“How are you, my dear?” Thea turned toward the voice—it was Mother Night. She looked completely different than she had that afternoon. Now her skin was dark, almost blue-black, and she had a nimbus of short white curls around her head. She was wearing a silver dress, very simply cut, that could have come from ancient Egypt or a modern fashion magazine.
“I’m all right, I guess,” said Thea. But she didn’t feel all right. Instead, she felt as though she might throw up.
“You haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, not even the apple in your backpack. You forgot about it, didn’t you? You have half a chocolate bar in there too, in the front pocket. So of course you’re going to feel sick. You need to take better care of yourself.”
“I’m not very good at that,” said Thea. “Taking care of myself, I mean.”
“No, you’re not. But you don’t have anyone else to do it, so you’ll have to get better at it. Why don’t you practice right now? Go over to the refreshments table and get yourself some of the fish pie, which is very good. And there’s asparagus with hollandaise, and ice cream. But meat and vegetables first! Not just ice cream, you know.” Thea nodded. It had been a long time since anyone had told her to eat healthily, and the fact that Mother Night was doing it made her feel like laughing, despite her sense of nausea.
“I’m serious,” said Mother Night. She put her hands, cool and dry, on either side of Thea’s face. Her eyes were black, with stars in them. For a moment, Thea felt as though she were floating in space. “Try to remember that you’re also one of my daughters.” And then, with a soft pat on the cheek, of both affection and admonition, Mother Night was gone. Thea shook her head as though to clear it, then walked around the dance floor, weaving between the birch trees and mossy stones, stepping over the stream, to the refreshments table.
She hung the peacock mask over her arm by its ribbons, then took a plate and some cutlery that looked like forks and knives on one end, and birch branches on the other. That must be fish pie—at least the crust was baked in the shape of a fish. She did not like asparagus but took some anyway, as well as some scalloped potatoes. A potato was a vegetable, right?
“What do you think that is?” asked the person ahead of her in line. Suddenly, she realized who she had been standing behind.
“Dr. Patel?” she said. The professor was wearing an ordinary black evening dress, with pearls. “I don’t know, it looks sort of like a fern, you know those fiddle-head ferns they sell at the farmer’s market, except those aren’t usually purple, are they? I’m Thea Graves. I graduated from Miss Lavender’s last spring. I think you lectured to one of my classes. On magic and physics?”
“Oh, hello,” said Dr. Patel, smiling the way people do when they’re trying to remember who you are. “Call me Anita. It’s always nice to see a fellow alumna. Have you tried those little cakes? The ones in all different shapes and colors. They have marzipan inside.”
Thea took several of the cakes. She did like marzipan. “It’s weird seeing someone I know—I mean, sort of know—here in the Other Country. Are you…just visiting?”
“Wouldn’t that be nice!” said Dr. Patel. “Sometimes I think only students get real vacations. No, I’m afraid that I’m here on business…Mother Night’s business, of course. And you?”
“Oh, um, yeah. Me too, business.”
“Emily used to say, We are all on Mother Night’s business, no matter what we’re doing. I bet she still says that to her students. How is everyone at Miss Lavender’s? It’s been so long since I visited—Homecoming, I think.”
Suddenly, Thea had a vision of Miss Emily Gray, and Dr. Patel, and Morgan Morningstar, all going about Mother Night’s business, whatever that might be.
“I’m really just here to find my shadow,” she confessed. She didn’t want Dr. Patel to think that she was taking too much credit, making her business out to be grander than it was…
“Unless it finds you first!”
Thea turned around. There stood a girl, as tall as her, shaped like her, with her red hair. She wore a black catsuit and a mask that looked like a cat’s face, with cat ears and whiskers.
“Asparagus? Seriously?”
“What,” said Thea.
“Asparagus? You like asparagus?”
“What…no. You’re her. Me. You’re me. You need to go home with me. We’re supposed to be together.” Could she sound any more inane?
The shadow took off her mask. Even though Thea had been expecting it, when she saw her own face she stepped back into the table and almost knocked over the tray of little cakes.
Dr. Patel was farther down the table now, and there was no one behind her in line. She and the shadow were as alone as they could be, in a ballroom.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” said the shadow. Her face was subtly wrong. Thea wondered why, then realized that for the first time she was looking at herself the way other people saw her, not reflected in a mirror. “Why should I? You put me in a box for twelve years! A shadow in a dark box—I barely existed. But here I’m as real as you are. Probably realer—you look sort of faded around the edges. In fact, why don’t you stay here and be my shadow? That would be amusing!”
No, it wouldn’t. “First of all, I didn’t put you in a box for twelve years. My grandmother did. And second of all…”
“Well, you didn’t take me out, did you? I’m not going anywhere with you, no way, no how. I just wanted to see you in person. When I saw you in the Seeing Ball with Morgan Boringstar, I thought, I wonder what she’s like. Well let me tell you, I am not impressed. Except for the shoes—I do like the shoes, but that’s it. And you can tell Morgan that she should find herself another Seeing Ball, because I’m not giving this one back!”
“Well, well, so you’ve found Thea, Thea!” The satyr Thea had seen dancing with the butterfly woman put his arms around the shadow. She laughed and yanked his long hair, then kissed him loudly on the mouth.
“Come on, Oryx,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere interesting. This party’s lame!”
He laughed and swung her onto the dance floor. As they capered away, over the stream and across the moonlit room, Thea heard, “I saw you talking to her! Did she have my Seeing Ball?”
“No,” said Thea. She turned around. Morgan was a little out of breath, still wearing her mask of black feathers. “She said to tell you that she wasn’t giving it back.”
“That little…When I find her, I’m going to put her back in a box. A sewing box—a cigar box—a match box. Let’s see how she likes that!”
“I’m sorry, I need to sit down.” How faint her voice sounded! Still clutching her plate, Thea turned away from Morgan and walked as steadily as she could to one of the doors, leaning for a moment against the frame, then down a torch-lit hall until she reached a stone arch through which she could see the garden. She stumbled out into the night and sat on one of the benches, putting her plate on her lap.
She could not eat. The nausea was even stronger than before. Was it because she had encountered her shadow? She looked down at the plate and almost cried out in fear. Its porcelain edges were visible through her hands. She held one hand up in front of her. Through it she could see the moonlit garden, with its topiaries black in the moonlight, its trellises on which white flowers bloomed in the darkness. Through her hand she could see the moon and constellations. Why was she fading so quickly? Mrs. Moth has said it would take time, but here in the Other Country, it was taking no time at all.
She had no idea what to do.
A small voice, her own although it sounded suspiciously like Mother Night’s, said You must take care of yourself. Step one: fish pie. Step two: scalloped potatoes. Step three: asparagus, ugh. But she ate every stalk.
“Finally you’re doing something sensible,” said Cordelia. The cat was sitting on the bench beside her, yellow eyes shining in the moonlight. “When you’re done, I want to lick your plate. I mean the fish part of it.”
“Where have you been all day?” ask
ed Thea, finishing the little marzipan cakes. She did not feel better, exactly. But at least she did not feel quite so hollow.
“On cat business, which is Mother Night’s business, of course,” said the cat. Thea put her plate on the bench, and Cordelia licked the remains of the fish and potatoes.
“I found my shadow, or she found me, but Cordy, it’s hopeless.” Thea looked down at her ghostly, almost transparent hands. “She blames me for putting her in that box. She doesn’t want anything to do with me, unless I become her shadow. And everyone says this is something I have to figure out myself—Mother Night won’t help me, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Well,” said the cat, licking her paws and washing her face with them, “you can start by thinking like a witch instead of a whiny twelve-year-old. Remember the day you arrived at Miss Lavender’s?”
“I’m not that girl anymore,” said Thea. That small, scared girl, scarcely larger than the trunk she had lugged through the airport and then onto the train from Boston. She wasn’t like that, was she?
“You could have fooled me.”
Think like a witch. No, she wasn’t that girl anymore. She was a graduate of Miss Lavender’s, and even if she didn’t know what to do right now, she would figure it out.
Thea took a deep breath. “Cordy, I bet she’s still in the castle. She’s the part of me that my grandmother cut away, the bad part. Or, you know, rebellious. Angry. She’s teasing us now, showing us that she’s smarter, better than we are. She likes doing that. So she’s still here.”
“Then let’s go find her,” said the cat.
“She stole Raven’s cloak of invisibility. I think that’s why Morgan hasn’t been able to find her all this time. So we need another way to find her. Can you find her by smell?”
“How would I do that?” said Cordelia, looking at her incredulously. “Do you have any idea how big the castle is? I don’t think even the castle itself knows! We could look for years.”
“I think I know where to start. She’s so confident, but it’s all on the surface—she doesn’t belong here any more than I do. She’s lost, just like me. I think she’s been hiding in the Library of Lost Books. That’s what I would do, hide among the lost things. I think that’s why she was toasting marshmallows in the library fireplace. Of course if she looks in the Seeing Ball, she can see us coming, in which case we’re out of luck. But she didn’t have it earlier—I would have noticed it on her, in that cat outfit. We have to take the chance that she’s too occupied or distracted to check. Anyway, this is the only plan I can think of right now. Will you help me?”
“All right,” said Cordelia. “I’ll even let you carry me, as long as you don’t turn me on my back. I’m not a human infant, you know!”
Thea put the cat over her shoulder. She didn’t have time to return her plate and cutlery to the ballroom—hopefully someone would find them. “To a witch, any door is every door.” Senator Warren had said that, speaking at her graduation. It was probably supposed to be a metaphor, but metaphorical language was poetry, right? And poetry was magic. She walked back to the stone arch that led into the castle. She stood in front of it, clutching Cordelia, and said,
“Ghosts of thoughts are lying
on the shelves, rustling
like a forest of dry leaves.
Take me to them.”
See? Metaphor—or was that a simile? She was getting better at this. Thea stepped through the archway and into the Library of Lost Books.
The library was dark and silent, illuminated only by the moonlight that came through tall, mullioned windows. It gleamed on row upon row of books with gilt lettering on their spines. She put Cordelia down on the floor.
“All right,” she said. “Look for someone who smells like me. I mean smell for. You know what I mean.”
Cordelia sniffed the air. Thea could see the shining circles of her eyes. Then she turned away and slunk into the darkness. This could take a while…but no, just a minute later Cordelia was back.
“Well, that was easy,” she said disdainfully. “She may have gotten all the anger, but you got all the brains. They’re asleep, right in front of the fireplace.”
Thea followed the cat across the dark, cavernous room to a stone fireplace. On a carpet in front of the fireplace, there was…nothing. “Invisibility cloak,” she said. “Show me where?”
Cordelia nudged the nothing.
Thea knelt down and felt the air…yes, it was fabric, scratchy like wool. She pulled it off. There, on the carpet, asleep and smelling distinctly of wine, were her shadow and Oryx the satyr. One of her arms was flung over his hairy chest.
“What now?” asked Cordelia.
“I don’t know.” She had been doing the next thing and the next, as they occurred to her. Looking down at her shadow, nestled against the satyr, she did not know what to do.
“Well, that’s helpful,” said the cat in her most disgusted tone. She sat on the stone floor and wrapped her tail around her feet.
Thea sat down beside her cross-legged, set the peacock mask on the floor, and put her chin in her hands. The green dress, black in the moonlight, puddled around her. How do you join a shadow to yourself after it has been snipped away? That was the question.
“If I could get her to back Miss Lavender’s, I could ask Miss Gray to rejoin us—or maybe Mrs. Moth would do it? But I don’t know how to get her back there without waking her up. And if I wake her, she’ll never agree to go with me.” The shadow had made that perfectly clear.
“Do you always wait for someone else to solve your problems?” Cordelia asked, as though posing a theoretical question.
Thea put her hands over her eyes, ashamed of herself. Yes, mostly, up to now she had. Her grandmother, and then the teachers at school. But she wasn’t in school anymore, was she? She was an adult now, and adults solved their own problems. So did witches.
“Wait.” She opened her eyes. Her hands were still in front of her face, but she could see right through them, to the bookshelves across the room. Both of her hands were completely transparent. Quickly, she put them in her lap, where she couldn’t see them. She didn’t want to know how much she had faded here, so close to her shadow. “Mrs. Moth said something—if only I could remember.”
Cordelia yawned, pointedly.
“That’s it!” Suddenly, it had come back to her—the conversation over tea, and a chance remark. “Magic is poetry. At least, poetry plus math. I always hated the math part, but all we need is for one plus one to equal one.” Carefully, she leaned forward and turned the shadow over—the other Thea made a sound, but did not wake up. Then she sat back and pulled out one of her long red hairs. “You’ll have to be both needle and thread,” she said to the red strand.
“Thread the needle, sharp as pain,
sew the fabric, strong as grief.”
She put the soles of her feet right on the shadow’s, her Keds to the soft black leather boots of the catsuit, and began to sew.
“Join the twain, join them well,
bind them as a single soul,
so they cannot be unbound.”
Starting at the heel, up the outside and a few extra stitches at the toe, down the inside, knot. Then the other foot.
“Sewing spell, join them soundly,
solidly and well.”
Once she had knotted the thread again, she stood up. The shadow lay on the floor, just where the moonlight would have cast Thea’s shadow. Thea looked down at her hands. She could no longer see through them. They were completely solid.
“Well?” said Cordelia.
“I don’t know. I think it worked. I remember being at Miss Lavender’s and being in the box. If I’d been in that box, I would have hated me too! I think I do hate me. And my grandmother, and Anne Featherstone, and my parents for dying, and…Cordy, what’s wrong with my face?”
“You’re crying. You humans do that.”
Thea could feel tears coursing down her cheeks. Suddenly, she started to sob—loud, heaving
sobs that racked her as she leaned forward, hands on her stomach, then fell to her knees. She felt as though she were going to split apart again, this time from anger and grief. She had never felt anything so painful—the wracking sobs continued—no, she had, she remembered now. But it had been long ago, when she was a child. And it all came flooding back—her mother’s soft auburn hair, the sensation of riding on her father’s shoulders, the day she had been told they would not, no never, come back. She couldn’t bear it. She knelt on the cold, hard floor and sobbed.
“You have to get up,” said Cordelia. “We have to go home. Look.”
Thea looked up. Through her tears, she saw that it was brighter—no longer moonlight, but the soft blue light of early morning, beginning to come through the library windows.
“What’s wrong with me, Cordy? Why can’t I stop crying?”
“You’re both of you now.” The cat rubbed up against her, a rare gesture of affection. “Come on. You can do it, you know.”
Thea stood up awkwardly and rubbed her hands across her face. They were slick with tears. She didn’t want to ruin the green dress by wiping them on it, so she just rubbed them against each other, hoping they would dry. She took a deep breath that hurt her ribs. Her stomach was still queasy and there was an ache in her chest, but somehow she felt stronger than before. As though the world had stopped tilting around her.
“All right, give me a minute.”
She knelt beside the satyr and kissed him on one cheek, despite his bad breath, then stroked his hair. “I liked you—a lot. And honestly, you’re pretty hot for someone who’s half goat.” Then she picked up the peacock mask from where she had set it down.
“Can we go home now?” Cordelia yawned a wide cat yawn and blinked her eyes. This time, she seemed genuinely sleepy.
Snow White Learns Witchcraft Page 17
