He felt his fists clench as he stared at the newcomer. He—Charlus, Gennady assumed—was tall and haughty, with a face that was entirely too angular for Gennady’s peace of mind and a nose that was tailor-made for sneering. His eyes were sharp—and angry. Gennady saw a hint of loathing in the eyes ... no, not loathing. Charlus thought they were too lowly for him to loathe. Gennady was sure of it.
“I’m Simon,” Simon said. “You must be Charlus ...”
“That’s LordCharlus to you, peasant,” Charlus snapped. “Lord Charlus of House Ashworth!”
He lifted his hand, spread out his fingers and jabbed them towards the other two boys. Gennady felt ... something ... hit the back of his neck, a blow that wasn’t a blow. The world seemed to grow larger all of sudden, something dark landing on top of him as magic—alien magic—pulsed through his body. It took him longer than it should have done to realise that Charlus had cast a spell on him. The room went completely dark as something warm and soft brushed against his head. He reached up and felt cloth. It made no sense.
The ground shook. Gennady nearly panicked. Fear held him frozen as the warm object was pulled away. Light flowed into his eyes, almost blinding him. It was hard, so hard, to make sense of what he was seeing. Charlus had become a giant, looming over him. His face was so large that ... Gennady started back as he realised that Charlus hadn’t grown larger, not really. It was Gennady who’d been shrunk. The room was suddenly so immense that it would take far too long to reach the door. He glanced down and realised, to his horror, that he was naked. He clamped his hand over his manhood as Charlus laughed. Tears filled his eyes as he bowed his head in shame. Charlus was no better than Hogarth. He’d used magic rather than his fists, but otherwise ...
He looked at Simon, who’d also been shrunk. They were barely two metres apart, but it might as well have been a thousand miles. Charlus peered down at them, his face a cruel rictus of amusement. He continued to laugh at them. Gennady felt a surge of sudden hatred that burned through him, demanding an outlet. But there was nothing. There was nothing he could do. He was helpless ...
“They told me I couldn’t share a room with my friends.” Charlus spoke quietly, but it felt as if he were shouting. “They told me I had to ... expand my mind. They told me ...”
His voice rose. “Get this through your heads. I’m in charge. When I tell you to do something, you do it. Or else I’ll punish you like the vermin you are.”
Gennady clenched his fists, knowing it would be useless. Charlus had all the power. There was nothing he could do to fight back. Not yet, perhaps not ever ... no, he told himself, firmly, that he’d study hard and learn how to best Charlus at his own game. The aristocrat had cheated, but ... he wouldn’t win. Gennady was grimly determined to make him pay.
“You can’t do this to us,” Simon protested. “You can’t ...”
Charlus snapped his fingers. Simon’s tiny form fell to the ground. “Yes, I can. And I will.”
He tossed his carryall at one of the beds, then turned. “I’m in charge. Don’t you forget it.”
Gennady watched him walk out the door, staring in horror as he realised they were still about two inches high. The floor shook as Charlus closed the door behind him. Gennady swallowed hard, then tried to cast the cancellation spell he’d been taught. It didn’t work. He gritted his teeth and tried again, telling himself that Charlus was just a student. There was no reason to believe his magic would last for more than an hour or two, but ...
“Gennady!” Simon was running towards him. It looked as though he was running a race. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” Gennady lied. It was a mistake—it was always a mistake—to show weakness. The boys would see it as an invitation. The girls would laugh and mock. “You?”
“I’ve been better.” Simon looked pale. “What a toffee-nosed bastard!”
Gennady flinched, despite himself. Someone might be listening. Someone was always listening, back home. The village had few secrets. Here ... who knew? Someone might be watching them through magic. He’d heard enough stories from his tutors—tales of Lord Whitehall and Lord Alfred and Robin De Bold—to know there were few true limits to magic. And then he remembered he was naked, that they were both naked ...
Simon didn’t seem to care. “A year of him,” he said. “It’s going to feel like an eternity.”
“Yeah,” Gennady said. The thought was unbearable. Hogarth had been horrid, but at least Gennady hadn’t had to share a room with him. “We’re going to have to study hard. We’re going to have to beat him.”
“If we can,” Simon said, pessimistically. He sat down, resting his hands on his knees as he waited for the spell to wear off. “He’ll have been raised in a magical household. He’ll know more than us ...”
“People like that never stop, unless they run into someone hard enough to stop them,” Gennady said. He’d heard that bullies were always cowards, but it wasn’t true. Bullies were rarely cowards because they rarely ran into someone who could stop them. They’d never tasted defeat, let alone the humiliation of being a victim. He promised himself that Charlus would taste it for himself before he was done. “We have to study hard.”
But he knew, as he tried to cancel the spell once again, that it wouldn’t be easy.
Chapter 5
The spell proved to be very resistant. Gennady tried again and again to cancel it, but he finally had to admit defeat and wait for the spell to wear off. He found himself growing back to normal just as the dinner bell rang for the last time. They hurried to dinner, snatched a quick meal before the older students chased them out and returned to their room. There was no sign of Charlus until Lights Out, when he returned, showered and went straight to bed. If he noticed the rude gesture Gennady made at his back, he didn’t show it.
Gennady didn’t sleep well. The sense that—at any moment—he might be turned into a small hopping thing kept him awake. He tossed and turned for hours before he finally slept, only to be tormented by nightmares of a giant Hogarth—who blurred into Charlus—lifting a foot and crushing him under his clogs. The howling alarm didn’t seem to make any difference, or to go away ... it wasn’t until Simon shook him that he realised he needed to get up. He rolled over, clambered out of bed and stumbled into the shower. Charlus, mercifully, was nowhere to be seen. His bathroom supplies, on the other hand, dominated the washroom. Gennady resisted the urge to pour the bottles of sweet-smelling liquid down the toilet. The faint hint of magic in the air suggested that trying might prove fatal.
“I heard you cry out,” Simon said. “Were you dreaming?”
“Just a little,” Gennady lied. He thought Simon meant well, but he didn’t know.Revealing weakness to anyone could be very dangerous. He liked Simon, yet ... his life had taught him that true friends were few and far between. “Did you have a good sleep?”
“Once I managed to block out the snores,” Simon said. He pointed a finger at Charlus’s bed. “He snored so loudly I thought it was a thunderstorm.”
Gennady laughed as he donned his robe, then headed to the door. A handful of students were running up and down the corridor, including a couple of snooty-faced aristocrats who looked down their noses at him. He guessed they were Charlus’s friends. They probably were. The local aristocracy back home hated each other, yet they were friendly at the same time. It probably made sense to them, he reasoned, but to him it was just stupid. The aristocrats needed some real problems to keep them from fighting over trivialities.