9. The Learning Place for Spectacularly Gifted Wizards

That marked the beginning of the happiest, most peaceful time in Wish’s small, short life. It wasn’t anything like being taught by Madam Dreadlock. For the first time, Wish could practice all the powers that she had spent so many years covering up and smothering. She could never imagine that such a wonderful timetable could exist in the world. There were whole terms on trees. The different kinds, how to recognize them from their leaves, talking to them, tending them, what different woods did what different things.

And then there was starcraft and invisibility and transforming-into-animals and bringing-things-to-life, not to mention flying-without-wings…

There was also word-learning and number-learning, of course, but they were a very small part of the timetable, and the teacher who taught them, Madam Mellows, was much more understanding than Madam Dreadlock. She had an entire set of letters and numbers that were all alive, and she kept them in boxes, a bit like Perdita’s spectacle box.

Wish found it far easier to remember the lesson of the day when it was demonstrated by small furry or spiky or twiggy number animals and letter animals performing cartwheels and handsprings in front of her eyes.

The other Wizard and magical creature children were very friendly and welcoming. As Perdita had said, they completely accepted that Xar and his companions were green because of coming from the east. So Wish and Bodkin found themselves, for the first time in their lives, making actual friends, with a Drood girl who came from the Lake of the Lost and had enchanted objects just like Wish (but not made out of iron, of course), and a boggart boy who came from under the ooze in the north.

At first, Bodkin thought that the long brown fur covering him all over in his disguise as a hob was horribly itchy and undignified, but after a while he realized how practical it was, warm and cozy, and really rather beautiful, particularly when you brushed it till it shone. He became proud of it and the lovely important swooshing noise it made when he walked. And the tail! Don’t get him started on the tail. Bodkin wondered how he’d ever lived life before without a tail. It was so expressive: perky when you were happy, droopy when you were sad, and extremely useful in the tree-climbing lessons. Bodkin could be up in the top of the tree canopy in three, four swings with that helpful addition of the tail, while the others were still climbing up the lower branches.

Bodkin had learned to read and write from overhearing things while he swept the corners in classrooms. Now, for the first time, somebody was actually teaching him as though he was a real person and not just somebody to give orders to. Bodkin was a fast learner, and he was very quickly shooting ahead in a lot of the classes—the ones that involved not actually doing Magic of course—and there were a surprising amount of them.^*

He was at a disadvantage in the classes where Magic had to be performed, but Perdita had given him a do-it-yourself Magic staff that did a simple spell, which was “sticking things to other things,” in order to hide that he couldn’t do any Magic at all.

Everyone looked forward to Perdita’s lessons. That spring, Perdita was teaching spell-making and tree studies and transformation.

“Wonderful!” she said, when somebody performed a spell correctly. “Marvelous!”

And a strange thing happened. Whomever she said this to really did begin to think that they were quite marvelous after all. It was particularly effective with Xar. Xar never had a mother—she died when he was born—so he was quite surprised when Perdita took out her rose-tinted spectacles and said things like, “How fascinatingly creative!” when told the story about how he had accidentally melted one of the chairs. It made Xar behave better because he wanted to impress her.

At first, Xar was constantly in trouble.

Some of this wasn’t entirely Xar’s fault. His hand with the Witch-stain on it seemed to have a mind of its own and often did the absolute opposite of what he wanted, in a spectacular way. So, for instance, the class would be practicing shrinking spells, and Xar would try and copy what everyone else was doing and find himself growing instead of shrinking. On that occasion he grew even larger than Crusher, and the teacher assumed he did it on purpose to be cheeky and sent him to Perdita for insolence.

Xar was never quite sure how Perdita was going to react when he was sent to the Lair of the Bear.

Sometimes she was understanding, but other times she seemed very stern and bearlike, and punished him if he deserved it. Or it might be she was in the middle of some spell of her own, so she would be distracted and entirely uninterested in why Xar had been sent to her, and get Xar to hold the cooking pot steady while Hoola stirred it.

On the shrinking-but-accidentally-growing-instead occasion, she wasn’t in the Lair of the Bear. The study was deserted, so he searched it very thoroughly to see if he could find the Droods’ tears, which he was sure she must have hidden somewhere. But Hoola came in and interrupted him, so he had to wander around the learning place until he found Perdita, eventually, in one of the side clearings. She was in the middle of a conference with a whole load of philosopher giants on the unexpected consequences and logistical possibilities of TIME TRAVEL, which was one of the very few things that the Magic people had not worked out how to do yet.

So although terribly sympathetic, Perdita waved him away, recommending Xar work out a way to get smaller again himself. He had to spend two days as a giant, before he got back to the right size again.

It was all a little difficult to predict.

But as time went on, Xar worked out a way of tricking the hand with the Witch-stain by performing the exact opposite of whatever spell they were supposed to be doing. This didn’t work every time, but enough so that he was in trouble a little less often.

So even Xar ended up liking the learning place more than he expected. He was very popular and had crowds of friends.

And after a while, they were all so busy that they nearly forgot that there was a world outside the charmed chalk circle of Pook’s Hill. Three months passed. The bear came out of his sleeping cave. Their wounds from the fights with the wyverns and the Witches healed, and it all felt like they had arrived only yesterday.

Not that everything always went well.

Wish, of course, had a very powerful Magic indeed. More powerful, Perdita thought, than the Magic of most of the other Wizards in the whole of Pook’s Hill put together, and maybe even more than that. Time would tell.

But Wish had terrible trouble with the spellfighting.

In spellfighting you were supposed to turn yourself into different animals, and fight as those animals. Wish started off well, transforming into a snowcat, lion, drearer, and ghoulfeast in impressively rapid progression… but her default position was always a fluffbuttle.

She did not know why this happened. She just panicked, mid-fight…

Her Magic eye blinked, before she could stop it…

…and there she was, a fluffbuttle again.

A fluffbuttle was, as the name suggests, not a particularly scary creature. Slightly smaller than a bunny rabbit, the fluffbuttle had so many natural predators in the wildwoods that Perdita had had to set up a special fluffbuttle animal sanctuary, because she was genuinely worried that the fluffbuttles might be in danger of being hunted into extinction. The sanctuary was located just beside the infirmary, and Bodkin spent hours leaning dreamingly over the fence watching them, for it really was a great pleasure to see the little fluffbuttles scampering about, squeaking at each other.

Once Wish had transformed into fluffbuttle form during the spellfighting, she didn’t seem to be able to transform out of it. So, unless the opponent had accidentally transformed into a carrot—which was unlikely but not impossible because ghoulfeasts were as allergic to carrots as vampires were to garlic, so if spellfighters were trying to be clever, sometimes they did go for the vegetable option—Wish automatically forfeited the fight.

And Perdita and Hoola and Caliburn exchanged significant glances with each other. Bodkin knew what those glances meant. They meant, “Wish is no more ready to fight the Kingwitch in single combat than a fluffbuttle.”

But on the whole, everything was moving in a positive direction.

Xar was trying his hardest and he had improved greatly, in behavior and thoughtfulness. Wish was struggling with the spellfighting, but she was learning so many other useful skills and had never been so content in her life. Even Bodkin had settled into being a hob.

Until Madam Clairvoy came to the school.

She was a new teacher, and from the moment she arrived, things went downhill.

Madam Clairvoy taught starcraft, and she was every bit as mean as Madam Dreadlock, just horrible in a different way. Madam Clairvoy never shouted, but she was sarcastic and she provoked Xar’s pride. Xar wasn’t very good at starcraft, and it was one of the lessons in which Bodkin shone, so Madam Clairvoy spent a lot of time comparing Xar to Bodkin. “Even a hob can do this, Xar!” said Madam Clairvoy. “So why, then, cannot you?”

This caused trouble between Xar and Bodkin, and Xar then acted up in the lesson, showing off and getting into trouble, and he was sent to Perdita for being disruptive, and Madam Perdita was only halfway understanding.

“Madam Clairvoy is so mean!” stormed Xar.

“The world is full of people who are mean, Xar,” said Perdita. “You have to learn how to deal with them without losing your temper.”

The meaner Madam Clairvoy was, the worse Xar behaved, even in other lessons as well.

So Wish was increasingly worried about Xar, who was being sent to Madam Perdita so much of the time that she thought he might be expelled. And Xar was beginning to draw away from them. Now he wouldn’t be seen with Bodkin, because Bodkin was a hob, and hobs were a little embarrassing.

“Sometimes I feel like the spoon in the middle of the key and the fork,” Wish confessed to Caliburn one evening.

And even the spoon, the key, and the fork were quarreling again in a way they had stopped doing for a while. The fork would ambush the spoon and pin him down on every occasion it could, and the spoon started hiding from both of them. Tiffinstorm and Hinkypunk had a fight over something and weren’t speaking to each other.

And worse than that…

Oh much worse than that…

WITCHES were appearing, to the north, to the south, to the west, to the east, surrounding the school. The Witches didn’t dare get too close, for Pook’s Hill was protected by very powerful Magic. They were just roosting, high up in the treetops, like a gathering cloud of crows. They hadn’t attacked anyone yet.

But they made everyone feel nervous.

And then two much more alarming incidents happened that meant they were not going to be able to stay in Pook’s Hill forever.