The Familiars (6 page)

Everyone helped rinse the pots and pans and douse the fire. Jack, the last to finish his chores, scooped up Aldwyn and headed for the cottage. They went straight to Jack’s bedroom, which the boy shared with his sister and Gilbert. After a quick survey, Aldwyn decided the room was a bit confined for his taste. There were two straw cots placed side by side, while a small trunk rested against the wall, stuffed with all of Jack and Marianne’s clothes. On a nearby nightstand, a pear-shaped globe was slowly spinning on a needle, showing the lands of Vastia and beyond.

Gilbert fell asleep on a pillow at the foot of Marianne’s bed and within two minutes was snoring loud enough to wake a hibernating cave troll. Jack folded up a blanket on the floor for Aldwyn to sleep on, then, after saying good night, lay down in bed himself.

Hardly a moment had passed before Jack whispered in the dark, “Aldwyn, are you awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you something? Do you ever get seasick?”

“You mean like on a boat?”

“A boat or a sailing skiff or on the back of a traveling whale.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been on any of those things. Why?”

“I was just thinking, after my wizard training is complete, we’ll be going on a lot of adventures together. And I’d hate for you to get all green in the face every time we take to the waters.”

“Shhhhhh!” said Marianne from her neighboring cot.

“Sorry,” replied Jack before continuing in a whisper. “My mom and dad were Beyonders, you know. When I was a baby, they were sent on a secret mission to retrieve stolen treasure taken by the queen’s jewel keeper and his wife, who had raided the palace vault they’d sworn to protect. My parents were lost at sea, but I’m going to find them one day.”

“You never knew them?” asked Aldwyn.

“No. Marianne did. Just a little, though.”

“I didn’t know my parents, either. At least you have your sister. I never had any family.”

“Well, you do now,” said Jack.

Jack’s hand reached down and stroked Aldwyn’s back. Aldwyn immediately cozied up to his touch. He never would have expected to feel such a strong kinship with a boy who’d been a total stranger a mere two sunrises ago.

“Good night, Aldwyn.”

“Night, Jack.”

Moments later, Jack’s breathing became heavy. The boy had fallen into a peaceful slumber.

Aldwyn tried to get comfortable, but unlike the first night, when he’d been too exhausted to care where he slept, tonight he simply couldn’t fall asleep with a roof over his head. He decided he needed a breath of fresh air and tip-toed to the hallway. As he passed Dalton’s neighboring room, he could see through the crack in the door that the boy was still awake, studying a scroll by candlelight.

Entering the living room, he spotted a window that had been left open and quickly made his way
toward it, passing the hammocks strung up in front of the fireplace. The room was much darker now, since the lightning bugs had gone to sleep in their hive. Hopping up onto a large oak table, Aldwyn paused to look at a framed painting of what appeared to be Kalstaff in his younger years, accompanied by another man wearing a robe just like Kalstaff’s and a beautiful, imperial-looking woman in a long white dress. He recognized her as a younger Queen Loranella—there was a statue of her in front of Bridgetower’s courthouse that Aldwyn used to sleep beneath on hot summer afternoons. The wizards were joined by what had to be their familiars: Kalstaff’s bloodhound, the wizard’s turtle, and the queen’s gray rabbit. Aldwyn continued along the table, past an enchanted quill pen that was busily copying Kalstaff’s lesson plans for the next day, before bounding out the window.

He immediately looked for the easiest path to the roof and spotted an orange tree whose branches brushed up against the clay shingles atop the cottage. As Aldwyn walked swiftly across the yard, he noticed that one of the spell
library’s windows was open. He didn’t think much of it until he saw Skylar exit with a small leather-bound book gripped in her talons. He ducked out of sight as Skylar pushed the sill shut with her beak before flapping off into the woods. Aldwyn found her actions curious and decided to follow her.

He stepped quietly through the dense underbrush at the edge of the woods until he arrived at a clearing. Fallen leaves of orange and green carpeted the ground, and at the center, Skylar was perched upon a tree stump, the borrowed—or was it stolen?—book open before her. Aldwyn hid in the darkness, peering through a narrow gap between two massive oaks. Skylar flipped the pages of the book with her wing, looking purposefully for a passage of interest. Then she seemed to have found it. Aldwyn watched with growing curiosity as she plucked the carcass of a large beetle from her satchel and placed it beside her on the stump. Her eyes sped across the page of the book, and then her clawed foot dove back into the satchel, removing a talonful of silver powder. She sprinkled some down onto the beetle carcass and
read aloud from the tome.

“
Mortis animatum
!”

Aldwyn felt a chill tickle his ear, almost as if the air were whispering to him. Then, on the tree stump, the beetle’s legs began to twitch. Aldwyn was quite certain the beetle had been dead just moments ago, so how could it be moving now? Skylar looked like she expected something more to happen. When it didn’t, she buried her beak back into the spell book, and as she read, a gust of wind blew some of the leaves up off the ground, exposing what lay beneath them: a scattering of elk bones, left behind by forest-dwelling wolves.
The same breeze sent the excess powder from the stump sprinkling down onto the gnawed skeletal remains. Skylar, still searching the text, failed to notice the bones of the great elk starting to reassemble themselves behind her. Aldwyn watched aghast and fascinated as the jigsaw puzzle of hooves and antlers pieced itself together, one cracked bone at a time.
What kind of dark magic was Skylar dabbling in?
Finally, she looked up, just in time to see the skeletal elk reborn. She seemed terrified and at the same time thrilled by what she had accidentally brought to life. Then the creature charged. Skylar instantly took to the air, as the reborn elk galloped blindly forward.

It was only then that Aldwyn realized that the creature was heading straight toward him. He braced himself as the skeleton collided with the trunk of the tree behind which he was hiding. When it hit, its bones shattered; rib cage, vertebrae, and antlers split apart once more, dropping back down to the ground in a lifeless heap. Skylar, rather unbothered by it all, returned to the book and her beetle, but Aldwyn had no intention of sticking around to see what spell she would cast
next. He high-tailed it out of there before he was spotted, thankful to still have his limbs intact.

Aldwyn ran for the cottage without looking back and took to the orange tree he had spotted earlier, effortlessly climbing up the bark and across the branch to the safety of the rooftop. Heart still beating rapidly, he sat himself down next to the weather vane, took a deep breath, and peered out over the Aridifian Plains. Far, far away in the distance, he thought he could make out the light at the top of Bridgetower’s spired watchtower. As he stared at it, Aldwyn thought of what this night would have been like back home: sleeping with one eye open, his paw clutching the scraps of food he had scrounged that day, guarding them against other alley strays who would attack him for even the smallest morsel of fish. It had been the only life he’d ever known, orphaned as a kitten, with no memories of his mother or father or what kind of alley cats they must have been. But here in Stone Runlet he would walk a very different path, one that was dangerous and unpredictable but also filled with a sense of purpose, of something larger than himself.

Aldwyn’s eyes began to close. Both of them. So here he would stay. He would learn to be Jack’s familiar, magic skills or no magic skills.
Familiar.
How strange that word sounded in his head, when in fact there was nothing familiar about this world to him at all.

5

WALKABOUT

“A
ldwyn?!” cried Jack. “Aldwyn, where are you?”

Aldwyn stretched his paws as far as he could, still half asleep on the roof of the cottage.

“Aldwyn?!” called Jack again, his voice growing more concerned.

Aldwyn’s eyes opened wide, and he quickly got his bearings. Giant puffy clouds were racing across the sky, swallowing up the sun for a moment, but burning off just as quickly as they had come. The autumn scent of falling leaves floated in the air,
an unaccustomed smell to a cat who had spent his life in the city. He peered over the edge of the roof and saw Jack searching the yard frantically, barefoot and still dressed in his cotton sleeping shirt.

“I’m up here,” said Aldwyn.

When Jack saw his familiar, his face flooded with relief.

“What are you doing up there?” he asked. “I thought you’d run away.”

“Sorry. I’m just used to sleeping under the stars.”

“Well, come on. We have to get ready for our walkabout.”

Aldwyn scurried across the roof to the tree branch and back down to the ground, walking up alongside Jack and rubbing his head against the boy’s ankles.

“I better get changed,” said Jack, bending down to scratch Aldwyn’s ear. The alley cat’s tail curled happily. “You should head over to the runlet and drink some water. It’s going to be a long day.”

“I’m not that thirsty,” replied Aldwyn, wanting to avoid another run-in with the swimming eyeballs.

Jack ran back into the cottage and almost collided with Dalton and Skylar as they were stepping out into the sunshine.

“Be sure to check your boots before you put them on,” Dalton warned Jack. “I saw your sister carrying a handful of marsh berries.”

“Hey, why do you have to ruin all my fun?” Marianne asked Dalton as she and Gilbert came outside right behind him. She gave Dalton a playful push, the kind fourteen-year-old girls give fourteen-year-old boys they like.

It wasn’t long before Kalstaff emerged from the cottage dressed in his wilderness cloak with his rod floating by his side. Jack followed behind, now wearing a tunic with leather laces up the front.

“Today we shall walk to the edge of the Borderlands,” announced Kalstaff. “Remember to bring your botanical field guides and quills. You will be taking notes.” Jack sighed, disappointed.

“Oh, and I almost forgot,” continued the elder wizard. “Have any of you seen
Wyvern and Skull’s Tome of the Occult
? It seems to have gone missing from the spell library last night.” Aldwyn immediately knew the culprit and stole a glance at Skylar.
She nervously shifted from one foot to the other, but nobody else seemed to notice. “I don’t want to discourage private study, of course,” said Kalstaff, “but let me warn you: this is a very dangerous book about necromancy, one whose spells of the dead can be corrupting in inexperienced hands.”

A tense silence followed. Despite Skylar’s skittishness, she remained stone-faced, and Aldwyn was in no position to reveal her secret. With none of his pupils coming forward, Kalstaff let the issue go unresolved for now.

“Very well, then. Let us be off.” Kalstaff waved his hand over his rod, and it immediately transformed into a large walking stick. Aldwyn watched as the old wizard headed for the trees, which seemed to open a path for him.

Even on the sunniest of days, glorious days like this one, the Forest Under the Trees was cloaked in emerald shade. No ray of light could penetrate the two-hundred-foot canopy of green that protected the woodland floor.

As they were heading deep into the shadowy forest, Kalstaff began a long-winded lecture on the
vegetative rarities unique to this isolated region, from lavender fungus to dew algae. Aldwyn could barely keep his eyes open as Kalstaff’s lesson turned to such snoozeworthy topics as “Proper Ivy Handling Techniques” and “The Advantages of Chopped versus Diced Pine Needles.” Aldwyn was more interested in looking up at the day bats that were flying in circles overhead.

Gilbert, who was lagging behind, stopped midhop as he passed a puddle of morning dew that had collected in an oversize leaf.

“Whoa, I think I’m seeing something,” said Gilbert to the two other familiars. “A vision. It looks like some kind of wyrm dragon.”

Skylar peered over his shoulder, then said in her usual exasperated tone, “You mean the reflection of that caterpillar up in the tree?”

Gilbert looked up and saw a black, prickly caterpillar that was clinging to a twig. “Huh. Well, puddle viewing isn’t an exact science.”

“Puddle viewing?” asked Aldwyn curiously.

“Gilbert comes from the Daku Swamp Forest,” explained Skylar, “where all the tree frogs are born with the power of divination—able to see visions
of past, present, and future in pools of water.”

“Neat,” said Aldwyn, as the trio resumed their walk, following behind Kalstaff and the young wizards. “What kind of tricks can
you
do?”

“
Tricks
are for circus monkeys,” Skylar responded, a little bit insulted. “I’m an illusionist, like all the birds from Nearhurst Aviary.” Aldwyn wasn’t entirely sure what sort of wizardry that entailed, but he was certain bringing elk bones to life in the woods was well outside what she claimed her talent to be.