The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  One day, after her grandmother had forbidden her from going out into the garden, she had shouted, “I hate you! You’re not my mother. I’m going to run away and you’ll never see me again, you old bitch!” Her grandmother had ordered the butler to hold her, and with a pair of gardening shears she had cut off Thea’s shadow, snip snip. And that was the last Thea had seen of it. By the time her grandmother had sent her to Miss Lavender’s, the third generation to attend, she had almost forgotten it wasn’t there. “Most people don’t even notice,” she had said to Mrs. Moth when first asked about it. She had just arrived at Miss Lavender’s and was trying to figure out where her room was, what classes she would be taking, whether she would fit in or have friends. It was so different from her middle school in Virginia.

  “Most people aren’t witches,” Mrs. Moth had replied. “While you’re here, we’ll work around it, but there will be certain kinds of magic you can’t do. And you’ll need it eventually.”

  Sometimes new students had said, “What’s wrong with Thea? Why doesn’t she have a shadow?” But at Miss Lavender’s one quickly learned that if one’s roommate turned into a wolf at certain times of the month, or was faintly, almost imperceptibly green, or was missing a shadow, it was considered impolite to remark on it as anything extraordinary.

  Before she had left for her grandmother’s funeral, Miss Gray had said to her, “Find your shadow, Thea. It’s time.” Well, she had tried.

  “No,” she said now, in response to Miss Gray’s question. “I looked everywhere”—from the attic to the cellar, with Anne and the butler and cook until they were all covered with dust—“but I couldn’t find it. I have no idea what happened to it. Do you think that’s what’s wrong with me?”

  “Of course, my dear,” said Miss Lavender, speaking for the first time. “You could do without it as a child, but now that you’re a grown woman—well, a grown woman needs her shadow. Without it, you’re fading.”

  Fading? She was fading?

  “It’s part of growing up,” said Mrs. Moth. “Children don’t need their shadows, strictly speaking—remember Peter Pan. But adults are a different matter. Lavinia’s right: without it you’ll fade away. It will take some time, but I’m afraid the process has already begun. Eventually even ordinary people—well, not ordinary, of course, but not witches—will start to notice. Let’s just see if we can find it, shall we? This didn’t work the last time we tried—I suspect the box was shielded with a spell of some sort. But since your grandmother’s passed away and the box has been lost . . . perhaps, just perhaps, it will work now.”

  How could she be fading? But Miss Lavender, more than anyone, could see things other people couldn’t. In school, it was rumored that she could even see the futures—the multiple possibilities created by each moment.

  Mrs. Moth leaned down and blew on Thea’s tea. In the teacup, on the milky brown liquid, she saw an image form, in sepia like an old photograph. A castle with strange, twisting spires, and mountains in the distance.

  “I’ve seen that before,” she said.

  “Of course you have,” said Miss Gray. “We went there on an eleventh-grade field trip.”

  Then it must be . . . “Mother Night’s castle. Is that where my shadow went?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Moth. “And I’m afraid you’ll need to go find it. You can’t do without it much longer. When Lavinia says ‘fading,’ she doesn’t just mean visually. Without it, you’ll keep getting more tired. You’ll start feeling despondent, as though you’ll never accomplish anything. Eventually, it will seem too difficult even to try. One day you might not get up at all.”

  “But how can I find it?” asked Thea. “Mother Night’s castle is in the Other Country. When we went, Miss Gray took us. Can you take me there again?” She looked at Miss Gray.

  The teacher shook her head so that her brown braid swung around.

  “Thea, my dear,” said Mrs. Moth, “you are a graduate of this school. Like any witch, you should be able to find your way to the Other Country. By yourself.”

  The next morning, Thea woke to Cordelia patting her nose.

  “Stop that,” she said, and rolled over. That’s right, she was at Miss Lavender’s, in a guest bedroom on the second floor of the headmistress’s house. Through the window, she could see the dormitory where she had spent six years of her life. It reminded her that Shoshana had sent her a Facebook message a couple of days ago, asking if Thea was all right and complaining about Chem 101. Of her two senior-year suite mates, Shoshana Washington was premed at Brown, and Lily Yu was in China working for a human rights organization. She would start an Asian literature and culture major at Stanford in the fall. She kept posting pictures of dumplings and rainy green hills on Instagram. Thea really should keep up with them, but it was hard when she was the only one who had nothing to say. Binge-watched Netflix and ate ice cream for dinner didn’t make for a very inspiring Facebook post.

  “Are you getting up, or do I have to sit on your face?”

  She turned back over. “Cordy, how do you get to the Other Country?”

  “How do I get there? I’m a cat—I just go. The question is, how do you get there?” All cats knew the way to the Other Country. That was one of the first lessons in Care and Feeding of a Familiar. If you couldn’t find your cat, it was probably in the Other Country.

  Thea scratched the cat behind her ears. “Can’t you just take me there?”

  “No, I can’t take you. A little lower down . . . there. Now under the chin.” For a moment, Cordelia actually purred. Then she continued, “You’re a thick, clumsy human. You can’t go the way cats go. We just slip between things. You need to go through a door.”

  “I remember!” said Thea. “When we went in eleventh grade, it was through a door. And the door was in this house. . . . But I don’t remember which one it was. Cordy, can you show me which door goes to the Other Country?”

  Cordelia swatted her hand away and looked at her with contempt. “Now you really are being an idiot. After six years in this place, you should at least know how to think like a witch.”

  Think like a witch? What did the cat mean? Suddenly she remembered a visiting lecturer, an alumna named Dr. Something Patel who taught physics at one of the local universities. She had come to talk to Miss Gray’s class about magical physics. Thea remembered her standing in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand, saying . . . how did it go? “One of the most important things I learned in my time at Miss Lavender’s, which has served me well as a theoretical physicist, is to think like a witch. If you can’t find the answer, a witch would say, you’re probably asking the wrong question.” Miss Gray had nodded emphatically.

  Think like a witch.

  “It’s not the door. It’s a door. I’m going to take a shower. I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Wait for me, okay?”

  Cordelia didn’t answer. She stretched out in a sunny spot on the coverlet and started to wash herself.

  Twenty minutes later, Thea was ready. In her backpack, she had a change of clothes, toiletries zipped into plastic bags, a notebook and pens, a battered copy of A Wrinkle in Time that she had been rereading, and half a chocolate bar.

  “Are you coming?” she said to Cordelia. “Or did you wake me up this morning just because you felt like it?”

  “I’m coming.” The cat jumped down from the bed, then looked up at her. “Which door?”

  “Kitchen. That way I can grab some breakfast along the way.”

  Thea walked quietly in case anyone else was still asleep, down the back stairs and to the kitchen. Last night, Mrs. Moth had shown her where everything was kept. “Just make yourself breakfast anytime you like,” she had said. Thea found a bagel, then cream cheese to smear on both sides. She put them together to form a sandwich so it would be easier to carry. She put an apple into her backpack. That would have to do.

  “All right,” she said, holding the bagel in one hand, with the backpack slung over her shoulder. “Let’s see if I’m right about how to
do this.”

  She walked to the kitchen door. Standing in front of it, she took the notebook out of her backpack, scribbled a few lines. . . . Then she put her hand on the door handle and read,

  “An entrance, entranced,

  you open into the brightness

  of summer and winter dancing,

  white snow on white blossoms,

  in the country of my longing.”

  Not her best effort, but perhaps it would do. And she did like the pun: entrance, entranced. The trick was to tell the door what it was, what it could become. “The creation speaks two languages,” Miss Gray had told them in Introduction to Magical Rhetoric. “Poetry and math, which are the same language to anyone who speaks them correctly. You must speak to the creation in its own language so it understands what you want it to do.” Thea took a deep breath, hoping the spell had worked, and opened the door.

  It was summer. It is always summer in the Other Country, or rather it is always no season at all: the apple trees are always blossoming, and in leaf, and bearing fruit at the same time. Sometimes it snows, and white flakes settle on the ripening fruit. But today seemed to be a perfect summer day. Thea and Cordelia walked down the sloping green hill toward the castle. Tall grass brushed against Thea’s jeans, and the sun was warm enough that she stopped for a moment to take off her jacket and stuff it into her backpack. Beyond the castle was a lake, shining in the sunlight, and beyond the lake were mountains with forested slopes and snowy peaks. It looked like a postcard, or something that had been Photoshopped.

  The last time she had been here, Shoshana had squealed in delight and Lily had said, “Seriously, are you making that noise? Because stop.” Miss Gray had said, “Come on, girls. We’re on a schedule.” The castle looked just as Thea remembered—beautiful, but strange. As she and Cordelia walked down the hill and came to the gardens, she could see more clearly the stone towers, some going straight up and covered with small balconies, some spiraling like a narwhal’s horn, some curled like a snail’s shell. The buttresses, some of them supporting nothing but air, resembled a whale’s skeleton. The whole structure was improbable, like a castle out of a dream, and reminded Thea of an Escher print. One of those towers, probably the largest, held the Tapestry Room, where gold spiders with jeweled eyes crawled up and down, weaving the threads of life into an enormous tapestry, whose front no person had ever seen. Her thread was somewhere in there. She wondered what it looked like, which part of the pattern it formed.

  “And this,” she remembered Miss Gray saying, in a voice like a tour guide’s, “is the Library of Lost Books. All the books that are lost in the worlds are kept here. To our left, you will see the extension built specifically after the burning of the Library of Alexandria.”

  Thea stepped onto a garden path. Cordelia ran ahead and stood by the side of a long stone pool with yellow lotus flowers at its farther edge.

  “Something interesting?” asked Thea.

  “Fish,” said the cat, staring down intently.

  Thea sat on a stone bench beside the path and put her backpack beside her. She was starting to feel hot, and the bench was shaded by a linden tree, both blossoming and in leaf. “Anyway, I need a plan, you know,” she said.

  “Why?” said Cordelia, reaching a paw tentatively into the water.

  “Well, because I need to find my shadow, and then I need to take it back with me, and I don’t know how to do either of those things, is why.” What she really wanted to do was stay here, in the warmth and sunlight, with the sound of bees buzzing in the linden flowers above her. After all, she had no idea how to find her shadow, or what to do after she had found it. She would sit, just for a little while. . . . At least it was better than sitting in her apartment, scrolling aimlessly through her Facebook news feed.

  Cordelia leaned down and patted at the water, then jumped back, shaking her head from side to side.

  “That’s right, stupid cat!” came a shrill voice. “If you put your head down here, I’ll spit at you again!” Thea leaned forward just enough to see an orange head sticking out of the water. One of the fish, looking rather pleased with itself. Thea heard a clucking sound and realized that it was laughing. Then it disappeared back beneath the green surface of the water. Cordelia hastily licked herself all over and then stalked off along the path, as though nothing had happened.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Thea called, but the cat did not turn back or answer. She was alone in the still, sunlit garden.

  “I want my ball back, and I want it now!”

  She turned toward the voice. A girl about her own age was walking toward her, dressed in a bathing suit that looked as though it had come from the 1930s, with a frilled bathing cap on her head. “Where is it, Thea? I swear, if you don’t give it to me right now, I’m going to turn you into a toad, or worse!”

  Thea stared at her in astonishment. The girl pulled off her bathing cap, and down fell long black hair, with stars tangled in it. “Seriously, I don’t know why my mother puts up with you. If I were her, I’d put you back in that box!”

  “Lady Morgan?” said Thea hesitantly. This must be Mother Night’s daughter. Was she supposed to curtsy or something? They had not met her on the field trip, but who else would be walking around the castle gardens as though she owned them, talking about her mother? And what was that about a box? “I’m not Thea. I mean, I’m the other Thea. I mean, she’s the other Thea—I’m the real one.”

  “Oh!” said Morgan Morningstar, looking at her with astonishment. “Why, so you are. You’re faded around the edges. Well, for goodness’ sake, take her back with you—she’s such a pest. You’d think being in a box for twelve years would have calmed her down, but evidently not. Last week, she almost started a fire in the library—there’s a reason that fireplace is never used! She and one of those annoying satyrs thought it would be a good place to toast marshmallows. Can you imagine? Now that you’re here, you can take her—where are you from, anyway?”

  “Miss Lavender’s,” said Thea. She stood up but decided not to curtsy. The time had passed for it, anyhow.

  “Oh, how nice. Say hello to Emily and Mina and dear old Lavinia for me. You must be one of the students.”

  I graduated, Thea wanted to tell her, but Morgan had already taken her arm and was pulling her down the path toward the castle. “The problem is finding her. She stole my Seeing Ball, and now she can see me coming and hide. You know a shadow can hide in very small places, and the castle has lots of those. But now that you’re here, maybe we can convince Mom to send her back. It’s clear that Thea—the other Thea—should go home with you. I mean, look at you. . . .”

  Thea didn’t know how to respond, but she didn’t have to. Morgan Morningstar was pulling her through the gardens: between flowering borders, and through a privet maze that Thea would surely have gotten lost in, and over a lawn laid out like a checkerboard, with chamomile forming the white squares. Where had Cordelia gone? Drat all cats. Then they were in the castle courtyard, with its Egyptian and Greek and Indian statues, and through the arched doorway.

  The great hall was cool and dim after the sunlit courtyard. Just as she remembered, it had no ceiling: tall pillars ascended up to the blue sky. But the sun was already sinking toward the mountains, so the hall was mostly in shadow. It was empty except for a small group of people at the far end, close to the dais.

  “Mom!” Morgan called. “Look who I found by the lotus pool.” Several of the—people?—stepped back. Thea noticed a man with the head of a stag, a woman with ivy growing over her head instead of hair, and a woman who looked exactly like Dr. Patel, only what would Dr. Patel be doing here? A pirate, in a black leather coat and tricorne hat, took off his hat and bowed to her. But between them all was Mother Night. Today she looked like her daughter, black hair falling to her feet, a face as pale as the moon, unlined. She could have been Morgan’s twin. The last time Thea had seen her, she had looked immensely old, with gray hair that wound around her head like a coronet. She had been
sitting on her throne, and Miss Gray had introduced the Miss Lavender’s students to her, one by one. They had bobbed awkward curtsies, having learned how to curtsy just the week before. Thea remembered what Miss Gray had told them: “Don’t be nervous, but remember that she created the universe.” It didn’t matter what she looked like at any particular moment. You couldn’t mistake Mother Night.

  “Mom, this is—”

  “I know, sweetheart. Hello, Thea. We’ve been expecting you. How are you feeling?”

  “Pretty well, ma’am,” said Thea, doing her best to curtsy, trying to remember how. This time she was sure she should curtsy.

  “How do you think she’s feeling?” said Morgan. “Look at her. Soon she’ll be as transparent as a ghost. I could poke my finger through her, not that I want to. You need to make Thea—I mean shadow Thea—go back with her.”

  “Your mother doesn’t need to do anything,” said the pirate. But he said it so charmingly, with a grin and a wink at Thea, that she could not help smiling back at him. “I know you’re in a bad mood, Morgan—”

  “Don’t you start with me, Raven,” said Morgan, still gripping Thea by the arm. “You said the same thing when she stole your cloak of invisibility. You said, ‘That shadow has to go.’ Remember?”

  So this was Raven! The famous, or infamous, Raven . . . Mother Night’s consort.

  “Stop, both of you,” said Mother Night. “I can’t make her go, for the simple reason that while she’s separated from Thea, she’s a person. Like any of you. Like Thea herself. I will not order her to leave here. I’m sorry, my dear,” she said to Thea. “You need to figure this out yourself.” Which was just what Mrs. Moth had told her. Thea felt sick to her stomach. She had no idea how to find her shadow, much less convince her to . . . what, exactly? She still wasn’t sure. And what had Morgan meant—as transparent as a ghost? Was she fading that fast?

  “Remember there’s a ball tonight,” Mother Night continued. “The other Thea will certainly be there—she loves to dance. And now I have some things to attend to before the ball.”