by Lucia Ashta
“You don’t actually know Albacus,” Steven said, while the rest of the ghosts observed their banter like it was a tennis match, and it wasn’t their place to intervene. “You know of Albacus, and that’s a very different thing.”
“Not in this instance, it isn’t. I know everything there is to know about his reputation. I certainly know enough to understand how incredibly important it is that this girl find him.”
“My name is Isadora,” I said, and she dismissed me with a wave of her hand.
“We have to help her.”
I arched my eyebrows at that. The Lady Gosselin had suddenly gone from I to we.
Lady Gosselin continued. “There’s no better wizard than Lord Albacus of Irele, beyond his brother Lord Mordecai, of course.”
So she does know them! Or of them at the very least.
“We’ll help her, won’t we, Steven?”
Steven didn’t answer right away. Opposite in every way to Lady Gosselin, he studied me with piercing eyes that made me want to squirm at his attention.
He was tall and thin, where Lady Gosselin was curvaceous, almost plump. Whereas she was bedecked with every advantage of fashion, he was dressed simply. His clothes were cut elegantly but designed not to draw the eye.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?”
He took his time to answer, during which even the other ghosts seemed impatient for his reply. “I’m debating how much help to give you.”
“Oh, good,” Lady Gosselin said, sounding strangely relieved. “So what are we going to do?”
The lady, who’s made it so evident she’s in charge, is asking him?
“We’re going with her,” Steven said. “All of us. We’re going to help her recover Albacus.”
Lady Gosselin smiled, transforming the imperious expression, which appeared permanent on her face, into a pleasant one. “How wonderful! This is just what I needed, a little adventure to pass the time. It’s been far too long since we gave those pesky sorcerers trouble.”
“Wait.” I was in a hurry, sure, but I wasn’t certain I understood. I directed my questions to Lady Gosselin. “So you and Steven are, uh, were magicians?”
“Of course.” She patted her hair as if to make sure it was still perfectly in place. Since nothing changed about the spirits, I guessed it was a habit from when she was alive. “No one could keep a secret as great as the existence of magic, not from me.” She seemed very pleased with herself. “And Steven already knew about magic when I met him.”
“Oh? You and Steven knew each other when you were, ah, alive?”
“Of course we did, silly girl. He’s my husband.”
My jaw actually started to fall open before I had the awareness to clamp my lips shut. Her husband? I definitely hadn’t seen that revelation coming. “I see,” I finally sputtered. “And, um, all the rest of you?” There had to be at least two dozens of them.
“Some of them were magicians, skilled in their own way. Some of them learned about it once they passed on from their bodies. Those of us with magic tend to band together.” She clapped her hands; they didn’t make a sound. “And now we’re all going to help you!”
She pointed to an ordinary-looking woman to my left. “Mariana there is quite skilled at locating spells. I’d bet she could pinpoint exactly where Lord Albacus is. How long has he been dead?”
“I’m not exactly sure. A while, I think.”
“Well, don’t go out of your way to be helpful, dear.”
I brushed off her comment, and she didn’t even seem to notice.
“Mariana, do you think you could find him?”
“I think so,” said the ghost of a woman with long, brown hair and a plain but pleasant face.
“Wait,” I said, ignoring the irony that I was the one who was in such a hurry, and I was the one to keep halting this train Lady Gosselin was anxious to set barreling down the tracks. “You can do magic once you’re, um, you know, dead?”
“Poor dear,” Lady Gosselin said. “Clearly no one has taken the time to teach you how to speak properly.”
No, it’s just that I’ve never had to talk to ghosts before. And speaking with the dead hadn’t exactly been on Mamá’s curriculum for my studies.
“We can’t perform the same magic as we could before,” she said. “But, as you know, all magic is based in the four elements. Therefore, even though we are, in theory, dead”—I was pretty sure it was more than theory—“the elements are still a part of us.”
Steven added, “So long as we exist in some form, the elements are within us, which means we can draw on them to perform magic.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You can’t affect the physical world, right? You can’t actually move things in the world of the living or anything like that?”
“No, we can’t,” Steven said, a somber tilt to his head.
“But you can still do magic?”
“Some magic. That which doesn’t require us to manipulate the physical world.”
“And so Mariana can find Albacus?”
Mariana smiled kindly at me, taking a step forward, separating herself from the many ghosts that surrounded us. “I believe that I can, so I can.”
Hunh. That was an interesting way to phrase that.
“Well?” Lady Gosselin said. “What are you waiting for? Mariana, do the spell. Find Albacus.”
“Please,” I added. “It would be most helpful.” But Mariana didn’t appear affronted by Lady Gosselin’s bossy nature. I supposed she was well used to it after who knew how long they’d shared the spirit world.
Oh! I bit my lip, debating how best to ask what I’d just realized. “How long have— Um, Lady Gosselin?”
“Yes, dear?” She looked at me pitiably, as if I were a bit dim-witted and it wasn’t entirely my fault that I couldn’t speak well.
“Were you actually acquainted with Albacus while he was alive? I mean, because you already said you didn’t know him, but, well, was he alive while you, ah, were?”
She tsked and shook her head, but let my stellar lack of ability to express myself eloquently pass this time. I didn’t really care. Even Mamá would cut me some slack given my circumstances.
For once, Steven beat his wife to the reply. “We did live when he did. Most of us here have. But he’s lived longer than a normal lifespan.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.” I was disappointed in his answer, without fully understanding why. I didn’t need to know when they’d lived and died. I’d just been... curious, I supposed. Knowing they were contemporaries of Albacus didn’t help at all, especially not when he’d lived more than three centuries before dying.
You don’t have time to understand things, Isa, I admonished myself. You need to find Albacus and get back to your body immediately. You already wasted time helping Sibylle. I hadn’t really wasted time helping Sibylle, but I had used up some of the precious bit I had.
“Are you quite finished with your questions?” Lady Gosselin asked. “I thought you were in a hurry.”
“I am, in a very great hurry.”
Lady Gosselin just looked at me, saying without words, Well, then why do you keep delaying Mariana?
When I didn’t reply, aloud or with my expression, Lady Gosselin folded her arms across her chest and said, “Mariana, proceed.”
Mariana smiled at me. I realized she didn’t take orders from Lady Gosselin, not in the way the great lady thought, anyway. I was starting to understand that Mariana, and probably many of the other ghosts, went along with the flow because that was easiest and led to less conflict. But the determined expression on Mariana’s face made it clear she was more than capable of standing up to the likes of Lady Gosselin if she had reason to.
The kind witch spread her arms wide, just as I’d seen the magicians of the academy do many times when they were about to cast a spell. She hovered in the air as comfortably as if she were standing on firm ground, then closed her eyes.
Right away, her lips began moving. I strained my ears to pick up the words of her spell, but if that was difficult to do with magicians who were very much alive, it was even more difficult when the witch was dead.
I made out little more than melodious sounds that showed me she was speaking, but I had no chance of learning her spell. Oh well. Maybe once this was all over and I came back to life I could actually sit in on some real classes of magic. One day, I might actually learn spell casting and have use for that spell book Madame Pimlish suggested we carry with us everywhere to jot down our new spells.
A rustling of the still air around us snapped me from my wandering thoughts. I hadn’t noticed until then how incredibly still the air had been, almost as if it, too, were dead—an impossibility, surely.
A stout breeze whipped to life now. Had we been alive, it would have been enough to muss Lady Gosselin’s hair. As it was, not a hair drifted out of place.
But I still felt the air flit across my skin, making me feel more alive than I had since I died.
“You feel it?” Lady Gosselin whispered to me, so as not to interrupt what Mariana was doing, I thought.
“What, the wind?”
She nodded, eyes wistful.
“Yes, I feel it. Don’t you?”
She shook her head, too sad for words, it seemed.
“What does that mean?”
“Perhaps you’re right and you have a chance to return to your body. We no longer feel anything.”
Well, that was incredibly sad, so sad that I whispered before thinking. “So why don’t you cross into the light?”
Lady Gosselin fully turned to face me and offered me a bitter smile. “We aren’t finished here yet.”
“Maybe you were waiting to help me?”
“Perhaps.” But by then her attention was back on Mariana.
The wind licked at my skin, and I suddenly wanted—no, needed—to return to my body. I needed to feel the breeze against my skin again, to experience the sunshine on my face, the scents of plants in bloom. I needed to hug my brother and share time with my friends. It would seem, too, that I needed to learn magic.
For something that had been so foreign to me not all that long ago, magic was fast becoming an important part of me. I didn’t think Mordecai’s runes had been wrong about me in the least. Not anymore.
All that was left now was for me to learn magic. I hoped to get started in earnest soon, assuming I could manage to regain life, of course.
Mariana’s lips stilled, as did the rest of her. She stood, unmoving, to the side in the center of this haphazard circle.
Though she did nothing overtly, I could sense the magic. It crackled and sparked beyond my sight, but in such a way that I could feel it running through my body.
I’d never experienced magic like this before, and I wondered if it was an aftermath of my intervention in the dark magic curse that had landed me here, dead. It was as if I’d become some sort of gauge of magic.
Mariana’s spell crawled across my skin. Or maybe it wasn’t her spell at all, but the elements, working to fulfill her wishes. Whatever it was, I experienced the raw power of the spell.
The ordinary-looking witch might be dead, but her magic was far from it.
Then the sensation simply... ceased. The air settled into stillness, and my skin felt almost normal—like I was alive again.
Mariana opened her eyes and pursed her lips into a grim line. “I know where he is,” she said to me. Then, to Lady Gosselin and Steven, “And you’re not going to like it.”
Chapter 7
Before I could recover from the ominous feeling of Mariana’s prediction, Lady Gosselin had already taken charge. “Well, where is he? Don’t make us wait, Mariana.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Mariana said with an innocent look plastered on her translucent face that seemed enough to convince Lady Gosselin that she was under her control. But I didn’t miss the rebellious spark in those otherwise lifeless eyes.
“So? Where is he?”
Mariana turned to face me, and Lady Gosselin bristled, evidently expecting to be the primary recipient of any important information. “He’s at Maurisse’s.”
“Maurisse?” I asked at the same moment that Lady Gosselin thundered, “Maurisse!”
“Yes, Maurisse.”
“That rapscallion!” Lady Gosselin continued to fume. “I presume he’s found a way to hold Lord Albacus against his will?”
“That’s what it felt like.”
“That—” Lady Gosselin’s eyes erupted in indignation. She spun on her husband. “That terrible, horribly awful man,” she spat. Her hands were alight in front of her face, fluttering here and there as they expressed her emotions. “Can you believe that he would dare to take a wizard of the likes of Lord Albacus?”
“Actually, I can very much believe it,” Steven said coolly. “He’s precisely the kind of sorcerer I’d expect such actions from.”
“But he’s the head of the Magical Council!”
The head of the Magical Council? Oh, that was bad, incredibly bad. I knew little about the organization, but I understood enough to realize that it set the rules for the magical world. If the organization had been infiltrated by the SMS, then we were in big trouble—big like the ocean trouble.
Unless it was a simple misunderstanding.... Maybe this Maurisse was holding Albacus for some other reason, a benevolent one?
“Perhaps he means well—” I suggested, but didn’t get a chance to say more. Lady Gosselin sputtered. “You can’t possibly be suggesting that.”
Yet I had been.
“If Maurisse is involved, it’s bound to be bad. Isn’t it, Steven?”
“It would seem like it.”
“More than ‘seem like it’. Definitely.”
“Are you so certain?” I asked. “I don’t think he’d be head of the Magical Council if he were evil or something.”
Lady Gosselin scoffed. “Then you’re ignorant of the reality of the magical world.”
I started to take offense to her words until I realized it was the truth. I was ignorant. I didn’t want to be, but I was.
“Maurisse has always had people under his charms and influence. People have a tendency to believe every ridiculous thing he says.”
“How? Does he enchant them or something?”
“I only met the man once, but even I almost fell for his charms, and I’m a very astute witch.”
I suspected Lady Gosselin would believe herself astute whether she was or not, and risked a glance at Steven. The slight upturn of his lips suggested that his wife had a higher opinion of herself than he did.
“I wasn’t around him long enough to figure out how he did it,” she added.
“Nor was I,” Steven said, with the confident yet understated look of a man who had the abilities to do exactly what he claimed. “I don’t think it was a spell though. The other members of the Magical Council were no fools.”
“Of course they are,” Lady Gosselin snapped. “Why else would they fall for his act?”
Mariana smiled. Apparently Lady Gosselin had forgotten that she’d just admitted that she’d fallen for his charms.
“The members of the Magical Council aren’t fools, Gosselin, no matter what you say. They can’t be. They’re chosen for their prowess. They’re some of the best of the magical world.”
“You don’t even know who the other members are.”
“Nor do you.”
“But I’m not the one making such outlandish claims.”
There was no reason to think they were outlandish, but this was Lady Gosselin. I was beginning to suspect that her ability to create drama was what kept her from crossing into the light. She appeared to enjoy it far too much.
“You can’t be sure of any of what you say without knowing who the other members are.”
“I know who two of the members are,” I said quietly, but every ghost there, including Steven and Mariana, spun to stare at me.
“You do?�
� Lady Gosselin gasped, her hands to her chest. “That’s—but that’s coveted information. It’s supposed to be a secret guarded until death.”
It wasn’t really my news to tell, but I was dead, and so were they, and I didn’t figure it could hurt to share. As much as I wasn’t overly fond of the overbearing Lady Gosselin, the look of pure enthusiasm on her face made me smile. These people were all dead and apparently stuck with each other for the time being. I wouldn’t mind offering them something.
“I know of only two of them.”
“Two?” Lady Gosselin squeaked. “There are rumored to be only seven of them beyond the head of the Council. Two is more than a fourth of the organization!”
I chuckled. This side of Lady Gosselin was much more enjoyable.
“Tell us,” she ordered, and I stopped finding her enjoyable.
“I will, but you all have to swear that you won’t reveal the secret.”
“Who would we tell?” Lady Gosselin asked. When every single one of us ghosts simply stared at her, she had the self-awareness to look chagrined. “Fine, we’ll all promise not to divulge the information.”
She whirled her hands in front of her face, hurrying everyone along for once, now that she was the one who wanted something. “We all swear, don’t we?”
A chorus of we dos and of course we dos satisfied me that they’d protect the secret.
“See?” Lady Gosselin prompted. “We won’t tell a soul. Now, spill.”
I opened my mouth to obey, then hesitated. When I first offered to tell them, I hadn’t realized the information would be as coveted as it was. I wasn’t sure I needed leverage in my current situation, but neither was I sure I didn’t.
I decided to hedge my prize nugget. “I’ll tell you who two members of the Council are, but only after Mariana tells me more.”
Lady Gosselin narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re negotiating?”
I did feel a bit guilty about it, but yes. “It’s just that I’m about to reveal a super important secret, one that hardly anyone knows.” My placating seemed to be working on the great lady, not so much on her husband. “Think of it as a treat. Dessert last.”