“So the castle is in Cairo?” asked Lucy, leaning toward the front to ask Bo Peep.
“One in Cairo,” said Bo Peep.
“One?” Noah looked at the others. “How many castles and manors do you have?”
There was no answer.
It was only as the light began to fade and a bit of a chill entered through the thin glass windows that Miss Brett lit the fires in the small braziers built into the carriage doors. The children huddled close.
Faye stretched as Lucy reached for Jasper. At the same time, Wallace took his coin out of his pocket to look at it. He took out his remaining magnetic sphere as well. Jasper reached up for a stretch, and when his hand came to rest on Faye’s shoulder, Faye suddenly jumped in her seat.
“That hurt!” she cried.
“Sorry,” said Jasper, remembering that this had happened before. He realized, just then, that this is what had concerned Wallace on Christmas Eve.
“Wallace,” he said, his eyebrows raised, “what do you know about these bracelets?”
All eyes were on Wallace.
“Wallace knows something?” asked Faye. “I mean, about your bracelets?”
“Well.” Wallace adjusted his glasses. “It’s not the bracelets. Or rather, not just the bracelets. I noticed that my coin was creating a strange, well, static electricity, or some other kind of reaction when it came near Faye’s necklace.”
“And now you tell me?” Faye said, rubbing her neck. “Maybe you created some kind of magnetic infusion, messing with all those rare earth alloys. Or somehow altered your coin.”
“I wondered about that,” said Wallace. “But with the carvings on the wall and the way my coin acted as a key, I felt there must be something more. And something changing.”
“Faye, don’t move,” said Jasper. “I want to just see . . .” Faye jumped as Jasper took Lucy’s hand and slowly moved their hands toward Faye’s necklace. They felt an electric shock, like the one at Christmas, but this time, the bracelets gave a tug and clicked onto Faye’s necklace. When Jasper tried to pull his hand away, it dragged her necklace with it, cutting off her hair.
“Get that off me!” she cried.
Jasper managed, but with difficulty.
“There’s some kind of magnetic force!” Noah said as he reached over to Lucy’s bracelet. Just then, Wallace’s coin slammed his fingers into a sandwich between bracelet and coin. Then the coin and bracelets began to move menacingly toward Faye’s neck. With Miss Brett’s help, they pulled and pulled at arms and hands, trying to prevent what might be a painful shock for Faye.
Finally getting them apart, each of the token-holders felt their tokens quivering.
“It’s like they’re coming to life,” said Lucy.
“Whatever it is, it’s getting stronger,” said Jasper. Even being next to Faye made his wrist ache.
“I think you made it happen with those magnetic spheres. Did you ever think you could be turning everything into magnets?” asked Faye.
“I don’t think I did,” said Wallace. “But they got a lot stronger after we had Antonio’s orb. It was almost as if his sphere was a catalyst. A trigger.”
An element? thought Jasper.
“Okay, this is really too strange,” Noah said, moving closer to the window and farther from Wallace.
“It is.” Wallace again wondered about his coin.
“I’d say it might be best to put everything in a box,” Noah said, “if only we could get these bracelets off your—”
“No!” shouted Bo Peep, pulling the reins of the horses and turning to his passengers. “Must never be as one.”
With no further explanation, Bo Peep gathered the reins and turned back to driving. In response to his reaction, the children moved their tokens farther apart.
“Could they have come into contact with some other kind of element—another catalyst of some kind?” Faye asked, rubbing her neck.
“Perhaps,” Wallace said, though he suspected it was more than that.
“It’s one thing or another,” Noah said. “It’s always one thing or another.”
“Or both,” Faye said.
“It’s ‘The Strange Round Bird,’” said Lucy.
“What is?” asked Wallace.
“Only that’s just the story about it,” Lucy said. “The pieces of our things.”
They were without a clue as to what she meant—except Jasper.
Lucy shook her bracelet in frustration. “They are pieces of a thing, aren’t they?” Lucy asked Bo Peep, leaning forward.
“They are one,” he said, “but never to be touched.”
“Never to be touched,” Lucy repeated.
Bo Peep said nothing else, and no one dared ask. Miss Brett tidied up and unfolded a blanket to cover the soon-to-be very sleepy children.
“What did he mean, Miss Brett?” asked Wallace, his eyelids growing heavy
“Well, I have a feeling we will find out soon,” said Miss Brett.
Lucy smiled, yawned, and blinked her eyes rather slowly “Never to be touched even if you are bold,” she said. “Turns the world to dust and lead into gold.”
So many people have inspired these pages, from the inventors and authors who still teach us from centuries long ago, to travelers and friends.
My amazing husband, Nate, is my sword and shield whenever I head into the unknown territory of the unwritten story.
My children, Julius, Lyric, and Cyrus motivated my heart and hand.
Both Harrison and Bruce at Bancroft are beacons of light in the journey through the forest of words.
And I want to thank those who spent time visiting these pages in earlier formulations and made them the better for it.
Finally, a bow and a tip of the hat to a very special man of words, Dr. Abe Bortz.
Eden Unger Bowditch has been writing since she was very small. She has been writing since she could use her brain to think of something to say She wrote at the University of California, Berkeley, and she wrote songs as a member of the band enormous.
She has written stories and plays and shopping lists and screenplays and dreams and poems—and also books about her longtime Baltimore home. She has lived in Chicago and France and other places on the planet, and has been a journalist, as well as a welder, and an editor, and other things, too.
The Ravens of Solemano, which is the second installment of The Young Inventors Guild trilogy (the first was The Atomic Weight of Secrets), is her second middle-grade/young adult novel, and she has been as excited writing it as she hopes you are reading it.
Presently, Eden lives with her family (husband and three children) in Cairo, Egypt. But that’s another story entirely . . .
The Ravens of Solemano or The Order of the Mysterious Men in Black Page 39
