Bursting through the stacks, she shot out into the open. The wake of her broom sent books fluttering and papers flying across the study desks. Rachel winced. She had forgotten about the wake. The librarian, a very tall man with gray hair but a youthful face, dressed in the owl-feathered robe of a monk of Athena, looked up, startled.
As he began to frown, she threw him an apologetic shrug over her shoulder. “Sorry! Very sorry! Won’t do it again!”
The librarian’s scowl turned into a bemused smile. “See that you don’t!”
Picking up a dog whistle, he blew. Soundlessly, silver sparkles left his instrument. The spilled books rose up into the air. Rachel smiled and sped onward.
• • •
Tired yet happy, she put her broom away and went to dinner. Coming out of the serving line with her tray, she stood searching the dining hall for the face she longed to see.
Salome Iscariot sashayed up behind her. “He’s not here.”
“Who’s not here?” Rachel asked in a rush.
“Val-iant,” Salome broke the name into two parts. Rachel tensed, fearing that she was about to be mocked, but Salome’s smile was cheerful.
“What makes you think I was looking for him?” Rachel asked casually, heat slipping through her false calm and onto her cheeks.
Salome rolled her eyes. Before answering, she paused to shoot a smoldering glance at a passing boy. The young man stumbled and nearly dropped his tray. “Oh. Come. On. What girl—having just acquired a new boyfriend—would not look for him?” She swayed toward Rachel, her huge luminous eyes dancing with mischievous delight. “Especially such a cute boyfriend.”
Rachel’s face grew pinker. “How do you know he’s not here?”
“He’s down in the Summoning Vault, putting charges in his new wand. Von Dread has a whole horde of people helping him. I escaped because, as a freshman, I know nothing.”
Rachel chuckled, but underneath she felt a wrenching sense of loss at not having been asked to participate. She wished she had been invited—even if there was little she could do.
An idea struck her. She inclined her head closer to Salome’s and whispered, “Hey, could you do me a favor?”
“Depends on what it is,” Salome whispered back. “Annoy somebody? Yes. Wear my bra as a hat? Probably not.”
Rachel paused. “Why would I want you to wear your brassiere on your head?”
“No idea. You’re the one asking the favor.”
“But…I didn’t…” Rachel puffed out her cheeks and blew, sending a stray wisp of hair flying. “That wasn’t what I was going to ask you.”
“Probably wise. What can I do? Please make it be to annoy someone. Please. Pretty please with a brownie on top…and I don’t mean a supernatural bakery worker.”
“Er…sorry. No. I just wondered if you could ask around Drake Hall, discretely, and find out a little bit about Gaius.”
“Ooo. Spying and gossip! Right up my alley.” Salome pantomimed pulling out a notebook and taking notes. “What do you want to know?”
“Um…” Rachel blinked. “Oh, I don’t know. What do other kids think of him? Who were his previous girlfriends? What kind of stuff did he do during the last three years? Don’t pry. I’m just curious what’s publicly known about him…and I can’t ask my brother. He’d go ballistic.”
“I imagine so.” Salome pursed her lips with suppressed delight. “My brothers would go ballistic, if I were dating a sixteen-year-old. My boyfriend is only a year older than me—he’s my brother Carl’s best friend—and my brothers still give me a hard time.”
Rachel blushed.
Salome leaned toward her. “He is a cutie, though! This boy of yours.”
“Yes,” Rachel murmured, her eyes dancing, “that he is.”
As they approached a table, Rachel noticed an atmosphere of suppressed excitement, the sort that often accompanied disasters.
“What is everyone talking about?” she asked.
Salome, always delighted to be the bearer of ill news, blurted out, “You didn’t hear? A truck struck the Wisecraft building in New York. Dr. Mordeau escaped from her cell. The entire building is on lockdown. No one goes in. No one goes out.”
“Oh, no!” Rachel breathed.
“How do they stop prisoners from jumping, I wonder?” Salome mused. “Can’t she turn into a beam of light and, wham, she’s out of there? Do Wisecraft offices have no-jump zones, similar to Roanoke?”
Recalling how Vladimir Von Dread had jumped on school grounds, she wondered if anyone thought to check whether Mortimer Egg had the password to the Wisecraft’s wards.
Aloud, she said only, “That’s rather scary. My father and my oldest sister work for the Wisecraft. I’m ever so glad they’re safe in London!”
• • •
After dinner, the others took off to study, leaving Rachel, Nastasia, Joy, and Sigfried at the dinner table with Valerie, who had come over to join them. She was reading a history book.
“This is amazing,” Valerie murmured, her nose in the book. “Did you know that it was once legal to mail children? A couple put fifty three cents in stamps on their daughter, and the mailman delivered her to her grandmother’s house. Boy, can’t help wondering how different the world would be if they had not outlawed that.”
“Is this World of the Wise history?” asked Joy.
“Nope.” Valerie turned the page with a flourish. “Regular, mundane, Unwary America.”
“Thought so,” Joy giggled. “The World of the Wise is a lot less safety-conscious than the Unwary. We probably still ship kids by mail.”
“I thought you all sent your posts by owls.” Sigfried surreptitiously wrapped a slice of pizza in a napkin and slipped it into his pocket. “Or was it vultures? Flying rodents?”
“That’s fictional,” Valerie smirked. Her head snapped up from her book. “Isn’t it?”
“There’s no such thing as homing owls, though that would be fantastic!” Rachel laughed. “But we do still have a loft at Gryphon Park from back when we kept homing pigeons.”
Valerie glanced at the princess’s Tasmanian tiger who sat chewing on a bone beside its mistress. “Please tell me there are still passenger pigeons in the World of the Wise.”
“No. Sorry.” Rachel’s face fell. “They really were killed off.”
The girls were all quiet for a moment, their expressions a chorus of sadness.
Sigfried looked around, as if counting who was present. “Ace! The uninitiated have departed. Valerie, you won’t believe what happened today!”
“Mr. Smith!” the princess cried, shocked. “We promised not to tell!”
“You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone,” Valerie assured him with a big smile.
“I didn’t promise anything.” Sigfried dismissed the idea with a gesture of disdain. “I told them I wouldn’t keep secrets from Goldilocks, here.”
“I order you not to tell her!” the princess commanded. “Are you my knight, or not?”
“But…” Sigfried drew himself up, “what kind of knight would I be if I were not loyal? Could I be your knight, Highness, and betray you? The one order you can never give a knight is to be unknightly. Leaving my girl in the dark is unknightly.” He took a bite of food and continued, his mouth full. “It’s also foolish. We have to pool our information to puzzle it out.”
“I confess to being tremendously intrigued.” Valerie looked back and forth, her eyes bright with curiosity. “I’m in the Inner Circle, right? Didn’t we agree to share all information?”
“We did!” Sigfried and Lucky nodded at each other. Lucky was under the table munching on a pile of leftover pizza crusts he had collected from other tables and some student’s left shoe. “So today, during our detention, we met this—”
Rachel cut him off, her voice urgent. “Siggy! We were told that if we tell even one other person…someone dies.”
“I don’t care if someone I hardly know dies! They have no right to command me to silence! Valerie is my
girlfriend. A guy has to be loyal to his girl! What loyalty do I owe a stranger? Right, Lucky?”
“Right, Boss!” chimed the dragon.
Siggy continued, “The way Romeo was loyal to Juliet. Or Pyramus to Thisbe. Or Tristan to Isolde. Or…blimey! Aren’t there any loyal lovers who didn’t bite the dust?”
Rachel bit her lip, torn. She hated keeping secrets, too. It weighed upon her like a heavy yoke. The idea of keeping the matter from Gaius was even more painful, and Gaius wasn’t even a member of the Inner Circle. She already had to keep things from him. Siggy did not have to keep anything else from Valerie. And yet, she could not bear to think that she might contribute to another’s death, especially that of the Elf who had given her such a noble gift.
Reluctantly, Valerie held up her hand. “You can’t tell me. Not if someone is really going to die. That would make me an accomplice to murder.”
“So?” Sigfried frowned angrily. “You’re my girlfriend! I tell you everything!”
“No!” Valerie insisted. “I won’t participate in a felony!” She reached out and squeezed his hand. “I appreciate your loyalty, Sigfried. I really do.”
Scowling with annoyance, Siggy puffed out his cheeks and blew.
• • •
As she lay in bed that night, Rachel played back her memory of the day, recalling the Elf and the Raven and all that they had revealed. She could now remember the missing part. She had crossed the stone wall on an impulse without thinking clearly. It had been a bit like being in a dream, rather like what happened when she stood too close to the elf—remembering roses and trees growing on trees and the rest. Once on the other side, she had seen the Tree and walked towards it.
Thinking back, she could remember other things that were different, too—little things. There was no pattern that she could discern: a name in a history book, a landmark that was slightly to the left of where it had been when she was a child, a silver rattle in her mother’s jewelry box with an A engraved on it. Why those things and nothing else? She could not guess.
An idea occurred to her. She searched her memory more diligently, examining dictionaries and encyclopedias. She could find no new information about the orphaned words—the words everyone used, but no one knew what they meant, like friar, saint, and steeple.
She did find one forgotten thing. Once, in her grandfather’s library—the one in the highest chamber of the tower of the old castle around which Gryphon Park mansion had been built— she had come upon a very old bestiary. It was a leather-bound book illustrated with delicate, hand-drawn illuminations of fanciful creatures. When she reviewed her memory of having read it, there was one additional page she had forgotten.
On it was a picture of a bird-winged woman. She looked much like the Raven in his man form or like the statue she had found her first day at school. The word above the picture was one Rachel had never encountered before: angel.
Nothing was making sense. She wanted so much to speak to someone about it. In particular, she wanted to talk to Gaius. She could not tell him about the Elf, but she could share what she had learned, so long as she did not identify her source. Perhaps he could help her make sense of it all. She could not help smiling as she anticipated how impressed he would be.
Gaius credited her with his return to his true shape. Perhaps he was right. It had taken great courage to confront Dread. She replayed her conversation with Von Dread and concluded that she was pleased with how she had comported herself. While recalling the conversation, however, she noticed something she had missed at the time. The gold, silver, and bronze disks hanging on the wall beside his bed were Olympic medals.
Sitting up in the dark, she pulled her knees to her chest and drew the memory into the foreground, examining the awards. He had taken golds in fencing, skiing, skating, and the sorcerous sport of septathlon. There were also silvers for swimming and shooting, and a bronze in fulgurating—a sport of the Wise involving striking targets with lightning. Even in the World of the Wise, winning so many metals in so many sports was a feat of legendary proportions.
Holy Jove! He must be good at everything!
Rachel had known Vladimir Von Dread won these events. She recalled having heard that he took time during his senior year at the upper school to compete in the Winter Olympics. Yet, hearing it was somehow different from seeing the medals with her own eyes.
Her impression of him, reading on his bed, altered. He seemed more impressive, more majestic. The awareness that she had been in his bedroom, while he was clad only in his sweats—which totally failed to hide the firm muscles of his upper thighs—seemed palpable. Her lips felt dry, her body strangely hot.
Despite his casual dress, he had been regal, imperial. He had radiated…Rachel pressed her fingertips together, searching for the word. What had she felt when she looked at him? Intimidated? Impressed?
Desire? Rachel shivered. She had never felt desire for a boy, not real desire, such as appeared in romances. The thought that she might feel such toward Von Dread dismayed her. She did not want to desire anyone but Gaius.
Besides, desire was the wrong word. It implied something coming from her toward him. What she needed was a concept that described an effect drew her towards him. It made her feel as if she were aware of him, even when he was not present.
Magnetic.
He was magnetic—as if he were a magnet, and she an iron filing.
Trembling, she lay down, closed her eyes, tried very hard to think of something else, anything other than the dark penetrating eyes of Vladimir Von Dread.
Chapter Twenty-Three:
Adventures with Elf Herbs
For the next four days, Rachel attended classes without interruption, except for the assembly on Tuesday, during which the faculty attempted to soothe fears over Friday’s events. Not a single wraith supped on a student. Not a single tutor transformed into a flame-belching dragon. Not a single world-guarding Raven glared at her with blood-red eyes.
The only downside was that she saw very little of Gaius. He spent all his free time closed away in the summoning vault adding spells to his new wand, though, he seemed happy to see her whenever they met. He would stop and smile and make an amusing remark and even kiss her lightly on the lips. He also arranged a meeting between her group and Dread for late Thursday night in the gym, after the main activities of the Knights of Walpurgis.
Despite waiting eagerly for Thursday, she enjoyed her classes. The subjects fascinated her. She loved the things they were learning: the structure of language, how to draw a perfect circle, the ancient origins of the Wise, the tune for summoning domestic will-o-wisps, how ash, cedar, and juniper were best for warding knives, and Euclid’s Postulates. She asked many questions, some even made her tutors smile.
Math class was conducted by substitutes—mainly other staff members who temporarily took on an extra class—while the school searched for a new tutor to replace Dr. Mordeau. Normally, that class would have been Rachel’s least favorite, since she shared it with the girls from Drake. Their recent adventures, however—being geased and told to kill other students—had left them subdued. They hardly spoke to one another, much less anyone else. Even Cydney Graves, who previously had been so mean to her, left her alone.
The downside was that classes went so slowly. Unlike at home—where she had studied at her own breakneck pace—the tutors aimed their instruction at students who did not have perfect recall. A great deal of each period was devoted to review, repeating the same idea over and over. Some classes contained so much repetition that it caused Rachel physical pain. Her head throbbed. Her eyesight blurred. She could not force herself to pay attention. She wished she had something else to do in class, something that could keep her mind busy without her appearing disrespectful.
Now, sitting at her lab station in science, staring out through the tinted windows—which had been repaired since she crashed through them on the previous Friday—Rachel tuned out Mr. Fisher’s fourth reiteration of the preferred methods for placing es
sences into objects. Instead, she recalled the conversation between the Raven and the Elf. It worried her that the Elf had been so concerned about the weakening of the spell that bound the demon Azrael. Illondria had made it sound as if it would be only a matter of days before the fiendish creature broke free. According to the Guardian, once this happened, terrible events would follow.
What would happen if Azrael broke free? Rachel’s mind replayed the details of the conversation, seeking clues that might help stop Mortimer Egg from killing more families. Alas, nothing presented itself. She hoped that the Wisecraft, informed of the matter through Nastasia’s report to the dean, was having better luck.
After half an hour of spinning her mental wheels, Rachel’s attention drifted. If cleverness could not help her save people, maybe old-fashioned heroics could. She pictured the dangers: the failing Walls, the demon Azrael. In her imagination, all this looked like tornadoes of black whirling nothingness rushing the campus, accompanied by smoke-winged minions shooting cruel spikes. She imagined herself leaping in front a spike to protect her friends.
The idea that she might be hurt, or even killed, did not trouble her.
She did not even think about it.
Gazing out over the hemlocks at Stony Tor, rising bare and rocky in the distance, she dreamed of courage and sacrifice. She wanted desperately to do something noble, something of worth: to save her world; to save her friends; to save even a single stranger.
She dreamed of a chance to be brave.
• • •
“We won’t begin our athames until next week,” Mr. Fisher’s words broke through the haze of her daydream. “Today, for a change of pace, we’re going to make a chameleon elixir.”
The Raven, The Elf, and Rachel (A Book of Unexpected Enlightenment 2) Page 27
