The Conjuring Glass

by Brian Knight

  “Nothing on this one,” she said, a little disappointed, and passed the wand back to Zoe so she could read the second new page.

  Zoe tapped it with the wand tip and read, taking several long moments to digest it. Her anticipatory grin wilted, became a frown. Finally, she groaned and handed the book back to Penny.

  Penny scanned the first new page, skimming over what appeared to be a few more spells, and an illustration of a cup like the one they found with the book. Finding nothing there to frown about, she moved to the second page.

  She read it three times, very slowly, before looking up from the page with a sinking feeling of disappointment.

  “Magic circle,” she said. “We have to make a magic circle before it’ll show us more.”

  Scanning back to the illustration of the cup, rereading the instructions below it, she saw that the book told them how to make the magic circle. It sounded easy, and everything they needed was here, except for one thing.

  The one thing they needed to move forward in their learning, neither girl knew how to find.

  The book said there must be at least three to start the magic circle, and they were only two.

  They needed to find someone like them, someone who had a talent for magic.

  They needed another friend.

  Questions.

  The girls had a hundred of them.

  Penny and Zoe sat across from each other on the ground next to the dead fire pit, a reluctant Ronan resting on his haunches between them.

  He turned his face from one to the other, then back again, and they fired questions without pause, determined to get them all out.

  “This feels like an ambush,” he’d said, and he had been right.

  “How long have you been here?” Penny asked.

  “How long have The Phoenix Girls been here?” Zoe fired her question a second later, before Ronan had a chance to even consider Penny’s.

  “Why doesn’t everyone know about this place?” Penny asked, crossing her arms and leaning closer to Ronan with an inquisitorial eyebrow arched.

  For the past few days Penny and Zoe had spent every possible minute at Aurora Hollow, and whenever Ronan came out to watch them practice, the questions began. At first they were hesitant, almost shy. But the more Ronan didn’t answer, the bolder they became, until finally Ronan emerged from the solitude of his cave one morning to find them simply standing on the other side of the creek, waiting for him. The wand and book were still locked in their chest.

  “Why are we the only ones who can see you?” Zoe asked.

  “Enough questions,” Ronan growled, apparently pushed to the edge of his patience. “You two should be practicing.”

  Penny rolled her eyes skyward.

  “Why should we be practicing?” Zoe countered, ignoring the renewed growls rumbling up from Ronan’s throat. “Why is it so important to you anyway?”

  Ronan’s feeble attempt at intimidation ceased and he turned to face Zoe again.

  So did Penny. That was a question, she thought, feeling a little stupid, which should have occurred to her.

  “Yeah,” Penny said, catching the thread of Zoe’s new enquiry. “Why is it so important?”

  Ronan shook his head in frustration. “This is precisely why some animals eat their young.”

  Zoe giggled.

  Penny rolled her eyes again.

  “Can you at least answer one of our questions today?” Penny asked, despising the whining tone of her question but unable to help it. “Then we’ll practice.”

  Ronan considered them again in turn, then mimicked Penny by lifting his snout to the sky and rolling his eyes. “If you insist … I will answer two of your questions today.”

  Penny and Zoe sat up straighter, irritation turned into anticipation. They both leaned in a little closer to Ronan.

  Penny’s excitement grew stronger as seconds passed with Ronan only staring into the distance, silent and still.

  Then he turned to Zoe.

  “Pick me up.”

  Zoe seemed startled by the request. They were still a little intimidated by him, such a strange and unlikely creature roaming around boring old Dogwood, but after only a moment’s hesitation, she rose to her feet then bent to pick him up. She wrapped her arms around his middle gingerly, as if afraid he’d turn on her and bite, and when she rose again he lay in the cradle of her arms like a pet.

  He looked down at Penny. “Anybody can see me if I want them to, but humans have an unfortunate tendency to shoot at things that walk on four legs.”

  Ronan closed his eyes, and for a second Penny thought he was going to take a nap right there in Zoe’s arms. His outline blurred, his body became translucent, and he fell through Zoe’s arms and drifted downward toward the ground like smoke. Then he was solid again and falling toward the ground. He landed gracefully on all fours and sprang into the air again, scrambling up the side of the big tree and stopping on his usual high perch.

  “I am proficient at escaping your kind, but it’s easier just to avoid their notice.”

  Zoe was still staring into her empty arms in surprise. “That was seriously cool!”

  “The reason you can see me even when they can’t is because you are different. You may find you see a lot of things the others don’t.”

  “How did you do that?” Penny nearly shouted.

  Ronan ignored this latest question.

  “The reason only you two know about this place is because the others who came here before you knew how important it was that it be kept secret. People like you are gifted, but they can still die at the hands of a mob.”

  Penny had no reply for that. The morning’s light mood had departed. She met Zoe’s eyes and saw the new, serious mood had taken her too.

  “If other people learn about Aurora Hollow and The Phoenix Girls, eventually the wrong people will. You would no longer be safe. This place would no longer be safe, and too much depends on …”

  Here his speech broke off. He seemed to have thought better of the direction he was leading them.

  “What?” Penny and Zoe asked in unison.

  Ronan shook his head, and a glimmer of his normal good humor seemed to have returned. “I’ve answered two questions, just as promised. Now get back to work before I change my mind about eating you.”

  PART 2

  The Red Magician

  Chapter 10

  Dogwood School

  There was only one school in Dogwood, the one at the end of downtown beside the riverside park, where Main Street turned sharply to the left before winding its way toward the coast. Penny’s house was less than a mile from the school, so she rode the new bike Susan bought her instead of taking the bus.

  The old school building housed kindergarten through high school, every student in Dogwood, which was still fewer than Penny’s grade alone back in the city.

  The school bus passed her as she neared town, and she saw Rooster’s stupid, round face pressed against a window. He made a rude hand gesture and ran his tongue out at her. A few others sitting around him had turned to face her as well, flashing grins that made Penny even more nervous about her first day at her new school. She recognized a few of the faces from the park, the day she’d met Zoe.

  She slowed and turned into the school parking lot a few minutes later, suddenly feeling only half her already diminutive size. All those new faces, many of them turning to regard her, the stranger in their town, were a little frightening.

  Ignoring the strange, gawking stares, Penny searched for one of two things, the bike rack, or Zoe. She found them both at once as Zoe coasted past an emptying bus, ignoring the pointing fingers and laughter as she passed Rooster and his friends. Her bike looked very poor parked between a new mountain bike and a ten-speed. The owner of the mountain bike, a girl about their age Penny thought, regarded Zoe’s antique-looking bike with distaste before clicking the lock on her chained wheel and walking away.

  “Zoe,” Penny called as she coasted in behind her and slid off
the seat, which even adjusted down all the way was a little too high for her.

  Zoe turned, looking a little alarmed, but relaxed into a smile when she saw Penny. “Hey Little …” she started, but must have seen the dismay that Penny felt. “Hey Penny!”

  Penny had seen Zoe only in passing for the past week, as Susan and Zoe’s grandma, a sour woman with thin and tightly curled gray hair, deep-set wrinkles, and a perpetual grimace, took them on their separate courses around town and out of it to Centralia, the nearest small city. These back to school shopping trips had left Penny feeling anxious and a little sick to her stomach.

  Penny parked her bike, and they compared schedules. She was disappointed that they only had two of the same classes together, the one before lunch, and the second to last of the day.

  “Susan said I could go to the shop for lunch,” Penny said as they wound their way through the thickening crowd streaming through the school building’s front door. “Wanna come?”

  “Yeah,” Zoe said, with some excitement.

  Zoe could, and had, browsed the bookshelves in Susan’s store for hours. More than once Penny had had to drag her out the door.

  “I’d rather eat road kill than the school lunch,” Zoe said, and Penny’s already queasy stomach seemed to roll over.

  The first half of that first day was an exercise in self-control for Penny. The overly curious looks, the talking behind hands, and the pointing fingers were uncomfortable enough, but she could handle them. The giggles from the town girls when she passed them in the halls and the occasional mockingly shouted “Hi Little Red” from Rooster and his friends turned a merely uncomfortable experience into an excruciating one.

  She didn’t have to wonder how that now hated nickname had spread so far so quickly, since only three people in Dogwood had known it, and the only one of the three who didn’t like her was a teacher at the school.

  Her third period, math with Miss Riggs, was the worst of the morning, and her fourth, English with Mr. Cole, who looked a bit like a scarecrow but seemed very nice, was the easiest because Zoe sat next to her.

  Penny’s hopes of outrunning that old nickname had vanished by lunchtime, as the previously silent mockery became a cappella chorus of “Hi Little Red” whenever she passed an unfriendly group. The taunts followed her through the halls, then outside, where they were able to escape to Susan’s shop.

  They arrived at Sullivan’s in moody silence, and Penny was not forthcoming when Susan asked how her first day at school was going. She grunted, shrugged, and mumbled something around a mouthful of glazed doughnut.

  “It’s a small town,” Susan said, as if that explained it. “They don’t get many new faces here is all. They’ll warm up to you.”

  Penny’s eyes found Zoe, who had escaped the inquisition by ducking into the nonfiction aisle to browse, and was not encouraged. Zoe already had a few months on Penny, and most of the kids were just as indifferent or outright nasty to her.

  Maybe they were slow warmers.

  It didn’t occur to Penny until halfway through the last class of the day that the way things were going, she wouldn’t make any new friends, and without at least one new friend, The Phoenix Girls were just words in an old book.

  After school they walked to Zoe’s house, and Penny endured several uncomfortable minutes in her grandmother’s company. Then they rode toward Penny’s house, and Zoe mentioned The Phoenix Girls for the first time that day.

  “I don’t think we’ll find another friend for the circle.”

  Penny made no comment, and Zoe said no more on the subject.

  They peddled through the tall green blades and pushed their bikes up the hill to the higher, wilder field, then laid them down in the high grass before the drop into the hollow.

  They practiced the spells they already knew, giving the old tricks new twists out of boredom. Penny discovering, while conjuring a wind, one of the first tricks she had mastered, that she could heat or cool it at will. She made a warm wind spin and spiral around the hollow like a mini-tornado.

  Zoe practiced directing her shield, making it move farther away from her, closer to her, or directing it over her head like an invisible umbrella.

  The atmosphere of oppressive glumness departed when Zoe chased Penny around the fire pit, giving her little static shock zaps with the wand. Their moods lifted even further when they heard Ronan, who had snuck out of his cave and perched himself on a high limb of the strange tree to watch them, laughing heartily in his weird accent.

  “Had a tough day at school, did’ja ladies?” Ronan asked when his laughter had subsided.

  This stunned them into silence for a moment.

  “Yeah,” Penny said. “How did you know?”

  “I have my sources,” Ronan said, and offered his toothy grin. “Don’t worry. Things’ll turn around. They always do.”

  “I don’t think so,” Zoe said, her mood turning dour again. “The kids here are awful.”

  Ronan cocked his head to the side and hunched his front shoulders in an almost comic imitation of a shrug. “All kids are awful,” he said.

  “Hey,” Penny said, taking offense. “I’m nice!”

  Ronan gave her a look, and she could almost read the expression on his furry face.

  Who you trying to kid, missy?

  Then he broke into that toothy grin again and said, “Just because you’re awful doesn’t mean you can’t be nice. It’s a matter of perspective.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Zoe asked.

  Ronan shook his head. “Now if I explain it all to you, what is left for you to learn?”

  “You’re not being very helpful,” Penny said, crossing her arms and shooting Ronan an irritated look.

  “Of course I am,” Ronan said, rising on his high limb and stretching, then scurrying down the tree trunk and leaping across the stream onto the little outcropping of rock in front of his cave. “I’m exceedingly helpful. You’re just too busy sulking to recognize it.”

  Ronan disappeared into his cave then, and when the girls tried to call him out, he did not reappear.

  “Fuzzy little pain in the butt,” Zoe muttered a few minutes later as they climbed the slope out of the hollow.

  Penny did not respond. She was too busy trying to decipher the meaning of Ronan’s words.

  Just because you’re awful doesn’t mean you can’t be nice. It’s a matter of perspective.

  Though she couldn’t grasp the significance of the comment, she was sure Ronan hadn’t just made it in passing.

  When Penny went to bed that night, it was with a new determination to stop sulking, as Ronan had put it, and try to find out how her classmates could be awful and nice at the same time.

  It’s a matter of perspective.

  She’d have to change her perspective, she supposed, but still wasn’t sure how she was supposed to do that, or even what Ronan meant by it.

  The next morning went much the same as the first, the turned heads, giggles, and pointed fingers as she and Zoe chained their bikes up and went inside the school building. After parting ways with Zoe, Penny passed the library on her way to her homeroom, and saw Rooster eyeing a little girl as she walked by with a stack of books in her arms. As she passed him, Rooster reached out and swung a fisted hand upward between her clutching hands, knocking her stack of books flying.

  Penny froze in shock and anger, watching as Rooster and a few of his ever-present friends burst into laughter.

  The girl’s face burned red in embarrassment as she bent down to gather her books and Rooster kicked one away from her reaching hand.

  Penny was moving through the library door toward him before she knew she meant to do it, her trembling fists swinging at her sides.

  Rooster grinned in surprise and mischief at her approach, but his smile melted into a wide-eyed look of shock as his eyes flicked over her shoulder.

  Someone pushed Penny rudely aside.

  “Hey!”

  The girl who’d shoved her asid
e ignored her and stalked toward Rooster, a half‐dozen friends following in her wake. She stepped up to him without hesitation and shoved him.

  “Hey, stop it,” Rooster cried, managing to sound like the victim. “C’mon!”

  “Make me stop it,” she said, and Penny recognized her as the girl who’d given Zoe’s bike a distasteful look the morning before. “Come on big man.”

  She shoved him again, and with a gaggle of her friends backing her up, Rooster and his few friends didn’t quite dare to do anything.

  “Geez, Katie, I was just having a little fun,” Rooster grumbled, and slunk away toward the exit at the other end of the library.

  Laughing at Rooster’s retreat, Katie’s friends began to gather the younger girl’s books for her.

  Penny’s initial shock and anger had turned to happy surprise as she watched this.

  Guess they aren’t all jerks, she thought, and stepped forward to help.

  “What are you looking at, Little Red?” Katie caught Penny’s eye and rose to face her, her eyes narrowing.

  Penny stopped short, stung. “I just wanted to help.”

  Katie apparently thought this unworthy of a reply, and handed the book in her hand to the now smiling young girl.

  “Scram, Little Red,” one of the others said.

  Fighting back the tears that pushed and stung the corners of her eyes, Penny scrammed.

  By the end of the first week, the jeering and teasing had mostly subsided, and with a few exceptions, the local kids turned their efforts in other directions.

  Penny could deal with that, she supposed. The indifference most of the other students treated her with wasn’t what she had hoped for, but it beat the constant teasing. A few of the town kids even started being nice to her, but none made any effort to befriend her.

  Katie and her small group of friends treated her with the same contempt as before, yet at least they left her alone.

  Rooster and his friends taunted her whenever chance allowed.

  By Friday afternoon, Penny and Zoe had fallen into a bearable routine: trudging through their morning classes, lunch at Susan’s shop, and spending their afternoon classes looking forward to the few hours they’d spend at the hollow after school.