Alexa yanked Peter down, and he crossed his arms over his chest with a stubborn look. She seemed to struggle for a few seconds, then said, “How’s your hand?” He held it out and she examined it.
“That was a very foolish thing to do,” Dad said.
“Foolish.” Alexa nodded in agreement, then added in a low voice, “But a good punch.”
“You want to punch with your whole body. Not just your hand,” Dad added.
Something chimed, and Dad curved the carpet up for a few seconds before we lurched into the air. Dad and Alexa cracked their heads against the force field, but we ords flew up, straight through the barrier. There was a moment of blind terror, and then the rope around my waist jerked me back down to safety.
Barbarian Mike and Trixie were coming up beneath us. They weren’t smiling anymore. They circled and dropped under us again, and Alexa made a grab for Frances and me. Her arms wrapped around us just as the adventurers smashed into us again, good and hard. Alexa managed to hold us in place, but I was starting to feel sick to my stomach.
Dad took our carpet up, then twisted us around and rocketed us back down, and started zipping in a confusing zigzag. “Dad, I need you to drop the force field,” Alexa said. “I’m putting a stop to this now.”
“There are a lot of people around here,” Dad said as we whizzed by a crowded carpet.
“Trust me.” Alexa grinned, and Dad dropped the force field. The magic barrier couldn’t stop ords, but it kept Alexa and Dad in and the wind out. Without it, the wind was unbelievable. It barreled into us, the carpet fibers burning along my legs as the wind pushed us back. The safety belt cut into me so tightly I thought it was going to snap me in half.
Alexa shouted something to Dad that I couldn’t hear, and he slowed down. He tried to separate us from the crowd, but there were so many people screeching and shouting as we wove past. As the adventurers got closer, Alexa stood. She looked wild and vengeful in all that wind.
“I order you to stop, in the name of King Stephen!” Alexa boomed, her voice doing that weird double-resonance thing it does when she’s really calling in the power.
“Ord lover!” Trixie shouted, so loud we could hear her over the rushing wind. “No king of mine!”
And then Alexa got the Look. It’s a lot like the look Mom gives us when she has had enough, but without the compassion or restraint. When Alexa gives you the Look, you either sit down and shut up or you get the heck out of there.
Barbarian Mike and Trixie ducked around and under us—and in one quick flash Alexa leaped over us and off the carpet. For one endless second she hung in the air like a pendant, the magic around her so strong the entire world seemed drawn toward her.
And even though the adventurers’ carpet was some distance away, Alexa landed neatly on it, right in between Barbarian Mike and Trixie. I saw flames building around Trixie again, but Alexa had control of the carpet now and it plummeted, spiraling toward the ground until it disappeared below us.
Dad snapped the force field back up. “What exactly … does your sister do?” Fred managed, staring over the edge of the carpet.
“She’s in education,” I said.
CHAPTER
9
Barbarian Mike and Trixie had booked it into the forest, leaving Alexa gulping ice water after swallowing one too many fireballs. The cops said they couldn’t really do anything except take a report of the incident and “keep an eye out for them.”
Mom was furious with us when we met up with her and explained what happened, even though it’s not like we asked Barbarian Mike and Trixie to chase us. Still, Mom told Alexa that she’d scared us half to death and to never do it again. Alexa lied and said she wouldn’t. And Dad worried that Alexa might get in trouble; authorities frown on time spinning—it’s that whole “no reordering the world to suit you” thing. But Alexa basically told us that while King Steve wouldn’t let her get away with murder, he pretty much gave her free rein. “If spinning a few seconds to save a kid is going to upset the court I’ll take the heat. Besides, I should get some fun out of suffering through that awful Summer Palace.”
Fred just kept laughing about how that was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, then rushed on, explaining, “about your parents selling you. It stinks.”
“Deeta’s … not my mom,” Fred said. “She’s my stepmom.”
“It still stinks,” I said.
Fred shrugged, his eyes on the carpet. “I’m not surprised. I’m not. I don’t know, I guess it’s hard on them.”
Alexa scoffed at that, and Mom elbowed her with a stern, “Alexa Eleanor.”
“That’s no excuse,” I said.
“Well, I am an ord,” Fred said.
“That still doesn’t make it okay.”
That got us talking about being ords, and about our Judgings. I told Fred about mine, and how it stunk, and I asked if he found out when he was Judged too. And Fred told me he had suspected it for a while but hadn’t been sure. One time he and his brothers had been babysitting their young cousin while their parents were hosting a charity banquet. Apparently they started roughhousing and his older brother threw a spell at another brother and it hit Fred on the arm when it shot by.
“Arthur panicked,” Fred said. “He thought he nailed me, that I was going to turn into a freak or something.” Fred paused and cleared his throat. “But I was okay, so he thought …”
“That he hadn’t hit you,” I finished.
“But he did, I felt it. They got Peggy. Our cousin. They got her less than me, and she disappeared.” He snapped his fingers. “We were still tearing up the attic, looking for her, when our parents got home. She ended up as an umbrella stand in the foyer.” Fred smiled, but it looked out of place. “That was the second-worst day of my life.”
He hadn’t known for sure until he was Judged this past winter. They asked him to leave school right afterward, just like me, so he’d been out much longer and he was worried about classes. “I tried to read more,” he said. “I went to the library a lot. They tried to keep me out but, you know, they couldn’t.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Protective barriers. Warding spells. Force fields. None of those things work on … people like us.”
“Ords,” Peter said.
“Yes, exactly, ords, thank you,” Fred said. “We can walk through all that. You mean you haven’t tried it? Not even once?” I shook my head and Fred grinned. “It’s kinda cool.”
“It’s called breaking and entering,” Mom told us, “and that’s illegal.”
Fred nodded, chastened.
“I—” Frances paused. We looked at her. She turned pink and whispered, “I spent a lot of time at the library, also. But I haven’t missed any school …”
I asked how long she had known.
“A month. My birthday is August first.”
“So your parents really had to move fast to get you in this year.”
“It was—”
“Pardon?” Fred said, leaning forward.
“It was Mrs. Eames, actually,” Frances said, her eyes darting back and forth like a frightened puppy’s. She had the most enormous blue eyes, they seemed to take up half her face. “My parents are very busy. They couldn’t be expected to …”
“Who’s Mrs. Eames?” I asked.
“She’s our neighbor. She lives across the street. I, um, lived with her after my Judging.”
“Oh,” I said. There was an awkward, silent moment. I mean, everybody knows that’s what you do with an ord. You get rid of them. But my parents had kept me, and Peter’s mom kept him, and Fred—okay, his dad and stepmom had apparently tried to sell him to adventurers, but still, that meant they’d retained custody, at least.
So I said, “I’m sorry,” but that didn’t seem like enough either. It didn’t matter; Frances had already tucked into herself again, and she didn’t answer. I turned to Peter desperately. “What about you?”
Peter didn’t look up from his book. “I have always known.”
“How?”
It took a moment, but he answered. “My mom.”
I glanced at Alexa, confused.
“Peter is an ord because his mother is an ord,” Alexa explained, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“I thought that wasn’t tried and true,” Mom said.
“It’s not,” Alexa said. “But it is very likely.”
Originally, Rothermere was just the site of the royal palace, shaped from a single perfect garnet that the very first queen, Samira, discovered deep in the earth. Queen Samira wanted a nice place where she could host official guests for parties and hold those endless political meetings that don’t really accomplish anything, as opposed to the house she had by the sea, where she could run around barefoot with her kids. It’s a beautiful castle, gleaming red in the sunshine and black in the moonlight. We have been up to Rothermere a lot—Olivia went to school in the city, and later for Gil’s book events. I have taken the official castle tour five times, which never gets old because the structure changes from day to day.
Of course, if you’re going to have a political centerpiece, you’re going to need a lot of support, and no sooner had Queen Samira opened the doors than the rest of the city exploded around it.
We arrived just after noon, when the sky was clear and the sun was soft and the city glowed like a pearl without the oyster. Dad kept us hovering above the crazy local traffic until we got close to the school, then brought us down so fast even Frances was shocked into smiling. The climate was more humid here than in Lennox, the air hot and heavy with the scent of people and clay, incense, and sausages. The streets were swamped, people jostling each other as they rushed past, checking out store windows, and vendors selling charms or incense or jewelry or—oh, pretzels, those looked good. And the noise—voices and shouting and music and every so often there were sirens.
Following Alexa’s directions, Dad parked the carpet right in front of a large building on an unusually empty street. Well, only half-empty. The opposite side was just as busy as every other place we had seen, but the sidewalk in front of the school? Nothing. Nobody. Carved into the paving stones was ward upon spell upon curse, until they all curled in on each other and it was impossible to pick one from another. Jeremy could probably tell the difference, but then, Jeremy was memorizing the entire spell catalog, front to back, for fun. When we climbed off the carpet, Mom winced from the force of the entry spells, and Dad took a moment to brace himself.
This was it. This was where I was going to spend the next eight years of my life. I took a good long look at the school, taking a couple steps back to see it all.
The school was square, and built out of dark-brown bricks. It was smaller than the buildings around it, only four stories tall, with a glass structure on top that gleamed so brightly under the sun it hurt to look. There was a fence all the way around the building, with bars on the first-floor windows and thick, strong shutters on the upper windows. The main entrance was barred by a sturdy gate that stretched above our heads, then arched into a short tunnel, revealing a courtyard beyond. The window bars, shutters, and front gate were all made from the same rough dark metal with a strange, muted sheen, almost like sunlight on frost. Cold iron, I realized. But that much must have cost a fortune. The most iron anybody ever needed was a few sprinklings of iron dust in the corners, to keep the fairies out. If someone had spent that much money on that much iron, then that someone had to be serious about this school.
See, cold iron isn’t just cold, or hard or strong. It feeds off magic, sucks it in. It drains a normal person’s magic to get even stronger and leaves you empty. It’s got, well, not a mind of its own, but an awareness. I have heard that cold iron works best on things like night fey, and Red Ladies, and all those scary creatures that are just supposed to be in bedtime tales, that kids aren’t supposed to know are real.
Flowering vines climbed up the stone walls, bursting with bright, hot color. But they gave the iron a wide berth as they crawled up one side of the entrance and curved over the arch, leaves dripping down. To the right, the flowers politely arced around a shiny engraved plaque, which read:
MARGARET GREEN SCHOOL
Chartered in 1 STPN
by writ of His Royal Majesty
King Stephen I
There was another, smaller plaque on the gate with a button: RING FOR ASSISTANCE.
Alexa pushed the button, and there were three strong, clear rings in succession. It took a minute for someone to answer, and Mom’s shoulders slowly tightened and Dad started shifting from foot to foot. Apparently, the iron affected them too.
“Breathe through your mouth,” Alexa told them. She was standing close enough to the gate that her words fogged in the air. “It helps a little.”
A woman with glasses whisked up to the gate. She was lean and wiry, with an aura of shrewd-eyed responsibility about her, as if she did a lot of babysitting. Her face was lean too. She had one of those quirked-eyebrow, thin-lipped faces that’s not so much pretty as it is interesting. Her cap of short dark hair was uneven, as if she cut it herself. She was wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved jacket buttoned all the way up, scuffed leather boots, and a length of black chain around her hips like a belt. The deep, rich green of her jacket caught the light as she wrenched open the gate barehanded.
Most important, she had something—or maybe a lack of something—that reminded me of Ms. Whittleby. Of Peter, and Fred and Frances and me. The missing piece and the look in her eye that said “ord.” And she was old. Not as old as Ms. Whittleby (this one looked like she was in her early twenties, give or take a few years, maybe around Gil’s age), but still. Another one.
“You’re late,” she announced. Her voice was brusque but friendly. She took a good hard look at Alexa and said, “Fireballs, huh?”
Alexa grinned. “A couple.”
“Looks like more than a couple. Looks like more than just fire.”
Alexa shook her head. “One of these days I’m going to get used to you doing that, Becky.”
The woman looked at us and then dropped down into a crouch by Alexa’s hem. “Quick lesson,” she said, waving us kids down next to her. “The first part is obvious. This,” she said, drawing her finger along a line of thread in Alexa’s skirt, “is new. It tells us something damaged her dress and it needed to repair itself. See here,” she said, pointing at a trace of wavy magic clinging to the hem. “How it looks like heat off a griddle?”
“Could we step off the sidewalk for this?” Alexa asked.
“The next clue is the smell.” She grabbed Alexa’s hem and held it out toward us. “Go on, take a sniff.” Fred glanced at us, wary, and Frances shook her head, but Peter and I leaned in and smelled. It smelled like heat, thick and almost muggy, and beyond that, the acrid shadow of smoke. “That’s fire magic. There’s a little more to it than that, but those are the basics—”
“Becky,” Alexa said. “Could we please go inside? Before the charms in your sidewalk start eating through my nice new boots.”
Becky stood, smooth as a cat, and, grinning, swung the gate wider to wave us in. “Mrs. Murphy already checked everyone else in and she’s working on the dinner. Ms. Macartney’s taking them on a tour now. I can get O’Hara, though.”
She took us through the main entrance into the brightness of the courtyard. A middle-aged man sailed over as we entered. He had a hearty, good-natured face, and his clothes were well worn but clean, with professorly patches at the elbows. “Miss Hale!” he exclaimed, clasping Alexa’s hands in his. “What a completely expected surprise. However, we expected you to surprise us much earlier. I hope there wasn’t any trouble.”
“Fireballs,” Becky informed him.
“I thought you had the triumphant air of someone who’d just picked a fight,” Mr. O’Hara remarked. “Nothing serious, I hope?”
“Adventurers,” Alexa said. “A nasty pair. They got away, for the moment. I’d recom
mend upping security.”
“Because of a pair of adventurers?” Becky sounded skeptical.
“Because they were desperate enough for an ord that they chased us down and threw fireballs,” Alexa said. “If one pair of adventurers are that desperate, it won’t be long before they, or someone else, turn their greedy little minds to this school.”
“The children are safe here,” Mr. O’Hara said, more to Mom and Dad than Alexa.
“Here, yes. Absolutely. No worries. But outside?” Alexa turned to us. “I’ll be saying good-bye now. I have to speak to His Majesty.” She hugged me tight, twice. “I’ll be back as soon as I’m finished, okay? Save me a seat at dinner.” I nodded and she kissed Mom and Dad, apologizing, “I’m sorry. It’s work; I can’t help it.”
“We understand,” Mom said, planting kisses on her cheeks. “We’ll see you soon.” The or else was implied.
As Alexa rushed off, Mr. O’Hara turned to Mom and Dad. “You must be Miss Hale’s parents,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Miss Hale has told us quite a lot about your family, though I’m certain she’s told you next to nothing of what she does here. Let me assure you, Alexa is our single greatest champion. You should be very proud of her.”
“We are,” Mom said. You could hear it in her voice.
He smiled down at me. “Miss Hale has told us all about you as well, Miss Abigail.”
“I hope not all,” I said, because I have got plenty of embarrassing stories.
“No need to worry, almost all of it was good.”
Mr. O’Hara greeted Fred and Frances and Peter and welcomed us to the Margaret Green School. He said he hoped we were as excited to start the school year as they were. “If you would follow Mr. Dimitrios here”—we looked around for a Mr. Dimitrios—“he will take you to your rooms and hand out your keys. You are all on the second floor.” The courtyard was open and sunny but I couldn’t see anyone. I glanced at Fred, who shrugged. Peter still had his head in his book and Frances kept her eyes glued to the ground.
Ordinary Magic Page 6
