Waiting For Sunrise - The Books Of Beginning AU

60. Class With A Subsitute

Michael took a deep breath and tried to push the doubts from his mind. It didn't work. He was panicking, his mind flitting from one thought to the next, but always coming back to the same question. Why did I agree to this? 

(He, of course, knew exactly why he'd agreed to this; because he wanted to be helpful, and because he didn't take into consideration the potential dangers of the task.)

The whole mess had begun in the morning, when everyone learned Miss B was laid up in bed with a headache, leaving no one to conduct the lesson she was supposed to be giving some of the younger children. Rafe was already out thieving, as were Abigail and many others. Furthermore, Addie was busy running the kitchen, and Kate had taken on the dangerous task of leading Emma, Jake, Beetles, and a few more kids in doing outside maintenance - that was to say fixing a hole in the wrought iron fence caging the churchyard in, weeding the front path, and replacing some of the shingling knocked off the side of the church by the fierce wind. Scruggs was around, but any suggestion of him teaching the class had been shot down quickly - he only taught the older Savages, and that was that. (Apparently, last time he tried to teach the small children, he'd lost control of the class and wound up hiding beneath a table as they screamed, used magic to send pieces of chalk flying at each other, and in general caused an absolute ruckus.)

Michael had observed all of this, and the ensuing frustration about having to cancel the class, and had stepped in, volunteering to supervise. How hard could it be, he'd thought at the time. Sure, Scruggs hadn't fared well, but he was Scruggs, a man who spent most of his time with the birds. Michael felt confident he could do better. After all, this was school. It was learning, and reading books, and practicing magic. This was his area of expertise - it stood to reason that he could teach a little lesson. It seemed easy.

Ten minutes in and he had already been proven wrong.

He'd begun the class by writing the incantation they'd be working with on the blackboard. It was a simple one, a basic illusion spell meant to project small images - butterflies, sparkles, that sort of thing - as all the children here were no older than nine. The kids were excited and a bit impatient to begin practicing, and Michael couldn't help but smile indulgently at their enthusiasm, their hunger to learn. He had been that way too, once, he recalled. He used to sneak off during lunch at school to hide in the library and pour over books that were way too big for him.

He'd walked them through the pronunciation of the spell, demonstrating by making the illusion of a flower bloom from his fingertips. It was a simple process, one that didn't require too much effort - just imagination from which the illusions came, and the incantation to keep them controlled. (Michael was, for a moment, reminded of the Countess's boat and how Dr. Pym defeated the Screechers there. Any parlor magician worth their salt could master illusions, he'd said. The memory made Michael's smile stretch a bit with pride at knowing this skill, at being good at something tangible, even something so small. But his grin quickly collapsed in on itself as other memories of Cambridge Falls threatened to come flooding back; Emma's angry, desperate tears, the way that makeshift noose felt around his neck, the saccharine voice of the Countess urging him to betray his sisters-)

"Alright!" Michael had exclaimed, a little louder than he needed to be. "Who wants to give it a go?"

Several hands shot into the air. One of the boys, a chubby-cheeked, confident seven year old named Billy, yelled out, "I will! I will!"

"Great!" Michael continued, in that false-chipper tone. "Get on up here!"

Billy came to the front of the room and stood beside the desk, back straight, hands cupped, chin tilted up proudly. His voice was clear as he began to recite the incantation, but it soon cracked around the third syllable. The young boy flushed red with embarrassment as some of the other kids giggled.