The Wizards of Once

  Wish could see the dull, dark shape slumped on the spell above them. It wasn’t moving.

  I’ve killed it, thought Wish with terrible sadness. I’ve really killed it…

  Tiffinstorm gazed at the sword, her mouth open in horror. “Don’t touch the sword…” whispered the sprite.

  The end of the sword was covered in a strange, milky green substance, and it appeared to be smoking. A single drop quivered on the end, and as if in slow motion it fell…

  …down toward Wish’s hand.

  But Squeezjoos rushed forward, squeaking: “Be’s careful, Princess, be’s careful!!”

  …And in his determination to guard the princess, he threw himself in between the drop of falling green and Wish’s hand, and he let out a shriek as the green sizzled there, and the poor sprite shook his own hand to throw off the smoking green blood.

  Squeezjoos leaped up in the air, screaming and waving his hand in horror. Wish tried to catch him, to soothe him, to calm him down, with Tiffinstorm shrieking, “Don’t touch! Don’t touch!” in a demented chalk-screech.

  More cracked lines appeared all over the surface of the spell above them, like lines on a frozen lake the moment before it breaks.

  “GET AWAY FROM THE BED!” yelled Wish, and the snowcats and the sprites flung themselves to the edge of the room—in the nick of time, for a moment later, the cracked, broken spell burst, sending bits of spell raining around the room, and the cold rainwater that had been lying on it came splashing down onto the bed, in a bucketing icy rush, and the dark shape crashed down too and took the bed down with it, down… down… down… burning a bright green hole in that floor, and sinking downward, ever downward, so that Xar’s room had a great hole in the center of it like a sinkhole.

  A sinkhole, seven feet deep with the corpse of a Witch at the bottom of it.

  “I think it’s dead,” whispered Wish, shakily peering over the edge of the sinkhole. “It’s not moving, anyway. Are you all right, Squeezjoos?”

  “I’s NOT fine…” whispered Squeezjoos, shaking his hand. “I’s NOT fine… That is bad Magic… Very bad Magic…”

  Even as he spoke, the green crept up his arm, to his heart and his head, turning him stiff as a tree twig, and he dropped, shaking and trembling, like a stone and fell down rigid to the floor. Wish picked him up gently.

  It is as I said.

  Bad things have been happening in Xar’s room.

  Very, very bad things.

  And a lot can happen in fifteen minutes.

  11. Xar Gets More Than He Wished For

  Xar did not immediately notice anything different about his room when the Enchanter’s Magic broke open the locked door and the flying chains slung him and the animals and sprites in there, with Caliburn flapping in just before the door was magically slammed behind them both.

  Why would Xar think there would be anything different? He had only left that very same room about fifteen minutes earlier.

  Anyway, he was too busy swearing loud and long and extremely creative curses at the shut door, and kicking it with his foot, to notice the strangely quiet, tense, and, quite frankly, shell-shocked atmosphere in the wrecked room behind him.

  “Um… Xar…” said Caliburn. “I think we may have a problem…”

  “I know we have a problem!” howled Xar. “My father and my brother don’t realize how important I am! Nobody realizes!”

  “No, I mean, a real problem, Xar.”

  Xar turned around.

  His jaw dropped open.

  Wish was standing, stricken, holding on to the Enchanted Sword.

  “YOU took my sword!” spat Xar savagely. “It’s all YOUR fault, you beastly burglar of a Warrior! I was beating Looter and then YOU interrupted! How did you do it, you treacherous daughter of Queen Sychorax?”

  Xar made a grab for the sword and the sprites screeched simultaneously:

  “Don’t touch the sssssssword!!!!”

  And that was when Xar realized that things had gone even more wrong than he’d thought.

  His room was always messy, of course.

  But now, right in the center where the bed once was, there was an enormous hole, seven feet deep, instead.

  Wish and Bodkin were standing sadly on either side of it.

  “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY ROOM???????” Xar gasped. “Oh my goodness, I only left you for fifteen minutes—what have you done to my room????”

  Bodkin pointed down the hole. “A Witch attacked us. We killed it.”

  “Oh by ivy and mistletoe and green things with long, hairy whiskers!” goggled Xar. “Are you quite sure it was a Witch? It wasn’t just a Rogrebreath coming to get its blood back?”

  “Take a look…” said Bodkin.

  Xar peered down into the hole, and there, at the bottom, was something huge and dark and dead, with long, feathered wings for arms, and a nose like a beak, and even though it was not moving, a reek of dark Magic came off that crumpled feathered thing so strongly that it made Xar reel back.

  Yup.

  He’d never seen a Witch before, but that was a Witch, all right.

  Oh by the nostril hairs of the Grim Grisly Gruntleogre…

  What had his father just said about obtaining Magic from a dark source?

  The reality of a situation is sometimes a little different from the imagining of it, and the recent scene with his father had made him realize that perhaps Encanzo wasn’t going to be as open-minded about Witches and dark Magic as Xar had thought he would be.

  And what was that threat about taking all of Xar’s beloved animals and sprites away from him?

  “Be good…” said Xar through white lips. “My father just said: Be good… I don’t think this really counts as being good, do you?”

  He gazed down at the hole in a sort of trance.

  “I mean… a big hole the size of a beastly great monument right in the middle of my ROOM with a WITCH in it?”

  Xar waved his arms around in agitation.

  “How are we going to get RID of it??? We have to get it out of here! My father said one more disobedient thing and he was going to expel me! I think this counts as about FIFTY disobedient things, don’t you?”

  “You can’t touch it!” screamed Tiffinstorm and Ariel. “Don’t go near it!”

  “How can we get rid of something we can’t even touch??????” said Xar. “We’ll have to cover it, but with what?” Xar started rather desperately kicking leaves down the hole, but it was like trying to cover a volcano with individual snowflakes.

  “And that isn’t the worst of it,” said Wish, swallowing hard.

  Carefully, Wish laid down the sword and opened a piece of cloth she was holding in the other hand. Inside lay Squeezjoos, shaking like he had the plague.

  Okay, just when Xar thought that things couldn’t get worse, they got worse.

  “What on earth happened to Squeezjoos?” Xar gasped.

  “He got Witchblood on him,” said Wish sorrowfully. “I’m so sorry, Xar.”

  “Is that bad? What does that mean? What’s wrong with him?”

  Squeezjoos had turned jade green, and his wings had folded up like they had been crushed in an invisible fist. Every now and then the trembling would cease, and he turned absolutely rigid for a second as if he had been frozen, before breaking out into violent shaking once more.

  “I’s guarded the princess…” said Squeezjoos. “But I’s fine. I’s jussst fine…” But you could see from Squeezjoos’s scared eyes that he was terribly frightened about what was happening.

  Caliburn said sadly, “Sprites are much smaller creatures than you are, Xar. The Witchblood will affect them much harder. You have led this sprite into bad, bad trouble.”

  “I will take this sprite to my father,” said Xar through numb white lips. “My father can do anything.”

  Caliburn said gently, “I think even your father will not be able to heal Squeezjoos, Xar.”

  It was time for some very hard truths.

  “For very soon, thi
s sprite will either die or fall into a coma,” said Caliburn. “And when he wakes, he will have turned to the dark side. He will become a creature of the dark, and he will seek out Witches to be his master.”

  A horrible silence.

  “And this means that the stain on your hand really IS Witchblood,” said Caliburn. “I am so sorry, Xar. I tried to warn you. You wished to be Magic, and now you have the wrong kind of Magic…”

  Xar turned over his hand.

  There, right in the middle of the palm, was the bright green stain. There was no way of covering it, any more than he could cover the great big hole with the Witch in it in the middle of the room.

  He tried to wipe it off on his cloak, but it did not move.

  “I can’t even make the Witchblood perform Magic…” said Xar sadly.

  “If your father finds out that is Witchblood on your hand,” said Caliburn, “he will send you to a Correctional Facility, and maybe the dark Magic will not yet have reached your brain, and you can be saved from turning to the dark side yourself. But your father would then be forced to expel you from the Wizards forever.”

  “No!” cried Xar. “No!”

  “What would you have your father do, Xar?” said Caliburn. “The other Wizards were calling for you to be expelled just for TRYING to get dark Magic. But you have succeeded, Xar… You have been in the Badwoods, and that is forbidden. You have brought iron into the camp, and that is forbidden. You are using dark Magic, and that is forbidden. You have drawn a Witch to us, and that is forbidden.”

  “NO!” yelled Xar.

  “Even your father cannot turn back time, Xar,” said Caliburn. “Nobody can turn back time. That is impossible.”

  “That’s the point of Magic, isn’t it?” said Xar. “To do impossible things?”

  There was a long silence.

  “There are some things that are done that cannot be undone,” said Caliburn.

  Ah, “Do As You Would Be Done By, or You Will Be Well and Truly Done” is a harsh law indeed.

  “You stupid Warriors!” raged Xar. “This is all your fault! This is your stupid sword and your stupid Witch, and I should never have left Squeezjoos with you when you can’t look after him.”

  Wish and Bodkin looked away, for Xar, the boy-who-never-cried, was crying.

  Xar knew in his heart of hearts he couldn’t really blame Wish and Bodkin for this. He felt a sludgy, depressed weight of guilt. This was all his own fault. Squeezjoos had trusted him. If he couldn’t save Squeezjoos, he would never forgive himself…

  “I’m so sorry, Squeezjoos,” said Xar wretchedly. “I never meant for this to happen… There must be some way I can make amends and put things back to the way they were?”

  “I’s trussst you, Master,” said Squeezjoos through shaking green lips, looking up at Xar adoringly. “You iss my leader, and so you will ressscue me, because that is what a leader doess.”

  Xar carefully put Squeezjoos in the front pocket of his waistcoat, and then Xar put his arm in front of his face.

  “I WISH I had never wished to be Magic,” said Xar passionately. “I WISH I could give it all up so that Squeezjoos could be fine again. I WISH I had never set that stupid Witch-trap in the first place, I WISH, I WISH, I WISH…”

  But wish how he may, Xar could not turn back time.

  They had all wanted Xar to learn a lesson, but this was a far, far worse lesson than anyone had ever dreamed of, and it was dreadful to see him crying and sitting there so small and silent and sad and un-Xar-like. Even his quiff of hair had drooped.

  Xar cried, and Wish patted him on the back sympathetically, and the animals and the sprites pretended they hadn’t noticed he was crying.

  Every now and then Xar blurted out fiercely: “I am NOT crying, and I will KILL anyone who says I am!”

  And the sprites pretended to be terrified of him to make him feel better.

  Down in the hall below them, the sound of music stopped abruptly, to be replaced by voices.

  Xar removed his arm from in front of his face, suddenly alert.

  “Lissssten…” whispered Tiffinstorm. “Someone must have noticed the break in the Magic covering the fort—they will be telling the King Enchanter…”

  The three children looked at one another, at the dying green sprite, at the sinkhole in the center of the room with the corpse of a Witch in it.

  “They will know it issss something to do with you, Xar… They will come up here… into this room…”

  This was bad.

  There was no doubt about it.

  This was really, really bad.

  Wish looked at Xar’s face, transformed from its usual cheekiness into total misery and guilt at the plight of his sprite.

  She forgot Xar was an enemy who had stolen her sword and kidnapped them.

  She put out her hand and touched Xar on the shoulder.

  “Don’t despair, Xar,” said Wish. “It’s not too late… It’s never too late. I have a plan for how we could save Squeezjoos.”

  Bodkin felt the first stirrings of unease.

  “Yes?” said Xar, lifting his drooping head.

  “Do you remember I told you, earlier on, my mother has this Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic that she keeps in her dungeons?” said Wish. “We could take you back with us to Warrior fort, and then we can break into my mother’s dungeons and get Squeezjoos to touch the stone, and that will take away the bad Magic of the Witch and save his life,” said Wish.

  “Could that work?” said Xar, eagerly turning to Caliburn.

  “Yes… no… I don’t know!” said Caliburn. “I suppose in theory, that is what the stone does—it takes away Magic… but something tells me this is an extremely bad idea…”

  “Well, generally it would be a bad idea to touch a Stone-That-Takes-Away-Magic,” said Xar, with growing excitement, “but in this case we have a whole lot of Magic that we want to get rid of, don’t we? Because at the same time I can touch the stone and get rid of this Witchblood on my hand, which my father wouldn’t like and it doesn’t even work…”

  “I also wonder what happened to Crusher,” said Wish thoughtfully. “He hasn’t gotten back yet, has he? I’m a bit concerned that my mother’s Warriors might have captured him.”

  “Do you think so?” said Xar, suddenly worried, for in his Xar-like fashion he had completely forgotten about Crusher. “Do you mean to say… I may have put Crusher in danger AS WELL? Wow… even for me, this has been a really bad day…”

  Xar was looking crestfallen again, so Wish hurriedly pointed out that while they were in Sychorax’s dungeons, if Crusher was in there too, they could release him.

  “That’s a brilliant plan, and it solves everything all in one go!” said Xar in relief. “For an enemy, and a weird one at that, you’ve come up with a great idea! What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  “Hang on a second!” boggled Bodkin. “This isn’t brilliant at all, Princess! I am putting my foot down! You can’t take this lunatic back to Warrior fort with us!”

  “I have to agree with Bodkin,” said Caliburn. “And if Queen Sychorax catches Xar, she’ll put him in her dungeons forever, not to mention take away the Magic of all his other sprites…”

  “My mother’s not as bad as all that!” objected Wish. “She’s lovely!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say lovely, exactly,” said Bodkin gloomily. “SCARY. That’s what she is. SCARY. She is one scary mother.”

  “She’s a queen and a mother and it’s a mother’s job to be scary,” said Wish.

  “Well, she’s very successful at her job.” Bodkin shivered.

  “But we’ve got to go into the dungeons anyway to return my mother’s sword, and we can’t let poor Squeezjoos die, can we?” said Wish. “This is sort of our fault too, and he’s flown by our side… Look at him!”

  Xar sensed Bodkin weakening as he looked at the tragically rigid body of the little hairy fairy tucked into the front of Xar’s waistcoat, shivering in pain and fear.

  “P
oor Squeezjoos…” Xar sighed. “He will be so unhappy trapped in a coma. He loved to dance, you know—to fly through the windy trees in autumn—and now his feet will be locked, his voice that sang to nightingales choked in his stony throat…”

  “STOP IT!” said Bodkin, putting his hands over his ears.

  “And even Xar…” said Wish. “He’s conceited and full of himself and kind of annoying—”

  “I am, aren’t I?” said Xar proudly.

  “But we can’t let him get expelled from his tribe! Xar made a few mistakes… but doesn’t he deserve a second chance? We all deserve a second chance,” pleaded Wish.

  Bodkin sighed. “All right,” he said. “It’s a mad idea… but all right, we’ll help them. But you have to promise me, Wish, after all this is over, you really will start being a normal, ordinary Warrior princess…”

  “I promise,” said Wish.

  The three of them shook hands on the plan.

  “Who’d have thought it?” marveled Xar. “Wizards and Warriors, working together…”

  The sounds of voices and running feet were getting nearer and nearer.

  “Okay,” said Xar briskly, picking up the Spelling Book and putting it in his pocket, “wolves, bear, you stay here. Caliburn, snowcats, sprites, you’re coming with us. But we’re going to need to be quick here, so we’ll have to go by door… Tiffinstorm! Do the spell!”

  “WhyisitalwaysMEwhohastodoeverything?” grumbled Tiffinstorm, getting out a number six from her wandbag, and lobbing one of her spells at the door of Xar’s room.

  “What do you mean, go by door?” asked Bodkin uneasily.

  As if in answer to his question, with a mighty cre-e-e-eak, the door of Xar’s room shrugged in its frame, and tore itself out of its hinges, and waddled into the center of the room, before tipping—SLAM!—flat on its face onto the floor, and then gently rising about a foot in the air, in a cloud of dust.

  Xar picked up the sword and climbed on top of the door, shouting, “Come on, you guys! Quick! Quick!”