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* * *
For my mother,
Sally Scovel Caterer,
born under the sign of the fishes
* * *
I must go down to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song
and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face
and a grey dawn breaking.
—John Masefield
Chapter 1
* * *
A Story Untold
Holly Shepard was unlike most twelve-year-olds in that she didn’t at all mind sharing a cramped cottage bedroom with her pudgy, snoring, laptop-loving younger brother. It didn’t bother her that she was four thousand miles from the place her parents called home, which was a little house in a little suburb in a big square of cracked land baking in the American Midwest. July was different here, in England.
Not that everyone in Holly’s family appreciated this damp, chilly village. Her brother, Ben, preferred a place with more electrical outlets. Her mother would get wrapped up in work; her father tried to remember to drive on the left. When they had arrived yesterday, after fourteen hours, three airports, and one rental car, her mother was already regretting they hadn’t rented a bigger cottage in a larger town, perhaps one that had a cricket team for Ben to join. (As if he would ever join a team of any kind.) Her father recalled that the grocery didn’t carry the coffee he liked, and asked if her mother would pick up some in Oxford, near her office.
But Holly was bothered by none of this. Instead she woke up content and well rested in the limestone cottage in Hawkesbury, with its creaking plaster and dark oak planks that smelled of lemon. Holly hadn’t left home. She had come home. And in any case, she didn’t plan on staying long.
Holly tiptoed around the bedroom, careful not to smack her head on the eave, and grabbed her clothes to change in the bathroom. She skirted Ben’s bed without waking him.
The world outside was sodden. The deep gray sky darkened the stone cottage, its white plaster walls glowing in the weak morning light. Holly slipped out the back door, ducked under the garden arbor ringed with hollyhocks, and sat down on the flagstone steps that led into a wide green valley. Through the mist she could just make out the shadow of Darton Castle on the far hill. It was a pile of medieval ruins now, like dozens scattered around the English countryside, but Holly remembered its cruel king and bloodthirsty knights. She pulled her poncho close around her. She had no desire to visit the castle. But the dense forest, which spilled through the west side of the valley, beckoned her. She double-checked her watch—which was also a compass—and then made sure the thin leather scabbard was buckled around her waist. The key—her key—was nestled inside.
It took Holly a long time to pick her way down the soggy hillside, and even so, her feet slipped and she slid on her backside the last few yards. She stood up and picked a muddy clump of leaves from one of her long braids.
Not the best beginning, but she was taking a long shot in any case.
The valley was alive with robins. Excited by the worm-yielding earth, they chittered along with warblers and bluebirds. A pair of rabbits noticed Holly and sped into the woods. But when she followed them, all the chirpings and chatterings ceased.
The woods of Hawkesbury were particular—silent, but full, like a dark theater crowded with a rapt audience. The air closed in as dank and close as a rain forest. Holly sighed. Walking through this deep green place was like being wrapped in a favorite blanket.
The iron key in its scabbard bumped along her leg as she hiked the path. She stopped, listening for the humming, the life of the forest reaching out to her. But she heard nothing.
It didn’t matter. She would find a way to make the key work.
It had been a long year waiting to come back to Hawkesbury. Starting middle school had meant the end of recess and easy math. Her locker jammed on a regular basis. Her English teacher handed out tardies if you were thirty seconds late, even if it was because the school’s one and only library book on Celtic mythology was stuck behind the section on anime superheroes. Her math teacher assigned homework every night and didn’t give them time in class to work on it. (“That’s why it’s called homework, Holly,” Ms. Knox said when Holly protested, and Holly’s mother said, “That seems like a reasonable answer.”) And though she tried to blend in to the cinder-block walls, Holly couldn’t help asking questions and interrupting teachers and even getting the occasional lunchtime detention for “wasting the class’s time.”
Worst of all, the other girls had suddenly noticed her. Tracy Watson nicknamed her Pippi because of Holly’s long brown braids. She cracked up every time Brittany King braided her own hair and then crossed her eyes, running her index finger up the bridge of her nose as if adjusting imaginary glasses. Holly knew what they were doing, but every time she glanced over at them through her own smudgy glasses, they shrugged at her with exaggerated innocent looks.
Holly had made friends with exactly one girl. Charlotte Devon, the shortest kid in the sixth grade, had frothy white-blond hair and arms so thin, she looked like she’d shatter if you touched her. Like Holly, Charlotte spent her free time in the library and even checked out books on fairy tales and King Arthur.
Holly almost told her about last summer.
They were sitting in the cafeteria and Charlotte was thumbing through Fairy Tales of the Middle East when Holly blurted out, “Do you think any of that stuff ever really happens?”
“What stuff?” Charlotte asked.
Holly steeled herself. “Magic stuff. Like in the books.”
“Oh, sure it does. Look! I never saw a genie like this one.”
“So you think it happens to real people? Did anything like that ever happen to you?”
“Is this like a joke?” said Charlotte. “I don’t get it.”
“No, I mean really. Maybe you saw something strange you couldn’t explain?”
“Like a fairy in the woods who wanted to take me away to the fairy realm?”
“Yes! Like that.”
“And then she’d give me something to eat so I’d be trapped in the fairy realm forever and be their prisoner?”
“Right!”
“And the fairies would steal the powers that only I had so they could come out of the shadows and reveal their true selves?”
“Exactly!”
Charlotte’s face broke into a beatific smile. “No. We don’t have any woods around here, Holly. So how would I get to the fairy realm? Hey, have you read this story about the snake master of Agadir?”
Holly sighed.
She didn’t say anything to Charlotte about how she had met a fairy in the woods. And how the fairy had offered her something to eat. How the fairy had wanted to steal the powers that only Holly had.
She said nothing about a kingdom where a tyrant king had outlawed magic, where centaurs and magicians were the closest of friends, where a prince had held Ben captive and forced him to be a knight’s squire. Where Holly herself was an Adept—a being of great magical power.
She didn’t say a word about Anglielle.
Chapter 2
* * *
The Red Bird
> A few minutes after Holly had entered the muddy overgrown path, the birds and squirrels took up their chatter. The dense canopy of oaks and beeches closed around her. She grasped a mossy sapling and pulled herself up along a slippery rise. In front of her a stream meandered through the wood, an offshoot of the river snaking through the valley.
But it didn’t look like the stream she knew.
The narrow brook she had so easily crossed before had swollen, producing whitecaps as it churned through the forest. Holly dropped a twig into the water and watched it disappear in the current.
The brook wasn’t safe to cross.
A harsh squawk broke over her head. A large bright-red bird sat on a low tree branch downstream. It glared at her and flapped its wings, showing their indigo undersides. Not a cardinal, or a hawk.
It looked like—though how could it be?—a parrot.
The red bird leaped onto an ancient tree that had fallen across the water. Holly stepped through the dripping undergrowth to reach it. The parrot launched into the air, screeching as if to say, You’re welcome.
Holly considered crossing the tree bridge on foot, but it looked slippery. Instead she sat astride it and edged out to the center. All this trouble, she thought, and I won’t even be able to get through the portal.
So what was she doing here?
She was the last Adept of Anglielle.
She never had figured out how someone who came from a world of jet airplanes and concrete and cell phones could wield the power of an ancient place of spells and sorcerers. But somehow she had magic within her. The closer she came to the portal, the stronger she felt that tugging, that homesickness. Hawkesbury felt more real to her than America. This forest felt more real than the lemon-scented cottage. When she reached Anglielle, something inside her would click like the tumblers of a lock aligning. She would find a way in.
Admittedly, the last year hadn’t exactly been magical. The wand she had forged in Anglielle had reverted to the form of an iron key in this world, just like the one Mr. Gallaway had given her. But it still had power. She had seen it.
She had packed the key away last summer, pained at the thought that she might never see her friends in Anglielle again. Her own world was horribly ordinary, and her shoulder felt cold without the warm Salamander, Áedán, to protect her. She wasn’t herself without him and Jade, the black cat. Feeling lonely one January day, she had stuffed the key into her pocket before going to school.
It was that most awful of months: only halfway through the school year, the weather cold and bleak, the new semester difficult. A phlegmy cough spread through the school and gave Holly a fever. Spring, let alone summer, was ages away.
Tracy Watson and Brittany King had chosen this day to sit near Holly’s lunch table and talk in very loud voices about which Pippi Longstocking book they liked best, and when Holly didn’t respond, they brushed by her seat and knocked over her milk with effusive apologies. That afternoon on the bus, Holly’s friend Charlotte dropped her notebook and the girls scooped it up. They laughed at Charlotte’s sketches of fairies and elves, even though they were better than what anyone else in school could draw. Charlotte bolted out of the bus with tears in her eyes. She’d be walking almost three miles home in the cold.
Holly tried to follow her, but the bus lurched forward, and the driver barked at her to take her seat. The girls squealed as Charlotte trudged along, her head bent against the wind, and then Brittany dangled the notebook out the window. “Be careful!” Tracy screamed. “Don’t drop it! It’s a work of art.”
Holly gritted her teeth. The front of the bus erupted into chaos; the boys shouted, “Drop it! Drop it!” and everyone laughed. In her pocket, Holly’s key vibrated, and a warm wave, like a lick of flame, washed over her chest and face. Her breath came in short, angry puffs. “Give it to me,” she muttered, and gripped the key.
A familiar shock of energy zoomed up from her heart down into the key and back again, charging her hand like a battery. She glared at the notebook, the key buzzing in her fist like a trapped wasp. Brittany screeched as the notebook broke away from her hand.
But instead of falling under the bus’s wheels, it rose like a feather on a breath of wind and wafted toward the center of the bus, where Holly slid her window open. The notebook slipped inside, hung in the air a moment, and dropped in her lap. The spiral binding was bent a little, but otherwise it was fine.
The kids stared gape-mouthed at Holly. But then she saw their internal logic kick in: A weird gust of wind had sprung up at the right time, and Holly had grabbed the notebook out of the air as it blew by. Brittany gave a pouty sneer and spun around in her seat so fast that her yellow ponytail trembled. Holly smiled. The ponytail yanked abruptly downward, and Brittany glared at the boy behind her, who put up both hands in surrender.
That was when Holly had realized that the key still had power, even outside of Anglielle, and what was more, she still had the power to control it. She went home and returned the key to her dresser drawer, closed up in the glossy wooden box Mr. Gallaway had given her.
She never brought it to school again, but she didn’t need to. Anglielle was there waiting for her, and whenever she doubted it, she ran her thumb along the faint red line, a scar she had received last year in Anglielle that stretched along her palm.
Now, as she stood in the Hawkesbury woods, the line wasn’t faint anymore.
Holly shook her hand as she hitched along the tree trunk, snagging her jeans every few inches over the gushing stream. The longer she waited to return to Anglielle, the more the old wound pained her. It had changed from a barely noticeable pink line to an angry red streak, and when she raised her palm, she saw a drop of blood.
She had made a blood oath to Bittenbender, the fierce leader of the Dvergar, to return to Anglielle. Now that she was within reach, he wasn’t about to let her forget it.
The Dvergar hadn’t realized she didn’t need an oath to call her home.
The minute she crossed the stream, a beam of sunlight cut through the forest canopy, illuminating an enormous oak tree standing like a sentry in the midst of a glade ringed by beeches.
She wanted to hug it, though it was too broad for her arms to span. The key buzzed in its scabbard and she drew it out, closing her eyes. She stood in front of the oak’s knobbly trunk. Please be okay. Please. She opened her eyes.
The lock was still there. And still broken.
Melted, more specifically. In the center of the tree trunk was an iron plate with the elongated, backward S shape that had once been a keyhole. It was the only way in to Anglielle, that magical place where Holly was actually somebody. Last summer she and Ben and Ben’s friend Everett had stood here as Holly’s key had unlocked the oak. She was glad the boys weren’t here now. Ben would be prattling about nothing, and Everett would be questioning whether she knew what she was doing, when he was the one who couldn’t be trusted.
At least, she never had quite trusted him.
But when she’d opened the oak, he’d stepped through it along with her and Ben. And by unlocking the oak, Holly had revealed the keyholes in the beech trees surrounding it. At least one of the five had led them to Anglielle.
But there were only four beeches now.
That was the problem. The fire that had warped the lock on the oak had consumed the beech-tree portal, too. Now Holly held the key up to the iron plate, willing it to fix the twisted keyhole. But Holly’s marvelous key, which translated languages and could levitate sketchbooks, which could work magic—even that wonderful key only clanged uselessly against the ruined lock.
She had come all this way, and waited so long—put up with her mother’s lectures and Brittany King and fractions with exponents—she had to get back where she belonged. Holly pounded the trunk with her fist and put her mouth up to the lock. “Let me in! I have to get back in!” she called desperately.
A blast of hot air shot through the keyhole. It glowed like molten iron, and she jerked away. A blister bubbled on her lo
wer lip.
Somewhere, somewhen, Anglielle’s Northern Wood was still burning.
But how could it be?
She walked away from the oak tree, stifling an urge to kick it, and approached the circle of beeches. None of them revealed their keyholes. Until she unlocked the oak, the portals were useless.
“Why won’t you work?” she yelled, flinging the key into the grass.
She didn’t see where it landed and she didn’t care. What was the point of knowing magic if eventually it stopped working? It was the same in all the stories. Kids get older, the magic disappears. Peter Pan let Wendy go because she wanted to grow up.
Holly hated the ending of that story.
But didn’t she still have magic? What about Charlotte’s notebook, and the scar on her own hand? That was real enough. . . .
It was all explainable. Maybe a gust of wind had lifted Charlotte’s notebook. Maybe she’d scratched her palm on the tree trunk across the stream. You’re going to need to grow up, Holly’s mother often said. Start taking some responsibility. Girls like Brittany King had put away their dolls and puppets long ago, and here was Holly, trying to unlock a tree with an old key. Why?
Because she didn’t belong here.
As she stood next to the oak tree, where somehow suspended in time the Angliellan woods were burning, her world of locker jams and tardy slips and text messages faded away like part of a story she had read in a book a long time ago. The real world was ancient, truer, somehow. If she never returned to it, she would stay anchored to a place she had never really understood, knowing her home was just out of reach.
She laid a hand on the beech tree closest to the gap in the circle.
A hoarse screech startled her. The red parrot.
It perched on a low, fat branch next to her. And in its beak it held Holly’s key.
The Wand & the Sea Page 1
