Petie walked into the Charms Room for the next class on his schedule, but then stopped just inside the door.
The other rooms had reminded him of his school, with long wooden desks and red plastic chairs that made horrible scraping noises across the tile when he accidentally shifted on one.
This room, though, was like stepping into a movie.
It had the same long wooden desks, but the chairs were wooden as well, and they all matched together. From the warm wooden floor to the counters, bookshelves lined all the walls, filled with leather-bound books, titles written in curling gold letters. Above the counters, on two of the walls, the books ran all the way to the ceiling. Large windows that looked out on the back of Ravens' Hall, where the cliff hid the sun, covered the third wall, while a squeaky-clean whiteboard filled the fourth.
Petie had never been a bookworm, and he didn't like school that much; however, this room felt comfortable, like he wanted to stay there and learn.
What had stopped Petie, though, from walking farther into the room, were the circular brown spots lazily swimming through the air. They looked like plugs of wood, each the size of his fist. When one of the kids reached up to touch one, it didn't scoot away, but, rather, drifted out of reach. There were at least a dozen of them weaving around.
The longer Petie stared at them, the more solid they seemed, as if they were wrapped tightly in black twine, something strong to keep them from flying to pieces. They seemed safe enough, wrapped up like that.
He stared at the dance they did. There had to be a pattern there, something encoded in their flight. His head hurt as he stared, but he couldn't look away.
A loud clap from behind Petie startled him enough to turn around.
Prefect Aaron stood just inside the door, his cool gray eyes assessing and judging everyone, and never kindly.
The prefect clapped his hands again, twice, before striding to the front of the room.
The little brown spots followed eagerly behind him, like soldiers marching after their leader.
When the prefect stopped behind the table up front, they fell, lifeless, onto the table, dropping silently. "Come, see," he instructed.
Petie crowded with the rest of the class up to the table.
Where had the brown plugs gone? Only three bundles of grass and sticks lay on the table. Black twine gathered each together in different configurations.
One looked like a doll with a lump of green grass for its hair, its twig arms stretched up over its head and its legs pointing straight down. The second looked like a star, twigs and grass and leaves spread out wide. The third looked as if it had been played with too hard and broken. The wood of the twigs had been snapped just beyond the black twine center, and held on with just strips of bark. The grass was either dried and burned, or snarled together in a lump, hanging to one side. It smelled like moldy water.
Petie couldn't take his eyes off it.
"Bob, Rick, Peter—you all have headaches, yes?"
Petie nodded with the others. How had the prefect known?
Looking back at the black and broken thing on the table made Petie's head worse and his stomach now started to ache. But he couldn't look away.
"Anyone else?"
One of the two girls stepped closer. "My head and my eyes hurt," she said with a lisp.
The prefect nodded. "If anyone else starts to feel bad, let me know right away. All right?"
Petie made himself look away from the black thing and back up at the prefect.
"These, here, are charms," Prefect Aaron said, continuing. "You four are sensitive to them."
Petie grinned with pride.
"It means you may be trapped more easily by them," the prefect warned.
"What do you mean by charms, exactly?" one of the boys Petie didn't know asked.
"Like Harry Potter?" another asked hopefully.
Petie's eyes went wide.
Magic?
Cai shuffled nervously.
"Not at all like Harry Potter. But yes, charms, magic that misleads you. Illusions. Glamours."
Petie's breath came fast and sharp, as if he'd been running. "Really?" he asked, not caring if his voice squeaked, or if a couple of the other kids giggled.
"Yes, really. You need to recognize charms when you see them, and know how to defend yourself against them."
"And make them?" the girl with the lisp asked.
"Only a very few of you will advance to that level," the prefect said, his voice serious. "Very few—maybe only one student in every three classes—learn how."
Petie deflated. The other kids had stepped back from the table as well.
Finding charms was cool, but making them… Petie sighed.
"And, you must be well-aligned with your raven soul to do it."
That perked Petie up. The chance to work more with Cai excited him. They still had so much to learn. Even though Cai didn't always seem to want to.
"There are two other charms hidden in this room," the prefect said. "Find them and bring them up here."
Petie immediately swiveled his head, glancing around. They could be anywhere, hidden in the books, under the tables, up on the windowsills—anywhere.
"But—" the prefect added, pausing so everyone looked at him again. "If you move something, you must put it back exactly where you found it."
"Do charms always look like these?" one of the boys asked.
"Many do, but not all."
Some of the other kids rushed off to the far corner, pulling out books, then carefully replacing them. A couple others dropped to the ground and looked under the desks, feeling along the edges.
Petie was about to join them, but something held him still.
Cai couldn't use the word for "wait"—that was too abstract for him. He generally communicated using pictures and physical things, though he had learned cold.
Still, Petie waited, making a half turn. The room grayed out, all the colors leaching away, as he gave Cai more of his sight.
There. Beyond the great gray birdman. In the window hung wrongness. A black spider where there should only be the whiteness of rock.
Petie had taken two steps toward it when one of the other boys raced across the room and snatched it from where it dangled.
"I found one!" he crowed, holding it up above his head.
Petie shook himself, blinking, color springing back into the room.
Cai plumped his feathers and settled back down, pleased with himself.
Petie knew Cai wouldn't want to help again—puzzles and games only interested him once. He turned, only to find Prefect Aaron staring strangely at him.
"Your raven soul helped you, didn't he?"
Was it wrong for Cai to help? "Yeah, but he won't do it again," Petie said hurriedly.
"Hopefully just once is all you need," the prefect said.
Petie hoped so, too.
After the lisping girl found the second charm, they all gathered back around the front table.
Prefect Aaron held up the charm like a doll. "Anyone want to guess this charm's purpose?"
"Did it make the pieces fly?"
"Yes, exactly. It's a distraction charm. These are the most common types of charms." He held up the star. "And this one?"
"It made the books glow," the girl with the lisp said.
"You perceived them glowing? Interesting. Did anyone think this was an ugly room? No? How about very special then? That's what this does. It's an enchanting charm, the second most common."
The prefect picked up the broken one. "Peter, can you take a guess about this one?"
"It's hard to look away from," Petie managed, dragging his eyes to the side.
"Precisely right. It's there to capture and hold your attention. These types of charms aren't as common, but they're much more dangerous."
The prefect put it down and Petie breathed a sigh of relief. Laying it on the table took away some of its power.
The charm that Petie had almost found looked like a blackened coin. "Can anyone guess what this one is?"
"Is it another distraction charm?" the other girl asked.
Prefect Aaron beamed at her. "Yes. It's a hiding charm, distracting you away from whatever it's lying on."
Cai stirred uneasily.
It did something more. Petie was sure of it.
One of the students asked about the black twine that all the charms had.
Petie felt Cai tugging on him. He turned his head, slowly, looking up toward the ceiling of one of the bookcases.
Three more charms sparkled there.
Petie looked back away quickly so the prefect wouldn't notice him staring. What did those charms do? Why hadn't the prefect asked the class to find those? Petie knew he couldn't ask. He'd just have to figure it out on his own.
Or rather, he and Cai.
* * *
Petie dragged his feet on the way to recitation class. It was the end of the day, he was tired, and it all felt too much like school. Plus, he'd attended a recitation class the year before, with his parents, the first time they'd come. It had been a lot of writing, copying down every word the prefect had said. Then his dad then drilled him on the recitations all year.
Words like, never tell, stay hidden, keep safe.
Things he couldn't ever tell Mom about, that were things just for him and Dad. Mom hadn't liked it, he knew, but she'd accepted it.
At least the room was different. Instead of the stuffy office in the basement next to the kitchen that had smelled like old socks where four of students were all crammed together around an ancient and scarred wooden desk, this was a well-lit room, with dozens of modern plastic-and-metal chairs with desks attached. From the front podium, the room spread out like a fan, with semi-circles of tiers on one side. Desks were stacked on each tier, held back by iron railings.
No windows, though—no distracting blue sky.
Of course, all the kids who had gotten to the room first were sitting as high as they could go. All the seats up in the highest four rows were taken.
Dang it. Maybe Petie would have to get there earlier next time.
"Hey, Petie-Peter." Jesse called him from halfway up.
Petie gave a wave, then grinned when Jesse indicated the empty seat next to him.
"Hey, how y'all?"
Petie sighed. "Okay, I guess." He still wasn't sure about the charms. Cai felt unsettled and uneasy, too.
"Whole lot to learn, ain't it?" Jesse said, nodding in sympathy.
"And now, there's more," Petie muttered as Prefect Brynach came in. He was a tall, thin man, with round glasses and thinning, sandy-colored hair. He wore a white shirt with a thin, standing collar and black pants, like musicians Petie had seen at a concert. He carried a small black bag, which he set down on the podium with a loud thump.
The bag continued to wiggle.
Cai stirred restlessly.
All noise in the classroom abruptly cut off. More than one kid shifted in their seat, a shushing noise of rustling cloth.
"You and you," the prefect said, pointing to two boys sitting at the end of their row. "You are the class monitors. It is your job to make sure the end of every row has paper and pens from the closet. And then to collect them at the end of the class, every one of them."
The boys sat there, nodding.
"That means today as well."
Petie bit his lip, glad he was safe here in the middle of the row with Jesse.
"Now."
The boys slowly got out of their desks and opened the beige metal cabinets to the right of the door. Stacks of notebooks lay piled high on every shelf. Black mesh cups filled with identical black pens obscured the notebooks on one shelf.
Petie glanced at Jesse, who merely shrugged.
More writing. He contained a sigh. He hoped Prefect Brynach at least talked slowly.
As the notebooks and pens were handed out, the prefect started. "Welcome to your recitations. You will write down every word I say, then hand in your books at the end of class. I will do spot checks during class—yes, even on the last row—to make sure of your accuracy. You will hear these recitations many, many times. You will memorize every word. They will come to you as easy as breathing. Trust the recitations. They will keep you safe."
Petie nodded. He'd heard that speech before. Dad had told him that, over and over again. Petie glanced at Jesse, who sat with his mouth open and his eyes wide. "They aren't too bad," Petie whispered as he passed along the notebooks and pens. At least not the ones he'd learned so far.
"I will keep my raven soul safe," Prefect Brynach said.
That was easy. Petie would do anything for Cai. He quickly printed the words, black letters marching across the white paper.
"I will never show my raven soul to an outsider."
"I will hide my true nature."
"I will keep safe."
Petie nodded as he wrote. He'd heard all this before.
So had some of the other boys, and they shifted in their seats. It appeared to be new to Jesse, though, and he carefully wrote down everything, staring at the page.
"My human and raven souls will remain aligned."
That was new. Petie wrote it down, wondering.
The bag on the podium suddenly rustled.
Everyone in the room grew still again.
"I will not eat insects," Brynach continued.
Insects? Eww. Petie still wrote down the phrase.
"I will not eat the dead rats in the yard."
Jesse shifted in his seat.
Petie grew very still, suddenly fearful of the next words the prefect would say.
"I will not eat the rotting bodies—called carrion—in the woods."
Petie shivered, writing furiously. He wouldn't do such a thing, not ever.
Cai poked at him, unhappy.
"I will not visit the battlefields and eat the bodies fallen there."
Petie shook himself. People did that? It didn't make sense.
"Eating carrion makes you a half-breed."
Half-breed—even in the short amount of time Petie had been at Ravens' Hall, he knew that was the worse insult ever. Worse even than calling your mom ugly, or wishing your dad dead.
"I will not suffer the half-breed."
Brynach opened the bag and drew out a small chickadee. He got the bird to perch on his finger, then he waved his other hand over it, as if gently petting it.
Magic, Petie told Cai as the bird settled down.
Cai shivered, then sent the image of blue skies, and them flying far, far away, as fast as they could.
Petie wanted to run away with Cai. But he couldn't. He wasn't even sure why Cai was so afraid.
"This is a half-breed," Brynach accused. He raised the head of the strangely passive bird with his finger.
Orange feathers marred the perfect brown circle around its neck. More colored feathers—orange and black—speckled its white chest. It gave a bleary chirp, its voice not soft like a bird's, or powerful like a human's, but something in between.
Petie stared in horror at it.
Fly. Fly! Cai insisted.
"This bird is a half-breed," Prefect Brynach repeated.
Petie looked around. That didn't seem like a recitation. Was he supposed to write it down? The other boys seemed to be edgy and restless as well.
The prefect grabbed the bird's head with one hand, its body with the other. The wings fluttered between his fingers. A small peep echoed through the room. He raised his hands above his head so everyone could see.
"My human and raven souls will always be aligned."
He twisted his hands.
The agitated fluttering of the bird stopped.
"I will not suffer the half-breed."