One of the mages behind the tables — Call had seen her, and her elaborate snake necklace, at the Trial — sighed and went to clear it up. Call blinked as her snake necklace seemed to move for a second. Then he decided he was seeing things. He probably was suffering from caffeine withdrawal.

“Where’s the coffee?” he asked Aaron.

“You can’t drink coffee,” Aaron said, squinting as he took a slice of mushroom. “It’s bad for you. Stunts your growth.”

“But I drank it all the time back home,” Call protested. “I always drink coffee. I drink espresso.”

Aaron shrugged, which seemed to be his default move when presented with some new Callum-related craziness. “There’s that weird tea.”

“But I love coffee,” Call told the green sludge in front of him, plaintively.

“I miss bacon,” said Celia, who was behind Call in line. She had a new bright clip in her hair, this one a ladybug. Despite how cheery it looked, she appeared woebegone.

“Caffeine withdrawal makes you crazy,” he told her. “I could snap and kill someone.”

She giggled like he’d made a really funny joke. Maybe she thought he had. She was pretty, he realized, with her blond hair and the spray of freckles across her slightly sunburned nose. He remembered that, along with Jasper and Gwenda, she was one of Master Milagros’s apprentices. A wave of sympathy swept over him that she had to live in the same room as a weenus like Jasper.

“He could kill someone,” Tamara said casually, looking back over her shoulder. “He has a huge knife in his —”

“Tamara!” Aaron interrupted her.

She gave him an innocent smile before heading back to Master Rufus’s table with her plate. For the first time, Call wondered if he had something in common with Tamara after all — an instinct for troublemaking.

The whole room was filled with stone tables at which groups of apprentices sat on stools, some Second and Third Years with their Masters, and some without. The Iron Year students were all clustered with their Masters — Jasper, Celia, Gwenda, and a boy named Nigel with Master Milagros, the pink in her hair very bright today; Drew, Rafe, and a girl named Laurel with grouchy-looking Master Lemuel. Only a very few students in the white and red uniforms of Fourth and Fifth Years were present, and they all sat together in a corner, having what appeared to be a very serious discussion.

“Where are the rest of the older kids?” Call asked.

“On missions,” said Celia. “Older apprentices learn in the field, and some grown-up mages come here to use the facilities for research and experiments.”

“See,” Call said in a hushed tone. “Experiments!”

Celia didn’t seem particularly worried. She just grinned at Call and moved off toward her Master’s table.

Call thumped into a chair between Aaron and Master Rufus, who was already seated before an austere breakfast containing a single clump of lichen. Call’s plate was covered in mushrooms and green stuff — he didn’t remember doing that. I must be cracking up, he thought. Then he took a forkful of mushroom and shoved it into his mouth.

The taste exploded over his tongue. It was actually good. Really good. Crispy at the edges and a little bit sweet, like the way maple syrup tastes on sausages when everything runs together.

“Huh,” Call said, taking another bite. The greens were creamy and rich, like porridge with brown sugar. Aaron was shoveling spoonfuls of it into his mouth, looking astonished.

He expected to see Tamara snickering at him for being so surprised, but she wasn’t even looking. She waved across the room at a tall, slim girl with the same long dark hair and perfect eyebrows as she had. A copper wristband glittered on the girl’s wrist as she lifted her hand in a lazy wave. “My sister,” Tamara said proudly. “Kimiya.”

Call looked over at the girl, sitting at a table with a few other students in green and Master Rockmaple, and then back at Tamara. He wondered what it would be like to be happy here, to be glad you were chosen, instead of its being a terrible accident. Tamara and her sister seemed so totally confident that this was a good place — that this wasn’t the evil lair his father had described.

But why would his dad lie?

Master Rufus was slicing his lichen in a very strange way, segmenting it like individual pieces of bread in a loaf. Then he cut each of those pieces in half, and half again. This freaked Call out so badly that he turned to Aaron and asked, “So do you have any family here?”

“No,” Aaron said, glancing away from Call as though he didn’t like talking about it. “No family anywhere. I heard about the Magisterium from a girl I used to know. She saw this trick I did sometimes when I was bored — make dust motes dance around and form into shapes. She said she had a brother who went here and even though he wasn’t supposed to tell her about it, he had. After he graduated and she left to go live with him, I started practicing for the Trial.”

Call squinted at Aaron across his pile of mushrooms. There was something about the too-casual way he told the story that made Call wonder if maybe there was more to it. He didn’t want to ask, though. He hated it when people pried into his life. Maybe Aaron did, too.

Aaron and Call lapsed into silence, pushing their food around their plates. Tamara went back to eating. From the other side of the hall, Jasper deWinter was waving his arms, clearly trying to get her attention. Call nudged her with his elbow and she scowled at him.

Rufus took a small, precise bite of lichen. “I see the three of you have grown very close already.”

No one said anything. Jasper’s gestures at Tamara were growing somewhat wilder. He was clearly urging her to do something, though Call couldn’t tell what. Jump in the air? Throw her porridge?

Tamara turned back to Master Rufus, taking a deep breath as though steeling herself to do something she didn’t particularly want to do. “Do you think you would ever reconsider about Jasper? I know it was his dream to be picked by you, and there’s room for more in our group —” She stopped speaking, probably because Master Rufus was looking at her like a raptor bird about to bite off the head of a mouse.

When he finally spoke, though, his tone was cool, not angry. “The three of you are a team. You’re going to work together and fight together and, yes, even eat together, for the next five years. I have chosen you not just as individuals, but as a combination. No one else will be joining you, because that would alter the combination.” He stood up, pushing his chair back with a solid thwack. “Now, rise! We go to our first lesson.”

Call’s education in the use of magic was about to begin.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CALL WAS PREPARED for a long and miserable walk through the caverns, but Master Rufus led them down a straight corridor to an underground river instead.

It looked to Call a little like a subway tunnel in New York; he’d gone to the city with his dad on the hunt for antiques and remembered looking down into the darkness, waiting for the glow of lights that signaled a train. His gaze followed the river the same way, although now he wasn’t sure what he was looking for or what it might signal. A sheer rock wall rose behind them, and water flowed swiftly past them into a smaller cave where they could see only shadows. A damp mineral smell was in the air, and along the shore were seven gray boats tied up in a neat row. They were constructed of wooden planks, each overlapping the other along the side and meeting at the front, affixed with copper rivets, all of it making them look like tiny Viking ships. Call looked around for oars or a motor or even a big pole, but he couldn’t see any way to propel the boats.