Lost Read Free

tall windows. It looked out toward the Twilight, the part of the city I’d grown up in. The sky over the Twilight was purple, fading above to black. Only a few lights shone from the dark buildings stacked along the twisted, steep streets. Behind me, Nevery turned the page over and kept writing, the metal nib of his pen going scritch-scritch against the paper.
    I finished the good part of the apple, then ate the core and flicked the stem out the open window.
    Nevery set down his pen and held up the paper to let the ink dry. “You’ve been out of school since the Underlord business last winter.”
    I had. Because I didn’t have a locus stone, the magisters wouldn’t let me take apprentice classes at the academicos anymore.
    Nevery looked at me from under his bushy eyebrows. “You need something to do to keep you out of trouble, boy. I’m asking Brumbee toreadmit you to the academicos for apprentice classes.” He folded the letter he’d been writing, pulled out his black and shiny locus magicalicus, and muttered a spell, sealing the letter. “If they’ll have you. Brumbee fears you are a bad influence on the other students.” He held the letter out to me. “I expect you are a bad influence on the other students. You’ve got your keystone?”
    The stone to open the magic-locked tunnel gates between the wizards’ islands, he meant. I nodded.
    “Good. Take this to Brumbee. Don’t talk to anyone else. And wait for an answer.”
     
    Brumbee was in the magisters’ meeting room, sitting at the long table with his locus magicalicus set in a dish for light, and papers and open books spread all around him. He was writing in another book.
    I stood in the doorway, waiting for him to notice me. I’d been in the magisters’ meeting room before. Once to spy on them, disguised as a cat; once when they accepted me as Nevery’s apprentice and gaveme thirty days to find my locus stone; and once after we’d destroyed Dusk House and the terrible device Crowe and Pettivox had built to imprison the city’s magic. That time, they’d argued about what had really happened in Crowe’s underground workroom and they’d scolded me for losing my locus magicalicus. They didn’t seem to understand that destroying the device had made the city’s magic work again like they thought it was supposed to, though weaker than before, Nevery said. He measured the magical levels every day with the gauge he had built, and the levels stayed low. We were worried about that, thinking maybe Crowe’s device had hurt the magic somehow.
    Then I’d told the magisters that the magic was a living being that protected the city. It had been like a pyrotechnic experiment. Take a room full of old croakety-croak magisters, add a new idea, and it was just like combining slowsilver and tourmalifine. They exploded, saying I was an ignorant gutterboy who didn’t know any better.
    “I do know better,” I’d told them. “The magic talked to me. It’s always protected me, and it protects the city. It’s not just a thing to be used, and it needs our help.”
    They didn’t like that, either. They shouted and shrieked and said I couldn’t be an apprentice anymore.
    “You’re being stupid!” I’d shouted.
    Nevery’d sent me out, and I’d stood outside the door shaking and angry, feeling my missing locus magicalicus like a hole in the middle of me, listening to Nevery shouting and Brumbee’s worried voice and other sharp voices arguing.
    “What is it, Conn?” Brumbee said, looking up from his book and setting down his pen.
    I went in and handed him the letter from Nevery.
    He spelled it open and read it, shaking his head. “Oh, dear,” he muttered. He waved his hand at me, still looking at the letter. “You may sit down while I write a reply.”

My dear Nevery,
    When you took Conn in as your apprentice last year, I thought you were doing a good deed, saving a gutterboy from the streets of the Twilight, but now I am not so sure.
    His ideas about the