BOOK ONE
to Alexandra Floyesta
to Floy and to Esta
BOOK TWO
to Betsy
for all those early adventures
SUMMER THAW
Wellington Jones awoke to the sound of dripping water. Drops fell from the eaves, then a whole patch of snow broke loose and rumbled off the roof. His eyes snapped open in excitement. They were having a June thaw!
He sat up, and the covers slid from his plump shoulders, letting a whoosh of cold air invade the bed. Hastily he pulled the coarse blankets around him and squinted across the small room. Of the two narrow windows set deeply into the stone wall, he looked eagerly at the one covered with real glass. The ice crystals that patterned it most of the year were gone.
If it was a real June thaw, this might be another mild summer. There had been one just four years ago when he first came to Llandoylan School, though he'd been too upset at the time to appreciate it.
Maybe Master Foxworthy was right. He'd said in geography class that in the five hundred years since the Devastation, the climate had been slowly warming again. Wellington had doubted, feeling that in his own twelve years he had seen no change worth noting. But if this summer proved like that other one, there might be another August with no snow on the ground.
Slipping a hand from beneath the blankets, he fumbled along the cold stone wall for the niche where he kept his glasses. Pudgy fingers grabbed the icy metal frames and yanked them into the warmth. He scowled. He wanted to see if the icicle hanging outside his window had shortened any. But, as every morning, he didn't want to give in to these glass tyrants and put them on. They were responsible for so much of his misery.
If his eyes had been stronger (and he had been a little thinner and faster), he would be at the Cardiff Military Academy now, learning to be a warrior, as the son of a noble Glamorganshire family should be, as his parents had expected him to be when they named him for the ancient hero Wellington. Not that anyone called him that now. He was just “Welly,” like the name of high boots for slogging through mud.
Angrily he jammed the glasses onto his round face and glared around the bare room. So now instead of the yearned-for academy, he was at Llandoylan School receiving a “well-rounded” education, when he wanted to be learning to fight boundary raiders from Gwent or Angelsy pirates or perhaps the rumored hordes of muties from the South.
Of course, he'd been told often enough, he was lucky to get any education at all. Children of herders or farmers generally got none.
The muffled clanging of the ten-minute bell startled him. Hurriedly Welly slipped out of bed, yelping as his bare feet slapped against the cold flagstones. When he was an upperclassman, he'd at least have a rug in his room. He tugged on a pair of socks. Then, rushing to the washbasin, he broke the ice crusting its surface and splashed his face perfunctorily with water.
Anyway, he thought as he hastily pulled on his long underwear, this was an early thaw—a time for exciting things to happen. And this time, he would make the most of it.
Trousers and shirt on, he slid into his boots and, grabbing his fleece-lined jacket, rushed out the door into the narrow hallway. Still struggling with one sleeve, he rounded a corner and smashed into another hurrying body. Adjusting his skewed glasses, his heart sank. It was Nigel Williams, accompanied by several of his cronies.
“Watch yourself, Frog Eyes!” Nigel snarled. “If you don't know how to act in the presence of your future duke, I'll be glad to show you.”
“Aw, later, Nigel,” drawled Justin, the young lord's chief lieutenant. “The pleasure of whipping a worm like that isn't worth missing breakfast for.”
Nigel snorted agreement, and without another word, he and his companions turned disdainfully and descended the stairs. Welly, pale and shaking, stood on the landing until they were out of sight. Then he hurried down, slipping into the great dining hall as the final bell sounded and the ancient wooden doors closed ponderously behind him.
Hazily lit by narrow windows, the hall was noisy with pre-mealtime chatter. Welly scanned the long tables and benches for a free place, finally sliding into an empty seat across from one of the younger students, not a friend but at least one who hadn't made fun of him yet.
Not, he thought glumly, that he had any real friends here. Except, perhaps, Heather McKenna. But he wouldn't sit next to her here. Nigel or his sort might trot out one of their taunts: “Horseface Heather and Frog-eyed Welly, ugly as muties and equally silly.” When they did, Heather usually pointed out that the rhyme stank and that, anyway, frogs were extinct, so how did they know what frog eyes looked like?
At last, bowls of steaming porridge were being passed down the long wooden tables. When Welly's bowl reached him, he clamped his hands around its rough pottery sides, letting the warmth seep into them. Up and down the table, the students' breath rose in white puffs.
At the head table, old Master Bigly rose and mumbled the usual invocation. “We remnant of Man thank the Creator for his mercy. As life is preserved and sustenance preserved, so hope is preserved. World without end. Amen.”
Welly began eating in silence and avoided looking at his tablemates by staring into the dim cobwebbed recesses of the vaulted ceiling. His thoughts were on how to avoid Nigel's promised punishment, though he might forget. The bully probably made too many threats in one day to keep track of them all.
Nigel had been here for less than a year and would return to the Cardiff Military Academy after a stint at rounding his education. But already the big, hulking boy had made his mark at Llandoylan. Welly wondered if Nigel's boast was true, if when he became Duke he'd change the title and declare himself King. Dukes of some of the larger shires had done that already. It added zest to the regular border clashes. Not that any of the shires had populations big enough for real wars. But it sounded better to fight for a king than a duke, even if Britain had a dozen of them.
After breakfast, Nigel sailed out of the hall along with the other upperclassmen, not casting Welly a glance. On the other side of the hall, however, someone was waving at him energetically. Squinting, he recognized Heather and waited while she threaded her way between the benches and departing students, light brown hair swinging in two thin braids. Her long, narrow face, though not quite pretty, was lit in an eager smile.
“Welly,” she whispered conspiratorially, “I've really come across something good this time. Don't dare talk about it now, it's too big. But I'll …” She stopped and looked with exaggerated caution around the near-empty hall. “I'll come to your room tonight. Usual signal.” Then she whisked out of the room to her first class, and prickling with curiosity, Welly headed to his.
Ancient Written English was not his favorite class, but it was necessary if he wanted to read writings that had survived from pre-Devastation days. Not that Welly was anxious to read most of them, unlike Heather, who read every printed word she saw. He simply reasoned that if he was too fat and blind to be a warrior, perhaps he could learn about ancient strategies and battles and be some general's clever strategist.
The morning's second class, geography, he enjoyed more. For the last several months, they had been studying the pre-Devastation world and the nations that had flourished before the nuclear war and cold darkness that followed wiped out most life on the planet.
Welly had been interested, partly because Nigel and his followers had loudly voiced their disinterest. They considered unimportant the layout of extinct nations, most of which were now poisonous, glassy plains, peopled, if at all, by sparse bands of mutants.
Master Foxworthy had stressed that the fate of all the earth was interconnected. Britain, he pointed out, had survived the worst of the war because in late pre-Devastation days it had disarmed, ridding itself o
f its own nuclear weapons and those that allies had placed on its soil. As a result, when war finally came, Britain was a minor target, and only the city of London, the former capital, had been bombed. Destruction from blast, firestorm, and first-wave radiation had been confined to the island's now-desolate Southeast.
But clouds of radiation from the bombed nations had swept the world. Debris and dust blown into the atmosphere blocked the world's sunlight, lowering temperatures and destroying most plant and animal life. The atmosphere's protective layers were thinned, and harmful ultraviolet rays, plus persistent radiation, brought lingering death and terrible mutation to generations of survivors. Civilization collapsed into centuries of barbarism.
Today, Foxworthy was back to the present, showing post-Devastation boundaries by jabbing a pointer into the map drawn on the skin of a large two-headed cow. The colored lines and patches showed the shires, which, sandwiched between the Scottish glaciers and the southern desert, had for centuries operated as independent duchies. For most of those centuries, the boundaries had wavered as shires fought among themselves, nibbling off territory and asserting dominance.
Glamorgan's eastern enemy, Gwent, was the topic of today's class, and for once, Duke-to-be Nigel paid close attention. But partway through the class, one of the older girls interrupted with a question that had been buzzing around the school for several days.
“Master Foxworthy,” she said deferentially, “could you tell us whether it is true that armies of muties from the Continent have invaded the Southeast and are attacking shires fringing the desert?”
“Miss Dillon,” Foxworthy replied after a frowning pause, “your question, although irrelevant to the topic of today's class, nonetheless deserves an answer. It is true, as I have pointed out, that with the capture of water in ice and glaciers, the sea level is a good deal lower than in pre-Devastation times. Not only is our coastline farther out, but areas such as the English Channel are narrower. And they present far less formidable a barrier than once they did.
“However, the human population of continental Europe, as indeed that of most of Asia and North America, was largely destroyed in the Devastation and aftermath. Only in the non-glaciated areas of Scandinavia is there any remnant of civilization capable of organizing armies as such.
“Still, bands of mutated animals and humans do reportedly roam the Continent, even as they do here on a smaller scale. And reports have been received of some having crossed into Southeast Britain. But these are isolated incidents and nothing to cause concern.”
Master Foxworthy glowered around the room to discourage further rumormongering and then returned to his day's subject. Half of Welly's mind attended to the class, while the other played with strategies for smashing armies of muties on the borders of Northhamptonshire.
After classes in math and culture came the final class of the day, science, which Welly and most of his classmates considered a waste of time. Perhaps the subject could be interesting, but not with Master Quiles pacing about bemoaning the loss of past glories and parroting tales of ancient wonders. And even if the grand old days and their fabulous devices had been that golden, what of it? The knowledge and skills to make those things were long gone.
But finally the intoning ended, and the students were dismissed to a supper of potato soup and barley bread. Afterward, it was still light, and many donned coats and hurried out into the walled school grounds. Usually Welly would choose a game of chess or checkers, but tonight he had other plans. Heather had passed him after dinner with a theatrical wink, and he didn't want to miss her visit. Wild as her ideas usually were, they added some excitement to life.
Leaving the dining hall, he threaded his way through the familiar maze of stairways and corridors that made up Llandoylan School. The venerable building had grown steadily and with no discernible plan since an order of monks had laid its first stones over a millennium earlier. After its monastery days, it had served as a hospital, an insane asylum, a hotel, and several institutes. Each new purpose had brought new additions. Nothing major, however, had been added since the Devastation, and the whole conglomerate had an aura of heavy, well-worn age.
Once Welly reached the boys' dormitory wing, he climbed the narrow back stairs to the second floor. Along his own hallway, most of the rooms were unused. Those that were used had only single occupants, following the school's independence-instilling policies. Welly, an only child, preferred this. Since most people apparently had little use for him, he had decided early not to show a need for other people. This ploy wasn't terribly effective, he realized. The others didn't care whether he needed them or not. Still, it made a defensive wall to fall back to when he was particularly snubbed.
His room greeted him with its familiar smell of cold mustiness. Gray early-evening light seeped through the windows. Through the glass one, he noted the length of his special icicle, seeing it had melted considerably during the day. Then, pulling out the drawer in the old wooden table, he checked his candles: two fresh ones and three stubs. That was all right, then. They were given only six candles per month, but since he often studied in the library, he usually had spares for needs like tonight.
Sticking a stub into the pottery candlestick, he placed his flint and steel in readiness beside it, then settled himself on the bed. In the growing darkness, he reviewed in his mind the translation he'd been reading of Caesar's campaign in Gaul. Of course, Gaul, or France, was as dead as Caesar, but the military strategies were ageless.
The room had sunk into darkness when he was startled back from Gaul by a rap at the window—one rap, a double rap, then another single. Having a code, he knew, was silly. But Heather liked melodrama. Certainly no one else would come scuttling like a spider over the roofs between the girls' and boys' wings.
Heather scrambled in along with a gust of cold air. While Welly fumbled with lighting the candle, she sat on the deep windowsill, swinging legs that, even padded in their wool-lined trousers, seemed thin and gangly. Then she hopped down, closed the window latch, and perched herself cross-legged on the table.
In the flickering candlelight, her thin face glowed with excitement. Ceremoniously she dusted off a spot on the table and plunked down the package she'd had tucked under her arm. With a flourish, she pulled aside the rag wrappings and revealed a small and very tattered paper book, obviously quite old.
“I found this in the library in the miscellaneous section,” she announced proudly. “And those snippy ‘social’ girls say they don't need me or my bookish ways! Ha! I guess I don't need them either!” She slipped off the table and pirouetted dizzyingly around the room, braids standing out like pinwheels.
“Wait till Mabel or Kathleen sees me sweeping into class bedecked with emeralds and rubies! Maybe I won't seem such a washout then!”
“Heather,” Welly said, feeling confused, “what exactly do you have there?”
“Treasure!” she declared, one hand held high like a torchbearer. “Treasure that you and I are going to find!”
Welly tried to sound cool and suave, but his “Oh, really?” came out rather high-pitched.
“Indeed!” She slapped a hand solidly on the old volume. “In these pages, we find the true tale of Veronica Hartwell, who, back in the dim past a couple hundred years before the Devastation, was subject to dire tribulation, and in her hour of deepest despair hid her treasures away, where no man has seen them since … I hope.”
“Where did she hide them?”
“Ah, that's the best part; it was right around here! It says so.” Heather picked up the crumbling book and flipped carefully through the pages as she continued. “She was a governess, see. Sent out to wild and lonely country in Glamorganshire.”
“There's a lot of wild and lonely country around here,” Welly objected. “There was then, too, I expect.”
“Yes, but this refers to a grand old estate, Ravenscroft, nestled in wild and windswept foothills northwest of Cardiff. And then it goes on to talk about the ancient battlements where Veronica ga
zed at the dismal sea.”
“You can't see the sea from around here.”
“Dummy, you could then. The Bristol Channel ran right up the Severn valley.”
“Yeah, that's right,” he muttered. “But that description still fits a lot of territory.”
“Naturally. But the best part is … we have a picture!” She shoved the book toward the candle, revealing a cracked and faded paper cover showing a lovely young lady with wind-tossed hair and disheveled gown running down a path from a gloomy castle-like building. A dark caped figure pursued her, and in the background was a glimpse of cliffs and distant sea. Above it all, in barely legible scarlet letters, were the words “Desire at Ravenscroft.”
“All we have to do now,” Heather said triumphantly, “is find a place that fits the description and the picture, and we'll have it.”
“Heather,” Welly ventured after a long examination of the cover, “are you sure this isn't a work of fiction?”
She gave him a long, withering look. “I'm not that gullible. I am eleven years old and exceptionally well read. Besides,” she continued as she thumbed through the old book, “I still don't believe what Master Gallowglass said about Holmes. I think he misread the historical evidence. Arthur Conan Doyle was clearly only a pen name for Dr. Watson. Anyone can tell those stories are factual accounts.”
With mixed emotion, Welly recalled Heather's enthusiasm of the previous year after she'd discovered the recorded investigations of a nineteenth-century detective named Sherlock Holmes. She had even involved him and a few of the younger children in a New Holmes Detective Agency to study the great man's methods and solve local mysteries. They'd had a splendidly exciting time until an investigation of the source of meat for the Sunday stew got them in a good deal of trouble, and Culture Master Gallowglass had disdainfully stated that the Holmes adventures were fictional stories written by an author who had also invented monsters and lost worlds.
“Anyway, this is different,” Heather resumed. “It's clearly an historical account—readably written, admittedly, but full of detail. What happens, you see, is that this young woman, beautiful, impetuous Veronica Hartwell, is from a poor but aristocratic family in Oxford. Her father, who was some sort of diplomat, dies in distant India, and she is left penniless. She's taken on as governess for the children of widower Drake Moorgrave, who lives in dark and sinister Ravenscroft Manor in Glamorganshire. Well, he has some mysterious secret in his past, though Veronica is strangely attracted to him. Then she receives a secret message from her supposedly dead father, leading her to a treasure stolen from him by Moorgrave. At last she has it in her room— lovely stuff, emeralds and rubies and a pair of jeweled daggers—when Moorgrave, who for days had been making impassioned advances, is heard approaching. She quickly hides the treasure, except for one dagger, behind a loose brick in the fireplace.”
Tomorrow's Magic Page 1