The Wizards of Once

  “Look!” breathed Tiffinstorm, pointing above them, and Xar caught his breath.

  That’s impossible… thought Xar. I can’t be seeing that… a flying heart…

  The small brown heart descended from above, rather fast, in a hurry, and plunged softly through the chest of Wish lying on the floor…

  And Wish sat straight up like a wooden automaton and took a huge gulp of air, gasped it, like she was drinking in life itself, and went from death to life in a shaking, spluttering, ugly-with-spittle-and-phlegm moment.

  “What… what happened?”

  “SHE’S ALIVE!!!”

  23. When the Adventure Is Over the Problems Begin

  SHE’S ALIVE! SHE’S ALIVE! SHE’S ALIVE!”

  Around the room they danced now, with even greater jubilation than before, the Enchanted Spoon doing mad pirouetting circles.

  “Oh my feathers and beak and tail…” breathed Caliburn. “Thank goodness for that. For one horrible moment I thought it was all going to go dreadfully wrong, and fate and the universe had given us the worst bad hair day of all… but she’s alive!”

  Wish staggered to her feet, in the clouds of dust.

  “I’m fine,” said Wish shakily. “I’m fine…”

  With her hair up in all directions, in an enormous electric ruff, she looked like a piratical sea urchin.

  “Quick! Put your eyepatch back on!” said Bodkin, bending down, picking up the eyepatch from the dusty floor, and hurriedly handing it to her, for the uncovered Magic Eye was making the walls shake again.

  As soon as Wish put the eyepatch back on, the floor stopped heaving, the walls straightened.

  “What… happened… there?” asked Wish, finding it difficult to keep her balance.

  “It was incredible!” shouted Xar.

  Unbelievable.

  Impossible.

  Inconceivable.

  “What we have just witnessed,” said Caliburn in impressive tones, “is one of the most extraordinary sights in the entire universe: that of a Great Enchanter regenerating themselves.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Wish blinked.

  “You’re alive,” shouted Bodkin. “You died, but you’re a Great Enchanter, so you have more than one life…”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Wish. “I wasn’t DEAD… I just fell over for a second there.”

  “You were in PIECES!” said Xar joyfully. “Tiny, little pieces all over the room… and then you came back together again! It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!”

  “Nonsense,” said Wish, a little more uncertainly, for what with one thing and another, she was feeling a little untogether, as you would be, if you had just been taken apart and put back together again rather rapidly.

  “That’s impossible… What are you saying? You’re saying that I can die and come back to life?” said Wish.

  “Yes, but there’s a catch,” said Caliburn. “Even Great Enchanters are made of flesh and blood, and that wears out after a while. So you have to be careful of your lives, Wish. For you do not know how many you will have.”

  “Okay…” said Wish, finding all this a little difficult to take in. “And what about my eye?”

  “It must be a Magic Eye,” said Caliburn. “Extremely rare. Very powerful. I’ve only ever seen that twice before, in all my lifetimes. And never that color. That must be the color of Magic-that-works-on-iron.”

  “Hang on a second,” said Xar crossly. “The person who has Magic-that-works-on-iron is the boy of destiny. Wish can’t be the boy of destiny! She’s a girl, for starters!”

  “Nobody says the person of destiny has to be a boy, Xar,” said Caliburn. “This isn’t the Dark Ages, you know…” (Well, it was, actually, but nobody ever thinks they are living in the Dark Ages.)

  “But I don’t understand,” said Wish. “I’ve taken my eyepatch off loads of times, and trust me, nothing like that has ever happened before.”

  “Yes, well, you’ve only just turned thirteen, so the Magic will only have just come in, won’t it?” said Caliburn.

  “So not only am I Magic,” said Wish, very, very upset, “but it’s a really weird kind of Magic, and it’s all my fault that these Witches are waking?”

  “Well, not your fault, exactly,” said Caliburn. “However, if the Witches could get hold of the Magic-that-works-on-iron, then they might have a hope of rising once again. They know from centuries of bloody wars that without that power, they cannot defeat the Warriors. That is what they have been waiting for, all these years.”

  SHOOOOOOOOOOT.

  This was bad, really bad.

  It’s not a pleasant thought to think that the most terrifying creatures on earth want to target YOU in particular.

  Wish was feeling very conflicted about all this.

  On the one hand, it was, of course, a disaster for a Warrior to suddenly discover she was Magic.

  But on the other…

  In the past she had always been Wish, a word that when spoken was accompanied by a sigh of disappointment; Sychorax’s very ordinary seventh daughter, a little bit clumsy and a little bit blind, who was trying and failing to be a Warrior like her sisters. But now she had discovered she was WISH, quite a different sort of word, a word that was another name for Magic itself, and this new WISH was an individual of some considerable specialness, who might look ordinary on the outside, but on the inside had a glorious (if rather dangerous) secret.

  “We can think about all this stuff later. In the meantime, it’s all worked out!” said Xar joyously. “We’ve saved Squeezjoos! Wish is alive! We killed the Kingwitch! I’ve broken that horrible stone and made amends! Everything ends happily! I knew it would all turn out right in the end.”

  He turned triumphantly to Caliburn. “You see? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “Oh, Xar…” said Caliburn, shaking his head. “You’re going to be the death of me. These adventures of yours are very, very bad for my heart.”

  Bodkin stared at them all in awe. In the last five minutes, he had rocketed so violently from terror to despair to rapturous joy that he felt as if a Great Gray ogre had been rattling him in a bucket.

  “You mean,” he whispered in awe, “you have experiences like this on a regular basis?”

  “All the time,” sighed Caliburn. “This was a particularly bad one, admittedly…”

  Bodkin looked around the devastated room.

  Sychorax’s precious chamber of Magic-removal was ruined, the floor a mess of rubble, the stone exploded, the door blown off its hinges, the scrape of a Witch’s talons on the door frame.

  An ancient peril, the Witches, dead for hundreds of years, woken up and come out into the world once more…

  “What do you mean, ‘worked out’?” said Bodkin. “I don’t call this ‘worked out’! It’s a mess! A total mess! The Witches are out there,” said Bodkin. “And it’s all our fault! I should never have let the princess out of the fort… I should have told the grown-ups…”

  Wish gently patted him on the shoulder. “Now, now, Bodkin. You’re being too hard on yourself. It’s not all our fault. The Witches were out there anyway… They were always there; we just couldn’t see them. We have to look on the hopeful side. And look how much we learned from this adventure!”

  Wish continued, “Warriors and Wizard fought a Kingwitch side by side, and defeated him! That has to be a good sign for the future.”

  They left the sword in the stone, for it would not budge, even when Wish pulled at it.

  Fate didn’t seem to think that either of them was ready to wield that sword.

  “I don’t understand,” said Xar, bewildered. “We need that sword, more than ever, now that Witches have returned to the forest.”

  “But the sword is a bit… wayward, isn’t it?” said Caliburn. “And we don’t really understand its secrets yet. So maybe this is the right place for it, at the moment.”

  Caliburn might be right, for goodness knows where you
could safely conceal and imprison an Enchanted Sword that seemed to have a mind of its own, and wanted to kill Witches, and could slice through floors and ceilings, and if even Queen Sychorax, who was a prison expert, couldn’t work out a solution of how to contain it, well, the stone was probably as safe a place for it as any, for the moment.

  They left a note for Sychorax by the sword in the stone. Wish wrote it, so the spelling was a little erratic. It wasn’t hard to find the Once-Magic-People who Sychorax had imprisoned. You just had to follow the noise, and as soon as they entered their dungeon, the singing ceased, and the Once-Magics stared at them, unable to believe they were there.

  The giant Crusher raised his shaggy head.

  “Xar!” he roared. “You’ve come to save me! I knew you would!”

  “Of course I have!” said Xar, conveniently forgetting that if Wish hadn’t pointed it out, he wouldn’t even have noticed Crusher was missing. “Because I am a leader and that is what a leader does!”

  One look at that giant’s kindly, innocent face crinkling up in delight as Xar hugged his ankle made everything worthwhile for Wish.

  This imprisonment of the Once-Magic-People was wrong; she could tell it was wrong.

  Her mother was mistaken.

  Not wicked like Xar said she was, of course not, but mistaken nonetheless.

  “Let’s get out of here!” roared Xar, punching the air.

  But to Xar’s surprise, the Once-Magic-People were not so keen to escape as he expected. They stood there, even the loudest of the hobs rather silent and depressed, as if the air had leaked from a balloon, and the poor sprites who had lost their ability to fly were so mortified they ran away, scuttling like mice across the prison floor.

  “They’re ashamed, Xar,” explained Caliburn. “For what is a giant without his size? What is a sprite without her wings?”

  They were like Warriors returning from battle, terribly wounded, these poor people, and they no longer knew how they would fit into the world of the Magic.

  But Xar coaxed them out.

  He jumped up onto a rock in the center of the dungeon.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, everybody!” cried Xar. “I am Xar, boy of destiny, and at present it seems, because of some weird divine oversight that I don’t understand, even I have no Magic yet! I have come to rescue you, and I will take you back to my father, Encanzo, the Greatest Enchanter who has ever lived, and I am sure he will be able to restore your Magic.”

  “I don’t think you should be promising them that, Xar,” said Caliburn. “I’m not sure that’s possible…”

  But the promise offered hope to these people. The thought of Magic being returned to them brought a shine even to the dullest and most crestfallen boggit or will-o’-the-wisp’s eye.

  Crusher the giant scooped up the little sprites who could no longer fly and kindly offered them a lift in his pockets, or they perched like little nits in his hair, and the gradually-growing-larger party galloped and sprang and ran through the corridors, back to the chamber of Magic-removal, because that was where they could pick up the path to the secret exit.

  At the chamber of Magic-removal, the little party stopped.

  “This is where we part,” said Bodkin.

  “Come with us, Wish,” said Xar. “Come back to our camp. You can be Magic there…”

  Xar and Wish had met in a crossing of paths and stars in the forest only twenty-four hours earlier. Here, deep in the underground prison, was another crossing of the ways, and Wish had to decide which way to go.

  One way, the sprite-dust trail of light led back through the dungeon maze and up to Sychorax’s hill-fort.

  The other way, a tall dark corridor led toward the secret exit and out into the forest, and that was where Xar and the Magic creatures were going.

  It was extremely tempting to take that path, for it seemed like the path of excitement and wildness and Magic and snowcats.

  But…

  “I can’t leave home,” said Wish. “I’m only thirteen. This is my home… and my mother isn’t as bad as you think she is.”

  “Your mother is a very dangerous person!” said Xar.

  Even though Bodkin wanted Wish to come back up to the fort with him, in all honesty, he had to agree with Xar. “Remember those heads in that chamber, those Spelling Books piled high in the cells… Sychorax is trying to be a sorceress, Wish.”

  “Murmuring mistletoe, do you think that’s true?” Wish gasped. “But how can she, when she’s the one who always goes on about how bad Magic is, and how we should fight against it?”

  Yes, Sychorax had plenty of secrets, and Wish had learned rather more about her mother than she wanted to know.

  “But she’s trying to do the right thing, I know she is, and my mother deserves a second chance,” said Wish stubbornly. “We all deserve a second chance, don’t we?”

  “Wish is right; she should stay here,” said Caliburn, thinking not so much of giving Sychorax a second chance, but of the many evil people, Wizards and worse, who might like to get their hands on Magic-that-works-on-iron. “Wish’s Magic is so powerful it will be better off for the moment in the protection of Warrior fort. In fact, now that I come to think of it, the Warriors have to keep Xar’s Spelling Book, just in case.”

  “Oh that’s so kind of you, Caliburn,” said Wish. “But I won’t be needing it.” She gave a little shiver. “I’m not going to be doing any more Magic for the moment, not till I can convince everyone in the Warrior tribe that Magic isn’t as bad as they think it is.”

  “No,” whispered Bodkin urgently, even though he was absolutely longing to look again at the pictures, at the stories, the recipes, the spells, the whole wonderful world of Magic in that book, which Caliburn had now taken from Xar’s pocket.

  “No, Wish shouldn’t have Magic things anymore… Look at all the trouble that beastly spoon and the Enchanted Sword has got us into! Wish is a Warrior princess, and she needs to give all this Magic stuff up…”

  Caliburn gave him an affectionate look. “Ah…

  Magic can be concealed… Magic can be hidden, but giving Magic up… that is very hard indeed. Look what just happened here in this fort!

  “However, the kind of Magic Wish has,” admitted Caliburn, “is so dangerous and so special, that it is probably better for you to conceal it. Nobody must ever find out, or Wish will be in terrible danger. There is a lot to be said for the nice, quiet, ordinary life of a Warrior princess. She is very lucky to have you, Bodkin, as her guardian angel.”

  Bodkin blushed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What is an angel? Is it something like a sprite?”

  “A little,” said Caliburn. “Remember, I cannot stress this more strongly, no one must ever find out about this. That’s why you need this book. There are many, many useful chapters in there about concealing and hiding your Magic from others… and if, by some unlucky chance, dangerous people start going after you, people with wicked hearts and deep spells and strong Magic of their own, why, then this book may save your life.”

  Wish took the book from the bird. It was in a terrible state, burned and stained, with pages dropping out like confetti.

  “You can write in it too,” said Caliburn. “Write your own story, and that always helps if you’re trying to keep a secret. Take a feather from my back—there’s one that’s about to fall out—and keep it with you all the time.”

  Wish drew the falling-out feather from Caliburn’s back and placed it carefully inside the Spelling Book, and put the book in a pocket in her cloak.

  “Good-bye, Squeezjoos,” said Wish as the sprite hovered crossly in front of her. “I hope you get well soon… and you fly just as well as you ever did…”

  “I don’t know why you’s don’t want to come back to Wizard camp with usssss… but I don’t care…” grumped Squeezjoos, crossly tweaking Wish’s hair and pinching her nose and giving her little bites like stinging nettles. “You’s have a face like a warthog… and you are stinkier than a cow pie?
??”

  “Oh, you’re cursing me, that’s wonderful, Squeezjoos! You must be feeling better!” said Wish delightedly.

  Squeezjoos looked dolefully into her eyes. “But why are you staying? Come with us… Don’t make me SAD…”

  “I’m so sorry, Squeezjoos…”

  “Never mind…” hissed Ariel, his eyes spitting with malice. “We’ll miss you but we’ll get over it, won’t we, Mustardthought? They can stay here in their lumping great fort of dullness FOREVER.”

  Ariel waved his thorny arms and spat out a few words that sounded like “XPCTELRBURTIBUT” and “CCRVMLBCXTT.” They did not sound friendly.

  “Good-bye, Xar,” said Wish.

  “Good-bye,” said Xar, whistling carelessly, his hands in his pockets, for he did not want anyone to think he was upset.

  And then they parted ways.

  Xar and his Magic creatures ran and flew down the corridor, the sprites trailing beautiful little snakes of light that spelled words like “good-bye” and “don’t come back” and “beware” and “good riddance.” Wish and Bodkin watched them until they vanished into the darkness, singing songs that were eventually too far away to hear.

  And then, sadly, Wish and Bodkin went in the other direction, up to where the guard was still sleeping at the dungeon entrance, and then back through the fort they tiptoed, carefully avoiding the sentries.

  Meanwhile, Xar and his Once-Magic-People took every second left-hand turn till they got to Queen Sychorax’s secret exit, an enormous door, which must have been constructed by the quick clever hands of hob-elves, for it was not only huge but also slanting inward from the slope of the hillside outside.

  It was a wonder, really, that it could be a secret, for the door was large enough for a giant to get in and out, if they merely bent their head a little.

  Once they got there, it was far easier to break out of the fort than it had been to break in.