by Kyle Shultz
“You’re talking like Nick’s curse has a mind of its own,” said Crispin.
“Magic stems from life itself,” said Cordelia. “All magic is alive. And complex spells, like the Beast Curse, often behave as if they have an independent will.”
I pushed myself up from the floor and began pacing back and forth across the roof on all fours. An embarrassing new habit, like so many things I’d started doing since the change, but it helped me think. “So where does that leave us?”
Cordelia reached into her pocket and withdrew more chalk. Different colors this time. Good grief, I thought.
“Here’s my plan,” she said, doodling rapidly on the stone. “If your curse wants to fight, then perhaps we should indulge it.”
I shook my head. “I don’t follow you.”
“Parallel casting clearly isn’t working. But I remember reading about something called ‘cross-casting.’” She wrote the word down in bold letters with a red stick of chalk. “Some magician back in the fourth century Before the End developed it as a possible method of breaking spells without destroying the source.” She drew another Stick-Nick (in red chalk) and Stick-Cordelia (in blue), as well as the symbols representing the spells.
“The theory,” she said, “is that if you take a creature enchanted with a particular spell, and cast another spell on it which is the exact opposite of that spell, the two enchantments will destroy each other without destroying the source.” She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and rubbed it across all the runes, turning them into smudges. “You see? The spells just cancel each other out. It’ll be as if neither of them was ever cast in the first place.” Finishing her dramatic display, she rocked back on her heels and wiped an arm across her forehead, leaving a big smear of chalk dust on her face.
Crispin nodded. “That makes sense.”
“You don’t understand it any more than I do!” I stopped pacing and stood up on two legs, pushing my fingers through my mane in frustration. “Never mind all the magical mumbo-jumbo, Cordelia. Does this method work?”
She hesitated. “Well…going by the historical record, that’s a little unclear. In fact, I’m not entirely certain that anyone’s actually tried it before. It’s pretty dangerous, in theory. Even the most insane wizards in history don’t seem to have been crazy enough to attempt it.”
“Right,” I said slowly. “But, naturally, we’re going to.”
“That’s the plan, I’m afraid.”
“It’s a terrible—”
She put up a hand to silence me, an exasperated look on her face. “I know it’s a terrible plan. You don’t have to say that for the fifteenth time. You may as well get used to terrible plans. They’re all I have left.”
“Which is exactly why I told you to stop trying to fix this,” I argued, motioning to myself. “It’s not worth it, Cordelia. One or more of us is going to end up getting hurt or killed or…I don’t know; thrown into a dimension ruled by vampire aardvarks or something.”
“That actually sounds like fun,” said Crispin, intrigued.
I ignored him. “Cordelia, given how mysterious you’ve been about your plan, I don’t know exactly why you’ve brought us to this Academy of yours—”
“I was about to explain that—”
“—and to be honest, I’m not sure it matters. We’re already in over our heads with all this undercover nonsense. Trust me, I’ve done undercover work before, and it’s hard. You and Crispin have no experience with it. You’ll probably get us caught in less than a week. Or less than a day, in Crispin’s case.”
Crispin looked hurt. “You know, you’re really not very nice to me; have I ever mentioned that?”
Cordelia poked me in the chest. “Hold on just a moment. This is my world, remember? My friends, my past. I know how to fit in. Don’t lecture me about safety.”
“Fine. I’ll lecture Crispin, then.” I turned on him. “You should be safely stowed away somewhere in some nice little cottage in the wilds of Grimmany, protected by the Dwarven Brotherhood. Like we planned in the first place.”
He snorted. “Not likely. You were bonkers to think you could just shove me in a cupboard and swan off on your own.”
“I almost managed it, didn’t I? Until Cordelia dragged you right into the middle of all of this!”
“Nick.” Cordelia’s tone was stern. “If this plan is going to work, we need Crispin. The whole thing hinges on him. Infiltrating the Academy is one thing. Contacting the person who holds the key to helping us is going to be another matter altogether.”
“Why?”
“Because the last time he and I met, I tried to feed him to a shark.”
I searched her face for any sign that she was joking. I didn’t find one. “Oh,” I said, unsure what else to say.
“Ouch,” said Crispin.
Cordelia’s cheeks went red with embarrassment. “Which is why Crispin, acting as a student, needs to be the one to approach him. Not me.”
I crouched down and began pacing again. “I don’t like this.”
“Really?” Crispin leaned his head on his hand and regarded me with a wry smile. “We’d never have guessed.”
“I want us to get out of here. This is too dangerous. Madame Levesque is never going to believe all that drivel you told Professor Grumpy-scales. She’ll probably have us trapped in paintings like all those people downstairs the second she finds out where we are.”
“Malcolm probably won’t even tell her we’re here,” said Cordelia. “He’s very discreet.”
“Ha! He’s a dragon, Cordelia! By definition, he shouldn’t be trusted! Tomorrow morning, he’ll probably just say ‘Oh, terribly sorry, but I’ve decided to snack on you after all!’” I paused, noticing that Cordelia and Crispin were both looking at me with wide eyes.
“That…was a really good impression of Malcolm,” said Crispin.
“That was Malcolm,” added Cordelia, amazed. “I mean, it sounded exactly like his voice.”
I blinked in surprise. “It did?” I tried impersonating Malcolm again. “Hello, you’re expelled from my school, and also, you’re my lunch.” Cordelia was right. The resemblance to Malcolm’s grumpy tones wasn’t just uncanny; it was pitch-perfect.
“You couldn’t do that before, right?” said Crispin, looking confused.
I decided to keep experimenting. “You couldn’t do that before, right?” I echoed, in a perfect imitation of Crispin’s voice.
“Stop it, Nick,” said Cordelia. “That’s disturbing.”
“Stop it, Nick, that’s disturbing.” Now I sounded exactly like her.
Cordelia’s teeth clicked together. “It isn’t funny.”
I coughed several times. “I agree,” I said, in my normal voice. “It’s creepy. Just wanted to play around with it a little. I suppose mimicry is another new ability I can add to the list.”
“Like a mockingbird,” said Crispin.
“If I had to get an ability from birds, I would have preferred flight.” I stood up and shook myself, trying to dispel the eerie memory of hearing other peoples’ voices come out of my mouth. “Let’s get back to the issue at hand. I’m sorry, Cordelia, but for all our sakes, I’m going to have to insist that we leave. If you won’t go with me, I’ll just go on my own. And you’ll have a hard time breaking my curse if I’m not even here.”
Cordelia scrambled to her feet, her eyes blazing with anger. “You are not leaving. I absolutely forbid it. You are not going to lose yourself in some dark corner of the Afterlands just to get me to give up trying to cure you.”
I met her gaze coolly as she glared up into my face. “Try and stop me.”
She gave a mirthless chuckle. “Oh, you don’t want me to do that, Nick.”
I tapped my chest. “Eight-foot-tall monster resistant to even the most powerful spells in the Afterlands.” I spread my arms wide, giving her an easy target. “Do your worst, Lady Beaumont.”
“I don’t need magic to take you down, Nick. I know about that vulnerable s
pot behind your ear. I’ll inject you with enough sedative to put you into a coma if I have to.”
“Go ahead and try it!”
“Oh, shut up, both of you!” Crispin shouted, jumping up and balling his fists at his sides.
Cordelia and I stared at him in shock. He was red-faced and breathing heavily with anger. I almost didn’t recognize him.
He shook his head in disbelief. “I swear, you two are just…poison to each other.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You,” he said, pointing to me, “are so infuriatingly sacrificial that you won’t let anyone help you. You spend so much time and effort being heroic and protecting other people that you walk all over them and act like an arrogant son of a what-not every time they try to look after you.”
I blinked. “Er…”
Crispin’s finger swiveled to Cordelia. “And you are so prone to feeling guilty about things that you throw all caution and sanity to the wind in desperate attempts to fix your mistakes.”
Cordelia bristled. “Now, wait just a second—”
Now Crispin pointed to both of us. “So when the two of you are together, it’s just one long, vicious cycle of insufferable nobility and toxic self-flagellation.”
My jaw fell. I hadn’t the faintest idea Crispin even knew any of those words.
“Here’s the point,” he continued. “Nick, you don’t have the right to order people not to help you, even if they’re taking a risk by doing it. Back off and let your friends and family care about you. And Cordelia, you’re never going to be able to help Nick if you’re driven to distraction by your guilt over what happened to him. Calm down and have some common sense!”
We both stood staring at him in astonishment for a long moment.
The angry determination on his face melted into embarrassment. “That’s all,” he said, ducking his head and tracing patterns in the stone with the toe of his shoe.
The awkward silence continued for what felt like hours, but was probably only a few seconds. Finally, I said, “You, ah…you make some good points. One or two. I suppose.”
Cordelia’s shoulders slumped. “It pains me to say it, but he was completely spot-on with absolutely everything he said.”
Crispin’s eyes widened. “I—I was?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “However, I really wasn’t planning to admit that. Ever.”
“We might as well,” said Cordelia. “Otherwise the problems between us are just going to get worse. We need to be honest with each other. And ourselves.”
I glared down at my feet, pinning my ears back in displeasure. “But I don’t like being honest with myself.”
“You’ll have to get over it, I suppose.”
I ground my fangs. “Fine. Where does that leave us, then?”
“We’re here now,” said Crispin. “Regardless of whether it was a good idea to begin with, we did successfully get into Warrengate. We might as well use that to our advantage, right?”
I half-smiled. “You want me to stop reminding everyone that this is a terrible idea, is that it?”
“That would be lovely,” said Cordelia.
“But,” Crispin cut in, raising his hand, “we should take a line through Nick and be very, very careful from here on out.” He motioned to Cordelia. “So go ahead and tell us what you had in mind, and we can all work together to figure out the best way forward.”
“Right.” Her eyes clouded. “Er…where was I?”
I studied the smudgy chalk diagram on the floor. “Something about spells canceling each other out, I think.”
She snapped her fingers, inadvertently throwing magical blue sparks in the process. “Right. Thank you. And that’s why we’re here. We need to come up with a spell that’s the exact opposite of the Beast Curse so that we can pit the two enchantments against each other.” She smacked her right fist into her left hand to illustrate.
I tapped a finger against my cheek as I pondered this. “So if the Beast Curse is a spell to turn a human into a monster…you’re looking for a spell that turns a monster into a human?”
She nodded. “Or at least a spell that transforms some kind of magical creature into a human. It doesn’t strictly have to be anything monstrous.”
“Can’t you just make up a spell like that?”
“Heavens, no.” Cordelia lifted her hand and watched as runes began drifting around her fingers. “Making up simple spells is easy—straightforward attack spells, and so on—but something like what we’re talking about would take a far more skilled enchanter than me to invent from scratch.”
Crispin cast a quizzical eye at the blurred chalk symbols. “Is it really so difficult to find a spell like that? I mean, things were always getting changed into other things back in fairy-tale times. You’d think there’d be a monster-to-human spell within easy reach.”
“There are quite a few spells along those lines, I’ll admit,” said Cordelia. “But we need a particularly powerful one. Nick’s curse will be fighting back with everything it has. The—counterspell, if you will, has to be able to stand up to that. Which is why we need a specific one.”
“And you think we’ll find it here,” I surmised. “Why?”
“You’re probably not aware, because the Council tries to keep it quiet, but this island is where the tale of the Little Mermaid took place. Or rather, the historical events that inspired it.”
This surprised me. I’d heard a rumor or two about Caledon being the setting of the story, but most accounts claimed it took place in Andermark. “So…mermaids are real.”
“Of course they are,” said Cordelia, laughing a little. “Given everything we’ve seen already, I’m amazed you even have to ask. Mer-folk is a more accurate term, however. They’ve got both genders. And the correct name for their species is ‘Undine.’”
Crispin wrinkled his nose. “Sounds like a cough medicine.”
Cordelia ignored the remark. “Warrengate Academy used to be the royal palace of the prince from the Little Mermaid story. The lost civilization of Aegiris—the country of the Undine—is said to be somewhere off the coast of this island. And my remaining contacts in Talesend told me that an old acquaintance of mine here at Warrengate has recently discovered a cache of Aegirian artifacts.”
I gave an impatient nod. “And all this is important why?”
“Because I need to find the spell that the Sea Witch used to turn the Little Mermaid into a human. It’s not among the artifacts Kiran found—there weren’t any spell-books, apparently, just some random junk—but I think he can lead us to the Sea Witch’s tomb. That’s most likely where we’ll find what we need. Powerful Undine always had their most prized belongings buried with them in elaborate crypts.”
I opened my mouth to speak…then hesitated.
“What?” asked Cordelia.
I looked at Crispin. “Can I raise some concerns, or are you going to shout at me again?”
“Be my guest,” said Crispin. “Just watch yourself.”
“All right, then. Number one.” I held up a single claw. “Is there a risk that you’re going to end up turning me into some kind of sea monster instead of making me human again? Because I’m having enough problems adjusting to the status quo already. I really don’t want gills and fins in the bargain.”
Cordelia bit her lip. “You becoming a sea monster isn’t likely.”
I frowned. “I was hoping for more confidence than that.”
“I’ll be using the spell as a guide to create my own counterpoint to your curse; so the…aquatic elements will be removed. However, I can’t absolutely promise you that there won’t be some unexpected result. We’re in uncharted territory with this kind of magic.”
“Lovely. On to Concern Number Two, then. So far, we’ve discovered that the stories of Beauty and the Beast and Snow White, plus who knows how many others, are actually completely inaccurate. That the real historical events are nothing like the storybooks. So how can you be sure that th
is spell you’re looking for even exists? What if the tale of the Little Mermaid didn’t happen the way everyone thinks it did?”
“That’s a risk,” she admitted. “The records on all the old stories are notoriously unreliable.”
“And finally, Number Three—how exactly is Crispin going undercover as a student going to work? This is an academy of advanced magic, right? He’s been studying magic for a matter of weeks! How is he ready for the advanced stuff?”
Crispin’s expression darkened, and he started to say something, but paused. “Actually,” he confessed, “I’m a little worried about that myself, to be honest.”
“There’s no need,” Cordelia assured him. “Trust me; this college is full of utterly inept enchanters. Most students get accepted on the basis of their family name instead of their skill level. By comparison, Crispin will probably be better at magic than his fellow students.”
This did not go a long way toward reassuring me. “I’ll take your word for it,” I said grudgingly.
“So who’s this person I need to get in touch with?” Crispin asked Cordelia.
“The Professor of Applied Arcanotechnology. I checked the schedule; you’ll have a class with him tomorrow afternoon.”
“Speaking of classes,” I said, “what’s this one you’ve got lined up for me to teach?” I struggled to remember what it was called. Finally, the title came to me. “‘Mundane Survival;’ what’s that about? Sounds boring.”
She smiled in amusement. “Not really. Your job will be to teach the coddled students of this academy how to survive the worst thing they can possibly imagine.”
“Which is…”
“Losing their magic.”
I didn’t follow her. “What?”
“You’re going to teach them how to survive in the event that they somehow lose their magical abilities. Should be a piece of cake.”