“Like Lola Spong,” Joy shuddered. “She’s said to be descended from a troll or an ogre.”
Rachel, whose run-in with the toad-like Miss Spong had been less than pleasant, found it easy to believe.
“Is that why?” asked California cheerleader, Brunhilda, who preferred to be called Hildy. Wendy’s best friend was a gymnast and an all-round athlete who had grown up among the Unwary. The two girls had joined the fencing team together and had bonded over their shared interest in athletics and the cute boys on the sports teams.
“Why what?” asked Joy.
“Poor, little, glowy buggies.” Hildy lowered her French horn and watched her will-o-wisps zip back toward their night hood in the ceiling. “They’re pooped. But, back to your point: I’ve been, like, wondering about that. People say Hollywood is filled with pretty people. So many good-looking kids head out there to try their hand at film and TV that even the waiters and the clerks in the airport are drop-dead gorgeous. I mean, serious hotties! And they’re all like, ‘Look at this face!’” Hildy stuck her neck out and pointed all her fingers at her cheeks. “Think I’ll make it in the movies?’ And my friends and I are like, ‘Yeah, you and a million others. Now finish bagging my groceries, bag dude.’
“But when it comes to pretty faces, Roanoke takes the cake—and the platter and the table it’s sitting on. There are people at school—like that upper school senior, Rory Wednesday or our princess here—who are so beautiful, that it makes you want to, like, gouge out your eyes after you see them. Because you know you will never see anything so exquisite, ever again.”
“Did you know that Joshua March once kidnapped her? Rory, I mean.” Wendy’s startling blue eyes sparkled. “It was back when she was twelve, and he was ten. He climbed in her window, put a pillow case over her head, and tried to fly her out in a kenomanced bag. He would have gotten in big trouble…except his father is the one who gets people in trouble. So, Joshua got off easy. Oddly, he and Rory been friends ever since. And no one’s friends with the Marches—No one wants to risk being questioned by their father.”
“Where did all this happen?” asked Hildy.
“At the lower school,” Wendy explained. “I was nine.”
“You went to the lower school?” Zoë’s eyebrows rose. “I figured someone must have actually gone there. But you’re the first person I’ve met who admitted to it.”
Wendy said, “I was a day student. My brother Michael’s there now. He still goes home on weekends.”
“Didn’t realize the Marches and the Wednesdays went to the Lower School?” said Joy.
Hildy shivered. “Weird to imagine being here since kindergarten.”
“Seven,” said Wendy. “The lower school starts at age seven.”
“Seven.” Hildy shrugged. “Close enough. Hey, did you know that Rory Wednesday’s hair has blue…” she waved her hand, patting her head. “…what are they called? You know. Those thingies where some top hairs are a different color from the others?”
“Highlights?” Zoë added pale green strands to her dark green hair.
“Yeah, highlights! That’s it!” Hildy’s head bobbed from the rapidness of her nodding. “Blue! Oh, and whose idea was it to have a high school and a college—both with freshmen, juniors, et cetera—in the same building? No one can ever tell what you mean when you say someone’s a senior! Are they an upper school senior? Or a college senior?”
“I have blue highlights, too, though not many.” Nastasia peered at her own golden locks and held out a hair. “Usually, they are only visible in the brightest of sunlight.”
Rachel leaned close, peering. Sure enough, the lock she held out was a pale blue.
“Could there be a relationship?” Wendy asked. Pointing her toe, she lifted her foot onto the table and stretched over it, bouncing.
Something about her expression made her face resemble that of her older brother. A lump rose in Rachel’s throat, as she recalled overhearing John Darling’s comments about her. A renewed desire to see Sigfried skunk the louse ignited in her breast.
“What might it be?” asked Joy. “What kind of fey has blue hair? Sea nymphs? Stromkarls? Rhine Maidens? Rory Wednesday is known to be descended from the most famous of the Rhine Maidens. Maybe the princess here is, too.”
“My boss, the P.E. teacher Mr. Chanson, has a steely blue tint to his hair,” Rachel said thoughtfully. “He’s also extremely handsome.”
Behind her, Astrid Hollywell lowered her banjo and sighed. Astrid was a painfully shy young woman with caramel skin and tight black curls, who always wore a scarf over her black robes. When Rachel looked at her, she blushed and ducked her head.
Astrid murmured, “Mr. Chanson is very handsome.”
Rachel threw her a conspiratorial smile and a wink. Astrid kept her head down, but the corners of her eyes crinkled with pleasure.
“Isn’t there anyone in the World of the Wise who’s just normal?” asked Hildy.
“You mean other than Joy?” quipped Zoë. She held up her Maori war trumpet and gave the pukaea two long toots, producing a fountain of multi-colored sparks. “Nope. Just look at us. The princess is divine. Wendy is like a Pre-Raphaelite dream. You’re a California golden girl, Hildy. Griffin’s a little China doll. And me?” She spread her arms and shrugged. “I’m like a goddess.” She flipped her short green locks. “A goddess of hair.”
“Yeah, like, other than Joy.” Hildy snickered. “Just kidding, O’Keefe. You’re cute enough…at least by the standards of everywhere but Hollywood and here standards. And not everyone in the room is a total hottie. Those Spenser Hall kids are pretty normal-looking. Well, except for Amaranth Kyle, but she always looks like she’s had a rat-hair day. And Suki Wong. But Asian girls are, like, double hot. So what can the rest of us do?”
Zoë laughed. Joy pouted. Rachel felt uncomfortable and looked down.
“In central California,” Hildy added, “we have all these beautiful people I mentioned, but even we had some ordinary people. People with acne, or on crutches, or something. Here, I don’t see anybody with, like, birthmarks, or deformities, or anything—much less people with actual disabilities. Do they not let people with disabilities into Roanoke?”
Zoë shrugged. “Magic heals everything.”
“Not everything.” Rachel looked up again. “There are two blind upperclassmen, Verthandi Odinson and her brother Hod. They’re seers. I think they’re descended from Norns.”
“Wait…” Hildy leaned forward. Her blonde hair with its streaks of pale gold fell across her face. “Rory Wednesday is descended from Odin, but the Odinsons are descended from Norns?”
The others laughed. Wendy lowered her foot and raised her other leg, stretching over that one. “They’re probably descended from Odin, too. To hear Grandma MacDannan talk, Odin got around.” Wendy’s intense blue eyes danced with amusement. “You’d think she had been personally scorned by the man. Er—god.”
“Maybe she has,” replied Rachel, who had heard all number of interesting stories about the uber-magical MacDannan family.
“I doubt it,” Zoë snorted, “no one has seen a real god in generations.”
Wendy put both feet on the floor and made an attempt to reign in her cloud of dark hair. “There’s a girl in the Lower School who’s in a wheelchair. She’ll be here next year, Kora Chandler. Her parents were performing Conjurers. There was an accident.”
“I heard about her,” Rachel said. “Mrs. Heelis told me when she was lecturing me on why I should never conjure improperly again.”
“Why didn’t they, like, fix her with magic?” Hildy asked.
Rachel felt herself go pale. “In the dream mist? If you get injured there, magic doesn’t work to heal…” Her voice trailed off, as a thought struck her.
Wendy nodded, her face sad. “Her parents died.”
“That is truly sad,” Nastasia said gravely. “Every child should have a parent. We must do our best to make her comfortable when she comes.”
R
achel glanced at Sigfried, who had managed to get his confused wisps to fly in a figure 8, but he had not heard them.
Rachel thought of the scrubby area behind Roanoke Hall—the place where magic did not work well. What if the boys who had caused the explosion that left the place resistant to magic had somehow drenched the place in the same mist that had made it impossible to heal Miss Chandler? She made a mental note to pursue the issue.
At the front of the room, Miss Cyrene watched the brooding Wulfgang Starkadder blast objects across the room with a wind produced by his accordion. Rachel looked at her thoughtfully and then turned to her friends again.
“But back to our tutor,” she said, “I didn’t mean ‘descendent from a siren’. I mean she looks like a real siren. Himerope—that’s her name, right?—that’s a real siren’s name.”
“That’s silly,” scoffed Joy. “Why would a real siren be here, teaching children?”
Rachel shrugged. “What else would a real siren do in our modern age?”
• • •
Rachel passed her practical—barely. She managed to summon only three of the tired, abused will-o-wisps, but apparently three were enough. Or maybe she passed because she was able to produce a reasonable gust of wind. It was not as strong as the gust she could have produced by whistling, but Miss Cyrene announced that it would do.
“Hey, other members of the Die Horribly While Debating Club,” Siggy came up between Rachel and Zoë, as the girls walked out of class, “Wheels, here, and I—”
“Wheels?” Joy asked. She and Nastasia were walking to Rachel’s right.
“Forrest. Our ride. The one who can get us to and fro,” Siggy explained, sticking his thumb out at Zoë. “Wheels.”
“Oh…Got it.” Joy nodded.
“You-know-who sent me a dream and asked me to bring Wheels to visit her.”
“Wait. Who-know-who?” Joy asked again.
“The fl-Eay.” Siggy stopped and cocked his head to the side. “Elf-Hay? F-Elay? Lucky, how do you say elf in Pig Latin.”
Lucky cocked his head in imitation of his master. “Fey? Lares? Lemur? Or is that Human-Latin. Wouldn’t the pig version be, ‘Soo-ii’?”
Rachel groaned when he said the word elf aloud. “Sigfried!”
“Huh? Anyway, the one whose name I have no idea how to hide wants to see Zoë.”
“We’re not supposed to tell!” Fear jagged at Rachel’s chest, as she recalled the Raven’s expression when he warned them that if more than three people knew of Illondria, it would lead to her death.
Siggy shrugged, unconcerned. “She asked me to bring Wheels. What am I supposed to do? Tell her, ‘No’? It’s her life. She must know how dangerous it is. Want to come?”
“We cannot go,” Nastasia said firmly, cutting off Rachel’s enthusiastic reaction before it got started. “The Roanoke Tree is off school grounds. We may not go there.”
“No, it’s not,” Rachel objected, feeling her face flush. This was the very conversation she had hoped to avoid. “The whole island belongs to the school.”
Nastasia frowned, her face severe. “Nonsense. Obviously, they meant the wards of the school. We cannot go, Sigfried. Tell…the person involved that she will have to come here. Or meet us in a dream.”
Nastasia walked on with firm purpose, as if the matter had been settled. Joy went with her. Rachel turned her head and met Sigfried’s eyes. With the slightest of motions, they nodded at each other.
Chapter Eighteen:
Behind Enemy Lines
“What’s this elf-person want?” Zoë asked, peering out over the zipper of her backpack.
Inside Zoë’s backpack was a chamber about thirteen feet in diameter. It was not a neat, house-like space, like within the princess’s bag. Rather, it was a messy collection of her belongings. Underwear, lingerie, comic books, jeans, and old soda cups lay scattered every which way. Rachel had sat down on a purple fake-fur coat with black leopard spots. She was a bit embarrassed when the thing poking her knee turned out to be a large, lacy, black bra with cups larger than her fist. She glanced at her own unimpressive chest and sighed glumly.
Outside, Sigfried called. “Um, Griffin…how do I get this to stop dragging to the right?”
“Left lever down…but just a bit!” Rachel stuck her head out of the pack.
Beneath her, by about a man’s length, flowed the gray-brown waters of the Hudson. To the right, she could see the shore of Roanoke Island. To her left, the forest north of Storm King. Somewhere in front of her, unseen by either her eyes or her memory, a chameleon-elixired Sigfried was riding her steeplechaser by himself for the first time. Rachel winced as they jerked suddenly to the left.
“Just a bit!” she cried.
“Er…got it. No wait, now, we’re…argh!”
The view from the backpack spun wildly, trees and rocks and the far shore flashing by. The sky turned sideways. The river water drew immensely closer.
Splash!
Water rushed into backpack. Cold spray shocked her face. Zoë shouted and lunged to secure the zipper. She had only just begun to slide it, when the deluge stopped. Looking out, Rachel saw the river bobbing beneath them and Lucky’s head above them. The gold and red dragon craned his neck and peered at them, one jade eye filling much of the opening of the bag.
“I got ’em, Boss,” the dragon raised his head, “but the broom got away.”
“Oh, Griffin, that’s rough,” commiserated Zoë.
“It should turn visible now that I’m not on it,” called Sigfried. “Maybe you can hunt it down.”
Rachel stuck her arm out of the bag and waved her hand around. “Varenga, Vroomie!”
The steeplechaser, just a faint line in the distance, turned obediently and zoomed back to her outstretched hand.
“Wow.” Zoë blinked. “That was cool, Griffin.”
Rachel shot her a half smile.
“What do we do now?” asked Zoë.
“I’ll take care of it,” replied Rachel.
Music practicals might not be her strong point, but flying she understood intimately. Rachel jumped onto the seat of her bristleless and ducked her head. She shot out of the backpack and flew down low over the Hudson. She could hear Sigfried’s teeth chatter as he shivered in the late October water.
“Obé!” She ended the magical effects of the chameleon elixir that was hiding Sigfried from her sight. Then, she cast tiathelu.
Sigfried weighed well over a hundred pounds, and the water made him heavier. Rachel strived and grunted, but she was unable to lift him. All she could manage was to pull his upper body out of the river. Sighing, she settled for dragging him through the river toward the shore. Lucky dived down and grabbed his master’s robe in his mouth, helping her to pull.
Siggy whooped with delight. “This is great. Bet you could water ski this way.”
“Okay, I’m going to let you go as we approach the rocks. I don’t want to bang you into something.” She released the cantrip and leaned forward, panting from the effort of lugging Sigfried’s body through the water.
Siggy sank out of sight. A moment later, he reappeared coughing and sputtering. He stood up and walked to shore. Rachel suddenly felt very grateful that the river was shallow here, for it occurred to her that it was very unlikely that Sigfried knew how to swim.
“We are out of view of the school and the proctors,” Rachel called down to him. “Why don’t you get in the backpack, and I’ll fly.”
Siggy climbed, dripping, into Zoë’s red and blue backpack. Lucky flew it to Rachel, who put it on over her robes. Then, she darted off around the coast and to the north.
She shivered as she flew above the rippling river. She had a sweater under her robes, but it was not proof against the late October chill. The autumn colors were nearly gone, the upper slopes of Storm King Mountain entirely bare. Lower down, sparse spots of red and orange remained. The waters of the river ran full of floating points of color.
Rachel shot over the north-most part of t
he island and over Dutchman’s Cove, until she crossed one of the stone walls that was part of the wards hiding the Roanoke Tree—apparently, it was a much more powerful obscuration than was ordinarily used, because ordinarily, Rachel was able to see through them, but not this one. The great tree with its seven massive branches—each one sporting a different kind of bark and leaf: oak, beech, birch, ash, elm, hickory, and maple—rose before her like a wall of rough wood. She zipped around, flying low over the great fence-like roots as she searched for the nine-foot tall hollow in its side.
As she approached the tree, Rachel could feel the hush, the exhilaration—that awe-inspiring sense that the folk of the forest were near. She slowed down and raised her head, floating slowly through the forest, listening. Soft sounds teased her ears. Was that laughter? Bells? The wind? Even when she recalled her memory, she could not quite make it out.
Fairy noises were like that.
Rachel smelled the tantalizing herbs of the Elf’s garden before she saw the great hollow. Illondria stood waiting for them. She wore an iridescent gown, the color of the sky reflected off autumn leaves. When she moved, it rustled like a wind passing through the forest. She waved to them. They landed. The elfin woman welcomed them warmly, quickly bundling the soaking Sigfried into the tree, when he emerged from Zoë’s backpack.
Within the trunk was a wondrous dwelling—cabinets, chairs, tables and more, all carved from the living tree. At the far side of the room, a spiral staircase swept upward and out of sight. The glow of will-o-wisps brought out the warm grain of the polished wood. The air smelled of wintergreen and fresh sap.
Inside the cheery chamber, a fire burned. Rachel halted and gawked at the fireplace. The dancing flames were blue and green with hints of lavender at the bottom and edges. Instead of curls and points, each tongue flickered into shapes—horses, castles, cars, rabbits, clouds, mountain peaks. Heat came from it, or at least Rachel thought it was heat, for the autumn chill vanished, but, she was not sure she felt heat. Perhaps it was radiating cheer and well-being.
Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland (The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 3) Page 24