The Real Boy

  He narrowed his eyes, and then turned and left, closing the door particularly firmly behind him. Oscar just stood. His eyes stung. His face was hot. His lungs sucked in breath.

  But for once, Oscar did not feel like there was a pestle grinding in his gut, like he should tuck himself into a ball somewhere so he would never do or say the wrong thing again. There was no pestle, and if he’d had one he would have liked to grind it into Master Thomas’s eyes.

  No, he understood the words behind Master Thomas’s words. Master Thomas did not want him to think very carefully. He did not expect him to come up with anything new to tell him. Master Thomas thought he was lying.

  So this was what it felt like to be angry.

  What do you do when your head is hot and your insides are boiling and your skin can barely contain all the dangerous things bursting forth underneath? The pantry pulled at Oscar—he could climb in there and shut the door and never come out.

  But instead, he slipped outside and ran to the healer’s.

  When Callie opened the front door, Oscar opened his mouth, and the words started to erupt. She glanced behind her. “Come in,” she said softly. “I have a patient.” She gave him a meaningful look.

  A moment. Then, pressing his mouth shut, Oscar grasped the erupting things with all his might, and held on to them until they settled.

  Something was wrong. Something that was not about Oscar. Though Callie wore her usual professional aura just as surely as she wore an apron, there was something not right about it. It looked put on, uneasy, like a mask that didn’t quite match her body.

  She led Oscar to the back room. A gentleman in a long green cloak was standing in front of the door.

  Flashes: a noisy house, an airless room, Callie’s murmuring, a rustle-swish of skirts, and a face colored all wrong. The shop, an amulet, the questions, and the girl who did not stop looking at him.

  Lord Cooper. Father of Hugo. The boy with the cold limbs. Oscar looked over to the cot, expecting to see a greenish-whitish-sickish face. But it wasn’t Hugo there at all. It was his sister, Sophie.

  Oscar stepped back. In his mind he saw ringlets, plump cheeks, shining red shoes kicking in the air, eyes searching Oscar for something he had no idea how to give. Now the girl looked like a little ghost in a bright red dress. All shell and no girl.

  He closed his mouth; he dared not say a word. He just backed into the shadows and listened to Callie’s murmurings. Her father sat perched in a chair in the corner. Callie started rubbing something on the girl’s arms now. “How does that feel?” she whispered.

  However the girl answered, it was too soft for Oscar to hear. She didn’t even seem to move.

  Callie slowly rubbed the ointment along her torso and arms, face and neck, telling her at every moment what she was doing, loud enough for Lord Cooper to hear. Though she spoke of limbs and skin and heat, it almost sounded like she was casting a spell.

  Callie said something to the father about bringing their carriage up to the shop door, and sometime after that he was holding his daughter in his outstretched arms, carrying her like a limp doll.

  Oscar watched, willing the girl to look back, to stare at him again. She did not.

  After Callie shut the door, the healer mask broke off and fell to the floor. Inhaling loudly, she plopped down at the table and looked at nothing.

  Oscar plopped next to her. “What’s wrong with her?” he breathed.

  A moment. Then Callie looked up at him, her eyebrows doing their Callie-thinking thing, and her jaw set. She held up her hand and then pulled over a piece of paper that was lying on the table. The map. She drew another blob.

  Sophie, Callie wrote. And then she tapped the pen on the table.

  “What is it?” Oscar asked. “What was wrong with her?”

  “Hold on,” she said, staring at the paper. “I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  She glanced at him. “About how I need quiet to think.”

  Oscar opened his mouth and then shut it. Words seemed to want to burst out anyway, so he swallowed them back and stared at the table and started counting. Meanwhile, Callie was examining the map of the children, eyes prying at all its secrets.

  Oscar kept counting, while Callie stared. Her face looked like a slowly tightening knot. When he got to 76, she opened her mouth and he stopped, but then she closed it again. So he kept going. When he got to 134 the same thing happened.

  And then, when Oscar got to 245, Callie leaned back in her chair, blew air out of her mouth, and shook her head slowly. He watched her, trying to decide if he should keep counting. But then she looked at him, and her eyes were blazing, and her Callie-ness was back.

  “Oscar,” she said, “these aren’t diseases. Think about it.” She pointed at the map. “Ronald who can’t remember. Jasper who can’t talk . . .”

  Oscar frowned. “Well,” he said slowly, “there are diseases of the mind. I have a whole book under my bed that Wolf left me—”

  Callie set her jaw. “Oscar, Sophie had no heartbeat. None. She’s still alive. I don’t know of any disease that lets you be alive with no heart.”

  Oscar stopped.

  “All these kids,” she breathed, “they’re not sick. They’re failing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She started pointing at the blobs at the paper. “This girl can’t eat, physically can’t take in food. This one’s mind isn’t working. This boy can’t see or hear all of a sudden. This one’s skin is cracking open. And this one, I think he’s hardening. Don’t you see? These aren’t diseases. The kids are breaking down.”

  Oscar shook his head slightly. It was so much easier when the map was in your mind.

  Callie turned to him. “Oscar,” she said, grabbing his hands. “Listen to me. You aren’t made of wood. The City children are.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Decoctions

  Oscar could not speak. His throat was all lump. He could only duck his head down and lose himself in the floor.

  Callie grabbed Oscar’s knee. “It’s true, Oscar. The children are made of wizard-tree wood and spells. But the spells are breaking apart now. The children are breaking down.”

  “But I’m—”

  “No,” she said firmly. “You remember how I said the children all had something missing?”

  Oscar could not answer, could not look up.

  “Well, they do. And I felt it from that little girl we ran into on the City street, the one who touched my hair. She was perfectly healthy. I felt it but I didn’t pay attention then. There’s just something”—Callie pursed her lips and thought—“lacking in them. And that boy, I couldn’t place it at the time, but his arms were hard. Like wood. Like skin on top of wood.”

  “But,” he said, squeezing the words out, “even if they are made of wood, it doesn’t mean I’m not.”

  “I don’t think so,” Callie said firmly. “It’s not like that with you.”

  “But . . . but there was only one doll. There are so many kids.”

  “That you found, Oscar. There’s one doll you found. There are five wizard trees down—at least. Can you imagine how much wood that is? Oscar, this is Caleb. If he had the power to turn wood into a child, do you think he wouldn’t try to make as much money from it as he possibly could?”

  “But those City kids are so . . . perfect.”

  Callie sat back in her chair and exhaled. “Well, you know what the City people are like. Maybe that’s the whole point.”

  Somehow the evening had snuck up on them while they were busy with other things, and the light in the healer’s shop was fading quickly. Callie lit the lantern on the table and then slid the map over to Oscar.

  “Look at this, Oscar,” she said, pointing, “Just look at it.”

  She got up and started lighting lanterns around Mariel’s front room, while Oscar studied the map. The blobs looked back at him, each wearing its wounds as words. He could see them now in his head, see the whole of them. Their b
odies were failing them—or if not their bodies, their minds. Oscar could feel his lungs take in air, his heart beat, his blood course, his mind record everything around him. Breathing, digestion, circulation, talking, seeing, hearing, remembering. They were systems, and in the children they were failing.

  He kept his eyes focused on nowhere. “If this is true,” he said softly, “then what about me? Why am I like this?”

  Callie turned to him, eyebrows raised. Oscar could hear the words in the air before she said them:

  Why are you like what?

  No one is quite right.

  But she did not. She crossed her arms around her chest. Her eyebrows tightened. The corner of her lip twitched, just a little.

  “You’re Oscar,” she said finally. “That’s all that matters.”

  He did not understand. But this was Callie, and so he had to believe her.

  Callie huffed, then adjusted her apron and sat back down as if that was the end of it. “Now,” she said, sliding the map back over, “let’s say I’m right. Let’s pretend. Let’s say these are all spells failing . . . somehow. Maybe they weren’t put together right, or maybe Caleb was supposed to be doing maintenance, or maybe it’s something to do with the missing wizard trees.”

  Oscar opened his mouth to ask her what she meant, but then the pieces began to fit together in his mind. A grove of five trees, gone. That area of the Barrow earth no longer fed by the wizards. Empty. A hole in their protection.

  “A hole in the magic,” he said.

  No wonder Caleb’s illusion spells had faltered. They were right on top of the hole.

  Callie tilted her head. “Yes, that’s what I think. But it doesn’t matter, really, what caused it. Just—saying I’m right, saying these are failing spells—is there something we can do? I mean you and me? The apprentice and the hand?”

  Oscar’s eyes went to the flickering lantern light. A simple question, cutting through the noise. A spell is failing. The magic is fraying at the seams. Can you put it back together again?

  “Yes,” he said. “I think so. I think we can make something. At least—”

  He was going to say at least temporarily, but he could not finish the sentence, because at that moment the door burst open, and Oscar jumped out of his chair, knocking it over. It was no soil monster who appeared from the dark of the night—but rather Lord Cooper and his great swooping green cloak, followed by the carriage driver, who was clutching his left shoulder. And Lord Cooper was bearing a gasping, sobbing Sophie in his outstretched arms.

  Callie popped up from the table. “What happened?”

  “Our carriage was attacked,” Lord Cooper breathed. “By some beast.”

  Callie sucked in a breath and Oscar stiffened. They glanced at each other, and somehow in that glance a book’s worth of words passed back and forth.

  “She’s hurt,” Lord Cooper said, holding the girl out like an offering. “It swiped at her, and—it hit her pretty hard. In the chest, I think.”

  It was like a lantern flared on inside Callie. She straightened, her face transformed from worried to purposeful, and she seemed to grow three years in the space of a second. “Come to the back room,” she said, herding everyone through the doorway. Lord Cooper was carrying his daughter like she was made of feathers. Callie motioned to the cot. “Put her there. Slide her on as gently as you can—that’s right.” She pointed to the carriage driver. “What is your name, and what happened to your arm?”

  “Pierre, miss. I crashed into the seat,” the driver said in a half-choked voice, “but it can wait. Take care of the little miss.”

  With a swift nod Callie pulled the stool up next to the cot and started talking to Sophie, while Oscar stood in the doorway, neither in the back room nor out of it. Sophie’s pale face was red and chapped with tears, and all her features were clenched up. She clutched at her abdomen, and even from where he was standing Oscar could see she was trembling. His mind flashed to Crow in the corner, bleeding and shaking, flank full of glass.

  Callie was standing over the girl now, murmuring questions, placing her hand gently on Sophie’s side. The girl let out a whimper.

  In a blink Callie was up, getting a pair of scissors from the shelf behind her. She looked over her shoulder and told the lord, “I have to cut her dress off.” She was not asking permission.

  Lord Cooper did not object. He didn’t even seem to be there, really—he sat on the stool, chest rising and falling, half watching Callie work, half somewhere else entirely. Lost. “It swiped at the carriage and took off the side,” he told the room. “And then it tried to take her. The horses got spooked and ran. If they hadn’t . . . I don’t know how we would have gotten away.” He closed his eyes. “It was enormous. And so dirty. Was it a bear? It must have been a bear.”

  Callie had the red dress off now, and she carefully lifted up the girl’s white shift. Her back tensed. She did not move for one moment, two, and then she slowly angled her face toward Oscar.

  “Oscar? What we were talking about earlier? Can you make something like that?”

  Her voice grabbed hold of him and pulled him forward. She looked at him, and he looked straight into her eyes for one full heartbeat. And he read them perfectly.

  “Yes.” And then he ran back to Caleb’s shop.

  His head was full of ice and noise, and it was everything he could do to sort through it all. His hand went to his other arm and squeezed, tight.

  The question had been simple: Saying these are failing spells . . . is there something we can do?

  Yes. You can strengthen the spell.

  At least, he was pretty sure.

  He had never made anything like this before, never heard of something like this being made. You usually used these kinds of herbs to help with a decoction—sometimes there was something inherently unstable about the mixture you were making and you needed something there to mend any ruptures, convince the herbs to work together. Sometimes you wanted the herbs to be a little louder than they were on their own: you needed something to coax them out. And sometimes you needed something to fuse them together so tightly they would never remember being separate in the first place.

  Repair, amplify, bind.

  Dandelion, vetiver, goldenseal.

  They were all hidden ingredients, helper herbs that no one really noticed, because they just made everything work as it was supposed to. They were pieces from other puzzles, but perhaps they could be put together to make something new.

  Oscar would have liked to think about it more, but there was no more to be had now, so he set a pot to boil and then ran down to the pantry and filled his arms with jars and ran back up. He put two handfuls of each herb in another pot, mixed in a bag of cornmeal, and when the water was ready he poured it on top of the mixture and stirred until it was thick. Then he took the steaming pot by both handles and darted back to the healer’s.

  When he got there, he found Callie holding Sophie’s hand. A steaming cup sat on the little table next to the bed, and the room filled with the smell of licorice root—for pain—and valerian—for sleep. They were basic herbs, the sort any ordinary healer would use. But they were the right ones.

  The driver was holding a towel to his shoulder, and Lord Cooper could be seen through the doorway pacing the front room.

  “A poultice,” he said to Callie, indicating his pot. In a flash she was collecting bandages from the cabinet. When Callie moved away, Oscar’s eyes fell on the girl’s torso. Her entire left side blossomed with a deep, terrible purple.

  His eyes darted away, landing on Sophie’s face. She was staring at him again, eyes wide as the world. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she was silent now, and mostly still. Her eyes called to Oscar, though nightmares flickered behind them. Oscar smashed his lips together and took one step into her gaze, and another. He was next to the bed now, and still she gazed at him.

  And then Sophie opened her mouth, and Oscar leaned forward, because he knew that’s what he was supposed to do. She whispered
one word in his ear, the first word she had ever said to him:

  “Monster.”

  He drew back and stared into her eyes. And he knew, finally, what the girl was asking of him.

  Oscar paced around the cellar that night, trying to hold all the pieces in his head. No magicians were coming, no magic smiths with glowing swords. They did not believe in monsters. And Oscar no longer believed in magic smiths.

  So Oscar paced. Bear watched him, and Pebble darted around the room. Oscar had put all the images of the night the monster attacked in a box and buried it deeply in his brain. Now he unburied it and dumped out all the contents to make a map.

  And he saw this:

  The monster, swiping the contents of a shelf into its mouth.

  And this:

  The love potions Oscar threw at it smashing against its chest. The monster stopping to wipe itself off and then suck the potions off its hands.

  And this:

  The glowing iron flail smacking into the monster’s chest. The monster clutching for it.

  And from the attacks on the marketplace:

  The boots for the City people. Master Christopher’s special brew. Madame Aphra’s dress cloth. The Most Spectacular Goat.

  And:

  Master Thomas and the very enormous bear in the cage—all the smell-enhancing charms around the trap missing.

  Oscar stopped. “It’s all magic,” he told Bear. “It’s eating magical things.”

  Bear flicked her tail. Oscar started pacing again, as Pebble darted through his legs. The sketch from Galen’s book flashed in his mind—the regular tree and the soil feeding it. The wizard tree, feeding the soil.

  A grove of wizard trees, now stumps. A hole in the magic. The system shut down. The wizard trees had been cut down, and the earth around them was starved for magic.

  “No,” Oscar whispered to himself. The monster was not made of earth—it was the earth, birthing a monster to serve its monstrous need.

  There was no rival magician, no one pulling the strings. The monster was alone, with no master. Just like Oscar.