Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded

by Sage Blackwood

  A servant answered. She was about nine years old, and had pale skin, red pigtails, and a frightened expression. “How-may-I-be-of-service?” she demanded.

  “We’re looking for Miss Tripes,” said Bowser.

  “You’re too late,” said the girl. “They got her already, and Miss Davidson too. And they got Miss Faranoko up on Waterfall Blind, so don’t bother looking there.”

  Chantel had a terrible feeling of foreboding. “Who?”

  “Some man,” said the girl. “Came and said ‘Wayswitch.’”

  “Did he look like death?” Chantel asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Who’s looking after you?” said Anna.

  “I’m looking after myself,” said the girl. “Now if there’s nothing else—” She started to close the door.

  Chantel felt like there was something else. “Wait!”

  The girl stopped closing the door.

  “You should come home with us—” Anna began.

  “What about all the other sorceresses?” said Chantel. “Are they gone too?”

  “How would I know?” The girl shut the door with a clunk.

  “We should make her come home with us,” said Anna. “She’s too young to look after herself.”

  “She’s better off here than with Mrs. Warthall,” said Bowser.

  Chantel felt torn. They ought to try to help the girl, but . . . Bowser was right. They had no help to offer.

  They wound their way back around the hill, bypassed Waterfall Blind, and then followed Rosewood Walk down to Bannister Square. The square was actually a triangle, a cobblestoned wedge that projected far enough over the city that you could see the sea. Chantel spared the ocean a glance—it was a distant, iron-gray band at the bottom of the sky—and hurried with her friends to the sorcery shop kept by Miss Waterstone and Miss Baako.

  Chantel was vaguely aware of an abnegation spell beside the shop . . . something hidden, but she had no time to think about that now.

  The shop door hung open. Everything inside had been removed, even the curtains.

  “Miss Baako?” Chantel called. “Miss Waterstone?”

  Her voice rang through the empty shop.

  They went up the corkscrew staircase to the little apartment above. That was empty too. A single broken chair was all that remained.

  No one questioned them when they came out of the shop. Everyone they saw looked the other way.

  “Shall we ask them?” said Anna.

  “No,” said Chantel. “They’re not going to tell us anything. I think they stole the sorceresses’ stuff.”

  She was horrified to hear herself say this. One might think such a thing, but to say it aloud . . . !

  “There’s an abnegation spell here,” she added.

  She twitched her fingers in the signs to undo it. It was hiding nothing interesting—just a slab of rock, behind which was darkness and cold, dank air.

  They went on searching for sorceresses. They climbed steep alleys and they followed dizzying walkways that spiraled out over open space. They plodded through the wide streets at the bottom of the hill, in the very shadow of Seven Buttons, and they followed the tightly wound passageways of the High Peak neighborhood, just below the castle. But it was the same in High Peak, and Buttonside, and Donkeyfall Close.

  There were no sorceresses anywhere. They’d all vanished. The few people who would talk all told some version of the same story. The sorceress in question had been visited by a stranger who looked like death, and had gone off in a hurry, and that was all anyone knew, and wasn’t it time the girls got home?

  In the end they had no choice but to do just that.

  “All of the sorceresses are gone,” said Anna.

  It was late at night, and they were sitting in the kitchen. Chantel stretched her bare feet out on the brick floor. Japheth, who had been exploring the kitchen in search of someone to eat and had found the place far too well scrubbed for his taste, slithered smoothly between her toes and snaked his way up to his favorite place around her neck.

  “Sir Wolfgang says they’re busy with other things,” said Bowser.

  “I think he knows they’re missing,” said Chantel. “He just doesn’t want other people to know. Because people might panic if they knew there was no one to do the Buttoning.”

  The other two looked at her in surprise.

  “You’re right!” said Anna. “There’s no one to protect the walls, and—”

  “And there are Marauders out there,” Bowser finished. “You girls are going to have to do the Buttoning yourselves.”

  “We don’t know how,” said Anna. “And anyway we have more important things to worry about. Mrs. Warthall is going to sell everyone!”

  Chantel stroked Japheth and thought. “I wonder . . . Those searchers who came here. Mrs. Warthall said they were looking for a spell.”

  “You think they were looking for the Buttoning?”

  “If they were, and if we could find it—” said Chantel.

  There was a sound of bare feet pattering along the hall. Chantel looked up to see Daisy, a little girl with beetle-black eyes and hair that hung over her ears in two shaggy braids.

  Daisy reached out a finger to stroke Japheth, who flicked his tongue at her. “Chantel, when is Miss Ellicott coming back?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chantel.

  “Are you going to go look for her?”

  “I—”

  Chantel thought how frightened the younger girls would be if they knew that all the sorceresses were missing. They must already be scared. They still had Miss Flivvers, of course, but Miss Flivvers was proving woefully inadequate, no protection at all from Mrs. Warthall and her ladle.

  Daisy was looking up at Chantel trustingly, big eyes in a hungry face. Miss Ellicott was not exactly loving, but there had always been a certain thereness to her. With Miss Ellicott around, you never doubted that someone was in charge, and that any bad thing that was going to happen was going to have to get through Miss Ellicott first.

  Well, now it had gotten through Miss Ellicott.

  “Yes. We’re going to look for her,” said Chantel. “Don’t worry.”

  “Come on, Daisy,” said Anna, and led the child away. Chantel heard them going up the stairs.

  “We’ll find the spell for the patriarchs,” Chantel told Bowser. “And when we do—we’re going to ask them to take Mrs. Warthall away before we give it to them.”

  5

  IN WHICH CHANTEL CONSIDERS GUTS AS GARTERS

  The searchers had already torn the school apart looking for the Buttoning. But the searchers couldn’t do magic.

  Chantel and Anna did summoning spells. They did them up in the attic, away from Mrs. Warthall’s suspicious gaze. For Chantel this was easy; summonings were her thing.

  They did the spell again and again, holding in their minds pictures of things the Buttoning spell might be written on. Clean white sheets of paper, and yellowed old parchment scrolls, and much-blurred palimpsests of sheepskin. All sorts of documents came flying through the air: recipes, and bills, and homework, and something that appeared to be a deathbed confession, although to what, Chantel couldn’t tell.

  Then the spells stopped working. They had summoned every loose bit of paper in the school. So Chantel, Anna, Bowser, and the younger girls searched the school by hand. (Leila couldn’t be bothered.)

  They looked under the carpet of the wide mahogany front stairs, and in every corner of the dark twisty back stairs. They climbed on chairs and felt behind the carved dragons atop the doors and windows, and they scaled bookshelves and peered at the dusty tops. They poked into the oddly-shaped closets and cupboards that filled in the crooked corners of the school. They searched the ceilings.

  Anna and Chantel took a hammer and pried up the attic steps, one by one, to see if there was anything written on the back of them.

  They searched the sloped attic walls where the nails from the slates stuck through. Bats hung in ranks from the rough
wood, and opened their tiny pink mouths and squeaked in protest at the intrusion.

  “Maybe it’s hidden under the bats,” said Chantel.

  “I’m sure those searchers looked under the bats already,” said Anna.

  Nonetheless the girls went back in the night, when the bats were gone, and searched the walls again.

  They looked through all the trunks and boxes in the attic. Old school robes. Winter coats. Dishes. There had been books, but the searchers had pried them to pieces looking for messages hidden in the bindings. They had burned most of the pages looking for invisible ink. Chantel felt no particular sadness about this, because she had never found any secrets or mysteries in books. She had never in her life read a book that hadn’t been sniffed over carefully by others, checked and rechecked, and stamped with approval as perfectly safe and unlikely to give her ideas.

  There was a sudden storm of mad flapping all around them. Chantel and Anna hit the floor—the bats were coming home. The girls clamped their hands protectively over their hair. They both knew, in their brains, that bats have a spell that keeps them from bumping into people or getting tangled in anyone’s hair. But their hair refused to believe it.

  The bats hung themselves up on the sloping wall. There were a few more rustlings and flappings, then quiet.

  The girls stood up, cautiously.

  Chantel looked at the bats. She looked around the attic. There was nowhere else to search.

  “It’s almost dawn,” said Anna. “I have to go up to the roof.”

  “Why?” said Chantel.

  “I always do.”

  Chantel had been Anna’s friend for years and years, and she had never known this. “I thought you were just an early riser.”

  “Yes. Because I have to get to the roof.”

  If you knew Anna well, you knew she had a rock-solid firmness that she hid from most people. You could see it now. Chantel followed her up the ladder.

  The girls emerged into the cold gray dawn. There was a small platform on top, surrounded by an ornamental paling. Below that were the steep slated sides of the roof.

  Birds were twittering and screeching in the trees down below.

  Anna fixed her gaze to the east, where the sky was brightening into splashes of pink and orange.

  “What—” Chantel began.

  “Shh. Wait.” Anna’s mouth was a thin hard line. The sun appeared, a sliver of red on the horizon that grew to an arc and then a semicircle. Abruptly Anna spun on her heel and faced west. “You should turn too.”

  Chantel obeyed. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Because Miss Ellicott told us to,” said Anna. “Or at least, she told me. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”

  “Well, she didn’t,” said Chantel, feeling annoyed. She’d been up all night and she was tired, stiff, and no closer to finding the spell than before. “And it seems pretty silly.”

  “I have to do it because I’m the Chosen One,” said Anna. “It’s what she told me.”

  “She told me I was the Chosen One too,” Chantel reminded her. “But she never said anything about coming up on the roof and spinning around.”

  “She told me always to remember,” said Anna. “‘At the dawning of the day/Face the sun and turn away.’”

  “Why?” Chantel said.

  “How should I know? She just did,” said Anna. “Maybe it’s some kind of spell.”

  They looked at each other in surprise.

  “What she told me,” said Chantel, “was ‘Speak the words that Haywith spoke/And keep the vow that Haywith broke.’”

  Around them, in the city, bells rang and trumpets sounded to announce the new day.

  “‘At the dawning of the day/Face the sun and turn away. Speak the words that Haywith spoke/And keep the vow that Haywith broke,’” said Anna. “Wait . . . you think she hid the spell inside our heads?”

  “Not just ours,” said Chantel. “I bet she told other girls that they were the Chosen One, too.”

  They hurried downstairs to the dormitory. The girls were still asleep, but Chantel and Anna rousted them out of bed and assembled them into two frowsy, yawning, eye-rubbing rows seated along the edges of two beds.

  “How many of you,” Chantel asked, “have been told by Miss Ellicott that you are the Chosen One?”

  The girls looked startled. Several hands went up. One of them was Daisy’s, and one was Holly’s.

  “If Miss Ellicott gave you something to memorize, we need it,” said Chantel.

  Most of the girls didn’t have couplets, as Anna and Chantel did. They just had single lines.

  The lines came out of order. Daisy’s was: “And touch the wall, and make it whole.” Which sounded like it ought to come near the end.

  Holly’s was: “Write the third sign with your feet.” That was easy enough. The third sign was a bit like a circle and a bit like an eagle that had swallowed an anchor.

  Anna wrote each line on a separate scrap of paper, and she and Chantel set them down on the floor and shuffled them around. Each line was part of a rhymed couplet. The trick was to get the couplets in the right order.

  “There’s something missing,” Chantel said.

  “Before the writing-with-your-feet bit,” Anna agreed.

  “Right,” said Chantel. “Do you write in the dust? Or—”

  “Maybe you cut your feet and write in blood,” said Leila.

  She looked smug.

  “Do you have a line, Leila?” Chantel asked.

  Leila just smirked.

  “If you do,” said Anna, “I think you’d better tell us, please.”

  “I don’t see why I should,” said Leila. “I really am the Chosen One. Miss Ellicott said so.”

  “She said it to a lot of us,” said Anna patiently. “It was probably just her way of making sure we didn’t forget.”

  Leila continued to look smug.

  “I don’t think she has one,” said Chantel. “I don’t think Miss Ellicott ever told her she was the Chosen One.”

  “Think what you want,” said Leila.

  That tactic obviously wasn’t going to work. “If you don’t tell us,” said Chantel, “I’ll have Japheth bite you.”

  The snake obligingly reared its head and bared its tiny fangs.

  “That snake doesn’t scare me,” said Leila.

  And then an odd thing happened. Japheth reared his head higher. And higher yet. His weight on Chantel’s shoulders was very much increased. Chantel cricked her neck and saw a mighty cobra rising above her head, its hood spread, its curved fangs gleaming, its forked tongue flicking in and out.

  One or two girls let out a squawk of terror. The rest gazed, awestruck.

  “Fine,” said Leila, in an I-don’t-care tone which nevertheless quavered a bit. “It’s just some stupid thing about tombs.”

  She gave them a single line. Japheth, to Chantel’s simultaneous relief and disappointment, turned back into a little green-gold snake.

  Once they had Leila’s line, they had this:

  At the dawning of the day

  Face the sun and turn away.

  When the bells and trumpets sound

  Cast dust from seven tombs around.

  Standing barefoot in the street

  Write the third sign with your feet.

  Speak the words that Haywith spoke

  And keep the vow that Haywith broke.

  Bring the peace that Haywith stole

  And touch the wall, and make it whole.

  This remains from long lost lore.

  The rest is gone. We know no more.

  The girls read it over several times. They tried mixing the bits of paper around some more, but they decided this must be how it was supposed to go.

  “And nobody’s got anything else?” said Chantel.

  No one did.

  “It’s not exactly a spell, is it?” said Anna.

  Leila looked amused and superior. “It’s instructions for how to do the spell.”

  “I
guess,” Chantel agreed reluctantly. “Part of it. But it says there’s something’s missing. And it doesn’t tell us what words Haywith—”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Sorry,” said Bowser, sticking his head in. “Mrs. Warthall said if you don’t come down to breakfast right now she’s going to tell Frenetica to pour it into the gutter.”

  “Small loss,” said Leila.

  “What do you think of this, Bowser?” said Anna.

  Bowser came over and looked. “Is it a spell?”

  “Almost,” said Chantel. “I think it’s instructions for the Buttoning. The spell to strengthen Seven Buttons.”

  “What are the seven buttons, anyway?” asked Holly.

  But none of the girls knew this, because none of their teachers had ever told them. And it certainly wasn’t in books.

  Anna frowned at the assembled rhyme. “Even with what’s here, it doesn’t say where to stand to do it—”

  “Somewhere on the west side of the city,” said Bowser. “Because you have to face the rising sun, which is in the east, and then turn around, and then you’re going to touch the wall, so the wall must be to the west. Could you all kind of get dressed and come down right away? Mrs. Warthall’s really not in a very good mood. I mean compared to what she usually is,” he added meaningly.

  Mrs. Warthall was furious, and distributed smacks, threats, and extra chores.

  “You girls may think you have it made,” she said grimly. “Lying late in bed and swanning in for breakfast when you’re good and ready. But you just wait. You won’t be living this easy life for long.”

  Chantel and Anna were assigned to help Bowser scrub down the walls in the kitchen. It was nasty work, involving a vile-smelling paste that burned Chantel’s hands.

  “I’m almost sure it matters where you stand,” said Chantel. “When you do the spell, I mean.”

  “Somewhere west,” said Bowser.

  “But where?” said Chantel, reaching into a tub of the nasty-smelling glop and quickly slapping the stuff onto the wall. “Seven Buttons is fourteen miles long.”

  “So there’s a button every two miles?” said Bowser.

  Chantel had never thought about it like this before. “You think it has actual buttons?”