The Iron Trial by Holly Black, Cassandra Clare Page A

start.”
    Even he didn’t manage to say it with any enthusiasm.
    The floor was cold when Call sat and he wondered how long it would be before the dampness made his leg ache. He tried to ignore this thought as Tamara and Aaron sat down, making a triangle around the sand pile. They all stared at it. Finally, Tamara stuck out her hand, and some sand rose into the air. “Light,” she said, sending a grain spinning toward the floor. “Dark.” She sent that one on the floor, too, a little distance away. “Light. Dark. Dark. Light.”
    “I can’t believe I was worried magic school was going to be dangerous,” Call said, squinting at the sand pile.
    “You could die of boredom,” said Aaron. Call snickered.
    Tamara looked up at them miserably. “The thought of that is the only thing that’s going to keep me going.”
    As difficult as Call had imagined it to be to move tiny grains of sand with his mind, it was even harder than that. He remembered the times he’d moved things before, how he’d accidentally broken the bowl during his exam with Master Rufus and how it had felt like a buzzing in his mind. He concentrated on that buzzing while he stared at the sand, and it started to move. It felt a little like he was operating a device with a remote control — it wasn’t his fingers picking up the sand, but he was still making it happen. His hands felt clammy and his neck strained — making a single grain hover in the air for long enough to see whether it was light or dark was tricky. Even worse was setting it down without messing up the pile already there. More than once, his concentration slipped and he dropped a grain into the wrong pile. Then he had to find it and pull it back out, which took time and even more concentration.
    There were no clocks in the sand room, and neither Call nor Aaron nor Tamara were wearing watches, so Call had no idea how much time was passing. Finally, another student showed up — he was tall and lanky, dressed in blue, with a bronze wristband that indicated he’d been at the Magisterium three years. Call thought he might have been sitting with Tamara’s sister and Master Rockmaple in the Refectory that morning.
    Call squinted at him to see if he looked particularly sinister, but he just grinned from under a tangle of messy brown hair and dropped a burlap bag of lichen and cheese sandwiches, along with an earthenware pitcher of water, at their feet. “Eat up, kids,” he said, and headed out the way he’d come.
    Call realized he was starving. He’d been concentrating for hours and his brain felt fuzzy. He was exhausted, much too tired to make conversation as he ate. Worse, as he studied the remaining sand, they’d made it only a small part of the way through the pile. The heap that remained seemed enormous.
    This was not flying. This wasn’t what he’d pictured when he’d imagined doing magic. This stank.
    “Come on,” Aaron said. “Or we’re going to have to eat dinner down here.”
    Call tried to concentrate, focusing his attention on a single grain, but then his mind slipped sideways into anger. The sand exploded, all the piles flying sideways, grains splashing the walls and settling into a giant, unsorted mess. All of their hard work was undone.
    Tamara sucked in her breath in horror. “What — what did you do ?”
    Even Aaron looked at Call like he was going to strangle him. It was the first time Call had ever seen Aaron look angry.
    “I — I —” Call wanted to say he was sorry, but he bit down on the words. He knew they wouldn’t matter. “It just happened.”
    “I’m going to kill you,” Tamara said very calmly. “I am going to sort your guts into piles.”
    “Uh,” said Call. He kind of believed her.
    “Okay,” Aaron said, taking big calming breaths, hands in his hair, like he was trying to press all that rage back into his skull. “Okay, we’re just going to have to do it all over again.”
    Tamara kicked the sand, then crouched down and began the