His straightforward attitude to her life being turned upside down strangely calmed her. It was true they couldn’t get in trouble now, not when they had so much work ahead of them. If this was the heritage her parents had kept from her, she had a right to know about it. Anger pushed its way past the confusion and fear, and that made her feel better. More in control.
Making her way to her room, it all dissolved away. When she was back in her bed, she burrowed deep under the covers, trying to keep whatever shadowy, sinister danger awaited her from haunting her dreams.
Chapter 6
Owen didn’t bother trying to get back to sleep. Ever since they did the first spell and filled the pond to bursting with lively, fat carp, he didn’t seem to need as much sleep as usual. The book invigorated him and every successful spell they did increased his confidence. He couldn’t wait to see the schoolmaster’s face when the winter break was over. Ariana had done a little hex on him that had improved his reading ability— the letters stopped swimming around on the page now, and while they spent most of their time practicing spells, Ariana had actually tutored him a bit as well. He felt certain he wouldn’t be getting any more beatings for his supposed stupidity.
He smirked, thinking of a hex he found that was supposed to make the hexed person’s feet itch unbearably until they were released. He almost hoped the schoolmaster might try after all. He wouldn’t mind seeing that cruel man dancing about the classroom, perhaps tearing off his socks and waving them around while he begged for mercy. He had to keep the fact he memorized that particular spell a secret, as Ariana didn’t like the negative ones. But she only got the occasional slap on the palm from her tutor, not the skin searing whippings he had to put up with.
The news that Ariana’s mum was from another time had his mind spinning at first, but the more he thought about it the more it seemed like something they should have seen all along. She talked funny, and he was certain it wasn’t just her being a foreigner. He heard plenty of foreign accents when he visited them in London. His Aunt Tilly’s strangeness came more from the things she spoke about. His father and mother always talked about how forward-thinking she was, and now he thought about it, they always exchanged looks when they said it. As if to say “of course she is.”
With a shiver of excitement, he remembered a story she told him about flying machines. Big metal birds that carried people all over the world. He thought it was a good story way back when he was five, but now he wondered if it was true in her time. He’d give anything to see something like that.
It was nowhere near dawn, but he couldn’t stay in bed a minute longer. No one would find out if he snuck out and scoured the book for possible ways to travel through time. He felt practically invincible, and considered just bringing the book to his room for greater convenience. Oh, they figured out a spell to keep themselves warm out in the barn, but it was bothersome to have it so far away, especially at a time like this, when he burned to look through it.
Throwing caution to the wind, he covered himself in a ridiculously simple cloaking hex. It was one of the first he memorized and thankfully it didn’t need anything messy to make it work. Taking a blanket to wrap the huge old book and its wooden case in, he strode out of his room as if it were the middle of the afternoon, secure in his new, fantastic abilities.
Ariana found him hunkered down on the floor near his bed, in a makeshift blanket tent, the book crushing his legs as he held it on his lap for hours.
“Goodness,” she said, sticking her face in the flapping opening of his hideaway. “Do you think it’s wise to bring that in here?”
He shoved it off his lap and crawled out, stretching his aching muscles. “What time is it?”
“It’s after breakfast. They were asking for you so I said I’d see if you were well.” She wrinkled her nose at him and he ran his hand through his disheveled hair. “Are you well, Owen?”
“I’m fine and you know it,” he said. “I just got caught up in the book.”
“You’re being reckless,” she said. “You said yourself we can’t afford to get in trouble now.”
He harrumphed, not overly worried about what the hypocritical adults might have to say to them if they got caught reading the book, which they wouldn’t.
“You need to hear what I found out last night.”
“You’ve been reading since last night?” she asked. “When you told me I needed to go back to sleep?”
He grimaced, mistaking her outrage for concern over his health. “You were upset,” he said. “And you might be more upset when you know what I know.”
She shook her head and backed away a step. “Perhaps we shouldn’t mess about with that anymore,” she said. “I was upset last night, but now I’m sure I must have misheard something. I know we got the fish to breed lightning fast, and your reading skill is as good as anyone’s now. And very well, we could make the adults ignore us and the time we made the twins run around in circles until they fell over was pretty fun.”
“Don’t forget the rocks we turned blue,” he reminded her. “And the snow in the—”
“Yes, it’s all amazing. But going from one time to another? Not just skipping a meal, mind you, but a hundred years or more? It’s madness.”
She turned her back and stamped her foot, a sure sign that she was upset again. He was surprised at her cowardice. He never saw her run from anything before, but she very clearly didn’t want to know the truth of what was right in front of her. Something she heard her own mother admit, and something he was about to convince her of once and for all.
“Come into the parlor, miss,” he said, holding aside the blanket flap. “Come on, Ariana. You’re acting like Grayson that time the chickens got loose.”
She whirled on him angrily. “I am not,” she said. “Am I running around screaming for Farrah to save me from the feather monsters?”
“Practically,” he said with a shrug.
“Bother,” she growled, but swept aside the blanket and sat cross-legged in front of the book.
He sat down and pulled it close, turning eagerly to the pages he marked while he should have been sleeping. “The first thing I want to show you is this,” he said, holding the magnifying glass up to a tiny scrawled signature. “Look closely and you’ll see that says Camilla Alexander Povest. That’s your late aunt and my father’s first wife.”
As he imagined, she gasped. “She knew about the book?”
He shook his head. “Not knew about it. She helped write it. That there is one of her spells.”
“Do you think your father knew?”
He flipped to another marked page, and showed her another tiny scrawl. “This book has so many pages and most of them aren’t signed, but last night I happened to notice one that was, so I started looking more closely.” He paused to rub his bleary eyes, glad it was finally daylight and he didn’t have to lean so close to the thing, practically setting it on fire with his candle. “Konstantin Povest,” he said with disgust. “According to the date he would have been about our age, which was when he first came here to live with your father’s family.”
“So he does know about it,” she said. “In fact, he actually wrote a spell. And my father’s sister knew about it, which means—”
“Your father knows about it as well,” he finished for her, practically spitting out the words. “Who knows how long it would have taken us to notice this, if you hadn’t overheard what you did? I practically went blind looking for that evidence.”
“He might not know about it,” she said uncertainly. “He rarely speaks about my Aunt Camilla. He’s only ever said she was very ill.”
Owen sighed and flipped to the very back of the book, where the writing was fresher and easier to read. He cleared his throat showily and read aloud.
“To close Ashford’s bloody portal, if Tilly ever meddles with it again. First, beat some sense into your wife, you damn fool. Second, consider moving the hell away from Belmary House and burning the accursed place to the ground. Th
ird, gather the seeds of—”
“Stop,” she cried. “I understand. They lied to us. Or kept it hidden. I’m not sure it’s really a lie since we never asked.” She twisted her hands together and her eyes grew wide. “That must be the portal that’s supposed to take me to the future. And it’s in my house!” She slumped forward until her head touched her skirts and moaned. “I wish you never had that filthy dream that led us to that thing. I don’t want to have liar parents and I really don’t want to get taken by any portal.”
“Calm down, Ariana,” he said, tamping down his irritation at her sudden fit of hysteria. “We don’t know for sure anything of the sort is going to happen and if it is, isn’t it better to be prepared? This spell here tells how to close this portal, wherever it is, so it’s good to know it, right?”
“Yes, you’re right,” she sighed, pulling herself together. “You’ve got about a thousand other pages marked. What other treachery do you have to show me?”
“That was the worst of the treachery,” he said, excited to move on. “The rest of this lot is all mentions of time travel, or time trickery, anything I could find to do with time, and I’m sure there’s loads more. I mean, look at this thing. I’d swear it gets bigger every day.”
“Don’t say that. It’s just a book. An inanimate object. It can’t grow.”
He gave her what he considered to be a chilling look and her cheeks reddened with embarrassment. Good. At least she knew she was being a ninny. He needed her to be her usual daring self for what he was about to suggest.
“Very well,” she said, returning his look. “Let’s get to studying, then.”
“I don’t think we should just study,” he told her, once again flipping to the back of the book. “There’s a spell here I think we should try.”
Chapter 7
Ariana thought Owen was being reckless but she followed him out to the forest anyway. She supposed that made her the foolish one, since Owen obviously firmly believed he could do the spell. His confidence in anything that had to do with the book astonished her, though now that she’d seen his father’s name in the book as one of the spell writers, she knew it came naturally to him. Besides her late aunt’s name, they also found her grandmother, who died long before she was born, and many other names of long dead people she was related to.
She’d done a few things since they found the book. She was the one who made it snow in a milk bottle. But it seemed so effortless for Owen, where she had to squint and study the words for ages before she felt confident to try uttering them. Owen barely glanced at a page, then whatever was supposed to happen would happen. And that thing he did where he kept the adults away, those words that just streamed out of his mouth. That wasn’t anywhere they could find in the book. That worried her. She found she’d lagged well behind him and hurried to catch up.
“How do you do that spell to keep Farrah and them away?” she asked, not for the first time. She didn’t think he ever kept secrets from her, not important ones anyway, but she didn’t trust his answers.
“I just do it,” he said, same as always. She hated not knowing exactly how things worked and his relaxed attitude irked her.
“I don’t know how you can be so calm about something happening and you having no idea how,” she said irritably. If she was honest with herself she was a little envious. She was the one who excelled at school, who did things effortlessly. “What if that thing you’re saying had hurt them? What if something you say does hurt someone one day?”
“It didn’t hurt them because I didn’t want it to hurt them,” he said matter-of-factly. “I can’t explain it, Riri. It’s like it’s always been there, waiting to come out.”
She punched him in the arm for the use of her hated baby nickname, not comforted by his answer one bit.
“Then do you think if you wanted to hurt someone, you could?”
He laughed, rubbing his arm where she knuckled him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, loping ahead of her on his longer legs once again. “Of course I could.”
The words drifted back to her and she shivered, though it was a mild day and she was well bundled up against the weather. She decided she must not have heard him correctly, wanting to try the spell despite her trepidations.
Every time they did one, she was filled with such a sense of purpose and power. It was like nothing she ever felt before. Better than figuring out a tough equation, better than hearing her mum’s praise when she stitched a particularly beautiful design. She wanted to keep learning and advancing. One day she wanted spells to flow effortlessly from her lips as if she’d always known them, just like Owen.
They found a clearing well away from the house and barns and sat down with their copied out spells in front of them.
“We can really only try the one,” Owen said. “This one is disgusting and will probably condemn us to hell if we ever tried it.”
He pushed the paper over to her and she struggled to read his messy handwriting.
“Does that say human bones?” she asked, swallowing hard and shoving it away from her. “Why would you even write that one down?”
“You said to write them all down,” he argued back. “And I always do whatever you say.”
She snorted a laugh and then realized it was mostly true. She felt a warm glow of kinship with him. They both knew they weren’t really related, but it didn’t matter. She saw how her father acted around his real cousins at the Happenham estate and would rather have a friendship that was as deep as hers and Owen’s any day.
“This one has some odd herbs I’ve never heard of,” she said, going through the other spells. “Looks like we’ll have to do this last one.” She squinted at it. “What’s this little note at the end?”
He took it from her and squinted at it himself. “Oh, right, I remember. It said it burned or somesuch.”
Ariana stood up and brushed the dead leaves off her clothes. “That’s that, then. Let’s go home.” She could see he thought she was joking, but someone had to use some common sense. Of course she wanted to try to travel to another time, see if her mother was telling the truth about being from the future, but, “Burning, Owen? It burns? What exactly does it burn?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. But listen, what if it’s just like snuffing out a candle with your fingers, or standing too close to the fire? Why would it be in there if it was really dangerous?”
He had a point about that, but she looked around her for more inspiration to convince him they should give up.
“What if it burns the forest down?”
“Then I’m positive it wouldn’t have made it into the book.”
“I don’t think that thing is a final draft,” she said. “There are plenty of dodgy spells in there. It must be more of a work in progress.”
“Well, madame clever britches, shall we just go back to the barn and try to get a squirrel to speak instead?” He smacked his forehead. “Forget I said that. That was a bad argument since you’d love that and besides, I don’t think we could. I’m trying this burn spell right now, so stay or don’t.”
“Don’t invite trouble by calling it that,” she said, reluctantly sitting back down. There was no way she was letting him do it on his own and lord it over her if he succeeded. “What do I do?”
He took her hand and held it hard enough to hurt. “Just think about the future and I’ll do the rest.”
She had so many arguments wanting to burst out. How far in the future? And how did she concentrate on something she had no idea about? But he already started reading off the spell, so she grabbed his other hand for good measure and squeezed her eyes shut, silently repeating his words in her head right after he said them.
The world went silent, and she thought it was just Owen being done with his chanting, but there was no swooshing sound of the breeze through the tree branches, no birds cawing off in the distance.
She opened her eyes to total darkness and realized she couldn’t feel Owen’s grip on her hands anymore. The moment she re
alized that, what she could feel was a searing pain. It started up her legs, then consumed her belly. She was being stabbed repeatedly with hot pokers while a giant vice closed on her chest. It threatened to crush the life out of her and she clutched at her throat, raw from screams she couldn’t hear. Just as she found a small bit of consciousness to pray for death to end her suffering, something hard hit her in the back of the head and it all mercifully stopped.
Chapter 8
Owen didn’t remember the last time he cried. He never cried anymore when he was hit at school and he held it in quite manfully when his old dog had died the year before, but he could feel the tears streaming down his cheeks now as he sobbed out Ariana’s name.
He’d been a stubborn fool and he killed her. As soon as he finished the spell, he had a moment of dark silence, then he opened his eyes to find that everything was the same. He was about to groan out his disappointment when Ariana started screaming and thrashing about, clutching at her throat as if she couldn’t breathe. Before he could figure out what to do, she fell over and conked her head on a log, barely breathing.
He shook her and gently tapped her cheek, not having it in him to slap her. His tears blinded him as nothing he did would wake her and he slumped over her, crying into her coat sleeve. Awful thoughts kept nudging their way to the front of his mind.
How could he go on, knowing he killed his best friend? He’d have to tell her parents, but then what? He didn’t want to go on without her, but knew his mother would go mad if he died, and his poor father had already lost a child. No, he had to stay alive, but surely the guilt would kill him? He rose up, and shook her hard, hollering her name as tears splashed onto her cheeks.
“Goodness, is it raining?” she croaked, cracking open her eyes.
“Sorry. It’s me crying like a baby,” he said, rubbing at his face.
He was so relieved he thought he might throw up. Without thinking, he leaned down and kissed her forehead, pulling her close for a hug.
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