Twice Magic

by Cressida Cowell

All that practicing she had done in the Punishment Cupboard, and Caliburn’s lessons back on the Sweet Track…

  All around her were the figures of the Witchsmeller and his Magic-hunters, with their armor frozen around them, stiff as statues.

  And then, almost the very second that the thought came into her head, the helmet of the nearest Magic-hunter began to untwist, as Wish’s Magic made it move. She didn’t even have to point her hand at it, all it took was a thought.

  “Be careful what you wish for, Witch…” whispered Wish. “You wanted Magic-that-works-on-IRON… and you… shall… have it!”

  The Kingwitch was halted abruptly, midair, by a flying iron helmet that hurtled through the sky and—CLANG!—attached itself to the Enchanted Sword, making the Witch’s sword arm so heavy that his whole body lurched violently to the right.

  The Kingwitch tried to shake off the helmet, but it was stuck fast, for the helmet had come into the orbit of the spell that the Kingwitch had cast to bind the sword into his hand, and it would… not… budge… however hard the Kingwitch shook it. CLANG! CLANG! Another helmet, and an iron glove soared through the air and stuck to the other side of the sword.

  The Kingwitch said the words of the undoing, to take off the binding spell he had cast, and he had the first stirrings of unease.

  “What is that?” the Kingwitch asked himself in a startled sort of way.

  For as the Enchanted Sword sprang out of the Kingwitch’s hand and dropped point first into the ground, the Magic-hunters’ frozen armor had exploded apart, leaving the bewildered Witchsmeller and his soldiers standing in their underclothes, staring upward in astonishment while their armor rocketed toward the Kingwitch. Spears and helmets and chains and knives and swords and breastplates, not to mention an entire Witch-destroying weapon, the whole armory of iron that the Magic-hunters carried with them on Magic-hunting expeditions, were sailing through the air toward the Kingwitch as if they were arrows fired at a bird.

  MORE iron, thought Wish, more and more and more…

  The army of iron attached itself to the Kingwitch as if he were a magnet.

  The Kingwitch tried to beat all the iron things off, but they clogged up his wings, and the harder he tried to fight them off, the harder they stuck fast, until he became smothered in a thick ball of iron, iron that melted around him as it met the green heat of his Magic. It weighed the Kingwitch down, and he plunged deeper and deeper in the air, and Wish added more and more and more and more and more until he fell to the earth like a stone.

  Xar and Wish scrambled out of the way over the heaving, tumbling earth as…

  The Witch encased in iron landed with such force that he created a great crater in the courtyard of the ruined castle of Pentaglion. Just as the iron solidified in a final, enclosing ball, the Kingwitch shot one last blast of Magic from his five taloned fingers and…

  REOOOOOW!

  The Magic came screaming out and hit Wish on the chest and there was a mind-blowingly loud noise, and a blinding white light, and something exploded with such energy that Xar was knocked over.

  The earth came to a shuddering halt at last, and great clouds of dust billowed and wafted across the shattered remains of the courtyard.

  The ball of iron that encased the Kingwitch was, strange to say, exactly the shape of the stone that used to be Queen Sychorax’s Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic, maybe because it was a shape that Wish had seen before.

  The clouds of Witches who had been hovering, waiting, watching for the outcome of this battle, shrieked across the sky, howling and raging against the defeat of their leader, before dispersing, flying away, who knows where?

  The ball of iron rocked once, twice, on its pointed axis… and then it rolled to the edge of the battlements… and fell over the edge… and down, down into the ocean below, before disappearing under the waves.

  The Wizards and the Warriors, the Witchsmeller, the Droods, and the Magic creatures staggered to their feet, coughing and choking, trying to work out exactly what had just gone on.

  Queen Sychorax leaped up, and ran toward Xar, Encanzo and Bodkin running by her side. The dust fell all around them like blue rain.

  Xar picked up the Enchanted Sword, which had landed right in front of him.

  The writing on the blade had gotten so scratched and rubbed away on both sides by the helmet and the other iron things, that it now just read:

  Once…

  “We did it! AGAIN!” grinned Xar as he put the sword into his scabbard. The two monarchs reached him where he stood, ragged and shaken, his quiff a little awry but still Xar-like in his jubilation.

  “I TOLD you we could do it, Father! And did you see, Bodkin? Did you see, Caliburn?” he cried, punching the air in triumph. “I DID fight the Kingwitch! I TOLD you I could!”

  “What on earth is the boy talking about?” snapped Queen Sychorax. “Where is my daughter?”

  “There she is,” said Xar, pointing at the great cloud of gentle, shimmering, bright blue dust falling around them.

  Queen Sychorax was without words.

  “She exploded,” explained Xar.

  Queen Sychorax’s chest heaved as she looked around at the clouds of blue dust before…

  “EXPLODED?” she said in horror. “My daughter EXPLODED??? What do you mean she exploded? And why are you celebrating? The child saved you, you horrible boy! You’re as bad as that Witch!”

  If she hadn’t been such a very great queen you might have thought that Sychorax staggered a little. She certainly turned deathly pale, and then she knelt down on the floor where the Enchanted Spoon and thirty iron pins lay quiet and cold and lifeless.

  She reached out a trembling hand to touch them.

  Squeezjoos whispered, “Don’t you worrys, ice queen, don’t you worrys… She’ll be back,” putting his little clawlike hands lovingly on the bewildered queen’s cheek.

  Queen Sychorax had given her heart away long ago.

  But kneeling in the dust there, one, two, three tears dropped from her cold blue eyes.

  “Outss of the way! Outsss of the way!” said the Once-sprite, swooping from nowhere, jumping from the back of the hovering falcon, and collecting the tears, one, two, three, as they dropped from the cheek of the mourning queen.

  Encanzo stepped in hurriedly. “For shame, Xar, you have to explain! Your daughter will regenerate, Sychorax. She has a Magic eye, which makes her a very great Enchanter, and very great Enchanters have more than one life.”

  “Regenerate?” said Queen Sychorax, blinking blankly. “Magic eye? More than one life?”

  She had forgotten how horribly confusing Magic people were.

  They couldn’t even obey the normal rules about life and death.

  “When? When will she regenerate?” gabbled Sychorax.

  “In a moment or two,” said Encanzo soothingly. “It can take a while… In the meantime, we have to be careful not to step on any of this blue dust…”

  “This blue dust is MY DAUGHTER???” said Queen Sychorax, looking around in astonishment and horror.

  “What issss that man doing?” hissed Squeezjoos, eyes narrowing.

  That man was the Drood Commander.

  The Drood Commander was behaving in rather a peculiar manner.

  He was working frantically, and as they looked more closely they could see he was actually spelling the blue dust with his spelling staff, collecting bright clouds of it and putting it in a gourd.

  “Yes,” said Encanzo, very puzzled, “what on earth are you doing, Drood Commander?”

  “Didn’t you see? The girl, the Enchanter, has Magic-mixed-with-iron, which makes her very, very dangerous!” said the Drood Commander. “Quick! We don’t have much time! We must trap her in here and then she won’t be able to regenerate!”

  “Be careful there, Commander!” said Encanzo sharply. “We’re talking about the pieces of a human being here.”

  “An extremely hazardous human being!” said the Drood Commander.

  “How dare you take
advantage of my daughter’s dustlike state to attempt to imprison her?” snapped Queen Sychorax.

  “Don’t you move any closer, Queen!” warned the Drood, pointing his staff at her. “Or I will put the lid on this gourd and throw it into the sea! And that will be far worse for your daughter than you can imagine, for she shall be half here, and half there…”

  Encanzo and Sychorax froze, for a state of limbo was a dreadful fate.

  But the werewolf stepped forward, growling, low, ominously, deep in his throat.

  “Get back!” ordered Encanzo. “That Drood is dangerous…”

  The werewolf ignored him.

  “What are you doing, werewolf?” screamed the Drood Commander, madly sweeping the blue dust into the gourd in great drifts. “Step back, you evil-bound beast! Halt, you loveless furball! I’m doing historically important work here!”

  And then Xar had a brilliant idea…

  And he did a Good Thing.

  A really, really Good Thing.

  Xar needed to get rid of those Witches. He knew that it was unlikely that the Kingwitch would have been defeated forever. His hand was still burning bright green. He needed all the ingredients in the spell to get rid of Witches, and they had just gone to considerable lengths to get hold of this one.

  But for the first time in Xar’s life, he cared about somebody else more than he did about himself.

  So Xar undid the stopper on the collecting bottle he was carrying.

  In a great glorious roar, the Giant’s Last Breath blasted out of the collecting bottle into which it had been shrunk only an hour or so earlier.

  “FORGIVE THEM!” roared the Giant’s Last Breath.

  “FORGIVE THEM!!!” at a decibel so loud that Sychorax and Encanzo and Xar and Bodkin had to put their hands over their ears.

  “FORGIVE THEM.”

  18. Forgive Them

  The released giant’s breath was a roar so loud, and it made a wind so strong, that the bright pieces of blue dust that the Drood was trying to collect whirled up into the air in a flurry of excitement, and out of the Drood’s reach.

  The Drood gave a howl of frustration as up and into the wind they went, around and around, impossible to catch, and the Drood, arms flailing, dropped the gourd, which rolled on the floor, all the dust spilling out of it in great glorious swoops…

  And the Drood himself lost his balance in the tremendous roar of the blast, and fell out and over the edge of the battlement that had been broken by the ball of iron that encased the Kingwitch only moments before, with a furious shriek.

  Down the Drood fell, becoming smaller and smaller, and when he had nearly reached the ocean, his pin-prick of a body transformed into a gyrfalcon, before spreading wide his wings and flying out, out across the waves in the distant direction of the islands known as the Giants’ Footsteps.

  Just in time, for all around them the freed blue dust was singing…

  Singing a beautiful sweet song of life returning, as all the whirling innumerable little pieces of Wish came joyfully back to life again, and they rushed around, those tiny fragments, in a confusing blur of reshuffling Magic, whizzing back together in the memory of where they were, the impossibly complicated reality of a human body, forming the perfect sculpture of what-once-was-Wish, until: Oh!

  Bodkin would never tire of the heart-stopping moment when up above, the small brown heart of Wish re-formed in the air, and then down it plunged through the chest, and Wish sat up and took in that breath that was life itself, in sweet, thirsty gulps.

  Caliburn had found Wish’s eyepatch in the rubble, and he hurriedly handed it to her, before the earth started trembling again.

  “Wish!” cried Queen Sychorax, extremely shaken, for it is not every day that you see your daughter blown into pieces, her heart flying through the air and her entire body reconstituting herself in front of your very eyes. “Are you all right? Is everything in the correct place?”

  She held her daughter’s hand and patted her down to check that she was real and alive and breathing and that all of her was there.

  “I’m sorry, Mother!” said Wish, gasping for breath. “I know it’s a bit unusual… but it seems that I have more than one life… I do hope you don’t mind?”

  “I do not mind,” said the queen, in a definite tone of relief, “as long as you promise never to do all this… all this flying about in little pieces in an untidy fashion… all this… making your heart go jumping through the air… ever EVER again…”

  “You were worried about me, weren’t you?” said Wish shyly.

  “Perhaps I was,” admitted Queen Sychorax.

  And then…

  “The way you defeated the Kingwitch was, I have to admit, clever. Queens have to think on their feet,” said Queen Sychorax.

  The queen did not smile at her daughter very often, but when she did, Wish’s whole world lit up with sunshine.

  Wish smiled back delightedly.

  And as Queen Sychorax smiled at Wish, Encanzo embraced his son.

  “You said you’d make me proud of you, Xar,” said Encanzo. “And I AM proud of you. You resisted the power of the Kingwitch. I never thought you could. I said ‘be good’ and you were. You really are growing up.”

  Xar stuck out his chest in delight.

  “It’s all going to be fine!” said Wish, joyously, holding out her arms. “Thank you, Lonesome! Thank you, Squeezjoos!” she said, hugging the hairy fairy.

  The werewolf was so surprised he actually let her hug him too.

  “URRRRR URRR URRRRR! URRR URRR URRRRRR! URR URR URRRRR!” roared the werewolf.

  “URR URR URRRRR!” shouted Xar. “Join in, everyone! She’s alive!”

  Completely forgetting themselves in the excitement of the moment, the Wizards and the Warriors responded to Xar’s demand, and they also looked up to the sky above and echoed this wild cry:

  “URRRRR URRR URRRRR! URRR URRR URRRRRR! URR URR URRRRR!”

  Miracle on miracle.

  What a sight it was, Wizards and Warriors howling at the sky alongside the most reviled, the most feared, the most despised beast in the wildwoods.

  And then…

  “WORRA WOORA REARRGH! WORRA WORRA CREAGGGGGLE!” screamed the werewolf, abruptly tilting his head downward, and fixing his savage gaze on the crowd with alarming intensity, foaming at the mouth, and making tearing-limb-from-limb motions with his arms, while gnashing his teeth. “GOORAGGOOGLE!”

  And the crowd’s happy supportive howling halted rather abruptly as they scrambled fearfully out of the way, pushing each other over and screaming a little, in case the teeth-gnashing and limb-tearing was intended for them.

  This is the problem with werewolves, you see. They’re hard to love, even when you’re on their side, because they’re so… well… scary.

  “Now it really IS all right!” said Wish, with a sigh of contentment.

  It had been a terrible adventure, but it had all been worth it, thought Wish. She had been dreading the moment that her mother found out her secret, but now that she had, it was sort of a relief. Now could be the start of the Wizards and the Warriors finally working together to fight the Witches. Her mother would fall back in love with Encanzo, and they would stop this silly war between them. It was all going to be fine…

  But now that she was over her initial relief, Queen Sychorax was no longer smiling.

  She was standing, her immaculate hair covered in bits of brick dust and dripping wet. Her once-white dress dragged behind her in the dirt, streaked with mud and mess, torn by Witches’ talons, and dripping in green Witchblood. She had made the unwelcome discovery (Sychorax may have suspected this already, but actual proof is always a bad moment) that she had an exploding daughter, with a Magic eye and a historically unfortunate Magic-mixed-with-iron component… It was all very irregular indeed.

  “All right?” snapped Queen Sychorax. “All right? It most definitely is NOT all right! This is a disaster, and I am now going to take my daughter home, and I do not want to he
ar ONE WORD about this ever again.”

  She adjusted her disheveled hair, and brushed down her white dress briskly.

  All of Wish’s wonderful fantasies about this being a new start collapsed in an instant.

  “But this adventure has been a lesson to all of us that things are going to have to change around here!” said Wish. “People are going to have to change, people like US. The Witches have returned to the wildwoods, and Wizards and Warriors have to join together, to fight them off, just like we did this evening.”

  “Never!” cried Encanzo.

  “Not on your life!” spat Queen Sychorax. “Wizards are incapable of change!”

  “As are Warriors!” said Encanzo, if anything, even angrier.

  “No, no, don’t say that!” said Caliburn. “Everyone is capable of change! What the children need is education… For the Witches are still out there, and when they come back, then this girl Wish is going to be tested, and she may be all that stands between us and oblivion…”

  “Yes, and Caliburn’s been giving us lessons while we were on the run!” said Wish. “He’s a brilliant teacher, not just of Magic, but all the Warrior spelling-and-words-and-maths stuff, and when Caliburn is teaching me it seems to all make sense!”

  “I am not going to have my child taught by a talking bird!” said Queen Sychorax. “I know perfectly well how to educate my own child, thank you very much.

  “You have both been saved from the Kingwitch,” she went on, “and now we must put things back to the way they were.”

  “But, Mother! You and Encanzo were in love!” said Wish, very distressed. “Remember the wolves? Every second Thursday!!! It’s the reason I am who I am! The true love’s kiss of a Wizard remained in your blood and it made me Magic even though I am a Warrior!”

  Encanzo and Sychorax went very still.

  Wish quailed before the look of utter horror in her mother’s cold blue eyes.