Call had a hard time believing he was staying at a place where there was a stable with horses out back.
There were clothes, too — bought in Call’s size from a department store, and ironed before being hung in the wardrobe in Call’s room. White shirts. Jeans. Swim trunks.
Tamara must have grown up like this. She talked to the butler and the housekeeper with an easy familiarity. She called for iced tea by the pool and dropped towels on the grass and left them, certain someone would come and pick them up.
Tamara’s parents had even been willing to tell Alastair that Call was on a trip with them and they’d bring him directly to the Magisterium once they got back. Mrs. Rajavi reported that Alastair had sounded perfectly pleasant on the phone and wanted Call to have a good time. Call didn’t actually think that Alastair had been happy to get the call, but the Rajavis were powerful enough that he didn’t think Alastair would come after him so long as he was in their care. And once he was at the Magisterium, he’d definitely be safe.
He wasn’t sure what he’d do at the end of the school year, but that was far enough in the future that he didn’t need to worry about it.
Despite Call’s uneasiness about his father, he let the days slip by in long sunshine-filled hours of swimming and lying on the grass and eating ice cream. He’d been self-conscious the first time he’d come out to the seashell-shaped pool in his trunks, realizing Aaron and Tamara had never seen his bare legs before. His left was thinner than his other leg, and covered in scars that had faded over the years from angry red to light pink. They weren’t so bad, he’d thought anxiously, sitting and looking at them in his room. Still, they weren’t anything he liked to show people.
Neither of them had seemed to notice, though. They’d just laughed and splashed him and pretty soon Call was sitting out on the lawn with them and Alex and Kimiya, soaking up the sun and drinking iced mint tea with sugar. He was actually sort of getting a tan, which hardly ever happened. Not that that was unexpected, considering that he went to school underground.
Sometimes Aaron would play tennis with Alex, whenever Alex could be pried away from Kimiya’s face. Magical tennis seemed a lot like regular tennis to Call, except that every time the ball went wide, Alex summoned it back with a snap of his fingers.
Though they’d promised to practice magic, they didn’t get a lot of practicing in. Once or twice they went out beside the house and called up fire, shaping it into burning orbs that could be safely handled, or used earth magic to pull iron filaments up out of the dirt. Once, they practiced heaving big stones out of the ground, but when one flew perilously close to Aaron’s head, Mrs. Rajavi came out and scolded them for endangering the Makar. Tamara just rolled her eyes.
One afternoon — late, when the hazy air was full of droning bees — Call was walking from the breakfast room toward the staircase and overheard Mr. Rajavi speaking in one of the parlors. His voice was low, but as Call crept forward, he heard him cut off by an exclamation from Alex. Alex wasn’t yelling, but the rage in his voice carried. “What exactly are you trying to say, sir?”
Call edged closer, not sure what kind of conversation he was eavesdropping on. He told himself that he was doing it in case it turned out they were talking about Aaron, but in fact, he was more worried they’d discovered something about him.
Could Alastair have said something else to Mrs. Rajavi on the phone, something she hadn’t told Call? The magical world already thought Alastair was nuts, but whatever he said about Call would have the advantage of being true.
“We’ve enjoyed having you as our guest,” Mrs. Rajavi was saying. “But Kimiya is still young and we think you’re both moving too fast.”