The Alchemists Academy Book 2: Elemental Explosions (13 page)

            “You were worried?” Priscilla asked, seeming surprised. “Why would you be worried?”

            “Of course I was worried,” Alana snapped back. “I thought you might have been eaten by something, or even some Thing, given what the school can be like.”

            “But you found me in the end,” Priscilla said, apparently unrepentant. “That’s the important thing.”

            “The important thing,” Alana said, taking Priscilla by the shoulders as though she would like nothing more than to shake some sense into her, “is that Ender Paine has had half the school looking for you. Half the school, Priscilla.”

            Priscilla nodded. “I know. Isn’t it fun?”

            “Fun?” Alana seemed slightly shocked by that one. “Priscilla, there’s nothing fun about going missing. Your father will have been told by now, you know.”

            “Well, I should hope so. I would be very upset if we went through all this without Daddy being told.”

            “Is that what this is?” Wirt asked, trying to make sense of it. “Some kind of attempt to get attention?”

            Priscilla looked at him like he had just suggested that the sky should be bright pink. “I always get lots of attention, thank you. In the summer, there was this lovely travelling minstrel who wrote a whole string of poems about me, you know. Plenty of attention.”

            Alana shook her head. “Priscilla, it seems to me that you aren’t taking this very seriously. People will be upset with you.”

“They will?”

Alana nodded. “Of course they will, after a stunt like this. You’ll have to issue an apology or something. At this rate, we’ll be lucky if the headmaster doesn’t insist on you leaving the school completely. He almost certainly won’t let you keep going with your magic lessons.”

            “But why?” Priscilla asked, looking suddenly hurt and confused. “He was the one who told me to.”

            Wirt felt he had to step in there. “Ender Paine
told
you to hide like that?”

            Priscilla nodded, but before she could explain anything, the door opened to let in another group of students, accompanied by the headmaster, Ms. Burns, and Priscilla’s brother Robert. It made for quite a crowded room, but if it meant that Wirt and the others were going to get a meaningful explanation of what was going on, Wirt could put up with it.

            The headmaster turned to one of the boys in the group, a ginger-haired young man in old fashioned robes, who seemed very proud of himself for some reason.

            “It seems that you were correct, Thomas. The princess is here. Well done. And thinking to use her brother to lead you to her with a spell based on the link between them was an intriguing approach.”

            A student getting praise from Ender Paine? Could this day get any stranger, Wirt wondered.

            “As such, Thomas will get the highest marks on this test, followed by the rest of those in his group… yes, what is it, Priscilla? And weren’t you to spend your time hiding in an alternate form, not talking with your friends?”

            “I did hide,” Priscilla said. “That’s what I wanted to say. Alana and the others found me first, not this lot. They should get the marks.”

            Wirt felt he spoke for all of them in the next moment. “What exactly is going on?” he demanded. “You’re talking as though this was all some kind of test.”

            Ender Paine looked at him as though Wirt had missed the most obvious point in the world. “This is the second year, boy. Everything is a test. The princess here agreed to help us test your skills at locating people by hiding.”

            “I was a troll doll,” Priscilla said proudly. The headmaster rolled his eyes, but it seemed Priscilla didn’t see that.

            Ms. Burns stepped forward then. “You say that your friends found you, Priscilla?” The teacher asked.

Priscilla nodded. “It was Alana really. She worked out that I would never leave my troll figures like that, and she worked out why my magic mirror only showed this room when they asked it where I was.
And
she and the others thought to check here rather than running off doing stupid ‘trace me through my brother’ spells.”

The red-haired boy who had seemed so proud a moment ago looked furious then. He jabbed a finger towards Wirt and the others. “But they cheated!”

“That’s a very serious accusation, Thomas,” Ms. Burns said. “Can you prove it?”

Thomas shook his head. “But it’s obvious. They came straight here. And it’s obvious that the stupid princess wants her friend to win.”

“Stupid?” Priscilla’s voice took on a dangerous note. “You want to watch what you’re saying. Some of us have been practicing turning things into other things, you know. Or do you
want
to spend your days hopping about catching flies?”

Wirt wondered if she might actually do it. He also started to see why royalty wasn’t generally allowed to learn magic directly. Thankfully though, Alana chose that moment to step in, putting an arm around the princess and moving her gently away.

“Priscilla, if you turn him into a frog, they’ll only make you kiss him to turn him back. You don’t want that, do you?”

“Kiss him? Eww! Not if he were the last frog on Earth!”

“So it’s better if you don’t turn Thomas here into one then, isn’t it?”

Priscilla nodded. “Absolutely. But I still won’t have him calling you a cheat. You didn’t cheat.”

The red-haired boy was either braver than he looked, or very desperate to get a good grade for this task. “You said yourself that they used a magic mirror to find you.”

“How is that different from using a locating spell?” Wirt asked, deciding that he didn’t like the other boy very much. “Besides, anyone could have come here and done that if they took the time to find out that Priscilla keeps one here.”

Thomas wasn’t willing to give up that easily. “Then there’s this stuff about how the princess would never leave her troll dolls lying around. How were we meant to know that?”

Wirt pointed at Robert. “You could have asked her brother what Priscilla was like. He would have told you. Alana knew it because she has made an effort to learn about Priscilla.”

“Because she works with her every day.”

To Wirt’s surprise, Ender Paine stepped in then, raising a hand for silence. “It is entirely acceptable for the girl here to have used her knowledge of the princess. Advisors are
meant
to know the royalty they work with.”

“Well, why was the princess human when we got here then?” Thomas demanded, before looking slightly nervous as he realized the tone he had just taken with the headmaster. “I mean… isn’t it possible that she never really hid? You said that yourself, sir.”

“I did hide!” Priscilla said indignantly, and Wirt got the feeling that she was considering the frog spell again. “I hid brilliantly.” She said a few words, and there was the little troll doll again. A second later, and she was back. “You see. Hiding.”

“Adequately, at least,” the headmaster said. “Assuming that you did it.”

“I did! Alana only spotted where I was because-”

“Because of some business with a mirror. Yes, you said, your highness. Now, please be quiet.”

It said a lot about Ender Paine that he could even make Priscilla shut up. He stood silently for a moment, seeming to think. “Ordinarily, of course, this would not be an issue. I always find that those who complain about cheating are merely the weak, and deserve to be trampled.”

Yes, that certainly sounded like Ender Paine’s approach to educational theory from where Wirt was standing.

“However,” the headmaster continued, “cheating on any test
I
have put together is another matter. So we need to find a way to establish the truth of this quickly and efficiently.”

“Without resorting to horrible tortures or rendering down anyone’s brain,” Ms. Burns muttered, and held her ground as Ender Paine glared at her. “I’m just thinking of the school, Headmaster. The king wouldn’t be pleased if you did that kind of thing to his daughter.”

The headmaster was silent for a moment, but then nodded. “You are correct, of course, and in any case, I suspect that there isn’t much to render.” Wirt noted that Priscilla didn’t dare to protest at that point. Ender Paine looked at Ms. Burns. “You have an alternative solution?”

“The mirror,” Ms. Burns said. “It will be able to show what happened, and they do not lie.”

“A simple approach, but an effective one, I suppose.” The headmaster seemed faintly disappointed that he couldn’t try his ones, but he moved over to the mirror anyway. “Show me,” he commanded.

It shouldn’t have worked. Wirt had have enough experience with that particular mirror to know that it only worked when you rhymed, and the magical spirit animating it usually complained bitterly even then. For Ender Paine, though, the magical device worked perfectly. It showed the door to the room opening, admitting Wirt, Alana, Spencer and Roland. It showed the next few minutes too, in perfect detail.

Finally, the headmaster waved a hand in front of it. “Enough.”

The mirror went back to just showing his reflection. Ender Paine took a moment to adjust the gloves he always wore. “The device is clear,” he said. “The girl, Alana, was responsible for finding the princess through her thinking. As such, she will receive full marks for this test. The others in her team helped, and will receive lower scores. Thomas and his team will receive less again.”

Nobody argued. Wirt suspected that nobody dared. Ender Paine, Ms. Burns, Robert, Thomas and the rest filed out of the room, leaving only Wirt, Spencer, Roland, Priscilla and Alana. Priscilla seemed pleased by the way things had gone, moving over to hug her friend.

“There! I knew you would do brilliantly. Your working out was almost as good as my disguise.”

“Yes, Priscilla,” Alana said, going along with it.

Wirt’s eyes weren’t on her in that moment though. Instead, he was busy watching Roland. The jealousy on his face was plain to see. Apparently, the other boy thought he should have gotten the top mark, despite Alana’s work. Wirt knew they would have to watch him. Somehow, he didn’t think Roland was going to let anything get between him and making it through to the next year.

Chapter 14

T
he next few weeks were busy ones for Wirt. There were lessons to deal with; endless lessons on everything from the proper way to deal with an infestation of griffons to how to wrap different elements around yourself as a shield and how to avoid attention from unpleasant Things while transporting yourself between spots.

            Perhaps more importantly, there were more tests, and plenty of them, until Wirt started to suspect that Ender Paine was right. Everything was a test there. There were written quizzes in classes and sudden requirements for practical demonstrations, large scale problems to be solved in teams the way the search for Priscilla had gone and informal things where the only warning you got that you might be being tested was that the teacher was watching you a bit more closely than usual.

            Not all the tests were even magical. Ms. Lake lined them all up on the bank of her home one morning, declaring that they would all have to swim to the other side. Wirt had pulled himself from the water long minutes later, well behind the likes of Alana, who had outpaced almost everyone.

            On another occasion, Sir Percival had them fighting with wooden swords. Wirt had barely used a sword before in his life, and had found himself roundly beaten by Priscilla, who wasn’t actually taking the test, being merely a continued royal presence at the school, but who decided to join in anyway. Spencer had laughed at Wirt losing like that, right up to the point where the princess beat him too.