Tabitha laughed.
“What?”
“You called me an alien.”
The boy went red in the face. “Well, you’re not from here, are you?”
She shook her head, swallowing a stray chuckle.
“Then you’re an alien, and you’ll have to go before the queen.”
Tabitha smiled. “I don’t think so,” she said, shifting suddenly. A great black swan took flight from where she had been standing.
“AAAGH! Sorcery!” the boy shouted, twisting and slipping in the puddle that she had left, falling onto his backside.
Tabitha flew to the opposite side of the massive circular hall. There was a large golden archway there, then it was gone. She hovered in front of the bare stretch of wall where the archway had been moments before and then turned around. There it was, off to her left.
Again, as soon as she approached it, the archway vanished. Puzzled, Tabitha turned again, spotting the archway on the opposite end of the room. She flew toward it, only slightly hopeful this time, and banked before she collided with solid stone. She landed at the feet of the boy with the book, who had made his way to a round desk covered in books and shiny silver buttons. A large, very dusty hammer sat on the only portion of the desk not covered in books. “There’s no way out,” she said breathlessly.
“I know.”
Tabitha sniffed. Most likely there was a way out, and this boy knew it. “What’s your name again?”
The boy squared his shoulders, taking a deep breath. “Fitzpatrick Auldo Waltverian McYormic the Third…but you may call me Fitz, so long as you stop making puddles on my floor and flying around the room.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Will you help me leave now? I really do need to find Archibald, you know…”
“No.” He turned his back to her, fiddling with the buttons on his desk. “You’re an intruder, like I said. An alien. I have to sound the alarm, as soon as I figure out how to do it.” He punched an especially large button several times, looking around, then frowned at it when nothing happened. “Bother.”
Tabitha leaned against the desk to watch him. “Are you a guard?” she asked.
He glanced up, startled. “Oh, no. I mean—well, yes, sort of.”
Tabitha raised her eyebrows and the boy coughed. He folded his arms, leaning casually against the desk and pushing several buttons by accident, which caused him to say “Bother,” again. “Technically, I’m the gatekeeper,” he explained. “But to be honest, I don’t have much to do. Nobody ever comes here. Halis used to go out and visit people in Aberdeen all the time, but even she hasn’t been here in years.” His eyes went wide. “Then she just showed up randomly today, and then the other queens came too, and then they came back with the alien.”
“Don’t call him that,” Tabitha said. “He’s the trusted advisor to the King of Aberdeen, and my friend.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean anything by it. I’ve just been here too long. Actually, I’m an alien too, I guess.”
Tabitha brightened. “Really? You mean you’re from Aberdeen?”
The boy nodded. “I was a student at the Magisterium, if you know what that is. I don’t know if it’s even there anymore.”
Tabitha laughed. “Of course it is! Oh, this is wonderful. I am a student there too—I mean, I was, until I became the Magemother’s Herald—and now I’m Belterras’s apprentice too, so I’ll never really be a student there again. I was their bird keeper,” she finished proudly. Her mood had brightened considerably at the revelation that she was speaking to a fellow student. “When did you attend the school?”
“Long ago.” He smiled weakly. “Before there was a bird keeper. I started there the year the school opened.”
Tabitha stared at him blankly. Her eyes glazed over. Fitz waved a hand in front of her face and she snapped back. “Oh! Sorry. But you must be ancient. I mean, you must be over five hundred years old!”
Fitz looked down at his hands despondently. “So then, time has passed there,” he said quietly.
“Oh, yes, lots.”
He nodded. “I figured as much.”
“What’s wrong?” Tabitha asked, for his eyes had started to water. “What did I say?”
“Well,” he said, pointing around the room. “Time does not exist in here, or so I’ve read. I didn’t know how long I’ve been in here…Time enough to read all these books a hundred times.” He waved a hand at the stacks of thick tomes. “But I didn’t really know until just now. Everyone I knew in Aberdeen is dead now.”
Tabitha gasped, putting a hand over her mouth. “Oh no! You’re right! But Fitz, how did you get here in the first place?”
“It’s a long story,” he said.
Tabitha cleared off a pile of books, sat down on the desk beside him, and picked up his hand in her own, which made him go bright red in the face. “Maybe you can tell me,” she said, “before you sound the alarm. After all, it sounds like it might be a long time before you see someone else again.”Tabitha hoped that this was the right thing to do. Part of her wanted to hurry up and figure out a way to get out of there. So much time had already passed since Archibald was taken. He might be in very great danger, or it might be too late already. But another part of her was certain that the only way out of this room was Fitz, who seemed like he needed a friend at the moment.
Fitz blinked at her thoughtfully, then shrugged and settled down onto a stack of books, the top‐most volume of which was so concave that Tabitha could tell he had been using it as a chair for a long time.
“It started when I was a student at the school,” Fitz began. “I was good at my classes, but my books were my only friends. My classmates had friends, best friends, girlfriends, all kinds of friends, but not me.”
Tabitha felt a twinge of pain listening to him. He could have been describing her own life back at the school, where she had spent most of her time up in the bird tower, talking to birds instead of people.
“One day, quite by accident, I met Halis by the underground river beneath the Magisterium. I used to go there sometimes just to be alone. I mean, it wasn’t really an accident. I was trying to summon a nymph. I had read about how to do it, but I didn’t think it would actually work—I was just doing it because I was bored. But it did work.” He paused, remembering. “She said she had never spoken to a boy before. Anyway, she knew a lot of things about uh…girls.” He blushed. “She gave me advice, and in return I gave her news about the world, but she got bored with that pretty soon. She had all kinds of questions for me about the Magisterium and magic and how it worked. Eventually I brought her a book to read. She didn’t know how, so I taught her.”
“You taught the queen of the nymphs to read?” Tabitha asked, impressed.
“Worst thing I ever did,” he said, nodding. “The more she read, the more she wanted to read. Soon I was stealing two or three books a day for her from the library. Of course, someone noticed and I got in trouble. They said they would throw me out if I didn’t return the books, so I asked Halis to give them back, and she said no.”
“But that’s not fair,” Tabitha objected. “You were nice to her.”
Fitz smiled weakly. “It gets worse. She said she wanted more books. She said she was going to put me in prison if I didn’t get her more, but I couldn’t, so…”He waved a hand at the expansive chamber they sat in. “Here I am.”
“Your prison,” Tabitha echoed, looking around the room with a new curiosity.
“Of sorts. I’m left to myself here, keeping guard over the gate to a fairy kingdom that I have never set foot inside, getting older and older every day, though it never shows. These are all the books I gave her,” he said, indicating the mountain of books with a wry smile. “They have been my only companions.”
Tabitha’s eyes widened. “That’s terrible. And you’ve read them all?”
Fitz laughed bitterly. “I have become, through my own studies, a pretty decent wizard, if I do say so myself.”Fitz stood up, stretching. “Well,
that’s my story. I suppose now I need to deal with you.” He frowned at the metal buttons, pushing several of them again with no success. “I don’t know why these aren’t working,” he said. “I guess we will just have to wait until someone checks in on us.”
Tabitha stirred. “But that could be another five hundred years!” she said. “I can’t wait that long. Archibald is in danger right now!”
Fitz shrugged. “There is no way for a mortal to leave this room alive,” he said simply. “If there were, I would have done it ages ago.”
“But how did Halis and the other queens come in here?” Tabitha asked.
Fitz pointed to the wall on the opposite end of the room. “Oh, there’s a gate. A big golden gate under a golden archway. But mortals can’t walk through it. It won’t appear for us. Sometimes you can get a glimpse of it, but that’s all. Only the nymphs can use it.” He frowned, glancing around suspiciously. “It always seems to be moving, too. I probably spent my whole first month chasing it, but it’s no use. Trust me.”
“There has to be a way to get out,” Tabitha insisted. “I can’t just let Archibald die.”
“Oh, there’s a way,” Fitz said darkly. “I didn’t say there was no way out. I said there was no way out alive.”
“What do you mean?”
Fitz pointed to the giant glass heart set into the floor. “That’s the Queen’s Heart,” he said, sliding a small manual out from beneath a stack of books. The cover read “Book of Laws.” He opened to the middle and began to read. “The penalty for entering Nymia is death. No mortal who enters the Golden Hall—that’s this room—shall live to tell about it, though the brave at heart may win a quick death, and an audience with the queen, by ringing the Queen’s Heart.” Fitz snapped the book shut with a sense of finality. “So you see, the only way out is to take the hammer.” He pointed to the large dusty hammer on the desk. “And ring the heart. It will get you an audience with the queen, but then you get executed.” He glanced down at the book and made a face. “If I remember right, it’s not a very pretty kind of execution either, so I wouldn’t recommend—Hey! Wait!”
Tabitha, who had stopped listening after he finished explaining about the heart, was halfway across to it, hammer in hand.
“DON’T DO IT!” Fitz cried, running after her. “I didn’t finish telling you about the—”
Whatever he was about to say was cut off by a sound like a giant drum as Tabitha brought the hammer down on the center of the heart. It was a good swing. She had been careful to raise the hammer high above her head and bend her elbows on the downswing like Master Bumps had taught her all those years ago when she was learning how to cut firewood to heat the bird tower. The sound that came from it was not what she had been expecting. It wasn’t at all like you would expect metal on glass to sound like. It sounded instead like a very big heartbeat: two big thumps a half second apart. She dropped the hammer in surprise.
“Now you’ve done it,” Fitz said, catching up to her. There was a look in his eyes that was half fear, half admiration. “You shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t finish telling you about what happens.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tabitha said. “I have to see the queen. I have to save Archibald.”
“But you don’t understand,” Fitz insisted. “It’s not that easy.”
Tabitha turned to him. “What do you mean? You said if I rang it I’d get to see the queen, and that’s what I did.”
His response was cut off by a clanging sound from behind them. There, at the end of the room, the golden arch had appeared. The gate beneath it had swung open and two very strong‐looking men were striding towards them. They wore armor and carried spears, and the skin beneath their helmets was blue like Halis and the other nymphs.
Tabitha expected one of the nymph soldiers to shout, “Who struck the Queen’s Heart?” but nothing like that happened. They strode up to them quietly, somberly. The soldier closest to her took the hammer from her hands and handed it to Fitz. “The penalty for what you have done is death,” he said softly. “If you are worthy, you will speak with the queen before you die.”
“If I’m worthy?”
The soldier said nothing, just took her upper arm in a firm grip and began leading her towards the gate.
“Wait,” she said. “What about Fitz? He made me do it!”
The soldier stopped to look at Fitz questioningly. Fitz had gone white as a sheet. Standing there next to the heart, hammer in hand, he looked very guilty. “I did not!” he protested. “I just told her the options. I was just doing my job.”
“Should an intruder enter,” the soldier next to Tabitha said to Fitz, “you are only permitted to read to them out of the Book of Laws. Then they are to be left to make their own decisions.”
“That’s what I did!” Fitz exclaimed.”I mean, I did talk to her, but I read to her, too.” He waved the hammer in front of himself, so flustered now that his arm shook nervously. “You can’t expect me not to talk at all after not seeing another person for so long.”
As Tabitha watched, Fitz’s nervous shaking got worse. On top of the shaking, Fitz had started to sweat. Tabitha remembered what he had said about his difficulty speaking to others, and of his shyness. No doubt being locked up alone for five hundred years had not helped matters.
The soldier considered him. “We will report your behavior to the Council of the Three Queens, and you will be punished as they see fit.”
“No, don’t!” Fitz shouted, stepping forward so that he stood directly over the heart. “I promise I won’t do it agai—”
But on his last word, Fitz shook so badly that the heavy hammer slipped from his hand and fell on the heart.
Tabitha covered her ears again as it thumped loudly.
When it was over, the soldiers were both staring at Fitz with livid, surprised expressions, and soon he was being led out of the room alongside her.
“Why did you say that?” Fitz hissed at her. “You made them question me, and I got so…so—”
Tabitha put a hand on his arm as they walked toward the gate. “You’re welcome,” she said. “You’ve been locked in here too long, Fitz. Don’t worry,” she added. “We’re going to be fine.”
“I doubt that.”
Tabitha, hoping he was wrong, grabbed his hand as they walked beneath the golden gate into the darkness beyond.
Part Two
In which there is a dragon
The darkness beyond the gate was the inside of a tunnel, which, after a few minutes, opened to the strangest view that Tabitha had ever seen. They were on a beach, but it was unlike any beach that she had seen before; the brown earth beneath their feet was so dark that she would have taken it for black had it not been for the water running up against it. The water was blacker than the deepest darkness of night shadows, blacker than the bottom of a well and the space between stars.
The water was evil, she sensed. It must be; nothing but evil could be so black. She knew right away that she didn’t want to touch it. As soon as she had the thought, the water seemed to creep toward her across the ground. She shied away from it nervously. Above them, the sky was a deep crimson red. Tabitha took it all in silently. Red sky over a twisting coast of brown earth and an ocean of black. It was not the beautiful kingdom that she’d imagined. This was a harsh place. In the emptiness of the ocean, her eyes were drawn toward the only object in it: a small raft, bobbing up and down on the water. She knew instantly, horribly, that they would have to get on it.
The soldiers waited as they climbed onto it carefully.
“Do not touch the water,” one of them warned needlessly. Then he put his armored foot on the edge of the raft and pushed them out to sea. The other soldier tossed a small oar to them and Fitz caught it.
“Wait!” Tabitha called to them. “Aren’t you coming?” But the soldiers just smiled at her through their helmets. A second later they were gone, vanishing from the beach like smoke in the wind.
“Where did they go?” Tabitha asked
. “What’s going on?”
Fitz sat down silently on the back of the raft and began to paddle, first on one side, then on the other. “To see the queen,” he said, “you have to pass a test. That’s what I was trying to tell you before you rang the heart.”
“What kind of test?” Tabitha said, sitting down unsteadily and trying not to think of the black death beneath them.
“The hardest kind,” Fitz said darkly. He removed his hands from the oar, and it continued to paddle by itself. He folded his arms glumly. He closed his eyes as if trying to remember. “The Book of Laws states that it is a journey through the darkness of your own soul.”
Tabitha’s face went blank, staring off the edge of the raft into the calmly undulating blackness.
“Tabitha?”
“Oh,” she said, coming back to herself. “Right. Darkness of my soul. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad. I’m not a very dark person. Are you?”
Fitz frowned but said nothing.
“Are you afraid?” Tabitha asked him.
He shrugged. “I didn’t mean to ring the bell. You did. I think this is going to be your journey. I’m just along for the ride.”
A wave lifted them several feet into the air and Tabitha’s eyes went wide in panic. “Oh!” she squawked. “I hate the ocean.”
Fitz grimaced. “That explains why it is here, then.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you get it?” he said angrily. “Until we meet the queen—if we meet the queen—everything we see, everything we experience, is going to be because of you. This is a journey through the darkness of your soul. Your fears, your deep dark secrets, that’s what we’re going to face. That’s the test.”
“But I don’t have any secrets!” Tabitha objected. Her voice caught on the last word as she felt something shift in the back of her mind like a restless animal. Suddenly, she felt afraid.
“Look!” Fitz said. “There’s something there!”
It looked like an island in the water, far enough away that she could not tell how big it was. She felt hopeful at the sight of it, glad at the thought of getting out of the water. They paddled toward it for what must have been an hour, but it didn’t seem to get any closer. After three hours, they had nearly given up hope.
Magemother: The Complete Series (A Fantasy Adventure Book Series for Kids of All Ages) Page 27