”
“I still don’t get the rules,” Nick said, leaning
against the fence. “And where are the pixies.”
“Pixies are not released every time someone
practices. You need a special permission from the coach.”
“What if we practice, too?” Aram asked, throwing
a side glance at Theodore and Nick.
“I don’t even know,” Theodore said. “We already
have a lot of classes, so much reading...”
“Knock it off, Teo,” Aram said. “We can find time
once or twice a week to ride a horse and hit the balls.”
“I can’t ride a horse,” Nick said. “I never
learned.”
“It’s never late,’ Aram said.
“Nah, I’ll pass,” Nick breathed out, rubbing his
stump.
“Will and I took riding classes since we were
five. I ride pretty well, but I’ve never played Pixie Polo.”
“My grandpa’s taught me to ride,” Aram said. He
watched Cillian hit the ball with his club while his stallion galloped freely across
the tall grass.
“Are you as good?” Theodore asked him.
“Maybe not as good, but I’m a fast learner.” He
glanced at Theodore, expectant. “Let’s sign up to riding classes,” he pleaded.
“Alright,” Theodore sniffed. Aram and Nick high-fived
each other.
“But if you break a bone or fracture a rib, don’t
blame me.”
“I won’t,” Aram laughed. He looked at the stands
and saw Meilin, Gwenlian, and Karishma coming toward them. They looked gloomy.
A few seats away Aram spotted Natalia and her gang of pretty girls sitting in a
circle, with Natalia in the center, and laughing loudly. It was obvious they
had once again bullied Meilin, Gwenlian, and Karishma, forcing them to leave
the stands. They shouldn’t leave, Aram thought, they should stay where they
were and retort Natalia and her gang. But then, the bullies only delighted when
someone answered back. It gave them an opportunity to sting back, and the
second insults were usually worse.
“Over here, girls!” Nick waved a hand at their
girlfriends.
Aram looked farther at the stands and his breath
clogged in his throat. The golden-haired ballerina and her friend were passing
right in front of Natalia’s gang, moving toward the two middle seats. Aram
still didn’t know the ballerina’s name or where she was from, and couldn’t
think of a way to sleek his curiosity. He looked at Natalia. She was ready,
waiting for the two girls to get closer before she opened her stinky mouth. Just
the thought that the ballerina was going to be subjected to a bully’s
humiliation pained Aram. Natalia said something and the girls around her burst
into a loud laughter. Aram expected the ballerina and her friend walk away,
just like Gwenlian, Karishma, and Meilin had done, but the ballerina turned
back and said to Natalia something in Russian, which Aram didn’t make out, but
which shut Natalia up and changed the color of her face from white to green.
The ballerina and her friend calmly sat in front of the bullies and took out
their snacks from their backpacks.
Aram chuckled under his breath. She wasn’t just
beautiful, but also confident and fearless. She was perfect.
All six had Astronomy in the crooked tower behind
the boys’ dormitory. Rumors said the tower had an elevator, but after none of
the first-years located it, all of them, silently and disgruntled, took the
spiraling stairs bedecked with images of the moon phases and zodiac signs, and
climbed for ten minutes, which seemed like forever.
But the moment they entered the Astronomy
chamber, fatigue was gone. It seemed to Aram that they had stepped on to a very
big orrery, with planets spinning around, comets and stars crossing the
distance and passing right through them. There was no floor, but the black and
endless space, and no one dared step on it until a few of the braves checked
its solidity with the toes of their shoes.
“Come in, don’t be shy,” said a voice from the
other side of the chamber.
But the students still didn’t dare walk over the
invisible floor.
“Desino!”
the same voice said, and the solar system faded away, giving its place to walls and floor muraled with the maps of the night
sky, and a long balcony with two dozen small telescopes and an enormous one in
the middle, constructed of gears, lenses and a big compass in its center.
The astronomy teacher was standing next to the
big telescope, waiting for the class to join him. He was a wizard, there could
be no doubt about it. He was everything an astronomy teacher could look like:
ancient, his white beard sweeping the floor, his long gown embroidered with
silver and gold, his dark blue mantle adorned with astronomy symbols and
astrology signs. The stars on his cone-shaped hat gleamed in the sun, and the
medallions hanging down his neck clang with his every move.
“Over here,” Wizard Estrellio said, gesturing the
students toward the telescopes. “Pick one and have a seat.”
Something stirred around his heels under the long
mantle, then an undistinguishable animal slid out and rushed into the shadows
on the other side of the chamber,
“Now look into the telescopes,” Wz Estrellio
urged them. “As my dear teacher, Nicolaus Copernicus, loved to say, let us not
waste a single star. Today we start from the Spellbinder’s Nebula.”
The students took out their books and copy-books
and looked into the telescopes.
“Informative,” Gwenlian said as they were walking
back from the Astronomy tower.
“Too much information for the first day,”
Theodore said. “How Will’s able to be a Scarab student is beyond me.”
“Stop complaining,” Aram said. “One more day and
there’s the weekend. We’ll rest and have a bit of fun in Amonshire.”
“Yeah, sure,” Theodore said gloomily. “With so
much homework assignments we won’t be having fun until the end the semester. Or
maybe even the ends of our lives.”
“Mr. Gloomy,” Meilin said jokingly, “brace
yourself for the Flying class. Today we’ll be flying with pairs.”
“Outstanding,” Theodore muttered with discontent.
Around the boys’ dormitory Aram became quiet and
listened. A sudden tremor made his hands shake and the blood rushed to his
face. “What’s that?” he said. “Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Gwenlian asked.
Aram stopped, listened.
“I do,” Nick said. “Someone’s reading something.”
Exactly, Aram thought. Someone was reading something.
Something painfully familiar, something he knew by heart. How could that be?
How could those words be known to someone else?
“We swear
to you this is for your own good,” a male voice was saying. “Please do not ever blame yourself or think
you were unwanted.”
Beads of perspiration sprang upon Aram’s brow.
There could be no mistake, and clenching
his hands into fists, he followed the voice.
“Aram?” Nick asked. “What’s going on?”
“Who’s reading my letter?” Aram passed the pillars and peered around the
corner.
A big company was sitting on the dormitory stairs,
forming a half moon. Aram recognized both first and second-years, heeding to
the one who was speaking the familiar words. It was Cillian’s goon, Andrew
Redmeyne, sitting in the center and reading from a sheet of paper.
“And
please, son, do not search for us. Try to forgive your unfortunate parents who
are leaving you not by their own will, but because of unjust circumstances.”
Andrew faked a whimper, making everyone laugh. “We will think of you day and night, and whenever you look into the sky,
know that somewhere two people that love you the most are looking into that
same sky and sending you their blessing.” Andrew finished reading and wiped
the nonexistent tears off his face. “And there he is,” he chuckled, noticing
Aram, “the poor soul thrown away by his own folks.”
It was noon, but the night arrived suddenly. Or
maybe it was his vision that darkened. Cillian and his minions had snooped into
his personal things, found the letter and were now reading it in the center of
the dormitory courtyard. Reading and smirking. And the rest were smirking
along.
“No, Aram!” someone shouted, but he wouldn’t
listen. When the sight returned to him, Andrew was on the grass, wriggling
under him. Cillian pulled Aram away and Aram punched him in the face. for the
second time that week they grabbed each other and rolled on the grass. Someone
was trying to pull them apart in vain. Aram punched Cillian with so much
strength blood spurted out of his nose. The sudden pain made Cillian loosen his
grip and Aram stood up, rushed to Andrew and pulled the wrinkled letter out of
his hand. He scanned the letter that somehow, probably by magic, had been
translated into English. Some pages were torn and crumpled, and it brought
Aram’s fury back. His punch would have knocked Andrew out, but luckily Theodore
and Nick dragged him away and his fist swept through the empty air.
“Don’t! Don’t!” Teo was saying. “Not again, Aram. Not worth it.”
“Please, stop!” Gwenlian yelled. Then she,
Meilin, and Karishma surrounded Aram, blocking his way and not letting him
lurch back at Andrew.
“The Artenberries will hear of his,” Andrew said
through greeted teeth.
“Gather your stuff, foundling,” Lucas Barbosa,
Cillian’s second minion, said gleefully.
Cillian would have said things worse, but he was
occupied with his bleeding nose.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” Karishma
yelled back at them. “You all,” she pointed her hand at the students on the
stairs, who had been laughing over the letter. “All you lot are disgusting
bullies. It’s his life, for heaven’s sake! How can you be so heartless?”
Some of the students sobered and looked away, as
if they were there by accident and hadn’t taken part in another student’s humiliation. Some shrugged,
others hurried away, well aware that detentions might follow like hot pies on
Christmas.
Karishma turned to Aram. “Don’t pay attention to
them.”
Gwenlian touched his temple. “You have bruises,
let’s go see the doctor.”
“Crap,”
Nick muttered in a low voice. “The Sullen One.”
Everyone in the courtyard went silent, for Wz. Persivald
was unhurriedly pacing to them. His morose glance nailed every single student
to the ground. Those who were hurrying away, stood petrified, and those who
were still sitting on the stairs, gulped down nervously. Wz. Persivald eyed
Aram, then Cillian and Andrew. Their two other friends, Lucas and Pedro, were
standing by Cillian, ready to jump to his defense if the situation demanded.
“Mr. Cobo, Mr. Barbosa,” Wz. Persivald told Pedro
and Lucas, “take your friends to the doctor. As for you, Mr. Nazarethian, at
eight o’clock in the evening I want to see you by the Academy doors.”
“He needs a doctor, too!” Gwenlian exclaimed, and
bit her tongue immediately when Persivald flashed her a glance, then strode
away, the hem of his dark blue mantle sweeping the grass.
Aram heard gleeful chuckles behind his back but
didn’t turn. Why Persivald didn’t give Cillian the same look was beyond him.
But what mattered now was that the torn shreds of the letter were in his
clutch. Torn, yes, but the handwritten words, though in another language, were
still there, and the paper that had been once touched by his parents, though
crumpled, had survived. Aram burrowed them inside the inner pocket of his
jacket and marched with his friends to the Flying lesson.
He was inattentive during the whole
lesson, and didn’t utter a word during dinner in the Refectory. His friends,
too, were mostly silent.
“He won’t expel you,” Teo assured
him. “If he wanted to expel you, he wouldn’t call you to the Academy doors in
the evening. He’d take you straight to the headmaster.”
“I’ve heard Wz. Grindewald has
expelled students for just one wrong word. You better be careful when around
him,” Nick said.
“Nonsense,” Meilin said. “You’ll
probably get a detention…”
“And detention is something we all
will be getting sooner or later,” Karishma laughed, trying to cheer him up, but
Aram nodded wordlessly and continued to stare into his plate.
At ten minutes to eight Aram was in
front of the Academy door, ogling the chiseled images of the cat, the broom and
the cauldron. The clock began striking, and after the eighth strike the doors
opened and Persivald stepped onto the threshold.
“Follow me.”
For a very long time they walked in silence. The
path Persivald had taken stretched into darkness, but as soon as he reached the
first candelabrum, it lit up on its own, illuminating the dean’s way. As the
eleventh candelabrum lit up, Persivald stopped, and Aram stopped along. They
were in front of wide and narrow stairs with iron handrails. Someone had
hunched over the stairs, scraping the cold stone with a wet sponge.
“Osvald,” Persivald said, and the man turned.
“You may have your leave. Mr. Nazarethian will finish.”
Osvald wrenched the water off the sponge and
placed it into Aram’s hand. Then he bowed to Persivald and slithered away into
darkness.
Persivald looked at the wet stairs, at the sponge
in Aram’s hand, then back at stairs. His slightly raised eyebrow spoke a
thousand words. Aram looked around. What if someone from his class was there
and would see him scraping the stairs? Unlikely, he thought. The
first-years had nothing to do inside the Academy, but the thought still didn’t
comfort him. Anyone could pass by those stairs and see him washing them.
Persivald could have used detention, extra homework, but his choice wasn’t just
punishment for Aram’s brawl, it was humiliation, too. Why, Aram didn’t know.
Aram knelt on the wet floor and continued
Osvald’s work. The stairs were caked with dirt. It had rained recently, and it
seemed that all the mud of the road and garden had slunk into the Academy,
covering the stairs with endless mire.
“I need to change the water,” Aram said, when the
water in the bucket became pitch black. Persivald pointed into the dark corner.
There appeared to be a marble sink with a copper tap in the form of a mermaid
with a jug. Aram filled the bucket with clear water and returned to the stairs.
During the whole time that he scraped the stairs, Persivald never flinched.
Like a stuffed dummy the wizard continued to stand in the shadow and keep his
small gray eyes on Aram, who never once looked at him, but who felt that stern
glance on his nape.
Still hunched over the stairs Aram froze as a
pair of red velvet slippers with shiny half-moons entered in his vision,
stepping softly on the stairs. Then the hem of a silver robe sprinkled with
stars came into view. As Aram’s eyes traveled up, he saw none other than
Grindewald Arterberry himself.
"Abracadabra: The Witchcraft Academy" will come out in the beginning of the fall. ;)
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