Discovery of Magick (Dark Light Academy Book 1)

by Tabatha Stephenson

  I grabbed my change of clothes and hurried back.

  "Take your time and have a good soak," she said. "We'll be downstairs if you need us, so just shout." She smiled again." We have over a decade of catching up to do."

  "Okay," I replied, unsure of what else to say to her. I was sure they'd tell me the story of how they came to drift apart and then reconnect sometime or other during this vacation.

  The cast iron, clawed foot tub, had a gentle incline to it that made it easy to lean against. I took a washcloth and folded it before wetting it and placing it over my eyes. Damn, that felt good. The bubble bath had a peppermint scent, and my skin lightly tingled from it, which felt night. I felt muscles unknot and relax that I hadn't even known were tense. When I found myself drifting off, I decided it was time to get out.

  They were still talking, so I decided to leave them to it. By now, it was completely dark, so I shoved everything back into my two suitcases, shut the door, turned out the light, and climbed into the bed. I was out within seconds.

  Morning came all too soon, my body jerking awake from unfamiliar noises outside. I padded downstairs to the bathroom to use it and found Aunt Lisanne was already up.

  "Coffee or tea?" she asked me by way of a greeting.

  "Coffee, please. Are Aunt Tillie and Uncle Joe still asleep?"

  "Oh, no, they've gone. They said to tell you they love you and to remember that you have responsibilities."

  Say what, now? They left?

  "Are you telling me that they told me we were going on a surprise birthday and graduation trip only to ditch me at the very start of the vacation?" I tried very hard to keep the hurt and anger out of my voice. This really was most unlike them, but that message, yeah, that was a very Aunt Tillie thing to say.

  "Oh, my, no. It's a birthday and graduation trip, alright, but not a vacation."

  I didn't understand.

  She pulled out a chair.

  "I think you best sit down and while you have your coffee, I'll do my best to explain. First things, first, though. I have a gift for you."

  She pointed to a large white box on the table, the sort clothing stores give you when you ask for a gift box. I opened it. Inside was a stack of five shirts and short blue skirts. Why was I being given schoolgirl uniforms? I closed the lid on the box, my Spidey senses tingling. I decided to sit down and hear her out. I had a feeling that her story was also going to explain the weird gift.

  She went into the small kitchen, returning with a small coffee press. Once she'd poured me my coffee, she passed it to me, and I added the milk and sugar from the containers by the teapot. She got up and went into the living room, opening a cabinet under the bookshelves she had where most people kept a TV. She took out a book and brought it to the table where I saw it was a photo album. She opened it.

  I saw pictures of young girls who looked like younger versions of my aunt and my mother, doing ordinary childhood things. They played in the snow, had pretend tea parties in front of a massive roaring fire, posed in their school uniforms. Uniforms that, once the pictured girls reached my age, looked suspiciously like those in the gift box. I started to ask her about that, but she held up a finger to silence me.

  "I'll explain, just wait." She turned the page. There were my mom and dad in a copy of a picture my Aunt Tillie had at her house. Mom stood smiling, wearing a white dress and cape. My dad looked happy, too, and he wore a suit with a heavy overcoat on. "Their wedding day," Aunt Lisanne informed me. "Her parents disapproved, so they left and moved to your father's hometown." She turned the page again.

  The four of them were now standing in front of a tall fireplace between a spinning wheel and a cradle with a sleeping baby in it. "Her family had to let them back for the registration and blessing. Tillie blessed you with the ability to always know right from wrong. I gave you the gift of intuition. Normally your grandmothers would have done the blessing, but your father's mother was human, and your other grandmother didn't want anything to do with a half-mortal child."

  I stared at the picture, then at her, coffee forgotten. Mortals? Blessings? I felt on the verge of some revelation, my gut telling me that as nutty as she sounded, she was revealing a great truth.

  "Mortal?"

  "Yes, honey. See, This is Asherwood, in the Summer Kingdom. We all grew up in Wildewood, which is in the Winter Kingdom. I moved here after your mother left for the human realm with you and your father. I had a job making tinctures for a local apothecary, and the garden space and weather allowed me to grow most of my own herbs. Tillie and Joe moved to the human realm when your parents perished. We didn't want you to suffer loss twice, and Joe's parents were still there. They'd met your grandparents when they went to your fourth birthday party. That's when they bound your powers, as bound by law. Any witch or Fae who stays in the human realm must have their magic bound. You're here today because of a promise we made your parents the day of your blessing. We promised to be the ones to bind you at age four so that we could unbind you at eighteen when you would come into your full powers anyway. The uniforms are for the academy where you'll go to learn to control and nurture your magic."

  "I'm a witch," I whispered.

  "Yes, and from a potent line." She pointed to the spinning wheel in the photo. "See that spinning wheel?"

  I nodded.

  "It's there because it's very, very old. It's the same one the girl you probably know as Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on. That same bespelled spinning wheel was thrown out and later picked up by a Fae peddler named Rumple who eventually added more magic to it in order to allow-"

  "A farmer's daughter to spin straw into gold."

  "Yes. She used it, and the magic imbued itself into the gold thread, which trimmed the swaddling clothes of her son. He then married a descendent of the original princess of this realm."

  "I'm a witch," I repeated. Well, damn. I hadn't expected that.

  Chapter 2

  I sipped my now tepid coffee and ate a pastry left over from the evening before. We sat in silence as I tried to wrap my head around the unexpected revelations. I wasn’t in one of those old timey tourist places, I was in a completely different world. Sometime during the trip, Uncle Joe had driven us into a place where magick was as real as technology and people had jobs that involved casting spells and shit. As for my aunt and uncle, I felt kind of guilty. They’d always been there for me but for a few moments, after discovering they’d dropped me off and left, I had thought they’d ditched me here so they could go swan off into the sunset with the new job and the money from the house sale without having to deal with me ever again. Instead, it looked more like this trip had been planned long ago and the timing was contingent on having to be here on my birthday so I could be unbound safely when my magickal powers would start to manifest.

  I finished my breakfast and headed upstairs to get dressed. When I came back down, I found Aunt Lisanne pottering about in the kitchen.

  “I’m making your cake for your birthday today,” she said.

  “It’s in two more days,” I informed her.

  “Time doesn’t match up evenly between here and the human realm. It’s today, We thought it best to match up with the date you were born here, just to be on the safe side. We don’t want your emerging powers to bottle neck and we have no idea how they might have been growing while their expression has been suppressed.”

  I imagined going off like a magickal firework, sparks flying from the ends of my hair and everything around me going crazy in some zany real-life version of that scene from Fantasia. Yeah, that wouldn’t be good.

  “I’ll get this baked then set it on the counter to cool. Then we can go into Plumeria and buy the rest of your school supplies.”

  “Plumeria?” Wasn’t that a flower?

  “It’s a larger town, just a short ride from here. It’ll only take us about fifteen minutes by train, after a five minute walk to the station.”

  “If I charge my phone, will I be able to get a signal there? I need to
let my best friend know I’ll be gone for a bit. We were planning to get jobs and share an apartment.”

  “No signal, dear. No cell towers for one thing, plus there’s the whole not in the same universe thing. To get here, your aunt and uncle had to open a portal and drive through and no, a call signal doesn’t get through one of those. But don’t worry, your aunt said she’d call and let her know that you’re on a graduation trip, then after that you’ve stayed to help me out and go to school so you can work in the family business I run.”

  As cover stories went, it wasn’t altogether a bad one. Still, I’d look like a shitty friend if I didn’t call her myself.

  “They’ll be here tonight for your birthday dinner. They only left so they could fetch what belongings they wanted to bring back to Wildewood with them.”

  “They’re moving back to Wildewood? So Uncle Joe’s new job wasn’t real?”

  “Oh, that’s real, alright. Just it’s not in the human realm, it’s in Wildewood. Your Uncle Joe is quite the tech mage. The plan is for the company to develop the tech here so we can use it, while adapting it to work without magick over there. There’s a bunch of human people working on similar tech so they have been hired to work in the human start up, they simply don’t know where the main parent company is based. So, they will also have a house there, and go back and forth every few months.”

  Wow. Okay. That made me feel better, actually. My whole life wasn’t as big a lie as I feared and I’d get to see my family still. The family I’d known, that is,. My dad’s parents had died of old age already and my one uncle from that side had died piloting the plane they were on, so Uncle Joe and Aunt Tillie were all I had left, other than Aunt Lisanne. I’d have counted Marla in that, but I had no idea when I’d get to see her or hear her voice again. A lump formed in my throat at that. We’d been best friends ever since kindergarten.

  I decided to change the subject so I didn’t start blubbering. “What kind of stuff do I need?”

  “We’ll get you some new shoes and underwear and socks, handkerchiefs, laundry bag, that sort of thing. They sent a list over of what to get you. It’s stuck to the refrigerator.” I looked and yep, stuck right to the front of her goldenrod yellow antique fridge was a pre-printed shopping list on a piece of paper with a header proclaiming it was from Dark Light Academy. It sounded rather gloomy and I giggled despite myself. I took the list down and looked it over. It read like a list people compiled for college students living in dorms, pretty normal except for the names of the text books and items on the prohibited list (First year students are forbidden to bring their own cauldrons). Aunt Lisanne finished mixing the batter and poured it into prepared baking pans.

  “There, now.”

  “Do I have to go?” I blurted out. Maybe there was still time. I could keep my powers bound, like my mother and presumably Aunt Tillie and Uncle Joe did, return to Bowring, and resume my life there. My nice, safe, boring life that had no magick in it.

  “No. You have to be unbound so your powers can finish developing. Keeping them bottled for so long could actually kill you should they grow strong enough to crack through the spell. Your mother and aunt and uncle made trips back to the realm every so often, to remove their binding charms. Temporary charms are fairly harmless. You have an actual spell, and it’s one keyed to your eighteenth.”

  Okay, yeah, I didn’t want to die in a maelstrom of magick gone whacky.

  “Can’t you teach me instead?”

  “No, my dear. They are far better qualified than I at Dark Light. It’s where all the fine young magickal folks from the most talented families go. Your mother put your name down before going to the human realm, the very day after your blessing was registered . It was proof you were a child of magick.”

  “How did that work, then?”

  “The magick settled into you instead of over you, my dear. Only a being of magick can take it within and have it become part of them, instead of the spell doing all the work.”

  My shoulders slumped. It looked like I definitely had to go off to this Harry Potter meets the Munsters sounding place. Hopefully Marla would turn out to not be really mad at me after Aunt Tille spoke to her. I could go this academy, learn what I needed to, and make my own charm that would allow me to go back.

  “Now, I’m going to go freshen up and then we can go. We can grab some lunch while we’re out,” Aunt Lisanne said brightly as she took off her apron and hung it up. “Keep hold of the list and wait for me please. I’ll just be a few moments.”

  I nodded and took the list with me as I took myself back to the table. The photo album was still there, so I took the opportunity to look through it more carefully while I waited. Maybe looking at the photos again would make this all feel more real, I thought.

  It didn’t but it did allow me to feel more connected to my parents who had a whole other part of their lives I’d never known about. I could do this, for them. I’d get Marla to understand that I’d had to honor my mother’s legacy once I found out about it. She’d understand and forgive me. I was sure she would, my intuition said. I trusted it, after all,; that was one of my blessings so I could rely on it, right?

  Aunt Lisanne came down the stairs, her face now lightly made up and she’d traded her slippers for a pair of comfortable shoes. She carried a brown purse that matched her shoes.

  “I’ll just get the bags,” she said, going into the kitchen and opening a small broom cupboard where she took out some reusable fabric shopping bags. They looked just like the jute ones with padded handles you paid a few bucks for at the supermarket in Lakeview that we shopped at twice a month, only instead of dancing vegetables and the store logo, the bag that held the others had pictures of herbs.

  “Okay, all ready!” she said in a happy sing-song voice.

  I found myself smiling despite myself. She was growing on me and I found myself wishing that they’d introduced me to her years ago. Sometime I’d have to ask why they hadn’t. If they had, this might have not felt so jarring, you know?

  Aunt Lisanne went out the front door and I followed her out the door and down the village street. The train station was indeed a very short walk. A steam engine similar to the one I saw yesterday was at the nearest platform, this one hooked up to a few passenger cars instead of cargo.

  “So you guys never moved on to electric or diesel trains, then?” I asked after she bought our tickets and we got into a car.

  “Oh, my, no. This is much cleaner. Just conjure a bit of heat and let the water boil to make steam. Keeps the air fresh and clean.”

  Her explanation made sense of the sparkles I saw in the steam yesterday. The fire in the boiler was magick, not made from burning coal or other fuel.

  “We try to stay as natural as possible, so as not to taint the magickal ether,” she continued. “For example, my refrigerator. You might have noticed it’s an older model. It’s not plugged into an electrical grid, though. It’s powered by a spell I renew once a week, one that keeps each item of food in it at the perfect temperature to keep it fresh for a week.”

  Now that sounded like some pretty practical magick. “And I’ll learn how to do stuff like that?”

  “You certainly will.” She patted my knee in reassurance. I knew then that it would be alright. I could take my worries to her and she’d help me. I had visions of coming home from a day of classes and feeling stumped by a spell I had to learn for homework. Aunt Lisanne would sit by me, helping me make the right motions with my wand and pronounce the words of the spell correctly. Then I’d go back and wow everyone there who’d grown up in this world so already knew about magick. It wouldn’t be so bad. I’d learn to do some really cool stuff and maybe even make a few new friends. I could have a magickal bestie here and Marla back in the human world. Feeling satisfied, I looked out the window as the engine began to chuff loudly and the train jerked into motion.

  Chapter 3

  Plumeria looked a lot less like I thought it would. It gave me the curious vibe of having landed
in some modern European town like the ones I saw on the shows Marla’s mother was so fond of. Half-timbered buildings mixed with mid-century office buildings and homes and modern glass and steel buildings.

  I gawked as we rode the open-top bus from the train station to what she called “the Old High Street”. That turned out to be a pedestrianized area with narrow, cobbled roads and stores that looked like they fell out of a Charles Dickens Christmas movie. She led me straight into a place that called itself Wanda On In.

  “Can I help you?” A man of late middle age with a head full of thick, steel-gray hair asked us, coming out from behind the counter. He blinked. “Bless my stars, it’s Lisanne Toliphant! How are you, my dear? It’s been years.”

  Aunt Lisanne tittered. “I think the last time we saw each other was when you ordered a tincture for your cat, Ollie. How is he?”

  “Oh, he’s still ruling the roost. He’s off sunning himself on a windowsill.” He pointed, and sure enough, there was an orange tabby sunning himself behind a display of crystal balls and wands.”He doesn’t get around so much anymore, rather like me. Old age, hmm?” he rubbed his hands together, turning a curious smile in my direction. “So, what brings you to my shop today?”

  “Do you remember Marietta Dupree?”

  He looked startled for a moment, quickly schooling his face to a more neutral expression. “Your friend, yes. My shop has always kitted out her family.” He turned to look at me gravely. “I should have known. Lighter hair, cut much shorter, but otherwise the spitting image.”

  “She is eighteen today and will be unbound. I’d like to have you help her pair with her conduit.”

  “It would be an honor.” He turned to me. “What happened with your parents was a terrible tragedy. Binding her so she couldn’t use her powers, ever, leaving her unable to save themselves.”

  Horror grew within me. My mother had her powers completely taken away? If she’d simply been charmed, she could have removed it and zapped them free or stopped them from crashing? Tears flooded my eyes.