Simon found the man who had moments before called for those heading to Hemlock Tower. He was a tall, slender man with carefully combed darkish-brown hair and slightly effeminate mannerisms. He wore a uniform just like Simon’s, only with a metal tag below his crest that read “SC Delegate” - and in his right hand held a baton with a sculpture of a flame just like the one held by Emily.

  The crowd that gathered around this man was somewhat smaller than the crowd that had gathered around Emily shortly before. As a matter of fact, there were only three people - Jesse, Simon, and an Asian girl that Simon didn’t know but whom he was sure he had seen before, but couldn’t recall exactly where.

  “This everyone?” asked the man. Ricky, Jesse, and the strangely familiar girl looked at each other. Simon got the impression that the other two were as unsure how to answer the man’s question as he was.

  “Okay,” said the man, after a moment’s wait. “I’m Ethan - and if you follow me, I’ll take you to your new home away from home.”

  Ethan led the three first-years through a door just opposite the one that Simon and Jesse had entered through not long before. The four of them found themselves in a foyer that seemed pretty much symmetrical to the one they had entered the Great Hall from. Only instead of leading the kids down the spiral staircase, he led them out the opposite door onto a walkway through a beautiful and large courtyard full of trees with small apples hanging off of the branches.

  A few floors above, Simon could see a skyway that ran directly above the path that Ethan was leading the three new students down. But the shadow it cast wasn’t anywhere near the path.

  “This is Misty Peaks’s famous Crabapple Orchard,” said Ethan, as he led the three down the path. “It was the pride and joy of the Berchertian communities that made their home at Misty Peaks before it became a school.”

  “Berche-what?” asked Simon.

  “Berchertian,” said Ethan. “You know, the Community of Saint Berchert? The order of monks and nuns?”

  “Are they the same ones who dug the tunnels?” asked Simon.

  “They sure are,” affirmed Ethan. “As a matter of fact, they’re the ones who built Misty Peaks itself back in colonial times.”

  Before long, they reached the outer wall of the orchard and Ethan pushed open another large oak door. They entered a series of hallways that were quite different from the underground tunnels. These hallways proudly displayed their wooden walls underneath the torches protruding from them. While there were a few oramasynthic paintings, they were rather sparse.

  “Is it safe to have fire so close to wood?” asked Simon.

  “Usually no,” explained Ethan, “but the wood that the school is built from is magically fireproofed, so it’s okay.”

  Simon looked at the torches burning just underneath the rafters, amazed at how they didn’t even seem to scorch.

  After a while, leading them through the halls, Ethan asked: “Everyone got your key clips on?”

  “Yes,” said the three students he was leading, one after the other.

  “Okay then,” he said, turning to the left. A moment later, they got to another large oak double-door. “Here it is!” he exclaimed, as he pushed the door open. “Welcome to the Hemlock Tower common room!”

  Simon looked around in amazement as he saw all the wooden tables and chairs and well-stuffed pillow couches throughout the room. They looked like they had seen quite a lot of use, but were still in rather good shape. This room, too, was lit by torches - some of them protruding from the walls like those in the hallways, but others mounted at the same level on tall narrow stands that rested on the floor. To the right, he could see a large fireplace in the wall. Though a few older students were seated in front of it, there was no fire burning in it at the moment. As a matter of fact, there was no fire in the room at all except the glow of the torches which seemed to be better at producing light than heat.

  To the left, mounted on the wall, there was a giant oramasynthic painting of a waterfall somewhere in the mountains pouring its water into a small lake. Simon could faintly hear the relaxing sound of the water hitting the surface. A few of the tables were pulled over to the wall that bore the painting, with the tops of the tables just a foot or two below the painting’s base.

  “As you can see to our left,” said Ethan, “there’s Drippidy Falls. It was added in 1893 to give a the common room a nice view - a virtual window you can peer through.”

  “Is that a real window?” asked Simon, cautiously.

  “No,” said Ethan, “it’s oramasynthy.”

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  “So what if we’re sitting there and forget that it’s a painting and not a window?” asked Simon.

  “So, what?” inquired Ethan.

  “What if I touch it by mistake?” Simon asked under his breath.

  “So what if you do?” responded Ethan.

  “Won’t I mess it up?” asked Simon. “I mean - it’s really a painting, not a window.”

  “It is,” said a familiar voice. “But it’s an oramasynthic painting.” Simon could see another student about Ethan’s age coming forth. She seemed familiar to Simon, but he couldn’t quite recall where she was familiar from or who she was.

  “They’re not really windows,” she continued, “but they’re designed to be like windows in every way, including that they can’t be messed up by you just touching them. The only difference is that what you see when you look through them isn’t really there. The worst that’ll happen is you get your hand-grease on them, and that can be cleaned off later. And on a high-quality one like this one, it’ll just fade in minutes without anyone having to do anything.”

  Finally, as she finished speaking, Simon recognized her.

  “Amy!” he shouted in excitement. He ran to his friend from the summer, who gave him a big hug. It had taken him a moment to recognizer her because her hair, instead of being purplish-pink as it was when he had seen her at Merlin’s Book Cove, was now a dark almost-black brown. But now that he recognized her, he was very happy to see her.

  “So - you know each other?” asked Ethan.

  “Sure do,” said Amy. “I met Simon when he came into the store to get his books.”

  “Okay,” said Ethan, a bit confusedly. “Anyway, it’s time to get y’all to your dorm rooms. I’ll take a look at your room assignment, and tell you how to get there. If you’ve brought a familiar, I or someone else’ll be by in a little while to help you get plugged in and help you with anything else you have trouble with. Let’s start with you - Simon.”

  Simon walked up to Ethan, holding out the parchment with his room assignment on it. “I’m in the same room,” explained Jesse, as he came up together with Simon.

  “Okay. Hemlock 103. Through the double-doors there,” said Ethan, pointing to some double-doors opposite the ones that he had led the three of them through upon entering the common room. “Take one flight up the stairs on your left, go on to the end of the hallway, and take a left. It won’t be very far on your right.”

  Simon followed Jesse through the double-doors, lugging his suitcase as he went. As soon as they got through, they saw two staircases, one on the left and one on the right. They weren’t spiral staircases like those they had seen so far at the school, but half-turn staircases. As soon as they had gone one flight up the staircase on the left, they reached a hall that dead-ended in the direction that they had come from upon approaching the staircase, but in the other direction led to another hallway that went on in both directions.

  Upon getting off the staircase, Simon noticed something strange. The staircase they had come up through went both down to the floor they had come through and on to the floor above. But the other staircase seemed to start at this floor and go only upward.

  “One moment!” he said. “I thought that in the last floor, that staircase went up to this floor. But here it isn’t going down!”

  “Must be a shortcut stairwell,” commented Jesse casually.

  “A what?” asked Simon.

  “A shortcut stairwell,” explained Jesse. “Some staircases go more than one floor at a time.”

  “What?” asked Simon, confused.

  “Well,” said Jesse, “think about the seventh-years. You don’t think they wanna have to walk seven flights to get to their rooms!”

  Simon shook his head in confusion as Jesse continued on to the main hallway and followed him. It was only a few doors after they turned left that they finally came to a room with a plaque on it that bore the number 103. Jesse pushed down on a lever-style doorknob, pushed the door open, and the two of them entered the room.

  It was a cozy-looking room made of lightly-stained wood. It wasn’t bare, but well furnished. It had four beds, each covered with a red blanket and a while pillow at the head. There were also four dressers, four closets, four desks each with a bookshelf above it, and a window with a view of the forest not too far away. He had just arrived at the school, but had learned that there were paintings in the magical world that could very effectively simulate windows. Still, he felt pretty sure that this one was a real window, probably because it had a sill rather than a picture frame. But though he was pretty sure, he wasn’t completely so.

  The two of them were not alone, as seated on the chair behind one of the desks was a Black boy about their age that they hadn’t ever seen before. He had clearly been there for a while, because his desk already was fitted with a pad of parchment, a quill-pen, and books on its shelf.

  “Hey,” said Jesse, extending his hand to this boy. “Name’s Jesse Davenport.”

  “Ricky McGhee,” said the boy, shaking Jesse’s hand.

  “Simon Corbin,” said Simon, sadly, extending his hand to the boy.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Ricky, shaking Simon’s hand.

  Looking around, Simon could see that the room’s accommodations weren’t up for grabs. Every desk, every bed, every dresser was labeled. One of each for Ricky, one for Jesse, one for himself, and one for a fourth boy who hadn’t yet arrived - a boy named Thomas Reynolds.

  Simon found his bed and threw his suitcase on it, with its handle facing him.

  “Is that a real window?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Jesse. “Paintings usually aren’t given sills like that.”

  “I didn’t think so,” said Simon, “but I wasn’t sure.”

  He slung his backpack off his back and threw it on his bed beside his suitcase. He then sat down on the remaining space on the edge of his bed and stared at his desk, his dresser, and his closet, in sheer intimidation. He finally was here with all his stuff - and had no idea how to begin with unpacking.

  “Not going to unpack?” asked Jesse.

  “I will,” said Simon, “but I have to sit here for a moment, first.”

  And so he just sat there, as Jesse began unpacking his stuff. His friend had already put all his hanging clothes in the closet and most of his folded clothes in the dresser before Simon finally, hesitantly, got up off the couch, turned around, and opened his suitcase. After thinking for another few moments, he finally began flipping through the levels of his suitcase’s contents to where his foldable clothes were. He took some underwear out, and held it as he looked over the dresser, trying to figure out which drawer was the best to put it in. He finally decided on one of the small drawers on the top row. After opening it up and putting the underwear there, he then returned to his suitcase for the rest.

  Once he finally had all of his underwear unpacked, he then began pondering what to unpack next.