Doubleborn

A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.

From “The Elixir”, by George Herbert

I had good teachers, bad teachers, terrible teachers and
wonderful ones. Don’t we all? This book is dedicated to
all my good and wonderful teachers.

asked Tamrin.

No one could have called her tidy at the best of times, and when she was cross, which was a lot of the time now, she looked more dishevelled than ever.

She waited for Vengeabil to answer. Either he didn’t hear her or he was pretending he didn’t, and she knew that he heard everything.

“I mean it,” she said. “What am I?”

Vengeabil put a piece of thread in his mouth. He was sewing up a stuffed dragon that had fallen from a high shelf and come undone. It was a Small Tortoiseshell, very rare, about the size of a cat, with a tail that ended in three points. He pointed to the thread and shrugged his shoulders, indicating that he couldn’t talk.

Tamrin jabbed her pen on her exercise book. The nib splayed out, ink sprayed over the page and on to her hands. When she brushed it away she just smeared it more.

“Blotting paper,” said Vengeabil.

“Hah!” she pointed her pen at him. “I knew you could talk with that thread in your mouth. What am I? Really. I mean it.”

“I know you mean it,” he said, taking the thread out of his mouth now that it no longer protected him from talking. “But I don’t know what you mean. They’re not the same thing.”

Tamrin had ink up to her elbows now and a smear of it on her cheek.

“I’m not a real apprentice, am I?” she said. “Not really.”

Vengeabil put the last stitch in and tied up the end. He examined the stuffed dragon from every side.

“And I’m a twin,” she continued. “But I don’t know what sort of twin and I never see my twin. I never even met him until a year ago, and then he was gone almost as soon as he was here.”

“This dragon,” said Vengeabil, “is the only one ever seen anywhere by anyone.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the book of dragons says there are seventeen varieties of dragon and eight of them have never been seen by anyone, and the Small Tortoiseshell is one of the eight.”

Tamrin peered across the kitchen at it.

“How did you get it?”

“There’s a story attached to that,” said Vengeabil.

Tamrin rolled her eyes. With Vengeabil there was a story attached to everything.

“That’s what I mean,” she said. She clenched her fists and knuckled her forehead. It was difficult to sort things out in her head. “You never teach me anything, not really. You just tell me stories. Not proper lessons, like in the college.”

The kitchen they were sitting in was in the cellars of Canterstock College, the oldest, biggest, and, if you really admitted it, the only college for wizards. Above their heads nearly two hundred pupils were studying magic. Tamrin had been one of them once, as a little girl, but it hadn’t worked out and she was sort of expelled and she sort of just left. After a while, Vengeabil took her on as his apprentice, to make her a wizard that way.

“Stories are how you teach an apprentice,” he said. “It’s how my old master taught me.” He stroked the dragon and looked into the distance. “Flaxfield. There was a wizard for you. He never went to the college. Proper wizards don’t; they pass it on to their apprentices. Your people upstairs, they’ll never be the sort of wizard he was. Not the sort of wizard I am. Not the sort of wizard you can be.”

This was Vengeabil’s story. Tamrin loved to hear him tell it. Every time it was just a little different. Every time there was just a little something new that he hadn’t told before. Every time she understood something better than she had the last time.

She pushed her books aside.

“Tell me,” she said.

Vengeabil moved across and sat next to her. He looked at her work. Despite her complaints about only hearing stories, Tamrin had filled many exercise books with notes and diagrams and drawings, lists and recipes, maps, names of herbs, and tables of figures. The pages were creased and blotched. The corners buffed and ragged. The covers, and more than the covers, were smeared with butter and wax and soot and grease. Any teacher upstairs would have refused to mark them, they were such a mess. Vengeabil marked them though, and he never found a mistake in the spelling or the calculations or the facts. Never. Tamrin had cried once because she couldn’t be neat and Vengeabil had said, “I remember Flaxfield saying to me something about the comfortable tidiness of the small mind.”

A bell rang high above them. Hundreds of feet thudded down the corridors.

“Lunch time. Lessons are finished for the morning,” said Vengeabil. “And it’s gloomy in here.”

He leaned over and pulled a candle towards them. He pinched the wick between his finger and thumb, and a flame was born, tiny, then small, then strong and blue with a yellow beating heart.

“Shouldn’t really,” he said. “I should get a light from the range, but there you are, there you are. Are you ready?”

Tamrin nodded.

“I was Flaxfield’s apprentice,” he began. “All in the proper way. Left home at six years old and went to learn from him. Signed my indentures when I was twelve. It was all going smoothly. And then there was the incident.”

This was the part that Tamrin wanted him to talk about. Sometimes he called it an event, sometimes an incident, once he called it a disaster, sometimes it was a chapter of occurrences.

“Anyway, after the – incident – everything changed.”

“What was it?” she said. “The incident.”

Vengeabil sighed. “You know, Flaxfield told us all never to talk about it. He said if we forgot all about it then we might be safe.”

“And did you forget? Is that why you never tell me what it was?”

“No. No, I never forgot. Still, after it happened, nothing was the same and I had to leave Flaxfield and come here.”

“Did you hate it?”

Vengeabil looked shocked. “Hate it? No. Not at all. Part of me wanted to come here. You have to remember, it was a different sort of place then. We had a good principal. A very good principal.”

Tamrin couldn’t stop herself from hitting the table with her knuckles, which hurt, but was worth it.

“I know,” he agreed. “Not like now. And I was apprenticed jointly to Flaxfield and to someone here. First time it’s ever happened. I didn’t go to lessons. Just learned,” he gave her one of his looks that made him look like a naughty twelve‑year‑old, “by stories. So I’m sort of half an apprenticed wizard and half a college wizard. Just like you.”

“Who was your master here?” she said. Not for the first time.

“So you see, to answer one of your questions – who am I? – you’re my apprentice and I like to think that’s not a bad thing.”

Tamrin felt ashamed.

“It’s a good thing,” she said. “I love it. But there are the other questions.”

She didn’t like to say that a question she hadn’t said out loud to him was, “And what are you?” She knew whatever answer he gave it wouldn’t be enough of an answer. And if she didn’t know what he was how could she know what she was?

“There’s someone coming,” said Vengeabil.

They paused and listened.

“I’d better go and see what they want,” he said.

Tamrin waited for him to leave the kitchen, then as she usually did, she followed him, silently.

“Mr Masrani,” said Vengeabil. “What can I do for you, young sir?”

Tim Masrani grinned at him.

“Did you want a new pair of shoes?” the man asked.

“No. Er, no, thanks.”

“No?”

Vengeabil lifted the counter top and stepped out to stand next to Tim.

Vengeabil’s storeroom supplied everyone in the college with books, uniform, equipment and ingredients for experiments and spells, paper, ink, games, toys, bandages, rubber bands, pens and anything else he thought they might need. He was the storekeeper, which was just about the lowliest job in the college. The pupils treated him as a bit of a joke. The better ones felt sorry for him. The others would have made fun of him if they weren’t just a little bit scared of the scruffy old man who lived in the dark passages under the college.

“No,” said Tim. “I haven’t come for new shoes.”

“Well you ought to. Look at the state of them. They’re all scuffed and dusty.”

Tim looked down at his feet. His shoes weren’t really in any worse state than the rest of his uniform – trousers baggy at the knee, jerkin just too small, with a hole in the left elbow and reminders of meals down the front, hair not combed for a week. He brushed himself down with his hands, achieving no improvement at all, and said, “I’ve come to take Tamrin to Professor Frastfil. He wants to see her.”

“What if she doesn’t want to see him?” said Vengeabil. “What if she’s not here?”

A jerkin slid down from the counter and wrapped itself around Tim’s leg, turning into a small octopus and winding itself round him.

“Oh, not that again,” he complained, shaking his leg. “Why do you always do that? It’s wet, and slimy.”

“I’ll go and see him,” said Tamrin, stepping out from the shadows. “What does he want?”