The Alchemists Academy Book 2: Elemental Explosions (16 page)

Chapter 17

W
irt stepped to the side as the giant kept coming forward, avoiding that first rush. Roland, meanwhile, had his hands up and was chanting words Wirt didn’t recognize from any of their classes. Dark strands, like semi-translucent ropes, shot forward from his arms, wrapping around the giant’s ankles. It stumbled for a moment, but didn’t fall, ripping through the strands instead in a sudden burst of strength.

            “Idiot,” Spencer yelled over to Roland. “Don’t you know giants are hard to use magic on?”

            He didn’t get an answer, because at that moment he had to jump back to avoid another sweep of the creature’s arm. Wirt tried to think of something that might slow the giant down, but if it wasn’t likely to be affected by his magic, he didn’t know what was left.

            Roland seemed determined to keep going with those magical strands of his. Apparently, he didn’t believe what Spencer had to say. At least, the strands shot forward again, and again the giant brushed them away.

            Wirt had better things to worry about than Roland, however. Alana was still slumped against the wall, and she didn’t seem to be awake. Seizing his chance in between lunges from the giant, Wirt darted forward, keeping his head down as he struggled over to Alana. She was breathing. Wirt’s heart leapt as he saw that much. It fell again just as quickly. There was a thin trickle of blood on the wall where Alana had struck it, and despite his attempts to wake her, her eyes wouldn’t open.

            Did he dare shake her awake? Did he dare move her at all? Wirt didn’t know enough about what you did with injured people to risk it. Which was a problem, because the giant chose that moment to turn to him, the fury on its face still raw.

            “You! Englishman! Now you die!”

            Wirt reacted on instinct, knowing that he couldn’t target the giant itself with magic, yet knowing that magic was exactly what he needed if he and Alana were going to survive. He gestured to the ceiling, calling on the earth and stone within it. An ominous creaking sound followed.

            “Ha, puny human!” the giant bellowed. “Your magic is
weak
. I will-”

            Wirt didn’t get to find out what it would do, because at that moment, half the ceiling collapsed on top of the creature in a shower of stone and dust. The giant fell to the ground, pinned under and howling with pain.

            “I’ll kill you,” it promised. “I’ll eat your bones and render you down for soup!”

            Roland stepped forward then, rolling up his sleeves. The black lines crawled across his skin almost like tattoos, though Wirt knew from having shared a room with him for weeks that he had no such thing.

“We should kill it before it gets up,” Roland said.

“It’s not going to get up, is it?” Spencer asked, looking worried.

As if in answer to that, the giant shifted, and the pile of rubble shifted with it. For the moment at least, it seemed that the creature was still pinned, but it was surely just a matter of time before it broke free.

“We should kill it,” Roland repeated, raising his arms.

Wirt moved in front of the other boy. “We aren’t killing anything.”

“But it wants to eat us.”

“Because we broke into its home,” Wirt pointed out. “Because
you
wanted to steal its eggs rather than look for the magical ropes.”

“Ropes?” The giant squirmed under the rubble. “There aren’t any ropes here. So you will be devoured for nothing!”

For nothing. All this trouble, and it was a dead end. Had Roland known that before he came this way? Of course he had. His conversation with the box last night proved that. And now Alana had been hurt for it.

“Well, I’m not letting this be for nothing,” Roland declared, and made for the pile of golden eggs once more. Wirt had finally had enough. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, whispered the words to a transportation spell, and jumped them both back to their room in the academy.

“What? Wirt, what did you do? You had no right-”

Wirt wasn’t listening. Instead, he jumped straight back to the giant’s home. He grabbed Spencer next, dropping him in the solarium before going back for Alana. Where should he take her? As Wirt tried to work it out, the giant shifted again, rubble starting to peel off it.

“I will find you,” it promised. “I will sniff you out and-”

“And when you do, I will bring more than a ceiling down on you,” Wirt promised. He wasn’t sure where the words came from but he knew that they were true even as he said them. This creature had hurt Alana. “We came into your home when we shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry for that, but if you try to follow me or hurt my friends, I swear it won’t be me who dies.”

With that, Wirt put a hand on Alana’s shoulder and jumped the pair of them to Ms. Lake’s office. There was a shielding spell around it, but Wirt cut through that with barely a thought about it. Thankfully, the teacher was in.

“Wirt, what do you think you’re doing, transporting yourself in here when there’s a perfectly good door you could… what happened to Alana?”

“A giant,” Wirt explained. “Please, Ms. Lake, there’s no time.”

Ms. Lake seemed to agree, because she took one closer look at Alana and hurried off to fetch Ms. Genovia the transmutation teacher. The strange looking woman with her fragments of animal features knelt beside Alana, using transmutation spells to undo the damage to Alana’s body. Even so, it was long minutes before Alana’s eyes flickered open.

“W…what? Ms. Genovia? Ms. Lake? What am I doing here?”

She started to stand, but then stumbled back, wincing.

“Easy there girl,” Ms. Genovia said. “I’ve healed some of the damage, but you had broken bones there, and it’s always best if you heal the last parts of those yourself. You certainly won’t be doing anything strenuous for a week or two.”

“But I can’t… the tests.”

“The tests will just have to wait,” Ms. Lake said, helping Alana to a chair.

Ms. Genovia spent a little time checking that Alana didn’t have any unexpected pain, and then declared that the girl was as fit as could be expected, considering the amount of damage she had just suffered. After that, the transmutations teacher took her leave, saying something about a cauldron full of frogs on the boil.

Ms. Lake waited until she was gone before turning back to Wirt and Alana. “Now, is one of you going to explain to me what happened here? What was that you were saying about a giant, Wirt?”

“Um…” Wirt wasn’t sure that he wanted to tell a teacher the whole story. Not when the four of them had clearly been in the wrong, breaking in like that.

“Wirt.” Ms. Lake’s tone had a warning.

So Wirt told her the whole thing, or at least the parts of it that he thought applied. He left out what he’d heard Roland saying the previous night, saying instead that Roland just seemed to have an idea where the ropes were, and then that he got distracted by the thought of the golden eggs.

Ms. Lake nodded sadly. “That can happen. And then Alana, I take it you got in the giant’s way?”

Alana nodded. “I just thought that if we all stopped to talk-”

Ms. Lake shook her head. “There’s probably a lesson in that somewhere. As nice as it would be if everyone wanted to sort their problems out as sensibly as you, dear, it doesn’t always work that way.”

Alana bit her lip and nodded. It seemed to be good enough for Ms. Lake.

“Obviously, I can’t condone what happened up there,” the teacher said. “Trying to steal the eggs was wrong of Roland. But I guess you all had a good reason to believe the ropes might be there.” She cocked her head to the side. “Hmm… it seems that we actually have news on that front. Come with me.”

Ms. Lake didn’t wait for Wirt and Alana to follow, but instead merely transported them up to the solarium, where the second year students were assembled. She left Wirt and Alana in the crowd as she walked to the front, where the headmaster was standing with a group that included the red-haired boy from the attempts to find Priscilla: Thomas.

“I can’t believe that you told Ms. Lake about Roland wanting the eggs,” Alana whispered to Wirt, sitting down on a nearby plant.

“Why not? He did want to steal from there.”

“I’m sure there was a better explanation,” Alana insisted. “If we had actually asked Roland, maybe he would have had an answer.”

Wirt shook his head. “You didn’t see him, Alana. He wanted to kill that giant in cold blood.”

“You’re right, Wirt.” Alana shook her head. “I
didn’t
see him do that. And I know you don’t like him much, but saying that kind of thing is just going too far.”

“You think I’m making this up?”

 Wirt didn’t get an answer to that, because Ender Paine chose that moment to silence the throng of students. In that silence, Wirt spotted Spencer and Roland standing off towards the back. Neither looked happy.

“It seems that we have a winner in our quest to recover the magical ropes taken from the school’s collection,” the headmaster said. “Step forward, Thomas.”

The red-haired boy moved forward a little, looking as though he expected a standing ovation. He mostly got resentful looks from the other students.

“Thomas here,” Ender Paine patted the boy on the shoulder, “correctly identified that the ropes were hidden in the castle of a giant, connected to the school via a beanstalk. He retrieved them and has returned them to the school’s keeping.”

Wirt winced at those words. The ropes
had
been there. So Roland’s attempt to grab the eggs was just him being greedy, trying to get a valuable object as well as the credit for returning the ropes. Only they had come away empty-handed, while Thomas got the credit. Wirt found himself wondering how Thomas had worked it out. For all Wirt knew, the other boy had simply followed them, though he suspected that it would probably be far more complicated, involving some kind of spell.

 It didn’t really matter either way. What mattered was that the other boy had gotten to the objects of the quest faster than Wirt and the others. Meaning that he would now get full marks for finding the ropes, while they got nothing. Well, Wirt assumed that it would be full marks. It depended on whether Roland would have left all the ropes there for the boy to find, or whether he might have held one back. Wirt didn’t know.

He did know, however, that it was time for him to finally tell someone exactly what he knew about what Roland was up to. Alana was out. She had proved that with her reaction to the news that Roland had wanted to kill the giant. Ms. Lake would want proof, while the headmaster would probably think that a student involved in some kind of dark plot merely showed initiative. That left one person who would undoubtedly believe anything bad Wirt had to say about Roland.

It was time to talk to Spencer.