Chapter 15

Rain came down in buckets the next morning when Alastair went into town—the Non-Magical part of town—and bought a cheap camera to take photos for his Glimmerglass students. He’d never quite gotten the hang of Illusionary Magics, so he would have to settle for the old-fashioned way.

He was once again troubled by the declining state of Watermere. In addition to the boarded up shops and dirty streets, small groups of people had taken shelter from the rain under the awnings of shuttered buildings. They didn’t seem hostile, exactly—and Alastair trusted in his own Battle Magic skills if things did take a turn—but they regarded him frankly, with a wary look about them.

When the time came, he was glad to get back into the castle.

He tried to snap a few photos of Emberstone architecture as he started to make the rounds of classes, and kept the camera hanging around his neck throughout. It attracted students curious about their new headmaster who might be too shy to talk to him otherwise. It wasn’t every day they saw a mage using such primitive technology.

“Sometimes it’s nice to do things the Non-Magic way,” he’d told one second-year who stopped to ask why he had that old thing.

His first visit was to Eloise’s fourth-year Summoning class. She acknowledged him with a friendly nod upon his entry, but otherwise, kept on with her lecture as if nothing changed. They were learning how to Summon a minor water spirit—a relatively safe creature for a group of sixteen-year-olds to work with, although they could be a bit tetchy.

The fourth-years were focused and taking copious notes as she wrapped up the verbal portion of the lesson, wrote the spell on the chalkboard in clear, legible handwriting, and rolled up her sleeves to demonstrate.

Alastair grabbed a spare chair from a stack at the back of the room and quietly sat down to watch. He hadn’t been in a Summoning class with Eloise since their fourth-year, when she’d been pulled out to study advanced Summoning with the sixth, seventh, and eighth-years. Now, she was the teacher, and he was excited to watch her work.

First, she used chalk to draw a complicated pattern on the floor. This would act to contain the spirit once she etched a Boundary spell around it. After doing that, she stood back, closed her eyes, and clasped her hands together in front of her. She muttered an incantation, though Alastair couldn’t hear what she was saying.

Then came a blinding flash of light and a faceless creature appeared in the middle of Eloise’s chalk pattern. It dripped with water, its exact shape constantly rippling and shifting.

“There we go, students!” she shouted. “Your water spirit. You can try to talk to it, though it might not be very polite.”

Soon, the students broke into pairs to try and Summon their own.

Eloise was skilled, offering correction or encouragement depending on each individual student’s needs. Walking the room, she judged each group’s chalk circle before allowing them to attempt Summoning anything.

“The incantation can be found on page thirty-seven of your text books,” she said.

Pages started turning as the students waved their wands. Alastair looked down at his camera, wondering when something as simple as turning a page couldn’t be done with their hands.

When she peered over at him, Alastair gave her a slight nod. He was relieved to see Eloise was good at her job.

When the lesson was through, he had no time to debrief with her. The Non-Magical classrooms were clear on the other side of the castle, and he would have to hop to it if he was going to make the introduction for the first of a trifecta of Non-Magical classes: Mr. Banner’s History of the Non-Magical World; Ms. Snapdragon’s Literature of the Non-Magical World, and Mr. Kerplunk’s Mathematics class.

Mr. Banner’s classroom was familiar. It hadn’t really changed at all since Alastair took the course when he was a student. The old man, likewise, still presented the work well and left plenty of time for questions—about history or otherwise. Alastair found himself enjoying the material more than he might have anticipated. Since it was the beginning of the semester, Banner was still talking about the earliest days in their country’s history—knights in armor, long-dead kings, Gremeir the Grand—their first Master Mage—and so forth. And he kept the pace up and the tone light for the whole hour.

Ms. Snapdragon’s Literature room was smaller, divided into more classes so they could all fit around a seminar table and discuss what they’d read. Currently, they were working their way through an old medieval epic—in alignment with what they were learning in Banner’s class—and the discussion was lively, touching on mistakes each student thought the protagonist had made and the ways in which they felt the world of the poem was similar to their own. Ms. Snapdragon ran a tight ship and steered the conversation carefully to a few main points.

Kerplunk’s class was the only one Alastair found tedious. In the man’s defense, Alastair had never been much of a mathematician. Mr. Kerplunk wrote numbers—by hand—on the chalkboard in a near-illegible scrawl. To Alastair’s surprise, the students had no trouble following. Kerplunk even had volunteers to solve his equations on the board in front of everyone.

They seemed to be getting a significantly better math education than he ever did.

“That was a fine class,” Alastair told Mr. Kerplunk after the students were dismissed. “If I’d have had you teaching me, I might not be so abysmal at the subject.”

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“That’s high praise, indeed. Thank you, Headmaster Meade.”

“Thank you for ending my day of audits on a high note!”

Ms. Snapdragon raced after him as he was leaving Kerplunk’s class.

“Well,” she said breathlessly. “What did you think? Isn’t he a wonder?”

“As a matter of fact, I just sang Mr. Kerplunk’s praises,” Alastair answered.

“Headmaster Meade, you have no idea. All the students have been talking about it. Some of them want to try to work on Mathematical spells—it’s not a new field, of course, but we’ve never had students interested in it before!”

She was practically glowing.

“Well, good hire,” he said. “Seems like it’s been a huge success.”

“And what did you think of our other Non-Magical classes?” she asked. “Worth promising to expand them, I hope?”