Spellwood Academy

by Kate Avery Ellison

  I broke off, looking up at my mom and grandmother. This was nonsense. No, madness. Born of fae blood? A vial of tears? A captured laugh? A nervous giggle escaped me. “What kind of sick joke is this?”

  But neither my mom nor my grandmother laughed at the absurdity.

  Instead, they looked grim.

  “How did that letter find us? I thought we were well hidden,” Grandmother Azalea said angrily. “I’ve spent a fortune in charms. I’ve been paying that fool spellcaster for years—”

  “It was me,” my mom interrupted. “I did it. I told Spellwood where she was. I wrote to them last week—”

  “If you told Spellwood, then they will know, if they don’t know already!” Grandmother Azalea burst out.

  “What’s Spellwood?” I cried. “What’s going on?” I looked between them, but they were focused on each other. My words failed to penetrate their bubble of fury.

  My grandmother fell silent as my mom clasped and unclasped her hands nervously.

  “Grandmother Azalea?” I tried again, feeling like a child.

  “I told the school directly,” my mom insisted then. “They don’t know.”

  “Who is they?” I asked.

  Grandmother Azalea’s eyes scorched as bright as midday suns. “Why?” she spat finally. “Whatever possessed you to—”

  “It was the accident,” my mom burst out. “Someone is obviously trying to kill her. And then someone else used magic to save her. Something is going on, Mom, and we have to take action.”

  “Someone is trying to kill me?” My mind flashed back to the rain-soaked night. The ambulance. The pain. The confusion. My mom’s murmured assurances that it was all fine, that I was fine. The look on her face that seemed to contradict her words.

  And that doctor, the one with the blue eyes, the one everybody insisted was a hallucination or a dream…

  I turned my arm over and looked at my sprained wrist. An inkling of a suspicion filled my head, and I began to unwind the bandages. My mom had been doing it, checking to make sure everything was well, telling me not to look because “it might make you feel queasy, sweetie.” Giving me things to keep me busy while she examined my injury, like a funny video someone sent her, or a catalogue full of clothing she was never going to buy. She’d kept me distracted. I hadn’t ever seen the injury.

  The bandage fell away. I looked at my arm, and my stomach clenched.

  A mark lay on my wrist. A dark purple-black bruise, streaked like ink beneath my skin. I drew in a sharp breath, my stomach twisting. Something about the shape of it seemed wrong. Intentional, almost.

  “She isn’t going,” my grandmother was saying, her voice crackling with anger. “She belongs with us, not with that world.”

  “She has to go!” my mom snapped back. “If she doesn’t—”

  “It was never sprained, was it?” I asked, my voice sharp as a steak knife.

  They both fell silent. My mom winced as she picked up the fallen bandage and folded it over and over into a square in her lap. She bit her lip. “No. But I wanted to protect you as long as I could. Until I was sure.”

  “Sure of what?” I demanded.

  “Sure you were in danger.”

  “And the doctor?” I asked. “He wasn’t a dream. I was really hurt, and he… and he…” I fell short of saying the thought in my head.

  “Someone healed you. I don’t know who.” My mom was pale.

  “And now, you want to send me away to some place called… Spellwood?” My throat thickened with tears. I stared at her.

  “You did this,” Grandmother Azalea said to my mom in a voice low and laced with fury. “You were always determined to exile her to Spellwood not matter what I said.”

  “I saved her,” my mom shot back. “Look at her arm, Azalea. That’s a death mark on her. Someone tried to kill her. She has to go. She’ll be safe there.”

  She only ever called my grandmother by her first name when they were fighting.

  “I—what?” I cried out, looking between their faces. “Mom, what’s going on? Who are you talking about? What’s a death mark?”

  “You’re frightening her,” Grandmother Azalea accused. “Look at your daughter. Look what you’ve done. My charms would have been enough.”

  “You’re both frightening me,” I snapped. “And the creepy letter delivered by spiders that talks about giving someone a vial of my tears isn’t helping. Stop fighting and tell me what’s going on. I’m not going anywhere unless I agree, and I can’t agree to something I don’t understand. So, tell me!”

  My mom put both hands over her eyes and sighed deeply. She wiped at tears and locked eyes with Grandmother Azalea.

  “It’s time,” my mom said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE SAT AROUND the kitchen table with steaming mugs of Grandmother Azalea’s herbal tea in front of us. The smell of the tea filled the room with hints of lavender, chamomile, and honey, but nobody drank. The letter lay in the middle of the table. My grandmother’s long fingers tapped against the mug that she wasn’t drinking from. The light from the garden streamed through the window in a golden haze, and I could hear birds chirping in the bushes. But inside, the atmosphere was grim.

  “Tell me,” I demanded when I could stand the suffocating silence no longer. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  My grandmother started to speak, but my mom put a hand out to silence her.

  “Please, let me,” Mom said. “It’s my story to tell, really.”

  “It’s both our stories,” Grandmother Azalea countered, but Mom persisted.

  “Please.”

  My grandmother jerked her head in a nod.

  My mom took a deep breath. “Kyra, your… your father wasn’t, ah, wasn’t exactly human.”

  Alarm pierced me. “What?” I managed to squeak out.

  Wasn’t human.

  Born of fae blood…

  I tried the word on my tongue. “Fae.”

  Saying it sent a shiver of confusion through my limbs. Fae. An old word from the periphery of my memories—bedtime stories from my Grandmother Azalea rose in my mind, how she’d read fairy tales to me at nighttime and scoff at the depictions of the tiny, dainty fairies as if offended.

  “That isn’t how the fae are,” she’d sometimes murmur when she thought I was too young to remember, too sleepy to hear her. Part of me thought her eccentric, part of me thought her charmingly old fashioned. Believing in fairies.

  “Yes,” my mom said. “He was one of the fae.”

  Grandmother Azalea’s oddness was one thing. But here was my mom, my sensible, hard-working, no-nonsense-but-still-a-little-bit-overly-emotional mother looking me in the eye and telling me that fairies were real. The same woman who told me flatly that getting pregnant from a hot tub was an urban legend.

  “My father was a fairy?” I said. The words sounded utterly ridiculous in the stillness of the kitchen.

  “He was fae,” my grandmother said. “Not quite the same thing. Calling one of the fae folk a fairy is the utmost of insults.” She sighed. “I’m afraid we have woefully neglected your education. It was done in the name of safety… I had hoped… well, never mind now. What’s done is done.”

  “I was young,” my mom explained. “I thought I might be able to live with him in—in their world.”

  Their world.

  My head was spinning. I had a million questions, but I let her speak.

  “I thought we were in love,” my mom continued. Her face was pale, and her cheeks flushed at the memory. “He made me promises. Declarations. He talked about marriage. And when I became unexpectedly pregnant, I thought he would be happy. But instead, he vanished. He left me.”

  I thought about my last name. I spoke it aloud, a question. “Kyra… Solschild. Sol’s child? Like the sun?”

  My mom shook her head. “I made up the name for your birth certificate. It was a tiny piece of connection to him, a joke between us. You see, he was… he was from the summer court, and he was like the sun
in my sky, and I met him at Summertide, on the solstice…”

  Summer court. Summertide. More words I didn’t understand.

  “I called him Sol,” my mom said. “And he called me Luna.”

  She lifted her mug and took a gulp. When she lowered it, she said, “The family sent his older brother to find me in the mortal world and demand I give them the baby, or else they’d kill me. I told them I’d had a miscarriage.” Her gaze was remote. “I think he wanted to believe me, because he put down his sword and went away without questioning my story.”

  “His sword?” I repeated faintly.

  “Yes,” she said, and took another sip from her mug. “He had a silver sword that glowed with an inner blue fire. He wore it on his back in a golden sheath. He drew it in the living room and stood over me like an archangel of death. But I don’t think he wanted to kill you. I think that’s why he believed me.” She shook her head and shuddered.

  I shuddered too.

  “So, we hid you,” Grandmother Azalea said. “We cast the charms and paid for the spells, and hid you from them. We moved a few times. But now…”

  “What?” I said. “Now they’re going to come for me with a sword again? Try to chop off my head?”

  “No,” my mom said. “You are grown now. You are not a tiny baby so easily taken and disposed of. But they will learn of your existence in time, and they will not be pleased with me.”

  “Am I in danger still, though?” I asked. My throat felt tight. My skin prickled all over. Half of me still reeled from the revelation—fairies were real. Magic was real. Either that, or both my grandmother and my mom were insane. But I’d seen the letter delivered by spiders. I’d have to be insane too. I looked at the mark on my wrist. “Was it my father’s family that did this?”

  “No,” my mom said. “Your father was from the summer court. This was the work of one of the darker, unseelie courts. The water, winter, and dark courts—their magic has this dark signature.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked.

  “Look at it,” my grandmother said. “It is like ink. It is their putrid work, I’m sure of it.”

  I stared down at it again. The dark tendrils almost seemed to shimmer, as if a handful of night sky had slipped into my veins and seeped stardust into the bruises. I rubbed my fingers across the mark, frightened. What was this… this stuff under my skin?

  “Magic,” my mom said.

  “Why do they want me dead?” My throat constricted at the words.

  My mom shook her head. “I don’t know. It could have something to do with my past.”

  I swallowed hard. “Will they try again? Whoever did this?”

  “You will be protected at Spellwood,” my mom said firmly. “That is why I enrolled you.”

  Grandmother Azalea let out a huff, but my mom cut off whatever she’d been about to say. “Their spells and protections are some of the finest among the fae. She will learn how to protect herself there.”

  “Tell me about Spellwood,” I whispered. The name alone conjured visions of somewhere mysterious and dark, a manor built of forests, the floors strewn with fairy dust.

  “Spellwood is a school for those born with a mixture of mortal and fae blood,” my mom said.

  Born of fae blood, the letter had said.

  “There, you will learn about your heritage—your fae heritage—and about what it takes to live in that world. You will make friends, alliances. It’ll be temporary—just until we can figure out who’s trying to hurt you, and what’s going on. Just as long as you need to be safe.”

  “Then,” my grandmother hastened to add, “you can come home.”

  “But I know nothing about that world,” I protested. “Surely everyone else will have been there for years, and be close to graduating—”

  “The school is those of your age,” she said. “More of a college than anything else, although some start younger. You will not be the only one beginning their first year. Most of mixed blood begin attendance between their sixteenth and eighteenth year. You will be eighteen in three months. You are the perfect age to go.”

  I looked down at my mug of tea, which had gone cold. “When do I leave? The letter said—n” I picked it up to reread the line. “—a month and a fortnight before Summertide’s Eve. What is Summertide’s Eve?”

  “One of the fae holidays. The solstice.” My mom was looking at the calendar that hung on the fridge, then counted on her fingers. “She would need to leave… tomorrow.”

  The word fell like a stone. My grandmother’s lips whitened.

  “Tomorrow!” I burst out, aghast. “But I haven’t even made up my mind yet.”

  “The letter was late,” Grandmother Azalea muttered.

  “Or someone didn’t want her to receive it,” my mom said.

  They exchanged a glance and then looked at me.

  “Well?” Grandmother Azalea asked.

  The weight of my decision pressed on my shoulders, but at the same time, it seemed clear. My indomitable grandmother was pale as bone. My mom had gone behind her mother’s back to secure this invitation. I trusted them both.

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  My mom sighed. She pressed a hand to her eyes, then looked pointedly at my grandmother. “We will not waste time while you are gone. We’ll find out what’s going on, Kyra. I promise you.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded. I was scared.

  After a moment, Grandmother Azalea rose and went to the cupboard. She took out two glass jars, one as slender as a finger, the other wide at the base and narrow at the top. She handed the bigger one to me first.

  “We have to capture a laugh,” she said.

  I stared down into the jar. “How? Do I just… laugh into it?”

  They nodded.

  I cleared my throat. I summoned a chuckle. It was forced, nervous. It skittered into the jar with an echo, and then Grandmother Azalea pressed a cork into the opening and set the jar aside. She handed me the vial.

  “Tears next,” she said briskly.

  I wasn’t sure how to make myself cry on command. “Do they have to be real tears? Can I poke myself in the eye?”

  My mom and Grandmother Azalea frowned at each other thoughtfully.

  We ended up watching videos online featuring reunions between lost puppies and their owners, something that never failed to move me. The video, coupled with the dizzying revelations of the day, made the tears come easily. I sniffled, my eyes pooling with a few salty tears when a white-whiskered Labrador was reunited with his elderly owner after weeks apart, and my mom pressed the vial into my hand. I held the vial to my cheek and captured seven tears as they fell, and they clustered in a thick liquid at the bottom of the glass.

  “You got enough,” Grandmother Azalea said, and took it from my hand.

  They packed the vials, along with the letter of acceptance, in a leather satchel Grandmother Azalea produced from deep within one of her closets.

  “What about clothes?” I asked as we stood in my grandmother’s bedroom. I held the satchel. The room smelled like baby powder and sage. The curtains were drawn over the windows, blocking the cheerful sunlight outside. It was noon. My stomach gurgled, but I had no appetite.

  “They’ll have uniforms there,” my mom explained.

  “Is there a website or brochure I could look at?” I asked.

  Both my mom and Grandmother Azalea turned to stare at me.

  “This is a secret school run by fae,” my mom said. “There are no websites, Kyra.”

  I nodded, crestfallen. I was terrified. Having some pictures, testimonials, anything of that kind would set my mind a little bit at ease. “Did you go to the school?”

  “I did not,” my mom said. “I…” She paused. Looked at my grandmother carefully. “Although I could have, I suppose.”

  Wait a moment. “Does that mean you…?”

  My mom’s face tightened slightly. “Yes, I am part fae as well. One quarter.”

  “Grandmother Azal
ea,” I said, turning to the older woman. “More secrets?”

  She sighed. “It is a long story, one I do not have the energy to tell you now. He was a commoner among the fae, a half-mortal himself. We were married. We lived in their world for a time. When he died, I came here. Raised your mother alone. She was not aware of her heritage when she met your father.”

  I looked at them, and heaviness lodged in my chest like a brick. Two single mothers. Two women who’d carried heavy secrets for most of their lives. They’d kept all of this from me. They’d told me lies my entire life. Part of me wanted to scream at them. I was shaking.

  I sank down on Grandmother Azalea’s bed and put my head in my hands.

  I was part fairy. Fae. Whatever. My uncle had tried to kill me. My grandmother had lived in another world. There was a mark on my arm from a fae assassin.

  “What else have you not told me?” I asked. I felt oddly calm now. As if I were drugged.

  “There is much to know,” Grandmother Azalea whispered. She brushed a hand across my cheek. “But you need to sleep. You need rest.”

  The tea. Had the tea been drugged?

  “It was only my calming herbs,” my grandmother said, smoothing her hand across my hair.

  “Wait,” I said. “The doctor. The one with the blue eyes. Who—?”

  “A fae, probably. Enchanted everyone to forget what he did.”

  “But who was he?”

  “I don’t know,” my mom admitted, and her mouth tightened. She didn’t seem pleased about it. “But whoever he is, he saved your life. Sometimes rogue fae roam the mortal world, doing good deeds if it pleases them.”

  My eyelids felt heavy. I tried to remember the face of the doctor, but all I could think of were his vivid eyes and his long, clever fingers.

  “Sleep,” my mom urged me. “You’ve had a great shock. You need time to process. When you wake, we will talk more and pack the rest of your things. Right now, your grandmother and I need to take care of a few things. Sleep, love.”

  So, I slept.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I WOKE LATER that evening from a nap that felt like an age. My mouth tasted stale, and my stomach cramped with hunger, but my thoughts were clear. When I reviewed the facts—I was part fae, someone had tried to kill me, I was being shipped off to a school for half-fairies tomorrow—I did not feel the same clawing panic as before. I still felt fear, but it was tempered by curiosity now.