To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  ‘Keeping up old traditions, I see,’ remarked the Professor. ‘Tribute to Mistress Wasp, I suppose?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The sizar ash,’ said Aiken, pointing with her feather duster, which now Mari saw it closely, was not a feather duster at all, but a wand with a feather duster end. ‘You know, you do look rather like that first portrait. A fine copy of the bracelet, too. Well done.’

  ‘Mistress Wasp was a sizar?’ asked Mari.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ asked Professor Aiken. She wrinkled her nose, then reached into the pocket of her rather horsey tweed coat and pulled out a snuffbox, flicked it open expertly with one hand, and scooped out some snuff on the back of her thumbnail. Inhaling it carefully, she closed the box and stowed it away, as Mari stood there gaping at her.

  ‘I suppose they do leave it out of that nasty little college brochure these days,’ she continued, occasionally taking small, nasal breaths as if she was about to sneeze, but never actually doing so. ‘But she was a sizar. In her memoirs she wrote it was the greatest advantage she had.’

  ‘Advantage? Being a sizar?’ spat Mari. ‘Uh, I beg your pardon, ma’am. About Mistress Wasp’s memoirs, in fact I was hoping to look at them tonight—’

  ‘The memoirs are forbidden to undergraduates,’ said the Librarian. ‘You can read them next year. But, yes, Mistress Wasp wrote that being a sizar gave her a great advantage. She said, “I have been forged in a hot furnace, my metal is of the strongest proof. Had I been born higher, I would have not striven to rise so high.’’’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mari. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘There is a portrait of her as a sizar. Not the big painting in the Hall with her in lace ruff and cuffs. There was an earlier one, that used to hang in the Mistress’s Lodge, but was lost a century or so ago. Spring-cleaning gone awry. But there is a fine plate of it in Landsby’s Colleges of Hallowsbridge. I’ll fetch it down for you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mari, who was rather stunned by this information. She had never imagined that Alicia Wasp, the most famous Mistress of the College ever, had been a sizar.

  ‘What else were you wanting?’ asked Professor Aiken. ‘I could get it on the way.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mari. ‘Well, I’m … I’m looking into the … that is … how Mistress Wasp and the Queen nullified the Original By-Laws. I was hoping to find a reference …’

  Her voice trailed off as Professor Aiken leaned in close and looked at her face again.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the Librarian. Her pale gray eyes were very sharp behind her half-moon spectacles. ‘More to this than meets the eye, I see. The Wasp Memoirs would be the best resource, as it happens. Though there is some relevant material in some of the court correspondence of Queen Jesmay, which we don’t have here, though there is an almost complete collection over at Jukes.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mari despondently. ‘And the Memoirs are forbidden to undergraduates?’

  Professor Aiken leaned back and took another thumbnail of snuff. Mari looked at her with a hopeful expression, trusting that it was not too spaniel-like to be effective.

  ‘You sit your Finals in three weeks, I believe?’ asked Professor Aiken.

  Mari nodded.

  ‘I thought so. I read your essay on a choir of seven. You know, your foster father was always very helpful to me, when I first came here as a Junior Fellow …’

  ‘Was he?’ asked Mari.

  ‘Very helpful. I’ll bring you the relevant volume of the Memoirs. Sit down.’

  Mari slid behind a desk and turned on the green-shaded lamp. When the professor had gone, zooming up the circular stair in the corner to the stacks above, she looked at her bracelet. It was very old, and her foster father’s mother had given it to his wife, and the Garridges had been porters at the College for generations … but surely it couldn’t have once belonged to the fabled Alicia Wasp?

  Professor Aiken was back in under ten minutes, which was interesting. The stacks occupied four floors above the reading room, and three beneath it, and a book request, even in the daytime when there might be a half dozen librarians available, often took an hour or more to be delivered.

  ‘There we are. The portrait is the frontispiece of this one, and here is Volume Six of the Wasp Memoirs. The part you need starts on page one hundred and ten, but I would start at one hundred and six for a little more context.’

  ‘Thank you, Professor,’ said Mari. ‘Thank you, very much.’

  ‘I wondered why I needed to come here tonight,’ mused the Librarian. ‘Sizar ash-face, and Alicia Wasp’s bracelet … yes, I’m a little slow but I now realize it’s not a copy. Tell me – is that ash the result of the Original By-Laws being invoked?’

  ‘Yes. A fragment, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ replied Aiken. ‘I wonder if whoever did it fully comprehends what it means?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mari. ‘Um, what does it mean?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure myself,’ replied Aiken. ‘But I believe there is a good chance that if even part of the Original By-Laws are released, the New By-Laws might be at risk, and the safety of the college … what time is it?’

  ‘Half past eight,’ said Mari. The library clock was behind Professor Aiken.

  ‘We have until midnight then,’ said Aiken briskly. ‘Do you have the fragment?’

  ‘No,’ said Mari. ‘I’m … I’m going to try and get it.’

  ‘Good. Read the Memoirs,’ said Aiken. ‘I must go and find the Chancellor, pity he won’t talk on the phone, ridiculous superstition, entirely unfound—’

  ‘The Chancellor!’ exclaimed Mari. Raised in the college, she regarded the involvement of any of the university authorities as a very last resort, and the Chancellor … well, the less he had to do with the College, the better.

  ‘Shouldn’t you tell the Mistress? I mean, I think she’s out, but surely—’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Professor Aiken firmly. ‘I really don’t think so. I’ll be off now. Do whatever you can, Miss Garridge. And good luck.’

  Before Mari could get another word in, the Librarian was striding off toward the revolving doors that led outside.

  ‘But, Professor!’ she called. ‘Couldn’t you …’

  The doors whisked around. The Librarian was gone.

  ‘Couldn’t you just take over?’ muttered Mari. Somehow everything had got even more complicated, but she wasn’t sure what it all meant. What had seemed to be just a petty act of bastardry against her by Diadem was assuming a new dimension. Where had the bone wand come from? Why were the police secretly watching inside the College? Why did the Librarian not want the Mistress to know what was going on?

  ‘One thing at a time, Mari,’ she whispered to herself, echoing her foster father’s advice. ‘Get the fragment, and get it done with.’

  She opened Landsby’s Colleges of Hallowsbridge and looked at the tipped-in, hand-colored plate. It showed a young Alicia Wasp standing against what looked like the south wall of the kitchen garden. She was wearing a simple muslin dress and had the ash design on her cheeks and the bracelet on her wrist. The inscription on the painting simply read, ‘A Sizar of Ermine College.’

  Mari stared at the painting for a long time. Alicia Wasp did not look at all like her. She had straw-colored hair and freckles. But there was something in her eyes, something Mari recognized in herself. Not the color. Alicia’s eyes were green, and Mari’s so brown they were almost black. It was something else. Determination. An indomitable will.

  At least Mari hoped that’s what she saw in both sets of eyes.

  She closed the Landsby volume, picked up the Memoirs, and turned to page 106.

  An hour and a half later, she hurried back to the sizars’ room, pausing along the way to break off and collect a bundle of hazel twigs from the branches that overhung the path alongside the Scholar’s Garden. Outside the room, she knocked and called out who it was, then entered. Francesca was sitting at the one desk that they all
shared, cutting a face in the last of thirteen radishes. Twelve others sat upright around the rim of a silver bowl.

  ‘Almost done,’ she called out. ‘Did you bring the twigs?’

  ‘Here,’ replied Mari, dumping them on the desk. ‘Did you tell Bill?’

  ‘Yes. I told him. But he didn’t want to talk, and he practically ordered me back inside.’

  ‘You don’t seem to mind,’ said Mari.

  ‘He cares about me,’ said Francesca proudly. ‘He was worried.’

  ‘We should all be worried,’ replied Mari. ‘There’s something bad going on here. I mean, really, really bad, not just Diadem making life miserable for a bunch of sizars.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not entirely certain,’ replied Mari. ‘But I think that because part of the Original By-Laws have been invoked, the New By-Laws will cease to work. At midnight tonight.’

  ‘Does that matter?’ asked Francesca. ‘I mean, they’re mostly about what time the gates are locked, the lights go on, what time breakfast stops, and so forth.’

  ‘The By-Laws aren’t just about the mundane stuff,’ said Mari. ‘They also describe the bounds and wards. Without the full By-Laws, Original or New, the College is vulnerable to banecraft and … summoning.’

  Francesca’s happy look faded. Summoning wasn’t always banecraft, but it tended to be, because the things that could be summoned were enormously powerful and dangerous. Summoning was not taught to undergraduates, and was only used under strict supervision at Cross-Hatch House, the university’s most secure laboratory, where summoned creatures could be properly restrained and, if necessary, banished.

  ‘You think Diadem’s going to summon something?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ exclaimed Mari. ‘All I know is that we have to get that fragment back, and we have to get it in the ground under the shadow of the moondial. At midnight, between the chimes of the tower bell.’

  ‘And what exactly is the plan?’

  Mari knelt down by the desk, selected a hazel twig and broke it into small pieces. She plucked one of Francesca’s red hairs and, taking a longer stick, used the hair to tie the smaller pieces on the end, making a serviceable miniature broom.

  ‘We make the radish-girls and brooms lively at quarter to twelve,’ she said. ‘We send them to Mo’Wood to fly around outside Englesham’s window, drawing out Diadem and her cronies. At the same time, we go into Mo’Wood on foot, get into Englesham’s room, and get the fragment. Then we dash to the moondial, do the incantation—’

  ‘What incantation?’

  ‘Sorry, the spell to nullify the fragment. I got it from Alicia Wasp’s memoirs, I’ve written it out, here – it’s only seven words. She was a sizar—’

  ‘What!?’

  ‘Yes … look, I’ll explain later. It must already be half past ten. We do the incantation, bury the fragment between the bell chimes at midnight, and all will be well.’

  ‘All will be well!’ exclaimed Francesca with a disbelieving snort. She finished carving the face of the last radish and picked up some twigs to work on another broom. ‘I suppose we use your keys to get into Mo’Wood? Even though you swore you wouldn’t ever again, after that time we were nearly caught in the Dean’s office?’

  ‘Yes, we’ll use the keys,’ said Mari. ‘It’s too important not to this time – even if we do get caught.’

  The keys were a set that properly belonged to the Porter of the College, and were imbued with magic that was recognized by college locks, as mere mechanical copies of the keys would not be. Mari’s foster father had given the set to her, with a heavy wink.

  ‘Not in anyone’s inventory, these keys,’ he’d wheezed out. ‘Don’t use them idly, Mari. Keys can turn into trouble, easily enough.’

  ‘Jena and Rellise will be back at half past eleven,’ said Francesca. She plucked one of Mari’s hairs and tied off her first broom. ‘We’d better clear off before then.’

  ‘We can wait in the Library Garden,’ replied Mari. ‘I want to look at the moondial anyway. We’ll launch the radish-girls from there, then run through the New House into Mo’Wood.’

  ‘Why couldn’t my stupid father have just saved his money and stopped gambling?’ asked Francesca rhetorically. ‘Other fathers manage it. Then I wouldn’t be a damned sizar.’

  ‘Like I said, this isn’t just a sizar thing now,’ said Mari. ‘But would you really want to be just another rich and self-satisfied undergraduate?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francesca. ‘It would be so much easier.’

  ‘Alicia Wasp said being a sizar was the greatest advantage she had.’

  ‘I bet she never said that when she actually was one,’ replied Francesca. She tied off another bundle of twigs. ‘There, that’s my six done.’

  ‘And my seven,’ replied Mari. She picked up a radish girl and speared it through the middle with the stick, to make the little vegetable figure look like it was sitting on the broom. Francesca followed suit, and within a few minutes they had the whole lot done and sitting back in the silver bowl, the brush-ends in and the radish-faces pointing out.

  ‘You take them,’ said Mari. ‘I’ll get our wands and the keys.’

  They only had student wands, green wych elm that would not take on much power. But Mari and Francesca had worked hard to make them as puissant as possible, gradually adding rune after rune in the last three years, and impressing them with cantrips and lesser spells. Mari took out her foster father’s keys as well. There were only three of them, huge old iron keys on a bronze ring, but one or another of them would open every door, gate, hatch, or cupboard in the college.

  ‘We should put on our academic gowns,’ Francesca said. ‘It might be the last time we get to wear them. And our hats.’

  Mari paused to think about this, then slowly nodded.

  ‘Yes. You’re right. We will be on college business. I hope.’

  They put down their various objects and slipped on their black academic gowns over their clothes, topping them with the shorter, student version of a graduate witch’s two-foot-high pointy hat. The sizars’ hats were mostly cardboard and blacking, unlike the sleek velvet of the lady undergraduates’ headgear. But, from a distance, no one could tell.

  It was quiet outside as they carefully made their way around the tower. The air was still and cool, and the moon was rising, big and bright and full. Mari and Francesca tried to stay in the shadows, moving swiftly through the occasional pools of bright light from the gas lanterns that hung over the Old House door, the tower gate, the corners of the Foreshortened Court, and outside the Library.

  It was darker around the back of the Library, the light from the windows falling over their heads as they sneaked along the southern wall. The garden itself was darker still, lit only by the dappled moonlight filtering through the leaves of the guardian rowans, their branches thick with late spring leaves and bunches of berries.

  The moondial was in a small clearing in the center of the garden. It was a modest thing, merely a rectangular silver plate hung vertically on a thin stone plinth, so that the moonlight fell on its face and the stubby gnomon cast a moonshadow down to the correct hour, indicated by deeply etched numbers that were gilded with fine lines of gold. In addition to the hours, the plate was also etched with a table for calculating the correct time at phases of the moon other than full, and the college’s motto ran around the edges. It was in Brythonic, but written in Anglic letters, not Ogham, and was usually translated as ‘I make women of girls and witches of women.’

  ‘Stay here,’ said Mari to Francesca as they huddled in the shadow by the trunk of one of the larger rowans. ‘I need to look at the moondial.’

  Francesca nodded. She was looking up at the clear night sky, watching for signs of flying witches, and also keeping an eye on the tower clock. It was already twenty-five minutes to twelve.

  Mari crept forward, bending low. At the moondial, she lay down on her side and pulled her legs up, spreading her gown across her body so that
she might blend in with the ground as much as possible. Then she reached out and thrust her fingers into the turf close to the base of the moondial, pulling back the grass and then the dirt beneath, grubbing away until she’d made a hole some ten inches deep and as wide as her hand.

  That done, she crawled back to Francesca, who was staring up at the sky.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Francesca pointed at the moon. A thin film of red was beginning to spread across its surface, flowing like spilled blood across a smooth-tiled floor.

  ‘Potent banecraft,’ whispered Mari. ‘Someone’s started a summoning already!’

  ‘Shouldn’t we make the radish-girls lively now?’ asked Francesca anxiously.

  ‘Five minutes,’ said Mari, looking at the tower clock. It was already becoming indistinct, as a strange fog began to fall across the College, rather than rising from the ground – another indication of most serious banecraft at work. Chill air rolled in front of the fog, making the two young women shiver. ‘Too early and they’ll get picked off, and then they’ll be after us.’

  It was a long five minutes. The fog grew so thick that they couldn’t see the tower clock, and the air grew so cold that frost began to form on the grass and on the trunks of the rowans.

  A single chime, muffled by the fog, sounded high above them. It was the quarter-hour before midnight.

  ‘Now!’ whispered Mari. She held Francesca’s hand, and they both bent down to breathe over the radish-girls before quickly stepping back. Brandishing their wands, they recited the spell that would make the vegetables and their brooms lively.

  The fog stirred as a breeze wafted through the garden. There was a sound like an ancient gate creaking open, and then instead of thirteen carved radishes speared by hazel-twig brooms, there were thirteen witches standing astride proper broomsticks. Seven of them looked rather like Mari, and six rather like Francesca, though all of them had redder skin and greenish hair.

  ‘Fly to the Miriam Oakenwood Quadrangle, and there play hide-and-seek,’ instructed Mari and Francesca together.

  The witches nodded, pointed their broomsticks, and rose into the air. Mari and Francesca didn’t wait to see them take off. They ran through the garden toward the New House, Mari fumbling with her keys for the one that would open the door. New House had no accommodation, it was all tutorial rooms, so she hoped no one would be inside.