The Language of Ghosts

by Heather Fawcett

  Noa mulled it over. One question wasn’t much, especially given how long it took Tomas to prepare a serpent-sized cake. But Beauty likely knew more about the Lost Words than anyone living, so maybe it was worth it.

  “Very well,” she said. “My question—”

  “Oh.” Beauty pouted. “I’ll need a cake first, dear.”

  Noa gritted her teeth. “You just had one.”

  “That was before I agreed to anything.” Beauty’s voice was sinuous.

  And so Noa and Tomas had to go back to the bakery to fetch the day-old lemon-lime cake. Tomas muttered mutinously the whole way about moisture and crumb quality, but in the end, Beauty seemed just as delighted with the second cake as she had been with the first.

  “I believe you owe me an answer to one question,” Noa said. “Unless you have a complaint about the cake?”

  “It would be impossible to complain about such a delicacy,” the serpent said, narrowing her eyes at Tomas in what Noa could have sworn was a smile.

  Noa rubbed her eyes. “Good. Now, tell me everything you know about Evert.”

  “That isn’t a question, dear. Have you forgotten our bargain?”

  Noa shrugged. It had been worth a try. “I’m assuming you’ve seen this island before.”

  “Yes. Well, that was easy.”

  “That wasn’t a question, either,” Noa said. “I think you’re the one who’s forgotten our bargain.”

  “Your remarkably talented friend has put me in a good mood,” Beauty said. “But not that good. Do get to the point, dear.”

  “Fine.” Noa crossed her arms. “Here’s my question: What secrets is the island hiding?”

  Beauty blinked. “How do you know it has secrets?”

  “You can only find it by sailing backward,” Noa said. “Plus, it’s really funny-looking. It obviously has secrets.”

  “That’s a rather broad question.”

  “Well, it was a rather large cake.”

  Beauty let out a slow hiss. “Very well, clever little Marchena. I know that, long ago, something was hidden here. I don’t know what, but I know that the mages hid it well—they made the island difficult to find, and they changed its shape to conceal their secret. It used to be called something else, too—Orchid Island. After the mages enchanted it, they called it Evert.”

  Noa’s heart leaped. So the Lost Words were hidden here! “How did they change its shape? You have to answer that, Beauty. It’s part of the question.”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” Beauty slid back into the water. “If you have any more questions, little Marchena—and I do hope you will—you know where to find me.”

  Noa hopped from the boat onto the beach, which wasn’t easy. Evert’s barren rock was weirdly slippery, as if it had been greased. There was no seaweed anywhere, nor any barnacles or mussels.

  Julian marched up the shore as soon as his boots touched ground, forcing everyone else—all the mages on the council, plus several scouts—to hurry after him, slipping and sliding. Noa remained behind on the beach, which wasn’t much of a beach, except in the sense that it was where the sea met the island. There was no sand. No stray pebbles. Only that strange, smooth rock, which had a reddish undertone, as if the island had been flayed.

  “Evert,” Noa muttered to herself. “Evert.” She walked along the shore and over a little rise, beyond which was more featureless stone. She was looking for a place to sit, but there wasn’t any, really, so in the end she squatted on the uncomfortable stone, which sweated and steamed and made the back of her trousers wet.

  She was certain the island’s name was important. The mages had changed it after they enchanted it, after all. She opened the encyclopedia she had snatched from the library. Encyclopedias weren’t magical texts, so of course they were covered with dust, because Julian never bothered looking at them.

  Evert meant a lot of things, it turned out. It was the name of an ancient goddess, and a species of crab with a bad temper, even for crabs, and also an ice cream dish eaten on Caraway Island. But Noa’s eyes zeroed in on one definition.

  “Julian!” she shouted. No reply. He was too far away. She shoved the encyclopedia into her pack—it barely fit next to the Chronicle—and sprinted up the shore. Evert was not an island made for sprinting—the rock was so wet and slimy that after a few falls, Noa abandoned the idea and settled for fast marching.

  Julian stood on a rounded hilltop, obscured by a swirl of magic. Little stars of light opened and closed, and a strange breeze lifted the ocean spray and spun it around him. Beneath his feet, unlikely spears of grass and flowers sprouted from solid rock, and daisy petals rose in the air to join the vortex. He held a piece of rock from the island that glowed and crackled; as Noa watched, it became lava and dripped slowly through his unscathed fingers. His eyes were narrowed in concentration as he muttered words in the nine languages, strange words that sparked like fire or glinted like gold.

  “Julian!” Noa called again. She pushed through the others, who were clustered below the hill, muttering and darting glances at him. She had to stop outside the vortex, which was now flecked with fire. “Julian!”

  The vortex sputtered and died. “What?” Julian said irritably, brushing ash from his hands. “Noa, can’t you see I’m in the middle of something? The mages cast some sort of spell on this island to hide the Lost Words—”

  “It’s inside out!” she interrupted. “Julian, the mages turned the island inside out!”

  He looked at her as if she’d barked at him. “What?”

  “Evert!” She didn’t seem to be able to stop yelling. “It means ‘inside out.’”

  “I thought it meant ice cream.”

  She made a frustrated sound and flipped opened the encyclopedia. “‘Evert: noun. To reverse, to turn inside out.’”

  He looked exasperated. “I’m sure it means a lot of things. It’s also a name. Augustine Evert, fourth-century fire mage, known for—”

  Noa slammed the book shut. “Beauty told me the mages renamed the island after they enchanted it. They obviously meant for it to be some sort of clue—maybe they wanted the Lost Words to be found again one day.”

  “Beauty told you? What does she know about any of this?”

  Noa felt like strangling him. “Julian, just once in your life, will you pay attention! Look at this place! If this isn’t an island that’s been turned inside out, I don’t know what is.”

  She watched Julian pause, watched him actually consider what she was saying. “But how?”

  “I don’t know,” she snapped. “You’re the high and mighty Dark Lord—can’t you guess?”

  She hadn’t meant to say that. It just came out, like a hiccup. After all, Julian had been distant since the council meeting, buried in his books, and he’d barely listened to the lecture she’d given him about not turning people into shadow-eyed ghouls. She couldn’t help being frustrated.

  Julian’s brow furrowed. “‘High and mighty’?”

  “Look, how many hundreds of grimoires have you read?” Noa rushed on. “Surely there are spells to turn things inside out.”

  “What would be the point of turning things inside out? I mean, I suppose there are laundry spells in Salt that help—”

  “There you go!” Noa said. “Think of the island as a big inside-out sweater. A sweater with a lot of pockets. You can’t find the Lost Words, because they’re in one of those pockets. You have to turn the sweater right side out first before you can get at them. Does that help?”

  “Yes, Noa. Imagine the island as a sweater. Your magical advice is always appreciated.”

  “Well, the magic bit is your job,” she huffed. “I just figure things out.”

  Julian pressed his hand against his eyes. She thought at first that he was overcome with frustration, but when he took his hand away, he was smiling. Not the detached, cruel smile he sometimes wore when dealing with his underlings, but an actual grin. Noa’s heart gave a happy skip. She had always loved Julian’s
smile—it filled his eyes with mischief and made him look younger, more like the Julian who used to read with her late at night after their mother thought they were asleep, while the palace cats snored at the foot of the bed and a fire crackled in the hearth.

  “Noabell,” he said, “you are an absolute genius.”

  11

  Julian Scares Everyone

  Julian stayed on Evert for the rest of the day, pacing and muttering strange spells and generally unnerving everybody. Left to their own devices, his mages wandered around like headless chickens, some trailing after him with ideas that he either ignored or viciously shot down, others flitting back and forth between the two islands with books and papers he demanded and then tossed aside unread when they were handed to him.

  Shortly before sunset, he ordered everyone back to Astrae. Then he gathered up all the earth mages and had sailors row them to Evert, stopping a distance from shore at evenly spaced intervals around the island. They all chanted the spell Julian had given them, and Evert rattled and shook horribly and sent huge waves crashing against Astrae. But it didn’t change at all.

  Julian spent the night there, along with a handful of his poor mages, who were fetched in the morning looking bedraggled and wild-eyed. Whatever strange spells Julian had been testing in the dead of night on that barren rock seemed to have satisfied him, for he ordered the earth mages back into boats, along with an equal number of fire mages. They ringed the island once again and began chanting something that sounded like the crackle and clamor of a blacksmith’s shop. Evert began to shake so hard that even Astrae was rocked by the waves, and Noa had to sit down on the beach to avoid falling over. Then Julian summoned a cloud in Squall, and stepped on top of it. It lifted him high above Evert, so high Noa felt herself grow dizzy. There came a boom of thunder, and then a strange glowing substance that looked like mist made of fire reached down and wrapped around the island.

  And then, with a pop, Evert turned right side out.

  It was the worst pop Noa had ever heard, a pop that echoed off the breakers and rattled her teeth, like a billion balloons exploding at once. But once the echoes died, and Noa and everybody else were able to unplug their ears and pull themselves to their feet, they found themselves looking at an entirely new island.

  It was still roughly the same shape, though lumpy in new places and flat in others. It must have been forested before the mages turned it inside out, but now the trees lay in crushed heaps, as if a horde of giants had stamped all over them. A cloud of pollen steamed off the island, and the waves around it were strewn with bits of trees and flowers and other rubble. Once the sea had calmed, Noa waded out and retrieved several flattened orchids that had been blasted all the way to Astrae. She felt a little sorry for Evert, which had the look of a mangy dog that had grown used to mistreatment.

  Julian returned to Astrae that afternoon with a stormy look on his face and a book tucked under his arm. It wasn’t a book Noa had ever seen before—it was twice the size of a normal book, with a plain black cover. Julian held it carefully, for the book was old and falling apart. Noa didn’t get more than a glimpse of it before he stomped past her and into the castle, but there was something about the book she didn’t like. Looking at it made her throat feel scratchy, as if she was coming down with a cold.

  “Is that it?” she demanded of Renne, who was just stepping out of the boat Julian had abandoned. “Is that the Lost Words?”

  “Probably,” Renne said. “One of them, anyway. We discovered the book in a cave. It was easy to find, but I suppose the mages didn’t need to bother coming up with a good hiding spot given that they were planning to turn the island inside out.”

  “How do you know it’s got one of the lost languages in it?” Noa asked.

  “Well, it’s written in a magical language that Julian isn’t able to speak.”

  “But—oh.” Noa swallowed.

  Julian could speak all nine magical languages. That is, he could speak all nine known magical languages.

  “So it’s true,” Noa murmured. Lost magical languages did exist, and they’d found one of them before Xavier had. It was an enormous victory. And yet . . .

  “But Julian—” Where magic was concerned, Julian could do anything. It made Noa feel anxious and unsteady to imagine a world where he couldn’t. “He must be able to speak it. If he can speak all nine known magical languages, surely he can speak the unknown ones, too. Maybe there’s a spell on the book to protect it from being read.”

  Renne gave her a weary look. “You sound just like your brother. Julian is convinced that he’ll be able to find a way to read it. You can guess what that means.”

  Noa bit her lip. “We’re going to sit here until he figures it out.”

  “Exactly,” Renne said. “Or drives himself insane, I suppose. Which, given the mood he’s in, I’m slightly more worried about now than I have been in the past.”

  Noa waited a few hours, then pounded on the door to Julian’s tower. He didn’t let her in until she’d been at it for at least five minutes. By then, her fist was sore, and she was in a thoroughly bad mood.

  “Was I not loud enough?” she snarled as the door swung open, revealing a pale and unkempt Julian, his hair sticking up and his shirt untucked.

  “I believe we’ve discussed this,” he said. “When the door is locked, it’s because I’m working on something important. You can open it yourself if it’s an emergency.”

  Noa knew this, of course, but she hated overriding Julian’s lock, which only she and Mite could do. You had to stick your finger into the lock like a key so that the lock could sense if you had Marchena blood. It didn’t hurt or anything, but Noa couldn’t shake the impression that something inside the doorknob was sniffing her.

  Noa marched past Julian, then stopped in her tracks. Mite sat at the table, swinging her legs, in the middle of devouring a sandwich. Her mouth was smeared with cheese grease and tomato sauce.

  Noa whirled. “So you’ll let her in, but not me?”

  “She is considerably quieter than you,” Julian said pointedly.

  Noa huffed. She wasn’t really upset about Mite, who had been hysterical when she had learned that Julian was going to be spending the night on Evert and would not be there to tell her a bedtime story. Or at least, she had been hysterical in the way Mite became hysterical, running from one end of the castle to another like a silent whirlwind, with Noa and half the castle staff trying to catch her before she fell down the stairs and broke her neck or got herself so wound up that she blew up another wing. As it turned out, Julian hadn’t forgotten after all, and had returned to tell her a story at the usual time before sailing back to Evert. But that hour of uncertainty had not been pleasant for anyone involved.

  “Renne’s worried about you,” Noa said. “He thinks you’re going to drive yourself mad.”

  Julian waved a hand dismissively. “Renne worries too much.”

  “Well, if you are going to go mad, I’d prefer it if you could wait until after you’re king of Florean.” Noa hesitated, then went over to the book sitting on the table. She poked at it, half expecting it to burst into flame or something. “For an enchanted book, it doesn’t look like much, does it?”

  “I don’t like it,” Mite said through a mouthful of sandwich. “It smells funny.”

  Noa agreed. But in addition to smelling funny, the book made her feel strange. When she touched it, she got that scratchy-throat feeling again, as well as a weird sense of anticipation, like a sneeze. A strange murmuring filled the tower, like the hushed voices in a library. And also—

  “What was that?” She spun around, her heart pounding.

  Mite gave her a funny look. “What?”

  Noa scanned the tower. She could have sworn she had seen someone out of the corner of her eye, a tall figure in a gray robe. There was something strange about his face, but the apparition was gone before she could pinpoint it.

  She rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t slept well last night. Whatever Julia
n had been doing over on Evert had made a warbly, sonorous sound, like a thunderstorm with a cold.

  She flipped open the book, and found herself staring at a lot of gibberish. Unlike most magical gibberish, though, the words swam strangely when she looked at them.

  She slammed it shut. “This thing is giving me a headache.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Julian tossed the book he had been staring at across the tower and pressed his fingers into his eyes. He had flopped down on the floor against one of the bookshelves with his long legs stretched out.

  Noa sat beside him. “You really can’t read it?”

  “No—it’s like the words fall out of my head as soon as I look at them. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

  Noa bit back a retort. That was how she felt when she looked at any magical language. “You don’t say.”

  Julian reached for another book. “It’s clearly enchanted. The mages would have wanted to protect it from being read.”

  “They put it in an inside-out island,” Noa pointed out. “Julian, have you considered that . . . well, maybe you just can’t read it? Maybe you can’t use whatever power is in that book.”

  “Yes, Noa,” he said irritably. “I’ve considered it. Contrary to what my mages say about me behind my back, I don’t think I’m all-powerful. But I have to try.”

  “Why don’t we look for the other lost language?” Noa pressed. “Didn’t Xavier find two sets of coordinates? That mage you wrecked said so, didn’t he?”

  “Oh!” Julian’s eyebrows disappeared beneath his hair. “So now you’re interested in what Thadeus has to say? I understood from your lecture the other day that you thought I’d done something heinous in getting that information from him.”

  Noa glared right back. “I didn’t think you were listening to that.”

  “It’s hard not to listen to someone at that volume. I’ve never had a worse headache.”

  Noa silently counted to five. Did Julian really believe that he hadn’t, even in the smallest way, deserved to be yelled at? Sometimes Noa wondered if her secret mission hadn’t already failed.