The Real Boy

by Anne Ursu

  When they stepped into the cellar, something hurled itself at Callie—though it was not Wolf, unless Wolf had become small and fuzzy and orange after his death.

  “Pebble!” Oscar said as the cat crashed into her legs. The kitten flopped on her back and rolled around in front of Callie as if Callie were catnip.

  Callie’s face broke out into a smile as bright as all the lanterns up and down the hallway. She squatted down and rubbed Pebble’s belly. “Good kitty,” she whispered.

  The cats multiplied around Callie—now Crow, and Bear, and even Cat. Callie’s smile broadened as they presented themselves to her, one belly at a time. Oscar had never seen them all like this; one person made them all come out of the shadows.

  “Did you name them all?” Callie asked.

  “Well, in a way,” he said. The cats had really named themselves.

  He glanced over at his pantry. Someday, he would like to show it to her. But instead he motioned her forward into the hallway, shooting a look at Cat. Master Caleb’s not back, is he?

  Cat blinked back, unperturbed.

  “This is incredible,” Callie said, as they walked down the long hallway. “There’s a whole world down here!”

  When they got to the library Callie just stood in the doorway, mouth open. It was not Oscar’s. He had not conceived of it or built it; he was not even supposed to be in it. But still, Callie was marveling at it, and pride tickled his chest.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she breathed. “It’s like a library in a book!”

  A book in a library. A library in a book. Oscar let out a little laugh, and then coughed to cover it up.

  Map yowled from his position on the chair, and Callie hurried over and gave him his due. The rest of them would come slowly, one at a time, and casually settle into different places in the library as if they had planned on being there anyway—except for Pebble, who didn’t do anything casually.

  Oscar went over to the shelves. He was no good for Callie up there in the sunshine, blinking at some senseless jumble of bits. But down in the cellar, he could help.

  He went to the Aletheian history section and pulled down the plague book. The little green book next to it fell over, so Oscar pulled it down, too.

  “Here,” Oscar said, calling to Callie. “This is about the plague.” He indicated the thick book in his hand. “This one might be, too.”

  Callie took the books and sat down in one of the big chairs. Map immediately jumped on her lap and flattened himself against her.

  “I’m going to look at some of the plant-magic books,” Oscar said. At the bits. He could at least try to help the kids feel better. That would make Callie happy. But even the bits were jumbled in his mind now with baby fountains and horseshoe buildings and naked statues and miniature trees. He tried to take the muddle of the day and pick the important pieces out. Weak heartbeat, swollen hands, cold limbs. Vomiting. Pain and breathlessness. Blind and deaf.

  “That’s right,” Callie said. Oscar flushed—he hadn’t realized he had been thinking out loud. She leaned back in the chair, shaking her head. “I wish they had more in common. Then we’d know where to start. There’s nothing except they were all weak, and they all seemed . . .”

  “What?”

  She cocked her head. “I don’t know. They all seemed like something was . . . missing. Did you feel that?”

  Oscar shook his head.

  Callie shrugged. “Illness takes things away from people sometimes,” she said. She exhaled and started looking through the big book.

  They worked quietly for a while, Oscar going through books hoping one of them would tell him what he was looking for. Every once in a while Callie would stop and tell him what she’d read. But none of it sounded like the country he knew—it was like hearing some tale of a far-off land. One Oscar did not particularly want to visit.

  “The plague came from the continent—it came in on ships,” she told him. “Once the plague swept through the coastal countries, most of the islands stopped all trade and forbade any boats from coming in, to keep themselves safe. But the duke thought the magic would keep Aletheia safe.”

  Oscar bit his lip. Wasn’t that the whole point of the magic?

  “So,” Callie continued, “it started in the coastal villages in the west, children getting sick first.” She looked up at Oscar meaningfully. “Um . . .” She scanned down the page. “Fevers and rashes and weakness and vomiting. And then it just swept through the villages south of the river.”

  Oscar sucked in his lips. There were no villages there now.

  The map of Aletheia appeared in Oscar’s head. He saw it—the great expanse of the eastern country, and the river snaking up across the south and to the west, slicing off the Barrow and surrounding areas from the rest of Aletheia, and he saw the shadow moving in from the southwest.

  “Everything starting dying all up and down the river,” she continued. “The whole western side of the island. Everyone was getting sick but the wizards. Even in Asteri.”

  “But,” Oscar interjected, “I thought the plague didn’t last that long. Especially not in the City.”

  Callie blew out air and motioned to the book. “It seems to have lasted.”

  Callie read on quietly for a while more. The book Oscar had been studying lay open in his lap—he could read so much more on Callie’s face than in the pages in front of him.

  “It spread over the whole island,” Callie said after a time. “Whole villages were dying. It wouldn’t stop until—” Her eyes grew wide and her mouth hung open. But her eyes kept traveling the pages. Oscar mashed his lips together and waited, counting silently to himself.

  She looked up, finally. “Well, then the duke decided to institute a quarantine,” she said, her voice heavy. “As soon as someone showed signs of being sick, they were arrested and taken into Asteri and kept there.”

  “Because it’s magic,” Oscar said. “To heal them.”

  “No. No. The duke lived in the east then; the capital was there, all the people with money lived there. Asteri—it sounds like it was run-down. Filthy. So they sent people there. Not just people with the plague, but their families, too, in case they’d been exposed . . . and then . . . they locked them in. Oscar”—she inhaled and leaned closer—“the City walls weren’t built to keep people out. They were there to keep people in.”

  Oscar stared at Callie. “What if . . . what if someone got better? Would they let them out?”

  Callie pursed her lips and shook her head.

  Oscar sat back. The Shining City, infused with magic, blessed by providence, where the residents wanted for nothing—that was where people had been sent to their deaths. The duke had kept the plague from killing the entire island by condemning the sick and exposed to the City.

  “Oscar!” Callie said, drawing him back to the library. She had the little green book open now. “Look at this one. It’s all handwritten, different entries. It’s like a diary—”

  “Can I see it?” Oscar breathed.

  Callie handed him the little green book, and he opened it carefully and flipped through the pages. Yes, it was a wizard diary, started after Secrets of the Wizards left off, after the plague hit. Only no one had copied this book and put it into type and produced it for library shelves. It was an actual handwritten account kept by a wizard, and somehow Caleb had it.

  “I’m just going to look at this awhile,” Oscar said, plopping himself down on the floor, not taking his eyes away from the book.

  The journal belonged to Galen—the wizard who had appeared at the end of the chronicle. It began:

  This is a true account of the wizards and the plague of Aleth-eia. The duke has ordered us not to write about the plague in our chronicle anymore. He believes he can erase his sins—but the land remembers, always. I will record our efforts for the wizards who follow us, should such a thing curse our land again. We will leave empty pages in the official chronicle before the wizard’s entries recommence. These will be the unwr
itten words on those pages.

  History condemns secrets to their death.

  With his breath stuck in the upper part of his lungs, Oscar flipped the page and plunged into the book.

  When the plague began to sweep the continent, the wizards told the duke to stop all trade and sea traffic to Aletheia, as so many other island nations had. But the duke said the magic would protect Aletheia; there was no need to close the ports. And Aletheia was growing so wealthy from sending magical goods and its unusual array of natural resources out into the world, and that was good for the island, too. The wizards could not change his mind.

  The plague began in the southwest, where the ships came in. The wizards told the duke to quarantine the area, but he refused; because the magic was all gone from the east now—if people could not go into the west, however would they get magic? Magic was the Aletheians’ birthright.

  With no official quarantine, the wizards asked the people of the east to forgo magic until the plague left. But they did not listen, and when an easterner crossed into the west for magic he crossed back carrying something far more powerful—and four days later half his village was gone. The duke ordered the wizards to find a cure, but they could not. Then he told them to build an impenetrable wall around Asteri to protect the vulnerable, and after they did he took the sick and locked them all in. And then their families.

  And still the plague spread.

  Galen’s entries—formerly pages long—grew shorter and shorter. Like:

  The plague has killed everything along the western banks of the river and the shores around the sea. Now, that earth is not just barren but a vacuum. One cannot plant a seed or light a match in this land, and one cannot carry magic across and expect it to survive the journey. Perhaps this will stop the spread. If it isn’t already too late.

  No. The magic had not kept Aletheia safe. It killed everywhere it went. It wiped out whole swaths of villages, took so much out of the land that it killed not just life but the potential for life.

  Galen wrote:

  The duke has given up on Asteri, left the people locked in there to die. He asks us to put all our efforts into protecting the east. He says it is for the good of all of Aletheia. But you cannot save a body and kill its heart. We feed him illusions and lies while giving the sick in Asteri everything we have.

  Later, simply:

  The plague does not affect us. Our magic does not affect the plague.

  And then, the next page:

  There is something in the magic we have that is greater than the magic we can do.

  And then:

  It is beyond us. We do everything we know, everything we can conceive of, we do things we don’t know, and it is beyond us. People will keep dying until nothing remains in Aletheia but us and our monstrous failure.

  Everything is sick. The plague is in the land now, and if it does not kill all the people first, the land will.

  The plague sucks everything dry. It takes and takes. It is sucking away the magic we do. All we have left is the magic we have.

  And finally:

  We, the wizards of Aletheia, are the sworn protectors of this land and its people.

  We are the guardians of a dying people, a dying land. All we have to give truly is ourselves.

  We will be the last of the wizards. Our bodies and spirits will die. Only our essence will live. We tended to the magic, and now we preside over its death. Perhaps the world will be safer for it.

  The spell has been cast. We will go take our places. May the magic that has kept us safe heal the city and the whole land, from the disease and from all it has left behind. May our lives do what our powers could not.

  We are all agreed.

  And then, signatures. Each one made by a different hand—some scrawled quickly, some elegant and embellished. One after another, filling the page, and pages after that. There were so many—several dozens at least. There might even have been—

  A hundred.

  Oscar frowned. It didn’t make sense. How could there be a hundred wizards living at one time, when there were only a hundred wizard trees?

  Oscar stared at the entry again. His heart thudded. Suddenly, he sprung up and pulled another Aletheian history book off the shelves, quickly flipping through until he found what he wanted.

  A map. Before the plague.

  And there it was, a country so like his—but different. All along the southern border there were villages right up to the river. When the river bent northward, the villages followed. And at the very southwestern end there was a hill, and upon it Asteri. And around the hill—

  “Callie!” he exclaimed. Her head shot upward and he brought the book to her. His face felt so hot, like something inside him was burning. “This map. Of Aletheia. Before the plague. What do you see?”

  “Um, the Eastern Villages,” she said. “A capital in the east. More villages by the river where the plaguelands are now. And Asteri.”

  “What’s missing?” He was not testing her. He needed to see if she saw what he did.

  She inhaled. “The Barrow. There are some trees around the hill, but—”

  “But there’s no Barrow.”

  Galen’s diagram in the wizard chronicle popped in his head—the two trees, one with arrows going up from the roots, another with arrows going down. Oscar had been wrong; Galen’s sketch of the trees feeding the roots was not a diagram of how the wizard trees worked, but a theory of how they might work. It was not an analysis, but a plan.

  “Callie,” Oscar breathed, “wizards haven’t been coming down to the Barrow and becoming trees since the beginning of time.” His voice sounded strangely even, like the words it spoke were nothing at all. “They died, just like everyone else. Or they used to. All the wizards during the plague, they made the Barrow. They turned themselves into trees, to infuse the ground with the magic. To try to kill the plague from the soil up.”

  The air in the library held on to Oscar’s words, refused to let them go. They hovered in the room like phantoms, and Oscar and Callie could only gape at them, faces as wordless as the empty pages of the official chronicle.

  The trees were not Aletheia’s gift to the wizards for their service, not living monuments to great men and women. They were monuments of a desperate act, necessitated because of foolishness and greed. The trees were not the wizards’ respite. They were their sacrifice.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Deciduous Ghosts

  Oscar and Callie sat in the library a while longer, Callie scanning the books for more information, Oscar just sitting inside his mind. There were no answers about the children, but they did not even know what the questions were anymore. The world had ruptured once again. Even history could disappear under your feet.

  The island of Aletheia teemed with magic—magic so powerful that when a plague ravaged the continent, Aletheia still thrived. For centuries great wizards had worked the magic to keep the island prosperous and marvelous, until slowly the magic faded, and eventually the wizards, too. But their power, their core, lived on in the trees they became, ensuring that the Barrow would thrive for all eternity. Even as the sorcerers replaced the wizards, then the magicians after that, and now the magic smiths, their essence lived on in the Barrow, feeding the soil magic so the blessed people of Aletheia’s Shining City could flourish, as was their due.

  This was what they had always been told. This was the legend of Aletheia.

  But no. It was just a story. Just pretend. The plague came, the Duke of Aletheia put all his faith in magic, and three-quarters of the island died. The plague ate away at the island’s lifeblood—the people, the land, the magic itself—and it would have consumed the whole place had the wizards not performed their last, greatest spell.

  The wizards gave themselves, and a cursed, blighted City was birthed anew. And somehow the magic in the Barrow lived on, and soon there were sorcerers, and then magicians, and magic smiths after that—the purveyors of petty little charms for a gluttonous populace.

  On
ce, people were walled into a City of decay and death. Once, there were villages on land that was now barren and toxic. Once, wizards fought with everything they had, and then despaired. Once, they encircled a hill and waited to take root.

  Callie put the rest of the pieces together from what she’d read in the history book. The spell worked—more than the wizards knew. It did not only rid Asteri of disease; it turned it into a jewel, one that shone so brightly the plague survivors flocked to it. Even the duke made the new Asteri his home. And, soon after, he offered a tremendous bounty for the first person who could draw magic from the earth again.

  The official Aletheian history book did not tell the story quite this way. It made no mention of the wizard’s sacrifice—simply, the magic had eventually saved its chosen people from the plague, just as everyone had known it would. The wizards themselves simply disappeared from the history of the plague. They lived only in the white spaces between the lines.

  Even the past was a lie.

  Callie and Oscar walked upstairs together in silence, and Callie slipped out the door into the night. When she was gone, Oscar could only crawl into his room and clutch Block in his hands.

  In the morning, Oscar woke up, got dressed, laid out food for the cats, and got water. He swept the shop and dusted the shelves, in case any dirt had accumulated overnight, and then surveyed the store and set to work restocking whatever needed restocking.

  When Oscar opened the back door, the smell of fresh bread greeted him like an embrace. A basket was waiting for him. Oscar took it in, and the cats began to circle pointedly. He divided up a loaf for them and set the pieces on the floor. And then he saw the piece of paper at the bottom of the basket: