Magic, Madness, and Mischief

by Kelly McCullough

  Where the fires touched, water began to flow. Within a minute my hands were six inches into the ice and a circular hole maybe three feet across was forming around them. The base of the tower was thicker than I was tall, and I had to scramble along on my knees as I burned my way through. I spared a moment to worry about the fact that Dave hadn’t caught up with us yet, but I couldn’t wait for him.

  Achingly cold water quickly drenched me, running down my arms and along my sides as well as soaking through my pants and boots where I knelt in the stream. The fire in my heart fought the chill, but there was only so much it could do given the heavy flow, and my skin felt as though I’d been scraped with razors of ice.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, there was also the series of ominous creaks and pops sounding through the walls around me with increasing frequency as I pushed my way deeper and deeper into the ice. The construction team had feared putting doors in the tower, and here I was making a very crude one without any sort of special reinforcements.

  The more I thought about that, the more it scared me, but then my hands broke through the last thin sheet of ice and I tumbled forward into the tower. For a brief moment I could see nothing as Darkness filled the space around me, but I answered it with soul light, and the Darkness vanished as I scrambled back to my feet.

  The inner chamber was a square twenty feet per side with the ceiling a hundred feet above. In the corner nearest me a spiral staircase made of stone that looked as if it had grown there rather than been constructed led down into the earth. In the center of the back wall a stone dais held a pair of thrones, one of ice, the other of charred driftwood.

  On the ice throne sat Oscar, dressed all in white with the Corona Borealis on his brow. He smiled at me now, cold and cruel, his gaze mocking. But I barely noticed. I was too busy looking at the other throne and my mother. Her thick, smoky hair hung wild and tangled, laced with dry leaves and crackling twigs. A mad smile touched her lips while a nimbus of fire danced among the folds of her red velvet dress and along the arms of her blackened throne.

  She turned to look at me then, and there was no hint of warmth or recognition in her eyes, no welcome or relief. Nothing but the turbulent chaos of untamed fire and its endless appetite for destruction.

  Here was my mother as I saw her in my nightmares, devoured from within by the fire of a spirit beyond her power to control or contain.

  My heart shattered in my chest and I fell to my knees.

  20

  Burning the Candle at Both Ends

  LAUGHTER. COLD AS ICE, hard as granite, cruel as the winter sky. Oscar’s laughter.

  It rolled over me as I knelt on the floor of Winter’s throne room, broken in heart and sick in spirit.

  He stood and walked slowly toward me. “Did you think it would be so easy, Kalvan? That all you had to do to defeat the Crown of the North was put on a fancy red snowsuit and waltz in to face me? Foolish child.”

  “Now would be a really good time to get up and start fighting back,” Sparx said from his perch on my shoulder. “Because in about five minutes it’s going to be too late.”

  His voice was quiet but deadly urgent. I ignored him.

  Oscar was closer now. “Look at your mother, Kalvan. Meet her eyes. Understand what lies behind them. That’s what she is without me anchoring her broken soul. I don’t think you can beat me, boy. Not on your best day. Not even with the weight of all that ritual out there behind you.” He waved vaguely toward the front of the tower, where the crowd was cheering the Vulcans on to victory. “I don’t think you’re even going to try. Because the cost is one you haven’t the will to pay. Defeat the King, destroy his Queen.”

  Sparx slapped me lightly. “Kalvan, come on!”

  Oscar’s eyes flashed angrily. “Oh yes, the k*tsathsha. Cetius, deal with it!”

  The delver erupted out of the earth by Oscar’s feet. “With pleasure, Oz.” He reached for Sparx, but the hare leaped clear of my shoulder, landing some feet away and bursting into bright flame.

  The delver snarled and lunged after him, extending long stone-cutting claws in a slash the hare only barely avoided. I knew that I ought to help him, knew that I had to do something or lose any hope of victory, knew that I should care. But all I could do was look into the madness in my mother’s eyes and despair. I had come to fight Oscar and rescue my mother, but he had defeated me without even lifting a finger.

  It was over. I bent my head and waited for Oscar to do whatever he wanted with me.

  Kalvan. My mother’s voice, soft and quiet but steady and present. I looked up into her eyes, but there was no one home there.

  Kalvan. Sharper this time, more insistent. Not through my ears, though. Not in my head at all. In my heart. The voice of a memory or a dream. I believe in you.

  I blinked and thought back to the day my mother and I had spent looking for the suit I was wearing now, to the conversation we’d had that morning. Phrases came back to me.

  You have a true heart, Kalvan. There’s nothing in the world stronger than that. All you have to do is listen to your heart.

  I turned my gaze on Oscar, who stood above me now. What did my heart have to say about Oscar? What did it have to say about a man who would use my mother’s illness as a weapon against me? I felt the fire within burst back into full flower at the thought. There were no words there, but the message was clear. What Oscar was doing was wrong. It was wrong, and he had to be stopped. Right here, right now, and there was only one person who had any chance of doing that.

  That was another lesson I had learned at the Free School. How many times had I heard that the answer to “If not me, then who?” was almost always me. But at what cost? I didn’t look at my mother, but I knew what she would have said on the subject.

  Listen to your heart.

  “Oscar?” I looked up at my stepfather.

  “Yes, Kalvan?”

  I lurched to my feet and pressed my palms flat against his chest. “Go to hell!”

  Then I opened my heart. I wanted Oscar to hear exactly what the fires had to say to him.

  Ash and char, sun and star, wind and smoke, ash and oak.

  A river of flame poured out of my hands and engulfed my stepfather. If he had been a normal man he would have died then, but if he had been a normal man I never would have unleashed the fires on him.

  He was a hard man. Stone hard. A cold man. The Winter King. A man of enormous power. The fires roared over him and he staggered back, throwing up arms suddenly sheathed in stone to shield his face and chest. It saved his life, though his hair burned away in an instant and the fur of his robes flared and charred.

  I felt the ground twist and buck beneath my feet—Oscar’s element acting to protect its master. I should have been thrown to the ground then, but somehow I held my feet through all the tremors. Held them and kept pouring forth the fires of my heart until the entire central column of the great tower filled with flames.

  I could feel the space through the medium of fire, the hard cold walls towering above and around me. The knot of human stone that was Oscar, like a rock in the corner of the fireplace. Sparx, a distinct flame within the greater flames—hotter and brighter and filled with light. My mother, another twist of flame, part and yet apart—cooler, smoky and swirling and somehow infinitely sad. The deep, unclosed hole where Cetius had plunged into the earth in his rush to escape. Dave, kneeling in the opening I had cut, one hand across his face, unable to advance into the fires, but ready to help in any way he could.

  I felt Oscar’s will pushing back against my own. Hard. Cold. Powerful. Yet overmatched. In any other time and place, I could not have defeated him. Here, now, with the weight of the Carnival’s ritual battle between winter’s Boreas and summer’s Vulcans only a few thin spans of ice away? The power of the crowd and its belief in winter’s ultimate demise was fuel for the fire of my soul. I didn’t know if it would be enough, but I burned it all now, pressing down on Oscar with the full weight of my will and my heart.

 
With a sudden cry of rage and anguish, Oscar ripped the Crown from his head and threw it at my face. I don’t think any talisman less powerful could have passed through the fires I commanded then, but he had chosen his weapon well. The Crown struck me above the left eye, a sharp, burning blow that had blood sheeting down to blind me on that side in an instant. While I was distracted, Oscar turned and threw himself down the spiral stairs, burning as he went.

  In that same instant, as the fires fell, Dave leaped out and ran pell-mell for the throne and my mother. He caught her arm and pulled her toward the entrance. He might not have been able to fight someone like Oscar, but he understood why I was here. I reopened the gates of my heart and sent fire roaring down the stairs after Oscar while Dave dragged my mother back to the hole I’d made. I started after Oscar.

  Dave pushed my mother through the gap behind me. From the top of the stairs, I saw Oscar lying halfway down, a shield of stone held between us. It wasn’t enough; I would end this now.

  But then, before I could do anything more, he chanted, “Earth and stone, blood and bone, beat the drum, darkness come.”

  Then he closed his fist and the earth pulled him under. The steps collapsed in on themselves, closing the hole in the ground and blocking my path. Whether it was Oscar’s physical withdrawal, his release of the Crown, or something else entirely, his tower ended with his reign. In a single instant the thirteen thousand blocks of the ice palace melted and fell, taking me with them.

  Black water, colder than death and heavier than stone. It pressed on me from every side. I knew that I was drowning and that this time there was no one to save me. This time would be my end. I wanted to fight it, but I had nothing left. I surrendered to the waters and drowned.

  Not this time.

  What? That was not my mother’s voice speaking into my heart, though it sounded familiar. Again, I thought, What?

  Perhaps later, but not today.

  Not today, what?

  There was no immediate answer, but the pressure eased and I saw a bright spot approaching me like a thrown torch. Or, rather, I was approaching it. As became clear a moment later when the Mississippi spat me out through a hole in the ice. I rocketed upward, riding a geyser of dark water that set me on my feet on the railroad bridge as neatly as a child putting away a doll.

  For one brief instant I saw the Rusalka’s face in the tower of water. “Today, I owe you a favor. Tomorrow…” A laugh, and then She was gone and I was alone.

  Though not for long. I hadn’t gone ten paces before a streamer of fire dropped out of the sky to land beside me. Sparx gave me a very hard look as he shaped himself out of the flames. “Don’t EVER do that again.”

  “You got it.”

  “What?” He looked nonplussed.

  “I said, you got it. I will never, ever do that again. What did you think I said?”

  “I don’t know. I just expected you to argue with me.”

  “I really don’t like drowning, and not doing it again seems like a good idea,” I said. “So why would I do that?”

  Sparx looked at me crossly. “Because you’re very difficult, and trying, and hard on my heart. Getting washed away when the tower fell and leaving Dave and me to rescue your mother while you pretended to drown. It’s inconsiderate.”

  “I’m difficult?” I snorted.

  “That’s what I said, yes.” Sparx nodded.

  “Well, it must be true, then.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Silly rabbit.”

  “That’s silly hare.”

  “Fine, silly hare.”

  “Accursed Master.”

  “Where’s my mom?”

  “Dave got her clear before the tower went down. I’ll take you to them.”

  “She’s all right?”

  “As all right as ever, yes.”

  A horrible thought occurred to me. “What about the crowd?”

  “Cold and wet, but otherwise all right. As far as I can tell, you’re the only one who decided to go for a swim.”

  * * *

  “Kalvan?” Genevieve Munroe stuck her head out of her office as I dashed for the front door and the bus.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “I made you lunch.”

  “Thanks! Where is it?”

  “It was your favorite, a bacon, bacon, bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich. I made it around midnight.”

  “And?” Somehow I didn’t think this was going to end with me eating a sandwich.

  “I got to repotting the spider plants—always best done by moonlight.”

  I nodded. “You’ve said that before.”

  “Anyway, when I got done, I was hungry. So I ate your sandwich.”

  “That’s great, Mom. Why are you telling me all this?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “All right. Love you, Mom. Gotta go catch my bus now. Bye.” I gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

  “Kalvan?”

  “Yes?” I forced myself not to sound as aggravated as I felt.

  “I really do believe in you.”

  “I know, Mom. I know.”

  I turned away so she wouldn’t see the tears blurring my eyes and headed for the bus and school. Because that’s what you do when you’re thirteen.

  Oscar was gone and the Corona Borealis was tucked neatly away with my great-grandfather’s Vulcan uniform. No, that’s not quite right. The uniform was mine now, and the transformation it had undergone was a permanent one as far as I could tell. My mother was … well, my mother, and as all right as ever thanks to a little help from my friends.

  I had made common cause with the Mississippi and burned down the ice palace and found the fire in my heart. And none of that got me out of school. But that was okay, because it was a pretty darn amazing school, one where the principal was willing to let me get away with skipping classes from time to time as long as the school board didn’t hear about it, where my advisor let me park a magic rabbit in her office and the science teacher had started instructing me in magic, and where my best friend would be waiting to meet me when I got in.

  “Sparx, come on, we have a bus to catch!”

  There was a flash and a bang and I felt a sudden weight on my shoulder. “Your wish is my command, O Accursed Master.”

  Author’s Note

  The Free School of Saint Paul as depicted in this book is not the Saint Paul Open School. Though my time at the latter certainly informed my creation of the former, all the characters and situations in this volume are fictitious and creations of my imagination rather than reconstructions from memory. That said, my eleven years at the Open School are fundamental to my life and to my work as an artist, and I would be a very different person without them. I owe so much to the school, its teachers, founders, and my fellow students. Thank you all. The me that I am today wouldn’t be possible without you.

  It is also worth noting that the downtown Saint Paul of this book differs in some significant ways from Saint Paul as it is now. It’s been thirty-five years since I used to sneak off to play hooky downtown, and the version of the city I describe in this book is a mixture of Saint Paul as it was then, as it is today, and of pure fancy that serves the purpose of my story.

  On the subject of mental illness and its treatment within the book, there are things I can’t say without violating the privacy of people I love, but I will note that I occasionally take anxiety medications and also that I grew up in a house with people who had significant neurochemical issues, including paranoid schizophrenia and major depression. To this day, I have people I love who have mental health issues. I come at the subject very much from the inside.

  Acknowledgments

  Extra-special thanks are owed to Laura McCullough, Jack Byrne, Holly West, Jean Feiwel, and Sean Murphy.

  Many thanks also to: my web guru, Ben; my family: Carol, Paul and Jane, Lockwood and Darlene, Judy, Kat, Sean, and all the rest; my extended support structure: Matt, Mandy, Mike, Sandy, Kim, Jonny, Lynne, Michael, Steph, Tom, Ann
… and so many more. With big thanks to my “twin,” Bethany, for the accounting garble.

  Feiwel and Macmillan folks past and present who have been instrumental in making my books here the best they can be and helping me to succeed: Ilana Worrell, Bethany Reis, Kim Waymer, Liz Szabla, Rich Deas, Liz Dresner, Dave Barrett, Nicole Liebowitz Moulaison, Lauren Burniac, Anna Roberto, Christine Barcellona, Ashley Woodfolk, Morgan Dubin, Jeremy Ross, and Ksenia Winnicki.

  FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK OR VISIT US ONLINE AT FIERCEREADS.COM

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  About the Author

  Kelly McCullough is the author of the adult fantasy series Webmage and Assassin’s Blade. School for Sidekicks was his first novel for young readers. He lives in Wisconsin with his physics professor wife and a small herd of cats, all of whom he adores. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  1. Fire’s Child

  2. Burning Hare and Other Worries

  3. Hare, There, and Everywhere

  4. Elementally Yours

  5. Rabbit, Aim, Fire!

  6. Red Haring

  7. Muskrat, Packrat, Give the Hare a Bone

  8. Bad Hare Day

  9. Mischief’s Child

  10. Long Day’s Bunny into Night

  11. Smoke and Mirrors

  12. The Redcoats Are Coming

  13. Fire Fur and Foul Weather

  14. Drowning Season