“I went to the Wisecraft offices. The man behind the counter was a guy with a pony-tail. I remember being surprised. I had seen him before. The day my father disappeared!” Her voice rose. “The last time I saw my father, he was talking to Mortimer Egg!”
The Agents looked back and forth among one another.
“I approached and introduced myself,” Valerie continued, her fingers fidgeting. She wiggled her fingers as if spinning her pencil, even though she was no longer holding it. “I asked what he and my father had been talking about and whether my father had mentioned where he was going next. Mr. Egg said, ‘Oh, no. This is not good. Come with me.’ I thought that a bit odd, but I went. I thought maybe he hadn’t known my father was missing until I told him. He brought me into a break room. There was a pump—an old fashioned one with a handle—and a self-heating tea kettle. He made me a glass of tea. Then, he pointed a wand at me. There was a burst of purple sparks. He told me to forget about seeing him and go on my way…” Valerie’s voice broke. “And I did.”
“Was that the only time the geas was used on you?”
“No.” Valerie frowned and rubbed her temples. “Dr. Mordeau called me over several times and asked me questions in front of a group of other students, including Eunice Chase and Cydney Graves and other kids whose names I don’t know. But I could pick them out of a line-up. Afterwards, she would say a word and tell me to forget the questions. And I did.”
“Remember any of Mordeau’s questions?” asked Agent MacDannan.
“Certainly!” The Fearless Reporter Girl counted off the questions. “Dr. Mordeau asked: How much did my father know? Could someone called Adam Kadmon resurrect the dead? Did my boyfriend know his father’s name? Had Miss Griffin’s father told her the secret of the moon glass? Did the princess know her father’s origins?”
The three students spoke simultaneously:
“Moon glass?” Rachel asked in awe. “What could that be?”
“My father?” The princess exclaimed, “He’s from Magical Australia. Wait? Could Father be from another world, too…like Lucky and all these people about whom I have had visions?”
“What do I care who my father was,” Siggy scowled. “Who cares about the kind of parents who throw their son away?”
“Interesting,” Scarlett MacDannan said below, in the mirror. “Is there anything else?”
Valerie’s face grew entirely pale. “Then she…” Her voice failed. She closed her eyes. Then, she opened them again, her expression grim. “She told her assistant, Jonah Strega…told him to do whatever he wanted.”
“Jonah Strega? The boy whose face got burned? What did he choose to do?”
Valerie did not answer; her whole body trembled like a branch in a gale.
“Miss Hunt,” Agent MacDannan asked in her no-nonsense fashion, “did Mr. Strega take advantage of you?”
Valerie could not get her voice to work.
Silently, she nodded.
Chapter Ten:
The Unlikely Proposal of Ivan Romanov
Screaming in inarticulate fury, Sigfried punched the glass with the hand holding his knife. Scrack! Cracks spread like dark spider-webs through the golden glass, and the picture vanished. Small shards rained down with a sound like cracking icicles. Blood dripped from his knuckles.
“Oops.” Rachel’s lips moved, but her voice caught in her throat.
Unconcerned with either the fractures spreading through the talking glass or the abrasions on his hand, Sigfried tore down the stairs from the belfry, jumping three steps at a time. Rachel and Nastasia stood as if rooted, watching him go.
Then, very deliberately, Nastasia began to pack the chairs back into her purse.
• • •
The dining room at Roanoke Hall was an enormous chamber, shaped like a plus sign, with a vaulted ceiling. To one side were the kitchens and the feeding stations for familiars. A fountain stood at the center, where the four wings met. The table nearest the fountain was the domain of Vladimir Von Dread and his cronies. The rest were either associated with a specific Sorcerous Art or free for anyone to use. Rachel and her friends had gathered around one of these, though there was no sign of Sigfried. Rachel hoped he was comforting his girlfriend.
It was after seven, but, due to the commotion, the kitchens were still serving food. Many of the students had already left. Most of those still present had been embroiled in the day’s events. There was an air of excitement and relief, as those who had participated in the fighting told their battle stories.
Rachel sat in front of her dinner tray, stunned. She had been tremendously hungry. Now, she stared at her food but neither saw nor smelled it. Instead her mind spun over and over, stuck. Something so unimaginable had happened to Valerie. How should she feel about it? She could not even bring herself to think about it properly. Something inside her felt torn, wrenched.
Could there be things she did not want to know, after all?
Not wanting to know everything was too alien a concept to properly contemplate. Yet, Rachel could not help wishing that it was last week again, before something so horrible had happened. Lifting her head sluggishly, she gazed around her. True, there were lots of excited conversations as people shared their experiences from the afternoon’s adventures, and plenty of students looked unsettled. Other than that, though, it seemed like a perfectly normal evening. People chatted. Familiars barked. Dishes clattered. Silverware clanked. Chairs squeaked along the floor.
How could such terrible things occur, and everything not be transformed?
Breaded fish and potato salad sat on her plate, but Rachel could not bring herself to eat. She had misplaced her stomach. The rest of her seemed to be there, but there was no spot inside her for food to fill. With Herculean efforts, she took a couple of sips of grape juice.
Was this how her grandfather had felt when he suffered his tragedy?
• • •
“Psst. Nastasia.” Zoë Forrest leaned over. Her hair, short except for one long braid, was bright green. The narrow braid hung in front of her right shoulder. It had a large mottled brown and white feather stuck in it. “Even royalty are allowed to eat fish sticks with their hands.”
Nastasia appeared unusually pale. Yet, she calmly ate her strips of breaded fish with a knife and fork. “In times of trauma, it is best to maintain discipline. Even when eating fish fingers.”
Rachel forced herself to take another sip of grape juice. “That’s a bit like what my grandfather used to say.”
“Oh?” Zoë asked, tipping her chair back. “What was that?”
Rachel was so weary that she could hardly hold her fork, but she forced herself to rally. Deepening her voice to match the intonations of her grandfather’s voice, she tapped first her temple and then her heart in imitation of his gestures. “‘Think now, Child. Feel later. There will be time enough to mourn when you bury the dead. If you think first and mourn later, you might not have as many dead to bury.’”
Rachel blinked with surprise. Wasn’t that how she had comported herself today, during the fight against Dr. Mordeau? In fact, wasn’t that what she was doing right now? Her grandfather would have been proud of her.
The thought almost made her smile.
“That’s rather creepy.” Zoë made a face, scrunching up one eye.
“I approve.” The princess nodded regally. “You were lucky to have known your grandfather.” She pierced a piece of fish with her fork, looking thoughtful.
The princess remained quiet until Zoë started talking with Joy O’Keefe, a cheerful young woman with mouse-brown hair and a heart-shaped face. Joy recited her adventures of that afternoon, describing with great excitement how the princess saved her life when Jonah Strega tried to stab her. The others at the table listened to her recitation, enthralled.
Nastasia spoke softly to Rachel, “I have never met my grandfather…unless the older man, whom I remembered when Agent MacDannan played her music, was him. The gentleman looked a good deal like my father, but
…”
“Yes?” Rachel inclined her head toward Nastasia so she could hear better.
“If my grandfather were alive, wouldn’t he still be king?”
“Oh.” Rachel blinked. “Maybe this man was a different relative, like a great uncle?”
“Perhaps,” the princess mused. “But why could I not remember him before today? I remembered coming into a room and finding him speaking with my father. Nothing more. Why was I made to forget that? More importantly, why did Mordeau ask Valerie questions that implied that she thought my father might come from…elsewhere?”
“I don’t know.” Rachel forced herself to try a bite of the fish. To her surprise, it tasted good. She was even able to swallow it. “Maybe that gentleman is your grandfather, and he is from Outside. Maybe, King of Magical Australia is a courtesy title.”
“Courtesy title?”
“You know, when a father has more than one title, so he fobs one off on his son? My brother Peter is the Earl of Falconridge, but my father isn’t dead. His title is Duke of Devon.”
“You mean like the Prince of Wales? Wouldn’t my father be a prince then?”
Rachel shrugged. “Maybe your grandfather is an even higher rank. Grand Imperial Majesty? Only, wouldn’t you have had a vision of your father, if he were from Outside?”
“I only have visions the very first time I touch someone. Or they touch me,” she added darkly, brushing the back of her hand across that same spot on her forehead again. “If I had a vision the first time I touched my father, as a newborn, I would not remember it.”
Rachel nodded. “Even I only remember events from after I learned to speak.”
Thinking of her childhood reminded her of her grandfather yet again. After he died, Rachel had taken over his tower. It was the highest part of the Old Castle, the original edifice of Gryphon Park built in 1452. At the top of the tower was a library. If she bent close to the shaft of her bristleless, she could fly her steeplechaser straight up through the center of the spiral staircase, directly into the top chamber with its wonderful scent of old books.
Shelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling, except for the high, round windows. A cavernous fireplace kept the room warm and cheery. Wing-backed chairs provided comfortable places to curl up and read. In three small alcoves, three eternal flames burned—one before a portrait of Alfred the Great, the king who had bestowed the original land grant for Gryphon Park; one before a painting of a Victorian woman surrounded by five happy children; and one in front of a likeness of the Second Duke of Devon, the builder of the Old Castle. Those things and thousands of books made Grandfather’s Library the most wonderful place in her world.
Because it was his tower, filled with his journals and his memoirs, she felt close to him there. She would curl up in one of the big chairs and pore through his thoughts and experiences, fascinated by the parts of his life that had happened before she met him. Yet, in the dozens and dozens of journals she had read, there had been no mention of a terrible tragedy.
How could he have suffered as terribly as Dr. Mordeau and Dean Moth implied and never mentioned it?
A wave of homesickness swept over her. She missed Gryphon Park. She loved their tenant farmers, the forests, the fields, the ruins on Gryphon Tor. She loved the great mansion itself, as if it were a dear friend. For her, living there was like dwelling in paradise. Yet, she was always aware that it was a paradise from which, ultimately, she would be expelled. Even from a tiny age, she had understood this. Someday, Gryphon Park would belong to her brother Peter. Upon her marriage, she would depart to join the world of her new husband.
Rachel shot a cautious glance across the dining hall at where Gaius sat at Von Dread’s table, laughing with William and a perky dark-haired upperclassman whose name, Rachel recalled, was Jenny Dare. Gaius was adorably cute, but he was a farmer’s son who wanted to be a scientist. If Rachel married a commoner, like Gaius, she would have to leave the aristocratic World of the Wise—the great manors and noble castles that so sang to her.
She would be cast out of paradise.
Across the room, Rachel could see the princess’s siblings heading purposefully toward their table. The oldest brother, Ivan, the crown prince of Magical Australia, looked both furious and concerned. Rachel guessed that he had only just heard what befell his sister at the hands of the Transylvanian prince.
As she regarded Ivan, an unexpected sensation of mirth took hold of her. She felt too solemn to laugh, but, leaning close to the princess, she confided with a wan smile, “You realize if I married your brother Ivan. I would be your sister…” Her smile grew slightly more robust. “When he becomes king, I would outrank you.”
The princess touched Rachel’s arm. “I would be honored to have such a sister.”
Rachel looked down shyly, pleased.
The first bite had made it down her throat. Rachel tried some of the potato salad, which she had to admit tasted quite good. Sighing, she resigned herself to eating another fish finger.
• • •
The princess’s siblings descended upon her, expressing great concern. Rachel slipped from her chair and headed back to the kitchens, to give the Romanovs some room. As she refilled her glass of grape juice, she caught a glimpse of John Darling talking intently with Marta Fisher and Oonagh MacDannan, perhaps telling them of his part in the events. He looked so handsome that Rachel stumbled. Catching herself, so that she did not spill her juice all over herself for a second time in front of him, she jerked her head away. Then, thinking back three seconds, she examined him in her perfect memory, where there was no danger of being caught staring.
He leaned against a pillar, so lanky and athletic, so intelligent and so tousled. His dark hair stuck up. His suit and half-cape bore rips from his recent tussle against the geased students from Drake. Even seeing him in her memory made her knees feel wobbly.
Three years of yearning, while she watched him from afar at Yule parties and Wisecraft picnics, welled up inside her. John was a senior at the upper school, the same as Peter and Gaius.
If Gaius could like her, why not John?
Should she walk over and talk to him?
They had so many things in common. They were both expert flyers. They both wanted to protect the school and their fellow students. As of today, they had something more in common. They had both been given the brush-off by his father. Rachel imagined the two of them grumbling good-naturedly about the Agents, sharing stories about how they had been denied information. She could confess to him the secret things she had learned, tell him about her struggle with his father, share with him the strange events of the past week. How pleased James Darling would be that his son was finally in the thick of things. How pleased John would be that she had taken him into her confidence. She pictured John’s expression of amazement and concern, as he listened to her exploits, him reaching out to brush a hair from her face, his fingers lingering on her cheek.
Snapping herself out of that daydream, she glanced again at where he laughed with the two girls, his cousin Oonagh and Mr. Fisher’s daughter—all three of them were children of the Six Musketeers. What would she say in front of the two older girls? What if she froze up? Made a fool of herself again?
No. Better not to talk to him now.
But she should speak to him before she made up her mind about Gaius Valiant. Quietly, she resolved that, if she could catch him alone, she would find the courage to approach him.
• • •
As Rachel returned to the table, she came face to face with the princess’s eldest brother, as he departed, a tray in his hand. Ivan stood over six feet tall with dirty blond hair and very dark brown eyes. Like the princess, his robes had a golden crest on the left breast that showed an emu. He was dressed in half-academic, which meant that his sleeveless robes revealed his white shirt sleeves. While he was neither muscle-bound nor as supernaturally beautiful as his sister, he was solidly built and rather handsome. Rachel noted that he still wore his copper White Hart k
nife hanging from a loop at his hip.
Glancing thoughtfully at Nastasia, who sat primly eating her dinner with her knife and fork, Rachel approached the older boy. “You’re Ivan Romanov.”
“I am. And who are you?”
“Rachel Griffin.”
“Laurel’s little sister?” Ivan looked intrigued. “You helped my brother Alex and his crazy friends fight a wraith?”
“Actually, he helped me fight a wraith, but yes.”
He leaned down until he was closer to her height. “That was very brave of you.”
His cheerful grin dispelled some of the gloom that had fallen over her. Rachel smiled. Tilting her head to gaze up at him, she wondered what kind of a person he was. She decided the bold approach would be best.
“Are you stiff and proper like your sister?”
He looked amused. “Not in the least.”
“And neither is Alex,” Rachel mused. “He runs around with Abraham Van Helsing and Conan MacDannan chasing non-existent vampires. What about your sister Alexis and your mother? Are they like Nastasia?”
Ivan glanced over at where pretty, blond Alexis spoke quietly with her friends, scholarly girls wearing glasses. “Alexis is the most normal of us, I would say. Cheerful but level-headed. Mother is calm and serious…but not like Nastasia. No one is like Nastasia.”
“How did Nastasia come to be the way she is?”
“We don’t know.” Ivan sighed and put down the tray he had been returning to the kitchen on an empty table nearby. “We think she may be overcompensating for Father’s lack of…” he waved a hand. “er…decorum.”
“I gather your father is…” Rachel searched for a polite word for daft. “Absentminded?”
“Absentminded? Father?” Ivan’s voice rose in amazement. “Not in the least. I’d say he’s the sharpest mind I know!”
“But…doesn’t he confuse crocodiles with swimmers and kookaburras with spies?”
“Confuse…” Ivan made an involuntary noise, perhaps a gasp of laughter. “You think he did all that by mistake? Oh, not at all! That sort of thing is Father’s…” Now Ivan was the one searching for a word. “Let’s call it his sense of humor.”
The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel (A Book of Unexpected Enlightenment 2) Page 11
