The Demon and the Fox

by Tim Susman

  “And mine,” Alice said. “Don’t feel bad. I didn’t know anything a year ago.”

  Kip smiled. “But now that we’re not engaged, this is the time I discover that you’re someone I would very much like to get to know better.”

  She squeezed his paw. “You are older than I am. You’ve had more time to do things.”

  “When I was fourteen, I wasn’t half as clever as you are now.” Kip shook his head. “I spent most of my wits not getting my tail cut off, or worse.”

  “Does that mean I’ll get even more clever?” Alice’s tail wagged faster.

  “Hard to imagine,” Kip said.

  She squeezed his paw again. “I meant to ask, what were those things he said before he tried to cast a spell?”

  Kip thought back. “Oh. That’s a bunch of nonsense sounds that help you focus on reaching magic to start with. Most of us don’t need to speak them anymore, but Farley isn’t exactly full of cleverness.”

  “I don’t know anything about how magic works.” Alice looked down, scuffing her feet through hay.

  “Those sounds are part of how it starts, and there are a lot of different ones. If one set doesn’t work, you can try another. Coppy tried three before he found one that worked.”

  “And you just say them and then you can cast spells?”

  “You have to find magic first, and it’s…down in the earth, sort of. It takes you a while to get to the point where you can feel it, but when you learn, it becomes…like breathing, almost.”

  “Oh.” She went back to humming, and after a moment said, “I think it’s wonderful that you’ve worked it out. The way you made the fire appear…”

  “Fire is what I have an affinity for,” Kip said. “For whatever reason, I understand it.”

  “Mm.”

  They stood there, paws linked, for several more minutes. Finally, Alice interrupted her humming with a sigh. “Mama will be wondering where I am. May I come see you again some evening?”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” Kip said. “But it won’t harm anything if you come by and I’m not here.”

  “All right, then.” She reached out to hug him.

  He returned the embrace. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Stay warm,” she said. “But don’t start a fire too large.”

  19

  Trust Issues

  Over the next few days, Kip remained mostly around the barn. Emily and Malcolm visited, bringing Coppy once, on the day that Farley was gone from the school. “Packed and left last night as far as we can tell,” Malcolm said, “and if we were allowed ale I’d have God’s own punishment for it this morning.”

  “Expelled?” Kip asked.

  “Nobody knows.” Coppy leaned against the fox, “and Patris isn’t saying. Adamson won’t say either.”

  “But he’s already tried to be friendly with us today. Jacob Quarrel wouldn’t have anything to do with him.” Emily’s upturned nose told Kip that Adamson hadn’t fared any better with her.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone.” Kip exhaled. “And magicless.”

  “I know.” Coppy grinned. “It’s like Christmas.”

  The otter stayed awake and kept his head up, which made Kip happy, but he and Malcolm and Emily couldn’t discuss their plans for Windsor in front of Coppy, and they all badly wanted to.

  And once again, after Coppy visited, Kip wanted to take the otter away from Windsor immediately. On their next visit, Emily and Malcolm convinced him to wait. “We’re watching him,” Malcolm said. “Every time I’m working with Master Vendis, I tell him I have to use the necessary and then I go to see if Coppy is in with Windsor in his third floor office.”

  “Isn’t Master Vendis getting suspicious?” Kip asked.

  Malcolm laughed. “He’s told me to use the necessary before our lesson, and today he told me that I might want to visit Master Splint for a look at my nethers. But every day they’ve been on the third floor.”

  “If they're not,” Emily put in, “he’s to come down to where I’m working with Master Argent and make some excuse why I’m needed.”

  “I decided to tell Master Argent that her mother is here for a visit.”

  “Don’t forget to tell him how much she’s missed me all these months,” Emily said with more than a trace of sarcasm.

  “Divorce and then magic school.” Malcolm shook his head. “Past redemption, you are.”

  “At any rate.” Emily smiled. “We’ll come fetch you and take you to the basement and then you can do your disappearing trick that you won’t tell us about.”

  “If I told you, you’d just forget about it,” Kip said. “It’s not my magic and I don’t understand how it works.”

  “Yes, fine.”

  Malcolm raised a hand. “So you see, we’re all prepared, and one more untoward expedition…” He snapped his fingers. “We’ll get him.”

  “The only question is,” Emily said, “which of the masters we should bring along. We can’t apprehend Windsor on our own.”

  “Not Patris.” Kip shuddered.

  “Obviously. Vendis or Argent might be best.”

  Kip rubbed his chin. “If we asked Master Jaeger, he might have the best chance of stopping Windsor. He can do things to people’s minds.”

  “Any sorcerer can stop another with the element of surprise.”

  “But if Windsor is making Coppy forget, he has spiritual magic,” Kip pointed out.

  “Ah, he has the right of that.”

  “But what if Jaeger is the one behind it?” Emily asked.

  Malcolm summed up their dilemma. “The same could be said of any master from New Cambridge.” And he looked at Kip.

  Kip drummed his claws against the wall. If they were to ask sorcerers from outside Prince George’s, he had really only three choices with Gugin gone. Cott would likely come along, but he would also be unpredictable and mercurial in mood. Headmaster Cross might come, as he’d seemed well disposed to Kip, but also he was likely very busy and Kip would have to spend a great deal of time explaining the situation. “I could ask Master Albright,” he said with some reluctance. “He’s the London master who said he was investigating the attack on the school.”

  “He’d be perfect,” Emily said. “Why didn’t you think of him before?”

  “Because…” Kip thought about how to express his concerns. “He was…putting spiritual holds on me.”

  Then he had to explain spiritual holds, because Emily knew a little bit about them but Malcolm knew nothing. “That seems dodgy,” the Irishman said when Kip had finished.

  “But it sounds like he had a good reason for it.” Emily was trying hard not to touch anything in the stall, but as she gestured, her hand brushed a sooty wall. She tried to rub the black mark off it as she went on. “He couldn’t very well come out and tell you that he was investigating the case. What if you were involved? Or unwittingly told the real culprit?”

  “I know.” Kip scratched his ears. They itched all the time now with the straw in the barn. “I don’t know why I still don’t quite trust him. It might be because of Master Gugin.”

  Emily winced. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  Kip closed his eyes and tried not to remember their lessons together and the discovery of the sorcerer dead on his couch, and failed. “He was a good man.”

  “We’ve got to pick someone,” Malcolm said. “My da used to say, guaranteed way to lose on a bet is not to pick a side.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Emily shook her head. “But we won’t know any more sitting around here.”

  “I vote for this Albright fellow,” Malcolm said. “The less association with our college the better, and he knows spiritual magic.”

  “If only Jaeger weren’t so old.” Emily laced her fingers together. “And I still don’t know about him.”

  “You haven’t spent time with him. I have.”

  “And he took your magic away. Or tried to.”

  “Y-yes.” Kip shifted
away from that subject. “But maybe Master Vendis? He knows some defensive magic.”

  “Aye,” Malcolm said. “What if we asked both of them? You bring Albright and I’ll bring Vendis, and that way if one of them isn’t right, we’ve still got the other.”

  “I like that idea.” Emily’s tone indicated that the discussion was over.

  “Listen,” Kip said. “Tell Coppy that I’ll see him again soon.”

  After that, the only thing left was to wait. Alice came to visit two other nights, and Kip quite enjoyed those evenings. In the back of his mind, he held out a faint hope that if he succeeded in apprehending Master Windsor (who in his mind had become definitely the architect of the attack), he would be returned to the college and celebrated so much that Thomas Cartwright could not help but renew his daughter’s engagement. In soberer moments, alone, he remembered that the engagement had already been broken and re-made once, and that if they succeeded in engaging Alice to a fox from Boston, they would not soon break that commitment.

  It didn’t escape his mind that after this ordeal with Windsor was over, he would still have to make a decision about independence, one he felt less and less sure about. He wanted to have a long talk with Coppy about it to get the perspective of someone who’d grown up on the Isle but also seen New Cambridge. And he missed the otter’s warmth of body and spirit, here in his cold ruined barn.

  The Monday morning after Kip was expelled, he was awoken by a loud rapping on the outside of his stall. “Penfold?”

  “Master Albright?” He scrambled to his feet, brushing dust from his clothes and tail. “How—what are you doing here?”

  “Cott has been quite the nuisance.” The silver-haired sorcerer looked up and around the stall. He wore his black robes and held a purple bundle in one arm. “Heavens, I know his workshop was not the most comfortable, but surely it was better than this?”

  “I’ve been expelled,” Kip said. He pointed to the blackened marks on the wood. “One of my classmates abducted my betrothed and was going to kill her. And me. So I set a fire to save her from him. Also,” he reflected, “I summoned a demon to track him, which I did not realize was forbidden. Master Cross said nothing about it, nor did you.” He lifted his nose in as much of a challenge as he dared.

  Albright stroked his beard. “We could have asked if you had permission, but your use of your demon was eminently responsible, so the question seemed unnecessary. Unsupervised summoning is forbidden, but allowances can be made. Of course, they need not be made if expulsion was desired for other reasons as well.”

  “So,” Kip said, “you haven’t been told? By Patris—Headmaster Patris?”

  “I wouldn’t be told in any case,” Master Albright said. “But Cott has not been told, or if he was, he did not understand the import of the information.”

  “How could he not understand?”

  Master Albright shook his head. “Cott receives a letter saying you are no longer a student, he thinks to himself, ‘oh, Penfold has gone to great lengths so he doesn’t have to come back and see me,’ for example.”

  “Did he?”

  The old sorcerer held up his hand. “I provide an example. For all I know, no letter was sent. Cott came to me and said very peevishly that the only apprentice he’d ever enjoyed teaching had been taken away from him.”

  Kip blinked at the unexpected compliment, and Albright smiled. “Indeed. As I’d met you, he nagged me for three days until I agreed to come find you. I must confess, I did not expect you to be living in a ruined barn.”

  “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

  Albright’s smile widened. “I appreciate a classical education. Nevertheless. If you have been expelled from Prince George’s—”

  “Sir,” Kip broke in, “do you think if I were to apply to King’s College, that…”

  He trailed off at the fading of Albright’s smile. “Unofficially, between Cott and myself you would certainly be welcome. But officially, were you to apply, almost certainly Patris would be consulted, and I imagine you know what his response would be.”

  “He might…he might be glad for me to be elsewhere.” But Kip remembered, during the debate over admissions that he hadn’t been supposed to hear, that Patris had said that a master of King’s College had advised him against the admission of Kip and Coppy.

  “The best I can do,” Albright said, “is relay the information to Cott and make sure he understands that you would very much like to continue as his apprentice. He’s not allowed to teach you outside of the College, but…” He shrugged his shoulders and shifted the purple bundle he carried to the other arm. “These were your apprentice robes, by the way. Cott sent them along. He thought they might entice you to return.”

  Kip eyed the robes. “They would have,” he said. “I would have come back anyway, if I were allowed.”

  “Alas—”

  “Listen.” Kip held up his paws. “Listen. I think—you’re investigating the attack—I think I know who did it.”

  What was left of Albright’s smile vanished, and his face took on a wide-eyed intent stare. “How—who was responsible?”

  Kip took a deep breath. “I believe it was Master Windsor.”

  Albright’s neutral expression remained fixed. “Master Windsor. At Prince George’s?” Kip nodded. “This is a very serious accusation.”

  “I know.” Kip swallowed. Faced with Albright’s severe visage, his evidence felt insubstantial, but he forced himself to go on. “There was a light on the sixth floor right before the attack. The office it’s in is abandoned, but—but someone’s been in it. And the only one it could be is Windsor.”

  The silver-haired sorcerer shook his head slowly back and forth. “That’s not enough to take any action on.”

  “I know,” Kip said eagerly. “We’re waiting—we have a system—my friends are going to alert me when he’s in the room. I was actually going to come ask you to accompany us when we go.”

  Albright shook his head, and Kip’s heart sank, but as he was about to renew his plea, Albright said, “I find it difficult to believe that I’m agreeing to this. But any possibility—I would be remiss if I did not follow it. So yes. How will you reach me?”

  “Emily knows how to get to Cott’s workshop,” Kip said. His heart pounded faster. “We were going to go there and find you.”

  “Hum. I can’t think of a better way right at the moment. I will have my raven keep an eye on Cott’s window so that you need only open it and signal.”

  Kip nodded. “Can you warn Master Cott to expect Emily as well? It might be easier for her to alert you directly without having to bring me along. She’s only starting her translocational sorcery.” Then he felt bad about downplaying Emily’s abilities, so he added, “But she’s very good at it.”

  “I will do that,” Albright said. “If you are correct in this, Penfold…well, I can’t promise anything, but you would certainly improve your case for reinstatement.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Kip said.

  And then Albright was gone. He took the purple robe with him, but left behind a greater sense of hope than Kip had had in days. Now he only had to worry about whether he was right.

  20

  The Demon

  The next morning, Tuesday, Kip walked out to the back of the barn to relieve himself. Something rustled behind him, probably a tree squirrel of some sort. The light morning breeze blew through the barn, bringing charcoal and no hint of what was behind him, so he cupped his ears back, and at that moment he was lifted from his feet and slammed into the wall of the barn. Stars exploded in his head. Dazed, he tried to focus on gathering magic, but a voice behind him said, “No you don’t,” and air rustled through his fur again—

  He came to lying on his side on the ground with the sun in his eyes and a horribly familiar rank smell in his nose. Dirt stung one of his eyes, and when he tried to bring up a paw to rub it, his arm wouldn’t move. Another moment and he realized that he was being held down with magic, his tongue a
s paralyzed as the rest of him so that while he might gather magic, he wouldn’t be able to speak any spell. He couldn’t even close his eyes or blink with the outer eyelids, but fortunately Farley’s magic had not affected his third eyelids. Since humans didn’t have them, likely Farley wouldn’t have known to specify them in the immobilization. That at least provided Kip with some relief.

  Farley was about, but this couldn’t be him, could it? He’d been expelled and shouldn’t have magic, unless…he too had made friends with Peter somehow? No, impossible.

  Kip breathed in and out, willing his heart to slow. His left arm throbbed, as did the back and top of his head, but he couldn’t tell whether any of them were broken or simply bruised. His trousers were still around his ankles, which might be the worst part. And though he could smell Farley, he couldn’t see or hear him.

  No, wait. There was the labored breathing he knew well. Kip focused. Anyone else? No, nobody he could hear. If it were only Farley, that was good and bad. Good because Kip only had to worry about one enemy (and no hostages), and bad because that enemy was Farley, and there was no Victor Adamson to talk sense into him.

  That he was still paralyzed meant that Farley was somewhere paying attention to him. Maybe the waiting was part of the torture? That wasn’t Farley’s style, though.

  Sure enough, a moment later a shadow moved across him as rustling sounded from behind. “It’s awake.” A scuffle and an impact in his back, the sharp pain of a kick, made worse when he couldn’t twist in anticipation. “We’re gonna have some fun.”

  Farley walked around him in a circle, aiming kicks casually, opportunistically. Kip could see trousers and a tunic, but nothing of Broadside’s face. The glint of metal swung in and out of his vision. “Fun for me, that is. Lesson for you.” A kick in the stomach. “See, I can do what I want. Because we made you.” A kick to the back of Kip’s head. “Made you to be servants. Work in fields, work for us.” A kick aimed at his nose that scraped along his muzzle instead, sprayed dust into his other eye. “Not take our houses and take our shops.” A kick to the groin that connected. Kip’s stomach roiled. Another kick to the groin. “Not go learnin’ magic, showin’ me up. I’m better than you.” A kick to the small of his back that almost rolled him over onto his stomach, but for the spell holding his arms and legs in place that kept him stationary. “An’ I’m gonna show you. You can summon a demon? I got a better one. You’re gonna see it and know I’m better than you. That’s the last thing you’ll know.