Finally, he said, “That’s better. Now, keeping the position and concentrating on your center, smoothly transfer some of the energy from your center to between your hands.”
There was a long, straining silence, while everyone tried to do this.
“Think,” Wermacht said, with contemptuous patience. “Think of flame between your hands.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” Ruskin rumbled.
“Did you say something, you with the voice?” Wermacht asked nastily.
Ruskin said nothing. He simply stood there with his face lit from beneath by the pile of purple flame cupped in his large hands. Wermacht scowled.
At that moment several students near the front gave cries of pleasure and held out little blue blobs of flame.
“Very good,” Wermacht said patronizingly.
After that, as if it were catching, blue flames burst out all over the North Lab.
“Like wildfire,” Olga said, grinding her teeth, and summoned suddenly a tall, green, twirling fire that forked at the top. The forks twisted together almost to the ceiling.
“Oh, dear!” said Lukin. He had managed to do it, too, but his blue fire was, for some reason, dancing in a little pit in the middle of his desk.
Wermacht exclaimed angrily and came striding up the lab. “Trust you lot to make a mess of it! You with the secondhand jacket, pick that flame up. Cherish it. Go on, it won’t burn you. And you, girl with the long nose, pull your flame in. Think of it as smaller at once, before you make a mess of the ceiling.”
Olga shot a furious look at Wermacht and managed to reduce her forked green flame to about a foot high. Lukin leaned forward and gingerly coaxed his blue flame to climb into his hands. Wermacht made an angry spread-fingered gesture over the desk, whereupon the small pit vanished.
“What is it with you?” he said to Lukin. “Do you have an affinity for deep pits, or something?” Before Lukin could reply, Wermacht turned to where Felim was nonchalantly balancing a bright sky blue spire of light on one palm. “Both hands, I said!”
“Is there a reason for using two hands?” Felim asked politely.
“Yes. We do moving the fire about next week,” Wermacht told him.
Elda, all this while, had her eyes shut, hunting inside herself for her center. She had never yet been able to discover it. It made her anxious and unhappy. Nobody else seemed to have any difficulty finding the place. But now, after reading Policant, she began to ask herself, Why? And the answer was easy. Griffins were a different shape from human people. Her center was going to be in another place. She gave up hunting for it up and down her stomach and looked into herself all over. And there it was. A lovely, bright, spinning essence-of-Elda was whirling inside her big griffin ribs, in her chest, where she had always unconsciously known it was.
There was a tingling around her front talons.
Elda opened her eyes and gazed admiringly at the large, transparent pear shape of golden-white fire trembling between her claws. “Oh!” she said. “How beautiful!”
This left only Claudia without magefire in the entire class. Wermacht turned from Felim to find Claudia with her eyes shut and her cheeks wrinkled with effort. “No, no!” he said. “Eyes open and see the flame in your mind.”
Claudia’s eyes popped open and slid sideways toward Wermacht. “I shut my eyes because you were distracting me,” she said. “I have a jinx, you know, and I’m finding this very difficult.”
“There is no such thing as a jinx,” Wermacht pronounced. “You’re just misdirecting your power. Look at your cupped hands and concentrate.”
“I am,” said Claudia. “Please move away.”
But Wermacht stood looming over Claudia, while everyone else stared at her until Elda expected her to scream. And just at the point when Elda herself would have screamed, Claudia said, “Oh—blah!” and took her aching hands down.
Almost everyone in the lab cried, “There!”
“What do you all mean, ‘there’?” Claudia asked irritably.
Wermacht took hold of Claudia’s skinny right arm and bent it up toward her face. “I can’t think what you did,” he said, “but it’s there. Look.”
Claudia craned around herself and stared, dumbfounded and gloomy, at the little turquoise flame hanging downward from the back of her wrist. “I told you I had a jinx,” she said.
“Nonsense,” said Wermacht, and strode away to the front of the class. “Withdraw the flame back to your center now,” he said. This was surprisingly easy to do, even for Elda, whose heart ached at having to get rid of her lovely transparent teardrop. “Sit down,” said Wermacht. Seats obediently scraped. “Write in your own words—you, too, you with the jinx. You can stop admiring your excrescence; dismiss it and sit down now.”
“But I can’t,” Claudia protested. “I don’t know what I did to get it.”