The Real Boy

  “But—” Oscar sputtered. “They did suffer.”

  “They were not supposed to!”

  “Didn’t you ever think they could fail?” Oscar asked.

  “No!” the lord exclaimed, shaking his head. “They’re magic!”

  “But,” Callie interjected, voice soft, “they’re made of wood.”

  “Wizard-tree wood!” Lord Cooper interjected.

  “What happens if everyone has wooden children?” Callie went on. “What if they never become adults? What happens if they can’t have kids? What happens to all the people?”

  The lord’s brow furrowed. “The City is blessed! It will endure as it always has. Others will carry on. My wife could not bear the thought of having children and watching them suffer. Losing them.” He looked straight at Callie. “Could you?”

  Callie flushed and looked at the floor. “It happens,” she said quietly, after a moment. “That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have existed in the first place.”

  A twinge in Oscar’s chest. He reached his hand over to her. He could squeeze her arm; he could put his hand on her back, on her shoulder; he could turn and put both his hands on her shoulders and look her in the eyes. People had done all these things to him in the past week. He could do them. Almost. He reached his index finger out and placed it gently on her arm and then took it away.

  The lord drew himself up. “Miss Callie,” he said, “I am very grateful to you and Mister Oscar for saving my children. This has been unbearable. This was not supposed to happen. They’re magic!”

  Callie swallowed. She wiped one eye and straightened, all business again. “Lord Cooper, there are other children like yours.”

  “Yes, there are.”

  “Do you know how many others?” she asked. “We need to help them. If they haven’t started having problems yet, they might soon.”

  “I would say . . . over fifty.”

  Callie let out a long burst of air. Oscar simply burst.

  Over fifty.

  “You see,” the lord explained, “everyone else has them. You wouldn’t want your child to be the only one who had flaws. What would it be like for them?”

  Oscar could not speak. Over fifty little Sophies, all with their systems failing. They were so small; he was grown-up compared to these children. He knew things now; he had done things. They should be allowed to do things, too.

  The surnames of the children they had visited popped in his head and arranged themselves—Baker, Collier, Cooper, Miller, Piper, Wright. And suddenly he knew where he’d seen them before: the ledger, in Caleb’s office. Over fifty names. And such big numbers attached to each one—so many coins. Caleb had exacted a high price to manufacture children.

  “Lord Cooper,” Callie was saying, “If you could write down the names of—”

  Oscar leaned over and whispered, “Master Caleb has the names.”

  When Lord Cooper turned to go, his face looked odd, like that of a cat who had secretly taken more than her share of cheese. His eyes caught Oscar for a moment, and then lingered there. “When I first saw you in the shop,” he said, voice low. “I thought you were . . . like my children. Caleb’s first attempt, perhaps.”

  Oscar’s face went hot. Callie stiffened.

  “You do not approve,” the lord continued, eyes still on Oscar. “But, young man, wouldn’t it be a nice thing, to be made of magic?”

  “Thank you, Lord Cooper,” Callie said, voice like a knot. “You may go.”

  After the lord disappeared out the door, Callie sank slowly into her chair, and Oscar followed suit.

  “I don’t understand,” Oscar breathed. “Fifty magic kids? Because everyone wants children who can’t get sick? That they don’t have to worry about losing?”

  “Lord and Lady Cooper did lose something,” Callie said. “They lost the human children they could have had. They could have existed and do not.”

  Oscar wrapped his arms around himself and squeezed tightly. The magic children, would they ever realize what they were? Or would they just feel that something was missing, something at the core of what they were supposed to be? Would they find themselves oddly wistful for the real people they should have been, for the life they could have had?

  It was like being an orphan, in a way. They would feel it, but they would never understand why. Oscar would never know why he didn’t work quite in the same way as everyone else. All this time, the gray shadows of the Home had been obscuring some bigger void, one he hadn’t even known existed until now. Wolf had said: You don’t even know where you came from. Oscar had thought Wolf knew some terrible secret about his past. But no. Oscar was an orphan with no history attached to him, no story of the parents he had once had. Wolf had been taunting him because his past was unknowable.

  Callie coughed a little, and Oscar looked up. She was staring at the table, twisting curls in her hand. “My brother was so much younger than me,” she said in almost a whisper. “I saw him go from a baby to a child. He went from being this creature who ate and slept and cried to being . . . Nico. And suddenly . . .” She squeezed her eyes closed for a moment. When she opened them, they were wet. “Suddenly he liked playing in the fireplace and pretending it was a cave. And building things out of little scraps of wood. He made me little houses. And when I’d tell him stories . . . he loved that.”

  Callie hugged herself. “Suddenly he was a person.” she said, voice as thick as the night. “It was amazing.” Her lips pressed together, her eyes fell closed again for a moment, and volumes of history passed over her face After a time, she added, “The child Lord Cooper was talking about, the one who died, was the duke’s son. Marcus was his name. Right after I first got here, the boy had a terrible fever. The duke screamed at Madame Mariel that she was supposed to be able to fix him. That this never should’ve happened in the first place.”

  Callie’s voice slowly changed, and suddenly she sounded like she was talking to him, and not to some tiny patch of air. “And Mariel couldn’t help him. She tried, but it was beyond her. The boy died a few days later. And soon after that, we were flooded with City parents looking for something to protect their children. Caleb was, too. They were all so afraid. Terrified. As if their own children were already sick. I’d never seen City people afraid, especially not like that.”

  No. City people were not supposed to be afraid of anything. Wasn’t that the whole point?

  “That’s where I met the duchess. The mother of Ronald-who-can’t-remember. While we were there, while the duke was screaming, she just sat in the corner, like a shadow. Like she’d died and was already a ghost. That was a long time ago. But Ronald . . . I wonder if he was the first one. A child who would never fall ill . . .”

  “They’d never have to watch their kid suffer,” Oscar said quietly. There was a need, Caleb had said. That was all. Not for a shop boy, as Oscar had thought. He had not understood that there were many different ways to need.

  Callie slowly traced a finger along the tabletop. “I’ve been reading about the City during the plague,” she said. “It was so awful in there. People would try to escape, but the walls kept them in. Everybody was dying, all around, hundreds a day, and their families were locked in, too, and they could only watch. . . . When you lose someone, it hurts so much your body can’t contain it.” She swallowed. “The wizards said the City was just a wound at the end. Maybe there are scars. Maybe the ground still carries all that grief. Maybe the whole land is still . . . traumatized, somehow, and the people who were born there have it in their blood, the way some people in the Barrow have magic in their blood.”

  “The land remembers,” Oscar said. The wizards had told him so.

  “Maybe that’s why the City people are the way they are,” Callie went on. “Acting so superior. Thinking they’re chosen. If you’re chosen, if magic exists for your benefit, nothing bad can ever happen to you, right? Then you don’t have to be afraid.” She glanced up at Oscar. “I’m not saying it’s right. At all. It’s horrible. It’s so
selfish, and now their children are suffering.”

  Oscar nodded slowly.

  Callie dropped her hand on the table. “Well, it doesn’t matter what we think,” she said, straightening. “They’re children now. This was never their choice. And they could all be breaking down. How many times did City people come in yelling for Caleb?”

  Oscar bit his lip. “A lot.” Over fifty children, all made of unstable spells, all threatening to fall apart at any moment. The decoction would keep them. But Oscar didn’t know for how long. They could fall apart again, or something else could fail. Their spells could simply fade, and they would be nothing but wooden dolls again.

  “Fifty children, Oscar! Do we give them all remedies? Even the ones who haven’t broken yet? How do we know the remedies won’t stop working, just like the original spells did? What do we do?” Eyes widening, she inhaled sharply. “What if Caleb was going to export them? What if he already did?”

  There is danger in small enchantments, my boy. Small enchantments make us dream of big ones.

  “There’s something else I have to do,” Oscar said. “It is very stupid.” He looked up at Callie hesitantly. “Do you want to help me?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Endings

  The monster was gone. Or at least it belonged to the sea now. But the monster was not the real problem.

  Even though it had very much acted like it.

  Oscar explained to Callie about his original plan, about all the magic he’d dumped into the earth trying to feed it, about the unrelenting hunger that surrounded him, about how it was only after he gave the ground every last piece of magic that the monster had appeared, desperate and ravenous for more.

  Everything and everyone was so hungry. The monster. The Barrow folk, buying everything up when danger lurked. The City people, clutching at pretty little enchanted things. Substituting magic for people. The shining people’s ancestors, when the plague threatened, ignoring the warnings of the wizards, assuring themselves magic would keep them safe as they themselves brought death upon the entire island. They could have kept Aletheia safe, they could have kept the plague contained, but they had all cared for magic more than their own survival.

  And, again, the City people, forgetting the lessons, believing the lies, letting the dark parts of their legacy be obscured by white space and blank pages.

  Everyone was so hungry.

  “So what are you saying?” Callie asked.

  “The hole in the magic is still there,” Oscar said. “The earth will keep bearing monsters as long as there’s magic enough to let it.”

  “So what do we do? The apprentice and the hand?”

  “I don’t think . . .” He glanced up warily. “I don’t think there should be magic anymore.”

  She drew herself up. “You think it should be destroyed?”

  Oscar swallowed. “I think we should destroy it.”

  Callie’s eyes widened; they took in the whole of him, the whole room, the whole Barrow, she took them all in, and then her eyes lit and her jaw set. “Great,” she said. “How?”

  That evening, Oscar and Callie sat in the library poring over the shelves, cats swarming around them. Books lay all around—Aletheian histories, atlases, the plague history, the official and unofficial wizards’ chronicles. But while people had written volumes on finding magic, using magic, and making magic grow, and more volumes on magic’s theories, ethics, practical applications, and even impractical ones—no one had ever written a word about making magic go away.

  So they put away the books while the cats settled on their laps, and talked, and slowly they hatched a plan.

  No one had ever tried to make magic disappear—but sometimes it disappeared anyway. Sometimes it got used up. And sometimes it was lost in a vacuum.

  It was Callie who mentioned the plaguelands dirt, the way Oscar had described it sucking off the magic on his skin; and the sea, lapping away everything that had held the monster together.

  It was Oscar who talked about the trees—Galen’s diagram with the arrows going up from the soil in one tree and down to the soil in the other. And, underneath the ground, the roots spreading the magic through the soil. A network. A web.

  Or a circulatory system, Callie said. With magic coursing through the roots like blood.

  And so, Oscar said, if something else got into the system . . .

  . . . it would course through the roots, Callie said. Like magic.

  And they had their plan.

  It was late when they were done—the cats were all balled up and sleeping. Oscar walked Callie upstairs. They were silent now; all the words had been said. But when Callie was about to leave, she turned to Oscar, raised her eyebrows, and blew air out of her cheeks.

  He could think of nothing better to say.

  Oscar kept an eye on her through the window as she walked back to the healer’s, though he didn’t know what he’d do if another monster appeared—except maybe send the cats after it. When she disappeared into the house, his eyes fell on the bakery. It was Sunday; bread day, once upon a time, when Oscar lived in the cellar.

  Oscar rubbed his arm. With the bakery shuttered, the marketplace looked like it was missing its wizard tree. And so he sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter:

  Dear Mister Malcolm,

  There was a soil monster. It killed Caleb. It chased me into the sea and drowned. Now Callie and I are going to destroy magic. Then we have to stay in the Barrow to watch the City children. They are made of wizard-tree wood. You should come back. You can bake bread.

  —Oscar

  That night, he dreamed of the plaguelands. But the dream was not like his sky nightmares. Everything was still empty and endless, and yet not monstrous. A boy was running through the land, moving toward the horizon—and at first it seemed like the boy was being chased. But the boy kept running, and nothing appeared behind him. When the boy finally disappeared into the horizon and nothing followed, it occurred to Oscar that maybe the boy might not have been running away, but maybe he’d been running toward something.

  When he woke up, Oscar had the taste of the plaguelands around him. He rubbed his chest, but he was uneven, everywhere. He held the plan in his head, and his stomach shifted, just slightly. The earth that they were going to put into the forest had been so damaged that nothing could survive it—its nothingness was an even greater power than magic. Maybe a greater power than wizards. Once, Oscar had not believed such a thing could be possible.

  When Callie arrived in the morning, Oscar was up in the kitchen reading Galen’s journal again.

  “Where’s your cloak?” Oscar asked.

  Callie shrugged. “Doesn’t seem necessary anymore.”

  “Come look at this,” he said, nodding to his book. “Near the end. Galen wrote about the plaguelands.” He tried to sound casual, but he was rocking in his chair a bit. He grabbed onto the seat to stop himself.

  It was one of the entries he’d read that night in the library—and at the time he hadn’t thought anything of it. But now—now, he wanted to see if Callie saw what he saw.

  She read:

  The plague has killed everything along the western banks of the river and the shores around the sea. Now, that earth is not just barren, but a vacuum. One cannot plant a seed or light a match in this land, and one cannot carry magic across and expect it to survive the journey. Perhaps this will stop the spread. If it isn’t already too late.

  “I remember this one,” Callie said. “What did you want me to see?”

  Oscar’s eyes widened. “Read it carefully,” he said, motioning to the page. “He says the plague killed the land, and then talks about it being a vacuum. But what if that was . . . later? What if he’s not describing what happened to the land, but rather what the wizards did?”

  Callie squinted at the entry. Her eyes passed over the words, and then again. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Here,” Oscar said. His words were starting to pile on top of one another.
“Look at the words. The plague killed the land, they say, made it barren. But what if the wizards did everything that came next? ‘Now, the earth is a vacuum.’ Now.” His face was flushed. “They couldn’t get anyone to stop crossing to the west and back for magic. What if they made the plaguelands so people wouldn’t have a reason to go to the west anymore?”

  Callie forehead scrunched up, and she studied the words again, tugging on a curl. “I guess,” she said, tilting her head, “it could be read that way.”

  “It could!” he said. “Yes!”

  “But we don’t know,” she said softly. “It’s not clear. It could have been the plague, too.”

  “It could,” he whispered.

  “Really,” Callie said, “it doesn’t matter, as long as it works. Whether the wizards did it or not, the plaguelands stopped the spread. And now they’re going to stop the monsters from coming. It doesn’t matter, as long as it works.”

  Oscar didn’t say anything. But she was right: it didn’t really matter, not in the end.

  Still, it was a nice thing to believe.

  Soon, they had plunged into the forest. Oscar had a bag with the jug of plaguelands dirt from Caleb’s workroom strapped to his back; Callie, one carrying the jug of seawater. This time they walked right into the center of the forest, the middle of the circulatory system, to the biggest wizard tree.

  It was Oscar’s favorite tree, the one with the honey mushrooms growing underneath, the one with the five massive branches rising up and out of the trunk like a flower.

  Had it looked so old when Oscar had last been here? The bark was gray, fading. The leaves were thinning like an old man’s hair. There was a long welt of missing bark in the middle of the trunk, and some kind of dark fungus was growing in the welt.

  The tree looked so tired. They all did.

  But maybe, without the hungry soil taking from them all the time, the wizard trees would not be so tired anymore. Maybe, now, the soil could feed them. Just like it was supposed to.