The Golden Thread

  “My hand-mirror that I gave you that afternoon?” she said. “The one that helped you rescue your mom? I kept the little piece you gave me back afterward. I thought I could see special things in there. Wishful thinking, I told myself. But I kept that piece of glass with me.

  “Well, I showed it to somebody in Barbados, a sort of special-talents person Aunt Ruth knows. He said he could see traces of strong magic inside the glass, so something big had happened around my mirror, just like you told me yourself.

  “Now I saw this man do things you wouldn’t believe—well, maybe you would, with your magic Gran and all. So yeah, I believe that my mirror helped you beat an evil wizard. And if you tell me now that Bosanka is harassing this committee of yours, I believe that too.”

  I felt my heart thump and my eyes get big. “You mean you’ve seen some magic yourself, in Barbados?”

  “Oh, a couple of things,” she said nonchalantly. “Tell you all about it sometime, when you got a minute. But first, what are you going to do about Bosanka?”

  Back to the horrible here and now. I sighed. “Lennie and I are going to ask her for more time, today, at drama club. I don’t know what will happen. She’s so crazy and arrogant—!”

  “Indeed,” Barb said dryly. She shut her photo portfolio and fished her camera out of her backpack. “Good thing I’ve got this with me today.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “To take to the auditorium, of course,” she said. “I want to get some shots of this royal witch of yours.”

  I had heavy, scary second thoughts. “Listen, Bosanka may be hazy about the details of her home magic but she’s still dynamite. I mean, she’s dangerous, Barb!”

  “Valentine, I understand that,” she said sweetly. “I’m the one who gets the A’s, remember?”

  “Okay,” I said, in a burst of creative annoyance, “so how about standing in for Beth Stowers in the Comet Committee? Then I can tell Bosanka that I’ve got a replacement, somebody who’s gone through some weirdness with me, and maybe we won’t get killed on the spot.”

  Barb hooked her arm through mine and we headed for the auditorium together. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Lennie met us outside the big double doors.

  “Barb is joining the Comet Committee in Beth’s place,” I said. “That’s one down!”

  Lennie solemnly shook Barb’s hand.

  We slipped inside and sat down in back. The drama club was rehearsing a modernized Hamlet. Kim Larkin, the school clique queen, was Ophelia, and gorgeous Michael Scott (the senior heartthrob who had completely slipped my mind lately) was Hamlet.

  To my utter amazement, Bosanka was reading the part of Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. I could not believe it! Lennie quickly got the story from his friend and passed the word on to Barb, who passed it to me. The girl playing Gertrude had failed a crucial chem test, so she was busy being tutored for a makeup. Mr. Fischer, the drama club’s faculty advisor, had somehow or other ended up letting Bosanka pinch-hit as the queen.

  I bet he had no idea why he did that. We did.

  Barb slipped off down the side aisle with her camera in her hand. I stayed put in the back row, feeling ravenous with tension.

  Michael declaimed, “Now, mother, what’s the matter?”

  Bosanka read from some mimeographed sheets in her hand. “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.” The effect was amazing. It didn’t matter how square and plain she was. She was the Snow Queen, lofty and cool, with Hamlet dithering around somewhere about knee level.

  My friend Megan sat down next to me. “Wow,” she whispered, “what an actress! I should have signed up for a foreign guest, too, though with my luck, I’d get some nerd. What’s she like, really?”

  “What wilt thou do?” said Bosanka with cool disdain. “Thou wilt not murder me?”

  “What you see,” I said, “is what you get.”

  “My mom is always yakking about ‘really strong women,’ you know?” Megan said. “She should meet Bosanka.”

  Was this Megan talking? Megan who had been madly in love for years with a boy who treated her like a wad of gum stuck to his shoe?

  But she was right, Bosanka was impressive as the completely unruffled monarch of all she surveyed. Poor Michael was just part of the scenery. On the stage with Bosanka, he was a mere cute boy saying words he didn’t really understand very well.

  “O, speak to me no more,” Bosanka said, “spurning” him, that was the only term for it. She sat down in the lone wooden chair on the stage and gazed coldly up at him. “These words like daggers enter in mine ears. No more, sweet Hamlet.”

  Even Mr. Fischer was impressed. I could tell by the polite way he talked to her, Fischer, who usually prowled the balcony roaring, “I’m not convinced! Convince me!”

  He said, “Gertrude, I think you could be more upset when you do this scene. The queen as a proud, powerful woman who follows her own will and isn’t used to being criticized is very effective. It will work even better if she falters here and lets what Hamlet says really get to her. Would you try that approach, please?”

  He was treating her the way a real director treats a real actress.

  Every single person in that auditorium was watching her while Michael, bemused, fished out his line and delivered it. It wasn’t his fault that he barely existed up there. He was on stage pretending to be a prince with a person who was royal without having to pretend.

  “Alas, he’s mad,” said Bosanka contemptuously.

  Royal and threatening. She had a ruthless streak a mile wide, something to do with being “highborn” in a place that I was beginning to suspect had been pretty rough, tough, and basic, no matter how magical. Her brutal simplicity came through, making her Queen Gertrude absolutely convincing.

  She was removed from everybody else. You could see it in the way the other kids treated her. They deferred to her, but nobody kidded around with her the way friends do. They wouldn’t shout her name in the hall or ask her how she liked or didn’t like her nose. She was only playing at being one of them, and they sensed it.

  No wonder she was so desperate to get back to “her people.” We were not them.

  Megan said in an awed whisper, “You know what she’s got? She’s got presence.”

  “Why, look you there!” Michael yelped. “Look how it steals away! My father, in his habit as he lived! Look where he goes even now out at the portal!”

  Mr. Fischer, standing in for the ghost, tiptoed away.

  Bosanka said icily to Michael, “This is the very coinage of your brain. This bodiless creation ecstasy is very cunning in.” I don’t think any of us knew what the heck “ecstasy” meant in that sentence, including Bosanka. It didn’t matter a bit. Michael cringed.

  “Excellent!” shouted Fischer. “Let’s stop there, everybody, for today.” He talked briefly with Bosanka and then walked out with Michael, the two of them intent on some line-reading or other. Not that advice from Fischer or anybody else would make much difference for Michael in the scene.

  Bosanka stood on the stage holding a long wooden dowel used as a sword in the duel scenes. She gave the side curtain a quick, vicious, capable-looking jab with it.

  When we were alone with her, I went down front with Lennie. Close by I could hear Barb’s camera snick.

  First the good news. “Bosanka,” I said, “we need to talk with you. We’ve been working on getting the whole committee together for you tomorrow. Beth Stowers just is not available, but we have a replacement, somebody who really belongs in the Comet Committee.”

  Her pale eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Who?”

  “My friend Barbara Wilson,” I said.

  Bosanka pointed the dowel at Barb. “That one?”

  “Yes, that’s Barbara—”

  The dowel whistled down and cracked against the back of the chair they had been using in the scene. The chair screamed. I mean screamed, a high-pitched shriek that left my ears ringing and my heart paralyzed.

  Bos
anka roared, “Should be you I hit! Or this walking darkness, witch of the left hand, night demon!”

  “What, what?” I stammered. I squinted at the chair. Had it really moved in a creaking flinch under the whiplash blow of the stick? “Demon? Who?”

  “Me,” Barb said loudly. “She means ‘black.’ ”

  “Black, black, black!” Bosanka yelled. She stamped on the stage, which boomed like a drum. “Even here you say it—black magic!”

  Which goes to show that I had just not taken Barb’s objections seriously enough. After all, how did racial prejudice fit in with royalty from another world? The plain fact is, I forgot there might be a problem and Barb had not reminded me. Maybe she’d hoped, deep down, that she was wrong.

  There was no more room for doubt.

  “The girl is crazy,” Barb announced in trembling fury. “You-all will excuse me if I take my wicked black self out of here so as not to lose my terrible left-hand temper and tear off somebody’s head.”

  I ran after her. Behind me I heard Lennie talking soothingly to Bosanka. Was he crazy? What do you say to a magical savage who is also a raving bigot?

  Barb and I burst out of the auditorium together.

  “What’s going on?” said Mrs. Denby, nimbly skipping out of our way. “Who’s in the auditorium, girls?”

  “Imperial Wizard-ess of the Ku Klux Klan,” Barb snapped, and stalked off.

  I panted. “Um, just rehearsing, Mrs. Denby We’ll be through soon.”

  “Valentine,’ she said, “you know students aren’t supposed to be in the building after classes without a faculty advisor. Didn’t Mr. Fischer just leave?”

  “Uh, yes.” How could I stop Mrs. Denby from going into the auditorium? A student turned into a deer was one thing, but the assistant principal?

  Mrs. Denby studied me with her well-known X-ray eyes. “What’s going on here?”

  “Just a rehearsal,” I said. Paavo Latvela had once commented, ambiguously, on my talent for lying. He would have been proud of me now. “We’re doing a skit demonstrating the meaning of the First Amendment.”

  Mrs. Denby said, “Really,” and walked past me into the auditorium. I plunged in after her.

  The place was empty—nothing, nobody, just the chair up on the stage.

  “What’s all the mystery about?” Mrs. Denby asked.

  “Uh, what mystery? There’s no mystery, Mrs. D.”

  “You kids,” she said, and she marched out.

  I jumped onto the stage. The chair, made of ancient, bescribbled school oak, had a jagged crack down the center of its upper back-support. Rough little beads of pale, sticky stuff oozed down into a small puddle of what looked like varnish on the hardwood stage below.

  That old oak chair, after years of drying out in classrooms and storerooms, was bleeding fresh sap from where Bosanka had lashed it.

  12

  Vandals and Huns

  I FOUND LENNIE OUTSIDE on the school steps. “Where’d you go?” I said. “You scared me to death!”

  “Out the side door to the other corridor,” he said. “Ssshh, look.”

  Bosanka stood with Michael Scott at the school’s front steps: trucklike, booted Bosanka and the beautiful Michael in stone-washed jeans, golden curls, and mountaineer parka. It was a distressing sight.

  I turned back to Lennie. “Are you okay?” I said. “Did you see what she did to that poor old chair—?”

  “Don’t remind me,” he said painfully. “She opened up a raft of possibilities that I don’t even want to think about. Like, what life was like in her world for the people who weren’t ‘highborn,’ or who weren’t even people, to her.”

  “Let alone the animal life,” I said.

  “I know,” Lennie said, wincing. He had always been sensitive about the cruelty to animals.

  But I was wound up, I just couldn’t stop. “All that stuff about hunting—in the sea and the air—maybe they tore their forests apart, too. Maybe all their plants had consciousness that a ‘highborn’ like Bosanka could wake with her magic and abuse whenever she felt like it! The girl is a total barbarian, like the Huns and the Vandals all wrapped up in one big package.”

  He started to say something—maybe a defense of Bosanka, as he’d defended her before—but just then Michael and Bosanka started walking away.

  “Come on,” I said. “We still have to talk to her.”

  “Right now?” Lennie said, hanging back. “I don’t know, Val. She’s pretty upset.”

  “Listen, Lennie,” I said, “even Bosanka might soften up after spending time with Michael Scott. I mean, she is a girl, right? And you have to admit, Michael is gorgeous.”

  “And he’s walking around with somebody we know might be a more or less lethal person,” Lennie said with a sideways look at me. “You really think us being around will protect him from her bad temper?”

  “Who knows,” I muttered. “Come on.” The thing about your good friends is that they know you so well—even the parts you don’t particularly want them to know.

  We followed Bosanka and Michael to the park through the chilly afternoon. Bosanka didn’t have any books for him to carry for her. She didn’t need props.

  “How come she didn’t turn you into a deer, or worse?” I asked Lennie.

  He zipped his parka shut. The afternoon sunshine didn’t have much warmth in it. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I said to her, ‘Look, we have to talk about this, and I can’t talk if you turn me into a dumb animal.’ She said, ‘You are already dumb animal,’ and stomped out.”

  Lennie had a lot of guts, but if I said so I knew he’d get all embarrassed, so I didn’t. Privately, I thought he was amazing.

  “Not that there aren’t animals that could talk to you, if you could just crack their code,” he went on. “My dolphin project is about some scientists who are teaching dolphins to talk. Well, communicate, anyway.”

  I said, “Lennie, that sounds great.”

  “They let you swim with them in the tank,” Lennie said, warming to his theme. “On Saturday afternoons, when the training sessions are over for the week.”

  Up ahead of us, Michael and Bosanka walked the length of Rumsey Playground. No point trying to talk to her with Michael around, and she was obviously in no hurry to get rid of him. We were going to have to be patient. This is not my strong point. Lennie is one of the most patient people I know. We have had our differences about this.

  “I hope I have a chance to get into this project,” he said worriedly, “even though I’m only in High School. My ear infection is clearing up, but what if they don’t want to take any chances with it?”

  “They’ll let you in,” he said automatically.

  Behind the arbor at the end of the playground, we found Michael and Bosanka rehearsing Hamlet together on the little stage of the concrete band shell. They paid no attention to us or to the guy with a push broom who was sweeping up trash in the seating area. Lennie and I wandered around, keeping an eye on the band shell.

  I noticed some pebbles lined up in long wavelike lines across the pavement—just before the push broom wiped out the pattern. Barb had said something about peculiar designs turning up in the park—magical designs, maybe. Could this have something to do with Bosanka?

  If it did, the clean-up guy had just swept up a mess of magic without even knowing it.

  If only we could deal with Bosanka herself as easily as that!

  We walked over toward the statue on the southwest side, two eagles with flapping wings fighting over a droopy, obviously dead sheep. There are a lot of statues on predatory themes in Central Park—the stalking puma crouched above the East Drive, the falconer over by Strawberry Fields, the Indian and his dog hunting at the foot of the Mall.

  No wonder the First Hunter felt at home here.

  “Lennie,” I said, feeling a little teary even, “I’m really sorry about all this,”

  He said, “Hey, it’s okay. Gives me something to think about now that I’ve started swimming l
aps again.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  Lennie looked surprised. “Me, too,” he said. “Swimming laps is boring.”

  “You don’t understand,” I mumbled. “What if this is all happening to teach me a lesson for thinking I was special, having the family talent and everything?”

  “To teach you a lesson?” he said thoughtfully. “What about the rest of us, and whatever talent we’ve each got?” He hesitantly put his arm around my shoulders and gave me his best werewolf grin. “Don’t be so nervous, okay? You’re scaring me. Let’s figure out what we can say to Bosanka if we do actually get a chance to talk to her.”

  Up on the band-shell stage, Michael waved his arms and declaimed while Bosanka prowled around with her script pages flapping in her hand: the fake prince who was pretty and easy-going, and the real “highborn,” who was impulsive, violent, arrogant—like a true aristocrat of olden times, I guess. The real thing without the romance people added later, and the real thing was powerful and ruthless.

  I looked at the fighting eagles. That was how we would have to be—red in tooth and claw—if we were going to be able to stand up to her.

  I said, “Lennie, we’re changing the plan. We’ve got to get Bosanka cooled out about the people missing from the committee, and persuade her to let Barb in and to give us more time to wait for Joel and locate Mimi. Then, when Bosanka does call the committee together, we all concentrate on making a sort of laser out of our power and—and use it on her, or try to.”

  Lennie looked shocked. “You mean—incinerate her?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” I backtracked. “But—well—yeah, something like that. We’ve got to stop her, Lennie. And I don’t know how else to do it.”

  He moved away from me, frowning. “I thought we were going to try to send her back where she came from.”

  My mouth was suddenly dry. I was as scared of what I was saying as I was of Bosanka, because I had an awful feeling that what I was proposing we could actually do, if we put our minds and wills to it. And it was horrible.