The Evil Wizard Smallbone (11 page)

Nick looked around. Smallbone had gone and Hell Cat was delicately licking the grease out of the frying pan. Nick wandered into the bookshop.

It was dark in the shop, apart from an island of light around the oil lamp on the book table. One of the books was propped against the others. Nick read its title:
Fairy Tales from Many Lands
. He went and picked it up. It was heavy and solid in his hands, the kind of book a rich kid’s grandma would buy, with a thick padded cover. A gift from the bookshop, Nick wondered, or just a random book?

There are no random books
, he thought, and took it up to his Bow-Wowzer-protected room.

Tom was curled up on his bed. He shoved him aside, settled against the pillows, and started to flip through the pages. A few stories in, he came to a picture of a flock of white birds flying above a sinister bearded guy in a fancy embroidered coat and a fur-trimmed hat. A title in curly letters read, “The Wizard Outwitted.”

Nick turned the page and began to read.

“The Wizard Outwitted” was about a boy whose father apprenticed him to a sinister bearded guy for three years. As anybody who’d ever read a story would have known, the bearded guy was an evil wizard. Like Smallbone, he collected apprentices and made them cook and clean while teaching them zero magic. He also had a habit of turning them into rocks when he was mad. Of course, the boy learned magic anyway. The part of Evil Wizard Books was played by the wizard’s beautiful daughter.

After a year or two divided between being a rock and studying magic, the boy sent an enchanted bird to his father to tell him where he was and how to rescue him. The old man went to the evil wizard’s castle, where he had to pick his son out of a flock of twelve white pigeons, twelve roan stallions, and twelve handsome young men, all alike one another as peas in a pod. Coached by the magic bird, the old man chose right every time, freeing the boy from his evil master.

So the boy and his father went home, but the story wasn’t over. There were eleven other apprentices to rescue, not to mention the beautiful daughter. Using the magic he’d learned, the boy tricked the wizard out of enough money to keep his parents comfortable for life and killed him in a wizard’s duel. Then he married the wizard’s beautiful daughter, who didn’t seem to care that her husband had broken her father’s neck.

Of course, her father had been trying to eat him at the time. But still.

By the time Nick finished the story, he’d recovered from his post-rock daze enough to wonder what the bookstore was trying to tell him. “The Wizard Outwitted” was a dumb story. Why did the boy trust his father to save him after the old man had traded him for a sack of coins? Why didn’t the wizard know his daughter was sabotaging him? And where had he been keeping all those old apprentices?

True, the boy’s situation and Nick’s were similar, but Nick didn’t have a father — not one he’d ever heard about, anyway — and though he wanted to get away, he certainly didn’t want Uncle Gabe coming for him. Finally, there were no suspicious flocks of pigeons or herds of horses or even piles of stones lying around that could be Smallbone’s former apprentices.

It just didn’t add up.

As Nick closed
Fairy Tales from Many Lands
, he noticed that the front cover was thicker than the back. He poked it, and it gave a little. There was something hidden inside it.

He tore back the endpaper, uncovering a crackly yellow packet. When he touched it, his fingers tingled. He pulled back his hand, then took out the packet and unfolded it. It was a chart of some kind, crossed and recrossed with fine lines and curves drawn with brown ink. There were numbers, too, some written on the lines and some between them. It was clearly magic and important enough to hide. But what did it mean?

The grandfather clock on the stairs chimed the half hour, impatiently, as though it had done it before. Nick jumped up and ran down to start lunch.

The chart filled Nick’s head as he chopped cold corned beef and onions and peeled potatoes for hash. It was obvious that he was meant to have it. Maybe what the bookshop was trying to tell him, he thought as he put the potatoes on to boil, was that he was the hero of this story. Maybe
E-Z Spelz
was teaching him how to outwit Smallbone and rescue himself. Maybe tests were part of being a hero. Maybe the chart was the thing he needed to learn that would set him free.

In any case, it fascinated him. He wanted — no, he
needed
— to know what it meant.

That night, he stashed the chart in his bureau, under his shirts. And he cast Bow-Wowzer Meowzer on the drawer, just to make sure.

N
ext morning, Nick bounced out of bed feeling ready to take on the world. He could protect himself and milk a goat, he could draw a perfect pentagram and light a candle, and under his clean shirts he had a cool secret chart he just knew would be his ticket out of Evil Wizard Books, once he learned how to use it.

He couldn’t wait to get started.

At breakfast, Smallbone said, “You’re looking mighty chipper.”

Nick swallowed a mouthful of egg. “Must be left over from the rock spell,” he said blandly. “It’s mighty restful, being a rock.”

“I didn’t do it to give you a rest. I did it to calm you down. You’ll be taking the evening chores from now on and keeping the wood box filled. I got important work in hand.” Smallbone cleaned out his pipe and put it on the mantel. “There’s a chicken in the deep freeze. You remember what I told you about roast chicken?”

Nick didn’t, but he could look it up in
The Joy of Cooking
. “Yep.”

Smallbone gave him a narrow look, whistled for the dogs, and left.

As soon as he was gone, Nick had
E-Z Spelz
out of his pocket.

The next week passed in a blur of chores and magic.

E-Z Spelz
was silent on the subject of charts with numbers, but it did start teaching him more actual spells. Some were more E-Z than others. Levitation gave him a lot of trouble, and he didn’t seem to have the knack of conjuring visions at all. But the spells having to do with water or fire or wind or stone came natural as breathing. He made little whirlpools in the animals’ water troughs and chased Hell Cat off the kitchen table with magically aimed water squirts. He learned a spell for finding lost objects and another for lifting and moving little ones, which must have been what Smallbone had used to retrieve Ollie’s jingle ball. Nick tried to use it to gather eggs. It sent the chickens into cackling hysterics, but it worked — maybe a little too well. Eggs, new and not so new, zoomed at him from the hayloft, the rafters, behind the mangers — all the hidey-holes discovered by generations of wily hens. He ducked, but they smashed into him anyway. When it was all over, he was covered with egg slime and smelled like a sulfur pit. He managed to wash off most of the stink before Smallbone came down for breakfast and covered up the rest by burning the bacon on purpose.

Smallbone didn’t notice. Smallbone was spending every waking hour in his tower workshop, appearing only for meals, looking more than ever like a badly made scarecrow and smelling odd. Sometimes it was paint and sawdust. Sometimes it was the hot metal and ozone that was the smell of magic.

After a few days, the chickens got used to the egg-gathering spell. It was funny to see them bobbing in the air like feathery balloons, peering underneath themselves and saying
werk
. Nick started using the same spell to clean the kitchen when Smallbone was out of the way. He lit the lamps with magic, too. It came so naturally that he slipped once and did it when Smallbone was in the room, but the old man was patting Mutt and didn’t notice.

When he realized what he’d done, though, Nick went cold. If he didn’t want to get turned into a slug and salted, he was going to have to be more careful.

A few days later, Smallbone left Evil Wizard Books after lunch, saying he’d be back for supper. When suppertime came and went, Nick, who’d made spaghetti, found himself watching out the window for the gleam of lamplight on a curling wave of snow.

It was almost nine when Smallbone finally showed up, looking fierce and carrying a dinged-up old lantern in his hand. He eyed the set table, the simmering pot of sauce, and the spaghetti draining in the sink. “Heat up them noodles and I’ll be down directly. Better make a fresh pot of coffee, too. It’s some nippy out.”

He disappeared with the dogs, who’d spent the evening whining and pacing by the door, bouncing joyfully around him.

Nick set a kettle on the stove and fumed. He was just a convenience, like the stove and the hot water and the laundry that did itself. He couldn’t go anywhere: he couldn’t do anything. And the only person he had to talk to was an evil wizard.

It was almost enough to make him wish he hadn’t run away from Beaton. But then he wouldn’t have the bookstore or the animals. And he would have Uncle Gabe.

Still, he was getting sick of being stuck in one place all the time.

Next morning, Smallbone came down carrying a large leather satchel.

Nick looked up from the slightly lumpy pancakes he had sizzling on the griddle. “What’s that?”

“Something I should have done a long time ago,” Smallbone said unhelpfully. “Hurry up with them flapjacks, Foxkin. We’re going into town again.”

This time, they walked, with Nick carrying the satchel over his shoulder. It was heavy.

Beyond the woodshed, a clear if somewhat icy path led eastward through the woods. Under the trees it was very quiet, except for the occasional whoosh and thud of wet snow sliding off a branch. A load landed on Nick’s head, soaking his blue watch cap and sending icy trickles down the collar of his jacket.

Smallbone, of course, was untouched.

The path came out at a small pond, iced over and snow covered, plunged back into the trees, crossed a bridge over a frozen creek, and fed onto the main street of Smallbone Cove. Some kids heading for the hill behind the church with sleds stared as Smallbone and Nick stalked by behind a wave of snow.

When they reached the Mercantile, Smallbone banged on the door, right under the
CLOSED
sign.

A window went up on the second floor. “Go away,” a male voice shouted.

Smallbone banged some more.

Zery’s head appeared at the window. “It’s Sunday morn — Oh. It’s you.”

Smallbone stepped back and glared upward. “Tell Lily the Evil Wizard Smallbone wants to talk to her.”

Zery disappeared and the window slammed shut. Nick peered through the shop window and saw Lily hurrying out of the back with her shirt buttoned cockeyed, a this-better-be-good look on her face. Behind her were Zery and a girl about Nick’s age. Nick looked away quickly. Girls made him nervous.

Lily opened the door. “ ’Morning, Mr. Smallbone. What can I do for you?”

Smallbone met her glare with glittering intensity. “Town Meeting. Now.”

“Town Meeting’s not until June,” Lily said.

“I’m calling a special one,” Smallbone said. “Get hopping.”

Lily sighed. “You heard the evil wizard, Zery. You and Dinah start knocking on doors. I’ll take the car and hit the farms.”

“Dinah can stay here,” Smallbone said. “I got some questions for her.”

Dinah’s mother looked unhappy.

“I’ll be fine,” Dinah said. Her voice was firm, like she didn’t mind being left alone with an evil wizard and his probably evil apprentice.

“You heard the girl,” Smallbone said. “Now get going.”

Lily and Zery got, but not before hugging Dinah and telling her they were proud of her — for what, they didn’t say. It made Nick want to roll his eyes, or maybe punch something — he wasn’t sure which.

The door closed behind them. Dinah wound her hands together. Like most of the other Smallbones Nick had seen, she had strangely colored hair — white, in her case, with black patches that might have been dyed, if a girl who wore fluffy sweaters with cats on them was the type to dye her hair. She was short and solid, and her eyes were Smallbone Cove black. Right now, white was showing all around her irises. Clearly, she wasn’t as calm as she had sounded.

Smallbone fixed Dinah with his spectacles. “I want to hear how you found that coyote pelt, girl, and you better not leave nothing out.”

Dinah took a slightly shaky breath and told Smallbone how she’d walked out on the icy Stream and found a coyote pelt that had turned her into a coyote when she put it on.

Nick listened open-mouthed, glad he wasn’t the only person outside a fairy tale ever to get turned into something he wasn’t.

“And what did the Stream do?” asked Smallbone when she stopped talking.

“The Stream? Nothing. It was all ice, like I said.”

“All the way down?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I was testing it.”

“Hmph,” Smallbone said. “And what happened after you got turned?”

Dinah looked at her feet. “I can’t say.”

“What do you mean, you can’t say?”

“I can’t, that’s all. I remember, kind of, but it’s like a dream, all feelings and smells. It’s hard to talk about.” She lifted her dark eyes. “I’m sorry. I wish I could.”

Nick wished she could, too.