Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded

by Sage Blackwood

  “No entry,” he said.

  “I live in there,” said Chantel. “And so do my friends.”

  “Nonsense,” said the guard. “Now run along, before you get hurt.”

  Chantel felt the snake twitch inside her head. “Owl’s bowels!” she cursed. “I do live there, blast you. Lightning Pass is my home. It’s all of our homes! Now let us in!”

  “I don’t think so,” said the guard, looking amused. “Lightning Pass girls don’t talk like you. Lightning Pass girls are shamefast and biddable.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” said Anna. “We do live in Lightning Pass. We go to Miss Ellicott’s School for Magical Maidens.”

  “Nice try,” said the guard. “But a Lightning Pass girl would never be outside the walls. Certainly not a nice little schoolgirl. She’d be all shut up inside her school where she belonged, doing as she was told. Now run along.”

  “Well, I live in Lightning Pass too,” said Bowser. “And I want to go home.”

  The guard eyed him a little more suspiciously than he had the girls. “That’s what they all say. No one in Lightning Pass is as ragged and dirty as the lot of you.”

  “We—” said Bowser.

  “Look.” The man bent down, while the other guards stared straight ahead and pretended they couldn’t hear. “I’ve got kids at home, myself. I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to you. Run along before something does, eh? I don’t want to see you dragged off to the dungeons.”

  Chantel, Bowser, and Anna didn’t want to see that either. They backed away from the gate, and turned down a cobblestone lane, out of the guards’ line of view. Franklin followed, regarding them all with an amused expression.

  “Nice work,” he said. “You guys guard that place so carefully.”

  “But we live there!” said Anna, outraged.

  “Looks like you don’t anymore,” said Franklin. “So what are we going to do now?”

  “We have to get in,” said Chantel. “We have to get back to the school. Mrs. Warthall said she was going to sell the younger girls.”

  “Sounds like a funny kind of school,” said Franklin, raising an eyebrow.

  “I heard a story once,” said Anna doubtfully, “where some soldiers got through the gate hidden in a wagonload of hay.”

  “It was the story of the treason of Wendy the Wayward,” Chantel snapped. “Ever since then all wagonloads of hay have been pierced with swords and pitchforks at the gate.”

  “Oh,” said Anna, looking hurt.

  “Sometimes w— in stories people crawl through a sewer grating in the walls,” said Franklin.

  “Well, that sounds lovely,” said Chantel. “But the sewers in Lightning Pass are underground all the way to the sea. I read that in a book.”

  “So there’s no way to get in,” said Franklin. “Oh well. I guess we’ll go somewhere else. What about High Roundpot? Or the Stormy Isles?”

  Chantel looked longingly at the ships. To sail off on a wind that blew toward places with magical names . . . She sighed. “No, we . . . we can’t. You go ahead.”

  “Too bad you threw the crossbow away,” said Bowser glumly.

  “No it’s not.” Franklin looked at Chantel. “You’ve thought of something. You think there’s another way in.”

  “Oh, Chantel, are you thinking of the but—” Anna stopped, and clapped her hands over her mouth.

  “Thinking of the butt?” said Franklin, smiling.

  Chantel glared at Anna, and Anna glared back.

  “Whatever you’re thinking of, you’d better tell me.” Franklin sat on a barrel and folded his arms and very plainly wasn’t about to go off in search of High Roundpot.

  Chantel decided it was better to get her version in before Anna or Bowser told too much. “Fine. There might be a magical way to get through the wall. There are these things called buttons. But we’ve never seen them, they’re probably invisible, and we’re not sure where they are.”

  “Well, that’s helpful, then,” drawled Franklin.

  It was quite possible he was the world’s most annoying person.

  “We know at least one of them is on the western side of the city,” said Bowser.

  “An invisible portal and you don’t know where it is. Maybe it would be easier to go back and find that place where you all came out,” said Franklin.

  “Fiends,” said Chantel shortly.

  “Besides, it’s a maze down there,” said Anna. “It’s only luck we got through it once.”

  “What about the vampires and zombies? And what are fiends, anyway?” said Franklin.

  “Spirits of the restless dead who take you with them to wander the wastes between this world and the next,” said Chantel.

  “Oh,” said Franklin. Chantel was pleased to see he looked slightly nonplussed.

  Finding a button didn’t seem like much of a hope. But treacherous Queen Haywith had once opened a breach in the wall . . . maybe now, with no sorceresses to do the Buttoning, it might be possible to do it again.

  They followed the wall. They made their way through the harborside neighborhood. A woman was cooking stew, over an open fire on the cobbles. People were lining up to buy bowlsful of it, and Chantel looked at it longingly. It smelled good and she was very hungry.

  The woman said something to a girl next to her and handed her a bowl. The girl took the bowl and, stepping carefully so as not to spill it (the bowl was very full) brought it over to Chantel.

  “I don’t have any money,” said Chantel.

  “My mother said to give it to you.” The girl’s accent was different from Franklin’s, but also different from the people in Lightning Pass.

  “We’re not beggars,” Chantel heard herself say, to her horror. It was terrible having a snake in your head.

  “But we are grateful,” said Franklin, taking the bowl from the girl’s hands. “Thank you.”

  The stew was the best thing Chantel had ever tasted. It had things from the sea in it, fish and shellfish and green stuff, and tomatoes and potatoes and a lot of pepper. It was gone too quickly, and the little girl came and took the bowl away. Then she brought it back, full again. Bowser tried to give her his knife in payment, but she wouldn’t take it.

  They gave the empty bowl back, and walked on, feeling considerably livelier and better about the world.

  They passed through another gate, and were out in the Roughlands again, this time to the west of the city. They were, according to Franklin, now in the kingdom of Eastern Karute.

  “I know that,” said Chantel. “Eastern Karute is known for its—”

  Barbaric behavior. Bloody history. Vicious Marauders. Even with a snake in her head, Chantel had to stop and think. Not everything she’d learned in school about the Roughlands seemed to be bearing up.

  “Apple trees,” said Franklin. “I wonder if we’ll see any.”

  They didn’t, though. They saw weeds. The Roughlands seemed to be largely composed of weeds. And then, although they were climbing toward the mountains, they ran into marshes. By the time they were all soaked well past their knees from stepping on what looked like solid ground and turned out to be cold, murky water, Chantel had learned to avoid walking on the greenest bits.

  “How far do you think we’ve come?” said Anna.

  “About two miles,” said Franklin promptly. “I’m going to climb this tree.”

  It was a three-quarters-dead tree, drowned, Chantel thought, by the surrounding marsh.

  “What good does that do?” Chantel asked, as he hoisted himself into its bare branches.

  “He wants to see where we are,” said Bowser.

  They watched the Marauder boy climb as high as he could, and stare off to the north, shading his eyes. A moment later he was clambering down at great speed. He fell off the bottommost branch and picked himself up, wincing.

  “There’s an army coming,” he said.

  “An army?” said Anna.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Chantel. “Why would there be an
army?”

  “Let me see,” said Bowser, grabbing the branch and trying without success to swing himself up as Franklin had done.

  Franklin seized him and pulled him down. “There’s not time! Where’s your wretched secret gate?”

  Chantel looked at the wall. If they’d come two miles, they ought to have reached one of the seven buttons by now. The wall looked exactly the same everywhere. Flat and shiny and utterly impassable.

  “Hurry up!” said Franklin.

  Chantel ran to the wall, jumping from tussock to hummock, and occasionally missing and splashing into cold muck. She put her hands on it, feeling for a crack, a line, anything.

  “Do some magic or something!” Franklin yelled.

  “We’re trying,” muttered Anna, who had joined Chantel at the wall. “Chantel, can you—”

  Chantel wasn’t listening. She was trying as hard as she could to summon an opening in the Wall. To summon a spell. To summon anything.

  It wasn’t working.

  Consider the girl.

  We do. We have considered her for some time. The girl is dangerous.

  But is she more dangerous inside the wall, or out?

  Outside the wall she cannot cause any harm. At least, not for some time.

  But if we lose her?

  Inside the wall, we can keep an eye on her.

  Inside the wall, she may be of use to us.

  Of use? She may be one of us.

  I think she summons us.

  Summons us? A mere child?

  A powerful child.

  Why does she not see Dimswitch, then?

  She ought to.

  If she is as powerful as we think

  she should see it plainly.

  She is upset. She is angry. She is thirteen. It’s a difficult age.

  Very well.

  Show her Dimswitch.

  10

  DIMSWITCH

  Suddenly Chantel saw something—a dark shadow against the vast expanse of smooth stone. “There! See that?”

  “I think,” said Anna, squinting. “Almost. Yes.”

  The shadow was the shape of a—well, a coffin, Chantel thought. And it was oddly really there. When Chantel put her hand over it, the shadow didn’t cover her hand; it stayed beneath it.

  “It’s a button. It’s—it’s called Dimswitch. And it seems like we have to—turn it somehow,” said Chantel. Touching it, she felt she could understand how it worked. She could feel that it was connected to the other buttons, and to . . . something else. She couldn’t tell what. “We kind of push it a little bit sideways . . . Anna, do the fourth sign and the sixth. Fourth with your right hand and sixth with your left. Together.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Anna.

  “No it’s not,” said Chantel distractedly. “I’m sure you can do it.” She listened to what the button was telling her. She took two steps backward, and sloshed into water halfway up her shins.

  She heard a cry behind her.

  She spun around. Bowser was still beside the tree—with a Marauder’s arm around his neck and a Marauder’s knife at his throat.

  The Marauder was tall and thick and utterly diabolical-looking, just like the drawing from the Girls’ First History Book at school. Chantel desperately wished she’d been taught any kind of magic that would help.

  “Let him go.” Franklin was halfway between the wall and the tree, his crossbow aimed at the Marauder. “Now.”

  His crossbow? Chantel wondered, with the tiny portion of her mind that wasn’t watching in horror.

  “You can’t shoot me,” said the Marauder. “You’ll hit the city boy.”

  “He’s right!” Anna called. “Franklin, don’t—”

  The crossbow went kerchunk.

  The bolt struck the Marauder in the arm, an inch from Bowser’s head. The Marauder yelped and dropped his knife. Bowser wrestled free and ran. Franklin, meanwhile, was fitting another bolt to the crossbow.

  The Marauder fumbled with his own crossbow—it couldn’t be easy with the bolt sticking through his arm—and Franklin shot him again. In the other arm.

  The Marauder turned and fled.

  Bowser reached the wall and collapsed against it, panting.

  Franklin was close behind him. “Open the blasted thing! Do your magic! There’ll be more coming!” He turned on Anna. “You had to call me ‘Franklin,’ didn’t you?”

  “You could have hit Bowser!” said Chantel.

  “No. I couldn’t have,” said Franklin. “Open it!” He raised his crossbow and pointed it at the distant fleeing Marauder. “I should have killed him.”

  “Why didn’t you?” said Chantel.

  Franklin spared her a look. “Killed a lot of people, have you?”

  “Chantel, let’s do the spell,” said Anna urgently.

  “There. There’s the other two,” said Franklin. “Karl the Bloody always sends three.”

  “I don’t see anyone,” said Bowser, still out of breath.

  Chantel didn’t either. She saw tussocks and hummocks and space.

  “Chantel, start the spell again!” said Anna.

  “I’m not bringing a Marauder with a crossbow into the city,” said Chantel. “Where did you hide it?”

  “They’re not much use for city fighting anyway.” Franklin had the crossbow aimed straight at something only he could see. “No good at close range.”

  “Then drop it,” said Chantel.

  “Chantel, he can’t!” said Bowser. “There are more of them out there. Just do the spell!”

  “There. They just moved closer,” said Franklin, shifting his aim slightly.

  “Come on, Chantel,” said Anna.

  Chantel didn’t like it, but she started doing the spell again. Anna, looking relieved, joined her and made signs.

  Chantel drew the third sign in the air with one hand, and the ninth and first alternately with the other. Then she switched hands. It was difficult. But not impossible.

  And slowly Dimswitch turned, folded itself sideways. A passage opened through the wall.

  Seven Buttons was fifteen feet thick. At the end of the passage Chantel could see a cobbled street of Lightning Pass.

  “Great. C’mon!” said Bowser.

  Franklin gaped.

  “Now leave the crossbow,” said Chantel.

  Still staring through the gate, Franklin began undoing little catches and clasps on the crossbow. It came to bits, which he stuck into various pockets.

  Chantel didn’t want him armed at all. But just as she opened her mouth to protest, two Marauders sprang up from the swamp and rushed at them.

  Bowser shoved Anna into the passage, and then ran back and tried to grab Chantel. Anna ran back too. Chantel dodged them.

  “I have to be last! It’s part of the spell! Just go!” She grabbed Franklin, pushed him into the passage, shoved Bowser and Anna after him, and then leapt after them as the Marauders reached the wall.

  The wall shut, starting from the outside. The children ran, passing solid wall that crunched as it tumbled into place behind them. Then Franklin, the fool, stopped, and just stood there, staring at the inside of the wall as it closed toward him.

  Chantel threw all her weight at him and knocked him through the passage and into Lightning Pass. The wall shut so quickly behind them that it caught a shred of her robe.

  Franklin picked himself up off the ground, without seeming particularly upset or grateful. “That’s odd,” he said. “The insides of walls don’t usually look like that.”

  “Why have you seen the insides of walls?” said Bowser.

  “Well, we knock them down sometimes. There’s usually infill.” Franklin stared up, down, and all around. “Everything here is so . . . squashed together!” he said. “All those tunnels and arches and things! Where does that one go to?”

  “To a court, probably,” said Bowser. “C’mon.”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “There are hundreds of arched al
leys like that,” said Bowser. “They all go to courts with houses and shops and stuff, and then there are more alleys off of them to other places.”

  “Amazing,” said Franklin. “And those bridges up there—”

  “Yeah. They go places,” said Bowser. “But could you stop being amazed? People are staring.”

  They were, Chantel saw. Not many people, but a few—a woman sweeping a doorstep, a boy carrying a load of firewood, a passerby stopping to open a door for him. Chantel wondered if anyone had seen them come through the wall.

  The only sign that Dimswitch had been there at all was the few green threads from Chantel’s robe, sprouting from a blank expanse of wall.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Mrs. Warthall might be selling the girls at this very moment.

  They climbed up steep streets, crossed by arched bridges that braced the stacked houses. They climbed a staircase that spiraled around a tower and deposited them on a path that crossed the rooftops. It was funny to see Franklin, the know-it-all of the Roughlands, utterly dazzled by Lightning Pass. Chantel felt a surge of pride. Lightning Pass was amazing. And it was a relief to have walls around her again. She was back where she belonged.

  Still, she hoped she hadn’t seen the Roughlands for the last time. She hoped she’d get a chance someday to see High Roundpot and the Stormy Isles.

  They hurried up the narrow alley that ran behind Fate’s Turning. The back door to the skullery was guarded by two skulls set into the bricks.

  From inside came the sound of thumps, followed by wails of pain.

  “What’s that?” said Franklin, alarmed.

  Chantel grabbed the doorlatch and tugged. The door was locked.

  “Hang on.” Bowser kicked off his boots and climbed up the brick wall, fitting his toes into small cracks and gaps left by crumbling mortar. He reached behind one of the skulls and retrieved a slim length of metal.

  They heard a sharp, angry crack from inside the school—the sort of noise that might be made by a belt hitting someone. Chantel jerked furiously at the locked door.

  “Let go.” Bowser stuck the length of metal into the crack between the door and the wall and slid it all the way to the top. Something clicked. “Okay, now try it.”