Magisterium

17

Finally she came to a clearing where the forest had been driven back just enough to make room for a house of timber and mossy stone.

The heavy copse of trees around it bent forward, looming over the thatched roof and the simple, bare yard. It was even darker in this area of the forest — out there in that small piece of land, it seemed to be almost night.

Kevin trudged up a slate walk toward the house. Glenn sank into the cover of the trees and watched as he went to the door and, without pause, reached for the doorknob. There was a flash of warm candlelight as it opened. Then Kevin stepped inside and was gone.

Glenn crouched in the snow-flecked debris of the forest floor.

Her hands shook and the muscles in her legs quivered as icy water dripped from her soaked hair across her skin. She needed help, but had no idea where she was, much less how to get back to Aamon. Even if she did, it might be hours before she could return with him. What would have happened to Kevin in that time?

What was happening to him now?

Glenn stepped out of the trees and onto the grass. Her legs shook as she made her way up the rock-lined path to the door. Once there, she took a single faltering breath, turned the door handle, and stepped inside the house.

Kevin sat at a small wooden table with his back to Glenn. In front of him was a bowl of what looked like oatmeal. Kevin picked up a spoon, filled it, then ate slowly and mechanically.

Rows of open cabinets lined the wall across from them. They were filled with glass jars, lumps of moss, a brass set of scales, a chart of the stars. A collection of animal bones was laid out on black felt.

The whole house smelled of wood and the musty perfume of dried flowers and herbs.

“Kevin?”

Small drops of blood fell from the soaked end of his shirt and splattered onto the wood floor. Glenn took a rag that was lying on the table and knelt down beside Kevin. He took no notice of her as she pressed it tight into his side.

Glenn became aware of a fire crackling off to her right, and alongside it, a strange rhythmic creaking. She wanted to grab Kevin and run, but she found herself somewhat like a puppet herself, turning toward the sounds.

Across the room was a gray stone fireplace and a rocking chair made from knotty bark-covered tree branches. The chair reminded Glenn of the animal bones on the table behind her, like the skeleton of some crouching beast.

The chair gently rocked, its back to Glenn. A lump grew in her throat. The rounded edges of someone’s shoulders and a sleekly pulled-back plain of gray hair was visible over the edge of the chair.

Mixed in with the rocking chair’s creaking was another sound, a dry clicking that made her think of jaws opening and closing.

“You must be cold.” The woman’s voice was crisp and strong, with only the slightest tinge of age. “Come, sit by my fire.”

“I came for my friend.”

“Sit,” the woman said. “Be warm.”

Glenn’s clothes were dark with river water and icy tremors still shook her. How far would she get with Kevin in tow on the verge of hypothermia? No, she needed the woman to stop doing whatever it was she was doing to him, and she needed to get warm.

“Hold this here,” Glenn said, moving one of Kevin’s hands over the rag. He said nothing but did as he was told while scooping spoonfuls of oatmeal into his mouth.

Glenn circled around to the woman’s right, staying as far away as she could, keeping an eye on the chair, ready at any moment to grab Kevin and take her chances. But the woman didn’t even look at her.

Glenn sat down on a stone bench beneath a window. The heat from the fire filled her up.

The woman was in her seventies or eighties, Glenn guessed. She had a small, finely shaped face and long gray hair that was swept into a bun at the back of her head. In her long-fingered hands she held two bone-colored knitting needles. She worked them back and forth, drawing together a pile of yarn in her lap.

“There,” she said. “That’s better. Isn’t it?”

“Who are you?”

The woman paused her knitting. The firelight flickered orange across the lines of her face. Her eyes were almost entirely covered with milky cataracts. She was clearly blind.

“My name is Opal Whitley,” she said.

“What do you want?”

Opal’s brow furrowed. “I can’t feel you,” she said, puzzled. “Him, I can feel.” She gestured to Kevin and then laid the tip of one of the knitting needles against her temple. “In here. But you, I try to feel you like I feel him and there’s nothing there. Where you are is … a hole. An empty place in the room.”

The red jewel on Glenn’s bracelet shone dully.

Back at the table, Kevin neatly set his spoon next to the empty bowl. “I’m done with my supper now.”

“Why don’t you go outside for a while, Cort?”

Kevin pushed his chair from the table, hand still on the rag at his side. He threw open the front door and slammed it behind him. Glenn looked out the window as Kevin ran into the yard and then abruptly stopped as if he had forgotten what he’d gone out there to do. He stood perfectly still, staring ahead into the shifting darkness of the forest. He reminded Glenn of a toy set aside, waiting until it was needed again.

“What did you do to him?” she asked.

Opal examined the pile of yarn with her fingertips, then picked up her knitting needles again. They clacked together once and she dropped them into her lap, as if she couldn’t muster the energy or the will.

“No one travels that road anymore,” she said. “It’s been years since anyone fell into the web. I had almost forgotten it was there. Then I felt him there, so … young. I’ve been alone for so long. I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t going to hurt him.”

Her web, Glenn thought, remembering the strange symbol on the rocks at the head of the trail. A circle with eight radiating lines, a spider.

The plaque had been a warning.

“What was that thing?” Glenn asked. “In the boat.”

“A servant. Pieced together from bits of my forest. The river. The trees. It has no will of its own.” Opal pointed to a locket that hung by a silver chain at the edge of the mantel. “It’s bound to the owner of that charm to do little errands.”

“Like kidnapping people.”

“Will you pour us some tea, dear?”

Opal inclined her head toward an iron kettle suspended over the fire. A thick towel sat on the hearth nearby.

“Let my friend go.”

Opal turned her face to the window. After a moment, her thin lips parted and she exhaled, a long exhausted release. She nodded.

Soon, the door opened and Kevin joined them again, looking

puzzled, like someone waking up from a very strange dream.

“Glenn?”

“It’s okay,” Glenn said. “Come in.”

Kevin sat on the floor next to Glenn, dazed. Glenn found ceramic cups on the mantel and filled them from the kettle over the fire. She had to put the cup in Kevin’s hand and wrap his fingers around it. She eased his bandage back. The bleeding had stopped for now. She took her own cup of tea and sat on the stone above Kevin.

“How old are you two?” Opal asked.

There was something childlike in her voice. Her long-fingered hands lay upturned on the pile of yarn in her lap, cradling her mug of tea.

“Sixteen,” Glenn said.

“Sixteen,” Opal echoed, savoring the two syllables with a small laugh. “Shadows of what you’ll become. Silhouettes.”

Opal turned toward Glenn, the yellow flames spreading across her lined but delicate face. Kevin was staring down at the mug in his hands, as if he was puzzling out some deep mystery buried within it.

“Who is Cort?” Glenn asked.

Opal lifted her teacup and blew across its rim. “My son,” she said.

“What happened to him?”

A wind rose outside. The tree branches raked the top of the house like fingernails.

“One day when he was twelve, he found a deer in the woods. It had been injured by a hunter in a neighboring village, but not killed.

Cort was new to his Affinities — he had such promise as a healer -

and he spent the next month nursing it back to health. After that — ”

“He challenged the hunter to a duel,” Kevin said.

He was looking at Opal, his teacup cradled in one hand, his eyes clear and intense, focused in a way Glenn had never seen before. She expected him to offer some explanation, but it was as if she wasn’t even there.

“He made a sword out of sticks,” Kevin added.

“Yes,” Opal said with the ghost of a smile. “He marched right to that man’s house and pounded on the door with his tiny fists, screaming that he was a monster, that it wasn’t fair. The hunter thought it was all a laugh until he made the mistake of stepping outside and took a couple licks from Cort’s sword.”

Opal shook her head.

“After the Magistra returned, I pleaded with Cort not to join Merrin Farrick’s cause with all of the others, but there was no hope. He was what he had become. We putter about with alchemy — thinking we’ll turn base things into gold — but what happens inside a gentle boy, who sat outside for nights on end nursing a frightened doe back to health, that turns him into an outraged young man with a sword? How does it happen? He wasn’t gone a month before he was taken by the Menagerie near Grantham with his friends….”

“Arno and Felix,” Kevin said.

Opal inclined her head. “Felix was a boy. He idolized Cort.” Her hand fell to her lap and smoothed a wrinkle out of her skirt, then closed her hand into a fist to stop it from shaking. “There was a trial of sorts, a sham presided over by the black witch’s handmaiden. Cort and his friends were led up a scaffolding and hung, one by one, outside the palace gates.”

Opal faltered. Her hands trembled.

“I was told that Cort held Felix’s hand and whispered to him the entire way up to the noose. The younger boy was terrified, crying. Even facing his own death, all Cort wanted to do was comfort him.”

Opal said nothing more for a time. She seemed smaller, crumpled.

Kevin set his teacup down and leaned over the edge of the woman’s chair. He kissed her forehead and squeezed her shoulder.

“He was thinking of you,” Kevin said, almost too quietly for Glenn to hear. “He loved you very much.”

Opal raised her hand to Kevin’s cheek and then let it fall. Small tears glistened on her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said.

Glenn looked away. The Kevin that stood there leaning over the old woman was like no one she had known. Kevin Kapoor was an avalanche. Chaos and noise. This person seemed older and smoothed by the wind like a weathered hill. The strangeness of it filled Glenn with barely understood fear.

“You must be tired,” Opal said finally. “I have rooms for you both. You can stay the night and then — ”

“We should go,” Glenn said quickly, standing up. “Shouldn’t we, Kevin?”

Kevin glanced out the window above Glenn’s head, his hand on the back of Opal’s chair as if the two of them were sitting for a portrait.

“It’s … cold,” he said, his voice dreamy. “You’re soaked. We don’t … we should stay. Leave tomorrow.”

“Kev-” But before Glenn could finish, the front door slammed open and struck the wall beside it, shaking the house to its frame.

“Glenn! Kevin!”

Glenn turned, relieved to see Aamon Marta striding through the doorway.

“It’s okay,” Glenn called. “We’re okay! Aamon, this is Opal. She

– ”

Before Glenn could finish, there was a blinding flash of white light and an ear-stinging explosion. Aamon flew backward and crashed onto the floor. Glenn turned to see that Opal had risen from her chair and was wielding a long silver-handled knife. Its needlelike tip was pointed directly at Aamon’s heart and glowing an eye-piercing white.

“Opal, no!” Glenn said, dumbstruck. “He’s our friend.”

“He’s a black and murderous thing,” Opal growled, not moving the tip of the blade in the slightest. “Aren’t you? Aamon Marta.” She spat out his name as if it was diseased. “Tell me, do you like being back? Do you like the world you helped make?”

Aamon slowly rose to his feet. “Opal,” he said.

“You know each other?” Kevin said.

“Leave here and go about your business,” Opal commanded, “or I’ll show you I have more than parlor tricks left in me.”

“My business is with these two, Opal. I didn’t come here to cause you any harm.”

A cruel grin raised Opal’s lips. “How many people have died after hearing those exact words?”

“Stop it!” Glenn said. “Opal, put down the knife. Please. Aamon is our friend. He’s taking us to Bethany. That’s all.”

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with, child.”

“Yes, I do,” Glenn said, matching the steel in Opal’s voice. “Now put it down.”

Opal gripped the hilt of the blade tighter, rolling it in her palm. “I won’t have him here,” she said. “I have a clean house.”

“Fine,” Glenn said. “We’ll go, then. Kevin — ”

“No,” Aamon said from his place at the doorway. “Opal, the way to Bethany is long and these woods aren’t safe. For their sake, let them sleep here tonight. I’ll stay outside. We’ll be gone tomorrow.”

Opal didn’t move. Kevin put one hand on her arm.

“I’d be dead if it wasn’t for him,” he said. “If you push him out, I’ll leave too.”

Slowly the brightness of the knife’s tip faded and she lowered it, muttering something under her breath that sounded like a curse but was in a language Glenn didn’t understand.

“Go,” she said to Aamon, seething. “Sleep in my yard with the other animals, traitor.”

Aamon backed away and locked eyes with Glenn. “Tomorrow,”

he said.

Glenn nodded, and then Aamon ducked under the door frame and disappeared outside.

“There are rooms for you both,” Opal repeated.

The fire popped behind her as a log was consumed and slumped into ash. Glenn said nothing as Opal led Kevin out of the room and down a dark hallway.

“A black and murderous thing.”

Why would she say that about Aamon? What did she think he

had done?

A door opened and closed down the dark hallway. Kevin hadn’t even looked at her as Opal led him away.

Glenn stood alone in the still house, wondering where she would drift off to if all the anchors that held her down were gone.