Oracle (Book I)

The Test

"Caprice, what's wrong?" Bossa said.

Looking around for her brother, Caprice frantically shook her head.

"Thierry! Thierry, where are you?"

Thierry and Ripley came out of the knot of students standing near the front row.

"Right here, Preece. What's—" Thierry followed the line of her gaze and cussed. "So he's here," he said darkly.

As Whitehare grew closer, Bossa and Nezzle moved in front of Caprice. Thierry stood beside her and squeezed her shoulder.

Again to the rescue it seemed, Earithean glided in front of the sorcerer, graceful as a bird, her now dark red robes flaring around her.

"Master Whitehare. The Headmaster has reserved you a seat. Please follow me."

"You must be Earithean. I do not wish to see you. I need to see the Headmaster at once," Edwin Whitehare said.

Earithean gave a vaguely polite smile.

"Sorcerer Whitehare, please observe the exam. We will discuss everything else in my office afterward."

Reluctantly, Sorcerer Whitehare conceded, "Very well." To his children, he said, "Do your best. I will be watching." Gray-blue eyes cutting sideways, he gave Professor Earithean a look unmistakably identical to Karrigan's offended, veiled look of disgust.

Alastair and an obviously disappointed Karrigan joined Alice Domier.

"Nothing's happened," Thierry said quietly. "Not yet at least."

Caprice stilled herself. As if it couldn't get much worse, the nearby Karrigan immediately began spouting off to Alice.

"With a wand, they're just as dangerous. Filthy mud monkeys."

"What is a mud monkey?" Alice asked.

"Those are. Students," Karrigan scoffed, waving her hand in Caprice's direction. "They can hardly read a spell. Let alone perform spells that do not revolve around minor magic. Self-rinsing mops and kitchen rags and such."

"And they don't have wands," Alastair said as he eyed Bossa. "They aren't allowed."

"There aren't any of them in my homeland," Alice said. "And they are servants in your land? With no magic?"

"Half a step above the quibbles. Barely," Karrigan said. "In status, even lower. All of them, in my opinion."

Caprice felt herself getting angry again but Nezzle said quietly, "Forget about her. She is irrelevant right now."

"Only because it might not be a good idea to shoot a curse at her head in front of her dad and all these witnesses," Bossa muttered. "But what's a quibble?"

"People born without magic," Caprice said numbly. She wondered if her magic would disappear all together once the test began. What if she couldn't perform a single spell?

"Here take this." Nezzle pulled a wand from the inside of her waistband. Caprice had never seen a wand like this one before. It was black and purple wood striped in a wide candy cane bands. Little rune-like symbols carved of other types of wood embedded the face of the wand in their own locked grooves like puzzle pieces. "Purpleheart and blackwood. The core is a lock of wonderette hair. My most powerful wand."

Eyes widening in fright, Caprice shook her head, gaze darting between the wand and Edwin Whitehare.

"Put it in your sleeve." When she didn't move, only staring in a kind of frozen terror, Nezzle took her arm and put the wand up inside her sleeve. "Hold on to it. Nothing too dangerous should come at you but take it just in case." She stepped close to Thierry's side and discreetly passed him a second wand which she also produced from inside her robes. "And you take this, Thierry. Sequoia. Don't break it or lose it. It's my mother's."