Call sighed. It looked like they wouldn’t be finished for a long while.
After the exercises were finally over, the three apprentices walked back from the grotto. Call was exhausted and had fallen behind the others. His leg hurt, his head hurt, and he dawdled near a pool of eyeless fish.
“You guys have it easy,” he told them as they swam lethargically, pale in the moss-lit gloom.
The surface of the water was suddenly broken and a fish was swept up into the air by a long pink tongue. Call looked up to see Warren hanging from a stalactite.
The elemental blinked down at him. “The end is closer than you think,” he said.
“What?” Call asked, thinking he’d misheard.
“The end is closer than you think,” the lizard repeated. Then he darted up the rocky formation to the ceiling of the cave.
“Hey, we helped you!” Call called after him, but Warren didn’t return.
At dinner, Call sat with Aaron, Jasper, and Celia, while Tamara, once again, joined her sister. Call could practically feel waves of ice radiating off her back every time he glanced at her.
“Why do you keep looking over at Tamara?” Celia asked, spearing a bright yellow mushroom with her fork.
“Because she told the mages to investigate his dad,” Jasper said. Call startled, turning to glare at him. Jasper smiled angelically.
“Investigate him for what?” Celia’s eyes were round.
Call didn’t say anything. If he started explaining or manufacturing excuses, it would only make things worse. Instead, he wondered how Jasper knew any of this. Maybe he and Tamara were back to being thick as thieves. It served Tamara right to be stuck with someone like Jasper.
Jasper was about to make another comment, but Aaron warned him off with a “Shut it.”
“I don’t know what he did,” Jasper admitted. “But I heard some of the mages talking. They were saying the search party they sent to find him didn’t turn up anything. Apparently, he’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Celia echoed, looking over at Call, waiting for him to say something.
Call frowned at his plate, small cracks appearing at the edges of the pottery from the force of his rage. He was a second-year mage, he’d walked through the Gate of Control; he knew he shouldn’t be losing it like this. And yet he didn’t want to stop Jasper from talking, not when Jasper seemed to know more about what was happening with Alastair than he did.
“Yeah, I guess someone warned him,” Jasper went on, his gaze sliding over to Call, the implication of his words clear.
“Call didn’t warn anyone,” Aaron said. “He was with us the whole time. And stop acting like you know anything, when you really don’t.”
“I know more than you do,” Jasper said with a sneer in Aaron’s direction. “I know he’s not to be trusted.”
A shiver went up Call’s spine, because Jasper was right.
Call couldn’t even trust himself.
That night, Call flopped down on the couch in the common room. Rufus had assigned them some reading about the robber-baron era of mage politics, which had lasted until only a couple of decades back, but Call couldn’t concentrate. The words swam on the page, the edges of the book occasionally sparking into tiny flames he quickly put out. Anger and fear had scorched the spine with black ash that smeared darkly over his fingers.
Tamara had made herself scarce after dinner, and Aaron had gone to the library to do his homework. He’d invited Call to come along, but that was because Aaron was nice and couldn’t help doing nice things. Call knew he was better off alone. Just him and Havoc on the couch, the wolf curled up on his feet, panting softly, his coruscating eyes glowing in the dim room.