The following day, lessons began.

Alfie, invigorated by what he had seen the previous day on the practice pitch, was up early. After he had fixed himself a cappuccino from a coffee machine that could have been ordered straight from any heartless local superstore—he couldn’t get over how out of place regular appliances looked inside the magical cottage—he got dressed, then sat out in the garden and waited for the others to wake.

Shortly after a simple breakfast of tea and toast, Jollux appeared.

“It’s my duty to escort you to your first lesson this morning, gentlemen,” the dwarf told the four young men.

“What is it?” Will asked, spraying crumbs across the table and reaching for another slice of toast from the rack.

“‘It’, Will?” Jollux asked patiently.

“The lesson,” Will said, buttering his toast. He made a grab for the marmalade, but Teo beat him to it.

“Perhaps, a more pertinent question might be what are all the lessons offered here?” Howie said, quietly peeling a hard-boiled egg with a dexterity that belied his sausage-like fingers.

“A well-made point, sir,” Jollux said, inclining his head toward Howie. “The Aetherbright Academy offers five classes: Offensive Magics, Defensive Magics, Magical Menagerie Studies, Thauma-Utilities, and Physical Training.”

“Offensive Magics, Defensive Magics, and Physical Training all sound fairly self-explanatory,” Teo said, cutting his slice of toast in half with fastidious exactitude.

“And Magical Menagerie Studies presumably take place out in the Beast House,” Alfie said.

“That’s the zoo run by that extremely fit bird, Schoolman Cutty, isn’t it?” Will said.

Alfie waggled his eyebrows at Will.

“Mr. Savage, if I might make so bold?” Jollux said seriously, stroking his beard.

“Go for it, Jollux,” Will said, applying marmalade to his toast in heaped spoonfuls.

“It would be a sincere recommendation of mine for you to never allude to Schoolman Cutty as”—the dwarf gave a small shudder as if the London vernacular pained him—“a ‘fit bird’, sir. Not within her hearing at least.”

“No good?” Will asked. “How d’you think it’d go down?”

“Like a lead balloon, Will,” the dwarf said earnestly.

“Noted.”

“So, what lesson have we got first?” Alfie asked.

“Offensive Magics, Alfie,” Jollux replied.

Alfie punched the air and almost upset the teapot.

“Starting with a bang,” he said.

The reason the cabal was guided to their first lesson by the dwarf porter was that they didn’t yet really know their way around the academy grounds, and certainly, they weren’t familiar with the interior layout of the academy itself, either.

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As they rounded an ornamental pond bordered on one end by a large willow tree, Alfie noticed a small building, constructed in log cabin fashion, nestled in a copse of sweet chestnut trees.

“What’s that all about, Jollux?” Alfie asked. “Looks like a blacksmith or something.”

“That is the workshop of old Groak,” Jollux replied.

Alfie eyed the smoking chimney, the forge, and the anvil sitting under an open-sided shed with a thatched roof.

Suddenly, the front door of the log cabin banged open and a wiry man, all sinew and tightly strung muscle, stepped out onto the porch. He was dressed in a pair of fire-proof trousers, a blacksmith’s apron, a string vest under that, and a pair of leather sandals. Alfie noted that he had faded old-school tattoos on his forearms. His head was bald, but he had a long, dirty yellow beard divided in half and tied around the back of his scrawny neck.

As the small group, led by the dwarf porter, drew level with the cabin, the old man turned his sparkling eyes on them and grinned. He had bright blue gimlet eyes, about as many teeth as Golem, and there was an air of manic energy about him, as if he was one strong drink away from going stark raving mad.

He raised a hand in greeting and then said, “How be’ee goin’ there, me young cock robins? ‘Tis a foin day to be out strollin’ the grass and sniffin’ the dew. Shame ‘bout the clouds, gray clouds. I’m not much into gray clouds, they’m like onions. Give me the wind somethin’ chronic. A’right, well, I’ll be seein’ ‘ee later, then. Much to do, much to do!”

Scooping up a broom with a snapped off handle, the wiry little man scampered back inside the cabin, cackling madly. There was a loud crash, as of a quartet of tuba players falling down some stairs, a muffled cry of delight, and then silence.

Alfie looked around at the others. “Now, I’m pretty sure at least forty percent of those words were English, but I have no idea what the overall message was.”

“I got something about onions?” Howie ventured. “How they tied into clouds, though…”

“Clouds? When did he mention clouds?” Teo said, tapping his pointed chin and frowning.

“I assume that was Groak?” Alfie asked Jollux.

“The man, the myth, the legend,” Will added in an excessively dramatic and hushed voice.

“Indeed it was,” Jollux replied.

“What does this Groak lad make?” Teo asked. “What’s his story?”

“Groak is a skilled Conjurer who sailed through his first year of study here, blazed a trail his second year—garnering much admiration and interest from MI7 whilst doing his mandatory work experience at Magical Intelligence Service, if the rumors are true—and made it all the way up to the examinations at the end of his third year before deciding that this life was not for him.”

Alfie whistled, his eyes getting drawn back to the rustic log cabin. A flicker of movement on the roof made him glance up. There was a goat lying on top of the sod roof. It was chewing cud and looking as mildly disdainful and bored as only a goat could look.

“Sounds like a lot of wasted potential,” Howie said wistfully.

“Ah, you have put your finger on the nub, Mr. Howie,” Jollux said, strolling along with his hands in the pockets of his plum-colored velvet jacket. “One thing that Provost Sharpe will make you see before long, is that every single one of you has unlimited potential. ‘So long as a man or woman breathes, Jollux’ he has said to me on many occasions, ‘the only limitations are those they impose upon themselves’.”

“Still…” Howie said.

“Anyway, why did this Groak geezer decide to give up magic if he was so good at it?” Will asked.

“Well, this was a long while back, during a black time in our world’s history,” Jollux said. “Whatever the reason was, it was a shame because the man was one of the best Conjurers there was at the time. One of the best there has ever been at the Aetherbright Academy, many say. Such were his talents that he was allowed to stay on here and experiment with his conjuring, making inventions for the good of the academy.”

“Sounds like someone didn’t much fancy having a brain like that out in the world where anyone could make use of it,” Alfie said.

Jollux looked over his shoulder and raised a bushy eyebrow at Alfie. “That may have been a consideration, certainly. However, the result was that Groak could, and still can, indulge his bottomless curiosity when it comes to conjuring without having to do any actual fighting, which he found was not to his taste.”

“Fighting’s not for everyone,” Howie said quietly, kicking at a stone and almost tripping over his own, very large, feet.

“Indeed, sir,” Jollux said. “I agree with you on that. A person should not be condemned whether they choose to fight or not. So long as their motives are sound—even if only to themselves. Many of us older folk have seen when someone spends too much of their time engrossed in fighting monsters and is not cautious to guard their mind and their heart.”

“And what’s that?” Alfie asked.

“They become a monster, sir,” Jollux said.