“Maysie, you keep feedin’ them birds.”
For the next week, the ravens brought me presents that increased in value as humans interpret it: gold rings, an earring with a dangling ruby, more cash. They also brought me things ravens find important, like polished river rock and the feather from a red-tailed hawk. I wondered if it was found, or if they’d plucked it just for me. I liked to believe they stole it directly from the hawk.
My mother and I ended up building up a stash in a shoebox under my bed. After another week of the ravens’ gifts, she took a day off and we drove into the next town to have the jewelry appraised. When the jeweler wrote down the value on a sheet of paper and slid it over to my mom, I thought she was going to faint.
“Maysie,” she said, her voice shaking. “Girl, read that number and whisper it back to me.”
When I saw what he’d written down, I almost dropped, too. I read the figure and whispered in her ear, “Two thousand, eight-hundred ninety-two dollars and fifty-seven cents.”
She gripped the edge of the store counter and her knuckles went white. I put an arm around her waist, and I noticed for the first time how frail she seemed. The jeweler watched us in curiosity, waiting for our next move.
Mom raised her eyes to his face. “I want to sell it.”
And that’s how we were able to take the money, break our lease, and move into an apartment where we each had our own rooms.
I left that garden without any regrets, and we moved across town to a duplex in a squat little brick building that seemed like a palace when we first set foot inside it. The ravens watched us carry our boxes in, and when we closed the car trunk after the last load, the three of them sent up such a jubilant squawk that it was like they were celebrating with us. We bought a whole roasted chicken from Tompkins Foods and shared half of it with our winged benefactors, whom my mom had started referring to as “them angels” instead of “them birds.”
That night, sitting on my new porch steps, tossing scraps of meat to the ravens, I thanked them for their help.
“White Feather, Julius, Brutus… I don’t know where you guys are finding those things you bring me, but I surely appreciate you for doing it. You’ve saved us from a certain misery, and there aren’t words enough to thank you. My mom is sleeping in a big double bed for the first time since we left my dad, and she finally has a real house to call her own instead of a shack.”
I held out a piece of chicken in my hand, and Brutus walked up to take it gently from my fingers. I reached out toward him, and he danced a little away, staying out of reach. Not quite ready to be touched, I guess.
I pulled off more chicken. “You three have been my best friends since we moved to Harmonville, and I want you to know that you’re precious to me. Absolutely precious. More precious than jewelry or greenbacks or even hawk feathers.”
A car came slowly down the street, sliding like a shark through the shadows cast by the elm trees. A white face in the passenger side window was turned out, staring at the houses as they drove past. I recognized Billy Collins, one of Reverend Tompkins’ boys, and our eyes made brief contact as they drove. The driver leaned forward to take a good look, too, and my ravens jumped up on our porch railing and sat with me like my posse. Julius fluffed out his feathers to look even bigger than he was, and he grumbled in the back of his throat until they passed.
“Those boys don’t mean us any good at all,” I muttered.
White Feather looked at me and shook his head in agreement.
The next day, my mother and I did laundry in our own washer, and I was hanging the wet clothes out to dry on the line. This time we had an actual back yard, and there were already flower gardens along the wooden fences that encircled it, growing late-season asters and daisies in profusion. It was early September, and summer hadn’t let us out of her embrace just yet, bathing the world in sunlight and heat that warmed my bones and matched the happiness I was feeling. It was the most beautiful day.
Julius came and roosted on the crossbar of the laundry line, watching me as I clipped towels to the plastic-covered cord that stretched taut from one post to the other. He tilted his head and chirped at me, and it was the littlest, songbird-like sound he’d never made. It was cute, and it made me smile.
“What am I doing?” I asked as if I understood him. “Hanging out wet towels so they’ll be dry by evening.”
White Feather joined him them, and Brutus occupied the other crossbar. They all watched me in fascination as I finished hanging out the load.
“Come on, guys,” I chided with a smile. “This can’t be that interesting.”
White Feather turned to Julius and made a soft “meep”, and Julius flew off with Brutus right behind him. White Feather stayed put, watching me, his bright eyes following the movement of my hands. He said something, and I swear it sounded conversational.
“I’m not sure what you just said, but let me tell you, I’m very happy right now. Things are almost perfect.”
He chirred and tilted his head.
“What’s not perfect? Is that what you asked?” I suppose I should have felt foolish, talking to a raven like I knew what he was saying, but I didn’t. “The only thing that isn’t perfect is getting ready to start school in the fall. I don’t like school here, and I really hate some of the other kids, because they hate me.”
He gave a low, sympathetic caw.
“Jeremiah Tompkins especially. I don’t know why I’m his target. He hates me and he goes out of his way to make my life miserable. That’s part of why summer is so nice - he lives on the other side of town and doesn’t come near me for months.”
I bent to get a hand towel out of the basket at my feet. I saw a streaking shadow through the corner of my eye and knew that Brutus was back. Nobody was as big as him, and he had a peculiar way of holding the tip of his left wing when he was coming in for a landing. Julius arrived as I straightened up.
“Anyway… that’s the only thing. But it’s my last year. I’ll be eighteen in March, and then I can quit school and get a job.”
White Feather gurgled at me and snapped his beak to punctuate his opinion. I sighed.
“Now, don’t start in on me, too. I know school is important, but I’ve got to help Mom out around here. I think she’s getting sick, and I don’t want her to have to work so hard.”
Julius made a clicking sound in the back of his throat, and White Feather responded in kind. The two big ravens flew down in union and landed at my feet, depositing two more presents.
One was a key. The other was a crudely-drawn map.
I stopped and stared. White Feather landed and tapped the map with one claw, then bent and pecked the key. He looked at me pointedly, and as one, the three birds flew away.
I clipped the towel on the line and retrieved their gifts. The key was a heavy, ornate brass affair, and it was a tribute to Brutus’s strength that he’d been able to carry it at all. It was as long as my hand, and the decorative curves of the handle filled my whole palm. The map was drawn in pencil on a piece of scrap paper, and it had tiny writing on it. I peered at it and realized that it was showing the main road out of town and a turn off nobody ever took because it dead ended in the supposedly haunted swamp. I’d seen this map before last year. Jeremiah Tompkins had drawn it, and it led the way to where he was hosting an illegal booze-and-bonfire Halloween party last October. I wondered if the ravens had gotten hold of one of his maps, and what the key belonged to.
They’d never led me wrong before. I borrowed the car keys and set out, telling my mom that I was making a run to the hardware store for more clothespins.
There was a story to this swamp, and even though I was new in town, I’d heard the whole thing several times.
A hundred years ago, back before the Civil War, the road on the ravens’ map had led out to the Harmon plantation. Old Man Harmon was a planter who raised crops - nobody could agree anymore on which ones - and had a reputation for being unreasonably brutal to his slaves. The graveyard on
his property had upwards of two hundred unmarked graves, they said, and seven hundred more marked ones. That number always seemed a bit too high to me, but that’s how the story went.
Harmon was a cruel man, with a cruel wife who was into dark witchcraft. She would cast spells and conduct rituals on their slaves, and she filled that cemetery more rapidly than her husband or his overseers, and they were working on it with a will. The woman’s name was Sylvia, she was a monster.
The story went that one day, the slaves rose up and killed Old Man Harmon and Miss Sylvia, hanging them from the oak trees at the edge of the swamp, the same two trees that now stood on either side of the road just after you took the turn from the main drag. Then they burned the house and cursed the ground so nothing and nobody could ever live there again.
It was a great story to tell around a Halloween campfire, especially if that campfire was on the grounds of the old plantation. I didn’t know if the story was true, but it sounded impressive, and it was scary enough to keep the average folks from Harmonville from sticking their noses into the swamp. Nobody seemed to know who owned that land now, but the consensus was that anybody traipsing around in there would be trespassing, and on the off chance that the Tompkins owned the land, the citizenry steered clear.
Well, the citizenry had never received a key and what amounted to a written invitation from three magical ravens.
The car’s tires crunched on the dirt road as I took the turn between the two glowering oaks. Oak trees are usually pretty calm and placid, even happy, but these two were grumpy at best and downright ornery at worst. I passed them quietly, feeling like I should nod to them in respect as I went. I did.
The road was little more than a dirt path, heavily overgrown with downy brome and foxtail. The tall stalks bent before the car, bouncing off the grill and rattling against the bumper. I drove slowly, aware that there might be animals in that mess and hoping to give them time to get out of the way of the tires. I wasn’t here to hurt anybody.
A flash of black in the treetops up ahead caught my eye, and I saw that my three raven friends were accompanying me. It made me feel better, because something was making the skin on my arms tingle, and I was starting to feel like I was being watched.
Up ahead, the path narrowed even further, and the tire ruts I’d been following disappeared. White Feather flew down and roosted on a tree branch that hung low over the former road, and I kept driving, trusting that he wasn’t leading me astray. The car bumped and lurched, and I began to see signs of a gate at the end of the road. Brutus landed on it and flapped his wings, cawing to me as the car rolled to a stop.
I thought at first that Brutus was on a bush, but when I got closer, I could see that it was really a huge wrought iron gate overgrown with creepers. The ravens all landed on the arch over the gate, their claws vanishing into the thick blanket of green that covered the metal. The leaves had been scraped away in one place, and in their absence, I could see a keyhole just the size of the massive key in my hand. I held my breath, pushed the key into the lock, and turned. With a click, the surprisingly well-oiled tumblers fell, and the gate swung open, releasing a rush of fragrant air that was cooler than the sweltering late summer around me. It smelled like sandalwood and roses.
The gate moved far more easily than its appearance told me it should, and the ravens flew in through the opening. I stepped through after them, and my jaw dropped open so far I swear it almost hit my chest.
I expected the ruins of a burned mansion, or maybe some tumble-down outbuildings. I wasn’t expecting this.
I found myself standing on a cobblestone driveway that cut through a meadow. The grass was lush and green, trimmed to a perfectly uniform height and cushion-soft. Tiny purple wildflowers peeked out amid the green blades, and it made the ground look like the upholstery on a rich woman’s settee.
The driveway led up to the front steps of a Classical style stone building that boasted stained glass windows in its facade, climbing ivy, and a single tower on the right. A flag flew from the top of that tower, black fabric with a silver pentacle in the center that caught the sunlight as it fluttered in the wind. Above the door, carved into the lintel, were the words Acadamh Draiochta.
The three ravens landed on the cobblestones in front of me. The air around them wavered like heat distortion, and then they weren’t birds at all but three blazingly handsome young men dressed in black clothes better suited to an earlier century. The largest of the three was on the left, with black hair that hung thickly around his face and down his shoulders in curls. He had intense black eyes and a scar across his neck that made me think someone had tried to slit it. Stepping forward, hed offered me his hand. He spoke in a deep voice.
“You called me Brutus, but my name is Ipfimel.”
I accepted his hand. He bowed and kissed my knuckles while I stared in disbelief. He smiled at me, released my hand, and stepped back.
The second of the young men approached next. Like Ipfimel, he was dressed in black, but his hair was dark blond, and it was in long waves that cascaded down his back. He had a neatly-trimmed beard and mustache, and his eyes were piercing blue. When he spoke, his voice was like buttered velvet.
“You called me Julius, but I am Setmon.”
He kissed my hand, too, and backed away.
I turned to the third, who could only have been White Feather. He was smaller than the others, with olive skin and black hair that was cut short but with a long fall of curls that shadowed his eyes. He had a white streak through that forelock, and his eyes were the greenest that I had ever seen.
“I was called White Feather,” he said, his voice a clear and musical tenor, “but please know me as Adziel.”
I finally found my own voice. “Wh… what is happening?”
Adziel smiled. “You have been chosen, Maysie.”
Setmon and Ipfimel smiled at me, too, and I felt like I should have known what they were talking about. “Chosen for what?”
“You are a natural witch, and you’ve been chosen to receive tutelage at this school of magic,” Adziel explained.
I wanted to sit down, and I sort of wanted to run away, but most of me was caught in a surge of happy excitement. It was as if I’d just been handed a prize I’d wanted to win for years.
“I… seriously?”
Ipfimel and Setmon grinned at each other, and Ipfimel said, “Seriously.”
“I.. what… how…” I took a deep breath and got a grip. “What do I do now?”
Adziel offered me his hand. “Now you come with me.”
I hesitantly took the hand he held out. His skin was warm, and I was surprised by the calluses in his grip. I’d expected something smooth and unmarred. The rough skin made this experience suddenly seem completely real.
“I’m not dreaming,” I said.
Setmon answered. “No, you’re not.”
He pulled me toward the beautiful school building, and as we walked, I realized that there were other ravens landing in the grass and on the roof. Dozens of them, their black wings gleaming in the sun, alit all around us and watched as we approached the school. The entire unkindness that usually haunted Harmonville had come to this special place to roost.
I turned and looked over my shoulder at the gate. The cobblestone drive led to an open arch made of golden stone, and there was no sign of the metal gate I’d come through, and no sign of the car. I had a flash of irrational panic. If I had somehow lost my mother’s only car….
“The car is still there, and so is your world,” Adziel assured me. “And we will show you how you can return to it. For now, please focus on this place.”
“I…” I swallowed. “I will.”
He smiled, well pleased.
Adziel, Ipfimel, and Setmon escorted me up the stairs and past the watchful ravens. One of the birds turned into a lovely girl with waist-length blonde hair, and she grasped the brass handles on the double doors. She smiled at me.
“Welcome, Maysie,” she said. She probably sang li
ke an angel with that voice.
The girl pulled the latches down, and then she opened the doors wide. Inside was a spacious foyer, far too large to fit into the building I’d seen from the outside. The floor was white marble with dove-gray streaks shot through it, and a gold-trimmed red carpet ran from the doors to the base of a wide, graceful stairway made of polished stone. There were sitting areas on either side of the stairs, with two doors in the wall directly ahead and two doors on either side of me, making a total of six rooms that I longed to run through and explore.
My companions took me up the stairs, though, toward a huge stained glass window that showed a raven perched on an open book, a rose in its beak and a jeweled rod clutched in its talons. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Beneath the window was a console table with an open book, and beside the book was a plume in an ornate inkwell. The book was filled with signatures.
“A guest book?” I asked. “Should I sign?”
Adziel smiled. “Not yet.”
The carpet continued to the left and right, passing two wooden doors with arched tops and leading to more stairs that continued on to upper levels. I looked to see where the stairs might lead and caught a glimpse of twin hallways lined with doors.
“The dormitory,” Setmon said, “but that can be for later.”
The door on the left of the guestbook opened, and a man in a black suit stepped out. He had a trimmed white beard and blue eyes, and he carried a golden walking stick. He rested his hands on the knob at the top, and through his fingers, I could see the glimmer of green jewels.
“Maysie Douglas,” he greeted. He had a posh English accent. “Please come in.”
Gaping like a fish, I realized that I was looking like an idiot, staring at this place and catching flies. I closed my mouth and nodded.
The man turned to my companions. “Gentlemen, that will be all.”
They returned to their raven forms and flew away, leaving me alone with this stranger. I felt a flutter of nervousness tinged with fear and clutched my hands at my sides. For the first time, I was painfully aware of my appearance: bedraggled hair, oversized T-shirt, scrubby blue jeans and battered tennis shoes. I was embarrassed. What could these magical creatures possibly want from me?
Draiochta Academy: All Genres Academy Anthology Page 8