Ordinary Magic (28 page)

He put a hand on my elbow because relief was making me a little shaky. “What’s your name?”

“Abby Hale. You have to help me, this is an
emergency
!”

“Tell me,” he said.

The older guard scoffed. “Don’t bother, Ned. Look, little girl, this is very funny, but it’s a little too early for practical jokes.”

“It’s not a joke!” I insisted.

“I don’t know how you got in here,” he continued, shaking his head, “but this is a dangerous place and you’re committing a crime by being here. We’re going to have to call the cops.”

“Yes, please, call the cops, call
anyone,
but she’s out there and someone has to stop her—”

“Tell me,” the second guard repeated.

I took a deep breath and tried explaining again. “I’m an ord. Trixie, this woman, she kidnapped a boy from my school, and she said she would hurt him if I didn’t come in here and try and get her friend. He’s in the dungeon because the two of them tried to kidnap me before except he got caught, and then she set red caps on the school. She said they could take us kids as payment!”

The younger guard looked up at his partner. “I think you’d better wake the king.”

“The king’s sleeping,” the older guard replied.

“That’s why I said wake him.”

“Over a kid?” The older guard crossed his arms, and I had to fight to keep from bouncing up and down on my feet. Why were they still
talking?

The younger guard sighed and stood. “I’ll wake him. Wait here,” he told me, and disappeared.

The remaining guard stared me down a bit before asking, “You really an ord, then?” When I nodded, he pointed to the far end of the hallway and told me to go over there and keep still. He barely looked at me. He didn’t even care.

I wanted to wait for the other guard, to see what happened.
To see if he brought help. But then I remembered how Peter screamed when Trixie twisted his arm, and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I followed my nose to the right portal and sprinted through.

Either the staircase was asleep or it remembered me, because I was able to corkscrew straight down without any shifts or trick steps. It was dim and I was going too fast—taking steps two and three at a time when I could manage it—I slipped a couple times and wrenched my foot, bad enough that I had to run one hand along the wall for support as I hopped down the steps. Fortunately, the wall had cracks and carvings that I could cling to. Unfortunately I ended up grabbing the wrong carving and set off a crisscrossing spiderweb of flames throughout the rest of the stairway. I had a moment of “I’m going to be burned alive” panic, but when I wasn’t, it was followed by an “oh thank goodness it’s just magical fire” relief. Even so, the sudden, fiery light seared my eyes; I had to squeeze them shut and find the way with my hands until my eyes adjusted.

Another twist in the staircase, and I felt a hint of coolness beyond the fire. I threw myself at it blindly and tumbled out onto the hard, level floor of the dungeon.

Behind me the staircase was still flaming and it was bright enough that I could see where I was going. Maybe I
could
do this. I mean, I’d been here once before—with King Steve. The icy, slicing thing overhead—I remembered to duck … except this time it didn’t come. And then the manticore pit.
That
was still there. In the light, I could see the illusion of floor covering it, and the dark, gaping space beneath. I plastered myself to the
wall as I inched along the narrow ledge. A soft, almost soothing, hooting sound drifted up from the hole in the floor.

Then solid stones stretched out under my feet again, and I scrambled over to Barbarian Mike’s cell.

His cell door was barred—
barred
, with one of those sliding-bolt things, not even a proper lock. I jerked the bolt back loudly and dragged the cell door open.

Barbarian Mike looked like he’d been Banished already. He was on his cot, arms and legs shackled (that was new), eyes closed, curled in on himself.
Like Fran
, I thought, and it churned like acid in my stomach. He didn’t move when I ran over; I grabbed one of his arms and shook.

He had his fingers around my neck before I realized it. Then he stopped and blinked. “What’re—”

“Trixie sent me.”

This took a couple seconds to sink in. When it did, he looped his shackled arms around me and crushed me in a hug. I think he might have been crying.

I tried to shove myself free. “We have to hurry. We don’t have a lot of time.”

He let me go, a wide grin splitting his face. “Anything you say.”

I didn’t like taking off his shackles, but I didn’t think I had a choice if I wanted to get him out. His shackles were secured with a simple toggle latch, although, okay, Barbarian Mike did look unpleasantly gray until I peeled them off, and they left these weird bubbly marks on his skin that he wouldn’t stop rubbing.

Barbarian Mike raced out of the cell, then stamped his feet a couple times and started bounding off the way I’d come. And part of me wanted to let him go that way. I really did. Let him drop into the manticore pit, or roast alive in the stairway. Or, even better, help him get through all that and lead him back up to that hallway, where there’d be, hopefully, cops or guards or Kingsmen waiting. I wanted to, but I couldn’t; I needed to get him to Trixie, or Peter would suffer.

I grabbed his arm. “Not that way, you can’t go that way. It’s, uh, on fire. Do you know any other way out? Maybe seen the guards coming and going?”

Barbarian Mike looked around. “This way,” he said, nodding in the other direction. “Guards always bring food from over here.”

There were a couple of shock traps along the hallway—we hadn’t gotten to them in school, but it didn’t matter because Barbarian Mike would just grit his teeth and charge through, though a couple of bolts made his hair stand on end. As far as I could tell, that was his strategy for everything. I had to pull him back before he barreled into a loop and got caught running the same three feet of hallway over and over.

But he was right. There was a door. I almost ran straight by it at first, because, for one, it wasn’t oozing magic like every other trap and trigger in the place. And, for another, it blended in with the rest of the stone wall. But it was just a little … off, the stones a little too regular and even, not quite matching the rest of the wall. I tugged Barbarian Mike to a stop. “Wait, wait, wait. Here.”

He looked it over and cursed.

“What? What is it?” I demanded.

“It’s a puzzle door. See?” He cast a light, held it up so we could get a better look. “These stones, you slide them around, right?” He shifted a couple of stones; they slid back and forth easily. “You get the right pattern, and the door opens.”

“What’s the right pattern?”

Barbarian Mike shrugged. “Search me. They’re usually easy to figure out. Markings you have to match up, or get the red block from the bottom up to the top, something like that,” he added, scanning the door. “Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.” He started shifting stones around. “You just have to be careful, though, because if you get the wrong pattern a couple times—”

The sound knocked me back. A screeching, pounding wailing that made the air rattle and the ground throb. It blared up through the floor, jangled out of the walls, until my bones were buzzing with the sound of it. King Steve told me later that they modeled the alarm system on the cries of real-life banshees. Hearing that, you can tell why banshees are so successful; after a few minutes of that screeching, you would do anything just so you don’t have to hear it anymore.

I clapped my hands over my ears, almost choking on panic. Could they hear that in the rest of the castle? On the street? Could Trixie hear it? How could anyone
not
hear it?

“Okay, so that’s not it!” Barbarian Mike bellowed amicably. “How about you give it a go?” And he looked so calm, so relaxed, I wanted to scream at him—not words, just scream, the way the alarm was screaming.

On the far end of the corridor, on the opposite side of the dungeon, the fire suddenly cut off from the staircase, slamming us into darkness. Then wall torches flared up, turning the hallway bright as day. Oh, sure,
now
someone was coming.

I turned and ran back to Mike’s cell, and yanked the iron bolt out of the door. It slid free easily, which made me think that if I got out of this and saw King Steve again, I was going to make him put actual chains on the actual cell and they were going to have a real, nonmagical lock and it was going to be as big as my head. The bolt was heavy, heavy enough that my arms ached from carrying it by the time I got back to Barbarian Mike.

Anger makes you strong, or at least it makes you able to pretend you are. I swung the bolt back and, with a yell, smashed it into the door. The stones cracked. I swung again and again as stones popped free and went flying and the door crumpled inward.

I could see shadows now on the staircase behind us. Barbarian Mike caught my arms just as I was about to swing forward again, and pushed the door open one-handed. It teetered slightly, and crashed against the wall, revealing what appeared to be a small, empty infirmary. Above one length of counter was a window, and the window led to the street.

I scrambled through first, but the window was a little small for Barbarian Mike, and I had to help him, yanking on his arms until he finally popped free. I fell backward on the smooth pavement of the plaza, and he pushed himself up and left me behind, running down the street and bellowing Trixie’s name.

And Trixie came right out into the open dragging Peter with
her. Barbarian Mike’s voice broke when he saw her. Peter looked okay. Trixie had him by the hair, and he was cradling his arm, but he looked okay, and the second she saw Mike she let go of Peter and ran. She didn’t even look to see if there were any guards coming. She just ran straight for Mike, and took a couple of leaping steps, and they collided. Arms wrapped around each other, faces pressed together, in a clutching, smooshing, desperate kiss. It was like a scene from one of Gil’s books.

They really should have paid more attention. Guards streamed out the window, poured around me, heading for them.

I didn’t watch. I didn’t care. I ran for Peter, which was more of a limp because by that time my ankle seemed to remember twisting on the stairs and wanted to make up for lost time. I grabbed for him, and tripped on the last step. Peter tried to catch me, and we ended up awkwardly half sitting on the ground.

A little ways away, Trixie and Mike battled and blasted at the guards, but they were hampered by the fact that they wouldn’t let go of each other.

Peter grinned at me, and it was his first smile in so long it felt like his first smile ever. “You look terrible,” he said.

I leaned against him and laughed.

It’s strange how I remember images, moments most of all. The alarm made everything blur together, but I remember the light shining oddly off Barbarian Mike’s and Trixie’s clasped hands as they were forced to surrender. I remember the confused look on one Kingsman’s face as he tried to cast me and Peter into a containment spell (they didn’t realize we were the victims at that point). I remember seeing one Kingsman, crouched down in front of me, seeing his mouth move as he said my name, realizing he
knew
my name, but not hearing it because that awful alarm was still screaming. He’d recognized me and convinced the others to stop trying to put us under arrest. Then he called for help for Peter. They took us into the palace, and I hobbled along until one of the Kingsmen shook his head and swooped me up in his arms. They took us into the small doctor’s office, and I remember waiting with Peter under the glaring lights and realizing that the alarms hadn’t followed us, that the pounding was coming from my own ears.

We were barely there five minutes when Alexa burst in. She choked something out, I couldn’t hear what, and threw her arms around me.

“What do you think,” she finally managed, “what do you think I felt like, getting a call in the middle of the night that the school’s been attacked, and I show up to find out you’re not there?” And she started crying. I’d never seen Alexa cry. Mom and Dad said she hadn’t cried since she was sixteen, when she begged them not to send her back to school after summer break. “I found Becky, and we tore through the goblin conclaves—all of them in the city! I didn’t wait for permission, I didn’t even ask! I threatened—” She put her hands over her mouth and crumbled.

I hugged her; she hugged back until it hurt.

“Did you find the other kids? The ones that were taken?” I asked when she calmed.

Alexa nodded, and I could almost see her pulling herself back together. “Most of them.” Then she added, at seeing Peter’s blank look of horror, “They’re all
alive
. Fred was there. We got him back, he’s fine. But …” She paused for a very long time. “We’re still tracking down some of the other kids. The ones Trixie sold.”

“Fran?” I asked.

“Sold,” Peter said. He gripped my hand. “She was sold. I saw them take her away.”

Afterward, Alexa took us back to the school. She guided us past the police barriers, through the courtyard to the dining hall—me on piggyback because the doctor confirmed my ankle
was probably sprained and, after wrapping it up, told me to keep off it as much as possible.