by Naomi Cyprus
That white slash . . . Suddenly it all made sense. Sort of.
“Marcus,” she said slowly, not taking her eyes off the bird, “it’s my glass falcon. It’s come to life.”
“But . . . but that’s powerful Thauma magic,” Marcus whispered. “I’ve never heard of anything like it outside of history books and fairy tales. How did you do it, Nalah?”
Nalah thought about the lucky turquoise and moonstone she’d used in making the falcon. Those small magics were nowhere near powerful enough to accomplish something like this. She remembered that strange moment when the bird had seemed to glow. But that was nothing, wasn’t it? Anyway, the bird hadn’t come to life until they got here.
“I don’t know,” Nalah finally replied, and took a tentative step toward the bird. The falcon ruffled its feathers once more, looked around as if it’d heard something that disturbed it, and then dropped from the bookcase and swooped right toward Nalah.
Nalah flinched, but the bird just landed lightly on her shoulder, its glass talons hooking into her tunic. It was heavy and warm, like a real animal. It chirped again and nuzzled her cheek with its hooked blue beak.
“What is this place?” Marcus asked, looking around as if he half expected more objects to come to life.
Nalah began pacing the room. “You know how when you look at things in the mirror,” she said thoughtfully, “they always look a little bit different than they do in real life? This place . . . it’s like that. There’s something about it that reminds me of New Hadar. Everything feels the same, but different somehow.”
“You’re right,” Marcus replied. “It almost feels like we didn’t go anywhere at all. It’s weird.” He paused, his eyes scanning the spines of the books. “A mirror world, huh? It’s almost like a tale from one of those old storybooks we read when we were kids.”
Gingerly, Nalah reached up a hand and ran her fingers over the smooth glass of the falcon’s wing. The bird head-butted her palm like an affectionate cat and made an urgent cheeping sound.
She looked into its glass eye, and for a moment she saw herself reflected in a field of swirling dark blue. But then her face faded, and she saw something else, a different image reflected back from the bird’s eye. A dark, stone room with iron bars; the crumpled shape of her father sitting on the floor, his clothes filthy, his face smeared with dirt.
“Papa!” she said. Then the bird blinked, and the image was gone. “Marcus,” she exclaimed. “I saw where Papa is. The bird showed me! He’s in some kind of dungeon. He looks terrible, but he’s alive!”
The bird chirruped again and bobbed its head, almost as if it were saying, Yes, that’s right! “Do you . . . do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked it.
The bird bobbed its head again and puffed out its chest feathers. As it did, the white stripe across its chest glinted in the candlelight. “Papa fixed you,” Nalah whispered, touching the stripe. “Is it possible you have some kind of connection to him?” Another chirrup, another bob. She suddenly wanted to pull the bird close to her chest and hug it tight, as if she could send some of her love through it to her father.
“Well, I can’t just keep calling you ‘bird,’ can I?” she said, “You need a name.” She paused for a minute, thinking of the special blue glass she’d used to create the falcon in her father’s workshop. “Cobalt,” she said. “Do you like it?”
The falcon seemed to consider this. Then he closed his eyes and rubbed his beak against Nalah’s cheek.
Nalah laughed, feeling slightly hysterical. Her heart was beating fast, and her fingers were tingling—but there was something different about the sensation now. At home, it felt like storm winds battering the shore, ready to sweep everything away. Here, it was more like the roar of the furnace fire, still potentially deadly, but steadier.
Whatever was happening to me back home, it seems like it’s happening faster here. She looked at Cobalt—once so cold and still, now warm and alive. Maybe what happened to him is happening to me too.
She blinked and refocused on Marcus. No time to think about that now.
“We’ve got to find Papa’s cell, quickly, and then get back to the mirror,” she said. “We won’t have long before Tam discovers we found a way through. I don’t want to find out why he wants me here.” She started toward the door, Cobalt still perched on her shoulder. But before she got there, she heard voices outside. Someone was coming.
“Too late,” Marcus said.
She shrank back, putting her finger to her lips as she turned to Marcus. He nodded, pressing his lips together. They held their breath, listening as the people outside approached the door. Nalah let out a sigh of frustration as she realized that the people weren’t moving on—they had stopped right outside the door. It didn’t sound like they were coming in, but they weren’t leaving, either.
Marcus poked her and whispered, “We should look around if we’re stuck in here. See if we can work out anything about where we are.”
Nalah hesitated, but couldn’t think of a reason why they shouldn’t. They would just have to keep their voices down. Slowly, trying to listen for footsteps moving away, she went over to one of the bookcases. Many of the book titles were about Thauma craft—history, practice, and theory. Other ones were simply titles she didn’t recognize. There was The Control of Water, which was odd, and Tales of the Outer Kingdom. . . .
“Nalah,” Marcus whispered. “Have a look at this.”
Nalah spotted Marcus standing by one of the tapestries that hung on the wall between the bookcases. It was a picture of a city on fire. Under the beautiful, burning towers, soldiers wearing blue cloaks were fighting against ones clothed in red and black.
“That’s strange,” Nalah said. “This looks a lot like that engraving of the Thauma War in our history books at school.”
“It does, doesn’t it? The king’s soldiers defending the city,” Marcus agreed. “Buying the king time to get the weapon ready.” He paused before continuing. “So, if the Thauma War happened here too, does that mean we’re just in a different part of the country? But if that were true, why would Tam have needed a magical mirror to get here? It doesn’t make sense!”
Nalah heard him, but she wasn’t really listening. Her fingers itched to touch the tapestry, just like they had with the obsidian dagger, just like with the shard. It was calling out to her. She reached out, her fingers brushing the coarse threads, and—
CRACK! Nalah jumped as she heard something splinter. She felt hot air on her face, and smelled smoke. All around her was the sound of crackling flames. But there was no fire in the library.
Another vision? she thought. But of what?
But this was different from her experience with the dagger—she wasn’t dropped into another place and time. Instead the tapestry in front of her was coming to life, as if every individual thread had a mind of its own. The threads flowed in and out of the stitches, colors bobbing and weaving, animating the scene. The flames licked around the roofs and windows of the buildings. Tiny people ran from the fires, clutching their children to their chests.
“What are you doing to it?” Marcus asked.
Nalah tore her gaze from the hypnotic movement of the tapestry to frown over at Marcus. “What, you mean you can see it too?”
“And hear it.” Marcus’s eyes looked like they might fall out of his head. “How are you doing that?”
Nalah just shook her head. She could feel her blood flowing smooth and strong through her veins, into her fingertips. How am I doing this? she wondered.
As they watched, the scene in the tapestry suddenly changed, as if the frame of their view was zooming over the heads of the soldiers, up a tall sandstone tower, and in through a window to a dark room. A man in deep purple robes was standing alone in a stone chamber, raising a great glass orb over his head. The orb was filled with murky, swirling colors.
“Forgive me,” a voice whispered, and the figure dropped the orb. It fell to the floor and cracked open like an egg, falling into tw
o jagged pieces.
A strange pulse seemed to shake the whole room. Marcus doubled over, and a purple-covered book on the shelf beside him fell to the floor. A roaring sound filled Nalah’s ears as the colored whorls escaped the orb and filled the scene with their dancing colors. The sound was like fabric being ripped in two, but so loud and unsettling that she stepped away from the tapestry to throw her hands over her ears.
As soon as she wasn’t touching the fabric, the noise stopped. When she looked up, the tapestry was back to normal, a still picture of a battle scene.
Nalah backed away from the tapestry, massaging her fingers, which were threatening to cramp up. She felt suddenly dizzy and exhausted. What was all that? Was that the king? But what was the orb he was holding?
“Do you think tapestries just do that here?” she asked Marcus.
Marcus shrugged and touched the tapestry. Nothing happened.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “If this is a Thauma tapestry that works by touch, I should be able to use it as well. So, why did it work for you, but not me? I’m the fabricworker!”
Nalah hadn’t thought of that. She couldn’t even begin to answer the question.
She looked around for the book that had fallen when the orb broke, but it wasn’t on the floor where it had landed. Instead it was right there on the shelf, as if nothing had happened.
That’s strange, she thought. She reached out and picked it up, afraid and a little excited that it might flip itself open and begin to read itself aloud to her. It didn’t.
“A History of the Magi Kingdom,” she read. She opened the book and skimmed the contents page. “Huh, I’ve never heard of this one.” It was strange, because she’d always begged her father to find more stories about the fairy-tale kingdom. He’d always told her that there weren’t any more.
“Nalah, we don’t have time for bedtime stories,” Marcus said.
“No, no, wait a second,” Nalah insisted. “There’s something odd about this.”
Marcus shrugged. “There’s something odd about everything,” he said. “What is it now?”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” Nalah said. “It’s just that this doesn’t have any of the stories I know. It hasn’t got ‘The Singing Butterfly’ or ‘The Princess Who Stole the Stars,’ or the one about the lovers and the dragon.”
She ran her finger down the contents page and read out some of the chapter titles.
“‘Administration of the New Farmlands in the Delta Region.’ ‘The Digging of the Great Wells.’ ‘Family Trees of the Great Thauma Households.’ It all just sounds so—”
She broke off, uncertain if she could finish her sentence without sounding crazy.
Real. It sounded . . . real.
Nalah looked around at the room again—the stone floor, the candles, the proudly displayed Thauma artifacts.
“Marcus, if magic is more powerful here, and they’re writing about the Magi Kingdom like it’s a real place,” she said slowly, “maybe this isn’t our world, after all. Maybe this is the Magi Kingdom.”
“What? The Magi Kingdom is a fairy tale! It doesn’t really exist,” Marcus said. But he didn’t sound so sure.
Nalah shrugged. “A man’s evil twin kidnapped my father, I walked through a magical mirror into a different place, and a bird I made came to life,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling like what does and doesn’t exist is a bit flexible right now.”
Marcus whistled through his teeth. “So the tapestry wasn’t about the Thauma War, after all? It was just about some battle that happened in the Magi Kingdom?”
Nalah frowned at the picture in the tapestry. The scene did look exactly like the ones she had seen pictures of back at home. The old-fashioned soldiers’ uniforms were the same, the buildings they were fighting around were the same kind as the ones that New Hadar had been built over. Those buildings had crumbled into ruins when the last king used the Great Weapon to end the war.
“Wait a minute,” Nalah said, her heart in her mouth. She opened The History of the Magi Kingdom again and turned to the very first chapter. It was called “The End of the War.” She scanned the page for a moment and then read aloud: “‘The king went to the highest tower room and used the Great Weapon, despite the warnings of his advisers, and of the Prophet of the Sands. Accounts state that at once the king’s enemies were felled where they stood—but there was no time for the royal forces to celebrate, as the first great quake ran through the kingdom almost instantly.’”
“But that sounds like our history,” Marcus said. “I mean, mostly. So that man in the tapestry, with the swirly orb thing—that was the king setting off the Great Weapon?”
Nalah nodded, reading on. “It’s strange, though,” she said. “In our history, the Great Weapon was said to have rid the world of powerful Thauma magic, so that no one could ever start a war like that again. That’s why, once the battle was over, the Hokmet took control and started weeding out the last of the Thauma users, restricting magic more and more as the years went by. We had that big quake that destroyed the old city when the weapon was set off, but that was all. It seems like here, it was totally different. Here the weapon caused a year of storms and earthquakes.”
“A year?” Marcus asked in disbelief. “How did anyone survive?”
“It sounds like a lot of people didn’t,” Nalah continued. “Many died during that year. The kingdom was rebuilt only after it all was done—by the Thauma. Instead of being weakened like they were in New Hadar, the Thauma here got stronger. A lot stronger.”
Marcus stared at her, and Nalah could almost see the gears in his head turning. “So this place and New Hadar shared the same history, the same Thauma War. But then, after the war—after the Great Weapon was used—everything was different for us than it was for them.”
Nalah nodded. “That’s what it seems like. But I still don’t understand how they’re related.” She skimmed more pages in the book. “They’ve still got kings and queens here, just like in the stories. Thaumas rule the kingdom. That might explain the tapestry and Cobalt.” From his bookshelf perch overhead, Cobalt gave another chirrup.
“But if no one had ever traveled between the kingdoms before Tam, how did we get those stories in the first place?” Marcus wondered.
Nalah shrugged. “I got a vision of this world from the mirror—some other Thaumas from the past might have gotten inklings as well. Maybe their stories ended up as fairy tales only because the Hokmet wanted to cover up the truth about the war.”
A thrill of excitement passed through Nalah. She’d always wondered what it would be like to live in the Magi Kingdom, and now here it was—a real place, with a real history, just on the other side of a mirror from her own world! How many of the stories were true?
If only her father were free to enjoy it.
So, who was Tam? If he had her father locked up in a dungeon, then was this a palace? Maybe the royal palace? He must be a powerful man here too, then, just like his twin was.
Her train of thought was cut off as she heard a clank of metal and whispered voices outside the room.
“Ready?” said a gruff voice outside the door.
“Yes, Captain.”
It was too late to hide or run. The door to the library flew open and nine people strode inside, all of them wearing black leather breastplates, with black metal helmets on their heads. Guards, Nalah thought. They looked like something out of a storybook, too—each of them had a curved scimitar hanging from his or her belt.
Cobalt took flight and landed on a candelabra, setting it swinging. Nalah threw up her hands, her heart hammering. Were these people working for Tam? We can’t get captured already—we’ve only just got here, she thought. I have to rescue Papa!
The guards formed a line in front of Nalah and Marcus. All of them were staring straight at her. Nalah risked a glance at Marcus, then back at the guards. No, she was right—they were staring at her, not him.
Some of their faces were partly obscured by t
heir helmets, but the woman closest to her wasn’t wearing one, and there was an odd look on her face, an expression of intense wonder and curiosity.
It reminded Nalah of the look Tam had given her when she’d first seen him in the market.
I guess they were expecting me.
Up on the candelabra, Cobalt gave an angry screech, and the guard looked up and raised an eyebrow at him. She didn’t seem particularly surprised that there was a living glass bird loose in the palace—he seemed more of a minor annoyance. The guard collected herself and addressed Nalah with a half bow.
“Greetings, lady, and young sir,” she said. “Do not be alarmed. We are here to welcome you to the Kingdom of the Magi. Please, come with me and all will be explained. And bring your . . . pet, too, of course,” she added, glancing up at Cobalt again.
Nalah and Marcus looked at each other in amazement. It’s true! This really is the Magi Kingdom!
This woman seemed to be in charge—she must be the captain Nalah had heard speaking gruffly outside. The captain stepped aside and gestured for Nalah and Marcus to walk in front of her, between the guards, toward the open door.
Nalah looked at Marcus and saw her own worries reflected on his face—they both doubted that these guards’ intentions were good, but they didn’t have much of a choice. Nalah lifted her arm and Cobalt fluttered down to land on it. He turned his head almost fully around to stare balefully at the guards as Nalah walked past them.
Nalah and Marcus walked out into a long, dim corridor lit with burning torches and lined with more tapestries. It was built from the same thick sandstone slabs as the library. The guards accompanied them closely.
Despite the guards marching beside her, still sneaking her stunned glances when they thought she wasn’t looking, it gave Nalah a thrill to know all of this was real. Swords and chain mail, living glass, a huge palace made of stone . . . It was just like all those tales had said it would be. All the stories were about the rise of the Thauma lords, or about princes and princesses who made amazing things or went on quests to retrieve rare crafting materials, or about young crafters whose creations got them into trouble. If all this was possible, maybe the stories were too.