The Real Boy

by Anne Ursu

  “That’s where the duke lives,” Callie whispered.

  “In which part?”

  “All of it.”

  The City people milled around them, wearing their bright lavish clothes made from Barrow magic. In their swooshing layers and extraordinary colors, they popped and swirled and glittered against the white stone around them—which made them look just as bountiful, brilliant, and unearthly as the flowers above. There were many thousands of them walking within the walls, and they all looked like this.

  The sky touched everything; Oscar had never been this close to it before, and the sun poked at his eyes. With the wind came a thick salty smell—the sea, Oscar’s mind whispered to him. His stomach shifted.

  It was all wrong. Too many colors, too many people; strange bricks underneath his feet; foreign and possibly poisonous air in his lungs; the lack of magic pulling at his skin. And even with so much around, it was so terribly empty. Everything in Oscar clenched. He felt like a farm animal who had wandered into the Barrow by mistake. He tightened his fist around Block.

  “Come on,” Callie whispered, tugging at his arm. “This way.”

  They moved through the courtyard, the City people oblivious to the children passing by. Oscar and Callie were made of grays and browns and bones and skin and had no place up here. They were like mice skittering through a congregation of peacocks.

  They skittered under one of the archways beneath the building and found themselves on a small street lined with thin, rectangular houses packed side to side like mismatched books on a shelf. Here, the houses shone with color—pink, yellow, blue, purple, green. More flowers burst out of window boxes and pots by the doorways, and they were all perfect—nothing wilted, nothing thirsty, nothing straining for sun or shadow.

  That was the thing with the City, Oscar realized as they walked. It wasn’t made of gold or encrusted with diamonds. No enchantment made the place truly shine. It was just that everything was unstained by anything like wear or want, so carefree as to sport exuberant embellishments—swirling patterns in the wrought-iron balconies, gold door knockers with faces of animals, sculpted frames around the doorways, ornate ridging on the roofs, little statues on the staircases, flowerpots with flowers painted redundantly on them, even a fountain with a sculpture of a baby with big fluffy wings. And the people were the same way: gilded with plenty, unsullied by suffering. Someone who thinks of possessing a fountain made of a winged baby with water shooting out of its mouth must not have too many troubles.

  Callie motioned to the statue. “I know. It’s ridiculous. People in the east pay them so much rent the villages barely get by, and they’re buying vomiting baby fountains.”

  They turned a corner and walked toward a man dressed in pleats and puffs and one carefully placed feather who was accompanied by a little girl, no more than five, with swinging skirts and a great velvet bow in her hair. She carried a little rag doll in her hands. The girl stopped when she saw them, and then reached up as if to touch Callie’s thick curls.

  “Julia!” said the lord.

  Even Oscar knew you weren’t supposed to do that.

  “Your hair is pretty,” the girl said.

  “No, it’s all right.” Callie bent down and let the girl stroke her hair. “Thank you. Your hair is pretty, too, Julia.”

  “It is,” said her father, shining like a star. “She’s perfect.”

  “That’s how they’re supposed to look,” Callie muttered as they walked on. “Glowing. All my time with Madame Mariel, I’ve seen only one City child be sick, really sick. And that was three years ago. They’re all so healthy. Or at least they used to be. Here we are.”

  Callie motioned to a pink house that looked as if it had been built yesterday. “These are the people who sent for me today.”

  Oscar beheld the house. No stone baby burbled here, but there were two matching statues of men wearing wreaths on their heads—and nothing else. Oscar’s eyes darted away as Callie brushed off her cloak, fixed her hair, and poised herself to knock.

  “Wait!” he said.

  “What?”

  “Wh-what do I do?” His eyes felt like they were as wide as his face. “What do I say?”

  Callie turned to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “It will be fine, Oscar. It’s just like the shop. Just pretend. That’s what I’m doing.”

  Caleb’s not here; is there something I can help you with?

  “Callie—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how to pretend.”

  Callie’s hands tightened on his shoulders and she looked him in the eye. “Well, pretend you do.”

  A woman in a simple black dress let them in and led them immediately down a hallway into a parlor. The house interior was like nothing Oscar had ever seen—a chaos of colors and patterns and objects and textures. The walls were covered in thick, intricately patterned paper; the furniture was all swirls, plush, and gilt; and things were scattered everywhere—tiny statues and figurines and vases and little tables perched on delicate bird legs that seemed they couldn’t hold more than the lace that covered them. Nothing made any sound, but it was still the noisiest place Oscar had ever been.

  Callie was greeting a lord and lady while Oscar focused on a small blue speck in the rug under his feet and tried to keep the noise from drowning him. “I am Madame Mariel’s apprentice,” she was saying, voice like a bell. “She is out on urgent business—”

  “Everyone’s gone!” the lady said, throwing up her hands. “Caleb, the healer . . . What business could they possibly have that’s more urgent than this?”

  “It’s all right,” Callie said, as sure and mighty as a tree. “She is deeply concerned, and so she wanted me to come right away to see you and gather information. I’ll tell her everything and then come back.” She held her hand out toward Oscar. He started. He had forgotten he was there. “This is Oscar, Master Caleb’s hand. He’ll be assisting me.”

  Oscar started to bow. Callie shook her head slightly. No. No bowing.

  The parents didn’t even blink, just led the two of them up the stairs and into a bedroom, the mother whispering things to Callie as they walked. A little girl with black ringlets and plump cheeks was sitting on a big yellow chair in the front of the room, looking just as perfect as the rest of them, though her shoulders were hunched and her eyes were too wide, as if she’d been startled once and had never gone back to normal. She was biting her lip and yanking on a ringlet. She kicked her feet in the air slowly, rhythmically, revealing shiny red shoes. Oscar looked at Callie.

  “No,” said the lady to his unasked question. “In the bed.”

  The lady motioned toward the other end of the room, where there was a wide bed and a pile of lush blankets on top. Except it wasn’t a pile—a boy was underneath it all, a little younger than Oscar. He was as limp as a doll, like the one the little girl on the street had been carrying. His whole body seemed sunken into the bed, like the bed had come with the boy already in it. The boy’s head turned at his mother’s voice, revealing a face that was entirely the wrong color—some whitish-greenish-grayish hue, lips and all.

  Oscar took a step back. Callie inhaled, brushed off her apron, and went over to the boy. “Hugo,” she whispered, “my name is Callie. I’m here to help you. How are you feeling?”

  The boy whispered back, but whatever he’d said, it was only for Callie. She held her head close, murmured something, and then took his other hand and frowned.

  She put two fingers on the boy’s wrist and held them there, murmuring quietly to him. Oscar felt a familiar pressure on his skin. He glanced over. The girl in the chair had fixed her eyes on him. She was still swinging her legs slowly, and her face was set in a strange expression, just like the one on the face of the boy they’d met in front of the shop who didn’t recognize his mother.

  Oscar clutched Block in his hand. The air was thick with the noises of the boy breathing, the parents fidgeting, the rustle-swish of the girl’s skirts, and the steady b
anging of her feet against the chair. There were so many sounds; he had no attention left for anything else.

  Callie was saying things to the parents—something about warm compresses and hot tea and massaging his limbs. Oscar stepped to the left to make way for her, and his eyes accidentally caught the girl’s and her legs stopped swinging. Her eyes did not let his go. Oscar flinched.

  Then he realized: he had seen her before. Sophie, the girl in the shop with her father that first day. The lord was Lord Cooper, who had been so curious about Oscar and had asked such strange questions: Might I ask, how long do you remember being here?

  She had watched him then, too; her gaze refused to let him go until it took in every bit of him. Now her eyes were asking him something, telling him something, and Oscar felt himself getting sucked into the great gap between her need and his comprehension.

  He looked at Callie helplessly, but she was busy with Hugo, so he glanced back at the girl—though it meant meeting her eyes. Those eyes looked like Pebble’s whenever the kitten was crouched in a corner hiding from Wolf. Oscar reached over with his non-Block-clutching hand and petted her on the head. It always worked on Pebble.

  Sophie tilted her head and now looked curiously at Oscar. And it was only when her expression changed that he realized what the one before had been telling him—the girl was frightened.

  Oscar sucked in a breath. His chest hurt. He opened his mouth but could find nothing to say to her. He shook his head helplessly. He was not made for this.

  “I’ll consult with Madame Mariel as soon as she returns,” Callie was telling the parents. She sounded so truthful when she was lying. “And then I will come back up. Please send word if anything changes.”

  Callie motioned to Oscar. Time to go—though the boy was still flat and gray. Sophie’s face shifted back again, and she was holding Oscar with those frightened eyes as if trying to keep him there.

  He could do nothing. He looked away.

  When they left the house, Oscar, for the first time ever, was glad to see the blue sky. Next to him, Callie’s perfect posture had collapsed.

  “Callie,” he whispered, “can you help him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. She pressed her hands on her cheeks. “I don’t know.”

  “You looked like you knew what you were doing in there!” The words came out too loudly.

  She sighed. “I know many things, Oscar. I’ve assisted on hundreds of healings, and I’ve read a lot. But—”

  “So, what’s wrong with him?”

  “Well,” Callie said quietly, “his pulse is faint. His hands and feet are swollen and cold. And he’s just . . . weak, everywhere.”

  It wasn’t what he’d meant. Oscar didn’t want to know the boy’s symptoms; he wanted to know what was wrong with him so someone could fix it and no one ever had to look like that again.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “I thought the City was protected. That’s the whole point, magic serves the City, and so everyone is blessed—”

  Callie’s face darkened. “Well, not anymore.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Last Words

  They visited three more houses, and at each it was the same—a young child flat in a bed, parents with the shine gone out of them. A girl could not eat. A stiff-looking boy said he hurt all over, and as he talked his lungs seemed to be trying to yank the words back. And another had gone to sleep at night healthy but when he’d woken up he could not see or hear.

  It was all wrong, everywhere, and so was Oscar. At each house, Oscar lingered in the shadows. He had nothing to say to the parents, to the children, to anyone. His body was there, but the real Oscar was tucked away somewhere else, somewhere dark with four walls and a ceiling and at least two cats.

  He stayed in that place until, at the last house, the boy’s father—a tall, older man with eyebrows like cat tails—grabbed his shoulder. Oscar jumped as if he’d been pulled from a dream.

  “You’re the magician’s hand? Caleb’s?” the lord said, voice just like his grip.

  Oscar stiffened and nodded slightly. Is there something I can help you with?

  “You tell him he needs to come to the City. You tell him something’s very wrong up here.”

  “He’ll come,” Oscar said. “I know he will.”

  The man leaned into Oscar and held him with his eyes. “Do I have your word on that?”

  “I—”

  “Oscar,” said Callie quickly, standing up. “Why don’t you go wait outside? I want to talk to Lord Baker.”

  A few moments later, Oscar was sitting on the front step in between two potted plants that looked like cypress trees in miniature. He eyed one. It was like there was a whole universe somewhere of inch-high people who lived in their own tiny little forest, and the City people were taking their trees for their own. The noise in his head buzzed steadily, and he pressed his arms as close into his chest as he could. It did not stop hurting.

  Callie had been right to dismiss him. He did not belong here. And now Callie knew it, if she hadn’t before. She could have just told him what was wrong with the children and he could have made something for them—he could look at a list of ailments and know what to do (comfrey, calendula, juniper berry). Name a problem and his mind would sift through pictures of book pages, browse the pantry shelves, pluck from his memory bits of things Caleb had said, until the answer took shape in his mind. But when these problems took flesh and became people, people with wrong-colored faces and cold skin and grasping breath and unseeing eyes and faint words, the books and shelves and bits of things went away, and all that was left were scared little sisters and angry fathers and no answers, and Oscar had nothing for them.

  When Callie came out, Oscar sprang up, nearly overturning one of the tiny-people trees.

  “Callie,” he said, eyes stinging, “why am I here? Why did you bring me up here?”

  “Oscar—” She blinked at him and then glanced at the house she’d just left. She took Oscar’s arm and led him down the stairs and into the street. “Don’t worry about Lord Baker,” she said. “Sometimes when people are upset about something, they take it out on the nearest person, especially if that person can’t get angry back. Do you understand?”

  Not really.

  “But you can’t make promises for Master Caleb, especially to City people. You can’t. All right? They’ll expect you to keep those promises.”

  He nodded, pretending.

  She put her hands on his shoulders. “Oscar, I brought you here because I thought you could help me figure out what’s causing all of this.”

  “But I don’t belong here! You could have just told me—”

  Callie shook her head. “No. There’s something underneath. More than we can see. And we can’t just look at all the different pieces. We need to put them together.”

  That was the problem. He couldn’t look at anything but the different pieces.

  “Oscar, listen to me. I wanted you to come because you might see something I don’t. I wanted your point of view.”

  “On herbs?”

  “On everything. Master Caleb’s not here and Madame Mariel’s not here and these children need us. The healer’s apprentice and the magician’s hand. We’re the best they have right now.”

  “But—”

  She held up her hand. “Yes, when Caleb comes back. But”—she leaned in—“he’s not here and we are and they are sick right now and I want to help them and I don’t know how. They need me and I can’t help them.” She put her hand on his arm. “Please help me.”

  He could not say no.

  Callie exhaled and started walking. “It can’t be a coincidence,” she said. “Something’s making these kids sick. The Baker boy can’t move his legs. The Collier boy’s muscles are stiff and he can’t seem to get enough air. The Miller girl can’t eat. Hugo—his heart isn’t working right. It’s like . . . like there’s something broken in each of them. But not the same thing. They’re sick, and . . . Oscar”—she tu
rned to look at him—“I don’t understand.”

  Her eyes were so big as she looked at him, and shining a little. He thought of Hugo’s little sister and her eyes and her red shoes and his utter lack of anything to give her.

  “I—” Oscar said. As he stood there, wordless, his mind made a map of the streets they’d traveled, and the houses of the sick children rose up from them. He saw no pattern, but something must be there—a current running between the children, some invisible force traveling from one to another. Something dark was in that current, moving from child to child, altering itself as it moved so it couldn’t be named, let alone traced. All they had in common was that they were young children, and—

  His head snapped up. “Callie, what if it’s the plague again?”

  Callie’s eyes widened. “But,” she said, her voice a thick hush, “that was ages ago.”

  “Before. But what if it . . . changed somehow? What if it can get around the magic?” It sounded so strange to say, but it was possible. One year you spread garlic all around the berry bushes and it keeps the monkey beetles away. The next year the monkey beetles decide to eat the garlic. Things have a way of getting around barriers when they want to.

  “I don’t know,” Callie said. “Nobody ever talks about the plague. I don’t know anything about it; do you?”

  “Not very much. But”—he looked at her cautiously—“I know where we can find out.”

  It was the first time Oscar had ever brought anyone below stairs—it was the first time he knew of anyone going down there at all besides the magician, the apprentice, and the hand, and when he opened the door to the cellar, he half expected some force to push them back.

  “It’s very dark in here,” Oscar said, taking a step down. “Be careful.”

  In fact, the cellar had never looked so dark before. It was like the City had blinded him. He looked back to Callie to make sure she was all right. His heart fluttered like he was handing her a secret with each step—what if Caleb came back and found them? What if Wolf had never died at all and was just lurking in wait to catch Oscar doing something wrong? Or what if he had died and was still lurking in wait?