Spellbinder (35 page)

“Are you alright?” asked Steve, a genuine note of concern creeping into his voice.

“Of course I am,” said Elsie confidently. “My grandfather was at Roarke’s Drift, you know. It’ll take more than one rotten alchemist to see off a Blaine!”

Steve rolled his eyes, but Belladonna could see that he was really pleased and more than a little impressed.

“Well, I’m off. Your Granddad’s making raspberry jelly. Be seeing you!”

And with that, she was gone.

By this time they were almost at the front door and Belladonna was already imagining herself sitting at home with a cup of tea and a slice of cake, when the door to the school secretary’s office flew open.

“Mr. Evans, Miss Johnson . . . in here at once!”

Their hearts sank. Mrs. Jay was the eyes and ears of Miss Parker and was popularly supposed to sit in her office near the front door just waiting to pounce on hapless students. She looked like a gatekeeper too. Even Belladonna’s mother had once remarked that there was something of the bulldog about Mrs. Jay, with her wrinkled jowls and her heavy black glasses.

Belladonna and Steve trailed into her office. Mrs. Jay shut the door, marched to her desk, and sat down.

Her office was huge, a great gray box of a room, with no decoration except for a long calendar of the school year marked with different colored felt tips showing all the major events, trips, and exams. The
desk itself was small and wooden with stacks of papers, but no computer. Mrs. Jay left tasks like that to her own assistant, a mouselike woman who worked in a cubbyhole beyond a small glass door on the far side of the office.

“Sit down.”

Belladonna and Steve sat in the two uncomfortable wooden chairs that were the room’s only other furniture.

“Right,” said Mrs. Jay, in her usual no-nonsense way, “hand them over.”

She held out her right hand as if asking for gum or water pistols or some other form of contraband.

Steve stared at her. “Hand over what?”

Belladonna squirmed on her seat, unable to imagine what the old lady was on about. Mrs. Jay just gave them her best gimlet stare and waited. Steve glanced at Belladonna, who shrugged, mystified. She looked at Mrs. Jay, and then at her desk: her pen holder, her cup of pencils and felt tips for doing the chart, and her name plate. It was all very ordinary, yet not quite right. Like an office in a play.

Belladonna reached into her backpack and pulled out the two amulets.

“Belladonna, no!” said Steve, his eyes wide.

“It’s alright,” said Belladonna, “isn’t it?”

She handed the amulets over. Mrs. Jay nodded and then looked disappointed.

“Where are the others?” she demanded.

“The others?”

“I thought the Sibyl told you,” tutted Mrs. Jay. “She was supposed to. Didn’t she give you two prophesies?”

“What is this?” asked Steve, irritation creeping into his voice. “A test?”

Belladonna reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out the piece of paper with the two rhymes on it. She looked at the second.

“As were the nights at the great Well of Wyrd,

So were the dragons far Cathay feared,

Likewise the worthies renowned of the sages,

The thrones of the dark queen,

And the stones of the ages.”

A light dawned and she looked up at Mrs. Jay.

“There are nine,” she said.

“What?” said Steve. “How do you make that out?”

“The Well of Wyrd is where the Norse god Odin had to hang for nine days and nights to gain wisdom. There are nine worthies. . . .”

“And nine Chinese dragons,” said Steve, starting to get the gist. “But what about the dark queen?”

“The Queen of the Abyss,” said Mrs. Jay. “She is in all worlds, wherever there is death. I didn’t think you’d get that one. I said so, but nobody ever listens to me, of course. So, where are the others?”

“There were two,” insisted Steve, getting irritated. “There weren’t any others. The Draconite Amulet and that, that yellowy one.”

“Hmmph,” said Mrs. Jay, sliding the two amulets into a drawer of her desk and locking it. “We thought . . . we assumed that the alchemist had them all.”

“Well, he didn’t,” said Steve sullenly.

Mrs. Jay looked at him with obvious distaste, then turned to Belladonna. “Are you sure he is the Paladin?”

“Oh, yes,” said Belladonna brightly.

“And what is with this Paladin-Spellbinder stuff?” said Steve. “More like reckless child endangerment, if you ask me.”

Belladonna sniggered.

“Oh, this is perfectly dreadful,” shuddered Mrs. Jay. “It wasn’t like this last time at all. Well, you can go home. There are seven more Nomials out there. I have to consult with . . . I have to find out what we’re going to do next. Go on. Off you go.”

“Can we have the rest of the week off?” asked Steve hopefully.

“No, you can’t. You’ve missed quite enough classes as it is.”

She scraped her chair against the floor as she rose, then crossed the room and flung open the door to her office.

“Wait,” Belladonna looked at Mrs. Jay. “I have a question.”

“Yes?” said Mrs. Jay, closing the door slightly.

“At the beginning, the night I first saw the Hound, I saw the stars go out. Just for a moment.”

“The stars didn’t go out,” began Mrs. Jay.

“But they did, I saw them.”

“There was our night sky and for a few seconds there was a different sky. The sky in the Land of the Dead.”

“There are no stars there.”

“Quite right. It happens sometimes if something is being sent from one world to another without using the proper doors. The alchemist used an ancient rite to rend a hole between the worlds to send something from that place to this.”

“The Hound and the Night Ravens,” said Belladonna.

“Just so.”

She opened the door wide again and looked at them with the kind of bored expectation that adults often use when they’re already thinking of the next thing they have to do.

Belladonna and Steve walked out slowly. As soon as they were safely in the entrance hall, the door slammed shut behind them.

“I reckon it was her personality got her that job,” said Steve, grinning.

“But she knew,” mused Belladonna, “she knew about the Nomials . . . about everything.”

“Well, not quite everything.”

“No . . . but who is she going to consult with? And what do you think it means?”

Steve opened the huge front door. “I think it means we’re going to need lots of sandwiches,” he said. “Come on, let’s go home.”

Belladonna smiled. They walked out of the school into the late autumn sunshine. She looked up at the trees and the clouds and listened to the sounds of the busy street: the cars and bikes and impatient pedestrians, the blaring music, the drills of the men working on the road and the clattering conversations of the people passing by. In a window at the top of an old house encased in scaffolding, a gray face looked down, a mob cap on its head and a soot smudge on its nose, while below a woman in a 1920s cloche hat glanced at her watch and hurried away, the Louis heels of her shoes glinting in the sunlight as she ran.

Belladonna felt a warm glow. A few days ago the world had seemed so empty, populated only by the living. It wasn’t until they had gone that she realized how much a part of her life the ghosts were. It wasn’t just her parents, it was the glimpses of all the lives that had been lived and that, in a way, continued to be lived. Perhaps she had resented her ability to see them at first, fearing exposure and ridicule, when she was yearning to fit in, but those few days without them had made her understand that her ability wasn’t some weird family curse, it really was a gift, just as Grandma Johnson
always said. Steve was right, they would probably need to go back. But for now she was going home through a town full of familiar faces, and when she got to 65 Lychgate Lane her parents would be waiting, just as they always were.

She turned right and headed up the street. Steve caught up to her, his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

“Hey,” he said, “d’you think that ruler thingy will work in this world?”

“I doubt it,” said Belladonna, smiling.

“Didn’t think so,” he said. “Too much to hope for.”

They walked away up the street, said a perfunctory good-bye at the top, and turned their separate ways. Neither of them looked back at the school.

Which is why they failed to notice the large black feather that circled slowly down from the great horse chestnut tree on the other side of the road and landed on the pavement, black as jet and soft as silk.