The Wizards of Once

  Xar did an impression of Queen Sychorax, shouting, “OPEN UP, AND BE QUICK ABOUT IT! The password is ‘CONTROL’!”

  And CRREEEAAAKKKKKKK!

  A guard standing on the other side opened the door, which was wood on one side and turfed like grass on the other, and they all trooped out. Xar was wearing that very distinctive red royal cloak, so the guard assumed that what looked like Queen Sychorax on the outside was Queen Sychorax on the inside as well.

  The guard did not seem surprised to see his queen going out of the fort in the company of a giant and a whole load of Once-Magic-People. He merely sent a hand signal up to the sentries at the battlements to let them know not to shoot.

  “Nobody run…” whispered Xar, for he could feel the snowcats quivering by his side. “We mustn’t look frightened—if we look scared and start running away, then they’ll suspect something is wrong.”

  All the sentries saw was someone wearing Sychorax’s red cloak in the middle of the party, as the soft tread of the snowcats made paw prints in the snow, and Xar and his Magic creatures strolled quietly away from the fort and into the forest, the sprites blinking out like snuffed candles as soon as they hit the sky.

  Xar only relaxed once he and the snowcats had reached the safety of the cover of the trees. He looked back at the fort. The door had been shut, and no one would guess there was a door there, unless they knew it already.

  And the little antlike figures of the sentries on the battlements did not look even remotely alarmed or agitated.

  It was almost as if Queen Sychorax made a habit of surreptitiously coming in and out of that secret entrance, with all sorts of strange Magic people and things, without the citizens of the fort knowing anything about it.

  Despite the fact that Magic was very strictly banned, by order of herself.

  Ah, she was an interesting woman, that Queen Sychorax.

  But tricky.

  Ve-ry tricky.

  24. What They Didn’t See

  It wasn’t only Xar and the Magic creatures who escaped into the midnight of the forest.

  As soon as Xar and Wish and Bodkin had left the chamber of Magic-removal, there was silence for a second.

  And then a strange wind crept up inside the room, although it is impossible for a wind to blow inside.

  The black feathers and the dusty fragments of the Kingwitch lying all around began to blow about restlessly.

  For you see, every light has its dark.

  Day only exists with night.

  Wish died and came back to life, did she not? For it turned out she was a Great Enchanter, and Great Enchanters have more than one life.

  But there was more than one Great Enchanter in the room.

  If Wish could come alive again…

  So too could the Kingwitch.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, the millions and millions of Kingwitch fragments rose up into the air, making a strange, sweet humming noise, and the tiny individual bits whizzed around at tremendous speed, like a swarm of bees, shuffling and reshuffling themselves, just like they had with Wish, as if they had some internal memory of where they were supposed to be…

  And a strange singing filled the room, sweet and evil all at the same time.

  How many times this Witch’s life…?

  How many times must it be killed…?

  How many lives must yet be left…?

  Risk it all…

  Risk it all…

  Risk it all…

  Not even a Great Enchanter knows exactly how many lives they have, so it is always chancy to risk one, in case that was the last one you had.

  But it appeared that the Kingwitch had one more life left to him, at least.

  Up, up, and up the feathers and fragments rose, and as they rose, they joined back together again in the dark and dangerous form of the Kingwitch.

  One of his wings was fractured and hanging limply, but he was very much alive.

  “… semitemoS uoy evah ot esol a elttab ni redro ot niw eht raw…” croaked the Kingwitch.

  Which means: “Sometimes you have to lose a battle in order to win the war…”

  The Witch gave an unintelligible shriek, and then he made himself invisible again, melting into the air like smoke.

  He flew back through the broken doorway.

  He was weak, so weak, after the fight, and the being-trapped-in-a-stone-for-centuries, and the wounding from the Witch-killing sword. He needed to get away, to rest, before he could attack again. So he lurked, like an invisible bat, flying above everyone’s heads as Xar and his Magic creatures ran along the corridors. When they escaped through Sychorax’s secret door, the invisible Witch escaped too.

  And out into the world the Kingwitch flew, slowly turning visible as he reached the trees.

  25. Mother and Daughter

  Bodkin and Wish parted ways at the door of Wish’s house, in the middle of the fort. (Wish lived in a house all on her own, for princesses were so grand they had houses all to themselves, which was a little lonely but showed their status.)

  Bodkin was feeling surprisingly gloomy, for now that it was all over, he was a hero no more, just an ordinary Assistant Bodyguard. It had been one stolen day, one glorious twenty-four hours, where he could ride and fight beside a princess, just as if he were her equal, and a proper Warrior himself.

  “Now,” Bodkin said to Wish, trying to sound more cheerful than he felt, “we can all get back to normal, Princess. You give me the spoon, and I’ll take him back to the kitchen, where he can return to life being an ordinary dinner spoon… It’s time to give up Magic things, just like you promised me…”

  “Ye-e-es,” said Wish thoughtfully. “But then I HAVE still got the Spelling Book, haven’t I? Maybe I’ll give up the spoon tomorrow…”

  “All right, then,” agreed Bodkin. “You promise you will tomorrow?”

  “I promise,” said Wish.

  “Good night, Wish,” said Bodkin. “Good night, spoon.”

  “Good night,” said Wish, shyly shaking Bodkin’s hand.

  “Um, Princess,” said Bodkin, for something had been bothering him, “that—fainting thing that happened a little bit tonight… you don’t think that’s going to be a problem, do you, with my future in bodyguarding?”

  “Is there any other profession you would be interested in?” asked Wish tactfully.

  “Well, yes, as it happens, I’ve always wanted to be a Fool, and I’m quite good at the whole storytelling thing, and—but that’s not the point!” said Bodkin. “The point is, all of my family have been bodyguards, so I have to be one—and am I going to be any good at it, with the slight fainting issue?”

  “I’m sure you’ll grow out of that,” said Wish. “Tomorrow, maybe… but in the meantime, look what brilliant bodyguarding you just did! You are a hero, and a very good friend.”

  “I am not a hero; I am an Assistant Bodyguard,” said Bodkin, very relieved, “and that is what an Assistant Bodyguard is for. To assist.”

  But he didn’t deny that he was the princess’s friend.

  And then they both went to bed.

  The princess to her royal bed of goose-down feathers.

  The Assistant Bodyguard to his bed of straw underneath the kitchen table.

  They both slept soundly, for it had been a tiring night, what with one thing and another.

  But everything cannot be the same as it always was, of course.

  Once an Assistant Bodyguard has been on an adventure like that one, he is changed forever.

  Like the Enchanted Spoon, he had been burned at the edges by Witch’s fire and scorched by the breath of sprites. He had opened his eyes in Wizard camp, he had listened to the speech of ravens, and they had made him see things from their point of view.

  I may have said this before, but…

  This can be the problem with adventures, which is why Bodkin’s father was so very, very against them.

  Meanwhile, Sychorax had a long, long night, all alone in that darkness, and she had plenty of tim
e for thinking.

  Who knows? She may have even learned a lesson or two.

  That is, after all, what a dungeon is for.

  And when, eventually, the guard woke up and unlocked the prison cell where she was trapped, Queen Sychorax ran out the door and straight to the chamber of Magic-removal, for she had heard the commotion of the night before, and she had imagined all sorts of terrible possibilities about what might be happening.

  She saw the stone, the sword; she read the note, and that chilly queen turned colder still.

  Queen Sychorax was no fool. The note said it was from Xar, but the handwriting on the note—the spelling—made the queen immediately think of Wish.

  She ran (not even gliding this time) to the platform, up to the surface, through the streets of the hill-fort, passing the staring eyes of her citizens, her beautiful golden hair an absolute bird’s nest shock of electric horror that would take her a week to brush out (and she was lucky to be able to brush it out at all—sometimes sprites can mess up your hair with such intricate Magic that the only solution is to cut it off entirely).

  She ran straight to the house where Wish lived. Queen Sychorax did not often go there, for queens are very busy, and they do not always have time to visit their children, like normal people.

  Bursting into Wish’s room, Sychorax found her daughter fast asleep, snoring on the bed, and the queen let out a sigh of relief.

  Relief quickly turned to anger, as so often it will.

  She gave her daughter a gentle shake to wake her up.

  Wish opened a sleepy eye and was instantly, electrically awake when she saw her mother standing over her like an enraged iceberg.

  Oh dear.

  “Good morning, Mother,” gulped Wish warily.

  “The Wizard boy has gone,” said Queen Sychorax in a white-cold fury, taking in the scratches on Wish’s face, the wildness of Wish’s hair, which like Queen Sychorax’s own hair was still whipped up into a frenzy of tangles by the sprites using it as a nest. “Escaping with all the other Magic creatures. Chaos! Disorder! Anarchy! The Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic is broken!

  “And I’ve lost the sword, as well!” stormed Sychorax. “It’s trapped in the stone, at a time when it is needed most, when Witches have returned to the forest. It’s an all-around disaster.

  “Someone must have stolen my key… Someone must have helped that wretched Wizard boy escape…Someone must have taken him the sword—the Someone who has done this is a TRAITOR to their mother, their family, their entire tribe of Warriors…”

  Wish avoided her mother’s angry gaze and looked thoughtfully into the distance.

  “I just had this very strange dream,” said Wish. “I dreamed there was a Witch inside the Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic who called himself the Kingwitch.”

  Sychorax started in astonishment.

  Her anger evaporated and turned to uneasy alarm.

  “A Kingwitch inside the stone?” gasped the queen. “What nonsense are you talking? Impossible… surely that’s impossible…”

  But…

  If Witches were not extinct, that meant the legends about the Kingwitch might be correct as well. In all the old fairy tales, the Kingwitch was the leader of Witches, the mastermind who controlled them all.

  “In my dream, the Kingwitch had been inside the stone for a very long time indeed. Who knows? Maybe someone long ago imprisoned him in there, to make the world a safer place,” said Wish.

  “The fairy stories about the stone always say not to touch it, don’t they? But the meaning of WHY we are not supposed to touch it has been lost. Centuries and centuries, that Kingwitch must have been willing people to come to the stone so he could take away their Magic and break out of the stone. And he will have been working his will on you too, Mother, on me, on Xar, on all of us.

  “In my dream, the Kingwitch broke out of the stone.”

  “Nooooo…” whispered Sychorax, with fierce, bright eyes.

  But she was thinking, hard.

  Wish could sense her mother weakening, so she carried on, speaking thoughtfully and innocently, looking dreamily into the distance.

  “Another odd thing in the dream,” continued Wish, “was that in the dungeons below us, there was this room full of heads. But they weren’t just any old heads. They were heads that I recognized, of people who came to court and argued on your behalf, Mother, or said nice things about you when you were away…

  “I’m not sure we would want the citizens of Warrior fort to know about those heads, Mother,” said Wish.

  “Dreams are odd things,” said Sychorax, staring at her daughter very, very closely indeed.

  Mother and daughter looked at each other, their faces identical masks.

  Behind both those masks they were thinking: What do you know?

  For the first time they looked surprisingly alike: hair in ridiculous upward waterfalls, faces carefully arranged to give nothing away, wary eyes.

  “It’s complicated,” said Queen Sychorax at last.

  “Yes, it is,” said Wish.

  She put out her hand and closed it over Queen Sychorax’s icy one. “It must be difficult being a queen,” said Wish.

  Queen Sychorax returned the pressure.

  “Yes, it is,” said Queen Sychorax.

  “What happened to the Witch-Inside-The-Stone? Where is it now?” asked Queen Sychorax.

  “We killed it with the sword,” said Wish. “In the dream, of course.”

  “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” said Queen Sychorax. “You were lucky to survive.”

  She touched her daughter’s face, with the scratches on it.

  Queen Sychorax looked down at Wish, and for one split second her mask dropped and there was no disappointment in her eyes, but a wary respect, suspicion, and fear.

  Queen Sychorax would never underestimate her daughter again.

  Her frosty cliff of a face melted into a glint of a smile, like the sun appearing through clouds over a glacier.

  “Well done, Wish,” said Queen Sychorax. “That must have been a very frightening dream, a nightmare, in fact, and it sounds like you have dealt with it in a very… Warrior-like fashion.”

  Wish was so relieved she beamed right back at her.

  My mother smiled at me!

  Queen Sychorax’s smile disappeared, and she was her brisk, composed self once more.

  She adjusted Wish’s eyepatch, which had gone a little askew.

  “I may have made a mistake about that stone,” admitted Queen Sychorax. “Even queens make mistakes sometimes. So in these very special circumstances, I am prepared to overlook whatever happened this past night.”

  Queen Sychorax’s voice turned diamond-hard. “But in the future, you do need to do as I tell you. I want you to have no contact with anything Magic whatsoever, no Wizards, no Magic creatures, not even the smallest Itch-sprite. Do you understand me, Wish?”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Wish.

  “And if you see that wretched, tricksome Xar, son of Encanzo,” said the queen, “you must tell me at once, you hear me?”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Wish.

  But underneath the blankets, I am afraid to say, I happen to know that Wish was crossing her fingers.

  “From now on, Wish, you must work hard at being a normal Warrior princess. You can start by keeping this eyepatch on at all times, nice and straight. Remember,” said Queen Sychorax sternly as she got to her feet. “We are Warriors.”

  She held up her finger. “And a Warrior should always be well put together,” said Queen Sychorax. “Every hair in place. Every weapon sharpened. Every fingernail shining. Remember that.”

  And then she swept out Wish’s front door, where a crowd had gathered, watching in staggered silence as Sychorax—her long white gown raked ragged, her hair a fright—swept through the courtyard, with as much dignity and gravitas as if she were at her own coronation. Guards scurried up to her to offer them her cloaks, and in one superb gesture she waved them away.

  Every inch a queen
.

  Someone started applauding nervously—they weren’t quite sure why—and the other Warriors joined in, even though they did not know what they were clapping for. What had happened? Who had dared attack her? What on earth, for the green gods’ sake, was going on with that hair?

  And then she turned, at the entrance to her own quarters.

  The crowd grew silent.

  They leaned in to hear what she would say, expecting her to tell them the story of exactly what had happened, down there in her dungeons.

  “I never,” said Queen Sychorax in her quiet, mild voice, “want anyone to mention this EVER again.”

  And they didn’t.

  26. Father and Son

  Meanwhile, Encanzo the Enchanter was pacing the main hall, distraught with fear, for although he had sent out search party after search party looking for Xar, the boy had not yet been found.

  The day before, when Encanzo the Enchanter and his Wizards burst into Xar’s room, they found it empty, and a great hole in the middle of it.

  And as Encanzo knelt down by the side of the hole and saw the dead Witch lying at the bottom, and his son vanished, well…

  “What have I done?” the Enchanter asked himself, imagining, for one terrible moment, that the Witch might have killed his son, before realizing to his infinite relief that, no, quite incredibly, it was the other way around.

  Looter peered over his father’s shoulder and turned a little white. “What is that, Father?”

  “That,” said Encanzo grimly, “was a Witch.”

  By mistletoe and leafmold and the ginger sideburns of the Great Grim ogre.

  Witches weren’t extinct after all!

  And the proof was right there, in the middle of Xar’s bedroom.

  It took a while for the Wizards, crowding into the wrecked ruins of this room, to take all this in.

  “You see!” said Ranter triumphantly, for even when something really dreadful has happened, there is always a satisfaction in being right all along. “I told you that the boy would do something truly appalling in time! And he has! Witches are not extinct, and after hundreds of years of peace, Xar has brought a Witch right here into Wizard camp!”