The Dark Shadow of Spring (7 page)

“Give me your hand and find out,” the girl said with a charming smile.

“I’m too heavy for you to pull me out,” Alex said as he raised his hand toward hers.

“I’m much stronger than I look,” the girl said as she clasped his hand in hers. That was an understatement, Alex thought, considering the ease and speed with which he felt himself pulled upward through the mouth of the cave, out into the air of the night, and lowered down to the ground. He looked up at the girl. She stood a good foot-and-a-half taller than he did. She seemed to be about his age. As his eyes adjusted to the light of the stars and the glow-wand, Alex noticed the pointed ears rising up through the curls of her blond hair and he thought for a moment that she was riding a pony. And then he realized why.

The beautiful girl who had saved him, maybe even saved his life, was a centaur.

“Hi,” she said, still smiling in the pale moon light. It was a smile that made her seem smaller than she was. “My name is Victoria.”

“Alex,” Alex said, extending his right hand. “Alex Ravenstar.”

“That’s right,” Victoria said, shaking his hand a little more firmly than he had expected, eliciting a slight wince that he strove to cover.
She must be stronger than Clark
, Alex thought idly as she continued. “Humans have two names. I only have one name. Just Victoria. There aren’t enough centaurs in the world to bother with more than one name. I’ve heard that pixies have three names. Probably because there are ever so many of them. But my father says we need to fit in, so we’ve started calling our family Radcliff. Which I always forget. So I’m Victoria Radcliff.”  She let go of his hand.

Alex let his hand drift to his head and rub the bulging knot on the back of his scalp. He grimaced as he touched it. It felt like it was the size of a watermelon.

“I can heal that for you,” Victoria said, pointing to his head.

“It’s not that bad,” Alex said, pulling his hand away from his skull. His mother spent a good deal of her time healing his cuts, scrapes, bruises, and broken bones. He was already figuring out what to tell his mother about how he’d nearly cracked his head open.

“It’s not a problem,” Victoria said, reaching her hands out to gently place them on either side of Alex’s head. “Centaurs are good with healing magic.”

There were many kinds of magic, each person being more attuned to one or two, but all magics fell into four broad categories, the mastery of each more rare than the next. There was Ka’Al, or magic that dealt with the control of matter and energy, which, for reasons that Alex was never quite clear, were apparently the same thing on some level. Ka’Al magic covered fire and earth and wind magics.

Ka’Ett was the magic of living things, such as the control of plants and animals and healing. Ka’Lem magic worked on the mind, which allowed a mage to communicate with telepathy or read minds or create hallucinations and illusions.

Finally there was Ka’Neff, or Spirit Magic, which was the rarest and least common of all magics, allowing mages to affect other souls, speak with ghosts, summon beings from other realms, and even, it was said, walk between the planes of existence. Nearly everyone learned to master one or more form of Ka’Al magic to control matter and energy, almost a quarter of all people had some facility with life magic, but only one in a thousand might have any real command of Mind Magic and Spirit Magic was so rare as to be nearly mythical. All of this flicked through Alex’s mind in a fraction of a second as he wondered how much talent centaurs really had with healing magic.

Victoria’s hands were cool to the touch and Alex stared up into her eyes as she whispered rune-words of life magic beneath her breath, noticing how soft and slender her fingers felt in his hair. He was about to protest that she needn’t bother when the back of his head suddenly felt ice cold. His eyes flashed wide open and he gasped, his breath caught in his throat. His mother’s healings never felt like that. A bit of a chill, yes, but not the intense cold he felt now spreading down his spine. Then the back of his head was burning as if a hot poker had been jammed into it. In spite of himself, he yelped.

“Oops,” Victoria said, yanking her hands from Alex’s head to place them at her mouth. “Sorry. So sorry. I used a little more magic than I probably needed to. I got a little carried away. I wanted to make sure I healed everything. So much for making a good first impression. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Alex said, stroking the back of his head roughly to make his point. “It feels like new. And you’ve made a great first impression. You saved me, remember.”

“Right,” Victoria said, dusting off her hands. “Not a bad night’s work.”

“Are you a relative of the Creaking Creek centaurs?” Alex asked.

There were only two families of centaurs in the Rune Valley. One was a large family of farmers in the fields near the Creaking Creek, to the east of Wolf’s Head Lake and north of the Silent Swamp. The other centaur family lived a more rustic life in a large cabin in the Crimson Forest in the south of the valley. Both stayed mostly to themselves, rarely being seen around town, but Alex was familiar with them from trips around the valley with his father.

None of the centaur children attended school in town, all of them being home schooled. Alex was too young to remember it directly, but his parents had told him about a human child being hurt during a fight with a centaur child long before he was born. The town had been in an uproar for weeks. Some of the townspeople, the ones who still harbored an unspoken fear of anyone who wasn’t a full-blooded human, had asked the centaurs to leave. Centaurs tended to be private creatures to begin with and it did not take a great deal of prejudice to convince them that living in town was not worth their time.

“I’m new to town,” Victoria said, her constant smile wavering for the first time. “We just moved into the old Lancaster house yesterday.”

That made sense, Alex thought. The Lancasters had been the town smiths for years and were second-generation giants who never had children. They had passed away two years ago, within days of each other. The house had sat empty ever since and, because of the size of its former owners, it would be perfect for centaurs who wanted to live within the town limits. “I start school on Monday,” Victoria continued. “I was just out for a run. I thought I’d get to know the valley a bit. See what the town looked like from the mountainside. I’m so dreadfully tired of unpacking boxes. Daddy has ever so many of them.”

“Well, if you live in town too,” Alex said, beginning to walk through the trees toward the deer path he knew would take them back down the mountain, “we should head back. Do you have any idea what time it is? My mom hates it when I miss dinner.”

“I don’t know,” Victoria said, walking beside him. “Seven? Eight? I’m afraid I was daydreaming and not really paying attention to the time. Daddy rarely ever notices when I’m late for dinner. He’s usually too engrossed in some invention.”

“What do your parents do?” Alex asked, wondering what Victoria’s mother thought about being late for dinner.

“Daddy is an inventor,” Victoria said with a note of pride in her voice. “Magical inventor, that is. He creates magical items. Stuff like that glow-wand, only far more interesting. And he turns Outsider machines into magical machines, like cars and things. He’s using the old smithing barn as a workshop.”

“That’s cool,” Alex said. “My dad’s the town warlock and my mom works for the bookseller, Mrs. Pak. Mom loves books. They’re stacked all over the house.”

“My Mum always did the same thing,” Victoria said, her smile dropping away suddenly. “She passed away last year. Centaurs have two hearts and her human heart was never very strong. But she loved to read. She was reading when she died. Sitting by the window in a special chair that Daddy built.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex said, wondering how he would feel if he lost one of his parents. He didn’t think about it for very long. It was too painful a thought. “You must miss her very much.”

“Oh, ever so much,” Victoria said, dabbing surreptitiously at her eyes with the back of her hand. “But Daddy’s the one who has taken it the worst. That’s why he works on his inventions all the time, I suspect. So he won’t have time think about Mum.”

“How do you deal with it?” Alex asked, trying to think of the right thing to say.

“By taking walks in the woods,” Victoria said, her smile suddenly blooming again. “I love to be surrounded by trees. Looking up at them when they sway in the wind. Speaking of looking up, is that how you fell into that cave? Looking up when you should have been looking down?  That’s happened to me more times than I’d like to admit.”

“No,” Alex said, swallowing hard at the thought of the cave. “I was chasing someone.”

“Oh,” Victoria said. “Like hide and seek? Or a game of tag?”

“No,” Alex said, quickly trying to figure out how much he should tell her about what he was doing before he fell into the cave. “I was chasing some other kids from school.” That was vague enough. “How did you find me?” And that might change the subject.

“I heard you screaming,” Victoria said, her voice a little softer. “And then I saw the light from your wand. It was very dim, but centaurs have terribly good eyesight. And hearing. I was about a mile away. I ran as fast as I could. You were screaming so loud I thought you had broken your leg or something. What were you screaming about, anyway? Not to sound rude, but you seemed very scared. Did you see a snake? I hate snakes.” Her front hooves stamped the ground in an unconscious repetition of her distaste for slithering reptiles.

“No, no snakes,” Alex said, wondering again how much he should tell her. How much would she believe? How much did he believe? “Did you hear anything else? Anything besides me yelling for help?” He wasn’t going to say he had been screaming. It sounded childish. The last thing he wanted to seem to the dazzling centaur girl beside him was childish.

“No,” Victoria said, cocking her head. “I hear something now, though.”

“What?” Alex said, straining his ears, wondering if the voice would come back.

“There are some people along the path ahead,” Victoria said. “I can see five of them. One very large and one very small. There’s another one. I think he sees us.” Victoria waved at what looked to Alex like trees in the darkness of the path.

“The Guild,” Alex said, his voice a sigh of relief and excitement at knowing his friends were near.

“He’s waving back! He must have excellent eyes for a human,” Victoria said

“He does,” Alex said. “But he’s not always human. Those are my friends.”

“The ones you were chasing?” Victoria asked as they continued along the deer path toward where the Guild stood clumped together in the darkness like a stand of small saplings.

“No,” Alex said, straining to make out the shapes of his friends. “I was chasing someone else.”

“So what did you hear in the cave?” Victoria asked. Alex wasn’t sure from the tone of her voice whether she was continuing to make idle conversation or whether she was pursuing the question out of real curiosity.

“I don’t think anyone would believe me if I told them,” Alex said, looking up at her. He realized that, while he wasn’t used to looking up at girls his own age, he didn’t mind looking up at Victoria at all.

“My father always says I’m terribly gullible,” Victoria answered, “so I’ll probably believe anything. Besides, no one screams like that unless there’s a very good reason.” She met his gaze and he could see from her eyes that she was being self-deprecating to give him a chance to say the thing he was bursting to share with someone.

“I heard a voice,” Alex said quickly. “A voice in my head.”

“What did the voice say?” Victoria asked, looking concerned. Alex hoped it wasn’t from concern for his sanity.

“It said it was coming back,” Alex said, his mouth dry as he remembered the words reverberating in his head. “Coming back for its revenge.”

“Hmm,” Victoria said, lowering her voice as they approached the waiting members of the Guild. “Maybe it was a ghost.”

“It seemed much more powerful than a ghost,” Alex said. He wasn’t sure how he knew this to be true, but he knew it was.

“Well, whatever it was, it sounds like it involved Spirit Magic,” Victoria said casually. “Only a living being can work Mind Magic and there didn’t seem to be anything living in the cave besides you. Does your family have a history of working with Spirit Magic?”

“Only one person in this valley has been able to use Spirit Magic for more than a hundred years,” Alex said, thinking of Old Batami the soothsayer in her cabin in the middle of the White Forest.

“Well,” Victoria said, seemingly unaware of what the impact of her words might be, “now it seems there are two.”

Chapter 6: Walk in the Woods

“Alex!” Nina said, dashing out of the shadows of the darkened path to slam into her older brother and wrap him in a vise-like hug. “It is you!”

“I told you it was,” Rafael said, a hint of annoyance in his voice.

“Pony,” Ben said, craning his neck back to look up at Victoria. “You also said he was with a girl on a pony.”

“A centaur,” Clark said as he bent down slightly to look Victoria in the eyes.

Realizing that everyone was staring at Victoria and was clearly more interested in knowing how he came to be with her and who she was than anything else that might have happened to him, Alex cleared his throat. “This is Victoria,” he said. “She just moved to town. Victoria, allow me to introduce the Young Sorcerers Guild. This is Clark, that’s Ben, this is Daphne, that’s Rafael, and this is my sister, Nina.” Everyone said hello, each of them more than a little impressed with the fact that they were speaking to a centaur. While Alex had met the other centaurs in the valley thanks to his father’s occupation, few others in the town had.

“It’s very nice to meet all of you,” Victoria said. “I must say, it’s terribly impressive that you’re all in a guild at such a young age. I didn’t realize there were still guilds in the Americas. The guilds have all died out in Europe. Back in South Hampton, which is in England, which is where I’m from, there hasn’t been a magical guild in two hundred years.”