Eventually, they made it through, crossing the barren wasteland of the smoking field beyond the sickly woods. The wispy snakes had vanished, the ground split in places, cracked apart by the vibrations of the Great Evil’s final quake, giving them a swift route to the hill. After passing through the crumbling wall, they walked through the desolate gardens, until they reached the front lawn of the manor. The gates stood closed, wreathed in gray ivy. Alex looked at them curiously, wondering what it would be like to see them swung open, at long last.
Virgil stepped through the crowd and stood on the top step, opening out his arms to address the masses below.
“Those of you who spent time here, I know you will struggle to trust me. I have mistreated so many under the jurisdiction of the king—you did not know him, but believe me when I say he was a cruel, callous man who made many people do terrible things. I ask for your forgiveness, on the steps of the school where you were kept prisoner,” he said solemnly. “If you cannot forgive, I understand. But, please take this final gesture as a show of my goodwill, and my desire for redemption. I shall open the gates, returning you to your homes. Wait here a moment, and you shall see it happen,” he added, before disappearing into the shadowed building. Alex and the others followed him, watching as he hurried along the hallways, lifting away clusters of ivy to reveal grates in the ground. Inside them lay small, flat golden discs. He crouched beside each one, opening the lid to reveal ticking clockwork, a barely visible sheen of something flowing through them.
Alex realized they were like the cylinders at Kingstone Keep, making the barrier flow, even when there was nobody to conjure it. The Head broke each one, the cold feeling in Alex’s stomach dissolving with each destruction.
“Mind helping me with these?” Virgil asked, turning to look over his shoulder at the group of friends.
Jari and Natalie volunteered, along with a few other former Spellshadow students. Alex assumed that they would be running along the corridors, seeking out each barrier, using magic and force to break the clockwork within. Every time Virgil moved a pile of ivy, he inhaled sharply, letting Alex know that the draining power of the plants was still at work. It took a fair while, but eventually Virgil paused, a satisfied expression on his face. As he dusted off his hands, a tight smile stretched the pallid skin of his mouth.
“Now, to open the gates,” he announced, heading back the way they had come.
Rushing down the steps, he glided toward the looming gates. His face twisted in a grimace as he tore down each vine, the power of the ivy sapping his energy, but still he persevered, until there was not a scrap left on the gates. The remnants lay in a messy heap around his feet.
From his pocket, the Head pulled a large key and placed it in the lock. A loud clunk echoed across the silent lawn as he turned it. Nobody dared to speak, their eyes set on the gates, and the hope that lay beyond them. Virgil grasped one of the bars and yanked it with all his might, the gate giving with a reluctant squeal of ancient metal. Once one side was open, he pulled the other, until both swung wide, revealing the long road with the crumbling, derelict buildings at either side.
The street no longer looked grim and gray, however. Instead, it was as if someone had gone along the rows of buildings, coloring them in, in preparation for this day.
A roar of victory went up from the crowd, but Alex could not join in. His breathing was becoming difficult, his limbs shaking, his mouth dry. He wanted so badly to be able to whoop and holler with the others, but he simply lacked the energy.
“You are free to return home!” Virgil shouted.
With that, the crowd swarmed toward the gate, walking along the road to the very end, where the camouflaging magic of the manor gave way to the real world. The glamor to keep the magical realm hidden was still in place, but the school’s barrier was long gone.
It was a happy moment, and one that the five friends, flanked by Demeter, Ceres, and Virgil, watched together.
Finally, Alex could feel that the time had come for more goodbyes, though he didn’t know if he’d be one of the people leaving. As much as he wanted to damn everything and stride down that road, it was becoming clearer by the second that he wasn’t capable.
“Okay, well, I guess we should get going, right?” Jari spoke first, breaking the awkward tension.
Aamir nodded. “Yes, I imagine we will have to figure out a route home, and who knows how long that will take.”
Alex shook his head, feeling his chest tighten. “I won’t be going with you, just yet,” he said quietly.
The group looked at him.
“Dude, you have to—this is what we’ve been waiting for!” Jari exclaimed, the disbelief written across his face.
“I can’t… I have to stay and recuperate,” Alex explained miserably, hating every word. “Right now, I feel like a zombie. If I go home to my mom like this, I’ll never forgive myself. I want to see her so badly it literally hurts my heart, but I’d rather she got her son back than this feeble mess.” Bitter tears glinted in his eyes as he balled his hands into fists against the sorrow he felt.
Natalie put her hands on his shoulders. “I think you are making a very wise, very brave choice, Alex,” she said. “And I suppose it is a good moment to say that I will not be returning either—not yet, anyway. Helena has asked that I join her, taking up the role of Deputy Head of Stillwater House, and I plan to accept.”
“What about your family?” Aamir asked, dumbfounded.
Jari nodded emphatically. “Yeah, don’t you care?”
“Of course I care, Jari. I am not as heartless as you seem to think,” she snapped, but her tone quickly calmed. “The truth is, I will see them again soon enough, once I have everything settled at Stillwater. This is simply something I must do first. I feel as if this is my life now. I belong in the magical realm—perhaps it was always meant to be this way.”
“This is insane!” Jari barked. “You’re all coming home, right now.”
“No, Jari, we are not,” Natalie said, stepping toward the blond boy. “We will go when we are ready, and we will see you again, but we have our reasons for staying. Alex needs to recover, and I need to figure out a life for myself.”
“Ellabell, tell me you’re not buying this madness?” Jari sighed, turning to Ellabell.
The curly-haired girl couldn’t meet his eye. “I will stay too, for a short while, to assist in Alex’s recovery,” she murmured quietly.
“This is a joke, right? You’re all in on this?” Jari asked, his eyes wide. “Come on, this has to be a joke!”
“It’s not a joke,” Ellabell replied simply.
Alex gazed at the young woman standing beside him. “Ellabell, you can’t stay here. You have to go back to your family. There is a life waiting for you out there,” Alex insisted, feeling a twinge of guilt that he was somehow responsible for making her stay.
She smiled. “And it can wait a little longer. You won’t change my mind.”
“Ellabell, you have to go. I’ll come and find you when I leave here, but you can’t stay for my sake,” he said, desperate not to see her give up this opportunity.
“Like I said, you won’t change my mind,” she repeated. “Where you go, I go. I’ve waited a long time for these gates to open… What’s a few months more?”
Alex swallowed hard. “And what if it’s longer than that?”
“Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said, taking his hand in hers.
Aamir and Jari shared a defeated glance. It was bittersweet; they had expected to walk through the gates together, but the group was splintering. It had done so before, under more strained circumstances, but it did not make the separation any easier. There was no telling how long it would be until they saw each other again, and the sad atmosphere that settled across them revealed that they all knew it.
“Looks like it’s just you and me for now, Petra,” Aamir sighed, forcing a smile onto his face.
Jari shook his head. “I can’t believe this.?
??
“We’ll see you again, both of you,” Alex promised.
“Yeah, you’d better! If you don’t, I’ll hunt you all down and make you,” Jari said, clearly trying to sound threatening, even though his voice was thick with emotion.
“Come on, Jari. We will return in due course. No need to worry,” Aamir encouraged, taking the tone of an older brother. Which, Alex reasoned, he kind of was.
They hugged and swore to meet again one day soon, until finally, there was no more to say. Shifting their gaze toward the horizon, Aamir and Jari walked down the long road to freedom, turning back every so often to wave and smile. It was sad and happy, both at once, and tears rolled silently down the faces of everyone present.
It was an image that would remain with Alex for the rest of his life.
Chapter 33
In the aftermath of their friends’ departure, life changed quickly for all those who remained. Natalie went to Stillwater, as promised, to help Helena set up a new school, much like Falleaf, where students were free to learn without fear. It would not only be for the elite anymore, either, with mages of all kinds coming to study there. They sent regular updates through to Alex at Falleaf, for him to read while he continued with his recovery.
Among that news was the more startling fact that Alypia had died in the mist that claimed Stillwater. She was buried with honor in the royal vault, the ceremony overseen by Venus and Virgil, who had swiftly taken charge of the magical realm, officially abolishing the essence system and initiating new laws to help with the establishment of the schools. Alex had been too unwell to make the journey to the funeral, but Ellabell had come to tell him all about it later, describing the beautiful music, Helena’s moving eulogy, and the sorrow the former Stillwater students had felt, despite what Alypia had done. When all was said and done, she had been a victim of her father too, whipped into being as cold and calculating as he was, in a bid to win his affection. Plus, no matter what sins she had to her name, she had still been Helena’s mother, and the silver-haired girl had loved her deeply, as any daughter would, so Alex’s heart went out to her.
Hadrian, Demeter, and Ceres made good on their promise to turn Falleaf into a better school too. Moving everyone to Starcross for a couple of weeks, they had refurbished the dorms and classrooms to appeal to the new starters. A fresh system began to take shape, and the students were moved back in, where they began lessons under the kind rule of Hadrian. Agatha and Vincent remained within the grounds of Falleaf, in their subterranean cottage, coming up to teach the students there. Vincent led a class on the darker side of magic, though he never strayed too far into anything potentially catastrophic, while Agatha taught students the art of healing, showing them how to make poultices and potions and pills, and how to reinforce their natural power with magic. She also told one or two choice stories, to make the students gasp in awe of the life she had lived.
Alex loved to hear these tales of how the magical realm was changing for all of their acquaintances. Usually, the news came from Agatha and Vincent, who visited him often, given that they were pretty much neighbors. Alex had been put up in a treehouse close to their underground dwelling, and most days Agatha would come over with food and tea, to ensure he was properly nourished. Vincent came with her on occasion, using his powers of necromancy to try to rebuild some of the broken strands that lay torn within him. Ceres visited often, becoming a kind of anti-magical physiotherapist. Each day, she would get him to focus on constructing shapes and objects with his anti-magic, and then she would ask him to search within himself, and use that skill upon the threads of his ripped soul. Piece by piece, he sewed himself back together, under Ceres’s instruction. His mind needed healing too, and with that came more tasks. Some of them were focusing exercises, while others were intended to help him piece together the memories and abilities he’d lost. In the first few weeks, he was clumsy, having lost some of his motor ability, but it gradually came back, with help from Ceres’s mental exercises, repairing the damaged neurons and anti-magical receptors.
She usually brought food too, in great big boxes, to wash down the vile taste of her potions, leading Alex to worry that he’d be ten times the size he’d been when he started, by the end of his recovery.
Ellabell often had bits of news for him too, whenever she went up to the pagoda to see how things were coming along. What pleased him most was to hear that Demeter had begun to teach Spellbreaker lessons, to ensure the new mages knew about both sides of the magical spectrum, and the histories that had divided a nation, long before any of them were born.
And, over time, Alex began to return to something close to normal. With the help of everyone around him, his strength slowly returned, his mind ceasing to wander aimlessly, and the vacant expression began to fade from his eyes. Demeter accompanied Ceres sometimes, offering up his use of mind control to assist with the fixing of any broken memories he found in Alex’s head. Having half his soul torn out had left some gaps, but Demeter proved to be a deft hand at filling them in again. It was like a game of connect the dots, joining up the numbers until the whole picture emerged.
Sometimes, Elias would pop into his head, and he would feel the poignant loss of the shadow-man all over again. It was strange to look at shadows on the wall and not have them manifest into a floating guardian, but that was something he had to get used to, alongside everything else that had changed. Slowly but surely, he stopped expecting to hear a voice whispering in the darkness, Elias fading into nothing more than a bittersweet memory.
Day by day, things improved, though they had started poorly.
For the first month, Alex had continued to feel weak and weary, his mind foggy and useless. Even simple tasks were too much, his brain unable to concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing. Short walks made him breathless and wobbly, and even talking for long periods left him exhausted. All he had seemed to do was sleep and eat and drink herbal tea, on an endless cycle that frustrated him deeply. Every time he awoke and saw Ellabell beside him, he hated himself for keeping her there. What fun was it to sit and watch someone sleep, their body and mind too useless to even chat awhile? He pitied her, his pity turning to bitterness. He had known he was hurting her with the cold things he said, and yet she had refused to go.
“I know what you’re doing,” Ellabell had said one day, sipping from a cup of coffee.
“I’m not doing anything. In case you hadn’t realized, I’m bed-bound,” he’d snapped.
“It won’t work, Alex,” she’d retorted. “You can push and push and push, but you won’t get me to go.”
After that, he’d endeavored to be nicer to her, remembering that she was there because she loved him, and he loved her. Accepting her assistance instead of resenting it, he had found himself feeling better. It wasn’t an instant fix, but the comfort of having her there had improved his mindset, allowing him to focus better on functioning like an ordinary human being, instead of using her as his verbal punching bag to vent his frustrations upon.
Shortly after that, he and Ellabell had begun to take more walks together. Soon, he could walk to the pagoda and back, with little trouble from wobbling limbs or strained breath, and he found he could go through a whole day without needing to rest. His energy improved, his appetite grew, his weakness faded, and his mind returned to him, slowly but surely.
A while later, Venus came to visit him. She had been so busy in her queenly duties that it had taken her a while, but when Alex saw her, he thought she looked happier than he’d ever seen her. There was a flush in her cheeks and glitter in her eyes, the ripple of fear no longer prevalent beneath them.
“And how is the wounded soldier?” she asked, smiling pleasantly as she sat beside his sickbed, neatly folding her legs beneath the chair, her hands resting on her knees.
“Getting there, Your Grace,” Alex replied, remembering the correct term. For some reason, though she was still strikingly beautiful, he didn’t feel the same magnetic pull he’d felt before.
S
he picked up a basket of fruit that Ellabell had brought for him, plucking a grape off its vine and rolling it between her fingers. “Nice to see people still bring fruit to the sick,” she said, amused, as she popped the grape into her mouth.
“Why did you do that for us?” Alex asked, skipping past the pleasantries.
“Do what?” she replied coyly, her eyes twinkling with irreverence.
Alex laughed. “Why did you set my friends free, and get the guards to stand down? If I hadn’t succeeded, you’d have been in a world of trouble.”
The queen gave a delicate shrug. “If you think I still feared my husband’s wrath by then, you are not as smart as I thought you were. Death would have been a kindness, had you not succeeded. Freeing those people would have been worth every foul word, every lash, every beating he gave as punishment.”
“How did you endure it? Julius as your husband—how did you get through it?” Alex wanted to know, in awe of her strength.
“I had a place in my mind where I would go when things became dark,” she admitted. “It was a place that was just for me… a place where Julius was nobody. My Leander was there, always there, standing by my side. After all this time, my loyalty to him never waned, even through the cruelest moments my husband could conjure up. Leander was my true love—you only get one of those, you know?” she said, with a quiet chuckle. “My life, and my marriage, were frightening and loveless after Leander’s passing, but I had the memory of him to keep me warm, and to give me strength when I had none left.”
“So you did it for him?” Alex pressed, wanting to have it clear in his mind.
She nodded. “My son and you share his blood—how could I not step in to assist, when you both needed me?”
She didn’t stay much longer, simply wanting to check on how he was, but Alex was glad she had come. With her words, he had been able to put his thoughts of Leander Wyvern to rest. Venus had loved him, and it was that love that had set his friends free.
He had just passed the three-month mark in his recovery, when Ceres came to visit him.