supposed to be softly fluttering snowflakes looked real.
“Well, welcome to portrait painting,” Stefanos continued when Kaelen had sat down. “As you can see, it’s just the two of us. For as much of class as I can, I will not hover over your shoulder. I will need you to read through this book before we can begin on any of your pieces.” He handed Kaelen a delicate-looking book entitled Beginning Portraiture: a Guide to the Human Face. “This is full of excellent tips on how to best capture the look of a person as well as capturing personality,” Stefanos explained. “I want you to try to have this read by the end of the week. Can you manage that?”
“If I don’t shred the pages,” Kaelen replied. “I have difficulty with books. Is there a more, um…”
“Resilient copy?” Stefanos finished for him. Kaelen nodded and he said, “I’m terribly sorry, this is the best copy they have. Just do the best you can with it. If it comes back looking a little shabby, I can fix that. Any other reason you wouldn’t be able to finish?”
“Nothing that comes to mind.”
“Good, read that this week and next week we’ll get our hands dirty. Now, you won’t just be learning to paint in this class. I’ll also be teaching you how to make brushes, mix your own paints and where to find the minerals for certain colors. After all, you never know when inspiration may hit you and you want to always be prepared.
“To start with we’re going to only do pencil drawings. But while you’re doing those, we’ll also spend some time making the materials necessary to begin your painting. When you do start your first painting, it will be with materials that you have made yourself. It makes the painting mean more to you when you’ve spent the time making everything. Besides that, it makes it more fun too,” Stefanos added. Kaelen was fairly sure that he wouldn’t find any part of this class fun, but kept it to himself.
By the time Kaelen met the other boys for lunch he’d had three of his new classes and all of them were individual classes with no other students. He discovered that his opponent in wrestling would be varied, but would start with Achilles. His third etiquette class was also before lunch. In that class he was being taught how to properly manage and run an estate.
“Gelasia, why do I need this class but none of the other boys do?” Kaelen had asked. “After all, we’re all going to be running kingdoms and stuff, right?”
“Well, of course we expect all our princes to succeed and eventually be ruler of their own kingdom, however this class isn’t about running a kingdom, Kaelen,” Gelasia had replied. “It’s about running an estate.”
At lunch, the boys gathered together, laughing and chatting until it was time to go to class. Adrian said goodbye as he headed to amphibian studies and the rest of them walked outside to the greenhouse for botany. It was bitterly cold outside with fat, wet snowflakes falling from a leaden sky. The greenhouse felt infinitely warmer as they hurried inside. “Well, boys, bit nippy out today isn’t it?” Russett asked as they shivered and crowded together by one of the tables.
“It’s freezing!” Jacobi stammered through chattering teeth.
“Well, give yourselves a few minutes,” Russett said. “The wind is certainly talking out there.”
“Howling is more like it,” George muttered.
Russett laughed and after giving the boys a few minutes to let the warmth of the greenhouse sink in, started class. “We’ll be doing some different things this semester. For one thing, you all need to know how to recognize dangerous plants. We’ll be seeing them at each stage of growth from seed to full maturity. Sometimes a plant is only dangerous during a particular time in their development. For example, darted morning glory is only dangerous in the middle stage of development before the flower fully matures. During that stage, the bud spits poisonous darts which would be a lethal problem if you didn’t recognize the plant for what it was.”
“Russett, wouldn’t it be lethal even if you did recognize it?” Jacobi interrupted.
“If you know what you’re dealing with, then you can be prepared to prevent injury,” Russett explained. “And if you did get hit with the darts, you could easily use an antidote that will cure the injury; if you recognized the plant.
“Other plants,” he continued, “are dangerous from the very start such as water hemlock or spiked hedgerow. Danger comes in many packages in the plant world. Some have poison, others throw spikes or thorns, and some try to wrestle you. If you are not prepared, these will defeat you easily. However, that’s why we’re in this class; to teach you what to look for. We’ll also be learning antidotes to use when dealing with these plants.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to avoid the plants?” George asked.
“It would always be better to avoid them,” Russett replied. “But sometimes you don’t have that option. If your princess is held hostage by a dragon, then he lives in a thicket of thorns. The interesting thing about thickets is that they tend to favor all sorts of dangerous plants, not just thorn bushes. I suppose it’s because misery loves company. So, yes, you could avoid the thicket; but then your princess is left with no one to rescue her. Are there any other questions?”
Kaelen paused for a moment before saying, “You said we’ll be seeing these plants at every stage of development. What does that mean, exactly?”
“That means, Kaelen, that you’ll be planting them and observing them. I have plenty of antidotes available if we should have problems. The key to this class is learning the plant’s full life cycle. That means you need to see it from seed to full maturity. I could have you read it in a book, but life doesn’t come out of a book. Real, hands-on experience is the best teacher. With that in mind, it’s time to start with our first plant; stinging thistle. Please put on a heavy set of gardening gloves and follow me.”
By the end of class, the boys were wishing they’d had some kind of face mask too. The gloves protected their fingers from the spiny seeds, but they weren’t prepared for the seeds to spit spines at them when they attempted to plant them in the soil-filled pots. Russett had given each boy a small tube of ointment. “Those will probably sting for a few days. Just put a little ointment over each one and you’ll be good as new. That’s really the hardest part, getting it planted.”
“You’d think the seeds would want to go in the soil,” Jacobi complained, rubbing some ointment on a spot over his eye where a particularly nasty spine had struck him. The spot was now a bright red blister.
“Maybe they just don’t like being touched,” George said, though he wasn’t much better off than Jacobi.
“I suppose I got off lucky,” Kaelen added. “The spines just got stuck in my fur. Only one actually hit me.”
“I don’t know that I’d say you got lucky, Kaelen. You got hit in the lip.”
“Hey,” George said suddenly, “where’d you get hit, Lucian?”
“In the chest,” Lucian lied. “I guess my seeds didn’t have enough oomph to reach my face.”
“Ouch. Well, at least no one will be able to see it,” Jacobi said.
“Yeah,” Lucian replied.
The boys separated for their next classes. “You didn’t actually get hit by any of the spines, did you?” George asked as the two walked towards the gazebo for their dragon languages class.
Lucian knew he wouldn’t be able to lie and said, “No I didn’t.”
“Lucky,” George admitted. They stopped chatting as they walked inside and sat down at the desks that had been placed nearest the lake. Every now and again a cold blast of air came through and the boys shivered.
Lorelei was sitting on her rock at the front of the room. If she was feeling at all cold like the boys were, she didn’t let on. Instead she smiled and said in Sea Serpent, “Good afternoon, boys.”
They responded in the same and the lesson got underway. Lucian and George had already decided that if they were going to keep the mermaid happy, then they were going to have to start practicing the dialects on their own as well as in class. At the end of the hour she asked, “Are you doing anyth
ing to study outside class?”
“We’re setting up a time we can practice today,” Lucian replied.
“Excellent,” Lorelei said. “Please make sure you both work especially hard on Sea Serpent. Your accent is a little off and sea serpents don’t take kindly to people mispronouncing their language.”
Lucian wanted to say that he felt that dragons in general became offended for the sheer purpose of becoming offended. However, he saw no purpose in being disagreeable to the mermaid either. They had learned over the past four years that mermaids were easily offended too. While Lorelei couldn’t burn them to a crisp, she had her own unique ways of showing displeasure and neither boy wanted to walk back to the castle soaked to the bone; especially since the snow was beginning to pick up outside.
Year 4 Chapter 5
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The next several weeks flew by. Their coursework became more and more challenging and often the boys commiserated about the vast unfairness of it all. One day was particularly bad for Lucian. In healing he accidently caused an explosion by adding one of the ingredients too rapidly. Morghana had quickly put out the flames and Lucian had apologized at least five times, but it didn’t save him from scorched eyebrows and a new assignment. “You will write a three page paper on proper safety while working with highly flammable ingredients,” Morghana