The Familiars

by Adam Jay Epstein

  Skylar lowered her wings and the illusion faded.

  “That was close,” she said. “Tremor hawks are not an enemy a familiar would want to face without a wizard present. They’ve been known to topple castles when agitated.”

  The three animals resumed their walk down the gravelly hill. Aldwyn remembered Skylar saying that the appearance of an object could be as useful as the thing itself, and he was beginning to understand what she had meant. The illusion of the log had saved them from being eaten. He was also quickly learning that in the world of magic, even someone as small as Skylar could wield great power.

  “Hey, Aldwyn, take a whiff of this,” called Gilbert, who had hopped over to a patch of brown grass.

  Aldwyn walked over to the tree frog, but he didn’t have to get very close before his nose recoiled from a horrible odor.

  “Ew, what is that?” asked Aldwyn, cringing.

  “Stinkweed,” said Gilbert with a smile. “Brings back memories. One time, Marianne put a clump of the grass in Dalton’s pillow. His hair smelled like rotten lizard eggs for a whole week.”

  Aldwyn had a good chuckle. Even Skylar smiled at the recollection.

  “Marianne’s always loved a practical joke,” continued Gilbert. Then he sighed. “She’s going to be okay, isn’t she?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find them,” said Skylar reassuringly. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Aldwyn was struck by Skylar’s and Gilbert’s devotion to their loyals, but he understood it well: in just a few days, he had already forged an inseparable bond with Jack. He could only imagine the kind of dedication years of companionship might bring.

  “Now come on. The main road is down below,” Skylar added, quickly returning to the task at hand. “We should be able to follow it all the way to the Weed Barrens. If everything goes according to my plan, our loyals should be safe before nightfall.”

  “What plan?” asked Gilbert.

  “Once we find Agdaleen’s lair, I’ll distract the gray-haired witch with an illusion,” said Skylar. “Then Aldwyn can use his telekinesis to unlock the dispeller chains. After that, Dalton, Marianne, and Jack can do the rest.”

  Aldwyn got a sick feeling in his stomach, one that was even worse than the time he lapped up spoiled milk by the Glyphstone in Bridgetower. His telekinesis was part of the plan? He didn’t have telekinesis. He had to tell them the truth, even though his new companions would surely want nothing to do with him once he did.

  “Skylar,” Aldwyn said quietly, “there’s something I need—”

  Suddenly, Gilbert’s head perked up, and he said, “Do you hear that?”

  Skylar’s attention quickly turned away from Aldwyn. As the rumbling noise grew nearer, Aldwyn braced himself for a return of the tremor hawks or another gundabeast attack. Then he relaxed, recognizing the familiar sound: wagon wheels. Farther down the hill he spotted a merchant steering a horse-drawn cart carrying sheaves of wheat.

  “Let’s hitch a ride,” said Aldwyn.

  “And how do you expect us to do that?” asked Skylar. “You think that merchant is just going to let us take a free ride?”

  “I wasn’t planning to ask permission,” said Aldwyn. “We can jump on the back.”

  “While it’s moving?” croaked Gilbert.

  Skylar considered the idea. “It would save us hours. We could reach the Weed Barrens before high sun.”

  “There’s no way we can catch up to it now,” said Gilbert, as the wagon headed for the woods, gaining momentum and distance.

  “I’ve caught up with carriages going a lot faster than that,” said Aldwyn. Skylar gave him a curious look. “When they happened to pass through Maidenmere, that is.”

  The trio hurried to the base of the hill. Skylar effortlessly flew to the cart. Aldwyn bounded: front paws, then rear paws, front, then rear. This was a skill he had perfected after years of daily practice. He made a running jump and his claws dug into the wood planks on the back of the wagon. He hoisted himself up and turned back to see Gilbert struggling to keep pace.

  “Come on, Gilbert,” he called out.

  “We can’t miss this opportunity,” cried Skylar, as if the tree frog needed the added pressure.

  Gilbert’s back legs pushed off the dirt, and he flew through the air. Aldwyn reached out a paw to grab him, but his hop didn’t have the height or the distance. Gilbert landed with a thud on the ground, and the wagon continued to roll, the horses now moving at a canter. The tree frog picked himself back up and started hopping again. He huffed and puffed, and his slender, webbed orange feet moved faster than they’d ever moved before. He leaped again, and this time Aldwyn poked his claws into a stick of wheat on the cart and stretched it out as a lifeline. Gilbert grabbed hold, but before Aldwyn and Skylar could pull him aboard, the stalk snapped and Gilbert went tumbling back toward the ground. But this time, the tree frog thought fast, shooting out his tongue and wrapping it around Aldwyn’s paw. Aldwyn gave a tug and Gilbert flew into the back of the wagon, toppling Aldwyn onto the wheat-covered wood planks.

  “I did it,” said Gilbert breathlessly. He collapsed onto his back, gasping for air. “I did it.”

  Then, without warning, the horses came to a sudden stop.

  “Grazing time,” called out the merchant, pulling his mares to the side of the road, where they began to feed on the grass.

  Gilbert gave an exasperated sigh and wheezed, “I…just did all that…for nothing?”

  Aldwyn and Skylar couldn’t stop themselves from bursting into laughter.

  8

  AGDALEEN AND THE OCTOPOT

  Aldwyn’s nose lifted into the air, sniffing excitedly. For the last three hours, he had been lying on a bed of wheat he had made for himself, lulled into a pleasant sleep by the gentle swaying of the wagon and the clop-clop-clopping of horseshoes. Now his nostrils flared as he breathed in his favorite smell: fresh fish! When he perked his head up over the wagon’s side rail, he saw Split River, a sprawling port town divided in half by the wide blue Ebs. A dense mist hung in the air, as if the clouds themselves had lazily nestled on the rooftops for a mid-afternoon nap.

  “This is where we get off,” said Skylar, as the cart reached a fork in the road and began heading east. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way to the Weed Barrens.”

  Aldwyn gave Gilbert a nudge, stirring him from the snooze he was taking in the shade of a water jug.

  “Wake up,” said Aldwyn, but Gilbert didn’t budge. Aldwyn tried a different method. “Gilbert, look, fruit flies!”

  Gilbert immediately snapped awake. “What? Where?”

  “Oh, too late, you missed them,” said Aldwyn, winking to Skylar. Gilbert was too befuddled to realize he had been duped. He barely had time to stretch before Aldwyn took a leap off the back of the wagon. With feline nimbleness, his four paws touched down on the muddy ground. Gilbert jumped next, tumbling as he hit the ground. Aldwyn watched as the wheat wagon, which had shortened what would have been a full day’s journey into a brief trip, disappeared down the road.

  “We go north and follow the river from here,” said Skylar as she flew over to their sides. “We aren’t far now.”

  Aldwyn still hadn’t told Skylar and Gilbert about his lack of a magical talent. He didn’t want to risk getting sent home. Not before seeing Jack one more time.

  The three animals walked a path along the cliffs beside the Ebs. Not long into their trek, they passed a metal plate embedded in the side of a large rock. A blue gem sparkled in its center.

  “This is where the Turn took place,” said Skylar, stopping to point her wing first to the monument, then to the river. “See how the Ebs takes that sharp bend?” Aldwyn followed the trail of her feather to where the waters bashed against the cliffs before heading southward. “That was the work of a spell cast long ago. A great wizard stood here. His name has been lost to time, but he was a man like no other. On the fiftieth day of the Unstoppable Storm, when the river was close to rising beyond its banks, he lifted
those cliffs from the earth to prevent all the lowlands from flooding. He turned the course of the Ebs forever.”

  Aldwyn could sense how greatly she admired Vastia’s human elders.

  “And it was men and women like him—wizards who forged these lands and made Vastia the great queendom that it is today—who were generous enough to pass magic down to the animals.”

  As they continued their hurried pace north, Aldwyn asked Gilbert, “Do you know all of this stuff, too?”

  “Oh, no. History was never really my strong suit,” he answered. “Of course, neither was arithmetic. Or astronomy. Or geography, for that matter. Although I do have a knack for writing love poems. Care to hear one?”

  “How about some other time,” said Aldwyn politely.

  “‘Lily pad, flat and round, my heart doth beat, oh what a sound,’” Gilbert recited from memory, ignoring Aldwyn’s answer.

  Their travels led them higher. The sandy banks of the Ebs soon turned to rock and gravel. Aldwyn was treated to some more of Gilbert’s original sonnets, and the tree frog even threw in a handful of haiku to show his range. Skylar never slowed, but that didn’t stop her from pointing out other historical markers of interest.

  It was just before high sun, as she was describing the ancient Warlock Trail—a racepath around Vastia where once a year noblemen and -women competed in a triathlon of foot racing, wand flight, and spectral steeding—when Aldwyn noticed something very unusual following them. They resembled the swimming eyeballs from Stone Runlet, only instead of tails, these egg-shaped eyes had wings and were flying through the air.

  “Skylar,” he interrupted. “I think we’re being followed.”

  She glanced back. “Spyballs!”

  Skylar flapped toward the winged eyeballs, pecking at them with her beak. The flying eyes soared upward to the clouds.

  “This doesn’t surprise me,” said Skylar. “No doubt these are the queen’s spies. A week ago, Dalton and I thought we caught sight of a pod of them swimming in the runlet, but we weren’t sure at the time. Now it’s clear that she has eyes everywhere. We’ll have to be careful what we say.”

  Aldwyn realized that he wasn’t the only one who had encountered the spying eyeballs down by the runlet. Spyballs—what fitting names they had, he thought, given their menacing stares.

  The gap between the river and the trees shrunk, and soon it was unmistakable that they had entered the Weed Barrens. Dead trees and thorny vines stretched beyond the eyes’ limit. Aldwyn wasn’t scared of ghosts, but there was something about the way the wind moaned through the tree limbs that made his ear hairs stand on end. The dense, rotted undergrowth was teeming with centipedes, millipedes, billipedes, and worms with too many legs to count. It looked as if the weeds had strangled the life out of a once vibrant forest, leaving it uninhabitable to all but the least appealing and, according to Gilbert, least tasty bugs.

  “Why would anyone decide to live here?” asked Gilbert.

  “Some people don’t want to be found,” said Skylar. “Agdaleen was born to the driftfolk but went mad before she even got her first tattoo. At the age of six, she burned to the ground her family’s wagon and all the others in their caravan. She was sent away to have her mind cleansed by the keepers of the Pineland Asylum.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Gilbert.

  “That’s because she burned that to the ground, too. She ran away into the night and came here.”

  As Aldwyn stepped over some stinkweed and around a tangle of bleeding creepers, green vines that dripped drops of red, he found himself face-to-face with a horrible sight: a human hand dangling by a strand of dirty yarn from a branch. An army of ants poured out from a hole between two fingers carrying their eggs. Aldwyn shuddered. Then he looked around and saw that the horrific hand wasn’t the only thing hanging from the trees. Wooden doll’s heads, rusty spoons, and cracked mirrors were swaying slowly in the breeze. Gilbert hopped up next to Aldwyn, pressing against his side.

  “We’re getting close now,” said Skylar, seemingly not bothered by the spooky objects.

  As the group continued forward, Aldwyn found it difficult to walk with Gilbert bumping into him constantly.

  “Gilbert, could you give me a little space here?”

  “Sorry.”

  Gilbert hopped back by about an inch, which didn’t really help.

  After another twenty steps, a hut made from straw and bone came into view, its rooftop and chimney shingled with rat skulls and its walls covered in weeds. A mushroom patch with toadstools and orange fungus had been planted outside.

  “That must be it,” said Skylar.

  There were no windows to see through and no door; only a dark entryway with strands of beads dividing inside from out.

  Aldwyn realized that he’d soon be called upon to use his telekinesis to unlock the dispeller chains. He’d have to tell his fellow familiars the truth: that he was magicless. He just hoped there was another way to free their loyals.

  “What do we do?” asked Gilbert. “Just go up there and knock?”

  “No,” said Aldwyn, who might not have had magic but knew a thing or two about sneaking into places. Of course, his area of expertise was fish and fowl shops, not witches’ huts. “We wait for the right moment.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” said Skylar.

  “Then we create one ourselves,” replied Aldwyn. “Stay right here.”

  He dashed back into the tangle of rotted undergrowth and grabbed a clump of foul-smelling stinkweed in his teeth. He then returned to Skylar and Gilbert, with his eyes now watering from the horrible odor. Aldwyn spit the mouthful of weeds to the ground.

  “Yech,” he groaned, as he tried to wipe the taste from his tongue with his paw. “Skylar, drop this down the chimney. That should get the old witch out of her hut in a hurry.”

  “Very clever,” said Skylar, nodding in approval.

  She picked up the stinkweed in her talons and flew for the rooftop. As she soared over, she dropped it down the chimney. The blue jay circled back and landed beside Aldwyn and Gilbert.

  “Won’t be long now,” said Aldwyn. “It’s like leaving a skunk’s tail in a butcher shop.” Skylar and Gilbert both looked at him, puzzled. Aldwyn immediately realized his mistake. “It’s an expression we telekinetic cats use,” he said, forcing a smile.

  Just then, a figure emerged from the dark, parting the beads and limping out into the mushroom patch: this was Agdaleen. The old crone’s face was hidden by a nest of gray hair that looked as if it hadn’t been combed for a hundred years. She waved her bony hands in front of her nose, coughing. She muttered something under her breath before disappearing into the dead woods.

  “Now’s our chance,” said Aldwyn.

  The three didn’t hesitate, knowing that they had precious little time. When they reached the entryway, Aldwyn saw that what looked like white beads from a distance were actually teeth, human and animal.

  Inside, a large black cauldron bubbled in the center of the room, a fire crackling beneath it. Clear glass jars lined the shelves, filled with every ingredient needed for concocting a witch’s brew: goat tongue, mugwort, vulgar cinquefoil, and goblin toes. Whole pickled groundhogs floated eerily in beet juice, their expressions frozen in terror. Leather-bound tomes were left all around, their pages stained and wrinkled from being splashed and dripped upon. Aldwyn tried not to let the creepy surroundings and the lingering foul smell of the stinkweed distract him from the fact that Jack was somewhere close by.

  “There’s another room,” Skylar called out from up ahead. “They must be back there.”

  Aldwyn and Gilbert hurried over to Skylar, eager to rescue the wizards and get out of there. But to their dismay, all they discovered was Agdaleen’s sparsely furnished bedroom.

  Jack, Marianne, and Dalton were nowhere to be found.

  “Where are they?” asked Gilbert.

  “You tell us,” replied Skylar. “It was your puddle vision.”

  “Maybe she mov
ed them,” said Gilbert desperately.

  “No, I don’t smell Jack’s scent,” said Aldwyn. “He was never here.”

  “Are you sure you heard that pond say ‘gray hair witch’?” asked Skylar accusingly.

  “Yes, I’m absolutely positive,” answered Gilbert. “I think.”

  “Why did we ever listen to you?” said Skylar, shaking her head. “You and your stupid puddle viewings. You never get them right.”

  Gilbert shrank back at Skylar’s unkind words. It was clear that he felt terrible.

  “I’m sure it was an honest mistake,” said Aldwyn, trying to comfort the guilt-ridden frog. “Now let’s get out of here before the old hag comes back.”

  The trio returned to the other room—and nearly leaped out of their skins when they saw the gray-haired witch standing beside the cauldron. She flicked her stringy hair from her eyes to reveal a thin face covered in hideous tattoos that looked as if she had etched them herself, perhaps with her fingernails and most definitely without the aid of a mirror. She stared at the intruders, licking her dry, cracked lips.

  “Lucky me,” said Agdaleen in a voice that had gone scratchy from a lifetime of breathing in cauldron fumes. “Usually, I have to go hunting for ingredients.” She gestured to a rack of dried frog legs and bird talons.

  The familiars made a run for it, but Agdaleen was quick. She stomped down her sandaled foot, screeching out an ancient evil chant, “Slikts ieeja augt dervis!”

  A wall of weeds spread across the entranceway, blocking Aldwyn’s, Gilbert’s, and Skylar’s escape.

  Agdaleen cocked her head, staring intently at Skylar. “Bird, where did you get that? Your anklet.”

  Aldwyn hadn’t given a second thought to the jewel anklet since he had first spied it upon meeting Skylar in Stone Runlet. Why the lace of silver and emerald squares was of interest to this old witch was most curious.