“A few years later, the girl was still young, with four pretty children, but the fox was very old, even for a fox. He knew his time was drawing near. The girl, now a powerful magician herself, spent all her time searching for spells to make him well again. She promised that she would be careful, but the fox knew her heart. He knew she would keep searching until she wore herself away to nothing. And so the fox went to speak to her mother, whose hair was now almost as white as his own fur, and they made a new pact between them.
“The girl’s littlest child had been born too early, and it seemed like as not he wouldn’t survive the winter. And so the old magician took her daughter’s heart, which the fox had kept safe all those years, and gave it to her grandson. Straight away, the child sprang up out of bed, healthy as a spring lamb, and seeing that, the fox died happy. And as for the girl, she kept her dear fox’s heart inside her until the end of her days. So you see, he never truly left her.”
Autumn’s eyes had drifted shut. She loved the story because it felt like it had been written about her and Winter. People called Winter her shadow sometimes, because he was quiet and as light-footed as the wind, and they were right, but not for those reasons. She’d always felt as if Winter was a part of her that lived outside her body—an important part, like her heart. Not because they each always knew where the other was without looking, or because sometimes it seemed like they shared the same thoughts. Because she simply knew, just as she knew that snow was cold.
“Think you can sleep now, child?”
“Mmm,” Autumn said. She was already halfway there. Gran’s voice near the end of the story had been like the gentle rumble of the sea. She felt Gran’s rough hand brush her brow, and then all was quiet and dark.
7
IN WHICH WINTER REMEMBERS HIS NAME
– LAST SPRING –
For a long time, Winter thought he was a cloud.
He drifted here and there, not minding it, not minding anything. He had no eyes, no hands or feet. He sensed things—faces and shapes moving in the distance—and sometimes his attention caught on them, like a cloud caught on a jagged peak, but he always drifted free.
But at some point a familiar face floated into view. An old woman, her face a scowl, her shoulders broad and hunched. She didn’t look at him as she went by, and an instant later, she was gone.
Gran, Winter thought.
And suddenly Winter knew who he was again—a boy, not a cloud. He was standing behind a sheet of glass. Beyond the glass was the grand foyer in Inglenook—there was the broad stone staircase, which fell from landing to landing like a tremendous waterfall. There were the tapestries of magicians and monsters, the stained-glass lanterns. There were the students in their glittering cloaks hastening to and fro.
Winter brushed his hand against the glass. He was looking out of a mirror—one of the big ones with gold frames that stood on either side of the staircase. Behind him, there was the same foyer, only with everything reversed. But it looked like the foyer the way a watercolor painting looks like the real thing.
He’d fallen into a mirror. But how?
You’re not afraid, Winter told himself as the breath got stuck in his chest. You’ll wake up soon. It’s a dream.
But he knew it wasn’t.
Autumn. The thought was like the lifting of a heavy weight. Autumn would find him soon. Autumn with her stompy boots and her loud voice. She would stomp up to him any minute, and everything would be all right.
He forced down the urge to run and run, screaming her name, the way he had when he was little and afraid for some reason and couldn’t find her right away. He wasn’t little anymore. He had to be brave.
Someone sniffled. Winter turned. A girl sat beneath the reflection of a grandfather clock, face buried in her hands.
Winter drifted toward her. “Excuse me. Where am I?”
The girl looked up. She was older than Winter by a few years. She wore a housekeeper’s uniform, and her dark hair was woven into two braids that floated around her shoulders.
“What sort of question is that?” she spat.
Winter frowned. A moment ago, the issue of where he was had seemed important, but now it didn’t.
“What’s your name?”
“I—” The girl’s eyes widened. “I don’t remember. Oh no! That’s how it always starts. They forget their names first. And then—and then—”
“It’s all right.” Winter made his quiet voice even quieter. It was a trick that always worked with … With what? He couldn’t remember who or what he’d been before he came here.
A memory flashed through him like fish in a stream—there had once been a large yellow dog, panting in the sunlight. Had that been his dog? Why couldn’t he remember if he’d had a dog? It was an important thing to know.
“Let’s try guessing,” he said. “I’ll go through the alphabet. You tell me when a name sounds familiar.”
He started with A, Abigail. His voice was growing hoarse by the time he got to M, Maddie, when the girl let out a squeal.
“That’s it!” she cried. “Maddie. That’s my name. I liked pomegranates—I used to spit the seeds out at Reese Jones, made him cry once. Serves him right for—for—” Her lip trembled. “I had it—just for a second. The memory, you know. But now it’s just pomegranates.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Maddie,” Winter said. “I’m Winter.”
Maddie burst into tears.
It took her a long time to stop crying. Winter let her cry on his shoulder until she was done.
Maddie squinted. “Are you new here?”
Winter thought. He remembered drifting. He had drifted for a very long time. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve been here awhile.” He looked out at the castle. “But I think I used to be out there.”
“We all did,” Maddie said.
“There are others?”
She nodded.
“How did we end up here?”
Maddie’s brow furrowed. “Dunno. Ask the Old One.”
“Who’s that?”
“The one who’s been here the longest,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He’s fading away. We all fade away, eventually. He forgot his name.”
Winter shivered. “I’m not going to forget.”
Maddie regarded him with a faraway look in her eyes. “That’s what I said.”
Winter touched the glass. He tried to push at it, but it was as if his hands had turned back into clouds.
“Not like that.” Maddie came to stand by his side. “Like this.”
She pressed her hands and nose against the glass and pulled a hideous face. One of the Inglenook students gave a start and skittered sideways. He blinked at the mirror and seemed to shrug. He quickly checked his teeth, then hurried off. Maddie giggled.
Winter gazed at the glass. “Can you teach me how to do that?”
“Sure. You got someone you want to scare?”
Winter tried to remember. Yes, he wanted to scare someone. A moment ago, he had known who it was. A flash of white hair; a lopsided grin. Something about boots?
“Bye,” Maddie said gloomily.
Bye? Was she going somewhere? Then Winter realized that he was going somewhere—he was drifting again, a wisp of fog in an invisible wind. He was only afraid for a moment, and then he felt nothing. He closed his eyes.
8
IN WHICH CAI SWALLOWS TOO MUCH MAGIC
The morning dawned gray and fickle as clouds soaked the mountains with rain, then parted in a spill of rainbows and wet sunlight. At the breakfast table, Autumn took her time stirring cream into her tea and scraping butter on her toast. The kitchen was filled with the sounds of eating; conversation had no place at the Malog table. Choo dozed by the fire. The boggart rustled around in the rafters in his unshape, hunting for spiders, his newest game. Every once in a while, one would drop onto Choo’s head, and the dog would start awake at the tickly sensation. The spiders always beat a hasty exit, leaving Choo blinking in puzzlement. Quiet chuckling em
anated from the ceiling.
“Gran?” Autumn said.
Her brothers looked up, startled, though their forks continued their uninterrupted journeys from plates to mouths. Gran raised a bushy eyebrow.
“Cai asked me to give him a lesson this morning,” Autumn said. “So if it’s all right with you, I won’t be free to help with the Hounds’ flea baths.”
Kyffin regarded Autumn with a frown on his handsome face. Jack’s eyes widened. Emys let out a bark of laughter.
“The fancy star kid’s lost it,” he said. “What are you going to teach him?”
Autumn gave him a brief glare. “Gran?”
“Hmph,” Gran said, often her way of agreeing to things. “Jack, you’ll help me with the Hounds. Kyffin, you’re on your own with that fence repair. I want it finished by lunchtime, and no bellyaching about it.”
“Easy,” Kyffin said, flexing his biceps. He’d been doing that a lot lately. He’d also been given to taking his shirt off when he worked on the fence, particularly when the kitchen girls were down by the forest’s edge gathering mushrooms. Autumn hoped he caught the world’s worst cold, and serve him right for such silliness.
“You could teach him how not to clean a chimney,” Emys said. He was in one of his sullen moods, and he was always mean when he was sullen. “Or how to come home covered in six kinds of mud, smelling like a swamp.”
Autumn narrowed her eyes at her toast, affecting haughty indifference as she murmured a few words into the boggart’s mind. A moment later, Emys gave a yelp and batted at his hair. A spider tumbled into his eggs.
“Can I help, Autumn?” Jack asked through a mouthful of fried mushrooms. He hadn’t looked pleased at his reassignment.
“Really?”
Jack seemed to mull it over. “Actually, I don’t want to. I don’t like Cai.”
“Why not?”
Jack frowned. “He smells funny.”
“Clean, you mean,” Autumn said. “Some boys bathe, Jack.”
“I bathe!”
“With soap?” Autumn raised a skeptical eyebrow. “In a tub?”
Stymied, Jack could only scowl at her.
A half hour later, Autumn was pacing in the shadow of the Gentlewood, watching the mountainside for Cai. Was he going to show up? It seemed unlikely, even after yesterday. But then, her entire acquaintance with Cai was unlikely. She tried to dispel her nervousness through vigorous stomping.
Behind her was a birdcage covered with a blanket. Within were half a dozen humming dragons—which were not, contrary to popular belief, named after hummingbirds, though they were about the same size. Gran kept half a dozen species of dragon in the menagerie, and Autumn had reasoned that if Cai was scared of dragons, it would be best to start small.
Not that humming dragons were particularly tame. In some ways, they were the worst dragons of all.
Autumn kept glancing up at Mythroor. The headmaster was up there on the rocky cliffs of Bawd Oer—she recognized his gleaming hair. With him were three senior apprentices weaving illusions, a magic that had always puzzled her. It seemed wasteful to paint the air with glittering vines and creeping roses, among other frippery. She guessed it was a sort of practice, like a musician going through scales, but what did she know? It wasn’t as if magicians ever explained things to their servants.
The illusions broke apart in little mists of light, silver and opal and flame. Autumn let out her breath. The apprentices followed Headmaster Neath up the path, their lesson complete. Even from a distance, the headmaster seemed large. He had the sort of long, heavy stride that made you half expect him to lift his boot and kick the mountain out of his way, if it hadn’t already given a polite cough and shuffled aside. Autumn was glad there was the usual amount of distance between them today. He unsettled her in a way she didn’t fully understand.
But then, up until recently, hadn’t she felt the same way about Cai? He was a different kind of large, as if his presence had more weight than other people’s, likely from all the stories he dragged along with him like little moons.
We’re the earth, and they’re the mountains. She decided to follow Anurin’s advice and turned her attention back to the muddy track she was wearing with her boots. Stomp, stomp, stomp.
The boggart circled above, flicking rapidly between shapes, a sure sign of temper. A cat became a dragon, a boy, a crow. Jack, it turned out, wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Cai. The boggart hadn’t been pleased to learn that Autumn was Cai’s new sidekick. Not that she was really his sidekick. Cai was a proper hero, and proper heroes had proper sidekicks, not servants.
“Don’t get your feathers twisted,” Autumn said. “Cai and I have a deal. If I help him get over his fear, he’ll help us find Winter. So I’ve got to keep my end of the bargain, else Cai might change his mind.”
The boggart became a boy again, deep in a sulk. “I just don’t know why we need help from some snooty magician.”
“You don’t know? We’ve been looking for almost a year, if you hadn’t noticed! We have a clue now, a real clue, and we need Cai to figure out what it means. You haven’t had any luck with that window, have you?”
“No.” The boggart stared glumly at his feet. Autumn had assigned him to keep an eye on the bay window. He’d stayed all night, folded into the pane, but no boy had appeared in the glass.
Her hands clenched as she looked up at the castle. Where are you?
“Me and Cai are searching the school tonight,” she said. “So you’d better not do anything to upset him. Now shut your trap—he’s coming.”
The boggart grumbled mutinously but disappeared into the trees as a squirrel. “And don’t throw nuts,” Autumn hissed over her shoulder. “Or spiders!”
“What?” Cai said. He looked as fresh as ever in the watery sunlight. He stepped neatly over the puddles Autumn had made with all her stomping.
“Nothing.” Autumn leaned toward Cai and whispered in his ear, “You need to give the boggart a present.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t like you,” she explained. “He’s gotten used to it being just the two of us. If you give him a present, he’ll warm up to you. He’s real greedy.”
Cai went pale. He didn’t need to be told how dangerous it was to be on a boggart’s bad side. “What kind of present?”
“Anything shiny,” Autumn said. “He especially likes pocket watches. He thinks clocks are funny.” She raised her voice. “Well, I guess we should get started.”
“Right,” Cai agreed, though he looked a lot less confident now. His gaze caught on the Gentlewood. They were near the forest’s edge, where tiny saplings dotted the ground. Every year, the magicians burned the new growth, but it always came back. Bluebells nodded in the wind, spilling out from the trees like the train of a gown.
“Cai?”
His gaze drifted back to her. “Did you say something?”
Autumn frowned. “You have to keep your head around monsters. That’s rule number one. You get distracted, and even the tame ones will take advantage—it’s in their nature.”
“Right, sorry. What’s rule number two?”
Autumn paused. Gran had always said keeping your head was rule number one, but she’d never mentioned any others. “That’s the only one,” she said gruffly. “’Cause if you can’t do that, you don’t get to worry about anything else. Come over here.”
Cai approached the cage with a jerky stride. He looked exactly like Jack had last spring when he’d watched Gran help a gwartheg give birth, right before he was violently sick.
“Well,” she said, looking him up and down. “Maybe this is as close as you should get for now. We can always—”
“No.” It came out sharp. He added with an apologetic grimace, “No. Let’s keep going.”
“But maybe if we took it slow—”
“Taking it slow isn’t a good idea, Autumn.”
“Why?”
He looked at her for a long moment, a look that seemed to measure and weigh her
against something she couldn’t see.
“Have you heard the prophecy?” he said. “About me?”
What prophecy? Autumn considered saying, but she decided it would be small of her to make fun of someone when their face was the color of porridge.
“Sure,” she said. “Gran told me the whole thing.” She could still remember all the words and recited them slowly. They felt cool and sharp, as if she’d taken a mouthful of starlight.
“I don’t understand it all,” she said. “What does ‘his thirteenth winter’s snow’ mean?”
“I’m twelve now,” Cai said. “So this will be my thirteenth winter. It means that I’m going to fight the Hollow Dragon before the first snow of the season.”
Autumn’s eyes widened. “But that’s—that’s soon.”
Cai didn’t answer. Autumn felt a dizziness wash over her. How long until the snows arrived? A month? Two at most? Her gaze drifted to the sky, though it was still the same messy tangle of sunshine and rainclouds.
She’d just assumed—like everybody else, probably—that if Cai was going to slay the Hollow Dragon, it would be when he was grown. Years and years from now. From that perspective, her helping him was of little importance—he would still have all sorts of time to find a better teacher, someone who could do a proper job. But now?
Now it felt as if her help—hers—was Cai’s only chance.
“Right,” she said, trying to keep the panic from her voice. She turned back to the humming dragons, desperate for a distraction, even one with claws and a nasty bite. “Right. Well, here goes.” And she swept the blanket off the cage.
The School between Winter and Fairyland Page 8