The Familiars

by Adam Jay Epstein

  Aldwyn’s belly was getting full, but he had worked up quite an appetite during his first official day as a familiar. After accidentally causing the rainstorm while gathering the conjuring ingredients, he had spent the rest of the morning assisting—well, watching—Skylar and Gilbert catch the slither of bookworms that had crept into the spell library. Skylar, nearly frantic, recounted how the last time the parasitic worms had invaded the book-filled study, they had eaten straight through The Collected Divining Spells of Parnabus McCallister, all twelve volumes. But she snapped out of it in time to start pecking at the bookworms, while Gilbert lit some warding candles that gave off plumes of smoke, forcing the worms’ retreat.

  The afternoon had been filled with wizarding chores as well: cauldron cleaning, wand polishing, and dusting the hourglasses. They spent some time collecting mud lizards for regeneration potions—potions that Aldwyn was told would cause a missing arm or finger to grow back within minutes. It turned out Aldwyn had a particular knack for catching these creatures made of living mud. He’d become quite comfortable digging through muck while living briefly in the sewers beneath Bridgetower, until the notorious crocodile infestation two years ago had made it too dangerous. He even got a compliment from Skylar for nabbing three mud lizards at once.

  Before the sun had set, Aldwyn watched the young wizards in training create water fairies out of thin air and cast a spell that allowed a bare everwillow tree to grow back its leaves. And right before dinner, Gilbert said this hadn’t even been a busy day.

  Aldwyn licked his bowl clean as embers popped and crackled right over his head. Dalton added some more kindling to the fire.

  “The evening breeze is strong for early fall,” he said. “If the strange weather occurrences of late keep up, my father’s barley crop will be a small one again next season. And I imagine Marianne and Jack’s uncle will fare no better.”

  “Well, word has spread that Queen Loranella is ill,” said Kalstaff. “Which would explain why her weather-binding spells have been unable to hold back the hail and mountain winds. And why there have been reports of gundabeasts breaking through her majesty’s enchanted fences and roaming Vastia.”

  Marianne glanced up from her stew.

  “I thought I saw something creeping outside our bedroom window last night,” she said with a devilish grin.

  “Stop teasing,” said Jack, clearly alarmed.

  “And it looked hungry.”

  “Now, now, Marianne,” said Kalstaff. The old wizard waited until her giggling subsided before continuing. “Border monsters like the gundabeasts are very serious business. The longer the queen is in a weakened state, the greater these threats to Vastia will become.”

  “But you could defeat them, couldn’t you, Kalstaff,” said Jack, more as a statement of fact than a question.

  “Nothing to be concerned about, Jack,” said Kalstaff. “Not yet at least.”

  Aldwyn had never realized how important the queen’s magic was for keeping Vastia safe.

  “May we be excused?” asked Dalton. “I have some component charts to memorize before bed.”

  “Not just yet,” said Kalstaff, as he turned to his youngest pupil. “First, it is time for Jack’s Familiar Rite.”

  Jack jumped up excitedly, hurrying over to Aldwyn. He picked him up and brought him before Kalstaff, who was seated on a mossy rock.

  “Set him beside you and take his paw in your hand,” instructed Kalstaff.

  Jack sat cross-legged on the ground, scooping up Aldwyn’s furry paw in his palm. There it was again: the warm, comforting sensation of belonging. It was the very same thing Aldwyn had felt in the familiar store when Jack first tickled his chin. Kalstaff began to draw circles in the air with his rod. Aldwyn glanced over at Gilbert, confused by what was happening.

  “Uh, what’s going on?” asked Aldwyn.

  “Shhh,” whispered Skylar. “You’ll disturb Kalstaff’s incantation.”

  Kalstaff continued with the ritual, throwing a spray of copper dust into the fire, turning the flames green.

  “Vocarum animale,” intoned Kalstaff. “Assendix scientento felininum!”

  In a flash, the fire jumped into the sky and then just as quickly got sucked back into the logs, disappearing as if it had never been there in the first place. Jack and Aldwyn looked around, waiting for more to happen.

  “That’s it?” asked Jack.

  “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?” asked Aldwyn.

  Jack’s head shot over to Aldwyn.

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said will somebody please—Hang on, are you talking to me?” answered Aldwyn.

  “Holy dragon eggs!” exclaimed Jack. “I can understand you. Say something else.”

  “Um, okay: I…like…fish!”

  “Wow! It worked. Now I suppose you can tell me your name.”

  “I’m Aldwyn.”

  “Nice to meet you, Aldwyn. I’m Jack,” he said before turning to the others. “His name is Aldwyn! He just told me.”

  “That is amazing,” teased Marianne. “What else did he confide in you? That he likes chasing balls of yarn?”

  “You forget how excited you were when Gilbert first spoke to you,” Kalstaff admonished her. “You nearly fainted.”

  “It’s true,” recalled Dalton. “Kalstaff had to carry you over to the runlet and splash water on your face.”

  Marianne blushed, and Jack let out a laugh.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” said Gilbert to Aldwyn. “Kalstaff waves his wand a couple of times, and next thing you know, your loyal gains the ability to understand what you’re saying.”

  “It’s a lingual divination spell,” explained Skylar. “It only works between you and your loyal. It allows human spellcasters like Dalton or Jack or Marianne to commune with their familiars, even though they can’t speak animal tongue the way elder wizards like Kalstaff are able to.”

  “I understand it’s some of Ebekenezer’s best work,” said Aldwyn, taking the small tidbit of knowledge he had overheard in the familiar store and claiming it as his own.

  Skylar nearly sprained her neck, so severe was her double take.

  “Horteus Ebekenezer,” clarified Aldwyn, “the great forest communer.”

  “I didn’t realize your studies were so advanced,” said Skylar.

  “Well,” replied Aldwyn, “I may not know so much about juniper berries, but I do know my communers.”

  Kalstaff got up from the lichen-covered rock he was sitting on.

  “Jack, this is the beginning of a long journey that you and Aldwyn will be taking together,” he said. “No wizard can accomplish true greatness without a devoted familiar at his or her side. I know I couldn’t have if it hadn’t been for Zabulon, may the gods rest his spirit.”

  Jack nodded, then looked at his new feline companion. Aldwyn glanced back up, saw the pride in the young boy’s eyes, and, to his surprise, felt a little proud himself.

  “All right, time for bed,” said Kalstaff to his three apprentices. “We leave for our walkabout at sunrise.”

  Everyone helped rinse the pots and pans and douse the fire. Jack, the last to finish his chores, scooped up Aldwyn and headed for the cottage. They went straight to Jack’s bedroom, which the boy shared with his sister and Gilbert. After a quick survey, Aldwyn decided the room was a bit confined for his taste. There were two straw cots placed side by side, while a small trunk rested against the wall, stuffed with all of Jack and Marianne’s clothes. On a nearby nightstand, a pear-shaped globe was slowly spinning on a needle, showing the lands of Vastia and beyond.

  Gilbert fell asleep on a pillow at the foot of Marianne’s bed and within two minutes was snoring loud enough to wake a hibernating cave troll. Jack folded up a blanket on the floor for Aldwyn to sleep on, then, after saying good night, lay down in bed himself.

  Hardly a moment had passed before Jack whispered in the dark, “Aldwyn, are you awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I
ask you something? Do you ever get seasick?”

  “You mean like on a boat?”

  “A boat or a sailing skiff or on the back of a traveling whale.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been on any of those things. Why?”

  “I was just thinking, after my wizard training is complete, we’ll be going on a lot of adventures together. And I’d hate for you to get all green in the face every time we take to the waters.”

  “Shhhhhh!” said Marianne from her neighboring cot.

  “Sorry,” replied Jack before continuing in a whisper. “My mom and dad were Beyonders, you know. When I was a baby, they were sent on a secret mission to retrieve stolen treasure taken by the queen’s jewel keeper and his wife, who had raided the palace vault they’d sworn to protect. My parents were lost at sea, but I’m going to find them one day.”

  “You never knew them?” asked Aldwyn.

  “No. Marianne did. Just a little, though.”

  “I didn’t know my parents, either. At least you have your sister. I never had any family.”

  “Well, you do now,” said Jack.

  Jack’s hand reached down and stroked Aldwyn’s back. Aldwyn immediately cozied up to his touch. He never would have expected to feel such a strong kinship with a boy who’d been a total stranger a mere two sunrises ago.

  “Good night, Aldwyn.”

  “Night, Jack.”

  Moments later, Jack’s breathing became heavy. The boy had fallen into a peaceful slumber.

  Aldwyn tried to get comfortable, but unlike the first night, when he’d been too exhausted to care where he slept, tonight he simply couldn’t fall asleep with a roof over his head. He decided he needed a breath of fresh air and tip-toed to the hallway. As he passed Dalton’s neighboring room, he could see through the crack in the door that the boy was still awake, studying a scroll by candlelight.

  Entering the living room, he spotted a window that had been left open and quickly made his way toward it, passing the hammocks strung up in front of the fireplace. The room was much darker now, since the lightning bugs had gone to sleep in their hive. Hopping up onto a large oak table, Aldwyn paused to look at a framed painting of what appeared to be Kalstaff in his younger years, accompanied by another man wearing a robe just like Kalstaff’s and a beautiful, imperial-looking woman in a long white dress. He recognized her as a younger Queen Loranella—there was a statue of her in front of Bridgetower’s courthouse that Aldwyn used to sleep beneath on hot summer afternoons. The wizards were joined by what had to be their familiars: Kalstaff’s bloodhound, the wizard’s turtle, and the queen’s gray rabbit. Aldwyn continued along the table, past an enchanted quill pen that was busily copying Kalstaff’s lesson plans for the next day, before bounding out the window.

  He immediately looked for the easiest path to the roof and spotted an orange tree whose branches brushed up against the clay shingles atop the cottage. As Aldwyn walked swiftly across the yard, he noticed that one of the spell library’s windows was open. He didn’t think much of it until he saw Skylar exit with a small leather-bound book gripped in her talons. He ducked out of sight as Skylar pushed the sill shut with her beak before flapping off into the woods. Aldwyn found her actions curious and decided to follow her.

  He stepped quietly through the dense underbrush at the edge of the woods until he arrived at a clearing. Fallen leaves of orange and green carpeted the ground, and at the center, Skylar was perched upon a tree stump, the borrowed—or was it stolen?—book open before her. Aldwyn hid in the darkness, peering through a narrow gap between two massive oaks. Skylar flipped the pages of the book with her wing, looking purposefully for a passage of interest. Then she seemed to have found it. Aldwyn watched with growing curiosity as she plucked the carcass of a large beetle from her satchel and placed it beside her on the stump. Her eyes sped across the page of the book, and then her clawed foot dove back into the satchel, removing a talonful of silver powder. She sprinkled some down onto the beetle carcass and read aloud from the tome.

  “Mortis animatum!”

  Aldwyn felt a chill tickle his ear, almost as if the air were whispering to him. Then, on the tree stump, the beetle’s legs began to twitch. Aldwyn was quite certain the beetle had been dead just moments ago, so how could it be moving now? Skylar looked like she expected something more to happen. When it didn’t, she buried her beak back into the spell book, and as she read, a gust of wind blew some of the leaves up off the ground, exposing what lay beneath them: a scattering of elk bones, left behind by forest-dwelling wolves. The same breeze sent the excess powder from the stump sprinkling down onto the gnawed skeletal remains. Skylar, still searching the text, failed to notice the bones of the great elk starting to reassemble themselves behind her. Aldwyn watched aghast and fascinated as the jigsaw puzzle of hooves and antlers pieced itself together, one cracked bone at a time. What kind of dark magic was Skylar dabbling in? Finally, she looked up, just in time to see the skeletal elk reborn. She seemed terrified and at the same time thrilled by what she had accidentally brought to life. Then the creature charged. Skylar instantly took to the air, as the reborn elk galloped blindly forward.

  It was only then that Aldwyn realized that the creature was heading straight toward him. He braced himself as the skeleton collided with the trunk of the tree behind which he was hiding. When it hit, its bones shattered; rib cage, vertebrae, and antlers split apart once more, dropping back down to the ground in a lifeless heap. Skylar, rather unbothered by it all, returned to the book and her beetle, but Aldwyn had no intention of sticking around to see what spell she would cast next. He high-tailed it out of there before he was spotted, thankful to still have his limbs intact.

  Aldwyn ran for the cottage without looking back and took to the orange tree he had spotted earlier, effortlessly climbing up the bark and across the branch to the safety of the rooftop. Heart still beating rapidly, he sat himself down next to the weather vane, took a deep breath, and peered out over the Aridifian Plains. Far, far away in the distance, he thought he could make out the light at the top of Bridgetower’s spired watchtower. As he stared at it, Aldwyn thought of what this night would have been like back home: sleeping with one eye open, his paw clutching the scraps of food he had scrounged that day, guarding them against other alley strays who would attack him for even the smallest morsel of fish. It had been the only life he’d ever known, orphaned as a kitten, with no memories of his mother or father or what kind of alley cats they must have been. But here in Stone Runlet he would walk a very different path, one that was dangerous and unpredictable but also filled with a sense of purpose, of something larger than himself.

  Aldwyn’s eyes began to close. Both of them. So here he would stay. He would learn to be Jack’s familiar, magic skills or no magic skills. Familiar. How strange that word sounded in his head, when in fact there was nothing familiar about this world to him at all.

  5

  WALKABOUT

  “Aldwyn?!” cried Jack. “Aldwyn, where are you?”

  Aldwyn stretched his paws as far as he could, still half asleep on the roof of the cottage.

  “Aldwyn?!” called Jack again, his voice growing more concerned.

  Aldwyn’s eyes opened wide, and he quickly got his bearings. Giant puffy clouds were racing across the sky, swallowing up the sun for a moment, but burning off just as quickly as they had come. The autumn scent of falling leaves floated in the air, an unaccustomed smell to a cat who had spent his life in the city. He peered over the edge of the roof and saw Jack searching the yard frantically, barefoot and still dressed in his cotton sleeping shirt.

  “I’m up here,” said Aldwyn.

  When Jack saw his familiar, his face flooded with relief.

  “What are you doing up there?” he asked. “I thought you’d run away.”

  “Sorry. I’m just used to sleeping under the stars.”

  “Well, come on. We have to get ready for our walkabout.”

  Aldwyn scurried across the roof to the
tree branch and back down to the ground, walking up alongside Jack and rubbing his head against the boy’s ankles.

  “I better get changed,” said Jack, bending down to scratch Aldwyn’s ear. The alley cat’s tail curled happily. “You should head over to the runlet and drink some water. It’s going to be a long day.”

  “I’m not that thirsty,” replied Aldwyn, wanting to avoid another run-in with the swimming eyeballs.

  Jack ran back into the cottage and almost collided with Dalton and Skylar as they were stepping out into the sunshine.

  “Be sure to check your boots before you put them on,” Dalton warned Jack. “I saw your sister carrying a handful of marsh berries.”

  “Hey, why do you have to ruin all my fun?” Marianne asked Dalton as she and Gilbert came outside right behind him. She gave Dalton a playful push, the kind fourteen-year-old girls give fourteen-year-old boys they like.

  It wasn’t long before Kalstaff emerged from the cottage dressed in his wilderness cloak with his rod floating by his side. Jack followed behind, now wearing a tunic with leather laces up the front.

  “Today we shall walk to the edge of the Borderlands,” announced Kalstaff. “Remember to bring your botanical field guides and quills. You will be taking notes.” Jack sighed, disappointed.

  “Oh, and I almost forgot,” continued the elder wizard. “Have any of you seen Wyvern and Skull’s Tome of the Occult? It seems to have gone missing from the spell library last night.” Aldwyn immediately knew the culprit and stole a glance at Skylar. She nervously shifted from one foot to the other, but nobody else seemed to notice. “I don’t want to discourage private study, of course,” said Kalstaff, “but let me warn you: this is a very dangerous book about necromancy, one whose spells of the dead can be corrupting in inexperienced hands.”