Fireborn

by Toby Forward

  By the time he had eaten his fill the sun was disappearing on the horizon. He wiped his mouth and clambered into bed. The long day and the hot walk led him into sleep before he had time to remember this was the very first time he had slept in a real bed.

  Age was always a thing with wizards. Cabbage decided there was no harm in actually asking Melwood how old she was.

  She laughed.

  “Is it rude to ask?” he said.

  “Not really. I don’t mind you asking.”

  And then she didn’t tell him.

  “What do you think of the lessons?” she asked.

  “I can’t really tell from outside the rooms.”

  They walked the corridors slowly. Melwood stopped as often as Cabbage wanted to. She seemed to have nothing else to do.

  “I’m sorry I can’t take you into a lesson,” she said. “It’s a firm rule. No interruptions.”

  “Are they always as quiet as this?”

  “Why wouldn’t they be? How can you learn if you’re not listening?”

  “Well, I’ve never seen a school or anything before. But I’ve heard parents, in the villages, they say that the children are naughty and make a row.”

  “How do you like our lights?” she asked.

  Most of the light in the college came from the many windows. The corridors had some natural light, but there were passageways that didn’t face outside. These corridors had a series of small globes set against the ceiling. Now Cabbage came to look at them he saw that they made patterns just the same as the ones in the night sky. They were star charts.

  “Do they talk?” asked Cabbage before he could stop himself. He blushed at the stupidity of the question.

  “Of course,” she said. “If you know how to listen.”

  Cabbage decided she was younger than Flaxfield. He thought that if he could see his mother she would probably be about Melwood’s age. No. He didn’t like that idea. If his mother had a younger sister she would be Melwood’s age. He knew that couldn’t be true because that would make her too young to be the principal of a college.

  “The stars stopped talking when the wild magic was abroad,” he said.

  “Have they started again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  Her hair was shorter than he was used to. Women in the villages wore long hair. Hers was mostly bronze coloured, with some small streaks of grey. So maybe she was older than he thought, in wizard years.

  “I forgot to ask them,” he said. “I was really angry with Flaxfield and couldn’t think of anything else on the way here.”

  He found her easy to talk to. She was nothing like as tall as Flaxfield so Cabbage’s face was more on a level with hers.

  “And I was thinking about Perry, too. I really have to go and look for him. I know he’s all right. I know the wild magic didn’t kill him.”

  He smelled the sweet scent of her breath again as she stepped closer to him.

  “How do you know?” she asked. Before he could answer she added, “And these stars have stopped talking as well. Listen.”

  He looked up at them. They were as silent as he expected such stars to be, not being the real ones.

  “Don’t tell Flaxfield,” she said. “I don’t want him to know. There are things I need to talk to you about alone, Cabbage. Is that all right?”

  Cabbage felt the thrill of a secret about to be shared. He nodded.

  “Later, though,” she said. “Tell me about your friend first. How do you know he isn’t dead? Be honest.”

  Looking straight at her Cabbage couldn’t lie.

  “I don’t,” he admitted. “I just can’t believe he is.”

  Melwood led him to a wider corridor and a stone seat beneath a window. She patted it and he sat next to her. She leaned in close.

  “Learn this now,” she said. “And never forget it. The worst things sometimes happen. Just because you can’t bear the idea of something doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Just because you want Perry to be alive won’t make him alive. And, most of all, just because you feel it was your fault he was left alone won’t keep him safe. If you left him to die, he died. If he lived, it wasn’t because you did anything to save him. Sometimes, the very worst thing that can happen happens.”

  Cabbage found it hard to breathe. As though he had been punched very hard in the stomach.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” he asked at last.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” said Melwood. “And neither do you. So don’t pretend. Work with what’s real.”

  Now she seemed as old as the stones from which the college was built. She touched his wrist.

  “The wild magic came here,” she said. “To the college.”

  “I don’t feel it,” said Cabbage.

  “No. It fizzed and crackled. Not much. It was like the sea. Where you were, it was deep and strong. We only felt the lapping of the smallest waves. But it came here. And it found something. And I know it has stayed.”

  “Stayed here?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, not stayed. Not that. I was wrong to put it like that. But made a difference. As the sea draws back when the tide goes out but the sand is moved. Something moved here. The stars are a sign of it. I don’t know what else.”

  “What harm will it do?” he asked. “Can you get rid of it?”

  Melwood stood up.

  “Some things you just have to wait and see what happens. That’s what it’s like with the wild magic, I think. It may drain away, like sea water. Or it may burrow down into the college. Like woodworm, or dry rot. It may live and grow and eat the college up from the inside.”

  “You must stop it,” said Cabbage.

  “Would you like to see the labs next?” she asked.

  Two of the laboratories had lessons going on. These looked more exciting than the classrooms. Melwood passed by these and found an empty one.

  There was a smell that caught Cabbage in the back of the nose, like vinegar, though it wasn’t vinegar. Layered on top of that were other smells, cow’s fart smells and toffee, the delicate scent of freesias and the dull dead smell of meat.

  The equipment and apparatus were ranged round the room on shelves and benches. Glass jars and bottles, tripods, cabinets, tubes and stoppers, scalpels, gloves, flasks and distillation chambers. There was a cupboard, taller than Cabbage, with hundreds of tiny drawers, each one with a yellowing paper label with faded black ink.

  “Magic is practical,” said Melwood. “No number of books will teach you how to be a wizard, you have to practise.”

  Cabbage knew he shouldn’t touch anything and he couldn’t stop himself. He loved it that Melwood didn’t tell him to keep his fingers off the things.

  “What sort of things do they do in here?” he asked.

  She took a text book from a bench, flicked through to the page she wanted.

  “Practical Magic, Book Three,” she said. “To make a glass to see far off.”

  Cabbage leaned over.

  “Get me,” she looked around, “that tripod, please, and a burner, a round flask and a shallow dish.”

  Cabbage fetched these while she took the book to the cupboard and, keeping her finger on the page, chose drawers and took ingredients out of them.

  She lit the burner, boiled the water in the flask, tossed in the ingredients in the right order, after weighing each one on a pair of brass scales.

  “What are you saying?” asked Cabbage, seeing that she was whispering to herself.

  “The words of the spells aren’t in the book,” she said. “You learn them in the classrooms. It stops people stealing magic.”

  She threw in the last ingredient, covered the flame and put a cork into the neck of the flask.

  “Give it a few minutes to infuse,” she said.

  Cabbage scratched his head with both hands.

  “I’ve never seen magic done like this before,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I jus
t do it,” he said.

  “Then what’s the point of being an apprentice?” she asked.

  “Most of the time I don’t know,” said Cabbage. “It’s annoying. Mostly, Flaxfield just stops me using magic.”

  “Does he say why?”

  Cabbage looked at the flask. The water had turned brown when Melwood boiled up the ingredients. Now it had a layer of green on the top. As they talked the green layer grew and the brown layer shrank. Then a blue layer capped them both so that there were three horizontal stripes of colour.

  “Flaxfield says it’s like music,” said Cabbage. “Say I can play the fiddle a bit. A teacher can show me how to put my fingers on the strings, to get better notes, new notes, and to stop me from using my fingers in ways that could hurt them. A teacher can show me all the old tunes that people have played before, ones I wouldn’t know, and then I know them. A teacher can show me how to play scales, because they’re the building blocks of music. A teacher can make new tunes with me. A teacher can let me try out new tunes of my own. Ones that no one has ever played before. Flaxfield says it’s like that for wizards. The music is the magic.”

  Melwood shook the flask. Cabbage expected all the different colours – there were stripes of red and yellow and all sorts of other colours now – he expected them to mix together back into brown. Instead the stripes broke up into thousands of particles of colour.

  “What do you want to see?” she asked.

  Without knowing why Cabbage said, “The Palace of Boolat.”

  She drew out the cork and poured the contents into the shallow dish. They leaned their heads close together over it and looked in.

  The colours whirled round like water going down a drain.

  Melwood murmured.

  The colours formed back into stripes.

  “Where is it?” asked Cabbage.

  Melwood grimaced.

  “Let’s try somewhere else,” she said.

  “The inn,” said Cabbage.

  Melwood nodded and held her hands over the water. She moved her lips. The colours moved quickly and Cabbage could see a small group of houses, and an inn, with trees.

  “That’s it,” he said. “You can even see them in the fields, over there.”

  “So it works,” said Melwood, “there’s nothing wrong with the spell. Let’s try Boolat again.”

  She repeated the movement with her hands and the words. The bowl shivered, then cracked and split and the water poured out, the colours covering the bench before they faded and turned to grey. Cabbage dragged his finger through and found that the bench was covered with a layer of ash.

  “It’s different at the college,” said Melwood. “Here, we don’t so much draw magic out of people as put it in.”

  Cabbage wiped his finger on a rag that was stuffed behind a pile of slates.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You have to be able to do some magic to come here,” said Melwood. “You have to have the gift. But it’s not the same as your gift. It’s a gift for learning magic, not making magic. It’s the difference between someone who can hold a paint brush and copy a picture and someone who can make a new picture in a new way. Not everyone can copy, but quite a lot can, and if you give them lessons they can get very good at it. Only a very few people know how to make a picture that is different from anything that’s ever been done before. Those are really great painters. They make you look at a thing in a new way, or feel something about it that you’ve never seen before. We take the copying people. You’re not a copier. You can do something new. That’s why you’re with Flaxfield and not here.”

  Cabbage drew a shape in the ash. He didn’t like getting his finger dirty in it. He couldn’t stop himself from touching it. He wanted to show Melwood what he could do.

  He wiped his finger clean again and put the rag away. Looking around he found a text book, battered and scuffed with the pages bent down at the corners. He had never seen a book like it before.

  “Why is this like this?” he asked.

  “What do you mean? It’s just a text book.”

  “It’s injured.”

  Melwood smiled.

  “Pupils don’t look after books very well,” she said.

  “Flaxfield does.”

  “I hope you’ll approve of the way the books are cared for in the library,” she said.

  Cabbage opened the book and smoothed the pages down. He fumbled in his cloak and brought out another book, smaller, leather-bound, locked. Laying them side by side he put one hand on each book, his left on his own, his right on the text book.

  He closed his eyes.

  Slowly, with the sound of pages turning and with the gentle scent of new-polished leather, the text book gathered its thoughts, remembered what it was, took pride in the dignity of being a book, and it renewed itself. The pages were crisp and clean. The edges were straight. The corners were sharp. The covers were upright and alert.

  He opened his eyes and looked at Melwood, surprised to see, not just approval and praise, but something that felt like sadness as well.

  “The Palace of Boolat,” he said. “I’ve seen that, but only from a distance.”

  He closed his eyes again and turned a page in the text book. It revealed a double page drawing of a building with the heading, THE CASTLE OF BOOLAT.

  He looked.

  “That’s not right,” he said.

  “No,” she agreed.

  The Palace of Boolat was elegant and decorated. High turrets and graceful curves. Slender walls and bright windows. It reached into the sky. This building was squat and coarse, thick and solid. It clutched the ground and glared up.

  “It’s a palace, not a castle,” said Cabbage. “This must be another place.”

  “No, said Melwood. “I recognize the woods and the fields, the ripple of the landscape. This is exactly where the palace is.

  “What’s gone wrong?” asked Cabbage. |

  Bee watched Flaxfold cup the beetle

  in her hands and look at it carefully.

  “Get it away,” shouted Bee.

  Flaxfold backed away from the bed. The beetle circled in her hands. It was a fine black beetle, with ridged wing case and delicate feelers.

  “This can’t hurt you,” she said.

  “Get rid of it. Kill it.”

  “I can’t kill it,” said Flaxfold. “It’s done no harm.”

  She leaned out of the open window, spread her hands and shook them. The beetle dropped and, finding itself falling, opened its wings and flew off.

  “It’s gone,” said Flaxfold. “Flown away.”

  “Flown?” said Bee.

  “Of course.”

  “They don’t fly,” said Bee.

  Flaxfold put her arm around the girl’s shoulders and made calming noises.

  “Let’s get you to eat some soup,” she said. “And then you can tell me all about beetles.”

  The soup wasn’t very hot any more. Bee didn’t seem to mind. She let Flaxfold hold the spoon to her lips for three mouthfuls then she took it and fed herself.

  She noticed her arms, the mad skin, the scars. She ignored it, kept on eating until the soup was all gone. Flaxfold took the bowl from her and she lay back, suddenly tired again.

  Flaxfold let her rest before she started to talk.

  “Have you heard what I’ve been saying to you?” she asked. “While you’ve been lying here.”

  “I want to see a mirror,” said Bee.

  “There isn’t one in here,” said Flaxfold.

  “Fetch one.”

  Bee lay quite still.

  “No. That isn’t a good idea.”

  “Go away then.”

  Flaxfold spoke softly. “Do you know what’s happened to you?”

  “I’m not talking to you until you fetch a mirror.”

  So Flaxfold left her alone.

  Bee felt tears rise in her eyes. She wasn’t upset. She was angry. Flaxfold had walked out on her, just as Bee was getting ready for a good fight.<
br />
  She lay looking up at the ceiling. Against all expectation she felt happy. Or at least she felt a sensation of pleasure, which isn’t quite the same thing. A ceiling. When you have lived for years in a round stone tower with a ceiling out of sight in the darkness there’s a pleasure in lying beneath a clean, white surface almost within reach of your hand. Bee had imagined a ceiling would be as unbroken as a summer sky. Instead, she saw tiny cracks, lines and edges where the plaster was not smooth, a little dip in the left hand corner furthest away from the window. The light played on the surface, emphasizing the roughness and individuality and character of the ceiling. It was a moment of revelation for Bee. Ceilings are as different as people.

  It was easier than she had expected to stand up. Her legs wobbled a little at first. That soon passed. The floor was pleasant under her bare feet, polished oak, broad planks. She dragged the top sheet from the bed and wrapped it round her.

  It was good just to walk so she made a circuit of the room, ending up at the window.

  When she tried to see herself in the glass the sun dazzled her. All the light was coming from outside so there was no reflection. She leaned forward then drew back quickly. The harvesters were outside and if they looked up they would have seen her. She didn’t want that.

  She tried to listen to their talk. It was fractured and layered, no voice rising above the other so she couldn’t make it out. They seemed happy though and she wasn’t used to that so she just let the sounds wrap themselves round her for pleasure.

  After the vast towers she had lived in the room seemed tiny. Comforting tiny. Not prison tiny. She felt enclosed and safe. Best of all it was light and clean and empty.

  Just as she was particularly enjoying being alone Bee heard the door open. Flaxfold came in and closed it behind her. Bee remembered that she was angry with the woman for leaving her alone. Then she remembered she was enjoying being alone and she was annoyed with her for coming back.

  “I’m not staying here,” she said.

  “That’s your choice,” said Flaxfold. She sat in the armchair and patted her hair. “Don’t you like it here?”