Class Dis-Mythed

"And smell up my outfit?" Freezia asked. "Not a chance. This is haute couture? "If it's not hot haute" I said, "you might welcome the warmth when the sun goes down. You're here for lessons in practical survival, right? It doesn't get much more basic than Sear. Nothing fancy, but you can find what you need."

"But what are we doing here?" Melvine asked in his perpetual whine.

"Today's lesson is finding simple solutions to problems," I informed them. "You're going on a scavenger hunt. I came here last night and hid a bunch of items on the landscape. By the end of tomorrow I want all of the items assembled at land's

end." I pointed downhill toward the silver sparkle of the distant sea that hugged this continent. "You'll find all the objects on this little shopping list. Oops!" I let go of the parchment, which I had conveniently torn into six pieces before we left Klah. The students leaped after them, jumping in front of one another, nearly racing up one another's backs to get at the swirling squares of paper. I groaned. They weren't thinking. They had all responded out of instinct, not intelligence.

"Hold it!" I said. The students all stopped and turned back to stare at me.

"What?" Pologne demanded. "They're going to get lost!"

"Not if you're smart. One of you, get all those pieces. Now!"

Tolk, quick as a wyvern, leaped into the air and snatched one with his mouth as the wind carried the fragment by. He jumped for another. The first one fluttered out of his mouth. Tolk snapped at the first one and lost the second. He turned this way and that, trying to decide which one to go for. One fluttered close. He leaped for it, but Freezia reached for it at the same time. They collided. Freezia jumped back with a shriek. Tolk landed on his back, and scrambled up.

"Gosh, I'm sorry!" he yelped. "Sorry sorry sorry!"

"Stop it!" she said, brushing hairs off her outfit. "I'm all right. Gack, you smell like dog!"

"That's good, right?" Tolk asked, puzzled.

The slip of parchment whirled up and away, untouched.

"I'll get 'em," Bee said, dumping his pack. A section of the list had settled for a moment in one of the thornbushes about a dozen yards from us. Bee pelted down the hill, just in time for a wisp of wind to flick it out of reach. He stretched out a hand, and the paper edged toward him. The next gust took it away. I realized he didn't have much of a command of basic magik. That'd have to be handled over the coming weeks.

Ignoring him, the three Pervects went into a poised huddle.

"What do you think, Jinetta?" Pologne asked, her finger to her lips. "Should we try Morton's Retrieval Spell?"

"This is too small a volume of matter for that," Freezia said severely. "The fragments might be crushed out of existence.

"I think Obadiah's Reassembly Spell is the best way," Jinetta said.

"Come on! Obadiah's is soo-oooo last week!" Pologne scoffed.

"Don't you think that's what Professor Maguffin would have suggested?"

The name seemed to stop the other two, and they adopted a respectful air.

"I don't know," Freezia said thoughtfully. "I never heard him say that Obadiah's was for outdoor use."

"But he didn't say it wasn't—"

Pologne raised her finger. "We could use Petronius's Beard Charm—"

"We'd get a backlash. Think of the third law of Sorcerodynamics!"

"Not the third law, the second!"

"That wouldn't address the ambient power sources," Freezia chided her friends.

"Obadiah's it is, then." Jinetta took out a small alembic and a bright red stick from her backpack. Pologne uncorked a small bottle and poured a few drops of thick liquid into the container. Jinetta stirred it with the stick, and the volume increased to fill the alembic. Scarlet steam started to pour out of the narrow spout. A thread of it shot upward, tilted and began to turn in a circle as if looking around, then headed off toward the nearest shred. A gust of wind caught the red smoke and wound it upward in a spiral. It tried to break loose from the wind, darting almost desperately at the invisible sides of the eddy, until it simply dissipated. The Pervects stared in dismay.

"It didn't work!" Pologne said. "What went wrong?"

"Oh, forget it!" Melvine grumbled impatiently, pushing them all aside. "I'll do it!" He clapped his hands and held them out.

The light whirlwind reconstituted and grew from a cute little dust-devil into an inverted cone thirty feet high. The wind

picked up mightily, screaming around us like a hurricane. A gale picked up my hair and started to twist it into a tight spiral on top of my head. Markie had warned me about Melvine's success in Elemental School, and it appeared it had been well earned. I braced myself. The three Pervects clutched one another, hanging onto their bags and each other.