Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  “And my seven,” replied Mari. She picked up a radish girl and speared it through the middle with the stick, to make the little vegetable figure look like it was sitting on the broom. Francesca followed suit, and within a few minutes they had the whole lot done and sitting back in the silver bowl, the brush ends in and the radish faces pointing out.

  “You take them,” said Mari. “I’ll get our wands and the keys.”

  They only had student wands, green wych elm that would not take on much power. But Mari and Francesca had worked hard to make them as puissant as possible, gradually adding rune after rune in the last three years, and impressing them with cantrips and lesser spells. Mari took out her foster father’s keys as well. There were only three of them, huge old iron keys on a bronze ring, but one or the other of them would open every door, gate, hatch, or cupboard in the college.

  “We should put on our academic gowns,” Francesca said. “It might be the last time we get to wear them. And our hats.”

  Mari paused to think about this, then slowly nodded.

  “Yes. You’re right. We will be on college business. I hope.”

  They put down their various objects and slipped on their black academic gowns over their clothes, topping them with the shorter, student version of a graduate witch’s two-foot-high pointy hat. The sizars’ hats were mostly cardboard and blacking, unlike the sleek velvet of the lady undergraduates’ headgear. But from a distance no one could tell.

  It was quiet outside as they carefully made their way around the tower. The air was still and cool, and the moon was rising, big and bright and full. Mari and Francesca tried to stay in the shadows, moving swiftly through the occasional pools of bright light from the gas lanterns that hung over the Old House door, the tower gate, the corners of the Foreshortened Court, and outside the library.

  It was darker around the back of the library, the light from the windows falling over their heads as they sneaked along the southern wall. The garden itself was darker still, lit only by the dappled moonlight filtering through the leaves of the guardian rowans, their branches thick with late spring leaves and bunches of berries.

  The moondial was in a small clearing in the center of the garden. It was a modest thing, merely a rectangular silver plate hung vertically on a thin stone plinth, so that the moonlight fell on its face and the stubby gnomon cast a moonshadow down to the correct hour, indicated by deeply etched numbers that were gilded with fine lines of gold. In addition to the hours, the plate was also etched with a table for calculating the correct time at phases of the moon other than full, and the college’s motto ran around the edges. It was in Brythonic, but written in Anglic letters, not Ogham, and was usually translated as “I make women of girls and witches of women.”

  “Stay here,” said Mari to Francesca as they huddled in the shadow by the trunk of one of the larger rowans. “I need to look at the moondial.”

  Francesca nodded. She was gazing up at the clear night sky, watching for signs of flying witches, and also keeping an eye on the tower clock. It was already twenty-five minutes to twelve.

  Mari crept forward, bending low. At the moondial she lay down on her side and pulled her legs up, spreading her gown across her body so that she might blend in with the ground as much as possible. Then she reached out and thrust her fingers into the turf close to the base of the moondial, pulling back the grass and then the dirt beneath, grubbing away until she’d made a hole some ten inches deep and as wide as her hand.

  That done, she crawled back to Francesca, who was still staring up at the sky.

  “What’s up?”

  Francesca pointed at the moon. A thin film of red was beginning to spread across its surface, flowing like spilled blood across a smooth tiled floor.

  “Potent banecraft,” whispered Mari. “Someone’s started a summoning already!”

  “Shouldn’t we make the radish girls lively now?” asked Francesca anxiously.

  “Five minutes,” said Mari, looking at the tower clock. It was already becoming indistinct, as a strange fog began to spread horizontally across the college, rather than rising from the ground—another indication of most serious banecraft at work. Chill air rolled in front of the fog, making the two young women shiver. “Too early and the radish girls will get picked off, and then Diadem and her cronies will be after us.”

  It was a long five minutes. The fog grew so thick that they couldn’t see the tower clock, and the air grew so cold that frost began to form on the grass and on the trunks of the rowans.

  A single chime, muffled by the fog, sounded high above them. It was the quarter hour before midnight.

  “Now!” whispered Mari. She held Francesca’s hand, and they both bent down to breathe over the radish girls before quickly stepping back. Brandishing their wands, they recited the spell that would make the vegetables and their brooms lively.

  The fog stirred as a breeze wafted through the garden. There was a sound like an ancient gate creaking open, and then instead of thirteen carved radishes speared by hazel-twig brooms, there were thirteen witches sitting astride proper broomsticks. Seven of them looked rather like Mari, and six rather like Francesca, though all of them had redder skin and greenish hair.

  “Fly to the Miriam Oakenwood Quadrangle, and there play hide-and-seek,” instructed Mari and Francesca together.

  The witches nodded, pointed their broomsticks, and rose into the air. Mari and Francesca didn’t wait to see them take off. They ran through the garden toward the New House, Mari fumbling with her keys for the one that would open the door. New House had no accommodation, as it was all tutorial rooms, so she hoped no one would be inside.

  She and Francesca were barely inside the door when they heard the first scream, immediately followed by a police whistle, both coming from the direction of the Miriam Oakenwood Quadrangle. It was answered almost immediately by more whistles, coming from other parts of the college, and the air above.

  “Bill!” exclaimed Francesca. She half turned to go back out the door, but Mari grabbed her sleeve.

  “No! The best way to help is to get that fragment!”

  Together they ran through the New House to the eastern door that led straight into Mo’wood Hall. Mari fumbled the keys there, uncertain which one was needed. As she tried each key, more screams could be heard, and more whistles, and then a horrible sound that was more a sensation, as if the air somewhere nearby had been sucked into a void.

  “Implosion,” said Francesca. “Hurry up, Mari!”

  Mari’s hands shook as she tried the third key. It turned easily. With a cry of relief, she swung the door open. Francesca ran ahead of her and raced straight for the stairs, her wand held ready. Mari wrestled the key out and followed as quickly as she could.

  First-year students were peering out nervously through partially opened doors on the top floor as Mari and Francesca ran past.

  “Evacuate!” shouted Mari. “Go to your assembly points! This one, Francesca!”

  Francesca had run past Englesham’s door. She skidded to a stop and turned back. Mari didn’t knock. She thrust in a key, turned it, and pushed the door open.

  Englesham must have been close up on the other side of the door, because now she was on her knees, awkwardly crouched on her very nice and expensive carpet, her hand going up toward a bleeding nose. Mari gripped her hard by the shoulders and looked around, ready for an attack.

  “Where’s the fragment?” she shouted.

  Englesham started to cry, tears streaming from her eyes to mingle with the blood from her nose.

  “Where is it?” Mari shouted again.

  Englesham pointed at the sleeve of her nightgown.

  Mari felt inside the elasticized wrist. Her fingers tingled as she felt the familiar magic of the fragment. She gripped it tightly and pulled it out.

  There was the sound of glass breaking and timber splintering in Englesham’s bedroom. Through the half-open door, Mari saw a shadow on the wall, the shadow of a witch throwing a shatter
ed broomstick on the floor.

  Francesca saw it, too, and dashed across to slam the door shut. She began to trace the frame with her wand to seal it closed, but even as she did so, the door itself began to froth and bubble like whisked milk, and a terrible stench of decayed flesh filled the room. One of the bubbles popped, making a hole three inches in diameter. Through it, Mari saw a pallid hand holding the bone wand.

  “Leave it!” screamed Mari. She let go of Englesham. “Everyone run!”

  The three of them were barely out of the room when the door exploded in a sickening gout of rancid matter, bits of it splattering into the hall beyond.

  Mari didn’t need to repeat her instruction. Englesham ran one direction and Francesca and Mari the other, back the way they’d come. Terrified undergraduates ran with them, and the two sizars had to fight their way through the crush to reach the connecting door to the New House, rather than out to the quadrangle.

  They ran through the New House without any thought for silence, heavy boots clattering on the polished wooden floors. There was still a great deal of screaming going on outside, though fewer whistles.

  “Almost there!” called Mari as they burst out the other side, down the steps, and into the Library Garden. “Get ready!”

  “Get ready for what?” asked a cold voice that came from a tall, impeccably dressed witch who was just stepping off her hovering broom a dozen paces in front of the moondial.

  It was the mistress of the college. Lady Aristhenia.

  “Something that must be done, ma’am,” answered Mari carefully as she slid to a halt, Francesca cannoning into her back.

  “Indeed?” asked Lady Aristhenia. “I will be the judge of that. Ah, Helena. You have been hasty, I see.”

  Mari looked behind her. Helena Diadem was coming down the steps of the New House, the bone wand in her hand.

  “Let me finish them, Aunt,” said Diadem. “Please!”

  Lady Aristhenia looked at her niece. It was not the look of a fond aunt, but rather that of someone who has found something displeasing in her morning porridge.

  “Where are the others?”

  Diadem gestured toward Mo’wood. “Distracting the constabulary and the proctors,” she said.

  “Who should not be here,” replied Aristhenia. “And would not be, save for your foolishness. I told you not to use the wand before I needed it.”

  “I am the heiress, Aunt,” replied Diadem stiffly. “The wand is mine to use.”

  “But you need me to tell you how to use it properly,” snapped Aristhenia.

  Mari slid one foot forward as the two bickered, hoping they were sufficiently distracted to not notice. Francesca slithered a little to the side, her own wand slipping out of her sleeve into her hand.

  “I know how to use it,” said Diadem. “It’s in my blood. You only married into the family—”

  “Don’t talk nonsense!” barked Aristhenia. “We haven’t got time. The summoning must be made complete. Give me the wand.”

  “When I’ve done these two,” said Diadem. She turned toward Francesca and raised the bone wand.

  In the fog above, the tower clock chimed the first of the twelve strokes of midnight.

  Mari screamed a word of power and threw the heavy bunch of keys at Diadem, at the same time diving toward the moondial, while Francesca flung herself behind a rowan.

  Diadem’s curse struck the tree. Its leaves all fell at once, like a truckload of mulch being dumped, and the bark on its trunk curled and withered. Any lesser tree would have crumbled into dust, but the rowans of the Library Garden were ancient and very strong.

  Even as the leaves fell, the bunch of keys hit Diadem on the face. One of them stuck there, the ensorcelled metal suddenly red-hot. The bane-witch screamed, dropped the wand, and tried to pull the burning key from her flesh.

  “Idiot!” said Aristhenia. In two quick strides she was at Diadem’s side. She snatched up the wand from the ground and gestured with it. The key flew off the younger witch’s face, leaving a ghastly brand on her cheek. Diadem fell to the ground, whimpering, little wisps of smoke rising from her ruined face.

  Mari reached the hole she’d made. She stuffed the parchment in it and was about to open her mouth to speak the incantation when she was caught in the grip of a geas even more powerful than the one Diadem had used on her before.

  “Judicious application of power is to be preferred,” said Aristhenia. She jerked the wand, and Mari found herself standing up as the tower clock struck for the third time. “The wand may prefer the traditional banecraft, with all its gore and foulness. I do not.”

  Mari couldn’t move anything except her eyes. She looked down at her wrist. Surely Alicia Wasp’s bracelet would do something now to protect her from this dread magic?

  Aristhenia saw her looking, and smiled.

  “It’s only a silver bracelet. Even if it was once owned by the fabled—”

  Whatever she was going to say was lost in the loud report of close gunshots, as Bill suddenly dropped down from the sky behind her, a flying cloak whipping around his shoulders, a service revolver in his hand. He fired three times, the first bullet silver, the second petrified wood, and the third lead reclaimed from the gutter of a house where wizards had lived for more than a hundred years.

  None of them had any effect. They went into and through Aristhenia, sure enough, and gaping wounds opened—but no blood came out. Instead a pale fire flickered behind the holes in her clothes.

  It was a very unwelcome sign that whatever was being summoned had already mostly arrived and taken up residence … inside the mistress of the college.

  But the bullets did have one small positive side effect. As the clock struck its ninth, or possibly tenth, chime, Mari turned her head to listen and found she could move again.

  Aristhenia turned around toward Bill and raised the dreadful wand.

  “Run!” screamed Francesca to Bill. She ran out from behind her tree and dived to the moondial, taking Mari’s outstretched hand. Bill’s cloak flapped as he leaped up into the air, as Aristhenia’s curse flew like an arrow, passing a finger’s-breadth beneath the silver hobnails on the soles of his size eleven police boots.

  Together, Mari and Francesca said the words. They were in Brythonic. In translation they said something like: “Rest you here, under the moon. If you wake it will be too soon.”

  The parchment sank into the earth and was gone. A fierce wind suddenly blew across the college, wrapping up the fog and rolling it away. The bloody haze on the face of the moon vanished, wiped clean by an unseen cosmic hand.

  “Interfering brats!” shrieked Aristhenia. She swiveled back toward Mari and Francesca, who were crouched by the moondial. In that second, all three of them were caught in the moment of the clock’s twelfth and final chime.

  The bone wand shivered in the mistress’s hand. She spat out a sound, but the word faltered in her mouth, and was never completed. Her fingers came unstrung, and the wand fell to the grass as the last echo of the chime faded into the night.

  The Original Bylaws were once again made naught, and the New Bylaws sprang back into force with renewed vigor.

  Lady Aristhenia looked down at herself and saw the blood gushing from the wounds in her chest and stomach. She took a step toward the moondial, crumpled forward, and fell facedown in front of the two trembling sizars.

  There was a flurry in the air above, and half a dozen proctors in flying cloaks plummeted down, silvered swords in hand. They were followed by a large, bearlike man in a red and gold dressing gown over blue striped pajamas that had the university coat of arms on the pocket. He was sitting in a well-upholstered armchair that landed with a heavy thump on the lawn, to be followed a moment later by Professor Aiken coming to a sliding stop on a broom.

  The Chancellor had a saucer and a cup of tea in one hand, with most of the tea slopped in the saucer, and he looked extremely irritated until he saw the body of Lady Aristhenia and the bone wand lying near her lifeless body.

>   “Hmmm. That old stick up to its tricks again,” he muttered. He got out of his chair, handed his teacup to the air, where it stayed, and took a handkerchief out of his dressing gown pocket. He laid this over the bone wand, drew his own, silver-inlaid ebony wand out of his sleeve, and tapped the handkerchief twice. When he picked up the handkerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket, the wand had vanished.

  “That’ll hold it till morning,” he said. He touched the body of Lady Aristhenia with the toe of his dun-colored, fleece-lined slipper and sniffed. “Whom did she invite in, then?”

  “One of the dwellers of the most far regions,” replied Professor Aiken, peering at the corpse through her half-moon glasses. “I suspect her niece will know which one. Fortunately it couldn’t manifest entirely, thanks to Miss Garridge and her friend restoring the New Bylaws.”

  “Mmm. Yes, well done, you two,” said the Chancellor, smiling and nodding at Mari and Francesca. “Grand tradition of Mistress Wasp and all that. Expect nothing less from an Ermine sizar.”

  “You’d better take over here as temporary mistress, Joan,” he said to Professor Aiken. He indicated Diadem, who was curled up in a ball, pallid with shock, and added to the nearest proctor, “Take her to the Infirmary, but keep her under guard. I expect the police will want to talk to her in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir, we will,” said Bill, from the top of one of the rowans. He was untangling himself from his flying cloak. Its trailing edge had been caught by the curse, and the whole garment was being eaten away by a rapidly spreading and highly unpleasant mold.

  “Bill!” exclaimed Francesca, letting go of Mari’s hand to run to him. He fell from the tree as she reached the trunk, and they embraced tightly before Bill remembered he was on duty and gently pushed her away.

  Mari smiled at them and pulled herself upright, using the moondial’s pillar as a support. Everyone seemed to have forgotten her. The Chancellor was talking to Professor Aiken; the proctors were picking up Diadem and clustering around in a guarding-the-scene-of-the-crime-long-after-it-was-necessary kind of way; Bill was taking out his notebook to write something while Francesca clung to his arm; several other policemen were dragging in Lannisa and Clairmore, both of them handcuffed; and large numbers of scared-looking undergraduates in a bewildering assortment of sleeping garments were filtering in from the New House and the Mo’wood quadrangle.