And that was it. I cracked. Very calmly and deliberately, I crumpled up my math worksheets and threw them out the window. Then I stuffed my books into my bag and stomped out of the library.
Aleta called after me—“Kalvin!”—but I ignored her and headed to the theater. I needed to get away from everybody and spend some time alone in my head. Well, as much as I could with a sarcastic talking bunny stuck to me with a thirty-foot invisible leash.
I didn’t go to the main doors, which ran along the middle of the second-floor hall, where anyone could see you. Instead, I went around to the stage door and knocked loudly—two slow knocks followed by three fast ones and then two more slow.
About a minute later the door opened and Josh Reiner poked his head out.
“Oh, it’s you.” He looked like he wanted to slam the door in my face, but the theater was neutral ground for arts students since most of us got involved in the plays in one way or another. He might hate my guts, but he wasn’t going to violate that truce.
So, Josh just let the door go and turned away. I caught it before it could shut and stepped through into the velvet darkness of the main stage where Morgan and Lisa—a couple of girls from Rob’s advisory group—were practicing a dance piece. On my left I could see a half-dozen students of various ages scattered around in the seats on the lower floor—mostly studying or reading. A couple of seniors were quietly rehearsing some sort of scene in the balcony above them. On the right, the door that led from the stage to the scene shop was propped open, and Josh was already vanishing through it.
The Free School had inherited the building from a now-defunct but once well-funded technical high school that focused on teaching practical skills to students who weren’t college bound. For reasons that never made much sense to me, the school had a huge theater/auditorium and scene shop—almost as big as the main stage and shop that Evelyn had taken us to visit at the University of Minnesota. It was my second-favorite place in the building to hang out after the gym, though mostly not as private.
Mostly. I went to the side of the stage facing the front windows and settled in with my back against the base of the low wall made by the raised thrust of the stage. On either side of me, louvered panels maybe two feet square let air flow in under the stage. After a few minutes of listening at the panel, I slid a finger through a gap where one of the slats had been broken away and unlatched the panel. It was hinged on the far side and opened like a door. It took me barely a second to slide through and close it behind me.
The space under the stage was about two feet tall at the front, and everything, including the concrete floor, was painted black, so the light from the louvers didn’t penetrate very far. Various old props and piles of folding chairs stacked around the perimeter made it hard to navigate without a flashlight, and kind of claustrophobic for most—not a problem for claustrophile me. Sometimes older students would slip in there to make out, but usually I had it to myself.
Today was one of those days, so I let Sparx loose as soon as I’d gotten back to the depth where things opened up to make room for actors who needed to enter or exit through the trapdoors. It got pretty close to four feet high at the back—enough to move smaller bits of scenery in and out as well, and that’s where I headed now. Bigger props were tucked against the back wall, including a ratty three-quarters-sized recliner that I liked to sit in.
As soon as I settled down, Sparx wandered off to poke around in the dark areas under the stage. Bliss! I was alone, really alone for the first time in more than a week. I pulled out a battered old science fiction novel and buried my nose in it. I only had a half hour or so, but for that long I was going to be able to pretend I didn’t exist and get my brain to stop chewing on itself.
But I’d barely been reading for ten minutes when Sparx hopped up onto the arm of my chair and touched my shoulder with a paw.
“What is it?”
“I want to show you something. Quietly.”
“Go away.” I went back to my book.
Sparx’s face appeared above the spine. “This is important.”
“Fine!” I dropped my book on my pack. “What is it?”
“This way.”
I followed him along the back wall to the corner where a three-foot steel mesh panel led into the ductwork. It had always been closed in the past, complete with a heavy padlock, but it was open now, the hasp burned through.
“Your work?” I asked.
He held up a shushing paw, but nodded. Then he touched the floor of the duct and made another shushing motion. The implication was clear, and I was careful about where I put my weight as I followed him into the duct. About ten feet back, another, narrower duct led upward. Sparx pointed to it and made a shushing noise again before he mimed standing up.
When I did so, I found myself looking through a floor-level grate in the wall of the scene shop. The pedestal of the table saw hid about a third of the room from my view, but I had a decent line of sight to where Josh was standing in front of an easel with a good-sized canvas on it. The easel was turned so that anyone coming through the door wouldn’t be able to see what Josh was painting.
I immediately wished I hadn’t seen it, either. It was a self-portrait. The Josh on the easel wore only a torn pair of blue jeans and a ragged tee as he leaned against a brick wall in the mouth of a rainy alleyway. Electric pain radiated from every inch of the painting. A deep-blue mark half closed his left eye. Blood stained the pavement beneath his bare feet. The image was rendered with a clarity and artistry I would never have expected from someone as downright nasty as Josh had always been to me.
I wanted to turn away. Initially it was because this was not a Josh I had ever wanted to see. I did not want to have sympathy for one of the few people at Free who I genuinely loathed, someone who had done his best to make my life miserable. But after the sympathy had washed through me, I found a second reason for wanting to turn away. I had no right to see this. Josh had not invited me to be a witness, and this was a violation of his privacy. But there is no unseeing what has been seen.
Sparx had somehow managed to climb up and perch on my shoulder while I was distracted. His nose touched my ear as he whispered, “Look over the shoulder of the boy in the painting.”
It wasn’t easy to turn my attention away from the portrait version of Josh to the background, but once I did, I had to suppress a gasp. Through the curtaining rain, a tall green tower rose from the river—the same one I had seen only a few weeks before when I faced the Rusalka’s castle. The Rusalka Herself stood on the pinnacle, Her hands reaching forward in an offer of comfort. Her face seemed barely more than a dot, but with a few tiny strokes of the brush Josh had somehow managed to convey compassion and welcome in Her expression. This was not the monster who had nearly drowned me, this was a queen of faerie offering sanctuary to a child who desperately needed it.
The nose touched my ear again. “Now, look down; on the floor beyond the easel is another painting.”
“It’s a badger in a bandolier,” I whispered back, my voice so low even I couldn’t hear me.
Somehow, Sparx understood me and shook his head. “No, it’s not. No more than I am a hare. Less perhaps, since I have chosen a shape that conforms almost entirely to the original. That is a delver. Look at its hands and the way it walks on two legs.”
Now that Sparx had pointed it out, I started to see the many ways in which the delver departed from the badger I’d first taken it for. To start with, it had thumbs and was ten times the size of any badger that ever lived. There was also the way it walked upright, though I suspected it could go at least as fast on all fours. It had a badger’s face and heavy claws perfect for digging, but a higher forehead, and there was the bandolier. Bandoliers, really, since they crossed its chest in an X.
Before I could speak again, Sparx touched a paw to my cheek and then pointed down. Apparently I had seen what he wanted to show me.
“Why haven’t I ever read about delvers before?” I asked once we had worked o
ur way back out of the vent. “I mean, I never heard of fire hares before I met you, but I’d at least read about rusalkas and selkies.”
Sparx laughed. “Well, you may have read about them, but what you’ve read and the ones you’ve met are only rudimentarily related. Unlike me, the delvers and selkies and Herself are all locally born. I came across from Europe in a ship’s lantern a few hundred years back, and while I call most of the locals by the names I grew up with, they have other names among the tribes who were here before the white man came. Herself’s older name is simply Mississippi.”
“Oh.” I was confused. “So, why did those muskrat women answer to selkie?”
“You’d have to ask them to know for sure, but I imagine it’s because we were speaking English and that’s the word for them in that tongue. Most elemental spirits aren’t all that fussed about what we’re called in any human language. You people change your speech so often it’s hardly worth the effort, and in our own tongues it’s impossible to mislabel us.”
I blinked several times. “So, there’s no equivalent to delver in English?”
“Not really, though dwarf gets close. There are delvers everywhere, and some of the more humanish sort look a bit like your dwarves, or trolls, or gnomes or what have you from legends, but the great bulk of them are more like our friend in the painting. More important than that, though, did you note the badge the delver wore on his chest?”
I thought back. “Some sort of crown?”
“Yes, the Corona Borealis. The delver that bitter-water boy painted serves the keeper of the Crown.”
“So?”
Sparx rolled his eyes. “We know the Crown is held by humans at the moment. We also know the Crown is supposed to shift masters with the seasons. Under normal circumstances no elemental creature would bother to badge themselves with an allegiance so brief and transient. We live too long for such ephemeral fripperies.”
“Okay. I’m still not getting why this is important.”
“Fool boy, it means that something has gone very wrong with the movement of the Crown and the alignment of powers here.”
“How bad is that?”
“It depends on what’s going on, but if the magical balance goes too far awry it could mean floods, tornadoes, plagues…”
“Really? How soon?”
“That’s hard to say. The Crown should never rest on any one brow more than once. It would only take a handful of years to badly skew things. I don’t think you’d get a major disaster in three years, but I doubt you could go ten without one. The seasons are meant to turn and change and the Crown with them, repeating the cycle but never duplicating one. If one individual has come to control the process, it would not take long for things to go very badly indeed.”
11
Smoke and Mirrors
IMAGINE A PIE in the face, one of those big heavy restaurant banana cream pies that’s just begging to be used to smack someone. It hits with a sound like a foot going deep into mud at the edge of a lake, kind of splooshy and mooshy and schlorpy all at once. Imagine the squish as your world goes white, and thick streamers of cream shoot past your ears to splash the walls and people behind you. Imagine.
I did. I let the weight of it knock me backward so that I stumbled and went down, rolling along my back and up over my shoulder to land on my chest and stomach.
In the darkness beyond the black box’s stage lights the room erupted in laughter. Pushing myself unsteadily to my feet, I scooped pie out of my eyes and blinked around wildly. That’s when Dave hit me with another pie. This time, when I went down, I stayed down, TKO’d by a pie. A few moments later, the bouncy music coming from Evelyn’s digital music player came to an end and Dave was there, offering me a hand.
“That was beautiful, man. I could almost see the pie!”
“Me too.” I mimed wiping more imaginary cream from my eyes, and we both laughed. “It helps to have done the real thing in the play last fall.” Dave and I had been the clowns in a Shakespeare-inspired piece, and I’d gotten hit with ten pies over the course of dress rehearsal and performances—all donated by a parent who owned a bakery. “There’s something really satisfying about a good pieing even when it’s imaginary.”
“Maybe especially then? I remember you complaining about getting that stuff in your sinuses for two weeks after the show.”
I snorted. “That was pretty miserable. Wish I’d known rule one of getting hit with food before that first pie.”
Dave grinned and recited, “Close your eyes and your mouth and breathe out through your nose.”
I nodded and we hopped down off the stage and took a seat on the floor while the next group of performers climbed up and got ready to improv. But now that I was offstage, I started to worry again, shifting around nervously instead of giving proper attention to the performers. That’s because today was it.
Oscar had gone to work at some construction site this morning for the first time in weeks, and I was finally caught up enough that I could afford to slip off for most of a day, and I planned to do just that after improv finished. It’s really hard to skip your first class when it’s with your advisor and you checked in with her right before breakfast. It’s especially hard when it’s your favorite class and acting with Evelyn basically saved your soul.
I’ll take anything she teaches that I can fit into my schedule, but I especially love group improv. I’ll do straight-up acting for plays too, but there’s something about the freedom of making it up as you go along that’s like no other feeling in the world. It’s this amazing mix of imagination and communication with the other players and the audience that can take you places you never would have found on your own.
One of the things I especially loved about it right then was the way it let me step outside of myself and my problems. For however long I was up there on the stage I didn’t have to worry about my stepfather or my mom or the magic that had become such a big part of my life.
When you’re doing it right, all that matters is the scene and how it affects the people watching it. Sometimes it’s big and emotional and scary. Sometimes it’s quiet and gentle and reassuring. But my favorites are the days where it’s silly and funny and full of laughs.
During the craziness after the bell rang, I leaned in close and whispered in Dave’s ear. “I decided today is the day we crack Oscar’s basement. I know you said you wanted to help.” That was important. I was pretty sure I couldn’t pull the lid up all by myself—a fact I’d realized when I slipped into the crawlspace to put the plywood sheets back the afternoon after Oscar nearly caught me. “Are you still in?”
“When are you leaving?”
“I was thinking in about ten minutes.”
“I’ve got a test next hour—can you wait till third period?”
I thought about it. “Yeah, that should still give us enough time. Meet me in the bushes on the far side of the gym.”
“Done.”
I was starting toward the door when Evelyn called my name. “Kalvan, come here for a moment.”
“Yes?” I said as I went over to her desk.
“You seemed awfully antsy out there after you got off the stage, and you’ve been distracted basically since the semester started. Is anything wrong at home?”
I paused for a long second while I tried to frame an answer that didn’t include my telling her that I thought my stepfather might be an evil wizard and that I might need to save my mom from him. I didn’t think that would end at all well, but she’d caught me off guard and I really didn’t have time to think of a good story. Stupid. I should have known Evelyn would notice any changes in her students. She might seem like she lived on a different planet some of the time, but like any good actress or director, she was a keen observer of people.
“Nothing’s all that different from usual,” I finally said, though I realized the silence had gone on too long already.
“Then you must have finally come into your magic,” she said.
“I, uh … wut?”
It was like getting a cream pie in the face all over again, but completely without warning.
“Then it is magic. I thought it might be. You’ve got the look to you, and so does your mother. Fire at a guess, though it’s hard to tell for those of us who don’t have any of our own.” She reached out and gently touched my chin. “Close your mouth before something flies into it, Kalvan. You don’t teach at someplace like Free in a world where magic runs beneath the surface without learning the signs. Honestly, I think it’s one of the reasons the school exists—to provide a safe place for the sidewise thinkers: the dreamers, the artists, and the magicians.”
“I really don’t know what to say to that.”
“Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me, though if you’ll take my advice, you’ll have a word with Tanya about the whole thing.”
“But she’s a science teacher!”
“Also a very good windwalker, or so I’ve been told. Head in the clouds, feet on the ground. She’s very sensible about the whole thing.”
“I … all right, maybe.”
“Good. I’m here for you, too, Kalvan. Come by my open hour anytime if you need to talk about it. I’ll do what I can, though I don’t have the practical experience Tanya does.”
* * *
“That’s really covered with spells?” Dave pointed at the bottom of the well.
Sparx nodded. “Some serious nasties. Hard to make them out in this light, though, even with the Sight.”
I finished attaching the nylon line to the ring bolt I’d added to the plank lid, then shinnied back up to join them. “Come and give me a hand with the end of this.”
I’d brought some oil down and glopped it all over the pulley, which cut down on the screeching, but even so, the planks made a frightful amount of noise as they dragged against the rough stone blocks. If anyone had been home we would have been sooooo busted. If we’d been doing it at any time other than the middle of the day, I’d have worried about the neighbors hearing. Fortunately, everyone who lived close to our house worked during the day. It was a good thing Dave had volunteered to help out, too; I’d never have gotten it open without him.
Magic, Madness, and Mischief Page 12