The Wizard's Map (6 page)

Peter,” Jennifer said, “that red jewel wasn't here before.” She set down the booklet and went to pick up the map.

“Wasn't where?”

“In the turban. It was only a plain turban before. And it wasn't even on the map. See?”

“What
are
you talking about?” Peter asked. His voice seemed lined with resentment. He hardly even sounded like Peter.

“I don't know,” Jennifer said, but softly, so as not to annoy him any more. “The map, the Patience games, the objects in the attic—they're all linked somehow. Like tumblers in a lock. Each one opens it a bit more.”

“You're not making sense, Jennifer,” Peter said gruffly.

“Just play the next game, Peter.”

He got ready to deal out Puss in the Corner, with the kind of ferocity he usually reserved for games like soccer, shuffling the cards with quick, angry movements.

Jennifer picked up the booklet again and found the right page. “‘This game is a derivative from the original Patience,'” she read aloud, stumbling a bit over the words.

“Whatever,” muttered Peter. “Hurry up, Jennifer.”

“‘The first step,'” she read,“‘is to take out the four aces, and to place them face upward, so as to form a square. Having dutifully shuffled the rest of the cards...'” She continued reading till the end of the instructions, but then instead of watching Peter's cards, she glanced over at the map.

As the game progressed, card upon card, the cat in the box on the map had taken on color. It went from no color at all to a perfect pearly white, as if the invisible hand now wielded a paintbrush.

“There!” said Peter after about ten minutes. “Done”

And done, too, was the white cat on the map, its whiskers a steely grey—like wires—its eyes a shade of amber, and its nails a shimmery sort of black.

“Peter...” Jennifer began, “the map...”

But he paid no attention to her. “The Four Marriages next,” he said. “Come on, Jennifer. Come on. Read to me how to set out the next tableau.”

This game took both packs of cards, and Jennifer began reading even before Peter had finished shuffling the packs together.

“‘Take the first thirteen cards that come to hand.'” She stopped. “Thirteen, Peter. I'm not sure that's a good number to be playing with.”

“Don't be daft,” he said to her, his voice as grey and steely as the cat's whiskers. “Just read.”

Wondering what “daft” was, Jennifer read.

Peter played.

And on the map, the four brides' faces were slowly drawn in with almost photographic realism.

Jennifer was startled when she realized that she actually recognized all four of the brides. One was Gran with her shiny white hair, one was Mom with that pair of deep dimples, one was Molly under glossy chestnut curls, and one was Jennifer herself, her red hair teasing from beneath a bridal veil. The white gowns suddenly shimmered like painted silk and, diagonally across the map, the white cat shimmered as well. Jennifer squinted her eyes and it seemed to her as if there were lines drawn across the map from the white of the cat to the white of the gowns.

“Peter!” she cried, grabbing as many of the cards as she could from the table. “That's enough! We're going about this the wrong way!”

He looked up at her, his eyes not Peter's eyes at all. “Gi'e me the cards, Jennifer.”

His voice wasn't Peter's, either, and she realized in that moment whose voice it was. She'd only heard it speak four sentences. But the slow, drawling, commanding tone was unmistakable.

“Michael Scot!” she said, almost in a whisper.

“Too bad ye didn't let Peter play the next game,” said Michael Scot. “My demon would ha'e loved him. Lads are so succulent afore they grow beards, and my imp has e'er had a monstrous sweet tooth.” He laughed, a strange and awful sound, especially coming out of Peter's mouth.

“So you were the one who finished Peter's game before,” she said.

“Not finished. I canna finish it. Not on my ain. Not wi'oot the map in my possession. Silly of me. But I canna resist a trick.”

“What do you want from us?” Jennifer asked.

“Answer me yer own riddle, and I'll give ye the round,” Michael Scot's voice in Peter's mouth replied.

Jennifer went very still.
Riddles.
One of the Minor magics. If Gran was right, then whatever Jennifer said next was terribly important. Yet how could she possibly know what the right answer was? This wasn't some silly riddle, like “Why did the chicken cross the road?” This was real. And the consequences were real.

Jennifer tried to breathe slowly and think.
What does Michael Scot want?
He had taken Molly. He needed the map. He couldn't play the card game without Peter's hands. Were any of those the answer she was looking for?

And then suddenly she remembered what Da had said—about what wizards
always
wanted.

“Power!” she answered. “And time enough to wield it.”

“Och, wee lass,” said the voice, “I will gi'e ye this round. Ye ha'e worked hard enough to earn it. And I did say I would.” He laughed again. “This round. But nae—I think—the next!”

Then all at once, like a balloon that had lost all its air, Peter's mouth went slack, his eyes went blank, and he tumbled from his kneeling position to the attic floor.

Oh, Peter!” Jennifer cried, putting her arms around him and helping him sit up.

“Sorry, Jen, I didn't mean to blub like that. It's just ... it's just I feel so helpless.” He looked at her with a strange, stunned expression.

“So you said. Before.”

“Before what?” He was clearly puzzled.

“Before you played the games.”

“What games?”

Only then did Jennifer realize that for Peter the last half hour—the three games of Patience, the changes in the map, and all their conversations in the attic—had not occurred. When Michael Scot had taken over Peter's body and mind, Peter hadn't felt a thing. Nor did he now remember any of it. It was like the time he'd fallen from the top of the slide at the town swimming pool onto the concrete and gotten an awful concussion. Everything that happened right before—and right after—the accident was gone. Forever.

Patiently, she explained what had happened.

“Jen, this sounds crazy.
You
sound crazy.”

“Any crazier,” she asked, “than stealing Molly away from the kitchen while we watched?”

Peter shook his head miserably.
That
he remembered. “So what can we do?”

“Do?” She had no answer.

“Maybe we should take the map, the cards, the turban, and the key and go downstairs and find Gran and Da. After all, they seem to know more about this ... crazy stuff than we do.”

She searched his face for any traces of the wizard, in case he was trying to manipulate her, but the eyes were Peter's. The voice, too.

“You're right,” she said.

***

They raced down the stairs and into the kitchen, but no one was there. No one was in the family room or the dining room or anywhere else in the house, either.

“But they wouldn't have just disappeared without leaving us a note,” said Jennifer.

“Unless..." Peter said, “unless they were disappeared by force.”

“Or by—magic.”

Magic.

The word hung in the air between them. For a moment it silenced them both.

“Then what should we do now?” Peter asked at last.

“Call the police.”

“Right—and say that a thirteenth-century wizard just stole our little sister and our parents and our sort-of grandparents in the hopes of making a trade for a map that makes crop circles when it's not being a magic bank. And that same wizard made me play three games of Patience and he has a demon that likes to have beardless boys for ... for pudding? They'll put us
both
in a Scottish loony bin.”

She had to admit that he was right. “Then..." She paused. “Then it's up to us to find them by ourselves.”

“How?”

They were back to that again. And they might have gone around and around, trying to figure out a logical next step and getting nowhere, but a strange sound outside the kitchen door suddenly broke through their argument.

Peter peered out the window. “Jen—there's a white cat out there, rolling around in the grass and making funny noises. Look.”

Jennifer crowded next to him and looked. There indeed was the white cat, on its back, wriggling about in the raised herb garden.

“Catnip,” she said to Peter.

“Catnip?”

“Gran told me she'd planted it. I thought it odd at the time.”

They stared for a moment at one another, then nodded. Without needing to say a word, they knew where it was they had to go.

The minute they opened the door, the cat leaped up and ran off, toward the rose arbor.

“Come on,” Jennifer said. She had the map in one hand, the key in the other. Peter was carrying the turban and the cards.

They followed the white cat through the arbor and around the great holm oak whose trunk was bound by the ironwork seat. Their feet thunked solidly on the paving stones and then crunched onto the gravel path, where the high stone wall suddenly hid Gran and Da's cottage from view.

The white cat never looked around to see if they were following, but skittered down the pathway in front of them.

Peter, who was slightly ahead of Jennifer, called over his shoulder, “How can there be this much forest in a garden?”

At the sound of his voice, the little white cat suddenly took off, straight into the woods, between two enormous, brooding trees.

Peter stopped, waiting for Jennifer to catch up with him, which she did within five steps. But instead of stopping, she passed right by him and plunged after the white cat through the dark trees.

Reluctantly, Peter had to follow.

As soon as they got into the woods, day became dark. There were only occasional shafts of light filtering down from infrequent breaks in the green canopy above. They had to blunder along, pushing through interlacings that were filled with things that scratched and stung their hands or slapped at their faces, for the forest was trackless.

Once Jennifer thought she saw a small green snake with jeweled scales cross in front of her. Another time a dragonfly the size of a hair clip hovered on faceted wings by her face.

Peter kept seeing the liquid shine of unblinking eyes, some round as quarters, some slotted like splinters of steel, staring out at him from the brush.

They were both afraid, but still they kept on, even more afraid to stop now that they had started. They worried about Molly and what the wizard would do with her; they worried about the disappearance of the grown-ups. But they did not worry about themselves. They felt they were somehow armored against the magic, for hadn't Jennifer already defeated the wizard once?

So they continued following the white cat, which—whenever they fell behind even the slightest bit—would stop and lick its fur until they caught up again.

“Where ... are ... we?” Peter said after about ten minutes of difficult slogging through the underbrush. He was breathing heavily between each word.

“In ... the ... woods,” Jennifer answered, not bothering to either stop or turn around. She had as litde breath as Peter.

“I know that!” His voice followed after her, full of exasperation; and he added, all in one big rush, “We must be going around in circles, Jen. There can't be this much forest in a walled garden.”

She was about to turn on him and say something just as exasperated back, when they stumbled into the little glade. It was shimmering in full sunshine, and motes of light danced about like insects. Or fairies.

In the center of the glade was the litde summer hoose. The white cat, curled in a corner of the front step, was once again fast asleep.

“Oh, Jen!” Peter said. “You were right. About the garden and the house.”

She bit back a sharp reply and held up the key. “Do you want to open the door and go in first, or should I?”

***

All their combined courage, suddenly and without warning, seemed to leak away.

Jennifer fumbled with the key and couldn't seem to get it into the keyhole. Peter leaned halfway over, hands on knees, as if trying to catch his breath. And when the key finally fit the hole and was turned, the door creaked open—with that awful squeaking sound that signals horrors to come in a movie.

Neither one of them moved forward.

“I'll go ..” Jennifer said, but didn't.

“No, I'll...” Peter started, then stopped.

The white cat stood, stretched slowly, and arched its back. Then it brushed past Jennifer's legs, its tail tickling against her right calf, and stalked into the summer hoose, leaving them both behind.

Peter looked at Jennifer and she looked back. They shrugged away any lingering fears and followed the white cat into the little house.

Molly was sitting on a canopy bed that occupied the center of the room, looking dazed in a white bridal dress and veil. Beside her were Gran and Mom, and they were dressed the same. In Molly's lap was the doll, which now had hair as red as Jennifer's, peeking out beneath a veil.

And slumped in wicker cages hanging from the cottage ceiling were Da and Pop.

Jennifer and Peter gasped and ran to the bed, but before they could speak, the fire in the massive stone fireplace roared to life and the door slammed shut behind them.

“I thought,” came Michael Scot's slow drawl, “that ye two minikins would ne'er get here ... in time.”

Peter turned around at once. “Let them go!” he shouted. “We'll give you what you want—just let them go.”

But Jennifer did not turn. Instead she shoved the map down into her jeans pocket and whispered to her little sister, “Everything will be all right, Molls. You'll see.”