8

CLASSES

Thornmallow was awake before first bell. By the time the bell had finished its booming call, he was out of his nightshirt and into his clothes. He brushed his teeth and hair and put on the black scholar’s gown. Then he poked his head out of the door.

The hallway was empty.

Cautiously, he stepped outside his room just as the second bell rang out, echoing loudly in the corridor. He could hear the boys starting to stir in their rooms. Head high, shoulders straight, he walked down the hallway, checking the names on the doors: Feverfew 107, Saxifrage 11, Pepperwort 96, Buck’s Horne 3.

The third bell resounded, and doors popped open all down the corridor. A rush of boys swept past him. One of them was Will.

“Here, Thorny, you’re going the wrong way,” Will cried, grabbing him by the shoulder and turning him around. “Never go widdershins in anything.”

“Widdershins?”

“That’s going the opposite direction of the sun’s movement, ninny. At Wizard’s Hall, only girls can go that way. It’s a rule. Number three, actually. Come on.” Will shepherded him to the dining room, where the meal was a bowl of thick porridge, clotted cream, and wild strawberries.

“No lizards?” Thornmallow asked.

“Don’t even think it. And wipe the side of your nose,” said Tansy.

He drew the blue handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped.

The meal was over almost as quickly as it had begun, and Thornmallow was pulled toward a classroom.

“Curses!” whispered Gorse, grinning at him. “It’s much better than Elementary Spelling. You’ll like it, Thorny. No snow.”

They filed in.

Curses was much better than Spelling. At least in Curses Thornmallow didn’t break down any walls. He learned how to curse a field to blight it, curse a cow to stop its milk, and curse a wart to remove it.

“Much faster than a poultice,” Gorse said, “though I heard a third-year named Milkweed got some of the words wrong and managed to lose a toe. It was found in Magister Beechvale’s tea.”

Tansy gave Gorse such a look that Thornmallow wondered, but it was Will who explained.

“She loves to try and frighten people with her stories,” he said.

“Then Milkweed didn’t lose a toe?” Thornmallow asked.

“Oh yes,” Tansy said. “But not because of the wart.” She glared at Gorse.

Gorse grinned. “I was just joking about the tea.”

Just then Magister Bledwort called them back to attention, and Thornmallow never did get the rest of the story. And later, when they were changing classes and he tried to ask, they were all much too busy to explain.

Besides, the next class was first-year Names, and he found it much too interesting to remember to ask Gorse about curses, for in this class he learned that all things have a True Name.

“Even me?” he asked timidly, raising his hand.

Magister Hyssop, who taught Names, smiled and nodded her head. “Even you, young Thornwillow.”

“Mallow,” he corrected automatically.

“No, not Thornmallow. That’s not your True Name at all,” Magister Hyssop said. “If it were, you’d have a distinct aura when you spoke it aloud. You are distinctly flat right now. But remember you must take care. Why, class?” She looked around at the hands all waving madly. “Yes, Tansy?”

“True Names,” Tansy said, standing as she answered, “must never ever be spoken aloud. That’s rule number nine.”

“See that you remember that, young Thornapple,” cautioned Magister Hyssop. “You never know when the knowledge may be vital.”

“Mallow,” he said again.

“Not at all,” Magister Hyssop replied and turned back to the board.

The idea of finding his True Name so fascinated Thornmallow that he would not let it go. He scarcely listened in the next class, Transformations, even when Will got himself tangled up in a shape-shifting spell and came out with donkey ears, and Wormwood, the blond boy with the hair growing into his ears, turned a strange shade of dark blue. And in Magister Beechvale’s Spelling class for the second time, he sat transfixed, whispering a variety of names like a spellmaster out of some ancient tale.

“Dandelion?” he tried. “Fennel? Bachelor’s Button? Thyme?” He checked his reflection in the window for an aura, some slight haloing around his head and ears. But he was, in Magister Hyssop’s words, distinctly flat. And though the list of names he tried went on and on, he saw and felt no change.

At last called upon by Magister Beechvale a second and then a third time, and pinched into awareness by Will from behind, Thornmallow stood.

“Yes, sir,” he said, trying to sound as if he knew what was going on.

“I asked, young Thornmolly, if you thought you might try a spell again. Not the snow spell, but another um … less active one.”

Thornmallow gulped. “Yes, sir,” he said in a small voice, setting aside for the moment his search for his True Name. He rose from his seat and went to the front of the class.

This time Magister Beechvale left Thornmallow strictly alone, no hands over the ears, and Thornmallow struggled along. He tried singing and missed each note of the spell by at least a tone and a half. His friends all put their hands over their ears, Wormwood giggled openly, and even Magister Beechvale shook his head.

“Never,” the magister muttered. “Never in my fifty years, boy and man, have I heard such sounds. Never. What could Dr. Mo have been thinking? And you, our much-needed one hundred and thirteen. We are worse off than before. How could you, young Thornmaple, have brought that snow yesterday? Never. Never!”

It was that never Thornmallow heard as they marched into the dining hall. It rang louder than any bell. He could not get the sound of it out of his head.

Never. Never. Never.