The Real Boy

by Anne Ursu

  “I don’t know,” Oscar said.

  “It seems odd that he would leave right now. With what happened to Wolf.”

  Oscar glanced at her. “Well, it was an accident.”

  “Still,” Callie said.

  “If there were something to be done, Caleb would do it,” Oscar said firmly.

  “All right,” Callie said.

  “He’s a magician.”

  “I know. It’s not that. I just mean—it would be more . . . respectful to stay, I think.”

  Oscar squinted at her. “The magic will keep us safe,” he said. “Everyone says so.”

  “I suppose I don’t have as much faith in magic as everyone else,” Callie said with a shrug. “I’m not from the Barrow. I grew up in the Eastern Villages.”

  Oscar stopped. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Most apprentices were from the Barrow village. They’d grown up on Barrow soil, the very air they breathed infused with magic, and one day they showed they had a gift and the magic smiths took them under their wings, nurturing that talent so there would be someone to take their place. So the Barrow always thrived. But occasionally an apprentice came from beyond the river. Oscar had heard the masters of these new apprentices in the shop, announcing, quite loudly, that the children had shown “exceptional promise.”

  “You must have shown exceptional promise!” Oscar said. Of course she could work magic. Why else would Mariel have taken her? Why would the duke have given her her pin?

  “Madame Mariel always has her reasons,” Callie said quietly. Oscar opened his mouth, but Callie went on. “Anyway, I didn’t grow up with magic. And we got by just fine.”

  Oscar’s brow furrowed. “Well, I suppose, but—”

  “Our healers used herbs, too. They didn’t have anything like we have here, but they used the basic ones. Only they weren’t magic there. Just . . . medicine.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s just how you look at it.”

  “No, it’s not!” Oscar said. Callie stared at him. He knew that expression now, the one that said, That’s rude, Oscar.

  He flushed. “You don’t need magic to put herbs together. But the way they work, it’s still magic!”

  Callie made her mouth into a line and simply nodded.

  He would just show her. It would be all right when they got to the gardens. He would have all kinds of things to say then; he could tell her about every plant, if she wanted. And she would see the glass house. If you could make a house out of glass, you could do anything. She would see that it was going to be all right.

  They got to the edge of the forest, and though Oscar willed himself to walk right out of the Barrow as if it were nothing at all, his body refused to listen. He stopped.

  “Are you all right?” Callie asked.

  “Yes,” Oscar said firmly. He shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and stepped through into the open air.

  Suddenly, Callie took in a great gasp, like she was sucking in the world.

  Oscar’s eyes popped open.

  The gardens were wrecked. A huge swath ran through them, a tumble of soil and green, all in the wrong order, like a giant scar. The swath began at the edge of the gardens closest to the forest and ran all the way to—

  The glass house. Or what remained of it. The glass house had broken. Shattered. Half of it stood—one complete wall, and two half walls, great splintered shards threatening the air. The rest was in glittering piles that spread all over the gardens as if for decoration.

  Oscar found himself running, tripping over plants—angelica, anise, arrowroot—following the scar toward the great glass building and all the treasures within.

  It seemed like something had smashed into one of the walls, brought it down and half the house with it. Only a part of the roof remained—cracks and jagged edges. It looked like the sky had broken.

  He ran into what was left of the house, his boots crunching bits of glass. The entire southwest corner was destroyed—glass and clay and wood and soil everywhere. And tiny bits of plants here and there, like leaves a cat had chewed up and spit out. But just bits: that was all that was left. Two years’ worth of imported plants—the world’s bounty, carefully cultivated, tended to, watched over, loved—were just gone. The surviving plants seemed to be withering, cowering, trying to fold back within themselves.

  Oscar stood in the wreckage, trembling. He could hear the glass shattering, feel it falling on his skin, as if it were happening to him right now. It rattled his bones, troubled his blood. All he could see was the sky from his dreams, the hungry monster devouring everything in front of it.

  Footsteps behind him. A presence next to him. Callie.

  “What is this? What happened? Who could have done this?”

  It was Callie’s voice. She was right there, he knew she was right there, but her voice sounded like it was coming from across the Barrow.

  “Oscar—” Callie suddenly turned and put her hand on Oscar’s shoulder. He looked down, but not before catching a glimpse of her eyes. They were watery and wide, like sad moons. “Oscar,” she said, her voice as firm as her hand, “say something. Can you say something?”

  Wolf in bits all over again, the house in bits in front of his eyes, Oscar in bits scattered everywhere. Everything in bits, and nothing could be put together again.

  “Oscar,” she said, “we need to leave. We’re going to go back to the shop, and we’ll figure this out. But I think we should go. I think we should go now.”

  She sounded so far away, but she was right there, in arm’s reach, pulling him back toward her, pulling him away. He should stop, he knew he should stop, pick out every green bit and try to save it; it would take him days upon days, but he could do it—

  But Callie was pulling him away, and all Oscar could do was go with her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Secrets of the Wizards

  Callie led him quickly back through the gardens, back into the arms of the forest. Oscar’s feet still felt like they were crunching shards of glass, and maybe they were. Maybe the whole Barrow was covered in glass.

  The echo of the house shattering hung in the air, like the forest could not let go of it. Oscar could hear it; it filled his entire head. His body was a container now, designed solely to keep the glass house’s last memory.

  There was pressure on his back, pressure that kept him moving forward. His legs obliged. His heart thrummed. Everything blurred. When the wind touched Oscar’s face, it told him that his cheeks were wet.

  At some point the force on his shoulder relaxed, and his legs stopped, and Callie appeared in front of him. She looked down at him with those sad moon eyes, and there was nothing he could say, because even the moon would mourn this.

  “Oscar,” she said, “I don’t know how to get home.” Her voice was still far away, like she did not exist in his world anymore. “Do you know how to get home?”

  He nodded. Yes, he did know how to get home.

  “Can you tell me?”

  He shook his head. No. He could not.

  “Oscar, I need you to take us home. Can you do that?”

  Yes, he could do that. He walked ahead. Callie followed. The trees watched. And sometime later they were at the shop, and Callie had his key somehow—maybe he had given it to her—and then they were sitting in the back room and she was giving him tea. Passionflower.

  They sat in silence for some time, Oscar huddled up inside his own mind. Every once in a while some cat or another brushed against his legs. His hand went to his pocket and wrapped around Block.

  “Oscar,” Callie said, voice low. “Can you talk?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. Say something.”

  Oscar stayed huddled. The cat brushed his legs again. A flash of gray: Crow.

  “All right,” Callie said. “I am sorry this happened. It’s awful. And I don’t blame you for being scared.”

  No. He was not scared. He had been scared to climb a ladder. What was it that you felt when the world came cra
shing down?

  “I’m scared, too, Oscar. But we’ll make a plan, all right?”

  Crow was on his lap now, heavy and warm and soft and real.

  “The first thing we should do is tell Master Robin what happened. He’s the Barrow guardian. He needs to know.”

  Some sudden sickness hit his gut, forcing him into his body. Tell someone? Oscar shook his head. What if Caleb found out? He’d left Oscar in charge.

  “Oscar, someone or something attacked those gardens. I don’t want to frighten you, but we need to tell someone. I think this problem is bigger than an apprentice and a hand can fix.”

  Fix? Oscar did not want to fix the problem. Oscar wanted the problem to go away. In fact, what he would really have liked was for the problem never to have existed in the first place.

  “I don’t like it, either,” Callie said, reaching out and grabbing his hand. “That’s why I’m going to go out and find Master Robin and I’m going to tell him what happened. As soon as I know you’re going to be all right. Is there somewhere I can take you?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say Mister Malcolm’s. But this was not a problem bread could solve. And anyway, what would he care about the destruction of a garden? Mister Malcolm had made it quite clear that he was not interested in magic.

  “No,” Oscar said. “There’s nowhere. There’s just here.”

  “Do you want to come with me?” Callie asked. “You could come with me. We could go find him together.”

  “I—I don’t know,” Oscar said.

  “All right,” Callie said. “You’re coming with me.”

  A gentle pressure on his back, a voice in his ear. “Come on, Oscar.”

  And so, though staying inside the shop and never leaving again was certainly the most rational thing to do, Oscar was out the door with Callie, following her through the marketplace and down the path to the main village.

  The Barrow village had risen up in a series of clearings, each containing a cluster of houses. It seemed a different country from the marketplace, one Oscar could barely understand. Oscar lived below a shop. These people lived in homes.

  Callie led him on the path through one clearing into another—a circle of six small gray stone houses lined with thick dark beams, all covered in vines and surrounded by an overgrowth of plants, as if the forest were trying to claim the houses for its own.

  “That’s Robin’s,” she said, pointing to the second house.

  Oscar looked. He’d never thought of Master Robin as having a house. He was the sort of person who was just around, not necessarily there.

  Callie strode over to the door, because Callie was the kind of person who strode up to doors, and knocked. Oscar tiptoed behind her.

  They waited. And waited some more. Oscar was about to step away when Callie knocked again, more firmly. For apparently she was the sort of person who did that, too.

  Then, the sound of a door opening. Not in front of them, but somewhere next to them. “You’re looking for Robin?” a voice called.

  A short, wide-faced woman was leaning out of the doorway. She wore an apron and was holding a meat cleaver.

  “Hello, Mistress Penelope,” Callie said. “We are.” She straightened and suddenly looked very official. “We have something to report to the Barrow guardian.”

  Mistress Penelope made a sound that was something like a laugh and something like a sneeze. “Well, that’s going to be difficult.”

  Oscar clutched Block. Callie took a step toward the woman. “What? Why? Is something wrong?”

  “Master Robin went off with Master Caleb to the continent.”

  Callie started. “He . . . left? How could he go?”

  Penelope waved the cleaver around. “Big dealings over there. Bringing magical goods to the continent! Their own marketplace! Why should we keep the magic to ourselves, Master Caleb asks, when a whole continent could benefit! Big fancy magic man, that Caleb.”

  “Enchanted things can’t survive crossing the sea!” Callie exclaimed. “Believe me, Madame Mariel has tried.”

  “Oh, she’s there, too. They were meeting her there.”

  Callie shook her head firmly. “Madame Mariel is in the Eastern Villages.”

  Penelope threw her hands up in the air, cleaver going along for the ride. “If you say so.”

  “I do say so,” Callie said, eyes narrowing. “How do you know all this, anyway?”

  “There are no secrets when there are open windows,” Mistress Penelope said. “Ears are a blessing. We should use them.”

  “I don’t understand why they would do this,” Callie said flatly. “What do they need with the continent?”

  “Good money in bringing enchanted wallets to people who only have regular wallets,” Penelope said. “And no duke on the continent to take his share.” She winked.

  “And Master Robin?” Callie said, crossing her arms. “What’s more important than being here?”

  “Oh, well, there are stores going up now. Someone’s got to guard, you know. He asked me to watch his plants. He has always been very fond of his plants.”

  “How could he?”

  “I don’t mind,” said Penelope. “I like plants.” She waved her cleaver around again, made some noise of finality, and disappeared into her house.

  Callie gaped at Oscar, as if he had something to contribute, as if he weren’t still huddled up in his head. “I don’t even know how they can do that,” she said, voice hushed. “It doesn’t make any sense. A marketplace on the continent? There’s no magic to work, and no enchantments last off the island. Even Caleb couldn’t . . . could he?” She grimaced. “Don’t the magic smiths have enough here?”

  Oscar closed his eyes. “I would like to go back home now,” he said.

  Oscar told her that he would be all right, that she could go on her own, that he had a lot of work to do. And it was true—at least about the work. So much in his pantry that needed attention, so many shelves that needed filling, so many ways in which Oscar needed to work hard, be loyal. But when he walked down the familiar stairs into the cellar, he passed by the pantry without a look and went right into his room.

  He sat on his bed, folded up in just the way he had when Wolf was killed. The shattered glass house filled his mind. The gap in his chest ached so badly it seemed like it might rupture. And then Oscar, too, would be in bits.

  The Wolf that lived in his brain chose this moment to reemerge. He stood next to the house-in-bits and leered at Oscar. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?

  The leering Wolf transformed into a sack of Wolf. A line drew itself between the sack and the glass house.

  Do you still think my death was an accident?

  Oscar pushed the thoughts away, unfolded himself, and went into the hallway, lighting every lantern in the place. He got two from the pantry and put them in his room. The lights were so bright Oscar could see the ceiling and the walls, all the structures and boundaries of his world. Cat came in and positioned himself in the doorway, like a sentry. Thus protected, Oscar picked up the wizard chronicle. As soon as he opened the book, the guardian ghosts surrounded him, filled the room, promised to let nothing else in.

  He’d opened the book about three-quarters of the way through, and as he read, it didn’t take him long to realize that Aletheia had changed mightily since the last entries he’d seen. They had begun exporting magical goods off the island, and getting great wealth in return. Now, the magic was disappearing from Eastern Aletheia.The wizards believed that the trade was overtaxing it; the magic was for Aletheia and had never been meant to meet the needs of an entire continent. They told the duke to stop the export, but the duke did not listen: the magic would endure; it was magic, after all.

  It was funny, Oscar thought as he read. The current duke wouldn’t allow magic outside of Western Aletheia, and the magic workers had to sneak any magical goods out. Back then, the duke had been sending it everywhere, and it had been the wizards trying to keep it in.

  Though Aletheia had
changed, the wizards had not. They still cared about animal magic and the stars, mushrooms and spiders. And, Oscar realized, they never talked about things like creating spells to make luck or bring love or attract wealth. They wrote mostly about the natural world, from the roots under the soil to the plants and animals on top of it to the sky and planets overhead. One wizard wrote on and on about a cardinal that lived outside his window. They observed everything to try to understand its core.

  Oscar read on into the night. The pages that marked the past grew thicker and thicker, and the future was getting very small. He stopped, eyeing the thin stack of pages he had left to look at, and suddenly his stomach was churning. The wizards had slowly died out at some point. What if the end of the book was the end of the wizards?

  No, he told himself, scanning the pages. This could not be all. Surely there was another volume somewhere; surely the wizards had many pages left to live.

  Chewing on his lip, he looked ahead. Many of the later entries were written by a wizard named Galen, who wrote long musings on the nature of magic and the role of the wizard as caretaker. One page had a diagram, signed by Galen. He’d sketched an oak tree with roots reaching into the ground and had drawn arrows traveling up the roots—a regular tree, whose roots took in food and water from the soil. And next to that, he’d drawn another tree—this one with the arrows going down from the tree, through the roots, into the soil.

  A thrill ran up Oscar’s back—this was how the wizard trees worked, had worked since the first wizard had taken his place in the Barrow. Simple, elegant, perfect.

  He turned the page. The word plague jumped out at him all of a sudden, and Oscar took in a sharp breath. That word did not belong in this book so filled with simple, elegant, perfect things. He flipped ahead, and the word was everywhere.

  His eyes fell on the last entry of the book:

  The plague is leaching every bit of magic and life from the land. The magic is all gone from the eastern regions, and the land is full of death and poison. Soon we will have nothing left. And then everyone in Aletheia will be damned.