“Wait!” said Oscar, grabbing her hand as it moved toward the hole in the talisman. “I just thought of something. What if your father isn’t in the courtyard? Suppose he’s flying about somewhere in the clouds.”
“She’ll fall to her death,” said the King, who had been listening with interest.
“I know he’s in the courtyard,” said Lucy. She didn’t know, but saying she did made her feel brave. She pushed her finger through the hole and said, “Take me to my father!”
Nothing happened. “It doesn’t work,” said Lucy.
Oscar gave a sigh. “I suppose it was a long shot.”
“Now just a minute,” said the King. “I know a few things about magic, and that object looks magical enough to me. How did you say it worked, sir?” he asked Oscar.
“You put your finger through the hole and say where you want to go.”
“Well, that isn’t exactly what the Lady Lucy did. Or, more precisely, that isn’t exactly what the Lady Lucy said.”
Oscar and Lucy looked at each other. “I told it to take me to my father,” said Lucy.
“But that’s not a place,” said Oscar, and from the look he gave her, Lucy knew he was thinking the exact same thing she was. “Go ahead!” he said, nodding.
Lucy put her finger through the hole again. “Take me to the place where my father is!” she said.
Instantly, it was as if a strong hand had jerked her arm and pulled her headfirst through the traveling talisman. It was like diving into water — all around her the air fizzed. She was upside down. She was falling. Just before she slammed into the ground she thought of cereal being shaken out of a box.
She landed on her left side. Something under her knees was thrashing about, trying to extricate itself from her legs. She rolled to one side. “There he goes!” she heard Oscar shout.
“Watch him!” she shrieked as she leaped to her feet.
But none of the others were fast enough. By the time they reached Lucy’s side, no one was sure which raven was her father.
“Try again,” said Oscar. “Only this time don’t let him get away.
So she tried again. “Take me to where my father is,” she said, and this time the traveling talisman tossed her onto her back. She could feel a raven caught under her shoulder. Its body twisted under her weight. “Get the potion!” she gasped.
Oscar was feeling in his pockets. “I haven’t got it.” He turned to the Queen. “I think I gave it to you, Your Majesty.”
“But I don’t have it,” said the Queen, surprised.
“Hurry!” said Lucy. Either she was going to crush her father to death, or somehow he would twist just far enough to bite her or tear at her with his talons.
“I gave it to you, and you used it to change Lucy back into herself,” said Oscar.
“But I haven’t got it now,” said the Queen.
“Maybe you set it down somewhere.”
“I suppose I must have.”
“Oh!” cried Lucy, rolling away. “I can’t lie here anymore. He’s going to rip a piece out of my back!” The raven was struggling to stand up. Its wing was dragging on the ground. “Where is the potion?” said Lucy.
“Look out!” Oscar shouted.
Lucy’s head turned in time to see a streak of black racing toward them across the grass. It was a cat.
“It’s Tom!” cried Oscar.
“No!” Lucy screamed as the cat leaped at her father. Then Oscar pushed her aside and dove forward, grabbing Tom by the hindquarters. He dragged Tom backward, and Tom turned belly up, clawing with his back feet. Oscar let go with a bellow.
“Bertram! Do something!” shrieked the Queen.
Now Tom was tearing into Lucy’s father. Though her father was fighting back, he was clearly losing the battle. “Stop it! Stop it!” Lucy screamed.
“Tom!” shouted the King. “I command you to stop!”
But Tom didn’t stop. He had Lucy’s father pinned to the ground. His teeth were sinking into the raven’s neck. “Stop! Stop!” Lucy sobbed.
She didn’t see the King raise his staff in the air. She barely heard him as he shouted what must have been intended to be the most expeditious spell possible:
“Evil cat — never more!
Go back to what you were before!”
And Tom, the cat, became Tom, the boy — a catlike boy who crouched on all fours. He let the raven’s limp body drop to the ground. “I had to do it, Your Majesty,” he said. “I couldn’t let him punish you.”
“He’s not quite dead,” said the Queen, leaning over the limp black thing that was Lucy’s father.
“He’s alive, Lucy!” said Oscar.
The answer to the question that Lucy had been too scared to ask didn’t relieve her fear. It only numbed it a bit, like Novocain at the dentist’s office.
Tom had drunk the last of the potion. That was how he had changed himself into a cat. He was admitting all this to the King, who was interrogating him and threatening him with a stick. Tom had been certain that Lucy’s father would punish the King. That was what sorcerers did. They punished other sorcerers for something called abuse of power by stripping them of their magical abilities, by taking away their familiars. “I was only tryin’ to protect you, Your Majesty!” Tom whimpered.
“Liar!” the King roared. “If I had my powers, I’d change you into the rat you are and throw you to the cats!”
Now the King was banishing Tom again. Perhaps this time it would work, Lucy thought as she watched Tom leave the courtyard.
It’s just a story, she reminded herself. A story with characters who could surprise you, who could catch you off-guard. Anything could happen in a story. You could lose everything, she thought, looking at Oscar. A king could steal your life, your family. A cat could kill your father.
The King laid his hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “There is still hope, my dear,” he said, his voice gentle. “If your father wakes — he may be able to change himself back to human form. His injuries will vanish in the course of the transformation.”
But the Queen was shaking her head. “He won’t wake. He’s too badly hurt. And I’m afraid there isn’t much time.”
Lucy couldn’t help herself. She began to cry.
“Don’t, Lucy. Please don’t,” said Oscar. “Your father will be all right.”
“He’s dying!”
“He’s not going to die. What kind of a story would that be? It wouldn’t make any sense!”
“Bad things happen all the time in stories,” argued Lucy, her voice thick with tears. “People die — like Snow White’s mother, and Cinderella’s mother, and her father.”
“Bad things do happen in stories. But the stories have to end right. It isn’t right for your father to die.”
“But your parents are dead!” Lucy cried, careless of how she made Oscar feel. “You’ll never see them again, all because of a few sentences you wrote. That isn’t right either. If it can happen to you, why can’t it happen to me?”
If her words hurt him, Oscar didn’t show it. “It won’t happen because we won’t let it happen,” he said. “There’s got to be something we can do.”
“Like what?”
“Well — maybe we can get more potion.” Oscar looked at the King, but the King shook his head.
“I don’t see how,” he said.
“Aren’t there any other magicians around?” said Oscar.
The King shook his head.
“Did your father have any more of that potion, dear?” asked the Queen, putting her arm around Lucy’s shoulders.
“I don’t think so — just that bottle,” said Lucy. She thought of tidying the attic with her mother, arranging papers on the worktable, sweeping broken glass from the floor. She hadn’t seen any other potion then. She thought of her father, showing her how the potion worked. Even then she hadn’t seen anything but that one little blue bottle. And Walter — Oscar — had come bounding across the table and knocked it to the floor. She remembered pushing spilled
potion back into the bottle, watching the potion drip between the floorboards. “Oh!” she cried. “I know! I know where to find more potion!”
“Where?” said Oscar.
But Lucy was already pulling the traveling talisman from her neck. “There isn’t time to explain. Watch over my father. I’ll be back in a minute.” She put her finger through the pentagon-shaped hole and said, “Take me to the attic of The Brick.”
This time the sensation of falling lasted longer and the fizziness seemed to penetrate her skin and bones. Lucy had barely enough time to wonder whether it was because she was traveling farther — between worlds — before she crashed like a meteorite onto the attic worktable. Papers and paraphernalia — some of it scientific, some of it magical, and much of it glass — went flying. Lucy rolled over and fell off the table.
She lay on the floor, watching the streaks of dusty sunlight from the window, listening to her own breathing, and wondering whether she had broken any bones. Her ear hurt; when she touched it, her hand came away sticky with blood.
No time to worry about that now. She must find the potion. She stood up and stepped carefully across the floor, her feet crunching on glass. When she thought she was in the right place, she crouched down. Her eyes traveled methodically across the floor, moving from crack to crack. She couldn’t see anything between the wide floorboards. What if the potion had soaked into the wood? What if it had evaporated?
Then her eyes moved on and she saw a sparkle of blue. “There!” she said out loud. Only a drop, but a drop of potion was all she needed. That and something to put it in. Her hand picked up an unbroken test tube. She looked about for something she could use to coax the potion out of the crack. There was a pencil on the table — too large. She grabbed a pair of scissors, using one of the blades to reach into the crack. “Almost got it,” she murmured. But the potion wouldn’t stick to the scissors. She used them to pry up a long, slender splinter of wood from the floor. She bent the wood so that she could push it under the liquid.
“Careful,” she whispered. The potion quivered like a drop of dew on a twig. “There!” she said as she dropped the splinter into the test tube.
And then she heard her mother. “Hello?” Her mother’s voice sounded timid, frightened. “Who’s there?”
Frantically, Lucy looked around for something — anything — with which to stopper the test tube. Her eyes swept across the worktable. She saw her father’s mouse — his familiar, curled up in the sawdust at the bottom of its cage. Then she saw a neat stack of papers; she grabbed the top sheet and ripped off a piece. She crumpled it and stuffed it into the top of the test tube.
“Lucy?”
Too late! She whirled around to see her mother peering at her from the trapdoor entrance to the attic. Her mother’s face looked mistrustful, as if she thought Lucy was a shadow or a trick of light.
“Mom . . .”
“Lucy!” Her mother was all the way up the stairs now. “Lucy! Is it really you?”
“Mom!”
Lucy almost fell over as her mother grabbed her and hugged her. “It’s you! It’s really you! Oh, I’ve been so worried!” her mother cried.
“Mom, please —”
“You’re bleeding!”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
“I thought you were dead!” Tears were streaming down her mother’s face. “Where have you been? We’ve been so worried — oh! I’ve got to call Helen and Byron. And Ray Jensen — he’s had the state police looking for you. Where have you been all these weeks?”
Weeks! Lucy wasn’t sure just how long she had been a bird, but she felt certain it hadn’t been weeks. Her mother entrapped her in another hug, and Lucy struggled to free herself. “Mom — it’s about Dad —”
“Your father! Have you seen him?” Her mother leaned back to look at her. “Where is he?”
“Mom, I’ve got to go to him!” said Lucy, pulling away.
“Lucy — what’s wrong? Where have you been all this time? Where is your father?”
Maybe dead by now, thought Lucy. “I’ll explain everything as soon as I can,” she said. “But there isn’t time now. You just have to trust me. I’ll be back.”
“What do you mean?”
That was the last thing Lucy heard her mother say, because she had already put her finger through the hole in the talisman once again. “Take me to the place where my father is,” she said.
The very next thing she said was “I’ve got it!” and then “Oh, no!” because she had landed on top of her father again.
“Quick, Lucy,” said Oscar, helping her up and taking the test tube.
“Is he — is he still . . .”
“He’s still alive, dear.” The Queen’s hands were cradling the raven’s head. Its wing was twisted at an odd angle.
“I was stupid,” said Lucy, her vision blurring as tears filled her eyes. “I told the traveling talisman to take me to where my father was. I crushed him.”
Oscar was already digging the crumpled paper out of the test tube. “He’ll be fine, Lucy.”
“I tried to hurry. But my mother saw me.”
“You weren’t even gone a minute,” said Oscar.
So time did run differently in the two worlds, thought Lucy. Then Oscar handed her the test tube and she drew out the wooden splinter. The drop of potion was still clinging to it.
For a second she worried. What if the lifeless bird lying on the ground wasn’t her father after all? She touched the potion to the bird’s wing. “I hope —” she started to say, and then she was knocked aside because what had been air was now filled up by her father, ever so much larger than the raven he had been, alive and whole and unbroken, blinking up at her and saying, “What the heck?” And the ending that had seemed so wrong only a short time before became the right ending after all.
Oscar was having a hard time grasping the fact that something good had happened at last.
He was sitting on one side of a long table in the palace’s enormous banquet hall. Lucy and her father were sitting on the other side of the table; Tom’s captains sat at a table across the room. King Bertram and Queen Leona were sitting at their own royal table on a dais at the end of the hall. Everyone was eating scrambled eggs; that was all there was to eat, according to the Queen, who had invited everyone to a feast in celebration of their finding Lucy’s father.
Lucy was telling her father about their adventures — about writing in The Book of Story Beginnings, about coming to Cat’n’berd Island, about getting thrown off Captain Mack’s ship, and then about the King and the terrible scene at the well. “Oscar turned me into a pigeon, Dad,” she said.
An echo of the panic Oscar had felt came back to him — his fear of the King, watching Lucy fly away, then realizing his horrible mistake. “I didn’t mean to,” he said. But Lucy’s father was smiling, enjoying the story.
Now Lucy was describing how Captain Mack had captured her. “She brought me to the palace and sold me to the Queen. So I was here when Oscar and Tom arrived with all the cats.”
Tom and all the cats. Again Oscar felt the echoing panic. He hadn’t known where Lucy was! And she was talking so cheerfully now, as if she had forgotten how terrified she herself had been only an hour ago. She might just as well have been describing an exciting story she had read in a book. Then again, thought Oscar, it was a story — a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Now that the end had come at last, what was there to be afraid of anymore?
Lucy was showing her father the traveling talisman. “We used it to find you when you were a raven, Dad, and we didn’t know which raven. I kept landing on top of you.”
“Don’t think I didn’t notice!” said her father, laughing. A picture flashed in Oscar’s mind like a flickering lamp: Ma’s face, her eyes crinkled in a smile as he told her a funny story about something he and Earl had done.
“I used the traveling talisman to go home, Dad,” said Lucy.
Home, thought Oscar. Like all important words, it was si
mple but powerful, capable of turning his mind toward thoughts he had been avoiding for days. What would it be like to go home? To talk to Ma the way Lucy was talking to her father? There was a sea, right in front of our house, Ma. I climbed in the boat and . . . Oscar felt alone all of a sudden, as if the table separating him from Lucy and her father were water and they were standing on a distant shore. They could go home and he could not.
“Home!” Lucy exclaimed just then. Oscar stared at her. Had she read his thoughts?
“Dad — we’ve got to go home right away!” she said. “Mom doesn’t know what’s happened to us. I saw her when I used the traveling talisman to go back for the potion. We’ve been gone for weeks and weeks.”
“Has it really been that long?” said her father.
“I think time goes more slowly in this world,” said Lucy. “A minute here could be a day or even a week back home.”
Again the word home. And now the word time, just as powerful. It was years, not miles, that separated Oscar from the place he belonged.
“If that’s true, your mother must be worried,” said Lucy’s father. “I suppose I ought to zip home and tell her we’re safe and sound.” He was studying the traveling talisman, turning it over and over in his hand. “I read about this thing in Lavonne’s notes. Her description of the metallic composition sounded so interesting that I tried making it. Are you sure it really works?”
“Well, yes. But it hurts. It practically threw me down on the attic table,” said Lucy. And then, “Dad!” Her voice grew alarmed as her father put his finger through the hole in the talisman.
“Not to worry,” he told her. “If what you say is right, I’ll be back in less than a minute.”
“Can’t we go with you?” said Lucy.
“If I recall correctly, the talisman works for only one person at a time.”
“What if Mom’s not home?”
“I’ll do what you did,” said her father. “Take me to where Jean is,” he added, and then he was gone.
“Oh!” Lucy rolled her eyes. “I wish he would think things through once in a while! He doesn’t even know what my mother’s doing right now. What if she’s driving the car? What if he crashes down on top of her and they have an accident?”
The Book of Story Beginnings Page 19