SPELLWOOD ACADEMY
Other books by Kate Avery Ellison include:
Red Rider (The Sworn Saga #1)
A Gift of Poison (The Kingmakers’ War #1)
A Bed of Blades (The Kingmakers’ War #2)
A Kiss of Treason (The Kingmakers’ War #3)
A Circle of Flames (The Kingmakers’ War #4)
A Shield of Sorrow (The Kingmakers’ War #5)
A Court of Lies (The Kingmakers’ War #6)
A Reign of Thieves (The Kingmakers’ War #7)
A Knife of Oblivion (The Kingmakers’ War #8)
All Her Secrets
Frost (The Frost Chronicles #1)
Thorns (The Frost Chronicles #2)
Weavers (The Frost Chronicles #3)
Bluewing (The Frost Chronicles #4)
Aeralis (The Frost Chronicles #5)
The Curse Girl
Of Sea and Stone (Secrets of Itlantis #1)
By Sun and Saltwater (Secrets of Itlantis #2)
With Tide and Tempest (Secrets of Itlantis #3)
For Wreck and Remnant (Secrets of Itlantis #4)
In Dawn and Darkness (Secrets of Itlantis #5)
Once Upon A Beanstalk
SPELLWOOD ACADEMY
KATE AVERY ELLISON
Copyright © 2019 Kate Avery Ellison
All Rights Reserved
Do not distribute or copy this book, in print or electronic format, in part or in whole, without the written consent of the author.
For Julie
CHAPTER ONE
YOU MIGHT THINK my story should begin with the acceptance letter to Spellwood Academy. The letter that arrived with the text still smoking from being written in fire on pages smelling of ancient forests and dusty crypts, delivered by spiders through the slot in my door.
But no. Everything started the night I almost died.
~
I never saw what hit me.
The rain was coming down in sheets as I steered my bike through the near-darkness in my small town of Everlade, North Carolina. Getting caught in the rain was one downside of not being able to afford a car. I hadn’t meant to head home so late—and certainly not in a veritable monsoon—but I’d been stuck at the library an extra hour trying to finish my final paper for lit class. Absorbed as I was in Jane Austen’s world of social graces, balls, and witty banter, I hadn’t even realized how dark the sky had become until lightning illuminated my page.
I knew my mom was waiting tables at her second job, and Grandmother Azalea didn’t drive due to her bad leg. So, I stayed until the library closed, and then I climbed on my bike and rode into the darkness, barely able to see more than a few feet ahead of me through the gloom of the torrential downpour.
Thankfully, I’d been wearing my helmet and my reflective vest that my mom insisted I take with me every time I biked anywhere that wasn’t our neighborhood streets.
All I could remember was the shriek of screeching tires against wet pavement, and the sickening bounce of headlights spinning across the trees to the right of me, and the gut-wrenching shock of something slamming into me full force. It was like all my senses went white at the same time. Numb. I remember feeling soft, almost peaceful. The way it feels when you let out the breath you’re holding and turn on your side before falling asleep.
And I was drifting like a piece of seaweed on the edge of a wave. Something—someone? —whispered sweetly in my ear, telling me to come home, telling me to let go. My soul unclenched and slipped through my ribs like smoke through bars.
Then—
Shouting. Blinding flashes of light in red and white.
I snapped back into my body with a jolt and felt hands touching me, then canvas against my back, and a dizzying sensation of being lifted. Rain wet my face. I was aware of pain, but faintly, like it was somewhere below me, threatening but not fully overtaking me.
Not yet.
Someone said something to me, a question, but I didn’t understand them. The words ran together like rainwater, and I couldn’t seem to turn my neck or remember how to open my mouth.
A hand squeezed mine. I squinted, trying to open my eyes, and fell back into an abyss of pain and then, mercifully, unconsciousness.
This time, my soul stayed where it was. The voice calling me from my body was gone.
~
I woke up in an ambulance, and I couldn’t breathe. My eyes opened this time, just a crack that let in a blurry image of bouncing walls and double doors with windows to a dark, rain-soaked world. A paramedic leaned over me, but he was speaking to someone else. I heard him say, his voice oddly calm, “We’re losing her.” I smelled the sharp scents of medicine, rubber, and rubbing alcohol. I couldn’t feel a thing. My body was numb, my legs two lumps covered by a blanket.
“Stay with me,” the paramedic murmured as he put an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth.
My eyes closed again. I was already fading again. The abyss reached for me with shadowy arms, and I couldn’t escape it.
I opened my eyes again inside a hospital. Harsh white lights spun above me. I lay face-up on a stretcher, and nurses were running with me down an impossibly long hallway. Shouts echoed around me, and I was still struggling to breathe despite the mask over my face.
The pain was like a blanket smothering me. I was in agony from my shoulders to my feet, and I couldn’t even scream. I was frozen.
My tangled gazes with a doctor standing in a doorway as we rushed down the hall. He looked young and old at the same time. His hair was dark; his eyes were blue.
That was all I remembered before I faded again.
~
The next time I woke, I wasn’t wearing the oxygen mask anymore. I stared up and saw round, saucer-like lights.
I shivered violently as the beeps and whispering sounds of medical machines filled the air. An operating room.
But I was alone in it. Alone and frightened.
No—there was a doctor, the same one with the blue eyes. He stood beside a sink at the wall, his back to me, but somehow, I still knew it was him. He had his hands braced against the counter and his head down. I saw his lips move as though he were reciting some silent mantra to himself.
“Doctor?” I croaked.
He turned. His eyes burned into mine with an intensity that stilled me.
“Am I dying?” I couldn’t stop the tears that slipped from the corners of my eyes and slid down my cheeks to pool against my collarbone.
The young doctor approached me. He stopped beside me and smiled. It was a lean, quick flash of teeth. A gambler’s smile. He reached down and placed a hand on my shoulder. His fingers were warm against my skin.
“You’re going to live,” he assured me, and then I blacked out again.
CHAPTER TWO
I WOKE UP in a regular hospital bed this time.
My mom was curled in a chair beside my pillow, asleep, her curly hair wrapped in a scarf, her face bare of makeup like she’d cried it all off. When I moved my arm, the IV in my hand tugged against my skin. The terrible, crushing pain was gone, replaced by a whimper of discomfort in comparison. I breathed in, testing my lungs, and they filled with air.
I turned my head and whispered, “Mom.”
She woke immediately and leaped to her feet. Her hands fluttered over me, anxious and unlike her. “Baby,” she gasped, her eyes filling with tears. “How are you feeling? Are you in pain?”
“Thirsty,” I croaked.
She lunged across the room for a pitcher of water and a glass that sat on a rolling table at the other end of the bed. “Water?” she asked, turning to me with the pitcher clutched in her hand like it was the solution to world peace. “Or juice? I can get you apple juice from the nurse’s station. They also have tea. No co
ffee for you yet, of course, but—”
“Let’s start with water,” I said, smiling at her. My eyes were leaking a little. I could tell she’d been frantic. I was sorry about that. I hated to think of her in pain, thinking I might die.
My mom poured me water, splashing a little in her excitement, and brought the cup to me. I gingerly tried to sit up, and she pressed the button to raise the top part of the bed.
“Here,” she said, helping me lift the edge of the cup to my mouth.
As I drank, she kissed the top of my head repeatedly. “Thought I’d lost you,” she muttered into my hair. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. Oh, my poor baby.”
“Mom,” I whispered. I didn’t want her to worry about that. My mom had a tendency to worry endlessly if she didn’t stop herself, even after something was over.
Her eyes widened. “Let me text Grandmother Azalea. She’s waiting to hear how you are.”
As she fumbled with her phone, I finished the water and set the glass down on the bedside table. Questions churned in my head. I remembered flashes from before—the ambulance, the operating room. I had no idea what time it was, or how long I’d been asleep. The shades were closed on the window, but I could see faint light that looked like dawn.
“Did you get here while I was in the operating room?” I asked Mom.
She lifted her head. Her brow wrinkled. “Operating room?”
“For my chest?” I said, just as confused. Hadn’t they told her? “The doctor was a young guy, dark hair?”
She shook her head. “Your doctor is a woman, Kyra.”
A knock came at the door. The doctor. She stepped inside and smiled at me. She was my mother’s age, perhaps, with yellow hair and crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes, which were brown.
“How are you feeling?” she asked. Her voice was brisk but kind.
“A lot better,” I said. “I was in so much pain before, but my chest and stomach aren’t hurting at all now.”
“Your chest and stomach?” She wrote this down as if it were something of interest.
“Y-yes,” I said. “Where all the blood was.”
She looked at me strangely.
“My mom and I were discussing earlier—I was in an operating room, but my mom seems to think—” I paused. “Where is the doctor who helped me? The one in the operating room? He had blue eyes. I wanted to thank him.”
The doctor came and sat down on the edge of my bed. She pulled a small flashlight from her pocket and checked my eyes. The place between her eyebrows pinched. “Can you tell me what month and day it is?”
“Er, well, how long have I been in here?” I hedged as I grappled mentally to understand.
If they were asking me questions like this, then they thought I had a head injury.
I didn’t understand.
What about the doctor? I hadn’t hallucinated that.
Had I?
The doctor’s brows drew together at my answer. I amended it.
“It’s almost May,” I said. “School’s almost out. I’m a senior… I’m graduating…”
“How many fingers am I holding up?” She held up three.
I sighed and answered the rest of her questions. When she’d finished, I said, “Can somebody tell me what’s going on?”
“You were knocked off your bike by a car,” my mom said. “You sprained your wrist, bruised your hip, and got a nasty bump on your head. The painkillers they gave you made you sleep a lot.”
Her eyes were watchful. As if she knew something I didn’t. Or maybe I was imagining things.
It had been a long night.
I looked down at my left arm, which was covered in a bandage. “Oh.”
“Sometimes patients have vivid dreams,” the doctor offered with a smile.
It wasn’t a dream. The denial rose to my lips, but I didn’t say the words. I forced myself to nod as if I agreed with her.
After she left, my mom hugged me again.
“Mom,” I whispered. “It felt really real.”
She smoothed my hair and pressed her forehead against mine. “You’re safe now. Let’s focus on that.”
I went home a few hours later.
My letter to the academy arrived thirteen days later.
CHAPTER THREE
MY MOM AND I lived with my grandmother, Azalea Brown. We’d always lived with her, because my mom was a single mother, and my father was nowhere to be found. I’d never even met him. We didn’t need him—we were the perfect three all by ourselves. I grew up calling us the Three Musketeers. My Grandmother Azalea, on the other hand, liked to refer wryly to the three of us the Three Blind Mice.
But we were happy.
We lived in a tiny house plunked down in the middle of a terrible neighborhood. Our yard was an oasis of sunflowers and sculptures amid the yards of tangled weeds and broken-down cars. The shutters were blue, and my grandmother’s sculptures and clay pots cluttered the front step and lined our walkway. When I was a little girl, I’d sometimes pretended our front yard was the domain of a wicked witch who’d turned everyone and everything to stone.
Somehow, we’d always escaped break-ins. I used to tell myself as a child that it was the power of the wicked witch that protected us.
~
The letter arrived on a warm, muggy morning.
I was eating breakfast when I heard the clatter of the mail flap. My mom shouted for me to get the mail, and I rose absently to retrieve the delivered papers.
I froze in the hall at the sight of the spiders. For a moment, my mind refused to process what I was seeing as a gray mass dripped through the flap, crawling down the door and into a heaving, rippling puddle on our mat.
I heard Grandmother Azalea call my name, but I was rooted to the floor as I watched the knot of spiders convulse around something. An envelope.
Nothing about this made sense.
As my grandmother’s footsteps rattled the floorboards, the spiders streaked back for the door, leaving the envelope behind.
“Kyra?” my grandmother asked from the other room, and there was a note of something in her voice, something like alarm, as if she sensed a change in the air.
Grandmother Azalea was a tall, lean woman, with golden-brown eyes that could scorch you or warm you to your bones depending on her mood. Her hair was black and curly, threaded with silver, but her smooth, dark brown skin had no wrinkles, and she was fit as a yoga instructor besides a withered left leg. I’d often wondered if she’d ever had injections to maintain that perfect skin, but I never dared to ask. She was a sculptor now, wresting beauty from clay in the shed behind our tiny house, and she’d just come inside. She still wore her clay-splattered apron, and she had a smear of mud on her left cheek.
“Kyra—” she began, but then she saw the envelope lying on the mat, and the last few of the spiders disappearing through the flap, and she let out a sound that was something between a gasp and a moan, as if she’d seen a corpse. She staggered, her hand flying to the wall to brace herself, and I shouted for my mom as I grabbed her arm to steady her.
My mom came running. She was in her work uniform, her makeup half-finished. She looked at my grandmother in alarm.
“The spiders are gone,” I told Grandmother Azalea. My head was ringing, because whatever had happened with the spiders was definitely not normal, but I was focused on my grandmother. She had turned a shade of gray that made me wonder if we were going to have to call an ambulance.
“Spiders?” my mom demanded. She looked around the floor at her feet nervously. “What’s going on?”
Then her gaze fell on the letter, and something in her face changed. She pulled back her shoulders and closed her lips into a line.
Whatever the letter was, my mom knew what it was.
Grandmother Azalea sank onto the couch. She was still staring at the envelope. “It’s not the spiders, Kyra,” she panted. “I… I can’t believe they’ve found… I thought…”
I looked at the envelope. “Who?”
“Pick it up,” Grandmother Azalea said in resignation, nodding at the envelope.
I hesitated. I trusted my grandmother implicitly, but there had been a lot of spiders.
“The arachnids are gone,” she murmured. “They were never real, anyway. Just an illusion. A joke…”
I didn’t understand. I crossed the room and retrieved the envelope. The paper was warm.
“Open it,” Grandmother Azalea commanded, and she sounded as if she were ordering me to dip my hand in acid. Regret, fear, and concern mingled in her voice. And one final emotion.
Fury.
The envelope was sealed with a heavy dollop of black wax, stamped with a symbol I didn’t know. I gentled broke the seal and drew back the flap.
Inside was a folded piece of paper and a bundle of what looked like powdered herbs. No, parchment. Heavy, with ragged edges. I drew it out and unfolded it.
The letters on the page smoked as if they had been burned into the parchment only seconds ago. They were the color of charcoal.
At the top was my name. Kyra Solschild.
A fizzle of shock broke over me. I shot a glance at Grandmother Azalea, who nodded grimly at me.
“Keep reading,” she said. “Aloud, please.”
I did as she asked. “Kyra Solschild, born of fae blood, we are pleased to extend an invitation to the year one class at Spellwood Academy. Please bring this letter, a vial of your tears, and a captured laugh to the address listed below a month and a fortnight before Summertide’s Eve. Be advised that you will also be required to submit a drop of blood and a lock of hair—”
Spellwood Academy Page 1
