Magemother: The Complete Series (A Fantasy Adventure Book Series for Kids of All Ages)

by Austin J. Bailey

  Archibald nodded. “A good idea. Sleep for a while. We still have the whole morning. Tobias and I can circle the lake while you rest and see if we find anything. Though I don’t doubt that whatever success we have here will have to do with the creature who has been throwing these.” He picked up a stone, frowning at it thoughtfully, then tossed it into the water and began to circle the lake slowly. The Swelter Cat followed him grudgingly, complaining all the while.

  “Tobias and I can circle the lake,” the cat mimicked. “Because the Swelter Cat doesn’t deserve a break.” The cat stepped in front of Archibald’s foot, causing him to trip and stumble into the water.

  “Argh! Stop it, you!” Archibald snapped, waving his cane at the cat and making it spring away.

  The Swelter Cat sniffed and licked a paw indifferently. “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.”

  Brinley grinned at them. What a pair they made. Archibald had explained on the way over that Tobias had indeed once been the servant of Cyus, but had left his service and the Void several years ago, against his master’s will. Archibald had heard rumors of where the cat had been hiding and decided that Tobias would make the ideal messenger for them. However, he had been strangely silent on the topic of how one actually gets into the Void. She made a mental note to ask him about it later.

  “Wake me up if anything happens,” Brinley said, watching Tabitha search the beach for other suitable message rocks. “I just need to rest awhile.”

  Tabitha nodded, not really hearing her. She was staring at the lake again. She waited as Brinley moved away to lie down on a soft patch of grass, then turned to stare at the water disapprovingly. She spoke softly so that Brinley would not hear. “You know, it’s really not nice of you to be like this. The Magemother deserves everyone’s respect. She’s one of the most important people in the world. You are supposed to help her. We are all supposed to help her.” She eyed the water patiently, waiting for a response, and when none came she wrote her words on a rock and threw it in.

  A moment later a plain rock came back and she picked it up, but nothing happened.

  I can’t read your thought rocks like the Magemother, Tabitha scratched into the rock. She threw it back.

  A moment later another rock came out with one word written on it: “Can’t.”

  “You can’t help her?” Tabitha asked. “You mean you can’t give Unda back?”

  Why? She wrote on another stone.

  The stone came back with words scratched haltingly on the opposite side: “Give the sun.”

  “Give you the sun?” Tabitha said, perplexed. “Trade? But you can’t have the sun. We need it. And it’s too big to fit in the lake.” She scratched the word “Can’t” on another rock and threw it into the lake, and it came back a moment later with nothing new added to it, just her original message.

  “I see,” Tabitha said, though she knew she probably didn’t. “You can’t help us? Fine.” She sat down on the shore and stared at the lake, and her mind drifted to another lake, and the journey that she had made to the kingdom of the nymph queens. She thought of the promise that she had made to them, that she would help find their sister, Brinley’s mother, the old Magemother. The only way that was going to happen was if they found the mages. Habis said that without all of the mages, Brinley’s mother would not be able to be healed. They had to get Unda back. They simply had to.

  She glowered at the lake, thinking of the merfolk within it who held the person that she needed, and refused to give him up. She felt helpless, stuck at the edge of a problem that she couldn’t solve for Brinley. She thought of Belsie and his disappointment. She thought of Peridot and how she had ignored her counsel. She thought of how she had risked Brinley’s life running from her own fear of violence.

  She felt something tighten inside her. She thought of the arm coming out of the lake, throwing stone after unhelpful stone out at them, speaking in riddles and barring their way to Unda, to Brinley’s mother. The thing that had been tightening inside her broke suddenly, and she picked up stone after stone, drawing on them, small curses, spells, hexes like the ones that Habis had taught her. One by one, she threw them into the water.

  When she had exhausted the supply of stones near her, she moved down the shore and started over again. She cursed the water to dry up, to be thirsty for rain and never receive it, to grow stale and warm and dank, for the fish to leave it, for people to never find it again. She cursed it to never be touched again by the sun, never to feed a stream, never to be fed by one. She cursed it to die. She threw the last stone in and left to find more. She had seen some good flat ones, perfect curse rocks, up in the patch of trees where she had found the berries.

  ***

  Brinley awakened. She had shifted in her sleep and now the little black stone from Calypsis was pinching her leg painfully. She drew it out of her pocket and ran a finger across the smooth, black surface. A sudden idea struck her then, and she reached into the stone with her mind. She thought back to the lightfall, to the words spoken there, to the peace that had filled her, and tried to fill the stone with it.

  It sort of worked, she thought. Not perfectly, but there was a sense of peace inside it now that hadn’t been there before. She withdrew from the stone and hefted it. It felt the same, and yet, without a doubt, something had changed. It had an almost soothing quality now. Just holding it made her feel better about things. She wondered if Tabitha would be able to feel the difference as well.

  “Tabitha?” she called. She put the stone back in her pocket and walked to the water’s edge. She could see Archibald and the Swelter Cat on the other side of the lake, but where was Tabitha? An uneasy feeling struck her.

  Oh no…She knew that feeling. Where was Tabitha? What had she done? Why had she gone to sleep and left Tabitha alone with the water? Something had happened. The lake had taken her too, perhaps. And now she had two people to rescue.

  “TABITHA!” she called, and the water rippled. A man with strong arms of braided seaweed rose from the water. His face was pale, white, and his hair was the color of the water. He wore a rusted steel breastplate on his chest and an empty sword scabbard on his left hip. In one hand he carried a wooden shield that was half rotted away, and in the other he held a bag of netted seaweed full of stones.

  “I am Dram,” he said simply, glaring at her as if she had done something terrible.

  “You are the one who caught our stones,” Brinley said, recognizing his arm.

  “Yes,” he said, dropping the bag on the shore. He leveled a finger at her. “You attacked us. You pay the price.”

  “Attacked?” Brinley asked nervously. “What do you mean?”

  “We talk with you. You talk with us. You ask. We say no.” He gestured with his empty hand. “And then you curse us.”

  Brinley’s eyes narrowed, thinking that the merman must be trying to trick her in some way. “I did no such thing,” she said firmly. “Tell me, where is Unda? Why won’t you give him back to me? Why won’t you let us return you to the ocean?”

  The merman pointed to the bag of stones that he had brought. “You have cursed us.” Then his expression darkened. “Yes. I will take you to the mage. You will become our prisoner, as he did.” He leapt forward and grabbed her around the waist, walking back towards the water. She struggled, punching him in the side.

  “Archibald!” she cried. “Help!”

  If Archibald heard her, she never found out, for even as she struggled to get free, the merman knocked her on the head with the flat of his shield, and everything went dark.

  ***

  When Tabitha returned to the shore with the hem of her dress full of flat stones, she found a bag full of her curse rocks sitting there. Brinley was gone.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, and then shouted for Brinley. She ran back to where Brinley had been resting but found her nowhere. She knew that she wouldn’t, but she tried anyway, even though she knew—the lake had taken her. It had been angry, she thought, about the curses.
It had gotten angry and taken Brinley instead of her. Why did she leave? What had she been thinking?

  She dove into the lake, changing into a fish. She wished, in that moment, that she could take the shape of a shark instead, something menacing, something scary. She searched the whole lake from top to bottom, side to side, and all around the edges. It was deeper than she thought, and colder, but it was empty. There were fish, of course, and rocks and plants, but nothing else. No kingdom of merfolk, no towers and halls like Brinley had said. And no Brinley.

  She rose from the lake bitterly and glowered at the water. It had taken Unda. It had taken Brinley. And it was all her fault. If she hadn’t lost her temper and cursed the water, this wouldn’t have happened. If she was a better herald, this wouldn’t have happened. If she had been a good protector, they would have known to be afraid of her. They would have known not to ever harm Brinley.

  “Bring her back!” she shouted, stomping into the water, but nothing happened.

  “Bring her back or I will burn you up,” she whispered. The water remained motionless, still and silent at her threats. “I will make you hear me,” she said, twisting around. She took everything that was in her heart and channeled it into her shaping. She shaped fire out of her fear. She took the anger she felt at herself and formed wings, and a great white dragon stomped a clawed foot into the lake and bellowed so loudly that the earth shook. Then it bent its head to the water and red fire burst from it, bathing the lake in light, making the water hiss and scream as it turned to steam.

  ***

  Brinley came to on the sandy floor of the lake with a hundred feet of water pressing down on her. She panicked, thrashing for air, then realized that she was breathing water. The merfolk must have done something to her, changed her so that she could breathe in their world.

  She was inside the dream that she had seen in the stone. She was in a round cell with black bars stretching all around her, as high as she could see, and through the bars there was nothing but darkness. Darkness and guards, that is. Four mermen with muscular arms and glistening red tails stood just beyond the bars, watching her. They carried no weapons that Brinley could see, but they looked menacing enough. Something made a ringing sound against the bars and Brinley peered into the half-light behind her. Sure enough, there was a figure there, sprawled on the ground and leaning against the bars. She stepped closer and saw that it was a boy. He was a few years older than she was, and had dark hair and blue eyes and a face that seemed to be always thinking hard about something else. Even now, he seemed not to see her, his eyes glazed over in some strange sort of trance as he tapped the bars again with his hand. There was a dull silver ring on his forefinger (which accounted for the noise), and it caught the light as he tapped again and again, a steady, feeble call for help into the darkness.

  “Unda?” she said, and his hand froze. His face, however, did not change.

  “Unda? Can you hear me?”

  Unda’s eyes came back into focus for a moment, and his face twisted in agony. He fell forward onto his knees, hands pressed against the sides of his head. He reached out to her, hand shaking, clutching at the water desperately.

  “Give it to me,” he groaned.

  She took a half step back, unsure of what to do, but at his words, something moved inside her. It was as if a great weight had been cut loose from its moorings in her heart and shifted, swinging slowly away from her, toward him, and she recognized it for what it was. She crossed the distance between them and placed her hands on his head, whispering into his ear. When she finished saying the words, she felt the weight tear away from her and settle into him, and at the same moment he seemed to straighten up.

  “Unda,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “That is my name. I had forgotten.”

  “You forgot who you are?”

  “I forgot many things,” he said wearily. “When I ran.”

  “When you came here, you mean?” she asked, indicating the cell.

  He shook his head. “When I hid from the pain,” he said. “There was great pain, when I lost the connection to the water.” He glanced at her questioningly. “When you took it from me…You did take it, didn’t you? And now you have given it back.”

  She nodded. “I did. I’m sorry, but I had to, to defeat Lux. You remember him, don’t you? And my mother, the last Magemother? She was the Magemother that you knew.”

  He squinted as if struggling to remember. “Yes,” he said. “I forgot their faces. I had to forget everything, to forget the pain.” His face went oddly blank, and she put a hand on his arm.

  “Unda,” Brinley said, “can you get us out of here?”

  Unda glanced around at the bars of their cell casually. “That will not be a problem,” he said. He gave her a searching look and began to circle their cell, reminding her of the giant cats that she had seen in a zoo once, pacing back and forth across their enclosure. “Is your mother dead?”

  “No, she’s alive. But she will die if we do not save her. We need all of the mages in order to save her. That is one of the reasons I came to find you.”

  He nodded. “One of the reasons?”

  Brinley hesitated. “I think that there may be a war soon. Lux is dead, but I have called a new Mage of Light and Darkness, and he is being tested. Shael has found a way to send creatures across the bridge from the Ire. We are going to need all of the mages again, though you may be in just as much danger now as when you went into hiding.”

  He shrugged. “Hiding us was the Magemother’s idea. Not mine. Who else have you found? Chantra? Lignumis?”

  She shook her head. “You’re the first.”

  “It’s Chantra that you should look for next,” he said, folding his arms behind his back thoughtfully. “I had the skill to forget my mind and hide from the pain. Lignumis may have succeeded in this also, but she will not have. She was young, wild, never willing to apply herself to the boring exercises that build that kind of strength. She would not have been able to cope well with the loss of her powers. She will need you.” He tapped the bar with his ring again and closed his eyes, listening to the sound. Then he swept his arms up and the bars peeled away, ripped away as easily as if they had been made of cloth.

  One of the four guards gave a shout and they rushed from the room. Not at all what you would expect guards to do when a prisoner was escaping, Brinley thought, but maybe they knew they were no match for him.

  “Why did they lock you up?” she asked.

  “I asked them to,” he said simply. “I wanted them to hide me, lock me away somewhere where I would be safe. They have guarded me, but they knew I would break out when I was ready.” He paused suddenly, raising a hand. “Do you feel that?” He closed his eyes as if listening hard.

  “What?” Brinley asked.

  His eyes snapped open again. “The lake is under attack. The water is evaporating…A great beast burns the lake. A dragon.” He glanced at Brinley. “Did you bring a dragon?”

  “Um,” Brinley said uncertainly. She thought suddenly of Tabitha. She couldn’t turn into a dragon, could she? Then she thought of Tabitha watching her get dragged into the lake, taken captive by merfolk. Suddenly it didn’t seem so out of the question. “Yes. I think I might have.”

  ***

  Archibald grasped the dragon’s tail, tugging on it violently, but to no avail. Rivers of fire continued to pour out of the dragon’s mouth and into the lake. Finally, in desperation, he drew back his cane and brought it down heavily on one of the dragon’s clawed, white feet. He wiped his brow and stepped back as the dragon slowly turned its head to look at him.

  “Tabitha,” Archibald said sternly, “what are you doing? Where is Brinley? Is she in the lake?”

  The dragon blinked and shook its head in annoyance, then turned back to the lake and roared, blowing another deep line of flames into the lake to make a great, frothing cloud of steam.

  Archibald picked his hat up from where it had fallen in his struggle with Tabitha and placed it ba
ck on his head. He had never seen Tabitha like this. Truth be told, he hadn’t known she had it in her. She was out of control, beyond reasoning with. She had nearly killed him earlier, when he had come up on her from behind. His vest was badly burned from the experience.

  He only hoped that whatever had happened, she had a good reason to be this way, and that she was making things better instead of worse. The lake had already receded noticeably. In another couple of hours she would likely succeed in reducing the lake to a puddle, not to mention cooking whatever happened to be living down there.

  He stumbled backward as a wave of heat hit him, retreating behind a tall, upright rock. The Swelter Cat was sitting on the other side of it, preening a paw as if it hadn’t a care in the world.

  “Quite a temper that one’s got,” the cat muttered. “Things are getting pretty hot.”

  Archibald scowled at him, then peered cautiously around the edge of the stone.

  ***

  The dragon did not notice right away when Brinley’s head broke the surface of the water.

  “Tabitha!” she shouted, swimming away from the flames and towards the shore. “Tabitha!”

  The dragon shook its head, baring its white teeth between spouts of fire. “Don’t worry, Brinley!” it growled. “I’m coming. I’ll boil them out. They can’t ignore me forever. I’ll—Oh, Brinley!” The dragon had spotted her now, and Brinley relaxed. For a moment she had wondered if she might be accidentally boiled alive.

  The dragon extended a paw to her and Brinley grabbed on to one of the curling white claws, careful not to cut herself as she was drawn toward the shore.

  The dragon shrank out of sight as soon as Brinley was back on dry ground, replaced by a frazzled-looking Tabitha, bobbing up and down on tiptoes anxiously.

  “Oh, Brinley!” she said, rushing forward and hugging her tightly. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”