Druid Magic (Druid Academy Book 1)

by C. S. Churton

  DRUID MAGIC

  Book 1 of the Druid Academy Series

  C. S. Churton

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and events described herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places or to living persons alive or dead. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher except for brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.

  Cover by May Dawney Designs.

  Copyright © 2019 by C. S. Churton

  All rights reserved.

  Chapter One

  It was a beautiful day in a beautiful town – if you happened to like grey, overcast skies above even greyer streets. I didn’t particularly care for either, but it was my town and today was going to be my day. I just knew it. I leaned back against the wooden bench and smiled, enjoying the little tingle of anticipation fluttering in my stomach as I looked at the white envelope in my hands.

  A mewling sounded from somewhere around my feet, and I glanced down at the scruffy ginger tom cat.

  “This?” I asked him, my grin spreading. “I’m glad you asked, kitty. This is, without a doubt, my university acceptance letter.”

  He mewled again, completely oblivious to my words, of course. My acceptance letter. It had to be. I just needed to actually open it.

  The grey little town of Haleford wasn’t renowned for its green spaces, but they were there, if you knew where to look. The one I’d come to today was little more than a handful of trees and a rustic wooden bench – and a cat, of course – and I took my time getting comfortable before I turned the envelope over in my hands. I’d applied for three universities and had in my possession two rejection letters. But this one was going to be different; I knew it. It wasn’t as elite as Durham, nor as academic as London, but they had an excellent literature program, and it would be exactly the stepping stone I needed to launch myself into a career I could live with.

  I ran my thumb under the flap and worked it loose. There was a single sheet inside, and with only the slightest tremble to my hands, I eased it from the envelope and carefully unfolded it. In the top right corner was emblazoned the Bristol University crest, and below it, a few typed lines. I ran my eyes over them.

  Dear Ms Eldridge, Thank you for applying… Blah, blah, blah. Bristol University receives thousands of requests… Yada, yada. We regret to inform you that on this occasion, we cannot offer you a place.

  Another rejection letter. That made it three for three. I leaned back against the bench with a sigh. There went my last chance of getting out of this dreary little town.

  “I guess that’s it for me,” I said to the cat, forcing a blasé smile back onto my lips that didn’t want to co-operate. “Time to resign myself to a lifetime of waiting tables.”

  The cat meowed loudly and swished its tail.

  “Well, I’m not exactly thrilled either, Toby,” I told the fleabitten animal. “But at least it means I’ll be sticking around here to feed you.”

  Which was just as well, since I’d never seen another person nor animal in this spot. I folded my letter up with care it absolutely did not deserve, and pulled a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of water from my bag. It wasn’t a particularly warm day, in fact it bordered on chilly, but I preferred not to go anywhere without some water. Besides, the sandwich had been in my bag for a while; it was probably a little dry by now. I set the bottle on the floor beside me and unwrapped the sandwich. I doubted the cat would care much for the wholemeal, so I slid the single slice of ham from between the bread and held it out. The tom snatched it from my hand and devoured it in seconds, then set about washing his paws. If only my life was so simple.

  “A bit of food and you’re happy. Where’s your ambition?”

  Probably wherever mine had disappeared to, and without weeks of tormenting himself, too. Maybe I should have been born a cat. I ate the rest of my lunch while he finished cleaning his paws and moved onto his face, watching me reproachfully the entire time.

  I leaned back against the old wooden bench and unfolded the letter again, but if I’d been hoping it had reconsidered its hurtful words, I’d have been disappointed. Above me, the sky was darkening and the first drops of moisture were filling the air. Rain again – must be a ‘y’ in the day.

  I reached down to scratch the tom absent-mindedly, my attention still on the printed words. From the corner of my eye I saw the first raindrop strike the animal right between his eyes. He hissed loudly, and slashed his claws at my hand.

  “Ow!”

  I yanked my hand away, but the damage was already done: four jagged red lines adorned my skin. Today just kept getting better and better. Movement caught my eye: a grey wisp spiralling up from my other hand. The letter! I released my grip on it, and the sheet fell to the floor, where it lay with an orange flame licking at one side of it. How the hell had it caught fire?

  I broke out of my stupor and stamped on it, smothering the fire with my foot.

  “What was that all about?” I asked the tom, plucking the letter from the floor and squinting at the still-smouldering corner. When I tore my eyes away from it, the cat was gone. Well, that figured. I shook my head and carefully folded up the remains of the letter and slid it back into its envelope. Just another day in paradise.

  All things considered, I had bigger problems than disappearing cats and spontaneously combusting letters. A third rejection was bad news; worse was that I was going to have to break it to my parents. There was no way that conversation was going to end well. With a sigh, I thrust the envelope back into my bag, and headed for home.

  *

  “I’m sorry,” I said, for the fourth time. I’d been counting.

  “Sorry just isn’t good enough, Lyssa,” my dad was saying, standing rigid as he glared down at me, his eyes tight beneath his thick, grey brows. His words cut me more than his sharp tone, though that was pretty scathing, too. “This is your future we’re talking about. You spent too much time with… with boys!”

  “That’s not fair!” No, really, it wasn’t. Dillon wasn’t even my boyfriend, and the hours I’d told my dad had been spent studying really had been spent studying. I folded my arms across my chest. “It’s not my fault I’m not academically gifted. We can’t all be like you and Holly.”

  “Don’t bring your sister into this.” For a moment he looked like he was going to really lose it, but my mum placed a hand on his arm.

  “Come now, George, she tried her best. There are other things in life than just school.”

  “Just school? What sort of future will the girl have without an education?”

  I tapped my foot on the tiled floor of our kitchen, earning me a glare from both my parents. Like I cared. Tap. Tap. Tap. Except I did care. About all of it. I wanted to be more like my dad and Holly. Someone my parents could be proud of. I didn’t want to be a disappointment. I dropped my arms to my sides and stilled my foot.

  “Mum, Dad, I really am–”

  “Lyssa, you have nothing to apologise for,” my mum interrupted, before fixing Dad with a stare. “Does she, George?”

  He cleared his throat. A shade over six foot tall, and a highly successful lawyer, there were few things in life that intimidated my dad. My five-foot-nothing mum happened to be one of them.

  “No, no I suppose not. She tried her best.”

  “I really did, Dad, I promise.”

  He exhaled slowly and nodded.

  “I know you did. You can always resit your exams and apply again next year.”

  Oh, joy. That would be something to look f
orward to. I swallowed the groan rising up in my throat and just nodded.

  “Of course, Dad. I’ll do better next time.”

  I slunk out from beneath the weight of his disappointment and made a beeline for my room, dropping straight down onto my bed as soon as the door was shut behind me. I’d been lying back, staring up at the ceiling, picturing exactly how bleak the rest of my summer was about to become, when I recalled the letter in my bag. I swung my legs over the side of my bed and pulled it out, easing it from its envelope once again. There, in the bottom right corner – or rather, what remained of it – was a black smudge, smeared about the crisp black edge. Right where I’d been holding it. Weird.

  I kept staring at it – why, I don’t know. Maybe I was waiting for it to come to life and explain itself, which seemed about as likely as it catching fire in the first place. People had gone insane over lesser things than getting rejected for a school they hadn’t truly wanted to go to in the first place. I blew air through my lips, then dumped the letter beside me on the bed and looked over at my immaculate desk, its top clear except for my laptop, and– Oh. That was odd. Another letter. Maybe my parents left it there? They must have forgotten to mention it in the big reveal of what an utter disappointment I was.

  I hopped off the bed and picked up the stiff white envelope. Emblazoned on the front in elegant, flowing letters were the words Lyssa Eldridge.

  Nothing else. No address, no stamp. Just my name. Huh. Odd. I turned it over and carefully unstuck the flap. Inside was a single sheet of equally stiff white parchment. I opened it up and smoothed it out, although the creases along the fold lines didn’t seem nearly so deep as I’d expected. Maybe expensive paper didn’t crease as much as the normal stuff.

  At the top of the page was a crest unlike any I’d seen before. It didn’t belong to any university I knew. In the centre was a tree that might have been an oak and beneath it to one side was a dragon, and facing it from the other, some sort of winged horse. Each quarter of the crest was a different colour – crimson red, bright blue, emerald green, and citrus yellow. The mix should have been jarring, but somehow it wasn’t.

  Dear Ms Eldridge, the letter began. It is with great pleasure that I inform you that you have been accepted to study at the Dragondale Academy of Druidic Magic.

  Druidic magic? A strangled laugh slipped up from my throat and I looked around.

  “Alright, Holly, very funny. You can come out now.”

  My little sister wasn’t much of a prankster, she was usually much too serious for that, but when the mood took her, she didn’t do things by halves. I had to admit, the unique crest and the expensive paper were nice touches. Excellent attention to detail.

  “Come on, I know you’re in here somewhere.”

  I listened for the telltale giggle, but there was only silence. A quick search around my modest-sized and sparsely decorated room soon revealed I was on my own. Guess she got bored of waiting for me to get back and find her little surprise. I picked it up from the desk with a smile. It really was elegantly done. I scanned the rest of the letter and gave her extra credit for including the date term was due to start – although it was a full fortnight earlier than actual universities started – and details of how I was to reach the academy, via a portal in my local ‘druid grove’. Very creative. And the signature at the bottom, a Professor Talendale, Headmaster of Dragondale, was so intricate it must have taken her forever to come up with, and as I held it up, it almost seemed to shimmer in the sunlight. I wondered what ink she’d used.

  “You got the title wrong, Hols,” I said under my breath, dropping the letter back onto my desk besides its envelope. “Universities don’t have headmasters. And forgetting to put the address on the envelope? Amateurish.”

  I fired up my laptop and jumped onto my school’s website. Might as well find out about resitting those exams. I heaved a sigh as I got started, and promptly forgot all about the strange letter.

  Chapter Two

  As predicted, my summer disappeared under a pile of books. I wasn’t sure how many strings my dad had pulled to allow me to retake the entire year’s classes, for which I was sure I’d one day find some way to repay him, but he seemed content that my future was secured, at least for the moment. I didn’t want to find out what his reaction would be if I failed a second time, so I obligingly spent long summer days buried under an ever-growing pile of texts books, trying to appear grateful. At least once a day I would head back to my favourite clearing, with my favourite cranky old tom cat. Nothing else ever burst into flames.

  It was on one of those days, as summer was drawing to an end, that I saw him. At first, I thought I must have spent too much time studying and my brain had taken a little time out, because no-one ever came to the clearing, and certainly no-one who looked quite like him. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone who looked quite like he did. He was tall and scrawny, with a slicked back hair streaked with grey. He wore what appeared to be a cloak, bright yellow and trimmed with blue, with some sort of black robes underneath, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that seemed to be perpetually sliding down his nose.

  Stranger still, as he stepped out from the bushes, he looked around, fixed his eyes on me, and stepped forward with a curt nod.

  “Ah, good, you’re here. And on time, too. Excellent. Talendale abhors tardiness.”

  He spoke with an upper-class twang, and it took me a moment to process his words.

  “Um… excuse me?”

  I glanced over my shoulder in case he was talking to someone behind me, but we were quite alone, other than Toby. The tom hopped to his feet and rubbed himself against the strange man’s legs. Traitor. The best I’d ever managed with him was not being bitten.

  “You are Lyssa Eldridge, correct?”

  “Well, yeah, but–”

  “And you did receive your letter, correct?”

  “Yeah– Well, no, I mean– What letter?”

  “Rather small, this druid grove, isn’t it?” he said, squinting around the clearing as though seeing it for the first time. “Still, I suppose you are the only druid in Haleford.”

  “I’m sorry, this what grove? Wait, did you just call me a… a druid?”

  He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked at me like I was the one who’d gone mad, which was rich.

  “Well, of course you’re a druid, what else would you be? And this–” he swept his arms, gesturing grandly to my humble little hideout, “is your druid grove, your protected space in which to practice magic. It’s shielded from outside observers, and of course mundanes can’t enter, though–”

  “Mundanes?” I interrupted.

  “Humans and creatures without magic – are you sure your mentor didn’t tell you any of this?”

  He peered at me over the top of his glasses with a frown.

  “This really is all rather elementary.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m sure.” This whole conversation was getting ridiculous. Shielded groves and druids and places non-magical creatures couldn’t enter, and–

  “What about him?”

  I nodded to the cat that had stopped rubbing against the stranger’s legs and had started washing his whiskers.

  “Hm, Toby? What about him?”

  “He’s a cat, he’s not a mag– Wait, how did you know his name’s Toby?”

  “He lives at the academy, when he’s not wandering through the mortal realms. Everyone knows his name.”

  “Then, how do I know his name?”

  The stranger’s forehead creased, and I replayed the words through my head and tried to work out how to reword them so that they sounded less ridiculous. How exactly was it I was the one needing to explain themselves in this particular conversation?

  “I mean, I’ve never been to this… academy, or whatever, so no-one could have told me. It’s just what I’ve always called him.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, Toby isn’t actually a cat, he’s a wampus. This form is just the one he chooses to assume outside of the acade
my’s grounds. Which is where he should be right now.”

  He raised an eyebrow at the cat – wampus – whatever, apparently completely oblivious to the fact that he had in no way answered my question, but had managed to raise at least a dozen more. Toby hissed at him, then darted into the bushes.

  “Toby prefers not to portal in front of people.”

  “Uh-huh. Of course.”

  He was obviously crazy, and possibly not the harmless kind, so I figured going along with it all was probably the best option right now.

  “Well, it’s been lovely meeting you, Mr, uh–”

  “Oh, where are my manners?” He looked startled at his oversight and hastily composed himself, pushing his glasses up his nose another time, and straightening the clasp on the front of his cloak.

  “Rufus Oswald Hamilton Pembington the Fourteenth, recruiter for the Dragondale Academy of Druidic Magic, and assistant to Professor Talendale, at your service.”

  He folded one arm over his waist and gave a curt bow.

  “Right. Well, Mr… Pembington, I really should be leaving now.”

  “Pardon me? Leaving? Oh no, I’m afraid that’s quite impossible. We’re already late, and the headmaster will be expecting you.”

  I frowned, replaying his words. Headmaster Talendale. Dragondale Academy of Druidic Magic. Those were all names from that letter Holly wrote me right after I got rejected from Bristol University. How did Rufus Osmond the whatever know about a hoax letter? I never showed it to anyone. I never even got around to talking to Holly about it. I took a breath.

  I mean, what if… what if Holly didn’t write the letter?

  I laughed and shook my head. Dragondale Academy of Druidic Magic? Of course it wasn’t real.

  “Something amusing you, Ms Eldridge?”

  “Yeah, look, no offence Mr Pemberton–”

  “–Pembington.”

  “–But I’m not going to any academy.”

  “All juvenile druids are required by law to attend the academy of their patriarchal line. And if we don’t leave immediately, we are going to be late. Professor Talendale abhors–”