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In the next few days, before classes started, they all got in trouble to one extent or other.

Arnulf, with his sad dad story, got a lot of attention from the snobbier kids, those whose parents were most integrated into mage society. Pindar Webb (Pinhead to his detractors), who lived on Ash’s third floor, picked on him repeatedly, obviously trying to spur a fight. Finally Pindar gave up and just attacked Arn with magic combat in the kitchen. Pindar clearly thought he would be able to knock out the poor half-breed Arnulf on the first throw of magic power, but Arnulf reflected the attack back, with his own energy added on, and Pindar was thrown back against the wall. Before it could go any further—they were both already almost out of energy anyway—Mistress Ash intervened, and the two boys got to know each other a lot better doing all the house dishes for a month.

Daphne got in trouble in much the same way. Ash was willing to put up with the gangly girl practicing sword at dawn, and with a few of the other girls joining her occasionally. The only other “Amazon” in the class was Jen “Spiny” Norman of Minnesota; she had a nice sword too, and they were well matched. Then there was Ahir Shaheen, whose father had been killed in the Iranian revolution, and whose mother had brought her to Chicago. Ahir was tall, Ahir was beautiful, Ahir had a distinct accent and an antique curved sword. She didn’t know how to use it very well, and Olympia Month (Limpy to her detractors) stopped to make fun of her. The next morning, Limpy made sure to be there to trip Ahir on her way out to the yard. Daphne went over to have a chat with Miss Month, but when she got there, something about Limpy’s grin convinced Daphne to let her fist have a chat with Limpy’s stomach. Daphne got a month of garbage duty.

Ahir and Olympia had to get along on the third floor of Ash House, and Mistress Ash may have been distracted by that issue. Also up there were the studious and quiet Jen Chang and the mysterious Bruce “Rats” Laguna, a Chicago native who claimed that neither of his parents was magical. “Yeah,” he said, “I kept getting in trouble and I didn’t even know how. I’d get mad and the paper I was drawing on would burst into flame. The social worker said they were going to send me to a special school. Fortunately the social worker was actually a witch.”

Rats and Cloudius hit it off immediately, and it was Rats’s idea to sneak into the house basement. They barely managed to escape being caught, but they escaped—the faceless, but actually rather nice when not on duty, House Ghost just missed finding them twice. In the meantime, they found a neat cellar with three side rooms: one with fruit and drying herbs, one with wine and liquor bottles (and possibly other things in tiny bottles), and one full of books.

“What sort of books?” Angelica asked when they got back to Tom Hexane’s room.

“We couldn’t get in to see,” said Cloudius. “It was locked.”

“Can’t you pick a lock, Ratso?” asked Angelica.

“Sure,” said Rats, “if it’s not a magic spell. This had Magic Lock on it over the regular lock.”

“But—for books? Those must be some books.”

For a week, the new friends got to know each other and the school. They learned a lot of rules, and quickly forgot a lot of them; they would be reminded. They dabbled in their books. They chatted. They tried spells on each other. They gossiped about all the Lyceum secrets.

“The attic,” said Angelica on Friday afternoon, feeling as if she hadn’t had as much fun as others.

“Let’s go,” said Tom Hexane, who was feeling the same way. They jumped up, while the other three plus Rats looked up at them. Then they all looked at Eva, who sat up, got up, stretched, hopped down and went to the door. She looked back at them—in her shadowy form, only her greenish eyes gleamed—and then she went through the door. She peeked back in and mraowed.

So Ange and Tom followed her. She gave them one more questioning meow: I do not approve, but I am not going to let you go by yourselves, you’d be caught for sure. Then up the stairs—no one had their doors open on the third floor—and up the attic steps.

The first room they came to, walled off with nice solid wooden panels and two by fours, had a lock on the outside. It was open, though, and inside was a bed and a table and chair and a shelf with a few books: a Shakespeare, a Bible, an Avesta and some Raymond Chandler novels.

“What’s Avesta?” asked Angelica.

“Mazdaist Bible,” said Tom. “Zoroaster supposedly wrote it. It’s like three thousand years old.”

“This copy?”

He picked it up and looked. “No,” he said, “it’s recent. Belle Wand Publishing, London, Paris, Berlin, 1867.”

“1867? Recent? It’s probably worth a fortune.”

Eva mraowed. They backed against the wall. The ghost flew by the door and dropped through the floor.

“Leave it,” said Ange. They stepped out into the main area, and presently came to a solid wall. “There’s got to be space behind this,” said Angelica. “This just yells Secret Door, doesn’t it?”

Tom looked at it and smiled. “I can hear it,” he said. “Secret door! Secret door! Right here.”

They felt around, and Ange, with her dagger, managed to trip the lock. They stepped inside and pulled the door nearly closed. The room they found themselves in was perhaps twelve feel square.

There was a telescope and a sextant, both set up in the middle of the room—which had no windows. There was also a table with a brass bowl on it which had what might possibly be dried blood in it, as if it had held a gallon or two which had been allowed to dry into thick cracked cake.

They were just taking all this in, and squinting at books on the shelf in here, when Eva made it clear that they needed to go. And go they did: Ange pulled the door all the way shut and it disappeared, and then she hurried to catch up with Tom on the steps. Door shut, around corner: here came Jen Chang out of her room.

“Hey, Jen,” said Angelica. “I was looking for your room. I wondered what classes you were going to take this fall.”

“Ash for math and defense,” said Chang, “she seems tough but I like her.”

“Me too,” said Angelica, as the ghost swept past, ignoring twelve-year-olds gabbing in the hall.

The first day of class was a Yellow Day (as opposed to Crimson). It was also a gorgeous day after a rainy hot weekend; now the kids in class at the Lyceum had to look out at the lovely sunny gardens. The Lyceum of the Lake Wind looked from the outside like an old closed-up elementary school surrounded by boarded-up houses. In here, it looked exactly like a school, except that the glossy posters were of wand positions and how to identify herbs.

Of course it was bigger on the inside than the outside, that beat-up playground was actually a football field with seating and concessions run by the house ghosts, and it had a two-level lunch room where students who had mastered flying could float up to the second level.

Everyone but Arnulf was in Ramona Sear’s Magic History lecture at 8 am. They got to see Cloudius not know what happened in 300 BC. While Angelica searched her own brain for the answer, Cloudius tried to get out of trouble by talking back to Mistress Sear. “Why would I need to know that?” he thought it a good idea to ask her.

“Pa kla kaln,” she said to him, and he was stricken dumb.

This had repercussions next period, in Defense, when he couldn’t answer Mistress Ash’s questions. Then he goofed around with Rats and he got in trouble, not Rats. On the other hand, Arnulf got asked to help Ash with the demo. “You really have a knack, Mr Shmoke,” she told him in front of the others. “Unlike Mr Cloud here, who is off on a cloud again.”

Things got no better in English. All five plus Jen Chang and Ahir Shaheen were in the class, along with a dozen from other houses; Susan White was the teacher, Ash’s best friend, a generally well liked professor. Cloud fell asleep in class.

Meanwhile Angelica impressed Master Temple in Alchemy, which made her feel good because he gave her the creeps; the Illusions prof, Ben Shag, who also gave her the creeps, used her as an example by fooling her repeatedly. “Now you try it,” he said to a second year boy, who made Angelica think he was a rhino.

“He had the whole class fooling me,” said Angelica that evening in Tom’s room. “This one’s a rhino. That one’s a dragon. Then one boy is a bunch of worms. One girl is a subway train. I have to do something or that class will drive me crazy.”

“It’s bad that he lets them pick on you,” said Pindar.

“No, it’s good. I have to practice.”

“Do you guys think there are terrible wizards out there and dangers and all that stuff?” asked Jen Chang.

“Yeah,” said Arnulf. “I’m pretty sure of it.”