Metal and Magic: A Fantasy Journey

by Steve Windsor

  He turned first to Evvie. “You’re in charge of moving mattresses. We need to find out how many people there will be.”

  Evvie nodded. “If everyone on our side comes, that’ll make eight of us.”

  “Nine,” Tristan said immediately. “You forgot Amber.” He hooked his thumbs into his pockets and moved on to Rusty. “Tomorrow you can go to Delair to work off more hours,” he said. “Get as many of those magic lights as you can, and see if you can find brackets or something to attach them to the wall.”

  “Cool,” Rusty said.

  “Leila, do you think Quinsley would lend us some old furniture?”

  “I’ll ask,” she said. “If he has anything, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. Also—Tristan, you should see if Alldusk still has that broken table from his classroom. The one he replaced, I mean.”

  “Good idea,” Tristan said.

  Rusty’s grin was wider than ever. “This is gonna be awesome. Like we’ve really got a home here, or something.”

  Tristan nodded fervently.

  The next day, Tristan enjoyed school as he never had before. It was wonderful to share this secret; for the first time since the crash, he felt as though he had regained a fraction of control over his life.

  Tristan and Rusty sat next to Eli and Trey in Brikkens’ first period class; while Brikkens blathered on about something called the Theory of Independent Movement, they explained the plan in an undertone.

  “Are you in on it?” Rusty whispered once Tristan had finished.

  “You kidding?” Eli said. “Hell, yeah!”

  Trey, who rarely smiled, gave Rusty a brief grin.

  A moment later Eli pretended to make a trip to the bathroom, and didn’t return until class was over.

  “Those mattresses are bloody heavy,” he muttered to Trey, still flushed with exertion. “I got yours too, mate. Tristan wasn’t lying about that room—it’s brilliant.”

  “’Course it is,” Rusty said, pounding Eli on the back.

  Rusty was able to talk with Hayley and Cailyn during Grindlethorn’s class, where they were learning emergency bandaging techniques; the two girls agreed to move out of the bunkroom almost as readily as Eli and Trey.

  “I can’t believe everyone is deciding so quickly,” Tristan said as they walked up to lunch.

  “I’m not the only one who has a problem with Zeke,” Leila said. She reached up a hand to smooth back her hair and stopped short, fingers splayed across her bare neck. Her expression darkened. “Besides, everyone likes Rusty.”

  At lunch, Tristan joined Amber at her solitary table.

  “You’re not here just to talk, are you?” she said, setting aside her glass.

  Tristan fidgeted, wishing he could tell Amber that she was mistaken. “Well, Evvie’s found a new room for everyone on our side of the bunkroom to move to,” he said. “Just to get away from Damian and Zeke, you know. So, if you want to come, Evvie’s helping us move our mattresses down to the new room during classes today.” Tristan took a bite of his grilled cheese sandwich and then set it aside, scrubbing the buttery grease from his fingers.

  After a long silence, Amber nodded. “I would like that,” she said. “For you to carry the mattress, I mean. Evangeline doesn’t like me very much.”

  “I don’t think she likes anyone,” Tristan said quietly. “But that means you’re coming?”

  Amber nodded and then fell silent for a while. She tore a small strip of crust from her sandwich and nibbled at it, staring vacantly at Tristan’s plate. Tristan had the uncomfortable feeling that she was disappointed with him.

  “You used to talk to me,” Amber said at last, so quietly that Tristan could have imagined it.

  “Yeah, after I failed Quinsley’s test,” he muttered. “And when we were punished for the lemon tree.”

  Amber smiled, her cheeks coloring daintily. “Thank you for inviting me to come to the new room.” She finally looked up and met Tristan’s eyes. “Anyone else would have forgotten me, I think.”

  She was right, of course. “You should eat with us sometimes,” Tristan said. “I would like that.”

  Instead of replying, Amber closed her mouth in a thin line. Tristan hoped she wasn’t angry with him. He finished his lunch in silence.

  After lunch, Tristan went down and helped Evvie move the rest of the mattresses to the secret room. Though Evvie’s palms were lashed with mottled lines from the mattress ropes, she didn’t complain. She was clearly a bit disgruntled nonetheless.

  Classes were almost over by the time they finished, so instead of returning to Environmental Studies, Tristan lugged everyone’s belongings down to the secret room as well. Leila and Rusty caught up to him at the end of the hall.

  “Where’ve you been?” Rusty asked.

  “I’ve been carrying down the last of the mattresses,” Tristan said. “And your books and things too. Come on.”

  After dropping everything in the secret room, Tristan, Leila, and Rusty decided to beg more supplies from the teachers. They returned to the main hall and separated—Rusty went down to the first floor to help Delair, Leila made for the kitchens, and Tristan stopped at Alldusk’s classroom.

  The dark stone door was ajar when Tristan approached, a crack of light spilling onto the marble tiling.

  Tristan eased the door open. “Professor?”

  Hearing no response, he pushed the door farther.

  One step into the room, he froze.

  Alldusk had his arms around someone, and it was a split second before Tristan recognized her as Merridy. Her hair was unbound for once, and it was much longer and fuller than he had imagined.

  Tristan stumbled back a step. Were they together? When Alldusk saw Tristan, he released Merridy at once. She yelped and stumbled into a table, her glasses clattering to the ground.

  “Tristan!” Alldusk said, startled. He fidgeting with his hands for a moment before shoving them into his pockets.

  Cheeks flushed crimson, Merridy fumbled for her glasses. When she found them, she jammed them on and hurried out of the room, head down. She slammed the stone door on her way out—for a moment there was no sound but the dull reverberations of the crash.

  Tristan swallowed. “I’m really sorry.” Alldusk was his favorite teacher; Tristan felt awful for walking in on him like this. Alldusk’s face was stony. “I won’t say anything, I promise, I—”

  Alldusk shook his head, expression lightening. “Don’t worry.” After a moment he took his hands out of his pockets and straightened one of the chairs. “You were hoping to work off punishment, I assume?”

  “Professor, I—” Tristan cleared his throat. “How old are you and Merridy?” The question slipped out almost accidentally.

  Alldusk’s mouth twitched. “Darla and I are thirty, Tristan,” he said softly. “New students are selected every fifteen years, though Professor Drakewell is the only one remaining from his year.”

  “Why?”

  Alldusk laughed quietly. “No one knows. And I wouldn’t go asking questions, if I were you.” He turned and made his way to the back of his room, where his office door stood open.

  Tristan followed, still apprehensive.

  “The headmaster keeps his job for a reason,” Alldusk explained, “but even the older teachers won’t say why.”

  For the next two hours, Tristan and Alldusk worked side by side, separating and labeling and grinding ingredients. Neither one spoke.

  By dinnertime, Alldusk’s mood seemed to have improved considerably. As they began to clean up their workspace, sweeping the plant dust into a metal trashcan and wiping the table with lemon-scented rags, Tristan remembered why he’d come here to begin with.

  “Do you still have that broken table, the one you replaced?” he asked.

  Alldusk turned away from Tristan, shaking his rag into the trashcan. “Darla mentioned this,” he said carefully. “She said a few of you kids are planning to move to a new bedroom.”

  Tristan fumbled with his rag and knocked over an e
mpty jar.

  “No, don’t worry—I won’t report you.” When Alldusk looked back at Tristan, his face betrayed no trace of shame. “Actually, I think it’s a brilliant idea. As I said before, I don’t think you kids have nearly enough space here.” He ran his fingers through his black hair. “The table is still broken, but you’re welcome to have it.”

  “Why can’t you fix it with magic?” Tristan asked. He folded his rag in half, the frayed edges coming together in an imperfect line.

  Alldusk nudged the trashcan back into the corner with his foot. “This is Brikkens’ subject, not mine. You should have learned that magic can only affect what happens in nature. The magic won’t always seem natural, but you can’t just toss common sense aside.”

  Tristan thought back to his earliest lessons with Brikkens, back when he’d still attempted to pay attention. “Can’t you change the color of things?” he said.

  “Yes,” Alldusk said, “because color is simply the reflection of light.” Gathering most of the jars in his arms, he retreated to his office. “I’ll see you at dinner,” he called over his shoulder. “Afterwards, you and your friends can see about moving that table.”

  When Tristan returned to the secret room after dinner, carrying the splintered table with Leila’s help, he was surprised to find that the space was already cluttered with new furniture.

  “Where’d all this come from?” he asked, setting down his end of the table.

  Leila dropped the other side of the table and wiped her sweaty hair from her forehead. “Gerry didn’t even let me help him in the kitchen,” she said, “so I’ve been moving shelves and chairs and things all afternoon. There are several rooms past the kitchen that are mostly empty, and apparently people have been stashing old books and furniture there for years.”

  Rusty joined them a moment later, with a sack full of magic lamps and nails. Leila was better at hammering them into the wall than Tristan or Rusty, so they mostly handed her nails and held the metal plates in place.

  Eventually all sixteen lamps were fixed to the wall and glowing merrily. The room was completely transformed, as bright and cheerful as the ballroom upstairs.

  Just then, footsteps in the tunnel signaled the arrival of Eli and Trey.

  “Hey,” Eli said, grinning. “This looks nice.” He spun in a circle, looking around at the walls and the furniture. “The lights are crooked, though.”

  “It’s Leila who put them up, not me,” Rusty said.

  Leila glared at them both.

  As the others began to arrive, Tristan and Leila set to work clearing a space along the far wall, where they spread the nine mattresses side-by-side. The wall was curved, so the beds ended up in something of an arc. Rusty and Eli were supposed to be arranging furniture, but instead they dug through the stuffed drawers, scattering bits of paper and other debris across the floor. In what looked like an attempt to be helpful, Trey knelt beside the pile of litter and sorted through it, occasionally flattening a crumpled sheet of parchment to see what was written on it.

  Tristan struggled to keep a straight face. The room was such a wonderful secret, as though the earth itself had folded its rich, cold layers around this one bright heart.

  According to the small clock perched atop a burnished copper vase, it was past eleven by the time Hayley and Cailyn joined them.

  “We should play cards,” Rusty said, beaming at the girls.

  Tristan had been shoving the enormous bookshelf to the back wall—he straightened, rubbing his bruised shoulder. “Sure.”

  Leila glanced up from the stack of books she was organizing. “Gerry has a magical fireplace we can bring down tomorrow, Tristan,” she said vacantly.

  “Great. Do you want to play cards?”

  There weren’t nearly enough seats for the eight of them—Hayley and Cailyn shared a wooden chair, Eli took the short bench, and Evvie sat awkwardly in the squashy armchair. Tristan, Leila, Rusty, and Trey stood.

  “We’ll play poker,” Eli said, whipping his usual deck of cards from his back pocket. “There’s plenty of junk here—we can bet with pens or something.”

  As Eli dealt the cards around, careful not to let anything slide to the caved-in center of the table, Leila described her plan for the room in a whisper.

  “We should have the fireplace right across from the door,” she said in Tristan’s ear. “Once we get more chairs, we can group them around the fire.” She pointed to the space, which was currently empty aside from an overflowing trashcan. The center of the room would be a study space, she explained, with the bookshelves and the table and the less comfortable chairs. The half-circle of mattresses could stay where it was, lining the wall to the right of the door.

  As he listened, Tristan picked up his hand of cards and sorted through them, cupping them in his palm so Leila couldn’t cheat. After furtively examining the broken table from different angles, he had an idea for fixing it. It had been ages since he’d gotten the chance to mend something, and he was looking forward to the work.

  “What do you get for winning?” Evvie asked, making a face at her cards.

  Rusty grinned. “Maybe Leila can bake you something.”

  “No way,” Leila said. “If you win, you can clean up these pens.”

  Amber wandered into the room just after midnight. She gave Tristan a distant smile before choosing a book from Leila’s pile and settling down in the far corner to read.

  “We should get to bed soon,” Tristan said, stifling a yawn.

  “You’re only saying that because you’re losing,” Eli said. More than half of the pens were stacked by his elbow.

  Hayley got to her feet. “We still need to put sheets back on the mattresses,” she said. She had lost her entire pile of pens on the second round; for the past hour, she’d been watching and trying to help Cailyn. “No, you keep playing,” she told Leila. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  Now that she had the chair to herself, Cailyn curled her feet under her and propped her chin on her hands, watching with a sleepy, contented smile as Eli dealt the next round.

  By the time the game was finished, Tristan’s legs were stiff from standing. “Okay, new assignment,” he said, shaking out his sore ankles. “Everyone has to bring down a chair by the end of this week, or you have to sweep the floor. Deal?”

  “That’s not much time,” Cailyn said, blinking lazily. She looked ready to fall asleep at the table.

  “You have tomorrow and Friday,” Tristan said crossly. “You shouldn’t complain—some of us still have fifteen hours to work off.”

  Leila yawned. “Tomorrow I—I’ll find a rug somewhere.” She didn’t seem to be paying attention to the conversation.

  Smiling sleepily, the others began getting ready for bed. Hayley had finished tucking sheets around all nine mattresses; Tristan looked around, wanting to thank her, but she’d already fallen asleep.

  In the morning, everyone who’d slept in the secret room was exhausted but cheerful. Zeke’s gang could only scowl at Tristan and Leila during breakfast, since the teachers were watching, though Tristan knew there’d be trouble later.

  As the students made their way to Brikkens’ class, Zeke grabbed Leila by the collar of her sweatshirt and thrust her against the wall, pinning her down. “Where did you and your buddies go last night, huh?” he said.

  Leila had been expecting this—digging her nails into Zeke’s palm, she wrenched her shirt from his grasp.

  Tristan shoved Cassidy McKenna aside and rounded on Zeke. “Get away from her,” he snapped. He didn’t want to start another fight; he had enough hours to work off already.

  Leila jammed her fist into Zeke’s jaw and ducked under his arm. Rusty dove towards Zeke, but Tristan and Leila lunged at him and grabbed his shoulders.

  “Snap out of it,” Tristan said, yanking Rusty around to face him.

  After a moment, Rusty lowered his fists and ran a hand through his hair, breathing hard. “Sorry,” he said.

  As Cassidy stalked past T
ristan, she gave him an ugly look.

  The first few chairs began showing up in the secret room that evening—Evvie brought a serviceable wood chair for the table, and Eli hauled down a squashy maroon armchair, which he sat in all evening just to lord it over the others. After dinner Leila started writing up a list of everything they still needed, while the others called out ideas.

  “Chairs,” Cailyn said, looking pointedly at Eli, who smirked at the people standing around him.

  “I already have that,” Leila said.

  “We’ll need a broom,” Hayley said. She stepped closer to the bookshelf and wiped a finger along the top shelf. A ring of gray dust clung to her finger when she held it up. “And a bunch of rags, if we can find them.”

  Leila nodded and bent over the table to add those to her list. “Anything else?”

  Tristan looked up, remembering suddenly. “We need one of those Prasidimums,” he said. “Gracewright said they only let certain people through, so if we planted one in the doorway, none of Zeke’s gang would be able to get in here.”

  “That would be perfect,” Leila said. She added this to her list. “It’d keep the teachers away, too, if they tried to kick us out.”

  Rusty laughed. “We should give this place a code name. That way no one will know what we’re talking about when we mention it.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s that stupid,” Tristan said, though he agreed.

  “It should be The Cave,” Rusty said.

  Leila tossed her pencil aside and crossed her arms. “That sounds dumb.”

  “But what if it stood for something else?” Eli said, sitting up straight and digging his fingers into the arms of his chair. “Like...the Cool Awesome Very...Eh...”

  Leila snorted. “Any other ideas?”

  “If we got more books, it could be called The Library,” Hayley suggested.

  “Or the magical bedroom,” Cailyn said eagerly.

  “That sounds dirty,” Eli said.

  Leila shook her head. “We’re trying to keep it obscure, remember?”

  “What about calling it the Subroom?” Trey said. Tristan and Leila turned and stared at him. “It can stand for the Secret Underground Bedroom.”