The Real Boy (10 page)

“What’s it like?” Oscar said, after a moment. “The City?”

Callie thought for a moment. “Very shiny,” she said finally.

And then they had come around the bend and joined the carriage path, and there ahead of them rose the towering stone walls of the Shining City.

“Oh,” Oscar said.

“I know,” Callie said.

People could make walls very high if they set their minds to it. These walls seemed as tall as a grove of wizard trees, and no less unearthly. They were made of thick bricks of some white stone Oscar had never seen before. He didn’t know how there could be that much stone in all of Aletheia. Great red flags emblazoned with golden birds fluttered on top of the walls. An intricate and decidedly pointy iron gate awaited them at the end of the suddenly very wide path. And the path was lined with hedges that had been sculpted so they looked like great birds, one after another, standing sentry—because apparently plants could be carved just like small pieces of wood.

It was something how the path curved around the hill just so someone’s first view of the City would be the grandest possible one.

“Let’s go,” Callie whispered.

Oscar sucked in his breath and stepped forward.

When he’d first seen the flags, Oscar had thought the strange birds pictured on them were perched upon oddly colorful nests, but as they got closer Oscar realized that that wasn’t it at all.

“Why are the birds on fire?” he whispered to Callie, pointing up.

Callie glanced up. “They’re phoenixes. They do that.”

Two guards stood perfectly erect at either end of the iron gates, holding matching spears. They were dressed like birds themselves, in bright red uniforms lined with gold roping (a specialty of the Barrow’s own Master Joseph) and adorned with glinting gold buttons. On top of their heads sat enormous fuzzy hatlike objects, shaped like upside-down haystacks about half an Oscar high, lined with red, yellow, and gold feathers. The hats seemed to suggest flames, if flames were made of feathers and looked ridiculous.

Oscar glanced up at Callie. She was not laughing.

So he would not, either.

Callie approached the guards and bowed deeply. “I’m the healer’s apprentice, and this is the magician’s hand,” she said, flashing her pin and motioning to Oscar. She bobbed her head at him slightly, and he understood he was supposed to bow, too, so he jerked himself stiffly forward. “We were invited.” She handed one of them a thick piece of paper. The guard squinted at it, then turned it around and examined it from different angles. Then he held it up to the sunlight and squinted some more.

Callie’s eyes slid over to Oscar and then rolled ever so slightly back. He understood now: This was what she did when people were ridiculous.

“Everything seems in order,” the guard finally said. “I trust you’ll be leaving before nightfall.”

Oscar glanced at Callie. He trusted that, too.

“Certainly,” Callie said.

And so the guards opened the big gates, walking in perfect synchronization, legs kicking up strangely as they took their giant steps. It seemed like a lot of work to open a door. Oscar tried to roll his eyes back, ever so slightly. But Callie wasn’t looking.

They entered into a large courtyard made of a dizzying pattern of yellow and white stone bricks. Each brick was a square, each four bricks formed another, and then sixteen another—you could spend your whole life counting how many squares were in the courtyard. Or at least you could if you were Oscar. He looked up quickly.

A four-tiered fountain stood proudly in the middle of the courtyard, with streams of water spilling exuberantly down, because in the City apparently even water was a decoration.

A three-story, horseshoe-shaped building framed the courtyard. Oscar hadn’t known buildings could bend like that. The white stone of the building was the same as they had in the Barrow, but it looked so much cleaner and brighter up here against the bright blue sky—and much more sparkly, due to the gold trim that edged everything. Each story was lined with huge person-sized windows, and every one had a window box bursting with bright, rich pops of enormous flowers, more beautiful than Oscar had ever seen.

“That’s where the duke lives,” Callie whispered.

“In which part?”

“All of it.”

The City people milled around them, wearing their bright lavish clothes made from Barrow magic. In their swooshing layers and extraordinary colors, they popped and swirled and glittered against the white stone around them—which made them look just as bountiful, brilliant, and unearthly as the flowers above. There were many thousands of them walking within the walls, and they all looked like this.

The sky touched everything; Oscar had never been this close to it before, and the sun poked at his eyes. With the wind came a thick salty smell—
the sea
, Oscar’s mind whispered to him. His stomach shifted.

It was all wrong. Too many colors, too many people; strange bricks underneath his feet; foreign and possibly poisonous air in his lungs; the lack of magic pulling at his skin. And even with so much around, it was so terribly empty. Everything in Oscar clenched. He felt like a farm animal who had wandered into the Barrow by mistake. He tightened his fist around Block.

“Come on,” Callie whispered, tugging at his arm. “This way.”

They moved through the courtyard, the City people oblivious to the children passing by. Oscar and Callie were made of grays and browns and bones and skin and had no place up here. They were like mice skittering through a congregation of peacocks.

They skittered under one of the archways beneath the building and found themselves on a small street lined with thin, rectangular houses packed side to side like mismatched books on a shelf. Here, the houses shone with color—pink, yellow, blue, purple, green. More flowers burst out of window boxes and pots by the doorways, and they were all perfect—nothing wilted, nothing thirsty, nothing straining for sun or shadow.

That was the thing with the City, Oscar realized as they walked. It wasn’t made of gold or encrusted with diamonds. No enchantment made the place truly shine. It was just that everything was unstained by anything like wear or want, so carefree as to sport exuberant embellishments—swirling patterns in the wrought-iron balconies, gold door knockers with faces of animals, sculpted frames around the doorways, ornate ridging on the roofs, little statues on the staircases, flowerpots with flowers painted redundantly on them, even a fountain with a sculpture of a baby with big fluffy wings. And the people were the same way: gilded with plenty, unsullied by suffering. Someone who thinks of possessing a fountain made of a winged baby with water shooting out of its mouth must not have too many troubles.

Callie motioned to the statue. “I know. It’s ridiculous. People in the east pay them so much rent the villages barely get by, and they’re buying vomiting baby fountains.”

They turned a corner and walked toward a man dressed in pleats and puffs and one carefully placed feather who was accompanied by a little girl, no more than five, with swinging skirts and a great velvet bow in her hair. She carried a little rag doll in her hands. The girl stopped when she saw them, and then reached up as if to touch Callie’s thick curls.

“Julia!” said the lord.

Even Oscar knew you weren’t supposed to do that.

“Your hair is pretty,” the girl said.

“No, it’s all right.” Callie bent down and let the girl stroke her hair. “Thank you. Your hair is pretty, too, Julia.”

“It is,” said her father, shining like a star. “She’s perfect.”

“That’s how they’re supposed to look,” Callie muttered as they walked on. “Glowing. All my time with Madame Mariel, I’ve seen only one City child be sick, really sick. And that was three years ago. They’re all so
healthy
. Or at least they used to be. Here we are.”

Callie motioned to a pink house that looked as if it had been built yesterday. “These are the people who sent for me today.”

Oscar beheld the house. No stone baby burbled here, but there were two matching statues of men wearing wreaths on their heads—and nothing else. Oscar’s eyes darted away as Callie brushed off her cloak, fixed her hair, and poised herself to knock.

“Wait!” he said.

“What?”

“Wh-what do I do?” His eyes felt like they were as wide as his face. “What do I say?”

Callie turned to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “It will be fine, Oscar. It’s just like the shop. Just pretend. That’s what I’m doing.”

Caleb’s not here; is there something I can help you with?

“Callie—”

“What?”

“I don’t know how to pretend.”

Callie’s hands tightened on his shoulders and she looked him in the eye. “Well, pretend you do.”

A woman in a simple black dress let them in and led them immediately down a hallway into a parlor. The house interior was like nothing Oscar had ever seen—a chaos of colors and patterns and objects and textures. The walls were covered in thick, intricately patterned paper; the furniture was all swirls, plush, and gilt; and
things
were scattered everywhere—tiny statues and figurines and vases and little tables perched on delicate bird legs that seemed they couldn’t hold more than the lace that covered them. Nothing made any sound, but it was still the noisiest place Oscar had ever been.

Callie was greeting a lord and lady while Oscar focused on a small blue speck in the rug under his feet and tried to keep the noise from drowning him. “I am Madame Mariel’s apprentice,” she was saying, voice like a bell. “She is out on urgent business—”

“Everyone’s gone!” the lady said, throwing up her hands. “Caleb, the healer . . . What business could they possibly have that’s more urgent than this?”

“It’s all right,” Callie said, as sure and mighty as a tree. “She is deeply concerned, and so she wanted me to come right away to see you and gather information. I’ll tell her everything and then come back.” She held her hand out toward Oscar. He started. He had forgotten he was there. “This is Oscar, Master Caleb’s hand. He’ll be assisting me.”

Oscar started to bow. Callie shook her head slightly. No. No bowing.

The parents didn’t even blink, just led the two of them up the stairs and into a bedroom, the mother whispering things to Callie as they walked. A little girl with black ringlets and plump cheeks was sitting on a big yellow chair in the front of the room, looking just as perfect as the rest of them, though her shoulders were hunched and her eyes were too wide, as if she’d been startled once and had never gone back to normal. She was biting her lip and yanking on a ringlet. She kicked her feet in the air slowly, rhythmically, revealing shiny red shoes. Oscar looked at Callie.

“No,” said the lady to his unasked question. “In the bed.”

The lady motioned toward the other end of the room, where there was a wide bed and a pile of lush blankets on top. Except it wasn’t a pile—a boy was underneath it all, a little younger than Oscar. He was as limp as a doll, like the one the little girl on the street had been carrying. His whole body seemed sunken into the bed, like the bed had come with the boy already in it. The boy’s head turned at his mother’s voice, revealing a face that was entirely the wrong color—some whitish-greenish-grayish hue, lips and all.

Oscar took a step back. Callie inhaled, brushed off her apron, and went over to the boy. “Hugo,” she whispered, “my name is Callie. I’m here to help you. How are you feeling?”

The boy whispered back, but whatever he’d said, it was only for Callie. She held her head close, murmured something, and then took his other hand and frowned.

She put two fingers on the boy’s wrist and held them there, murmuring quietly to him. Oscar felt a familiar pressure on his skin. He glanced over. The girl in the chair had fixed her eyes on him. She was still swinging her legs slowly, and her face was set in a strange expression, just like the one on the face of the boy they’d met in front of the shop who didn’t recognize his mother.

Oscar clutched Block in his hand. The air was thick with the noises of the boy breathing, the parents fidgeting, the rustle-swish of the girl’s skirts, and the steady banging of her feet against the chair. There were so many sounds; he had no attention left for anything else.

Callie was saying things to the parents—something about warm compresses and hot tea and massaging his limbs. Oscar stepped to the left to make way for her, and his eyes accidentally caught the girl’s and her legs stopped swinging. Her eyes did not let his go. Oscar flinched.

Then he realized: he had seen her before. Sophie, the girl in the shop with her father that first day. The lord was Lord Cooper, who had been so curious about Oscar and had asked such strange questions:
Might I ask, how long do you remember being here?

She had watched him then, too; her gaze refused to let him go until it took in every bit of him. Now her eyes were asking him something, telling him something, and Oscar felt himself getting sucked into the great gap between her need and his comprehension.

He looked at Callie helplessly, but she was busy with Hugo, so he glanced back at the girl—though it meant meeting her eyes. Those eyes looked like Pebble’s whenever the kitten was crouched in a corner hiding from Wolf.
Oscar reached over with his non-Block-clutching hand and petted her on the head. It always worked on Pebble.