What was that? Alis demanded of herself as she approached her bed. Were you flirting with him? Ugh. In the privacy of her room, her cheeks burned. She was so awkward at these things. And he didn’t even seem to notice.
You can’t just fall for the first man that pays you close attention, she told herself with disgust. This ends now. She could not risk ruining everything with this. Alis was a professional. An adult. Not some starry-eyed girl.
All of this over a joke from an old friend of his. She rolled her eyes.
As she drifted off to sleep, she convinced herself how stupid the entire idea was, and that she didn’t have any sort of romantic inclination towards Cahan at all. Satisfied with the lie, and hoping that thinking it would make it true, she finally succumbed to her dreams.
Morgon Newquist started life by causing an international incident in Central America, and has been marching to the beat of her own drummer ever since. She grew up in the Rocket City – Huntsville, Alabama. After a stint at the University of Georgia to study Latin, she has returned to the place of her upbringing where she wrangles two dogs, a cat, and four children daily.
The Most Secret Magic of All
Tom Anderson
Having read ‘The Worst Witch’ growing up and encountered Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University, Tom Anderson enjoyed the Harry Potter series when it took the world by storm, but found it surprising that many readers seemed to think the idea of a magical school was new. His view of JK Rowling’s work was that its success lay not in its setting, but in its Agatha Christie-style mystery plots and Roald Dahl-esque colourful descriptions of abusive upbringings and the glories of food. For that reason, like many fans of the series, he has had some misgivings about Rowling’s later focus on world-building on a setting that was never meant to be more than a flimsy background to a thrilling plot. Online discussions of the problems caused by this prompted him to write a parody series on AlternateHistory.com in which these are comedically exaggerated, from which this more serious story naturally grew.
The Most Secret Magic of All
“Yah! Filthy little taint!”
Miranda Carter gripped her satchel ineffectually, with a resigned attitude born of long practice, as her textbooks scattered across the stone flagstones of the corridor. Iris Blades, her archnemesis in the rival Serpentine House, gave her a smirk of triumph, then blended into the crowd of pupils racing the sonorous chimes of the magical bell.
Miranda shook her head in frustration, her long dirty-blonde hair flying everywhere in the process, as she struggled to retrieve her precious books before they were trampled. As swift and practiced as she was at this point, The Annals of Magwit’s School still obtained a fresh bootprint, on top of all the others, before it could be returned to her satchel. At this point, she had probably collected samples of every shoe size in the whole school.
Tears started in the corners of her eyes. It was so unfair! She, who would never have been late to a class if it was left up to her, would once again get a talking-to from…who was it next? Doctor Trossberal? And she never felt she could come to them with stories of bullying. It wasn’t the done thing here. It wasn’t the culture.
It was unfair. It wasn’t as if she picked fights with people. Her friends Gareth and Will, love them though she would, always gave as good as they got in their rivalries with the Serpentines. They couldn’t complain if it became a never-ending escalating war of pranks. Miranda just wanted to focus on her studies. She’d been born to Normie parents she didn’t remember, orphaned at a young age, and raised in the magical orphanage in Daventry. In the holidays, she stayed here rather than going home. Magwit’s School of Thaumaturgy was her life, in many ways. But bit—girls like Iris seemed determined to make her not feel safe there, either.
Normie parents. A tainted one, according to the extremists in the Serpentines. Would it make any difference if she’d come from an old-established magical family like them? She suspected not. She knew hidalgos like Clement Brevas, good people, who got just as much vitriol from the Serpentines. Anyone in a weak social position in this school, for any reason, they would try to dominate and exploit. It was all they knew.
Trying not to look at the grandfather clock chiming at her, Miranda searched for her last book. Her Normie Studies textbook. A natural scholar, she usually found reading textbooks to be a joy in itself rather than a chore. This was the exception. She hated that subject. It was so boring, and the Serpentines would make cracks about how she should be a natural for it, being a Normie herself who’d rudely intruded on their society.
But she needed the textbook back, darnit. She needed to focus on her work at this time. Gareth had been taken away again by the Thaumaturgical Authority. It was another of those conspiracies the three friends kept getting entangled with thanks to Gareth’s family history with Lord Skallheim, the dark wizard who was plotting a return to power. Will had gone to call in his own family connections to try to get Gareth exonerated. Miranda wished there was something she could do. She’d tried poring over legal texts until her vision swam. But on some level, she would always be an outsider to this society.
There! The blooming slim textbook with its light blue colour had skidded all the way across the flagstones, bounced off the edge of a rug, and lay right under a flaming torch in its bracket on the wall. Doubtless Iris would have burned it altogether if she’d had the wit to. Satchel under her hand, her carefully arranged books now all dusty and jumbled, Miranda bent down to pick up the book.
And paused. The corridor was now deserted. The grandfather clock was still chiming. She would be late! Get on with it!
But no, the reason that made her such a good student wasn’t simply her aptitude for memorising things from textbooks. It was because she had an inquiring mind. While other pupils just struggled to learn the spells as they were taught in class, she tried to understand the underlying theories of them and experimented with making changes. It didn’t always work out; Will still ribbed her about the time they’d had to take her to the Sanatorium, having turned herself into a dog while trying to make toast. But it did mean that she couldn’t see something that didn’t make sense without pulling the thread.
Literally, in this case. As was common throughout the castle of Magwit’s, the stone wall was partly covered with a large and impressive tapestry. Unlike similar Normie weaves, the characters depicted on this one were in a state of motion. Amid the ornate border of flowers and nettles, the red, blue and yellow tapestry depicted Julius Magwit himself, playing cards with the three other founders: Arundel Vauxhall, Ordosia Oublizerg, and Franco Serpentine. They were all dressed in what Miranda vaguely recognised from this very textbook as Jacobean doublets, or a dress from the same era in Oublizerg’s case. The animated scene currently depicted appeared to indicate Vauxhall accusing Serpentine of cheating. Miranda smiled to herself at that, but her attention was mainly devoted to that strand of red thread which dangled from one frayed corner of the tapestry. It was floating as though blowing in a draught. Again, not unusual for the ancient castle of Magwit’s, except this draught seemed to be in an impossible direction.
Miranda felt in the pocket of her blue robe and took out her wand, a slim rod of elm with a softly glowing sapphire at the tip. With this, she felt the stones of the wall next to the tapestry and behind it, tapping cautiously. Yes, maybe it was her imagination, but they felt hollow.
A secret passage!
Magwit’s had hundreds of them, of course. Gareth had inherited a magical map, an heirloom of his grandfather, last year which claimed to depict all of them. The boys had had a lot of fun trying those out and getting their revenge on the Serpentines, while Miranda worried herself sick about being caught. But, with her usual gift for memorisation, she’d done a pretty good job of remembering where the passages were. And she was almost certain there had been none here.
Had Gareth’s grandfather missed one?
Might this explain how Doctor Malvolio, the treacherous Protective Studies teacher they’d
had last year, who had secretly been working with Lord Skallheim, had been able to get around the castle unnoticed? Gareth said even Professor Hummerhorn, the Headmaster, had confessed himself stumped by that one.
Miranda’s orderly soul was still screaming at her that she needed to get to class and throw herself on the mercy of Doctor Trossberal. But, hang on, this was a matter that might impinge on the future of the whole school! And, darnit, on some secret level she was fed up with Gareth and Will always having all the transgressional fun.
She studied the wall carefully, thinking how the other secret passages she’d seen had worked. There might be some elaborate magic pass-phrase, that her advanced Cryptomancy reading-ahead suggested could take a long period to puzzle out from first principles. Or perhaps it worked on the law of similarity and the law of contagion, so she’d have to find a particular item and touch it to the wall.
While considering, Miranda absently dumped the final book in her bag. It was very heavy on one shoulder. She reached out and leant on the torch-bracket to one side…
And then the wall wasn’t there, and the bracket wasn’t there, and she was falling forward into a dark void—
“Oh sh—sugar! You shouldn’t be here!”
Miranda woozily looked up. She felt as though she’d only lost consciousness for a moment of shock. Maybe not only a secret passage, but an arcane transference spell that had taken her to another realm of existence altogether? She had read ahead in theory texts that suggested such travel would come with a shock to the system.
On the other hand, she doubted such shock would manifest itself as painfully-bruised knees and sore palms where they had hit the stone floor.
Except this floor didn’t feel like stone. There was a rug on it, or a carpet, but not like the rich magical carpets she’d seen the senior students practicing with. This was thin and ridged and oddly joyless in texture, and its colour was—
What was its colour?
Miranda’s dark blue velvet robes pooled in a heap around her prone form, yet she could only say they were blue because she already knew. This—passage, room?—was dark, with none of the homely glow of flaming torches that lit Magwit’s. The silver stars and moons on her robes gleamed reflectively in dim, distant brightly-coloured pinpoints of light: red, green and occasionally yellow. They reminded her slightly of the fairy lights at Christmas, when real fairies were entrapped in bottles to illuminate the festivities in the Great Hall, but these lights were cold and lacked vitality.
“You shouldn’t be—there shouldn’t be—” The voice sounded distracted and worried. There was a sound like shuffling paper, but different to someone perusing a scroll. “There’s nothing here about—something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?”
Miranda’s eyes were still used to the corridor, which wasn’t that well lit by the flaming torch, but she’d been looking near the torch when she’d been examining the wall, and she’d discovered that meant she couldn’t see anything when suddenly plunged into blackness. Discovered it not in one of textbooks, which were silent on such points of everyday importance, but by the empirical method of having a sack plunged over her head by Iris and her cronies on the sports field when the teacher wasn’t looking.
All she could see were vague shapes in the gloom. She had a basic impression that this was not a long, snaky passage, but a small, stuffy, boxy room—though perhaps there might be a second door to lead elsewhere. There were those red and green and yellow lights over in one direction, in complex patterns but ones that suggested order rather than chaos, horizontal and occasionally vertical lines. There were also faint greyish-white glows from a set of squares, like enchanted paintings which were showing nothing more than views of restless snowstorms.
What else? The analytical mind that teachers had praised her for was going to work. That carpet, under her bruised knees, she followed it with a hand until she hit a wall. She could see the wall dimly in those strange lights, too, as her vision adjusted. Unlike the carpeted floor, the wall looked familiar…yes, those were definitely the homely stones of Magwit’s.
She hadn’t fallen into some out-realm then but merely into a secret passage as she’d first guessed, or at least a secret room.
“Why don’t you—it’s shock, innit?” The voice continued to gabble away. It was a male voice but not that deep and increasingly panicked in tone. “‘Ang on—now what did ‘e say…”
Miranda had met students who’d grown up in London, and she recognised the accent, growing stronger as the speaker became more agitated. He was just a near-shapeless silhouette in the dark room. He was fumbling about with something near the lights—the horizontal lines of lights—like they were sitting on a desk, a table?
There was a sound that Miranda knew very well from her attempts to get Gareth better grades in Alchemy class, though he insisted the teacher hated him, and it was pointless. It was the sound of pieces of solid glassware crashing against one another, hard enough to make her wince but not quite hard enough to break them. (Though Gareth had certainly acquainted her with that sound, too, as had Clement).
“Whoops,” the voice said. “Uh, I think it’s Oh Kay…dammit, I didn’t mean to…” Sound of a liquid slopping over the side of a glass. More sounds that Alchemy class had well prepared Miranda to recognise. “He’s gonna kill…never mind.”
The lights, red and green and yellow and grey, gleamed off a glass as it was proffered to Miranda. A few other reflective features stood out. The man had slicked-back, oiled hair, and wore glasses with lenses that looked black and opaque, like the ones Dr Volkano used in Magimetallurgy class when he was demonstrating his forge. But there were no bright thaumic sparks here. Maybe the man just had very sensitive eyes, perhaps damaged in a magical accident, and that was also why the room was so dark. Miranda was speculating.
Out of politeness, out of inertia, she took the glass from him and gingerly sipped from it. She almost choked. She recognised the taste from when she’d recuperated in the Sanatorium from the aftereffects of one of Iris’ pranks, or had it been Lord Skallheim’s latest plot from beyond the grave to resurrect himself? They all blurred into one after a while. Either way, the man was giving her medicinal brandy. Yes, he’d realised she had suffered a shock.
Miranda took a second sip and nodded. “Thank you,” she managed.
“Oh, you’ve got your voice back—I mean, uh, thank you, sir, ma’am.” The man’s speech kept accelerating into an indistinct, nervous mumble. “I’m sorry, I meant—” He looked around wildly. “I didn’t expect this to happen! He didn’t expect…”
“It is well,” Miranda said, trying to calm him down. “Thank you,” she repeated.
“Oh Kay, Oh Kay,” the man said, an incantation with which she was unfamiliar. Wait, no, hadn’t some of the Normie Borns used that before? He must be one of them. Miranda was technically Normie Born herself, of course, but she rarely thought of herself that way. “Uh…I’m not sure if I’m authorised to take your debriefing, you’d better wait for Dad—that is, Supervisor Alexander, I mean—to come back.”
“That is well,” Miranda said automatically, trying to work out what he meant. “Uh, Oh Kay.”
She was missing her class. But then, Iris had ensured she’d already be late, so she might as well try to figure out what was going on. Who was this man who lived behind the walls? A ghost of the castle she’d never encountered before? No, he had handled that glass and given it to her. Some secret extra caretaker who worked directly for Headmaster Hummerhorn? That, she could believe; the man was full of secrets, and she’d always suspected that what Gareth had learned through his misadventures had only scratched the surface.
“So you’d better…I guess…” The man gestured vaguely behind him, at the lights and the glows. Miranda was starting to see a little better and could now see they were coming from peculiar-looking boxes stacked on a desk. There were two equally unusual-looking chairs in front of it. “While you’re waiting, do you want to, er, join me?” Despite the lack of li
ght, Miranda was sure he had blushed slightly. “That is, I mean, there’s nowhere else to sit in here, I mean…”
“Oh Kay,” Miranda said, just to cut him off.
She got up, wincing as the fabric of her robes rubbed past her bruised knees. Students weren’t supposed to try healing spells on themselves, but for something as minor as this she’d rather trust in her own abilities than wait hours in the Sanatorium for the Lady to become available. She found her wand where it had rolled along the sad carpet, her pointed hat next to it. She stuck the latter into her satchel for now, but pointed the wand at her knees. “Exsarcio Patellae!”
There was a brief flicker of golden light. Miranda experimentally rubbed her knees through her robe, then grinned. “Knew I’d got that one down!”
The man, his form once again rendered indistinct in her eyes by the brief flash of light, was staring at her through his dark glasses. “Wow, you’re one of the ones who really knows how to do it!” he commented. “Uh…” he shakily held out his hand. “You won’t have met me, I’m, uh, Dougie Alexander. Supervisor Alexander’s son,” he added.
Miranda looked at the hand in confusion for a moment, before remembering this was another thing Normie Borns sometimes did. She extended her own, tentatively grasped his and shook it. “Ah…I’m Leandra Cooper.”
There were some magical beings to whom it was dangerous to speak your real name, as doing so would grant them power over you. She doubted this man was one of them, but experience over the past few years had taught her not to give away trust lightly.
“Oh!” The man—Dougie—scratched his slicked-back hair for a moment. “Uh, I do know your name from somewhere, but forgive me, I’m not up on your file.”
That surprised Miranda, assuming he wasn’t just lying. She’d plucked the name Leandra Cooper from an American exchange student who’d been part of their adventures last year. Miranda would reluctantly admit that Leandra had proven to be basically a good sort, and her suspicions of her had been unfounded—though she would never admit, even to herself, that the latter had been driven by Will’s open adoration of the pretty New Englander. He’d always been there to answer her stupid questions about why there weren’t any cheerleaders or show-and-tell sessions at Magwit’s. At least, she was home, now, back at Chubb College of Sorcery, and the enchantment on Will had been lifted.
Fantastic Schools: Volume 2 Page 13
