Ordinary Magic

by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

  They really should have paid more attention. Guards streamed out the window, poured around me, heading for them.

  I didn’t watch. I didn’t care. I ran for Peter, which was more of a limp because by that time my ankle seemed to remember twisting on the stairs and wanted to make up for lost time. I grabbed for him, and tripped on the last step. Peter tried to catch me, and we ended up awkwardly half sitting on the ground.

  A little ways away, Trixie and Mike battled and blasted at the guards, but they were hampered by the fact that they wouldn’t let go of each other.

  Peter grinned at me, and it was his first smile in so long it felt like his first smile ever. “You look terrible,” he said.

  I leaned against him and laughed.

  CHAPTER

  29

  It’s strange how I remember images, moments most of all. The alarm made everything blur together, but I remember the light shining oddly off Barbarian Mike’s and Trixie’s clasped hands as they were forced to surrender. I remember the confused look on one Kingsman’s face as he tried to cast me and Peter into a containment spell (they didn’t realize we were the victims at that point). I remember seeing one Kingsman, crouched down in front of me, seeing his mouth move as he said my name, realizing he knew my name, but not hearing it because that awful alarm was still screaming. He’d recognized me and convinced the others to stop trying to put us under arrest. Then he called for help for Peter. They took us into the palace, and I hobbled along until one of the Kingsmen shook his head and swooped me up in his arms. They took us into the small doctor’s office, and I remember waiting with Peter under the glaring lights and realizing that the alarms hadn’t followed us, that the pounding was coming from my own ears.

  We were barely there five minutes when Alexa burst in. She choked something out, I couldn’t hear what, and threw her arms around me.

  “What do you think,” she finally managed, “what do you think I felt like, getting a call in the middle of the night that the school’s been attacked, and I show up to find out you’re not there?” And she started crying. I’d never seen Alexa cry. Mom and Dad said she hadn’t cried since she was sixteen, when she begged them not to send her back to school after summer break. “I found Becky, and we tore through the goblin conclaves—all of them in the city! I didn’t wait for permission, I didn’t even ask! I threatened—” She put her hands over her mouth and crumbled.

  I hugged her; she hugged back until it hurt.

  “Did you find the other kids? The ones that were taken?” I asked when she calmed.

  Alexa nodded, and I could almost see her pulling herself back together. “Most of them.” Then she added, at seeing Peter’s blank look of horror, “They’re all alive. Fred was there. We got him back, he’s fine. But …” She paused for a very long time. “We’re still tracking down some of the other kids. The ones Trixie sold.”

  “Fran?” I asked.

  “Sold,” Peter said. He gripped my hand. “She was sold. I saw them take her away.”

  Afterward, Alexa took us back to the school. She guided us past the police barriers, through the courtyard to the dining hall—me on piggyback because the doctor confirmed my ankle was probably sprained and, after wrapping it up, told me to keep off it as much as possible.

  Inside the dining hall, all the tables had been pushed aside and there were blankets and pillows and cushions lined up on the floor for everyone to sleep on. It was like that first night with the red caps all over again, when we’d had to stay in the lounge. Except nobody was really sleeping. They lay there, staring at the ceiling, or the windows, or screwed up in their blankets so tight they’d probably have to be cut out. Mr. O’Hara sat in the middle of a circle of kids, reading aloud. It sounded like an adventure novel, something silly and empty and fun, like he never would have taught in class. Ms. Macartney was in a back corner, talking to a group of older students and scouring what looked like a map. And Mrs. Murphy walked up and down the rows, crouching down for a soft word here, a soothing hand there.

  And Fred? He was okay. He was scratched up but he was okay, and he was here, and he was safe. He bounded over a couple of curled-up students, and I slid off Alexa’s back, and we bounced up and down like idiots. Or tried to, anyway. And we even dragged Peter in, and he let us, because there are some moments when you don’t get to be standoffish, when it’s just not possible.

  CHAPTER

  30

  Mom and Dad were really, really, really mad at me, by the way. Alexa called them, of course, and they came racing up with Ms. Whittleby to yell at us.

  I couldn’t blame them. I mean, it was like our lives were stuck in this horrible game of repeat: something bad would happen, and they’d come rushing up to Rothermere in a panic. Mom wanted to know if I was trying to give her a heart attack, and I said yes, and she said very funny, young lady, and grounded me for seventy-five years. Dad said I could get time off for good behavior, contingent upon no more middle-of-the-night phone calls to say something bad had happened to their daughter.

  “What happened at Fall Fest wasn’t the middle of the night,” I protested. “It was morning. Like, before noon morning.”

  He gave me the “you know what I mean” look, and said, “Talking back does not constitute good behavior.”

  In the moments right after the attack, it felt like we were never going to smile again, never be happy, never close our eyes without having nightmares. But we did. Time passed, and we did all of those things. Just not right away.

  Becky took it harder than any of the other teachers. She was red eyed and quiet for days on end, wandering around the grounds, muttering to herself about what good were safety measures if they could be beaten with enough charms and desperation to withstand the pain. But for Fred, and the other kids who’d been rescued from the goblins’ conclave, they treated her with something like devotion. They still hadn’t talked about what happened there, or what they’d seen, and I didn’t want to pry, but sometimes you’d catch them talking quietly with each other.

  Some students left. For the first week after it happened, we’d wake up in the morning to find a cot empty, or a pile of blankets rolled up on the floor. I guess it was all a little too much for some kids to take. Mrs. Murphy would contact the family, if the kid still had one, to see if he’d headed home. Sometimes they did. She didn’t force anyone to stay, but she did try to impress on us how we’d be safer sticking together.

  We slept in the dining hall at first. It was a matter of safety; the broken windows and busted doors were repairing themselves, but it’d take a couple of days for the building to seal up completely and upgrade the protection. But even if the dorm wasn’t messed up, it would have been too hard to go back right away. It was hard enough going back that first morning to get my clothes. There was glass and rubble on the floor, and the furniture was toppled, the books spilled out over the desk and floor.

  Only the pictures on the walls were still perfectly straight. I stood there, staring at them, until Fred came to check on me. Then he insisted on helping me pick out my clothes, using himself as a model until I heard myself laughing.

  Classes were suspended. There was too much work to do, way too many nights to get through.

  To be honest, it helped that the school was a mess. It helped to have something to do, to be able to think about something other than that night, to keep moving all day so we were so worn out and fell asleep without panicking too much.

  There were scratches on the walls, floors, ceilings. Some, we patched up. Other scratches we left. It was horrible to see them and be reminded. But it was more horrible to cover them up and pretend our friends were just gone, when instead they’d been taken.

  The scratches were the first step. Odd as it was, they cut through the fear and shock and found the anger. Someone had taken our friends. They’d broken inside our school, which was supposed to keep us safe, and they’d stolen our friends. We’d see the scratches, and we’d forget to be tired.

  The wors
t part was about a week after the attack. It was dinnertime, and we were all out at the tables. Cook Bella kicked everyone out of the kitchen, and when we protested, she told us she could handle it herself and, for heaven’s sake, go spend time with friends.

  We were at our table, trying to eat, and Fred kept making all of these ridiculously corny jokes that were so stupid you couldn’t not laugh. So we were—laughing—and I turned, expecting to see Fran. For one second I was confused.

  I mean, of course she wasn’t there. I knew that. But sometimes, like then, the reality came rushing in.

  I didn’t cry. I tried to keep talking, and nobody said anything. But I think they knew. Naija glanced over to where Fran should have been, her eyes bright. Then Fred, stumbling over his words, rushed in to ask did we know that with all the donations, Mrs. Macartney said we could send out a scouting party as soon as next week? “Please don’t cry, Abby, please don’t cry.”

  Under the table, Peter took my hand. His fingers were warm and steady, and I held on.

  Nobody was looking forward to being allowed back in the dorms, but we couldn’t sleep in the dining hall forever. The best we could do was swap rooms, and try to avoid the ones with the most visible scars.

  I waited until lights-out, then grabbed my blanket and pillow and snuck down to Fred and Peter’s room.

  I didn’t even have to knock. Peter swung the door open as I limped up, and Fred was setting out an extra mattress on the floor.

  Later on, as we fought off sleep, Peter said, “I should have been nicer to her.”

  The words hung in the air.

  And then Fred said, “You’re not nice to anybody.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s nice to me,” I said, adding, “Sometimes.”

  Fred laughed. “Yeah, but that’s because—”

  Peter chucked a pillow at him before he could finish.

  “The point is, you can still be nice,” I said. “So when we find her, you just have to tell her that. And that you’re sorry.”

  “If we find her.”

  This time I threw a pillow, careful to aim for his giant, stubborn head. “When.”

  “Okay,” he said. “When.”

  CHAPTER

  31

  Spring came in earnest, full of clear, sunny, mild days, as if the weather wanted to make up for everything we’d been through. Classes started again, and we fell into the routine, thankful for any kind of normalcy.

  Of course, this routine included Kingsmen coming by to check the windows before lights-out, and patrolling throughout the night. And Peter struggling to write with his other hand; in the meantime Fred helped him take notes and fill out his homework. There would be nights when Fred started shouting and kicking out in his sleep, and Peter and I would take turns carefully waking him up and reassuring him that he was safe.

  King Steve offered Barbarian Mike and Trixie a reduced sentence if they’d tell him where Trixie sold the other kids. It would still mean prison time, for a full century or two, but it wouldn’t be Banishment. Nobody at the school was really happy about this, but I think if it came to it, we would have agreed to let them walk if Trixie would just say where our friends were.

  They asked for Banishment. King Steve, more than happy to oblige them, performed the ceremony himself. He apologized later for not officially inviting us to watch the sentence carried out the way he was supposed to. I was glad. If it were up to me, I might have wanted to watch, and I’m not sure it would have been a good thing.

  Mrs. Murphy refused to have a memorial service for the five missing students, and whenever someone suggested doing something to remember them, she would fire back, “It’s not as if they’re dead.” Instead, she and Ms. Macartney (who, it was whispered, had experience with this sort of thing) launched a schoolwide recovery effort.

  It was, as Ms. Macartney coolly explained during one tactical meeting, a matter of information and money. We find out where the students were, and we buy them back. If we couldn’t buy them, we’d take them. (That got a lot of cheers.) We pasted a huge map on one wall of the dining hall and Ms. Macartney cast up a desk underneath from where she could lead the charge. In a small box, in the corner of her desk, she kept a collection of colored tacks: yellow for leads, red for rumors, blue for sightings, and five green tacks for the missing kids.

  We were all assigned jobs—the older students worked with Becky and Dimitrios to train and put together teams to follow up on leads, and us younger kids worked with Mr. O’Hara to contact guilds and get the word out. We made a list of every guild in Rothermere, and visited them one by one, Mr. O’Hara cheerfully leading the way as we tramped all over the city. A couple minotaurs came with us, mostly for protection, but a little for the looks on the mages’ faces when we marched through the front door. Rothermere had a lot of guilds, but however far we walked, we were never too tired that we couldn’t visit one more.

  It was Fred who came through on the money front. With black-market prices, the ransom Ms. Macartney was estimating was stomach-churningly high. But right after the first meeting, Fred got Dimitrios to set him up on the crystal ball and he called his family. And he called and he called until his dad picked up in person, at which point Fred blithely talked about summer break coming up, and looking forward to staying in his old room, and didn’t Deeta have that charity runway show coming up, he’d love to help out, until his dad cast up an obscenely large donation.

  The second they hung up, Fred called his dad’s friends, one after another, to see what they’d be willing to pay.

  “It’s mostly good timing,” he admitted when Mrs. Murphy stopped him to thank him personally. “Spring and summer is gala season for everyone’s charities. All I have to do is threaten to show up.”

  We blinked, and the school year was over. The last weeks passed by smooth and quiet, like water over river rocks. None of the teachers mentioned grades, but I heard later that everyone quietly passed except Cesar, who’d been assigned Ms. Macartney as a personal tutor over the summer, to make sure he was ready for next year.

  There were the last couple of tests, the last papers to hand in, and the farewell dinner. That night, for the first time in forever, the dining hall was clamoring and noisy. The teachers sat quietly at their table; Mrs. Murphy opted out of a speech, only saying that this once we deserved to get straight to the party.

  The teachers purposefully forgot about curfew. I guess they thought we just needed a party. Around two in the morning, the police showed up with complaints about the noise, asking if we could keep it down. Of course we’d keep it down, we said; had they eaten yet? So they took seats in the back to monitor the noise level and tuck into Cook Bella’s chocolate cake.

  The next day, Mom and Dad came to take us home. Fred was going to spend the summer with my family. While Mom and Dad cast our trunks back home, we hugged … well, everyone who was willing to hug. That meant Mrs. Murphy and Ms. Macartney and Mr. O’Hara, and Dimitrios and Naija and Eila. Unless he was fighting, Cesar wasn’t comfortable touching anyone, ever, but he came with the others to see us off and nodded good-bye. Becky followed us out to the street and stood there, waving, as we climbed on Dad’s carpet and sailed up into the sky. We went up and up and up. Everyone on the street shrank to specks and disappeared, and then the school shrank into a brown square and blended into the city around it.

  We landed in Thorten what felt like two seconds later. Ms. Whittleby offered us lunch, and Mom and Dad let her convince us to stay.

  Afterward, Peter held me back as the others climbed on the carpet. “You have to visit,” he said. “You have to promise me, Hale.”

  “Don’t be silly, Peter. Of course we’re going to visit,” I said. “And you’re going to visit us.”

  “When?” he demanded.

  I thought about it. “My birthday is coming up. You should come then.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise,” I teased him.

  “I promise.” And he hugged me.


  When I pulled back, I laughed. “I like you a lot better when you’re nice.”

  Peter grinned. “No you don’t.”

  I waved to him as we flew off. I waved as we got farther and farther away and he got harder and harder to see. And I kept on waving, even when we couldn’t see him at all.

  After home and hugs, Dad took Fred and me downtown, where we bought a map and a ton of colored tacks. Afterward, we stopped by the Guild to make an appointment with Mr. Graidy for the next day. Mom said they still didn’t have an ord, so Fred and I were hoping to hire ourselves out in return for their resources and information.

  When we got back, Dad helped us hang the map in the living room, and we divided the tacks into different-colored piles. We could already put up a few red and yellow ones. It was wonderfully satisfying to push them through the paper and into the wall. Red and yellow, and blue soon, and tonight I would dream of green.

  In the meantime, I picked out five green tacks and put them in a small box to carry in my pocket, where they rattled a reminder every time I moved.

  That night we circled around the kitchen table, and Olivia cut us slices of strawberry pie as Dad set out our brown clay teapot. I watched the steam curl up into the air as he poured, the delicate scent of mint drifting out of the mugs.

  I thought about the school, about Ms. Macartney at her desk in the dining hall, and Mr. O’Hara marching out into the streets every day. I thought about Becky waving good-bye, her belt glinting in the sunlight. There had been talk about improvements, new safety features. I wondered what everything would look like when we got back in the fall, if anything would look different.