Metal and Magic: A Fantasy Journey

by Steve Windsor

  Magnolia leans over the little glowing cauldron between the front and the back bench of the carriage. She takes a big sniff. “Let’s see,” she says, “on day six I believe I got. . .”

  Magnolia’s already turned sixteen. Last year, I think, but no witch is allowed to tell of it to anyone who hasn’t yet. I lean in with her. She’s the only one who seems as excited as I am about my birthday. Everyone else gets more serious by the day. But turning sixteen is a big deal for young witches, or so I’m told. We get more freedom, stronger spell sticks, and best of all—and I only know this because Magnolia broke the rules and told me—

  Magnolia reaches into the cauldron and pulls it out faster than I can think it. “There we are.”

  “You didn’t,” I say. And I snatch the little glowing red bottle from her hands.

  “Easy,” she says, “that’s some mighty magic. I’d be neck-deep in croctarts if Baxxster found out I gave this to you before Sunday. Probably burn me alongside you.” She waves her hand and the cauldron vanishes. Then she flops back in our seat.

  I slump back next to her, hold up the bottle in front of us, and we both stare into the swirling black cherry-colored liquid. It changes to all different shades of red from dawn to blood. “Bile Island,” I say, “I thought it was going to be a—”

  “Another broom?” she says. “Please. What sort of friend would I be if I didn’t give you the passion potion first?”

  Now, from what I’ve been told. . . Magnolia says that passion potion doesn’t work the way everyone thinks—it can only give you hints. And she says that in the end it will only tell you what you already know. That’s as far as she’d go with her explanation. Believe me, I pressed her for more.

  “Mrowrrr,” Magnolia says. She stares at the bottle. “That’s all it took for me. Once I found that. . .”

  I’ve never met her . . . “boyfriend” I guess I’d have to call . . . whoever, but the way she tells it. . .

  “Careful though,” she says, “they can be ornery little liver lickers, unless you know which whisker to whisper in.” She smiles at me.

  “Maggie!” Excited as I am about it, I’m also more than a little frightened. I stare at the bottle with her. It’s hard not to. “How will I know?”

  She closes her eyes. “Trust me, Dixxon,” she says, “you’ll know it when you hear it.” When she opens her eyes back up, she’s miles away. She shakes her head and then squeezes my arm. “The real trick is figuring out how to turn all that ferocious fur to purr.”

  I unscrew the little wooden cap on the bottle and take a small sniff. It smells just like my clearing in the swamp. “Bloody hell,” I say. “It’s worse than a broom’s boil.”

  She laughs at me a little. “I felt the same way, but there’s no way around it. And once you do—loyal to the end, they are. Loyal to the end.” She can tell I’m scared. She squeezes my arm a little tighter. “Back of your head to the broom, missy. No going back now.”

  I tilt my head back. “Here’s to breaking the rules, then.” I pinch my nose with my other hand.

  But before I can guzzle it, Magnolia grabs my wrist and says, “Just remember”—her eyes glow green when she speaks—“there’s only one rule you can never break.” I already know all about the four “Ms,” but she’s going to remind me anyway. “Magic and mystic, and morphing and mortals don’t mix.”

  I forget to let go of my nose, so I sound a little nasally when I say, “Right then.”

  Magnolia giggles at me and pinches her nose. “Get on with it.”

  I smile at her and guzzle the entire miserable moss-tasting bottle. “Ich!” Then I look at Magnolia and she looks like a—and my head spins, everything goes into slow motion like a thick Sunday gumbo, and then my vision goes gray and closes in from the sides and this warm feeling. . . Then everything’s black.

  — 3 —

  “DIXXON.” THE VOICE is far away, but that’s my name, and I want to wake up, but—“Nice crocdoggie,” I mutter. “What you doin’ in Dixxon’s carriage, boy?”

  “Dixxon,” the voice says again, “it’s not funny. You have to wake up. We’re here.”

  “Hello, kitty,” and that’s not my normal voice.

  Then it raises up a paw at me and—Crack!—bright light shoots right into my head, and then Magnolia’s face is hovering right over mine.

  I sit straight up—wide awake—like I’ve been hit with Broom’s wide-awake tea. “Wow,” I say. “What was that?”

  Magnolia smiles. “Tick-tock goes the clock,” she says. “Time to pay the priest his penance.”

  She grabs my arm, swings open the door to the carriage, and we’re out and into the bright sun.

  Magnolia pulls me up the steps, alongside the rest of the racing town children.

  “School?” I say. There’s at least a dozen kids in front of us and I can hear more of them, cackling and giggling down the steps, behind us.

  Every one of us is wearing the uniform of the day—dark skirts and white frilly tops for the girls, dark wool pants, long-sleeved white button-down shirts and dark vests for the boys. The only color any of us is allowed is on our heads—hats for the boys if they want them, ribbons for the girls. Mine’s always deep green velvet and pinned tightly to the back of my hair.

  Magnolia and I wear just enough to fit in, not enough to get noticed. Only the Maplewood kids can afford or get away with wearing anything more showy. Magnolia and I secretly call them snobwoods, because that’s what they are.

  The cackling gets louder and I shut my eyes and frown. I know who it is.

  Jean Alisson Wilder-Safrit—“Queen Jean”—and her posse of poisonous Maplewood meanies clop their new boots, pressed black skirts and wild hair bows up the steps and past Magnolia and me, careful to lean in and shove us when they go by. I know I shouldn’t, but I wish they’d get bolted. I can hardly stop the urge to wave my hand at them and turn them into the little squealing piglets that they are.

  Magnolia grabs my wand hand and weaves in all of her fingers before she squeezes tight. She shoots a defiant look up the steps after them. “Now, sister,” she says, “careful-careful. We don’t want any of those pretty pixies to fall down the steps and break their bristles.”

  To a snobwood, it’s the worst kind of insult. They stop on the steps above us, turn around, frown and shake their heads. “Oh the Saints,” Queen Jean says, “when Mae-mae gets here. You two miserable. . .”

  And I can feel the tingling in my wrist and the power building. “I’m not afraid of Mae-m—”

  “Shhh,” Magnolia says. She glances around and a few kids are looking right at all of us. They can smell a fight faster than Baxxster turning up his nose at the step skunks. She speaks louder than normal, “Of course we are. We wouldn’t want anything. . . Mae-mae is so scary. . .”—she leans into my ear and whispers—“let go of it now, or we’ll both burn.”

  The first warning bell clongs, and everyone pops back to serious and heads up the steps again. No fight is worth being late for.

  I look back over my shoulder and my undead driver’s already buggy-whipping the horses. They’re off and down the dirt road in a boil of dust before anyone can get a good look at his buggy eyes. It’d be hard to tell through his driving goggles, but he knows not to take any chances.

  Magnolia and I are the last ones in.

  Slam! Two town boys shut the big white doors behind us, and I jump a little at the sound.

  Magnolia glances at them briefly, and then half-drags me to my desk. Thankfully, we sit together near the back of the class. I’d hardly be able to tolerate school if I had to sit alone. It doesn’t matter though, because sooner than summer, someone always finds a way to single us out.

  “Dixxon,” the voice booms from the front of the class, and all of us jerk straight out of our seats and stand at attention.

  Headmaster Father Felixx LaFavroux is as tall as he is mean. His own uniform is black, just like the old-world Louisiana voodoo-hoodoo he practices. And his voice snaps me o
ut of whatever’s left of Magnolia’s passion potion, like a trident spikes the croak out of a frog.

  He looks right down over the top of his horn-rimmed spectacles at me, and then says the one thing I wish to the great white witch every morning that he won’t, “Sister Dixxon, why don’t you lead us off this fine fiery morning? Do the brothers and sisters some good to hear the word tell from the other side of the lake for a change.”

  I try not to hesitate, because by now we’re all supposed to know it by heart. And I do know it, but my mind’s still smelling the sweet scent of swamp and little crocdoggies. I pause longer than I should—I can feel Magnolia squeezing my arm—and then I try to buy a little time. “Y-yes sir . . . Father.”

  Father Felixx smiles down from the headmaster pulpit. I swear that his long lily-white teeth look like he just yanked them out of a caiman. I shiver a little, staring. Then I gently pull Magnolia’s hand off my arm and clear my throat. “Ahem. . . Well . . . no shifter . . . or swiffer or . . . cauldron sniffer, shall go unpunished . . . by a brother or sister.”

  I feel Magnolia’s head sag. And I know I’ve wand-waxed some part of it, because half the class is snickering at me. I look around at the faces, all staring at me. Everyone but Mae-mae. Where’s. . .? I don’t have long to think it, but once the doors shut. . . No matter who you are. . . I fight back a grin—Mae-mae’s late.

  Despite how glad I am that we won’t be getting tormented by Queen Jean’s evil enforcer, Mabelle Mae Johnson, the entire schoolhouse is now focused at me. It’s horrible. This is not how I imagined the week before my birthday would be. School is school, but this is—then I see him. Not that I haven’t noticed him before, but the quiet burb boy’s staring at me.

  Brimstone Hill’s a pretty simple town to figure out. Anyone who doesn’t live in snobwood is considered a second-class suburban citizen, and that basically means you live anywhere but snobwood. I guess, technically, Magnolia and I could be called burb girls, but they have a special name for us. One that I hate repeating.

  I can see everyone’s mouths laughing now, but I can’t hear anything. I try not to look back at the burb boy, but when I do, this wave of swamp scent fills my. . . He’s not grinning or laughing or anything. His pitch-black mane of hair is crowding in on his face and his ice-blue eyes are focused right into mine.

  It feels like he’s staring through me, like there’s nothing else but the two of us. Then he mouths one word at me. And he’s all the way across the aisle and two or three pews toward the front of the class from me, but I hear it like he’s whispering in my ear. “Bane. . .”

  And everything, every vision I’ve had in the last three weeks, real or not, spikes its way through my head.

  The burning post, the crowd of townspeople and the woman, the two witches fighting in the woods, all those dead crocdoggies and me racing into my clearing to a white spike of light—

  When I wake up, Father Felixx is hovering over me like a croc crow waiting for the gators to finish so they can swoop down and clean up the bones. He smiles down and I can feel the evil. “There you are, Dixxon. You gave us a scare.”

  Magnolia’s kneeling right beside him, and she looks at me like Cat does when I tell him I’m going on my walk. She scoots in closer. Her eyes are as wide as my carriage driver’s. She looks back and forth at me and then at Father Felixx.

  His hand feels cold and callused on my face. He lifts up my eyelid with his thumb, then he leans in close—eyeball to eyeball. I can smell the hoodoo hooch on his breath. “You hit the ground pretty hard, sister. Are you feeling dizzy . . . or dazed at all?”

  “Wha-what are you looking at?” asks Magnolia. It’s about all she can say or do. She certainly can’t stop him.

  “Not that I . . . I notice,” I say.

  Then the father mumbles some Creole Cajun that sounds like Cat bantering with Oven this morning. “Couper les oreilles au mulet en fait pas un cheval. Bane, come over here, if you please.”

  Bane. . . And I get another rush of . . . I don’t know what. It’s his name that’s doing it.

  Bane kneels down next to Father Felixx and puts his arm under my head.

  My thoughts are all over, He’s crazy! That . . . that feels like. . .

  “You want me to carry her back to her seat?” Bane asks.

  Father Felixx ignores him long enough to thumb open my other eyelid. And I want to grab his hand off my face, but I’m more afraid than Magnolia looks.

  I guess he doesn’t find whatever he’s looking for, though, because he lets go of my face, and then looks at Bane. “Yes, assist sister Dixxon back to her seat, if you will. So we can get this morning back to the daylight of our purpose.”

  But Bane asks another question, “What was you sayin’ bout her eyes, Father?”

  Hush it, now! I think. You’ll get us both burned. Take me back to my seat, like he says.

  I don’t know if he could hear me or not, but Bane hefts me up as easily and gently as I lift Saucer and Smug for morning tea. He carries me back to my seat, staring into my eyes through his hair the entire time. I swear his eyes look . . . red, just like a—I can’t help it, I whisper it without thinking, “Crocdoggie?”

  I feel a slight growl in his chest when he whispers, “You’re not thinking clearly, sister.” His lips barely move, but the upper one is curled just enough that I get a good look at his teeth.

  Long and white and . . . beautiful. . .

  “Time for you to quit drawing attention”—Bane looks at Magnolia—“to all of us.”

  He sets me down as gently as he picked me up, right next to Magnolia . . . and her wide-open mouth and half-bugging eyes. Then he grunts at her under his breath, barely loud enough for the three of us to hear him. “Catchin’ fireflies?” he asks her.

  In my head, everything that comes out of his mouth sounds like a lonesome crocdog, howling to his lost pack. “You should be more careful with your friend . . . sister. Seems a bit prone to accidents. We wouldn’t want that to spill over onto the rest of us, would we? I might not be there to pick her up next time she falls into the swamp.” He tilts his head at her and his hair falls to the side, away from one of his eyes. “And you’re gonna wanna close your mouth.”

  Magnolia closes her mouth a little. She barely moves her lips when she whispers back at him, “Passé,” she says. “Go’on now. Find yourself another bone to play with.”

  I can feel the silence in the schoolhouse. I’m sure everyone’s seeing and hearing us.

  This has to stop. “Thank you . . . Bane,” I say it louder than I have to, but all this attention is bad juju. And that name. . . I shut my eyes and let the heavy moist scent of sweet cypress swamp into my nostrils. I open them back up and pretend to feel my forehead with the back of my hand. “I think. . . Yes, I feel much better now.” I look out of the corner of my eye and Father Felixx is back up at the pulpit. “I’m sorry, Father. I have no idea what came over—”

  “Bane,” it doesn’t sound as wonderful when Father Felixx says it, “take your seat, brother.” He waves his hand toward Bane’s seat. Then with both hands, he picks his huge book up from the pulpit and holds it high above his head. The thing is supposedly full of what he tells us the Saints say about the evils of magical creatures—no one’s ever seen inside the book but him. I’m pretty sure he sleeps with it. “Brothers and sisters, pull out your parchments and turn them to page one.”

  Thank the great white witch, I think. I grab my parchment from its pocket on the pew in front of me, and it opens itself to page one. I look around nervously. Did anyone see. . .?

  Magnolia nudges me with her hip. “Dixxon,” she whispers, “you can’t do—”

  “No shifter or drifter or cauldron sifter,” Father Felixx’s voice stops Magnolia and the last murmurs in the schoolhouse cold, “shall go unpunished by a brother or sister.” Slam! He smacks down his big book on the pulpit. “This . . . brothers and sisters, is the only thing that saved us from ruin during the Purge. It’s why we are still here, it�
��s how we survive each day, and it’s the only rule you need never forget.” He turns and looks right into my eyes. “Sister Dixxon would be wise to remember that.” Then he looks back to the rest of the class.

  A few of the students are still staring at me, but most of them are blindly staring back at Father Felixx.

  He clears his throat and continues. “Yet, as this is the week of the Blue Moon, magic and mischief are free from the forest, witching their way into any weak soul who wanders into their path. Therefore, we must remain ever vigilant . . . lest they possess us and turn us to their wicked will. The consequences, as you have all just heard read, are out of anyone’s hands . . . and in those of the Saints themselves. For we are bound to send the wicked and the wanting back into the flames of the fire that spawned them . . . along with anyone they might possess”—he looks right at me—“to pit against us.”

  We all know what to say when he says that. “So say the Saints!” every last one of us shouts. Peter, Lazarus and Anthony—the only three left after the Purge. I wonder if they were really as murderous toward magic when they were living?

  I push the thought from my mind. I’ve survived the first five minutes of school. Less than six hours left. . .

  Crossbow and torch training. . . Second Set isn’t as fun for Magnolia and me as it seems to be for the other students. Reading about the history of the Purge and all the wondrous morphing, magical and mystical creatures that existed back then is one thing—First Set is actually pretty interesting—but despite the terrible things that went on before I was born, training to kill my own kind is . . . not my favorite part of the day.

  I heft up the crossbow. As familiar as I am with it by now, it still seems like a blunt stump from Broom’s woodpile, and I’d love to just burn it outright.

  The rotating cylinder of barrels on the front holds twelve silver-tipped and sulphur-dipped razor-sharp bolts, and inertia-driven or not, it still bucks against my shoulder more than I’m comfortable with. I squeeze my eyes shut and flinch a little every time I have to fire it.