Her Stolen Magic

by Zandra Pope

“No, what’s going on?” Ava was the picture of calm. Meanwhile, my heart was already speeding along at a million miles an hour. Any sign of the world going insane was always bad.

  “Someone detonated a charge in the Potomac River this morning. It stirred up the water witches,” reported Tabby

  “The witches killed three joggers along the C&O Canal,” added Hannah.

  “But that’s not the worst of it,” continued Tabby. “The Red Scare claims the Purists are responsible, but the Purists are saying it was the Red Scare. Both of them are saying the charge was detonated becasue of the new magical forgery law.”

  “What law?” I asked.

  “The Tribunal declared magical forgery a capital crime yesterday. Purists say it doesn’t go far enough. The Red Scare says it’s going to lead to genocide.”

  “Why is the law such a big deal?” asked Ava.

  “They already executed the first person.” Tabby’s face was a picture of fear.

  Magical forgery? What did that mean? Using magic to forge paintings? Money?

  “Do you mean, like, counterfeiting?” I asked.

  “So much worse than counterfeiting!” Tabby exclaimed with melodrama.

  “The Tribunal is after non-magicals who are using magic. They’re also targeting magicals who are sharing magic with non-magicals,” said Hannah.

  Ava and I both stopped dead in our tracks.

  “What?” my sister asked barely audible.

  Tabby put on hand on her hip and the other she waved around in the air. “I can’t believe there are people who are pretending to have magic when they don’t. That’s just wrong.”

  “That’s not the issue, Tabby,” said Hannah. “It’s more than that. The Tribunal is going after people who think magicals can share magic with non-magicals. I mean, it’s not like we did something special to deserve magic, right? Why is it wrong to share?”

  Tabby paled at Hannah’s words. “It’s just not done, Hannah. We are separate from non-magicals. We have been given a gift for a reason. They haven’t been given it for a reason.”

  “What’s the reason?” shot Hannah.

  “I don’t know,” protested Tabby. “All I know is that it’s a privilege we need to safeguard. If we just hand out magic to everyone willy-nilly how to we keep bad guys from getting it?”

  “Bad guys already have magic. Magic doesn’t make you good or bad. It’s just a tool,” said Hannah.

  “You sound like The Red Scare,” complained Tabby.

  “Ok. Well try this on for size. Remember Greg Hill? They expelled him for magical forgery. He will be the next one tried for it,” said Hannah. “They’ll execute him if he’s found guilty. Is that fair?”

  I swallowed. The world had gone dark around the edges and I felt dizzy.

  “Wait,” I said. “I thought he was accused of being a member of the Red Scare.”

  “He wasn’t part of the Red Scare,” Hannah said, a bit too quickly. Alarm shone in her eyes as she closed her mouth. Tabby and Ava seemed not to have noticed Hannah’s sharp, definite response — as if she knew for sure who were members of the Red Scare.

  “I don’t understand,” said Ava.

  Tabby looked at her like Ava was the dumbest person in the world. She sighed. “You’re supposed to be the smartest girl at the school, Ava.”

  Hannah checked her watch. Her hand was shaking. “We’ve got to hurry or we’ll be late. Professor Dahlerst will kill us.”

  Hannah and Tabby ran off together. I walked in an unreal state behind Ava. Capital crime? Execution? We passed clusters of students talking in the halls on the way to Magical Law. I caught phrases like — justice will finally be served, thank goodness for the crack-down, keep the Voids out at all costs.

  Ava turned away from Dahlerst’s class, into an empty corridor. She looked down at me, her silver eyes shifting color in the shadows.

  “It will be okay,” she whispered.

  “We have to tell,” I said, struggling to keep my panic in check.

  She held up her hand. “We can talk about it later at the barn. At practice. For now, let’s just pretend nothing happened.”

  “We’re just kids,” I whispered. “They can’t execute us.”

  She nodded. “You’re right. Let’s see what Dahlerst says. I bet he’s champing at the bit to lecture us about this.”

  10

  “Magical forgery is now a capital crime,” screeched Mr. Dahlerst. “As it should have always been.” Pulling himself up to his full height of five feet four inches, my Magical Law professor did his best to convey the gravity of the topic at hand.

  I started to slump in my seat, but Ava jabbed in in my ribs and gave me a withering look. Paying attention to law lectures was not my strong-suit, even if my life might be on the line.

  Dahlerst continued. “Magical forgery is a horrible thing, an abhorrent thing, an unnatural, supernatural act. Imagine, if you will, the Voids outside the Slip. All those vile non-magicals who are desperate to get their hands on our gifts, our power.” His eyes glinted dangerously at mention of the word power. No need to guess that Dahlerst’s political sympathies lay with the Purists. His use of the slur ‘Void’ was all the hint I needed. I’m sure he gave lots of money to Valerian’s dad’s Senate campaigns.

  “But why a capital crime?” queried Hannah.

  Dahlerst eyed her with suspicious. “I will assume you do not have Void sympathies.”

  Several people gasped. Void was an offensive word and before today it hadn’t been used by teachers. The only people I ever heard using it were Valerian and his ilk. Void sympathies? What the heck was going on?

  Hannah shook her head no.

  “Good.” Dahlerst rocked back and forth on his heels, thumbs hooked in the lapels of his suit coat. “We all agree that counterfeiting currency is wrong.” Heads nodded in agreement.

  “Forging signatures, paintings, both are bad, too, but they have a more limited scope of devastation — namely for the people involved. Magical forgery, on the other hand, has a far deeper scope of devastation. Imagine you are going on a quest to kill a dragon. You’re given a relic to achieve this goal. You find yourself standing before a dragon only to discover the relic is a forgery.”

  “Shouldn’t you test it first?” asked Jeremy. Once he spoke, he looked around the room with a cocky grin, waiting for smirks of approval — which he received from all the tools on his basketball team.

  Dahlerst pursed his lips. “That’s not always possible.”

  Jeremy tossed his wavy brown hair out of his eyes with a derisive snort. “Should be,” he muttered.

  Dahlerst ignored Jeremy and continued. “Imagine, you’re fighting to get a seat here at Illysian. There was a waiting list of over fifty Freshmen hoping to get in. Imagine, just imagine, if a Void forged his magic and beat you out of a spot.”

  My stomach lurched. I never considered that I might be taking someone else’s place. Ava and I had always assumed that my magic would kick in some day, somehow, and then we’d just move on with our lives. I stole a glance at her. She was scribbling dutifully into her notebook.

  “Now picture a world in which magicals are channeling magic into objects and giving them to non-magicals. Actual enchanted objects. No big deal, right?”

  Several kids nodded including Hannah.

  “Wrong,” shot Dahlerst. “How long until those objects show up for sale on the black market? End up in the hands of criminals? Are used to promote darkness, soul work, or even a non-magical agenda within our own world? In addition to these horrors, magic would become diluted. Magic could be extinguished.”

  His words hit me like a blow to my chest. My heart ached. My breath was short. Everything he said made sense. None of the students were arguing with him. The ones sympathetic to the other point of view, ones like Hannah, sat still in their seats.

  Suddenly, I felt a lot less free.

  Of course the law made sense. It was there to protect us. To protect magic. It made me uncomfortable nev
ertheless.

  “Imagine the distrust you would breed, the discontent, the lack of cohesion, the extreme suspicion on the hearts and minds of everyone inside the Slip if there was a possibility that the person you were talking to was only faking magic. The Tribunal wisely passed down an executive order yesterday recognizing magical forgery for what it is, a crime that risks lives, ruins reputations, and puts the magical community in danger.”

  “I heard they executed someone today,” said Tabby, her voice quivering.

  “Indeed,” blustered Dahlerst. “Mathilda Weed.” He spat her name like a bite of spoiled food. “This felonious enchantress had a single magical ability. The faintest trace of magic. She could levitate three inches off the ground at will.”

  The class tittered. Three inches of levitation was a stupid, useless magical power. You couldn’t do anything with magic that weak, not even get a jar of jam from the top shelf in the pantry. Still, it was more magic than I had.

  “Rather than be a laughingstock, Mathilda did something vile. She did something repulsive and barbaric. She broke the magical law. Now,” he blustered, “one could argue that she was just a child. Barely fifteen years old.”

  I nearly passed out. Fifteen years old. Holy crap! How I kept my calm and stayed upright in my chair, I’ll never know. Maybe Ava held me there with her magic.

  Noting the surprise in our faces, Dahlerst lowered his chin to look down on us and curled his fingers around the edges of the podium. “That’s right. She was younger than you. Let this be a lesson, be it a person of fifteen or eighty-five, magical forgery will not be ignored. It will not be overlooked. It will not be tolerated. No matter how piteous the situation, how defendable the act, magical forgery is a capital crime and will be treated as such. Who can tell me by what means an execution is carried out?”

  “Chase,” boomed Mr. Dahlerst at the new guy who was, once again, clicking his pen. “By what means do we execute criminals?”

  Of course he’d ask Chase. If anyone would know the gruesome details of how we kill people, it would be a former Blackwell student.

  Chase cleared his throat and leaned back in his seat. He was trying to give the appearance of not caring, but I could see his chest rising and falling rapidly as he struggled to get his emotions under control. “There are several.” His voice wavered with emotion and I found my heart stirring with sympathy. He cleared his throat again, this time managing to sound clinical. “The most popular being the Inside Out Curse if torture is part of the punishment. If no torture is ordered, simple disintegration is used.”

  “Right you are! So to emphasize my point.” Mr. Dahlerst turned to his white board and wrote “Magical Forgery = execution!!!!!!”

  He liked to use exclamation points. He always used them.

  Ava shoved a note to me discretely. She winked.

  I opened it using my desk for cover. She had written: “Stay Calm and Magic on.”

  I looked up. She was watching me with a devil-may-care grin. Our lives were on the line and she was making jokes.

  I gave Ava a skeptical look. She pointed her pen toward the teacher and mouthed the words, are you listening?

  Insulted, I mouthed back, of course.

  She made a sharp motion across her neck.

  “Ava, would you and your sister like to share with the class?” Mr. Dahlerst was annoyed.

  Caught! My chest tightened and I felt the dreaded fist clench my stomach.

  Ava stood at the side of her desk and adopted a formal air. “Yes, sir. My sister and I thought it seemed severe that they tried Miss Weed for forgery when she was merely attempting to fit in. Did she harm anyone or use her faked magic to commit crimes?”

  Ava sat back down in her seat.

  Chase shook his head. It was barely perceptible. He knew a lot more than he was letting on, but he wisely knew to keep his mouth shut in Dahlerst’s class.

  Mr. Dahlerst’s thin lips curled into a smile as if this was the question he had been dreaming of getting all day. “Perhaps you were unable to comprehend my lecture. Let me put this in simple terms. It seems severe because forgery is severe. Magicians do not take kindly to being tricked.”

  I wasn’t about to contradict my teacher and call attention to myself, but being tricked and executing someone for said trickery didn’t connect.

  “Let me put it this way, Miss Verities.” I hated when he pluralized our names. Leaning on his podium, he stared at us with arrogant superiority. “Mathilda Weed took power, power that wasn’t hers and never should have been. Then, she lied about it. She stole power that wasn’t hers. She passed it off as her own. I’m flabbergasted that you don’t see this as deserving the title capital crime. It’s entirely logical that Mathilda was found guilty and put to death. It is a happy day for this school and for the entire magical community.”

  Ava raised her hand. “Sir, how long did Mathilda fake her magic?”

  “Two months. Which brings me to another point. Magical forgery rarely happens because we can always sniff it out quickly and efficiently. Forgery has a certain malodorous scent. It’s a dead giveaway. Don’t even try it,” he warned. “It’s worse than cheating. It’s worse than murder. It’s an attack against the very heart of the magical word.”

  Worse than murder? My mouth went dry. Ava and I had been committing a capital crime — that possibly made us smell bad — for the last seven years. I stared at my desk. Why had no one stopped us? Oh, yeah, because no one knew — only Ava and me.

  Mr. Dahlerst looked delighted answering questions from the scrupulous students who were terrified that they might have accidentally forged magic somehow and were now on the Tribunal’s hit list. Try as he might, Mr. Dahlerst’s oily reassurances did nothing to alleviate the class’ uneasiness over this news, but while everyone else only imagined venial sins of misuse Ava and I had broken a serious magical law.

  The magical world was a fragile one. The strings holding it together had to be spun out of truth, not lies.

  One question wormed its way into me. If it was so easy to sniff out magical forgery, why hadn’t we been discovered? If what Dahlerst was saying was true, it should have been easy to tell Ava was supplying me with magic and yet, no one had suspected much less discovered us. We had been forging magic since we were ten. How could little kids pull off magical forgery if experts could sniff it out so easily?

  One thing was clear, Ava and I were dead if anyone found out. This was a secret I’d take to my grave.

  Hopefully, that grave wasn’t being dug right now.

  11

  Ava and I weren’t speaking to each other. After Dahlerst’s class, we had a heated argument in whispers that escalated into hisses, and finally into an icy silence.

  Ava couldn’t understand why I was “freaking out” so much. Right. As if execution was no biggie. My head was on the immediate chopping block and I was vulnerable in the extreme. She felt invincible, as though she was up to the task to save us from the death penalty.

  I knew that it was impossible to keep up the front. The authorities sniffed out Mathilda Weed’s crime in two months. Ava disagreed, citing her powerful magic as the reason we had not, nor would not be caught.

  Ava was the most powerful magician in the school, but she had limits. I mean, even now, I couldn’t take part in team sports because the games were magically enhanced and moved too quickly for Ava to follow. So right there was a huge limitation to her ability.

  Our next class was Magical History. I arrived just in time. Ava sat in the back, the seat next to her open. I suppose she was expecting me to join her.

  In a demonstration of independence, I ignored her and sat across the room. I didn’t look in her direction. I didn’t need to see her to know that she was shooting daggers of anger at me through narrowed eyes.

  Sitting apart from Ava wasn’t a huge risk in this class. Magical History didn’t demand demonstrations. It was straight-up lecture format.

  When Jeremy sat next to me. I felt my familiar feelings
flare up inside. I wanted to pound my body into submission. Jeremy was a bad dude, I scolded myself. My stupid body didn’t care. It wanted to stare at him, moony eyed and drooling like a stupid dog.

  Jeremy threw a heart-melting look at me over his shoulder. “Can I borrow a pen?”

  Ever smooth with hot dudes, I dropped my pen onto the floor. “Crap. I mean, yes.”

  I bent to pick up my pen at the same time he did. He smacked me in the head with his arm.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “My fault.” Could he please stop hitting me in the head? For the love!

  He held out his hand.

  “What?” The pain in my head had made me forget what I was doing.

  “A pen?”

  I looked at the pen in my hand. “Oh, right, but you don’t want this one. It was on the floor.”

  “Any pen is fine.”

  “Right. Of course. I have a clean one. Just a sec.” I pulled out my backpack and rummaged around for a clean pen. “I mean, really I should give you this one,” I babbled idiotically. “I mean, it’s not like you care if the pen passes the five second rule. You’re not going to eat it.”

  “Pens aren’t part of my diet,” I heard him say.

  I pawed around my bag. The problem was, the bag was magical. It could hold anything. I could stick an elephant and a bike in there and still have room for a sandwich and a lipstick. Plus, I never cleaned it out.

  “Here,” said Tabby handing Jeremy her pen.

  “Thanks, Tabs.”

  I looked up to see him give Tabby a dazzling smile. Crushed, I set my backpack down. Had all my sense left me? Why didn’t I give him the pen I had dropped on the floor? Crushing on him and hating him at the same time was making me crazy.

  Was there magic for getting over crushes? I made a mental note to check on that later.

  History as dry as old bones. Sitting next to Jeremy did nothing to help me pay attention. I spent the entire time see-sawing between mad crush and deep resentment.

  After class, Ava stormed up to me.