by Anne Ursu
“It costs a lot to get good magic,” Oscar said. It was something Caleb said all the time, his eyes twinkling at customers, his hand reaching for their coins—Well, you know, you have to pay to get the best. They smiled and handed him their money and walked away, clutching their magic close.
But Callie did not smile. She glanced at Oscar, and then looked away. “I know,” she said.
A moment passed. The air thickened. It pressed upon Oscar’s skin.
“I need to go,” Callie said.
“The passionflower will work,” he said. “I promise. I can show you in a book if you want!”
Callie gave him a whisper of a smile. “I know it will. Good night, Oscar.”
Even with the shop empty, he could feel the rhythms and patterns the customers had left behind, hear the ghosts of their voices in the air. That was what happened—people came into the shop and left and went on about their days, but their echoes stayed behind, took up residence in Oscar’s head, and did not leave.
He let out a breath when he got into the cellar, where the steady darkness welcomed him, took him in, wrapped him up. No unfamiliar voices lingered down here, and the only rhythms and patterns belonged to the cats. When he got to his pantry, he found Bear sleeping in a corner. So he laid himself down on the floor, placing his cheek very gently on top of the sleeping lump of cat. She rumbled softly. Her stomach rose and fell, and Oscar tried to match his breathing to hers. In and out.
Tomorrow, at least, was Sunday, and the shop would be closed. Oscar could go back to the gardens in the morning, gather some herbs, keep company with the plants. Maybe he would ask Callie along, if she didn’t have appointments. There were so many herbs he could show her. Maybe if he asked her just right, she would come with him. Pardon me, Miss Callie, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m wondering if you might perhaps . . .
As Oscar lay with his head still resting on the accommodating cat, his eyes fell on his satchel. It was sitting underneath his bench, tucked way back against the wall. The piece of wood he’d picked up the other day nudged at his mind. His hands twitched. Oscar scooted himself over to the bench, opened the bag, and reached for it, then held it in his hands and studied it. Maybe it had come off a bigger piece of wood that had become something—a charm, a figurine, an enchanted trinket—but this was nothing, just a rough, discarded scrap, left to rot.
“I’ll make you into something,” Oscar whispered.
He got down his woodworking tools, shooting a glance at Bear, who was watching him curiously.
“I’m going to do some carving,” he told her. “It’s all right.” He lined everything up on the floor and stared at the straw-colored block. “What should I make?”
Bear blinked up at Oscar, her blue eyes betraying nothing.
The wood still felt warm in his hands. He began to chip away at it, because that seemed to be the thing to do. Whenever Oscar worked, he knew exactly what his project was—gather, pluck, chop, grind, dry, sort, smooth, carve—beginning, middle, and end. Everything had its path, every process, every moment.
Until now. It should have unnerved him. Normally it would have; normally he would have put it down and muttered something to a nearby cat and gone back to his mortar and pestle, where every system was right in front of his eyes.
But the wood, it had its own ideas. It would not let him go. And so he kept chipping away.
He could draw something first—Caleb always worked from designs. But Oscar could only draw things that were already there; how did you make a map of things that might be?
So he kept chipping.
Not much of the wood was left by the time he was done. But he got to the core of the thing. And he started carving, carefully, slowly. The core spoke to him and told him what to do, and for once in his life Oscar needed no map.
When he was done, he had in his palm a small wooden cat.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Glass Houses
He had the dream again. The sky, bright and blue, luring him in. The forest, empty of people, because they had all been taken already—except for Oscar, and Wolf in a sack at his feet. The wind pushed over the wizard trees, tearing the roots from the ground, leaving great mourning gashes in the soil. The roots gulped and gasped and grasped. The gashes in the ground grew under his feet; the wind battered his body. And then it was all gone—the ground, the forest, all of Aletheia—and Oscar was left with the sky and its terrible hunger. He fell into it, and kept falling, and falling some more into the blankness.
And then the dream-Oscar disappeared, expelled by the body-Oscar, who awoke with a start. He was sitting upright in his bed, surrounded only by darkness and the feelings the dream-Oscar had left behind—and he realized suddenly that his hand was clutching something tightly. He opened it to reveal the little wooden cat. Oscar stood the cat up in his hand and stroked it with one finger.
“You need a name,” he murmured.
He leaned over and lit his lantern and then lifted the cat up and appraised it. The cat gazed back with tiny etched circle eyes. “You,” Oscar said, “are Block.”
He gave the smooth back another stroke. Block was a good name.
Oscar looked around his room. Morning could be hours away. But he had had enough nightmares for one night.
He peered into the hallway. With his dreams still skittering around under his skin, the darkness did not feel welcoming now. Anything could be hiding there. He was in a dark underground labyrinth all alone; Caleb would not return for days, and if something happened to Oscar, no one would even know about it.
So he picked Secrets of the Wizards out from under his bed, slipped Block in his pocket, and headed upstairs. For the first time, the upper floor felt safer than the cellar; the moon didn’t allow the darkness total reign.
After setting out some cheese for the cats, who all rushed upstairs, happily accepting this change in routine, and then setting Block out next to him, Oscar sat down at the table in the kitchen and opened the book.
“What are your secrets?” he murmured.
The first page read:
This is the official chronicle of the wizards of Aletheia. We will record our experiences here from now on, so no piece of knowledge is ever lost to time, and we entrust future generations to do the same. Our future is nothing without our history. We serve Aletheia and its magic—it is our oath and our honor.
Goose bumps tickled their way down Oscar’s back—that page had been written by an actual wizard, one who lived and breathed and cared for Aletheia and performed magic far beyond Oscar’s imagination. The book consisted of almost two centuries’ worth of typeset entries by the great wizards who had nurtured and harnessed Aletheia’s magic so the island and its people could thrive.
Oscar settled in his chair as the dread left over from the nightmare lost its hold over him. For the rest of the night, nothing existed outside the small, secret world of Oscar, the wizards, and the light of the moon.
The wizards saw magic in all kinds of things—the movement of the planets, the tides, the behavior of animals, even the mutterings of madmen. They wrote long entries musing on the properties of turkey, tail mushrooms, or of venom from a wolf spider. Oscar began to recognize the wizards and their interests; the one named Nikola, for instance, liked animal magic, while Theodore wrote long treatises on the constellations and their movements. The generations slowly shifted over—one by one, the familiar names disappeared from the chronicle, and Oscar felt their loss as if the wizards themselves had been in front of him. But new ones always took their place, young men and women who had shown from birth some ability to bend the rules of the world. The island always replaced its wizards, one at a time. There had to have been exactly a hundred over the generations, to match the hundred wizard trees.
There was a wizard named Elia who loved plants. She discovered things that Oscar now knew as fact: Cloves for fevers. Balm of Gilead for swelling, with alfalfa to enhance its power. Elia wrote that everything natural had some unique element at its core, something that m
ade the mushrooms mushroomy and the stars starry. The wizard’s job was to discover that core element and coax its energy out. Magic was manipulating these energies and making them work together—creating a world not made of a jumble of discrete entities, but of balance and harmony.
She had one long entry about the wizards’ orchard, about the trees that bore fruit and the great network of roots hidden underneath the soil, each almost touching the others—a secret confederacy. The ground beneath our feet is home to more untapped wonder than the skies above our heads, she wrote.
That was her last entry.
It’s all right, Oscar told himself, rubbing his chest. This was a long time ago. Elia was a tree now. She got to nurture the soil in turn. She would like that. They would all like that.
Oscar read on until the presence of morning could not be denied and he shut the book, giving it a little pat. The monsters of the night had been banished. The wizards lingered on—guardian ghosts. If they watched over him, he had nothing to fear from dreams.
Oscar got up, put some water on to boil and threw chamomile in the steam basket, and tried to map out the day ahead. It was usually so easy; he could do it almost as a reflex. But the truths of the days were getting harder and harder to hold on to.
A knocking, then, at the back door. Oscar jumped and peered out through the window, but it was only Mister Malcolm, carrying a basket. Sunday, time for bread. Oscar tucked Block into his pocket, then opened the door, the non-wooden cats swarming behind him. The smell of the bread called to Oscar, and he wanted to swarm, too.
“May I come in?” Malcolm said, as he came in.
“Yes?”
“I assumed you would not be able to make it to the bakery this morning,” Malcolm said. “I was going to leave your delivery, but I saw you in the window and thought I might give you personal service.”
The words did not make much sense, but Oscar moved his lips into a smile, because it seemed like the sort of thing Callie would tell him to do. He was full to bursting with the wizards, and nothing else seemed real.
“Is your master away, young hand?” Malcolm asked.
Oscar nodded. “He has business on the continent.”
“Ah,” said Malcolm, eyes narrowing slightly. “I see.” His eyes fell on the book on the table and then traveled back to Oscar. Oscar’s heart skipped, but then eased—who would see a book and think he had been reading it?
A yowl from the floor. Pebble, staring insistently at Malcolm.
“May I help you?” Malcolm asked.
Cat thumped his tail. Pebble began to crawl up Malcolm’s leg.
“I think they want some bread,” Oscar said, helpfully.
“I think you might be right,” Malcolm said. He reached into his bag, pulled out two rolls, and began to divide them into pieces. “Master Caleb keeps remarkable cats. I have two myself. I keep them in the cellar, as they are prone to putting teeth marks in my merchandise.” He paused and looked up at Oscar. “Your master is the only magic worker I know who keeps them.”
“He says they’re the only animals that will stay in the forest,” Oscar said. “Besides the birds and spiders and bats and rats and those kinds of things, but they’re not as good to have around.”
“It is true,” Malcolm said, “that cats do not seem to mind the Barrow like most animals do . . . with the notable exception of the Most Spectacular Goat.”
“Do you know why?” Oscar asked. “Why the farm animals and messenger horses all have to be kept outside the forest? Why the City horses need Madame Elodie to tend them when they’re down here? I mean, the forest has animals, all sorts of weird ones, and they don’t mind.”
“I believe,” said Malcolm, taking loaves of bread out of the basket and placing them on the table, “most animals do not like magic—other than the ones native to the forest, of course. But in the case of cats, I believe magic does not like them.” He brushed his hands together and began to move back toward the door.
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?” Oscar asked, squeezing the cat in his pocket. “We have things that can help you. We have—” Oscar stopped. He had told Malcolm all this already.
“You don’t need magic to make bread, my boy.”
“But . . . it could make things easier for you. If you tried it, you’d see . It’s not anything big; it’s . . . just small enchantments.” He flushed, as if the wizards could hear him.
Malcolm eyed him levelly. “There is danger in small enchantments, my boy. Small enchantments make us dream of big ones.”
“But . . . that’s good. Isn’t that good?” He bit his lip.
“Some may say so. I prefer we dream of a big world.”
Oscar looked down at the cats, who were lined up happily, devouring bread. Trying to understand conversations was like trying to hear a quiet voice across the room. You strained so hard that it hurt, but it was all still just wisps in the air.
“Forgive an old man’s opinions,” Malcolm said. “I have been around a long time and have seen many things.” Now it was Malcolm’s turn to glance down at the cats. His eyes flicked back up to Oscar. “I was a magician once.”
Oscar’s eyes grew big. “You were a magician?”
“I was. A very long time ago. Now I bake bread.” He adjusted his cloak.
“Wait!” Oscar gaped up at Malcolm. The baker suddenly seemed to fill the room. “Why did you stop? Why would you ever stop?”
“I chose to,” Malcolm said, as if that were all there was to say. “My boy, you cannot look to magic to solve your problems. Magic is big and beautiful and terrible. The wizards understood, but no one understands anymore. People treat it like some cheap little thing, a commodity that serves at their pleasure. Magic serves at no one’s pleasure but its own.”
Oscar could not speak. The weathered old man who always smelled of yeast, who had a voice like the smell of baking bread, still stood in front of him. But now another presence was there, too, some mesmerizing glow just underneath the surface, as mighty and steadying as a wizard tree. Malcolm could stretch out his arms and hold the whole forest.
“Well,” Malcolm said, “now I must get back; I have more bread in the oven.” He picked up his basket and was just Malcolm again. But for Oscar the ghost of the magician still lingered. “Remember,” he added, “if you need anything while your master is away—or even if he is here—you may come find me. Whatever you need.”
“You mean if I need more bread?” Oscar asked.
“That is one possible need, yes,” Malcolm said. “But you might find there are others.”
“Wait!” Oscar exclaimed. “Should I call you Master Malcolm?”
A flash went over the baker’s face, as if the basket in his hands were suddenly very heavy. “No,” Malcolm said. “You should not.”
He left, and Oscar found himself looking around the room, feeling as though he had lost something. His eyes went to the herbs steaming on the stove, and he went over and took the pot off the fire. That done, he ran the wizard chronicle back down to his room, got dressed, and a few moments later he was walking across the marketplace to Madame Mariel’s.
Oscar was knocking on the door before he knew what he planned to say, exactly, or really why he had come in the first place. And there was no guarantee Callie was even there: he had no idea where she lived; many apprentices—
But the door opened, and Callie was behind it.
“Oh, you live here!” Oscar said. “I didn’t know if you lived here or the village. Or somewhere else. I live in the marketplace, but I know some apprentices live in the village—”
“I live here,” Callie replied simply. She leaned against the doorway.
“Good. That’s good. It’s Sunday. So the magic workers’ shops are closed. Master Caleb’s shop is closed and you’re closed, unless you have appointments, but—”
“I know, Oscar,” Callie said. “We are closed. I have no appointments.”
“Well, you helped me in the shop yesterday. And so it’s
my turn to help you. We had a deal. You remember, right?”
Callie cocked her head and smiled a little. “Yes, Oscar, I do remember.”
Oscar looked at her face for a half a moment “All right, good,” he said, for there was nothing to do but keep talking. “So, I have to go to the gardens today. And we have all kinds of plants there. You wouldn’t believe how many! And so I could show them to you. And I could tell you what they do and how you can use them. You can use them for so much.” He glanced up. Callie was watching him, still with that wisp of a smile on her face.
It would be so much easier if she were a cat.
“And I could show you the glass house plants,” he continued, because he could not stop. “They’re from all over the world! There are really good ones for healing. There’s this tree with flowers like stars. It’s really good for rashes—the oil, I mean. There are these plants that look like spiders”—he made his hands into claws to demonstrate—“the leaves help with . . . well, um, bowels. They work and they’re important. And the glass house is . . . it’s like a palace. With . . . plants. A plant palace. You have to know it’s there, though; you have to expect it. It’s a spell Caleb did, so no one can see the gardens. Except the people who already can see them. I mean—”
The words kept coming and he could not stop them, not while Callie was standing there so indecipherably, and so he was going to keep talking until he used up all the words there were and then no one would be able to talk to anyone else anymore and then all anyone would have left were one another’s unintelligible faces, and maybe some weird gesturing, too, and it would be all Oscar’s fault.
“Yes,” Callie said, saving the world with one word. “You can show me your glass palace.”
Soon they were walking together through the marketplace, into the forest, each with a basket in hand. Callie’s hair was wrapped up in a knot at the back of her head, and with every few steps one or two strands would break loose.
“What do you think Master Caleb does on the continent?” Callie asked, after a time.