“I’ll see,” said Elda. She hooked a talon into the bag around her neck and whisked out a timetable, then reared on her hindquarters to consult it. It already had claw holes in all four corners. “A cl
ass,” she said. “Foundation Spellcasting with Wizard Wermacht in the North Lab.”
“Where’s that?” Claudia inquired shyly.
“And have we time for coffee first?” Olga asked.
“No, it’s now,” said Elda. “Over there, on the other side of this courtyard.” She stowed the timetable carefully back in her bag. It was a bag she had made herself and covered with golden feathers from her last molt. You could hardly see she was wearing it. The five others gave it admiring looks as they trooped across the courtyard, past the statue of Wizard Policant, founder of the University, and most of them decided they must get a bag like that, too. Olga had been using the pockets of her fur cloak to keep papers in—everyone handed out papers to new students all the time—and Ruskin had stuffed everything down the front of his chain mail. Claudia and Felim had left all the papers behind in their rooms, not realizing they might need any of them, and Lukin had simply lost all his.
“I can see I’ll have to be a bit better organized,” he said ruefully. “I got used to servants.”
They trooped into the stony and resounding vault of the North Lab to find most of the other first-year students already there, sparsely scattered about the rows of desks, with notebooks busily spread in front of them.
“Oh, dear,” said Lukin. “Do we need notebooks as well?”
“Of course,” said Olga. “What made you think we wouldn’t?”
“My teacher made me learn everything by heart,” Lukin explained.
“No wonder you have accidents then,” Ruskin boomed. “What a way to learn!”
“It’s the old way,” Elda said. “When my brothers Kit and Blade were learning magic, Deucalion wouldn’t let them write anything down. They had to recite what they’d been told in the last lesson absolutely right before he’d teach them anything new. Mind you, they used to come back seething, especially Kit.”
“It is not so the old way!” Ruskin blared. “Dwarfs make notes and plans, and careful drawings, before they work any magic at all.”
While he was speaking, the lab resounded to heavy, regular footsteps, as if a giant were walking through it, and Wizard Wermacht came striding in with his impeccably ironed robes swirling around him. Wermacht was a tall wizard, though not a giant, who kept his hair and the little pointed beard at the end of his long, fresh face beautifully trimmed. He walked heavily because that was impressive. He halted impressively behind the lectern, brought out an hourglass, and impressively turned it sand side upward. Then he waited impressively for silence.
Unfortunately Ruskin was used to heavy, rhythmic noises. He had lived among people beating anvils all his life. He failed to notice Wermacht and went on talking. “The dwarfs’ way is the old way. It goes back to before the dawn of history.”
“Shut up, you,” ordered Wermacht.
Ruskin’s round blue eyes flicked to Wermacht. He was used to overbearing people, too. “We’d been writing notes for centuries before we wrote down any history,” he told Elda.
“I said shut up!” Wermacht snapped. He hit the lectern with a crack that made everyone jump and followed that up with a sizzle of magefire. “Didn’t you hear me, you horrible little creature?”
Ruskin flinched along with everyone else at the noise and the flash, but at the words horrible little creature his face went a brighter pink and his large chest swelled. He bowed with sarcastic politeness. “Yes, but I hadn’t quite finished what I was saying,” he growled. His voice was now so deep that the windows buzzed.
“We’re not here to listen to you,” Wermacht retorted. “You’re only a student—you and the creature that’s encouraging you—unless, of course, both of you strayed in here by mistake. I don’t normally teach animals or runts in armor. Why are you dressed for battle?”
Elda’s beak opened and clapped shut again. Ruskin growled, “This is what dwarfs wear.”
“Not in my classes you don’t,” Wermacht snapped, and took an uneasy glance at the vibrating windows. “And can’t you control your voice?”
Ruskin’s face flushed beyond pink, into beetroot. “No. I can’t. I’m thirty-five years old, and my voice is breaking.”
“Dwarfs,” said Elda, “are different.”
“Although only in some things,” Felim put in, leaning forward as smooth and sharp as a knife-edge. “Wizard Wermacht, no one should be singled out for personal remarks at this stage. We are all new here. We will all be making mistakes.”
Felim seemed to have said the right thing. Wermacht contented himself with putting his eyebrows up and staring at Felim. And Felim stared back until, as Claudia remarked to Olga afterward, one could almost hear knives clashing. Finally Wermacht shrugged and turned to the rest of the class. “We are going to start this course by establishing the first ten laws of magic. Will you all get out your notebooks and write? Your first big heading is ‘The Laws of Magic.’”
There was a scramble for paper and pens. Olga dived for her cloak pockets, Elda for her feathered bag, and Ruskin for the front of his armor. Felim looked bemused for a moment, then fumbled inside his wide sash until he found what seemed to be a letter. Ruskin passed him a stick of charcoal and was rewarded with a flashing smile of gratitude. It made Ruskin stare. Felim’s narrow, rather stern face seemed to light up. Meanwhile Elda saw Claudia sitting looking lost and hastily tore her a page out of her own notebook. Claudia smiled almost as shiningly as Felim, a smile that first put two long creases in her thin cheeks and then turned the left-hand crease into a dimple, but she waved away the pen Elda tried to lend her. The words Laws of Magic had already appeared at the top of the torn page. Elda blinked a little.
Lukin just sat there.
“Smaller headings under that, numbered,” proclaimed Wermacht. “Law One, the Law of Contagion or Part for Whole. Law Two—you back there, is your memory particularly good or something? Yes, you with the secondhand jacket.”
“Me?” said Lukin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I’d need a notebook.”