by Lucia Ashta
“Can you agree to that?”
Some replies came right away. To my shock, the caterpillars were the first to nod. Then came the girl’s sweet-sounding yes. The elves spoke their agreement as well.
Other replies came after some deliberation. The wolves howled, and the dwarves grunted and huffed. One finally yelled out, “For the castle of Irele and its magic!” The other dwarves cheered along, and I wondered if they had any volume other than loud and louder.
The rabbits were the last to agree. Eventually, however, they did. They put their teeth and claws away and nodded.
“Very well,” Albacus said. “We thank you for your loyalty and your bravery. You’ve chosen to honor a vow you took very long ago when you first came to inhabit this castle. You swore to our ancestors that you’d protect the castle, its magic, and its inhabitants with your life. Today, you’ve chosen to bring honor to yourselves in keeping that promise.”
The soldiers beamed. Even monstrous creatures—magical ones—understood notions of honor.
Albacus spun to face Rondel and the gargoyles. “And you, dear friends? Will you also protect the castle, its magic, and us?”
Rondel spoke at once, shuffling his feet together and bowing. “I will.”
When Albacus addressed them, the gargoyles came to life, animation coursing through them as they affirmed their dedication.
“Very well. Very well indeed,” Mordecai said. The brothers didn’t ask Robert, Marcelo, or me, or even Sylvia or Sir Lancelot. All of us who stood, sat, flew, or slithered in this room right now were united in our defense of the Castle of Irele.
Albacus and Mordecai looked pleased before sharing a look that communicated more effectively than words. Then Albacus faced their army again.
“I ask all of you, including you,” he said as he turned to address the gargoyles, “to follow Robert into the rooms on the fourth floor. Only Rondel, Sylvia, and Sir Lancelot will stay behind. The fourth floor is open. You should have lots of room. There, I want you all to practice, to spar without true aggression or injury. Bury your hatchets.” He sent a pointed look at the dwarves, and he might have meant it literally.
“I know many of you haven’t been called to arms in a very long time. Reacquaint yourselves with your strengths and explore your abilities. As soon as Mordecai and I have plans of attack and defense, we’ll call you here again to share them with you.”
Some of the soldiers looked excited at the prospect of sparring. Others looked indifferent. I noticed, however, that not a single one of them looked frightened, not even the caterpillars. I wondered what this most unusual of armies would reveal. I seemed to be the only one in the dark about their potential.
Albacus turned to their butler now. “Robert, will you please supervise and let us know if there’s anything we need to be aware of?”
“Yes, Milord.”
“You may lead them away now.”
“Yes, Milord.” Robert stepped out of our ranks to lead the soldiers. He walked to the door, opened it, and a steady stream of creatures followed. They walked, skipped, slunk, and hopped, but soon they were all gone. The only trace that they’d been there were long slimy trails of caterpillar residue and rabbit droppings. But most of all what gave away their absence was the deep and profound silence that followed.
Chapter 36
“Let’s finish our dinner while we regroup,” Mordecai suggested.
I looked warily at the mess right behind the table. Mordecai noticed and placed a hand on my shoulder. His other hand performed a sweeping motion while he spoke softly into my ear. “I know those rabbits are ill-mannered, but you’ll be glad to have them on our side when the enemy arrives.” I wasn’t so sure.
Since Mordecai’s magic made the mess disappear, I didn’t need anymore convincing to sit. Now that the distraction of the army was gone, I remembered how hungry I was. But when I brought the half-eaten soup to my lips Marcelo interrupted me with a question: “What would a magician do with a cold soup?”
If I were a true magician, I’d summon steaming fresh bread and warm butter, some of the stew Martha made at Norland Manor, full of aromatic herbs and fresh vegetables (that I recognized) from the garden, and a mug of warm apple cider.
But I wasn’t a true magician yet, so I’d have to settle for what I noticed the brothers and Marcelo were already doing. Steam rose from their bowls.
“How do I do it?” I asked Marcelo.
“We do it by identifying the individual elements within the soup and changing the temperature of them all together. But you haven’t mastered the individual elements, so you could create a very small”—he gave me a pointed look—“fire to heat your soup. And then put it out.”
“Let her try to heat the soup the way we do,” Albacus said, overruling his student.
I was the one to protest. “But I haven’t even attempted to create water or earth yet. I’ve barely tried any magic at all really, and I’m not sure I’m good at any of it.” However, as the last words left my lips, I recognized they weren’t entirely true because there was no denying that I was gifted in magic. My gift didn’t have a chance to reveal itself fully yet.
Albacus waited a beat to see if I’d refute my own criticisms. “Try it,” he said.
Mordecai looked at me encouragingly, and Sir Lancelot flew over to watch. Marcelo squeezed my hand under the table. Even Sylvia opened one eye halfway to see how it went.
What choice did I have? I didn’t want to discourage my friends. Besides, I was curious. Could I do what they’d done?
I wrapped my palms around the ceramic bowl and draped my eyelids tentatively closed, not entirely sure I was ready to do this. But my mind flew ahead of me.
While I ignored the bowl as an irrelevant container, I focused on the soup itself, exploring its contents with my mind. The water element was easy to find in the liquid soup, and I separated it right away. The air topped the soup and aerated it, and I located and set it aside too.
Next, I searched for fire. It was there as well. The soup was no longer hot, but heat—or fire—existed both through its presence and its absence. It survived within this contrast.
This may not have been how the brothers or Marcelo would teach me to find fire, but, as usual, they left me to figure it out myself with minimal guidance. This way worked for me. I isolated the fire too.
It was more difficult to identify the earth element within the soup. I prodded here and there until I eventually found it, hiding within plain inner sight. The vegetables, grown in the rich dark dirt of the castle grounds, contained the earth element in the highest concentration. But almost every component of the soup possessed traces of earth matter.
After all, nothing could survive for long without the earth, not truly. Indirectly, the earth supported all life. And the same could be said of the fire, air, and water elements. Within the microcosm that was the bowl of soup, the four elements were present, interdependent and each as powerful as the next.
With my inner vision sifting through tepid vegetable soup, I encountered an understanding of how elemental magic was the source of all magic. I also discovered its power.
I began to rein my mind in, tugging gently at the cords I created between the four elements and myself. Simply, I was going to change their temperature as one combined unit.
Once I set my mind in motion, the elements responded seamlessly, as if they and I were one. The soup began to heat; I felt it through my hands that held the stoneware bowl.
But then something distracted me. What was it? I sensed it. The four elements were incomplete without it. Whatever this was, it was a component of equal power as the four elements.
I reached for it within my mind’s eye, and it snaked toward me, content to finally be recognized. I led it to interweave with the others.
What started as a haphazard coming together of the four elements, a tangle of four threads, became something else entirely when the threads tied together in a knot.
The knot reminded me of a fiv
e-petal flower. I hadn’t intended to arrange the threads in such beautiful symmetry. I paused to admire the knot’s balanced proportions; they appealed to a deep part of me that appreciated the simple intricacies of nature’s design.
The knot pulsed with a glowing light that converged in the bowl of soup.
Raising the temperature of the bowl’s contents was easy. The elements responded to my guidance immediately, and the soup was so hot that it warmed the palms of my hands through the ceramic bowl.
I kept my eyes closed.
Now I had to disconnect from the cords.
But when I tried, they did the opposite of what I wanted them to do.
The more I guided them to return to the soup and detach from me, the more they did the contrary. When the cords became insistent, I relented. Who was I to argue with the five elemental building blocks of all life? Surely, they knew better than I did.
I surrendered to their will, and I allowed them to find the place within me that suited them. Mesmerized, I watched the knot. It floated straight toward my heart.
It found its proper place.
It had become a part of me.
The knot began to draw the cords in, up and out of the soup. Eventually, the threads came to an end, and they, too, merged with my body, winding themselves around the knot, each wrap symmetrical.
When the knot claimed its dangling threads, my eyes popped open.
I hadn’t decided to open them. They did it on their own.
Chapter 37
Even with my eyes open, it took me a few moments to come back to myself. Once I did, I noticed that Albacus, Mordecai, Marcelo, Sir Lancelot, Sylvia, and even Rondel were staring at me.
I picked up my spoon and scooped up soup. I brought it to my lips. Its temperature was perfect.
With the results of my magical experiment verified, I met Marcelo and the brothers’ eyes. “I did it,” I said and smiled.
But no one smiled back at me. “What is it? I know I probably didn’t heat my soup exactly the way you did, but you barely told me what to do. You didn’t even tell me about the fifth element.”
Albacus and Marcelo’s jaws dropped, but Mordecai’s didn’t. He dropped the spoon he was holding. It hit the bowl, splattered soup on his face, ricocheted onto the table, and then onto the floor in a loud clatter.
Mordecai didn’t move to wipe the soup from his face. Albacus and Marcelo didn’t move to look for the fallen spoon.
“What? What did I do?” I asked.
But none of them answered me. Not yet.
Many seconds passed, slower than usual, until Marcelo finally spoke. “We didn’t tell you of a fifth element because we didn’t know of one.”
I laughed. I thought he was joking.
But their serious looks didn’t falter.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Very,” Marcelo said.
“You’ve never seen the fifth element that’s bound to the other four?”
“No,” Marcelo said, his face impassive. Too much was racing through his mind right then to be able to form coherent emotions.
“Oh,” I said, stunned.
Some moments passed until Mordecai spoke. “Do you realize you’re glowing?”
“I am?” I looked down at myself while I extended my arms. I examined them and my hands. He was right. A faint glow surrounded me, obliterating the normally hard lines that defined my body.
“Do you know why you’re glowing?” he asked. Even before he finished his question, I was shaking my head no. But then I realized that I did know why I was glowing. In fact, I knew precisely why I was glowing. There was only one possible explanation.
“It’s because the five elements knotted themselves and merged with me.” There was no real easy way to explain this. “They were glowing on their own, and now they’re inside my center.”
“Oh,” Mordecai said, imitating my earlier response, though his eyes were wide and his eyebrows high.
Chapter 38
While I waited for my three magician teachers to recover from the news and prepare to help me understand, I looked out the window Sir Lancelot usually perched at. It was late, the night was dark, and my life at Norland couldn’t feel any more remote.
Perhaps it was just as well that they considered me dead—even though the notion still elicited a pang in my heart for Gertrude—the life I led before arriving in Irele seemed not to be my own. Creatures I never imagined existed replaced a mostly normal family life at Norland Manor.
My parents raised me from the start to be appropriately ordinary. Now, magicians, talking animals, and mythical creatures surrounded me. This was a world totally unlike the one I was born into. Yet it was the one claiming me.
I felt the knot within my heart. The five elements were a part of me now more than my blood family ever was, and the connection between the five elements and me would only continue to strengthen.
The five-element knot radiated power and magic in a way my blood family wouldn’t understand. I was entering a world where they couldn’t follow.
To them, I truly was dead.
Chapter 39
The time I planned to give the magicians to process the existence of a fifth element was up before it even began. In reality, time had been running out on us since Marcelo rescued me from the merworld. The days since then had both flown by and extended themselves in the unique juxtaposed fashion that only time possesses.
“They’re coming,” I said, my voice surprisingly calm.
“What do you mean?” Marcelo asked. All eyes were on me. All were suddenly alert.
“Our enemy approaches now. It will be upon the castle gate within the hour,” I said.
None of the magicians at the table with me needed to ask how I knew. One look at the faint glow of my eyes was enough to tell them that I’d accessed a different kind of power, one that brought knowing with it.
“Then there isn’t a moment to lose,” Marcelo said, getting to his feet. My words forced the magicians to leave their wonderings of what had just happened to me far behind. Our reheated soups and the rest of our dinners faded to unimportance that night.
The brothers stood too, but didn’t yet move from the table. Mordecai and Albacus faced each other. “We need to clone Rondel immediately. We must come up with a plan of attack for the army. And I must speak with Sylvia so that she knows her role as well,” Mordecai rattled off.
Albacus turned to me. Urgency sparked in his eyes. “Clara, you won’t have the opportunity to explore the creation of earth and water magic as we’d hoped. But it may not be necessary. Instead, use the time left to familiarize yourself with the capabilities that you have. Explore this fifth element and what power it holds in combination with the other four basic elements.”
I nodded my agreement, and Albacus met my eyes with ferocity. “Clara,” he said, “it’s time to throw caution to the wind. Don’t hold back the power that’s begging to find its place within you. Don’t shy from it. Become the witch you’re capable of becoming. You must release all fear and do this now. There may never be another chance. You must give this fight everything you have.”
His gaze held me, his eyes boring into mine. “Do you understand?”
I nodded again. “I do.” I already felt a strength simmering within me that was foreign to anything I experienced before. Yet, it was mine. All I needed to do was seize it.
Aware of every minute that ticked past, Albacus moved on to Marcelo. “Leave Clara be for now, son. Leave her to explore and discover. We need you to help us.”
“All right,” Marcelo said, dragging out the words, hesitant to leave my side when danger approached so palpably. “Clara, you can ignore us for now. We need to enter discussions for plans of defense and attack. You can step off to the side when you’re ready, just please stay in this room with us. We can’t afford for the castle to take hold of you.”
I didn’t respond at all, and in seconds, the magicians had moved on to their orchestrations.
&
nbsp; “There are several points where we must halt the enemy, and we must have different plans of defense and attack for each. Firstly, we must do our best to prevent the enemy from climbing the mountain to us. Our ancestors were quite wise in building the fortress atop such a steep mountain, and that advantage will serve us well,” Albacus said.
“Unless the enemy is entirely composed of magical creatures, in which case they can fly up the mountain like Clara did,” Mordecai said.
“It’s possible, but we still can’t ignore that point of defense. We must make it impossible to climb. Marcelo, you’ll help us and we’ll use our combined magic to make the trek up the mountain unnavigable,” Albacus said.
“If the enemy manages to fly up the mountain despite our magic,” Mordecai began, and Albacus interrupted and took over, “Then we hold our ground at the castle gate. We’ll place magical protection on the gate and the castle walls. The army will stand in the courtyard, ready to fight. Mordecai, do you think it would be good to place Sylvia on the rooftop? She could monitor the enemy’s approach and alert us if they’re somehow scaling the precipice that lines the opposite side of the castle. Is her fire strong enough to take out any who approach?”
Mordecai looked toward Sylvia, who was still perched in her alcove. She appeared tranquil, but she was as alert as we were. She flicked her tail back and forth in restless anticipation. “What do you think, girl?” Mordecai called out. “Do you think you can stand guard for us on the roof and warn us of any invaders, taking out those that manage to reach the castle?”
Sylvia’s answer was clear. She crouched in her alcove, took in a deep breath, and blew out a trail of blazing fire. Perfectly calculated, the fire reached from the alcove across the room to within a foot of the table the magicians stood around and I still sat at.
The firedrake no longer looked like a docile pet. Her posture was menacing and her face vicious, with smoke trailing from her nostrils. Her talons clutched the lintel at the bottom edge of the alcove.
“I’d say she’s up to the task,” Marcelo said.
