Magic Gambit (Hidden World Academy Book 3)

by Sadie Moss

  “Who is this woman, anyway?” Cross asks Theo as we set out.

  We don’t actually have straight directions to the interpreter. We’re just… exploring in the general right direction of where she’s supposed to live and hoping that we find her.

  “Her name is Madame Mulfrey,” Theo explains. “And she’s—well, she’s like most interpreters, isn’t she? Super reclusive.”

  “Right. Because God forbid this kind of thing be easy,” Cross mutters.

  “Interpreters sort of have a right to be hermits.” Theo shrugs, swatting at a bug that buzzes too close to his face. “After all, they can only interpret what the prophecies say, they don’t actually choose what they say. They’re not making it up, they’re just making sense of it. There are loads of hacks out there claiming to be interpreters, as we discovered. But seers and interpreters who are actually talented? Once word gets out, they get loads of people banging down their door, and then inevitably there’s a client who hates what they’re told and tries to—shoot the messenger, I suppose.”

  “That’s bullshit. It’s not the messenger’s fault,” Cross grunts, frowning.

  “Of course not. But the messenger is the one who’s there,” Kasian replies thoughtfully. “And someone who just found out that their destiny isn’t at all what they’d hoped is unlikely to be in a rational state of mind.”

  “Geez, no wonder she’s hiding out in this fucking swamp.” Cross glances around, his coppery hair glinting in the beams of sunlight that filter down through the trees. “I bartended for a while in my first year at Radcliffe. People got pissed as hell when I had to cut them off. Her job must be about a thousand times worse.”

  We have to search for a while, and as the sun climbs higher into the sky, the air around us getting warmer, stickier, thicker with humidity, I start to worry that we won’t find her. That’ll mean we have to come back tomorrow, and there’s a good chance Professor Harris will notice if we go missing two days in a row.

  “Um…” Cross’s voice drags me out of my thoughts. He stops walking, and I pull up behind him.

  “Not to be paranoid,” he drawls. “But I’m getting a feeling that we’re not wanted here. Just call it a hunch, a magical clue…”

  I peer around him to see what Cross is staring at and catch sight of a sign hanging from a tree: KEEP OUT.

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, poking him in the ribs. “Real crack instincts there. Wherever did you get that amazing premonition?”

  He snorts in amusement and ruffles my hair. “What can I say, cupcake? I know what I’m about.”

  I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling, so I know that it doesn’t stick.

  Kasian squints, frowning. “Yeah, she’s got some magical traps set. Nothing too crazy. She obviously doesn’t want to kill us, but they’re not pleasant.”

  Well, I suppose that it’s a mercy that Madame Mulfrey doesn’t want to kill us—she just wants people to stay away, she doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

  “Can you disable them?” I ask.

  Kasian nods. “Not alone, of course.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  Theo, Cross, and I follow Kasian’s lead and begin to undo the traps as we walk along. Kasian’s very considerate and has us seal the traps up again so they’re active once we pass through, leaving Madame Mulfrey’s careful work intact.

  That’s one of the things I love about Kasian. He’s so damn thoughtful.

  The farther along we go, the more signs there are. None of them explicitly say FUCK OFF, but it feels like they might as well. Madame Mulfrey really, really doesn’t want to be bothered.

  “Are you sure we’re not making a mistake?” I whisper.

  “What other choice do we have?” Cross whispers in return.

  He’s got a point. What else are we going to do? What other real interpreter do we know? None of the other interpreters we talked to could give us anything useful to go off of.

  “Look out!” Theo suddenly yells, launching himself at Kasian, who’s in the lead.

  The two men go down in a heap just as darts come shooting out from between the nearby trees, whistling right through the spot where Kasian was just standing. I scream, because I’m never going to get used to this kind of thing, my heart pounding, adrenaline spiking, and I drop instinctively, hitting the ground hard.

  “I thought you could see all the traps?” Cross yells, also hitting the dirt.

  “Clearly not!” Kasian shouts back.

  I scramble to my feet. “We have to move!” We have to get through the traps before all of them can activate.

  “Gabbi!” Cross leaps back up, his eyes wide. “Look out!”

  You know it’s bad when Cross actually calls me by my real name instead of “cupcake,” and I instinctively dodge wildly to the left—just as a gigantic motherfucking alligator leaps out of the water at me.

  There are no alligators like this in my world. No alligators with strange patterns on their skin that look like slick oil rainbows on water. No alligators with red eyes and rows of teeth like that of a shark. And stop me if I’m wrong, because I know they can get pretty damn big, but I don’t think alligators in the Dull World get quite this fucking massive.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” I hear Theo exclaim as he and Kasian scramble to their feet. “Careful, love!”

  “Yeah. I’m trying!” I call back, getting out of the way as the alligator snaps its huge jaws at us.

  Cross flings a spell at it and grabs me around the waist, dragging me farther away from it as Theo and Kasian try to dart around the gigantic fucking monster.

  The thing is huge. It looks like it could swallow me whole and chomp Theo, who’s the tallest out of all of us, in half without even thinking about it, and I am definitely a few levels of terrified right now. This thing looks like it crawled out of my worst nightmares—in fact, I’m gonna be having nightmares about this for a long time, I can just tell.

  I hurry backward, half-jogging, keeping my eye on the alligator as Kasian yells to stay calm, which, honestly, I’m not sure I’m capable of that right now. My only concern is making sure there isn’t another alligator somewhere else in the water that’s going to leap out and actually get me this time. I thought Madame Mulfrey wouldn’t want to actually hurt us, just keep us out, but holy crap was I wrong. Those other traps must’ve been to deter visitors with lower-level magic than what we’ve got, and now we’ve run right into the big guns—

  As I take one more step back, my foot sinks down into the ground unusually quickly.

  So, here’s the thing about quicksand. Everyone thinks that it acts super quickly and you go sinking into it screaming like it’s a hungry mouth or that one sand creature that Jabba the Hutt tries to feed Luke Skywalker to in Return of the Jedi.

  Quicksand doesn’t actually work like that. In fact, it acts quite slowly. You just have to be smart about it.

  But… try telling that to the quicksand I’m currently sinking into.

  Either quicksand works differently in this world, or Madame Mulfrey has enchanted it so that it actually does what everyone is scared it will do, because I can feel the ground sinking beneath me far too quickly, sucking me in like a damn vacuum.

  I scream and try to yank myself out, which does nothing except make me sink even faster.

  Next to me, I can hear Cross yelling, “Shit, shit, shit!”

  I realize he’s stuck too, and that just makes me panic more.

  “Hold on!” Kasian yells, and then he and Theo are rushing over, trying to yank us out. I see Theo flinging spells at it, but nothing’s working, and in seconds, they start to sink too.

  “It’s like… there’s something that… cancels out our magic,” Cross manages to gasp out. I’m sunk in up to my chest now, and I can’t feel the bottom. My breath is coming short and panicky, my chest tight, and I’m trying not to thrash because I think that’ll only make things worse.

  “What do we do?” Theo asks, as Kasian tries with no avail to yank himself out.

  �
�In quicksand, you want to float on your back—”

  “I don’t think this is traditional quicksand, Kas!”

  “You got a better idea?!”

  We’re being held down, sinking faster and faster, and my stomach clenches into a tight knot. Our magic won’t work. There’s nothing we can do.

  This is it.

  Chapter 19

  We’re all stuck with little more than our heads up above the sand.

  Theo sounds like he’s close to hyperventilating but is trying to keep his breathing somewhat even so that he doesn’t make it worse for himself by freaking out. Cross is grunting, straining, still trying to break free. Kasian is silent, but I can practically hear the gears turning in his mind as he runs through different scenarios, trying to find one that’ll get us out of this.

  There’s only one scenario I can think of. “Madame Mulfrey!” I yell at the top of my lungs.

  All those traps seemed to activate on us at once. Maybe that’s because they weren’t traps that were just laid down for anyone to stumble into, like the others, but deliberately released on us. Maybe the interpreter is watching us right now from wherever she is, waiting to see who we are.

  “Madame Mulfrey!” I yell again. “Please, please let us go! We’re just here to get help! I don’t care if it’s bad news, I won’t blame you, I know it’s not your fault!”

  It’s not even Roxie’s fault, even though I spent a long time being pissed at her. She didn’t ask to have a prophecy center around her, or for that prophecy to foretell the destruction of the world.

  None of us asked for this.

  But here we are.

  About to get buried alive in sand.

  “We just want answers, please!” I gasp, calling as loud as I can and almost inhaling a lungful of sand. “It’s a matter of life and death! My whole world will die if you don’t help us, please, I promise we won’t hurt you!”

  There’s a terrifying moment where I think I must be wrong. That she hasn’t heard us and these were traps activated by us after all, or that she has heard us and just doesn’t believe me. But then… then the quicksand reverses.

  Instead of sucking us down, it pushes us back up, up and out, until we’re practically being spat onto a patch of dry land, a small island of dirt in the middle of the swamp.

  Theo retches, going onto his hands and knees. Cross pats him on the back, grimacing in empathy, as Kasian looks us all up and down for injuries.

  I stagger to my feet and look around.

  Up ahead, still on the island of land, a house shimmers into view. There was some kind of cloaking magic on it, obviously, because it wasn’t there a second ago—not that we could see, anyway. It’s just like the magic we put on our tents with the other students, only I suspect it’s a much more powerful version of that spell.

  It’s a squat wooden house, the kind you’d expect to find in the middle of nowhere, with moss hanging off of it, and a small porch with a rocking chair. A thin trail of smoke comes out of a rock chimney at the side of the house.

  It looks rather cozy.

  The front door opens, and an older woman steps out of it. She looks to be about my grandmother’s age, if my grandmother was still alive. But there’s nothing aged in the spark in her eyes. She walks with a straight back, her hands fluttering in quick, aborted movements, and her mouth is set. She seems spry and sharp-witted, despite the lines and lines of wrinkles on her face.

  “Well.” She folds her arms, eyes narrowed. “A matter of life and death, you say?”

  I nod. “Yes. We… we saw your signs, and we wouldn’t have kept going if it wasn’t important.”

  Cross and Kasian help Theo to his feet. He’s looking a bit recovered now, less panicky. I think he’s claustrophobic, and I make a mental note to do whatever I can to protect him from tight, enclosed spaces from now on. He had the worst time of it in the quicksand, but we all look a mess, covered in sand and mud from the pit we were just in.

  Madame Mulfrey eyes us critically, squinting even more until her eyes are nothing but slits.

  “Clean off, and wipe your feet before you come inside,” she finally says, turning sharply and retreating into the house.

  Well, all right then.

  We use some quick magic to wash and dry ourselves off, making us look presentable again, and then we step inside, wiping our feet on the front mat. It doesn’t say WELCOME but rather GET LOST, which sounds about right for this woman.

  Inside, the cabin is small and covered all over in knickknacks. Little whirligigs hang from the ceiling, wind chimes and dreamcatchers are in the windows, and the sills are lined with small figurines. It’s hard to know what to touch, or rather what to avoid touching, and there’s not a lot of furniture. There’s a table and a comfortable looking armchair, but really, everything is set up for just one person, and there’s not any extra space—it’s clear that she doesn’t get a lot of visitors, and it’s just as clear, from her traps and signs, that she likes it this way.

  “So.” Madame Mulfrey looks at us, her arms folded. “Talk to me.”

  The guys all look at me as if to say, ball’s in your court, and I clear my throat nervously. “Well, um, hi. My name is… Roxie Macintyre. There’s a prophecy about me that I received in August, and ever since then people have been after me, but I can’t even figure out what it means. Something about—about me breaking the world? It’s hard to figure out. I tried to go to a djinn, and the djinn tried to kill me, and now there’s some kind of cult after me. I just want to know what the prophecy says so that I know what I’m dealing with.”

  Obviously, this isn’t the full story. For one thing, I’m not Roxie. But we don’t have time for me to go into the whole thing, and I don’t know how much I can trust this woman. I also remember something Anton St. Claire told us when he cracked open the crystal ball we took from Summer Padmore’s shop: namely, that it’s illegal to open someone else’s prophecy.

  Madame Mulfrey stares at me for such a long time that my skin starts to prickle. I’m certain she must’ve seen through every lie I said, that she’s about to kick us out of her house. But then she nods, a sharp jerk of her chin.

  “Figures,” she mutters. “We were about due for a world-changing prophecy.”

  She sounds so flippant about it. How can she be nonchalant about this?

  My thoughts must show on my face, because she chuckles. “Ah, you’re still young. Every so often, a prophecy comes along that changes everything. When you’re a seer or interpreter, you kind of get used to the idea. It doesn’t usually happen in your lifetime, but it could, and you have to be prepared. I’ve been around for over seventy years, and there hadn’t been anything for some years before I was born, so I knew it would probably happen in my lifetime or soon after.” She makes a flapping motion with her hand, like she wants me to hand something to her. “All right, let’s have it.”

  The prophecy, I realize. She’s talking about the prophecy. I recite it to her, word for word, and Madame Mulfrey listens intently, her gaze boring into mine.

  Time stretches and expands,

  But only rarely does it stop.

  The one with golden hair holds that power.

  The future rests in the palm of her hand.

  The one with golden hair will find her power.

  She will touch the threads of existence.

  She will walk the line between two lives,

  And in her hands the world will break.

  “Can you make sense of it?” Kasian asks after I finish speaking.

  Madame Mulfrey gives him a sharp look, as if to chastise him for interrupting her train of thought. Kasian falls silent, looking abashed.

  “Well, you’ve got a doozy of a prophecy here,” she announces.

  “Ha. Don’t mince words,” Cross mutters. “Give it to us straight.”

  Madame Mulfrey sticks him with a look too, but Cross just glares at her defiantly. Even though this woman is intimidating, Cross is going to die like he lived, spitting
in the face of anyone who tries to be authoritative with him.

  I’m never going to tell him this out loud, but it’s pretty hot.

  “Interpreting prophecies is kind of like interpreting your dreams,” Madame Mulfrey says, still glaring at Cross before she switches over back to me. “Different ideas or images are expressed, and you have to interpret those rather than trying to look for a literal word-for-word meaning. This isn’t a literature class.”

  She scrunches up her nose, her eyelids falling almost shut, and I get the feeling that no matter how no-nonsense this woman acts, what she’s doing is incredibly difficult. That she’s not just thinking about what the prophecy means. She’s peeling back its layers to reveal the absolute kernel of truth contained within the flowery words.

  Then her eyes snap open, sharp hazel irises focusing immediately on me.

  “This prophecy is saying that the world will be split,” she declares. “And once it’s done, it can never be undone.”

  My stomach clenches at the certainty in her words.

  “Well, fuck,” Theo says.

  Yeah, that’s about what I’m thinking.

  “Time… Time… Huh. There is a moment that will come where you could possibly avoid your fate,” Madame Mulfrey muses. “But you most likely won’t take it.”

  What? Why wouldn’t Roxie take it? If there’s a chance to avoid this mess, why wouldn’t she leap at it? She already fled into another universe in order to try to avoid breaking the world, so surely if the choice comes to her again she’s going to take it.

  My mind is whirling, but instead of letting panic take over, I focus on the one good thing the old woman just said.

  A moment will come when Roxie could avoid her fate. She may be unlikely to take it, but if we can figure out what that moment is, we can nudge her in the right direction. A hard nudge.

  “How will she know when the moment comes to make the choice?” I ask.

  Maybe if I can find that out, I can find a way to tell Roxie, and then—

  Oh, shit.

  I realize what I just said, and freeze.