Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded

by Sage Blackwood

  “If you come down here, I will show you,” said Miss Ellicott.

  “I think I would rather help from up here, thank you,” said Chantel.

  Miss Ellicott gave her a cold stone look. “I expected you to be more dutiful, Chantel.”

  “I—” Chantel began.

  I think I am dutiful. I’m not sure what my duty is, but I know it’s not to the king. That would be too small. I think it’s to the people, but that might be too small, too. She wanted to say these things, she wanted to talk about these things. But Miss Ellicott did not like questions. Only answers.

  Questions are more important.

  “If you’re doing the spell now,” said Chantel, “does that mean the patriarchs are . . .” She searched for the acceptable word. “Deceased?”

  “Those who remain alive have sworn loyalty to the king,” said Miss Ellicott. “Real loyalty this time, for which they will be properly rewarded. They have seen the advantages of being his men, not his masters.”

  “What about you?” said Chantel, curious.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”

  “Is the king rewarding you? Or is he just rewarding the patriarchs?”

  There was a rumble of thunder in the distance.

  “Chantel, I find your questions impertinent. I did not raise you to ask questions.”

  “No, you didn’t,” said Chantel. “And I wish you had. But, um—” This was hard to say. “You took me in, and fed me, and had me taught to read and do spells, and . . . and I want you to know that—” she looked down at her feet, and then further down at Miss Ellicott. “That I’m, um, grateful for that, whatever happens now.”

  Miss Ellicott nodded. “That sentiment becomes you very well, Chantel. Now, your dragon can best be used in service to the king, so if you will summon him—”

  “I beg your pardon.” Chantel pulled in her legs and got to her feet. “He’s not mine, and he’s not to use.”

  A loud crack of thunder made her start. It was accompanied simultaneously by a jagged pink streak of lightning.

  “Chantel!” Miss Ellicott sounded worried. “Come down from there before you’re struck by lightning.”

  The dragon was circling lower now. In the distance, the battering ram had stopped.

  “I . . . I think I’d better not,” said Chantel. “But, if you don’t mind, I’ll watch you do the spell.”

  A sudden gust of cold wind blew deep black storm clouds toward the city from the west. In the east, dawn was just beginning to break. Bells rang; trumpets sounded, announcing the day. Thunder rumbled overhead, and lightning flashed and flickered in all parts of the city.

  Miss Ellicott began doing the spell.

  Chantel watched carefully. She recognized the sign that Miss Ellicott did as the one from the rhyme.

  And Chantel tried, without really thinking about it, to summon what was missing from the spell. But she couldn’t figure out what that was. Something—she had a sense of something to do with a circle—was that the wall itself? Whatever it was, she couldn’t reach it.

  She saw Miss Ellicott scatter dust; it must be from seven tombs. She listened carefully for the words that Miss Ellicott spoke, the words of Queen Haywith.

  “Derval sabad ijee. Dwilmay kadapee pasmines choose maul,” Miss Ellicott intoned.

  And Miss Ellicott reached out and touched the wall.

  That ought to have strengthened it.

  That was not what happened.

  22

  OCTOPUS STEW

  Two lines near the end of the rhyme, Chantel remembered, were:

  Bring the peace that Haywith stole

  And touch the wall, and make it whole.

  Miss Ellicott had just made the third sign with her bare feet. She placed her hand on Dimswitch.

  Thunder, lightning, and the earth shook . . . no, the wall shook. There was a sound of rending and breaking, of rocks shifting. Chantel fell to her knees.

  At last the shaking stopped.

  And Seven Buttons was cracked, a crack that went right through the wall.

  The battering ram? Chantel peered over the parapet. No . . . There was no battering ram at Dimswitch. But some of the Sunbiters had heard the noise, and they were running toward the breach. It was only a couple inches wide, but they dug their fingers into it, and then their swords, and then men came with more tools, long iron bars that looked exactly right for prying a wall apart.

  The Lightning Pass guards fired arrows down at the attackers. A hail of Sunbiter arrows came back, zinging over Seven Buttons.

  Hunched behind the parapet, Chantel ran. “Lightning,” she said aloud. “I need you now.”

  The storm overhead broke, and rain poured down, emptying the sky. The dragon came bursting through the downpour and landed, his claws screeching on the stone wall-walk. Chantel clambered onto his back. They took off into the storm.

  Arrows rattled against the dragon’s scales. Chantel felt one hiss past her leg. Flashes of lightning rippled all around them. Thunder rolled across the sky. The city below was invisible, just a grayed-out map of vague shapes, the wall an indistinct gray line.

  “Lightning,” Chantel called over the singing wind. “Now they are attacking the city and now I would breathe fire on them!”

  And then she couldn’t help adding, “Wouldn’t I?”

  Lightning dove sickeningly through the storm, leaving Chantel’s stomach behind. He breathed fire at the masses of Marauders working at the crack in the wall. The flames hissed in the driving rain, but the men cried out and fell away. Chantel couldn’t see how badly hurt they were—or whether they were alive—but she couldn’t afford to think much about that. She remembered what Franklin had said. The streets will run with blood.

  Lightning spiraled away, came back, and breathed fire again. More Sunbiters came, but the rain had soaked their crossbow strings and they couldn’t fire.

  Chantel leaned against Lightning’s neck and called, “The crack! Close the crack!”

  “How?” croaked the dragon.

  “Melt the stone!” said Chantel. “Please, I mean!”

  The dragon breathed flame after flame onto the crack in Seven Buttons. Hissing and steaming in the rain, the stones glowed red hot and then white hot. Finally the stone fused, closing the crack.

  “Now we have to look at the rest of the wall!” said Chantel. “There might be more cracks!”

  There were. There were five more places where there were great cracks in the wall, and Chantel supposed that these, and Dimswitch, made up six of the seven buttons. Where was the seventh? she wondered, as Lightning heated and fused each of the cracks in turn.

  Then the dragon wheeled out over the sea, and deposited Chantel on the same rock island.

  And left her. Chantel watched in dismay as he flew off, circling, plunging, diving—for fish, she guessed. Maybe all that fire-breathing had made him hungry. Meanwhile the storm raged, and everything Chantel had read about thunderstorms suggested that a rock in the middle of the ocean was a very, very bad place to be during one.

  The rock was slippery. Chantel found cracks and crags to cling to, and she hung on. The wind whipped across the rock and tried to sweep her into the sea. Her sopping-wet robe clung to her skin. She chattered with cold.

  At last the rain let up, and the sun flashed out from behind dark clouds. In the distance Chantel saw the dragon happily diving after a fish, and she momentarily hated him.

  “Lightning, come back now!” she said.

  She wished she’d thought of that before. The dragon, far away, halted in mid-gambol and came flapping back.

  “Was hungry,” he said by way of apology.

  “Well, now I am too,” said Chantel irritably. “And cold, and—yuck.”

  The dragon looked hurt as Chantel recoiled from the large dead octopus he dropped at her feet.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Chantel hurriedly. “Thank you. We’ll take it home and, er, cook it or something, and I’m sure the girls
will love it.”

  As they soared over the city, octopus and all, Chantel saw that something strange was happening. People were climbing the streets—mobs of people, thousands of people—carrying their possessions on their backs. Babies were strapped atop bundles, and small children clung to skirts and cloaks. Everyone looked grim, terrified, and wet.

  The sun reflected off a plane of water covering the lower city.

  “What about the drains and culverts?” Chantel wondered aloud. It always rained hard in Lightning Pass—sometimes as hard as it had rained today—but the drainage system sent everything out to sea.

  The dragon glided down into Bannister Square. People scrambled to get out of his way, yelling and stumbling, their bundles tumbling.

  Chantel dismounted to pick up a fallen child. A woman came running to claim it.

  “What’s happened in the lower city?” Chantel asked.

  The woman chuddered with fear. “Flood, Dragon Girl.”

  “Why don’t they open the city gates and let the water out?” Chantel asked. “That would force back the attackers with the battering ram too.”

  “The city gates don’t open,” said a bearded man carrying what looked like part of a sawmill on his back.

  “Of course they open,” said Chantel. “I mean, I know they’re usually closed, but if they didn’t open, we wouldn’t have—”

  “Oh, I see now dragons fall from the sky and girls correct men,” said the sawyer. “Excuse me. I should have realized the world had turned upside down.”

  And he stalked off with his sawmill bits. The woman with the child turned and fled.

  “But why doesn’t the water drain away?” Chantel asked the empty square.

  Later, back in the cave, she asked the same question of Anna, as they worked together to invent octopus stew. This involved figuring out which parts of the octopus were to eat and which parts weren’t, and lighting a fire with broken furniture and dried seaweed, and filling the cave with a steamy octopus-scented fug which Chantel was sure would hang around for days.

  “The drains must not be working,” said Anna, ladling up octopus stew for one of the smaller girls. “No really, you’ll like it,” she told the child. “Well, at least try it. Well, you can’t be that hungry if you won’t try it.”

  All of this was said in the same patient, calm tones. Chantel felt an urge to bop the whiny child with an octopus tentacle, but she overcame it. “All of the drains at once? And the city gates?”

  “Do the city gates open inward?” said Anna.

  “Only if the architects are stupid,” said Franklin, wiping up octopus stew that one of the little girls had knocked over. “In a defensive wall, the gates open outward.”

  “So the walls cracked, the drains and culverts sealed up, and so did the gate,” said Anna. “All of that happened when they did the spell.”

  “Maybe it was because they weren’t doing the real Buttoning,” said Chantel.

  “It was because they did the Buttoning without you,” said Anna.

  “Without me?” Chantel was astonished. “They’ve always done it without me!”

  “But you weren’t a dragonbound sorceress before,” said Anna.

  “I’m not a sorceress at all!”

  “But you are dragonbound,” said Anna pedantically. “And according to the books, when there is a dragonbound sorceress, also called a Mage of the Dragon, no great working can be done unless she has a hand in it. The Buttoning must be a great working.”

  Chantel cautiously tasted a bit of octopus. It was just as she’d expected . . . rubbery. And salty and fishy and . . . rubbery. She disagreed with Anna. You could probably be quite hungry and not want to eat octopus.

  I was helping the sorceresses, she thought. I was trying to summon that circle, whatever it is. I was probably helping wrong.

  So the Buttoning had gone wrong because of Chantel. It was completely unfair. What was she supposed to do, anyway? “Can I fix it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Anna.

  “If the sorceresses did the spell again, and I helped them—”

  “I’m not sure how you’re supposed to help exactly,” said Anna.

  “Oh.” Chantel imagined a blood sacrifice, with herself in the starring role.

  “I kind of think dragonbound sorceresses don’t ‘help’ so much as take control,” said Anna.

  The sorceresses had put Chantel in a cage. This did not suggest a willingness to let her take control.

  “Well, at least we sealed the cracks in the walls,” Chantel said.

  “How?” said Anna.

  “With fire,” said Chantel. “Lightning breathed flames on the cracks in the wall, and fused the stone where the Sunbiters were trying to pry it apart, and—what?” she demanded of Franklin, who was staring at her.

  “Fusing stone doesn’t strengthen walls,” he said. “It weakens them.”

  “How do you know?” said Chantel.

  “Everyone knows it,” said Franklin. “Parsifal the Peacemaker used magic fires to seal the walls of his fort, and the marauding Coriscanders were able to pick the wall apart in a matter of weeks using the jawbones of asses.”

  This was very depressing news.

  “Chantel, I wanted to tell you . . . I’ve found a few things.” Anna led the way to a library table, with several books lying open on it. Silver hairpins and bits of velvet from the dragon’s storeroom were stuck in them for bookmarks.

  “This,” said Anna, pointing to a page, “talks about Queen Haywith. She was one of the dragonbound sorceresses. In those days queens were usually sorceresses. All the kings and queens have always taken a vow to defend the city and its people. There are words to it here.” She pointed to a book.

  “So that’s the vow she broke?” Chantel remembered how offended the queen had been at the mere suggestion.

  “Some people might say so,” said Anna. “In fact, this book says so.” She tapped a page. “I think we have it at school. But this other book here says that what happened was that some of the people wanted to build a wall around the city—”

  Chantel remembered her journey into the Ago. “There was no wall in her time.”

  “Right. And Queen Haywith refused to have one. She said a wall becomes a wall in the mind, and she wanted no walls for her people. So this book”—Anna reached for another one—“says she broke her vow by refusing to build the wall and then by refusing to abdicate in favor of her son.”

  “Then she left the city open to attack,” said Franklin. “She doesn’t sound like a very good queen.”

  “She was an excellent queen!” said Chantel hotly, and then stood aside and looked at herself in surprise. When had she decided that?

  “She said a wall wasn’t necessary,” said Anna. “She said there was no threat. She used to go out into the marshes—”

  “Dressed like a man?” said Chantel.

  “It doesn’t say. But she had a house out in the marshes, just an ordinary house, and people would come and talk to her and stuff. People from anywhere.”

  “She had a dragon?” said Franklin.

  “I saw him,” said Chantel.

  “The Swamp Lady,” said Franklin. “I bet that’s who she was. I didn’t know she had a name, though.”

  “Everyone has a name,” said Anna. “Who was the Swamp Lady?”

  “A sorceress, you’d call her,” said Franklin with a shrug. “Very powerful, but she never did any harm. Advised people and stuff.”

  “Well, she was dragonbound,” said Anna, reaching for another book. “And dragonbound sorceresses are powerful. But they’re bound. They can’t do anything a dragon wouldn’t do, and the dragon can’t do anything they wouldn’t do.”

  She and Franklin both looked at Chantel expectantly.

  “I know,” said Chantel.

  They were still looking at her, so she added, “I’m not a sorceress.”

  “Not yet,” said Anna. “But you got the dragon at the right time. You let him into your head
, and he grew, and he learned from you, it says here, and you learned from him. And now that you’re bound, that goes on happening.”

  “So have you found the real Buttoning spell yet?” said Chantel.

  “No,” said Anna.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll—”

  “No.” Anna cast a despairing glance at the books spread out on the tables. “I’ve looked everywhere it could possibly be. Chantel, I don’t think there is a Buttoning.”

  “But . . . but . . . the Sorceresses wouldn’t . . .”

  Chantel trailed off.

  “Sure they would. Makes them seem more important,” said Franklin. “I wouldn’t think you’d need a spell for a wall that thick. Well, I mean, if you hadn’t—”

  “I didn’t know fire was going to weaken it!” Chantel turned back to Anna. “We’re going to have to make a Buttoning.”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “I know the sorceresses say never to try anything new but . . . do you ever get the feeling that what we were taught was maybe a little . . .”

  “Too small?” said Chantel.

  “Yes.” Anna picked up a book and frowned at it. “I think this one talks about how to make new spells. But it’s all written in very old-fashioned flowery language.”

  Chantel reached for it. She wasn’t afraid of old-fashioned flowery language. The book smelled ancient. Bits crumbled off the edges when she touched it.

  “There are some other spells I found that look useful,” said Anna. “There’s one called Inversion, where you make your enemies see everything upside down.”

  That did sound useful.

  “I wonder why I only found six cracks in the wall?” said Chantel.

  “Because the gate is the seventh button,” said Anna.

  Chantel went back to the city the next day to see if there was anything she could do. She changed into her green school robe, because the purple one attracted too much attention. People were busy fixing iron bars to their doors and windows and preparing to be invaded. Panic reigned; it seemed the sorceresses had not had time to do a Contentedness spell.

  The water was ten feet deep in the lower city. An unpleasant dirty-water smell drifted through the streets. It hadn’t rained again yet; the floods would get deeper when it did.