Read Online Forest of Illusions (The Broken Prism) by V. St. Clair - Free Book Online Page A

smoothed his red Mastery robes. Hayden had already turned away when he said, “Oh, one more thing.”
    Hayden looked back at the Master once more.
    “Keep your friends close, Hayden.”
    Hayden nodded and walked away, unable to ignore how ominous Master Willow’s parting words sounded.
     
    As luck would have it, Hayden’s arena team came up late in the drawings and they didn’t have to face their first challenge for three weeks. This was fine with him, as they were having a hard time arranging practices with all of the homework everyone had to contend with each night, and were mostly restricted to weekends.
    Lorn had even started to be nicer to Tess during these training sessions . Well, nice was probably stretching things, but at least he didn’t call her Tess the Mess anymore.
    Unfortunately, Hayden’s resolve to not get his butt kicked this year was going poorly, though not in the way he’d originally anticipated. Every-other day he and Master Asher switched between mind-boggling calculations and all-out war with prisms, which the Prism Master—predictably—always won. Not only did he win, but he was fairly merciless about stomping Hayden into the ground each time.
    “Is anything broken?” Asher asked him for the third time that day, lift ing his eyepiece so he could watch Hayden with both eyes. His Mastery robes were draped over the branch of a pear-blossom tree behind him as he surveyed Hayden from across the lawn with his arms folded. They’d taken their sparring sessions outdoors at the insistence of Master Willow, to avoid destroying the castle. Hayden was just grateful that they were behind the school near the cliffs that overlooked the Gawain Sea, instead of displayed prominently in the main courtyard where everyone could see him get beaten.
    “I don’t think so,” Hayden groaned, testing his arms and legs and climbing slowly back to his feet, rubbing his backside where he’d landed hard. “I don’t suppose you could try to avoid throwing me off the cliffs? That last one nearly had me.”
    Given that the Prism Master was wearing a faded blue t-shirt and loose-fitting black pants, he looked strangely impressive standing there with the wind whipping through his hair and the prism circlet on his head. The effect was lessened when he snorted and said, “Your enemies won’t hesitate to throw you off a cliff if they get the chance. I’d be doing you a disservice to spare you the effort of accounting for it in your training sessions.”
    “ What enemies?” Hayden snapped in exasperation. “You act like the sorcerers are invading the continent for the sole joy of hunting me down and lobbing me off of tall objects. Is there something I should know about?”
    Asher relaxed his posture slightly and said, “No, I doubt you’re even on their radar right now, but we have to face the reality of the situation. If the Council attempts to call you into service, you will come to their attention, and they are fully-trained adults who have come here to murder anyone who gets in their way. Also, if your father knew any sorcerers—which seems possible given the sigla you found in his bathroom—it stands to reason that they hate him by now and would love to take their aggression out on his only living descendant.”
    Hayden raised an eyebrow at this.
    “Why do you think they’d hate him now?”
    “You didn’t know your father at the height of his power, but believe me when I say that, as his former best friend, he was a colossally-arrogant jerk. He burned every bridge he ever had without a care in the world, and quite literally everyone on the continent was screaming for his head by the end of his campaign—even former allies and friends. If he was communicating with the sorcerers, it was because he wanted something from them—magic, most likely. When he got what he wanted, he would have had no qualms with infuriating them either.”
    “Oh, good,” Hayden frowned, “more inherited enemies to deal