Opening the book, he had read her the section about Abaras, the Arimaspian priest of Apollo from whom the Griffin family was descended. Then he read her Daring Northwest’s tale of his own experience stalking gryphons in Hyperborea, north of the Rhipaean Mountains. How he had ventured, complete with the pale eye patch and hooded lantern of an Arimaspian, into a gryphon’s lair and emerged with a handful of its treasure. There was even a drawing of two pieces of the treasure, a coin with a Roman eagle and an ancient medallion shaped like a plus-sign, perhaps a family heirloom or the symbol of some forgotten god.
In later years, when Rachel read the book herself, she had discovered that her grandfather’s recitation had been the “good parts” version, spiced up with dramatic comments and wry observations. Nonetheless, the book remained a favorite. Her grandfather had gone on that day to speak of Daring Northwest, his cleverness and his courage—how bravely he had gone places no one else dared to go. Rachel, her imagination afire with images of smoke-castles and gryphon caves, had decided that this was the life she wanted when she grew up.
At the time, she had thought her grandfather was describing some ancient figure whom he had learned about through reading books—an author he had loved the way she had loved A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Dr. Seuss, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was only now, after her recent conversation with her art tutor, Mrs. Heelis, that she realized the truth: Blaise Griffin had been describing his own childhood friend.
She recalled the photograph Mrs. Heelis had shown her: her grandfather as a young man—serious and handsome, already developing his impressive eyebrows—dressed in Victorian clothing and flanked by her grandmother and young Mrs. Heelis in their bustled gowns, with the dashing Darius Northwest next to Mrs. Heelis and the fierce Jasper Hawke on the far side.
They had looked so alive in the photo; but, oh, the terrible sorrows they had faced since.
Darius Northwest vanished over a hundred and fifty years ago. Jasper Hawke had been killed fighting Johan Faust the Sixth and the rest of Bismarck’s black sorcerers. Her grandfather’s entire first family, his wife and five children—aunts and uncles she had never met, unless one counted Myrddin, the Ghost Boy—had been murdered by the demon Azrael. Out of sorrow and sympathy, Amelia Abney-Hastings had broken her sacred vows and deserted the order of the Vestal Virgins to marry Blaise Griffin, becoming his second wife and Rachel’s grandmother. To keep Azrael from doing even more damage, her grandfather had been forced to bind the demon into another friend, Aleister Crowley, turning Crowley into a fiend.
Her grandfather had not led an easy life.
Rachel looked around at her friends. Suddenly, they seemed inexpressibly dear. Sigfried, who had emerged again, looked so fierce and cheerful, as he fenced with the poleaxe he had taken from the downstairs wall. Lucky looped about happily in figure eights, egging him on. Joy bounced up and down with excitement, as she watched Siggy. Zoë tapped on Joy’s shoulder and then, when Joy turned around, stood whistling, pretending that it had not been her. Xandra examined the tapestries curiously, one lavender eye peeking out from under her hood. Valerie, looking slightly pink-cheeked, held up her camera thoughtfully, contemplating how to use the last shot on her roll. In her mind’s eye, Rachel added the princess, seated outside in her chair under the venerable elm, reading a book about an assistant pigkeeper.
Cold fingers of fear clutched at Rachel’s heart. She suddenly felt so small and helpless. Her friends looked so vibrant, so alive. And yet, just yesterday—or had it been earlier today?—the earth had nearly been destroyed. Would these people she had come to care so much about, despite their short acquaintance, be allowed to live peacefully to adulthood?
Or would they, too, suffer fates as tragic as her beloved grandfather and his friends?
Taking a steadying breath, Rachel reminded herself that Azrael was bound up and in custody. She had seen the red and gold sparkles in the form of a gryphon, made by her grandfather’s spell, sink into his body.
That meant everything would be fine now, right?
The world was safe again, and she could finally please her father by obeying his request. He had asked her to concentrate on learning sorcery and being a young lady.
He wanted her to be an ordinary girl.
What did ordinary girls do?
Rachel thought back over the last month and a half of school, pulling up memories and examining what others around her had done. Girls chatted together in small groups, occasionally bursting into laughter. Boys mocked each other good-naturedly. Couples walked arm-in-arm. She grinned at that. She would like to spend more time walking arm-in-arm with her boyfriend. Older students often sat alone reading books. That would be nice, too! She had done little else but fly and read before coming to school, other than occasionally riding her pony. Now she never seemed to have any free time. She almost envied the princess, sitting outside with her nose in one of the best books ever written.
Rachel sighed and smiled slightly. She could do this. She could be an ordinary girl. All it would take would be to stop rushing headlong toward ever possible adventure.
“Nice broom.” Xandra had come up beside where Rachel was hovering, lost in thought. “What kind is it? It’s too short to be a traveler and too long to be a racer. Besides, it has an awful lot of blades in the back.” She counted the alternating slats of reddish and brownish wood. “…seven, eight, nine, ten! I’ve never seen a bristleless with ten blades! Most have four.”
Rachel beamed with delight. Vroomie was her pride and joy.
She hopped off and let Xandra examine the bristleless. It had a shaft of polished dark walnut, a shiny black leather seat, and levers, handlebars, and footrests of black cast iron and shiny brass. The tail fan, where an ancient flying broom would have had bristles, consisted of ten blades, alternating mahogany and cherry wood. In the muted wisp-light, the three shades of reddish and dark wood gleamed like a living thing.
“It’s a steeplechaser.” Rachel patted the polished shaft proudly.
“Ooh!” Beneath her dark hood, Xandra’s lips formed an O. “You mean like Sukie uses to beat the Good-Witch Mother, who was anything but, in the fairy tale? I didn’t know they were real. I hear you’re a really good flyer. They call you the Broom Goddess. Are you planning to go pro when you graduate? Join a flying polo team, or a broom dancing company?”
Rachel blushed, embarrassed by the praise. Flashbacks of the whole dining hall clapping for her when the Broom Goddess nickname was announced threatened to unravel her composure. She shook her head and quickly climbed back on Vroomie. “I want to be a librarian.”
Nearby, Zoë snorted in derision, but Xandra’s lips quirked with interest.
“A mundane librarian?” she asked, “Or an adventurer-librarian, like Darius Northwest?”
Rachel’s whole face lit up. “Like ‘Daring’ Northwest. Exactly like Northwest!” Her smile faltered. She looked up at the castle around them. “Do you know he died here? In Beaumont? Or at least, he entered the castle, and no one ever saw him again.”
“N-never?” stuttered Joy. She looked up at the strange triangular chandeliers as if they might suddenly come to life and drop on her. “I-I’m…going to check on the princess. She’s probably lonely. She might need company.”
Joy turned and ran back toward the spiral staircase.
“Hey!” Sigfried swung his poleaxe, jabbing wildly at the air. “There’s a big room one floor up filled with colored mirrors. Like that belfry back at school. One of them has silver light coming out of it.”
“Really?” Zoë’s eyes narrowed as she looked left and right. “How could you know?”
“A glass hall!” Rachel engaged her broom, her eyes sparkling. “Let’s go!”
As she flew toward the spiral staircase, a tiny self-amused quirk caught up the corners of her mouth. What was that resolution she had made, just moments before, about no longer rushing headlong toward adventure?
Maybe this ordinary girl thing was going to be difficult aft
er all.
Chapter Four:
The Mystery of the Moonlit Mirror
Moonlight spilled from a key hole in a door on the fourth landing. Crisp black shadows leapt up behind each young sorcerer as they approached the silvery light.
“Libra!” Xandra performed the Word of Opening cantrip. The door trembled, but it did not open. “It’s warded. We can’t get in.”
“Oh please! Allow me.” Valerie knelt in front of the door and examined the lock. “This is a very old fashioned lock. I should be able to open it if I only had…” She frowned at her camera, as if trying to decide which fastening from her red strap she wished to cannibalize.
“Would this help?” Rachel pulled from the pocket of her robes one of the bobby pins she kept to hold her hat on when she was flying, the hat she had lost today, while trying to stop the plane.
“Perfect!” Valerie exclaimed in delight. She rubbed her hands together. “Let’s pop open this puppy.” She wiggled the pin around in the lock.
Click. The door swung open.
“A girlfriend with criminal tendencies!” Sigfried grinned with fierce pride.
Valerie gave him a friendly punch and led the way into the Mirror Hall. Rachel and the others followed. Beyond the doorway was a chamber as large as the great hall below, though it was only two stories high, not three. Mirrors lined both walls. Some glittered with a bluish or greenish hue; others were hidden behind curtains. One mirror emitted a silvery light so bright that the chamber seemed to be lit with the brilliance of a full moon.
Rachel bent low over her handlebars and slipped through the door above the heads of her friends. Darting into the chamber, she flew up to the mirror from which the silvery light emanated. She had never seen anything like this before.
“What are we seeing, Griffin?” Siggy came up beside her. He peered at the silvery mirror with cautious interest. “Is this a weapon? Can we blind people with it? Cause them to jump at their own shadows?”
“That’s a lame attack, boss,” said Lucky the Dragon, sniffing the glass.
“Not if we could make their shadows come to life and strangle them!” crowed Sigfried. He tapped the mirror with the tip of the poleaxe. “That would be wicked cool!”
Rachel flew a quick circuit around the hall and returned. “Most of the others are green. That means they’re talking glasses. There are some blue ones. Walking glasses.”
“Any chance one of those would take us home?” asked Xandra.
Rachel rapidly reviewed her memory of the images she had just seen. “Most of the ones I could see, some were hidden behind curtains, looked as if they led to private dwellings, probably other places in Transylvania. Still, there might be one that leads to a public glass Hall. We can examine them more carefully.”
“And the light?” pressed Siggy.
“No idea,” admitted Rachel. She glanced at the upperclassman.
“Me, neither,” murmured Xandra, shaking her hooded head.
Hovering beside the silvery mirror, Rachel peered into it, trying to catch a glimpse of the glass’s hue. From the edges, it looked as if the glass itself was silver. But that made no sense. There was no known glass that shone like the moon. On the other hand, she had never seen a real looking glass before this year, either. So, maybe there was more to glasses than she knew.
“Hold on!” she cried suddenly. “Do you think this could be the moon glass?”
“The what?” Siggy jabbed invisible enemies with the tip of the poleaxe.
“Wait…” Valerie pressed her fingers against her temples, blinking several times. “Dr. Mordeau asked me about that. She wanted to know…” The blond girl screwed up her face, struggling to remember.
Rachel watched her uncomfortably. The difficulties that others had with their memories always unnerved her. Finally, she could not stand it.
“In your interview with the Agents, Valerie, you said that Dr. Mordeau asked, ‘If Agent Griffin had told his daughter about the moon glass.’ I wonder if this could be it. The moon glass.”
“There’s a plaque.” Valerie moved up next to the mirror and frowned at a brass rectangle set into the wall. “Oh. It’s written in Hungarian. Of course. Duh!”
Rachel moved forward and glanced at the writing. A shiver ran through her from scalp to sole.
The plaque read:
Darius Northwest átment a hold tükrön, eltûnve mindörökre
She felt as if the breath had been sucked from her lungs.
He had been right here. In this spot.
She had hoped—she had so hoped—but she had not actually expected to find anything. Yet, this plaque next to the mysterious moon glass bore his name. Had he died here? Had he stepped through this glass to vistas beyond, never to return? Had the Transylvanians known his final fate all this time and never told the rest of the world?
Rachel peered at the sentence intently. What did it say? According to the dictionary from the main library at Gryphon Park, Hungarian was one of the few European languages that was not part of the Indo-European family of languages. It was, instead, from the Uralic family, related to Estonian, Finnish, and Thulese. Rachel knew some words of Thulese from summers spent at Hot Springs Beach, but none of them appeared on this plaque.
She could not puzzle it out, but she would remember the phrase forever.
“He must have gone through here,” she whispered, her throat parched dry. “Where does it go? Did he…die on the other side? Or could he be trapped there. I…”
What was on the other side?
She peered and peered, her heart pounding, but she could not glimpse anything except silver light. Fingers trembling, she put her hand on the glass’s surface, despite Xandra’s and Zoë’s warning cry. She concentrated, as one would to activate a walking or talking glass. Nothing happened. The glass did not seem to be working. Either that or something more was needed, the way a thinking glass needed an ore cantrip to activate it.
Wherever Daring Northwest had gone, Rachel could not follow.
“And that’s the guy you want to be like when you grow up, right?” Valerie asked, trying to adjust her camera to take a picture in the unusual lighting. “The one who disappeared here?”
Rachel swallowed, nodding.
“I love his books,” mused Xandra. “My favorite is: Fifty-Nine Beneficent Fey and Where They Make Their Homes. I’ve read my father’s copy at least five times.”
“Yeah, I love that one!” Rachel sighed, as she walked down the line of mirrors peering into the rest, looking for anything that might offer a way home. Over her shoulder, she called, “What about you, Xandra? What do you want to do when you grow up?”
Xandra snorted sadly, as she peeked behind one of the thick velvet curtains. “Be a hermit…and a nurse.”
“Going out on a limb here…” Valerie snapped a picture of the glass with the silvery light, using her last shot. “But isn’t it hard to be both? Don’t nurses have to, um—you know—talk to patients?”
“It’s a work in progress,” muttered Xandra.
Rachel glanced at Valerie. “What about you, Ace Reporter?”
“I’m thinking of majoring in True History and Obscuration,” Valerie paused to wind her film and change the cartridge. Under her breath, she murmured, “If I had known we were going to leave Roanoke grounds, I would have brought my digital camera.”
“True History?” Siggy paused, mid-swing with the authentic Fifteenth century poleaxe, and gaped at his girlfriend. “You mean, True Snoring? The class of Utter Boredom? You know I admire you tremendously, Coochie-Pooh, but I think your rocking horse might have just flipped off its rockers.”
“Sigfried,” Valerie’s voice was soft yet deadly, “don’t ever call me Coochie-Pooh again.”
“You’re right,” Siggy nodded sagely. “What was I thinking? I’ll call you Pert Bosom.”
“I’m going to slap him,” murmured Valerie, turning red.
“Go for it!” Zoë cheered. She reached into in her backpack and pulle
d out what looked like a large solid paddle made of greenstone. “Or, if you prefer, I can whack him for you! What is the point of having a magic-infused war bat, if I never get to whack anything.” She made a few practice swings.
“It’s okay.” Valerie watched her swing. “If Siggy needs whacking, I’m quite capable of providing said whack.”
“True History.” Xandra shuddered. “I’m with Sigfried…not about the Coochie-Bosom thing, but the rest. But you live with the scholars of Dee Hall, right? I guess that makes sense.”
“Why?” quipped Zoë. “Are people in Dee all crazy and eager to subject themselves to unnatural intellectual torture?”
“Before I found out about magic, I wanted to be an investigative reporter. I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to get to the bottom of things.” Valerie explained as she closed up her camera again. “But what’s the point of investigating, if the Obscurers working for the Parliament of the Wise are altering the records—hypnotizing witnesses, mucking with historical documents? Anything I find out is probably wrong.
“If I want to find the truth, I am going to need to understand how records and memories are changed. What are the signs that the World of the Wise has meddled with something? How is Obscuration done? Can you make a person believe anything? Or just some things? If I understand the process, then maybe I can find the truth. The real truth.”
“That’s quite noble.” Rachel nodded admiringly, wistfully recalling the photograph of Dee she had kept under her bed for years. She had wanted to live there, but, when she arrived at school, she had been automatically put in Dare Hall with her siblings. “And you, Zoë?”
Zoë was in the act of running her hands over her head. As she did, her hair changed from pink to the yellow damask pattern on the downstairs walls. The others gawked. Rachel had never seen hair with patterned design before.
Zoë shrugged. “Don’t care, really. Whatever.”
“Really?” Valerie stared at Zoë as if she had just grown a second head. “You don’t have plans for the future?”
Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland (The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 3) Page 5