The Familiars: Secrets of the Crown (2 page)

It was a simple wind-gust spell. One that Aldwyn had heard him cast a hundred times. But nothing happened.

Then, suddenly, the cages that had held the tremor hawks disappeared, allowing the dangerous birds to go free once more.

Aldwyn watched as Sorceress Edna waved her arms frantically on the ground, but there was no ethereal helping hand to save them this time.

As the wizards and their familiars continued to plunge downwards, gathering momentum with every second, Gilbert tumbled out of Marianne’s pocket.

“Gilbert!” Marianne reached out to grab him just as a tremor hawk tried to snatch him out of the air with its beak. Fortunately, the bird mistimed its attack, and Gilbert landed on the hawk’s back, clutching its feathers in his webbed hands.

“Ahhhhhhh,” he shrieked.

Skylar seemed terrified as well, but if she was screaming, it must have been on the inside. She grabbed at Dalton’s shirt with her talons, trying in vain to slow his descent. Fortunately, her loyal was heading straight for the black ivy-covered hedge wall, which would spare him from a bone-shattering impact. Marianne looked to be headed for a safe landing too, as she was tumbling towards the reflecting pool. Jack and Aldwyn didn’t appear to be so lucky; they were on a collision course with the barren ground. Thinking fast, Aldwyn concentrated as best he could, given that he was hurtling towards his death, and focused on the nearby garden canopy.

Move, move, move
, Aldwyn repeated in his head. He wasn’t exactly an expert in this whole telekinesis thing yet. He had only recently discovered that he was a Maidenmere cat, one of the legendary black-and-white felines who had the power to move things with their minds. And while each day for the last four weeks he had continued to hone the skills born out of this revelation, he wasn’t in full control of his magical abilities yet.

At the very last second, Aldwyn managed to make the entire canopy and the frame beneath it drag across the dirt, and he and Jack landed safely on the cloth top. The frame collapsed beneath their weight, and boy and cat rolled to the ground. A nearby splash signalled that Marianne had had her own fall softened by the reflecting pool. And Dalton was climbing out of the shrubs with nothing more than a few cuts and bruises. In the distance, Aldwyn could hear the faint sound of Gilbert screaming from the tremor hawk’s back.

“What has happened to my magic?” wondered Sorceress Edna, who was hurrying, or rather waddling, towards them.

There was no time to ponder the question, as the tremors were growing louder. All six hawks were in attack formation now, and they were flying lower, heading straight for the manor, with Gilbert flailing atop the one leading the way. The day’s exercise of capturing and releasing these normally reclusive creatures of the sky would have been routine – a simple and safe class lesson. But given the fact that the human wizards had suddenly been rendered powerless, the enraged birds had become deadly foes.

As the sky-shaking predators swooped down over the reflecting pool, the columns that lined its sides began to vibrate, cracking from the base to the top. The fissures of dark energy left in the hawks’ wake finished the job, toppling large chunks of the pillars into the water. Marianne had to dive beneath the pool’s surface to avoid the crumbling debris.

The bone-rattling birds flew over the group’s heads, and Aldwyn could see Gilbert still clinging to the neck feathers of the lead hawk.

“Somebody get me off here!” Gilbert shrieked.

“Without the ability to cast spells, we’re powerless to stop them,” said Edna.

“We might be,” said Jack. “But Aldwyn’s not. His telekinesis moved the canopy.”

“Yes,” Edna concurred. “It appears whatever curse has affected us human wizards has no hold over the familiars.” She turned to Aldwyn. “If you don’t do something quickly, they’ll destroy all of Black Ivy Manor.”

Marianne had barely pulled herself out from the pool, and Dalton had only just dropped down from the hedge wall, when the tremor hawks came back around for another onslaught.

“Don’t worry, we’ll handle this,” said Skylar.

“What can we do to help?” asked Dalton.

“Just stay back. It’s too dangerous for you,” replied the blue jay. Upon hearing Skylar’s words, Aldwyn couldn’t help but think how strange it was to see that the roles between humans and animals had been reversed yet again. Normally, it was the wizards telling their familiars to stay out of harm’s way. But now it was Dalton, Marianne, Jack and Sorceress Edna who were forced to take cover behind a tall topiary.

In unison, the hawks let out another scream that sent a seismic blast reverberating through the air, causing the trees to bend and sway.

“You need to get Gilbert off the back of that hawk,” said Skylar to Aldwyn. “I’ll see what I can do about our rude guests.”

Aldwyn nodded and looked up at Gilbert, who had an expression of true terror on his face. His eyes were bulging even more than usual. Aldwyn glanced over at Jack, then back to Gilbert.

“Gilbert, help is on the way,” Aldwyn called out. He used his telekinesis to rip the flight wand out of Jack’s hand and make it fly like an arrow towards Gilbert. “Catch it!”

As the hawk made a sudden dip, all Gilbert could do to grab the wand was shoot out his tongue. He snatched it out of the air, and the wand magically jerked Gilbert upwards, off the tremor hawk’s back and into the sky.

“How dugh I uthe thith thing?” screamed Gilbert, tongue-tied.

“Don’t look at me,” Aldwyn shouted back. “I was just supposed to get you off that hawk.”

Meanwhile, Skylar had perched herself on the edge of a garden fountain, her wings outstretched and trembling. That could only mean one thing: she was preparing to cast another illusion. And indeed, a second later, a baby lamb was limping across the grounds, stopping atop the fallen canopy. And like vampire leeches drawn irresistibly to a pool of blood, the tremor hawks came down, eyeing the feast in front of them. Once they converged, the lamb disappeared. The hawks screeched angrily, clearly confused.

“Aldwyn!” shouted Skylar.

He knew just what to do. Aldwyn turned to the canopy and narrowed his eyes. A moment later, the cloth fabric was ripped telekinetically from the collapsed metal frame and was quickly wrapped into a bundle, trapping the birds inside.

Just then from above, Aldwyn heard Gilbert, whose tongue was still wrapped round the wand, shouting, “Looooo ouuuu!” Although his friend was difficult to understand, Aldwyn knew enough to get out of his way.

Gilbert was coming in for a landing, and if he had any ambition to do it gracefully, he was failing miserably. The wand jerked him left and right, up and down. The tree frog smacked against shrubs and branches before hitting the ground, bouncing along the dirt as the wand magically dragged him to a stop.

Gilbert coughed up a mouthful of mud and dust as his tongue let go of the wand. Then he looked around dizzily. “Whoa. My life just flashed before my eyes. I’ve spent a surprising amount of time picking flies out of my teeth.”

Sorceress Edna and the children came out from behind the topiary and rejoined the familiars. The tremor hawks remained tied up in the canopy cover.

Aldwyn could see by the look on Edna’s face that she was deeply unsettled. She stared blankly at the garden fountain, which was no longer flowing. Dalton was watching the topiaries, which were now motionless, standing as still as any common shrub. Jack’s attention was on the sky.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a pillar of grey smoke that was rising into the blue in the distance.

Curious and with a growing sense of dread, Aldwyn hurried to the hedge wall and scaled it. From the top, he surveyed the Vastian countryside. It was worse than he had feared: the enchanted dam that stood beyond Black Ivy Manor was gone, and water from the lake above had flooded the grazing fields. Cows and horse carts drifted aimlessly, while fish swam in and around stalks of corn. Further in the distance, the floating torches of Bronzhaven, which were always magically held aloft as a symbol of Queen Loranella’s great power, had fallen, igniting the palace walls. And lightning storms and thunderclouds, normally held at bay by the queen’s weather-binding spells, were forming over the lush green hills to the south, moving in on the great expanse of plains west of the Yennep Mountains and east of the Ebs River. This stretch of grassland, once known for its tranquillity and peacefulness, was in ruins.

Aldwyn felt his stomach do a somersault for the second time today. But unlike before, it wasn’t adrenalin or gravity that was twisting his insides. It was the realisation that something terrible had befallen Vastia: all the spells and enchantments that wizards had cast upon the land had vanished. Human magic was gone.

“Have there been any reports of humans casting magic since the
green flash
?” Queen Loranella enquired of the council and the concerned citizens who had gathered in the grand hall of the New Palace of Bronzhaven. Not a single voice called back from the room – the only response was a shaking of heads and anxious murmurings.

Aldwyn sat in Jack’s lap in the back row of the high-ceilinged chamber, alongside Dalton, Marianne, Skylar and Gilbert. The six of them had travelled here with Sorceress Edna, who had received word of the emergency meeting from one of the queen’s courier eagles shortly after the disenchantment. By the time they had taken to the roads, most of the water released by the dam had sunk into the earth, so at least the group was spared having to swim to the palace. Instead, they made the short trip on foot, witnessing some of the profound effects already being felt by the loss of magic: the enchanted scythes that were responsible for chopping down the wheat and corn crops lay lifeless on the ground, awaiting human hands to manually use them; healing wizards were turning away sick patients from their doorsteps, unable to help them; and rock beetles were pouring out from the ground now that the bug plugs were broken – an unpleasant nuisance to everyone but Gilbert. While their old teacher, Kalstaff, would have surely kept his concern and worry hidden from his young pupils, Sorceress Edna wasn’t shy about sharing her own. “This is bad, very, very bad,” she kept repeating until they had reached the castle, whose walls were charred and smoking from the fires caused by the fallen torches.

Aldwyn looked to the front of the grand hall, where the queen was standing at the head of a long, crescent-shaped table, five chairs to her left, another five to her right. The men and women occupying the chairs wore different-coloured wizarding robes, all distinct to their local region. Each was accompanied by their familiar – ranging from the common pot-bellied weasel to the truly bizarre wall-crawling dingo.

“Those ten sitting on either side of Queen Loranella are the council elders,” Dalton whispered to Marianne. “They represent each of the ten provinces of Vastia.”

The room itself was grand, with high-vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows, the largest of which depicted a swirl of silver dust rising up above the Peaks of Kailasa. Hundreds of notables had gathered to fill the benches that stretched in long rows across the hall. Wizards and non-spellcasters alike sat side by side, waiting impatiently for answers.

“The spirits from the Tomorrowlife have come back to curse us,” a voice shouted from the crowd.

“No, it’s an
estriutus burst
,” another citizen interrupted.

“I’ll wager my goat farm that those ore miners in Kailasa struck a spell vacuum – sucked all the magic out of the world!” said a country villager. Aldwyn thought his theory even more desperate than the first two.

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” said Queen Loranella in a steady voice that was comforting in spite of the gravity of the situation. “This is neither a cosmic event nor an accident. It’s a purposeful attack, and a focused one at that: not all magic has been displaced from Vastia, only that cast by humans. And it is no coincidence that animals have retained their gifts. I am certain that it is an animal who is responsible for bringing this dispelling curse upon our land.”

Aldwyn knew just who the queen was talking about.

“Paksahara,” Queen Loranella continued. “A spell so powerful and encompassing could only have been cast from the Shifting Fortress. And since she stole my wooden bracelet, Paksahara is the only one with the ability to harness its powers.”

Aldwyn had been told of the Shifting Fortress, a secret tower whose location changed each day. From the top of the Fortress, powerful spells could be cast that affected all of Vastia. He knew that while under the control of the queen, the Fortress had been used to protect the lands – but he shuddered to think how Paksahara would wield its ancient magic.

“Well, I will not just lay down my wand and give up,” a bearded wizard called from the crowd. “I’ll defend myself with sword, and shield, and bare fists if needed!”

“Urbaugh won’t be the only one. I’ll be at my brother’s side,” said another citizen in the hall, who definitely shared a family resemblance to the bearded wizard. “Who here is frightened by a carrot-eating hare anyway?”

Defiant laughter briefly lightened the mood. They wouldn’t be laughing, Aldwyn thought, if they had seen Paksahara’s skills of sorcery or the coldness behind her pink eyes.

“Her spell will never hold!” shouted a townswoman. “This will all be over by the morning’s sun.”

These boasts, as unsubstantiated as they might have been, still seemed to lift the morale of the masses and rally the hall.

Queen Loranella raised her hand to quieten the people. “I’d like to hear what the council—”

Just then, what sounded like nails scraping across a mirror screeched through the hall. Aldwyn looked up to see the circular pane of stained glass – the one that depicted the Kailasa mountains – begin to transform. The triangles of different-coloured glass began to shift, rearranging on their own to form a different picture – that of the grey hare, Paksahara. The image smiled down menacingly on the assembled, and then the lips of the stained-glass hare started forming words.

“Question: What’s a wizard without magic?” Paksahara’s voice taunted them. “Dragon food,” she continued, as her nose twitched happily.

Dalton had to hold Skylar by her tail feathers to keep her from flying up, so spitting mad was the blue jay.

“Now, I’d love to take all the credit for this cruel turn of events, but you have Loranella to thank as well,” continued the face in the glass. “If it wasn’t for my old loyal foolishly underestimating me, I never would have been able to betray her.”

“I know how much you desire my crown,” said Queen Loranella, “but what good will it be if no one is there to follow you?”

“You may rule with the will of the people,” replied Paksahara, “but I shall do it under the fear of clenched paw.”

“When I find you, you’ll face the sharp end of my blade,” threatened Urbaugh, rising to his feet.

“And while you’re off searching for me, who will be there to protect your family?” asked Paksahara, a frightening chill in her voice.

The word ‘family’ made Aldwyn snuggle closer to Jack. It was perhaps the thing he longed for more than any other.

“We defeated you once,” shouted Skylar, her voice bold and trumpeting. “Don’t think we won’t come after you again.”

Gilbert cowered inside Marianne’s shirt pocket. “Speak for yourself,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

The pink panes that formed Paksahara’s stained-glass eyes turned to the three familiars in the back row.

“Such animosity,” said the hare, “when we’re on the same side. If you were smart, you’d leave your loyals behind and join me. Many animals already have.”

“We’re the Prophesised Three.” Aldwyn jumped in. “It’s our destiny to stop you.”

“Prophesies are made to be broken,” said Paksahara. “I won’t underestimate you this time. I even considered disenchanting animal magicians, just to eliminate you as a threat. But that would have left me in a bit of a pickle.”

Queen Loranella spoke up again, and this time her voice sounded fierce.

“Why do you choose to show yourself like this?” she enquired of her former trusted companion. “What is it you want?”

Paksahara turned her glass face back to the queen. “For all on two feet to bow down before me. For you to relinquish your throne and pledge your allegiance to the original rulers of Vastia. For you to let me enslave you, the way you did me – you called me familiar, but in reality I was nothing more than your servant.”

“I was your loyal and you my companion. We were a team,” said the queen. “I will never bow down to you.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. I’m quite looking forward to hearing you beg for mercy.” The sunlight gleamed through Paksahara’s stained-glass visage – it was strange for something so terrifying to be so beautiful too. “Upon the arrival of the next full moon, a new Dead Army will rise, one comprising animals, and it will not stop marching and conquering until every human has surrendered to it.”

The glass panes began to shake once more, but this time, instead of reforming into their original picture, the window shattered. Triangles of coloured glass, sharp as knives, rained down upon the queen and her councillors. Elders ducked beneath the table, while the gathered townsfolk covered their heads with their arms. With no magic to protect them, the shattered glass impaled itself in flesh and fur. It was only after the last shards had settled that humans and animals came out from their hiding spots. But they did so cautiously, fearing that Paksahara could return at any moment. A quick survey told Aldwyn that, fortunately, no one was badly hurt from the blast; as far as he could see, there were just cuts and grazes. Queen Loranella signalled everyone to return to their seats.

“Let’s not panic,” she said, trying to bring a sense of peace back to the grand hall.

“If we are to have any hope at all of regaining our magic, we must find the Shifting Fortress,” said Sorceress Edna, rising to her feet. “It is the only way to stop Paksahara’s plot.”

One of the council elders, wearing a blue scarf on her head, spoke up. “We can put together a team of trackers and a volunteer citizen army. Try to have eyes everywhere at once.”

“No, Vastia is too big,” responded Queen Loranella thoughtfully. “We have only eight days until the full moon rises. Without the bracelet, finding the Fortress is a hopeless task.”

A hush descended on the hall, and there was a silence that seemed to go on for ever, until the elder from the Estovian province, recognisable by his black gown, spoke up. “There might be another way,” he offered. He had grey, lifeless skin and eyes sunk back deep into his sockets. Only patches of long stringy hair remained on his scalp, as if the rest had fallen out in clumps.

“If you hold truths, speak now, Feynam,” said the queen.

“I have no knowledge of the Shifting Fortress’s secrets. But if I still had my magic, there’s someone I would talk to – the famed architect Agorus, the man who built the Fortress itself. Of course, given the circumstances, I’m unable to commune with the dead.”

“Then why did you even bring it up?” shouted a voice from the crowd. “You’re just wasting our time.”

“We need another plan,” said a different citizen.

Out of the corner of his eye, Aldwyn saw Skylar whisper something into Dalton’s ear. Then he watched as the fourteen-year-old boy slowly began to nod. Dalton stood up and cleared his voice. A familiar could communicate with their loyal and any master wizard, one who had the many years of training needed to become adept at comprehending animal tongue. But common man and lesser wizards were unable to understand the words that animals spoke.

“My familiar can do it,” Dalton told everyone. “Skylar has become versed in more schools of magic than the one her kind is born with. She has studied necromancy. She believes she can speak to the non-living.”

Aldwyn knew his fellow familiar had experimented with dangerous magic. He had watched her try to bring a beetle back from the dead, with hair-raising results. He also suspected there was more to the mysterious bejewelled anklet she wore than she had yet revealed. But as every single head in the hall turned towards Skylar, he wondered whether the blue jay would really be able to do what she had just claimed she could.

“She is a blue jay,” said Feynam. “Her talent is illusions. No animal has ever been known to commune with the dead. Why should she be different?”

“She strives for more,” said Dalton, defending his familiar.

“Such conjuring is forbidden for non-humans,” said another member of the council. “Look what happened to Paksahara!”

“Things are changing,” said Queen Loranella. “And with our own magic gone, we have to put faith in our animal friends.”

The queen left her spot behind the table and walked down the aisle towards Skylar, who remained perched on Dalton’s shoulder.

“You familiars are just full of surprises, aren’t you?” she said, a note of hope coming through in her words. “Perhaps this is the next step in your journey to fulfil the prophecy.”

By mid-morning the next day, the queen’s royal carriage was rolling south, across the Brannfalk Pass and towards the rolling hills that hugged the east bank of the Enaj. Without the aid of Loranella’s swift-step spell, the horses pulling the coach could only travel as fast as their own hooves could gallop. The queen had decided to leave at dawn, concerned they wouldn’t be able to find what they were looking for by moonlight alone.

From inside the gold-trimmed carriage, Aldwyn stared out at the lush green slopes and flocks of sheep, whose wool had taken on the same emerald hue as the grass they ate. He sat on Jack’s lap; his loyal looked eagerly out of the window as well, for as little of this land as Aldwyn had seen, Jack had glimpsed even less. Dalton and Marianne were seated beside them, along with Skylar and Gilbert. Marianne had dozed off, her head slumped on Dalton’s shoulder. Skylar studied a pocket scroll on necromancy, reading the words silently to herself as she prepared for the task ahead.