The Real Boy (12 page)

Oscar stared at Callie. “What if . . . what if someone got better? Would they let them out?”

Callie pursed her lips and shook her head.

Oscar sat back. The Shining City, infused with magic, blessed by providence, where the residents wanted for nothing—that was where people had been sent to their deaths. The duke had kept the plague from killing the entire island by condemning the sick and exposed to the City.

“Oscar!” Callie said, drawing him back to the library. She had the little green book open now. “Look at this one. It’s all handwritten, different entries. It’s like a diary—”

“Can I see it?” Oscar breathed.

Callie handed him the little green book, and he opened it carefully and flipped through the pages. Yes, it was a wizard diary, started after
Secrets of the Wizards
left off, after the plague hit. Only no one had copied this book and put it into type and produced it for library shelves. It was an actual handwritten account kept by a wizard, and somehow Caleb had it.

“I’m just going to look at this awhile,” Oscar said, plopping himself down on the floor, not taking his eyes away from the book.

The journal belonged to Galen—the wizard who had appeared at the end of the chronicle. It began:

This is a true account of the wizards and the plague of Aleth-eia. The duke has ordered us not to write about the plague in our chronicle anymore. He believes he can erase his sins—but the land remembers, always. I will record our efforts for the wizards who follow us, should such a thing curse our land again. We will leave empty pages in the official chronicle before the wizard’s entries recommence. These will be the unwritten words on those pages.

History condemns secrets to their death.

With his breath stuck in the upper part of his lungs, Oscar flipped the page and plunged into the book.

When the plague began to sweep the continent, the wizards told the duke to stop all trade and sea traffic to Aletheia, as so many other island nations had. But the duke said the magic would protect Aletheia; there was no need to close the ports. And Aletheia was growing so wealthy from sending magical goods and its unusual array of natural resources out into the world, and that was good for the island, too. The wizards could not change his mind.

The plague began in the southwest, where the ships came in. The wizards told the duke to quarantine the area, but he refused; because the magic was all gone from the east now—if people could not go into the west, however would they get magic? Magic was the Aletheians’ birthright.

With no official quarantine, the wizards asked the people of the east to forgo magic until the plague left. But they did not listen, and when an easterner crossed into the west for magic he crossed back carrying something far more powerful—and four days later half his village was gone. The duke ordered the wizards to find a cure, but they could not. Then he told them to build an impenetrable wall around Asteri to protect the vulnerable, and after they did he took the sick and locked them all in. And then their families.

And still the plague spread.

Galen’s entries—formerly pages long—grew shorter and shorter. Like:

The plague has killed everything along the western banks of the river and the shores around the sea. Now, that earth is not just barren but a vacuum. One cannot plant a seed or light a match in this land, and one cannot carry magic across and expect it to survive the journey. Perhaps this will stop the spread. If it isn’t already too late.

No. The magic had not kept Aletheia safe. It killed everywhere it went. It wiped out whole swaths of villages, took so much out of the land that it killed not just life but the potential for life.

Galen wrote:

The duke has given up on Asteri, left the people locked in there to die. He asks us to put all our efforts into protecting the east. He says it is for the good of all of Aletheia. But you cannot save a body and kill its heart. We feed him illusions and lies while giving the sick in Asteri everything we have.

Later, simply:

The plague does not affect us. Our magic does not affect the plague.

And then, the next page:

There is something in the magic we have that is greater than the magic we can do.

And then:

It is beyond us. We do everything we know, everything we can conceive of, we do things we don’t know, and it is beyond us. People will keep dying until nothing remains in Aletheia but us and our monstrous failure.

Everything is sick. The plague is in the land now, and if it does not kill all the people first, the land will.

The plague sucks everything dry. It takes and takes. It is sucking away the magic we do. All we have left is the magic we have
.

And finally:

We, the wizards of Aletheia, are the sworn protectors of this land and its people.

We are the guardians of a dying people, a dying land. All we have to give truly is ourselves.

We will be the last of the wizards. Our bodies and spirits will die. Only our essence will live. We tended to the magic, and now we preside over its death. Perhaps the world will be safer for it.

The spell has been cast. We will go take our places. May the magic that has kept us safe heal the city and the whole land, from the disease and from all it has left behind. May our lives do what our powers could not.

We are all agreed.

And then, signatures. Each one made by a different hand—some scrawled quickly, some elegant and embellished. One after another, filling the page, and pages after that. There were so many—several dozens at least. There might even have been—

A hundred.

Oscar frowned. It didn’t make sense. How could there be a hundred wizards living at one time, when there were only a hundred wizard trees?

Oscar stared at the entry again. His heart thudded. Suddenly, he sprung up and pulled another Aletheian history book off the shelves, quickly flipping through until he found what he wanted.

A map. Before the plague.

And there it was, a country so like his—but different. All along the southern border there were villages right up to the river. When the river bent northward, the villages followed. And at the very southwestern end there was a hill, and upon it Asteri. And around the hill—

“Callie!” he exclaimed. Her head shot upward and he brought the book to her. His face felt so hot, like something inside him was burning. “This map. Of Aletheia. Before the plague. What do you see?”

“Um, the Eastern Villages,” she said. “A capital in the east. More villages by the river where the plaguelands are now. And Asteri.”

“What’s missing?” He was not testing her. He needed to see if she saw what he did.

She inhaled. “The Barrow. There are some trees around the hill, but—”

“But there’s no Barrow.”

Galen’s diagram in the wizard chronicle popped in his head—the two trees, one with arrows going up from the roots, another with arrows going down. Oscar had been wrong; Galen’s sketch of the trees feeding the roots was not a diagram of how the wizard trees worked, but a theory of how they might work. It was not an analysis, but a plan.

“Callie,” Oscar breathed, “wizards haven’t been coming down to the Barrow and becoming trees since the beginning of time.” His voice sounded strangely even, like the words it spoke were nothing at all. “They died, just like everyone else. Or they used to. All the wizards during the plague,
they made the Barrow
. They turned themselves into trees, to infuse the ground with the magic. To try to kill the plague from the soil up.”

The air in the library held on to Oscar’s words, refused to let them go. They hovered in the room like phantoms, and Oscar and Callie could only gape at them, faces as wordless as the empty pages of the official chronicle.

The trees were not Aletheia’s gift to the wizards for their service, not living monuments to great men and women. They were monuments of a desperate act, necessitated because of foolishness and greed. The trees were not the wizards’ respite. They were their sacrifice.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Deciduous Ghosts

O
scar and Callie sat in the library a while longer, Callie scanning the books for more information, Oscar just sitting inside his mind. There were no answers about the children, but they did not even know what the questions were anymore. The world had ruptured once again. Even history could disappear under your feet.

The island of Aletheia teemed with magic—magic so powerful that when a plague ravaged the continent, Aletheia still thrived. For centuries great wizards had worked the magic to keep the island prosperous and marvelous, until slowly the magic faded, and eventually the wizards, too. But their power, their core, lived on in the trees they became, ensuring that the Barrow would thrive for all eternity. Even as the sorcerers replaced the wizards, then the magicians after that, and now the magic smiths, their essence lived on in the Barrow, feeding the soil magic so the blessed people of Aletheia’s Shining City could flourish, as was their due.

This was what they had always been told. This was the legend of Aletheia.

But no. It was just a story. Just pretend. The plague came, the Duke of Aletheia put all his faith in magic, and three-quarters of the island died. The plague ate away at the island’s lifeblood—the people, the land, the magic itself—and it would have consumed the whole place had the wizards not performed their last, greatest spell.

The wizards gave themselves, and a cursed, blighted City was birthed anew. And somehow the magic in the Barrow lived on, and soon there were sorcerers, and then magicians, and magic smiths after that—the purveyors of petty little charms for a gluttonous populace.

Once, people were walled into a City of decay and death. Once, there were villages on land that was now barren and toxic. Once, wizards fought with everything they had, and then despaired. Once, they encircled a hill and waited to take root.

Callie put the rest of the pieces together from what she’d read in the history book. The spell worked—more than the wizards knew. It did not only rid Asteri of disease; it turned it into a jewel, one that shone so brightly the plague survivors flocked to it. Even the duke made the new Asteri his home. And, soon after, he offered a tremendous bounty for the first person who could draw magic from the earth again.

The official Aletheian history book did not tell the story quite this way. It made no mention of the wizard’s sacrifice—simply, the magic had eventually saved its chosen people from the plague, just as everyone had known it would. The wizards themselves simply disappeared from the history of the plague. They lived only in the white spaces between the lines.

Even the past was a lie.

Callie and Oscar walked upstairs together in silence, and Callie slipped out the door into the night. When she was gone, Oscar could only crawl into his room and clutch Block in his hands.

In the morning, Oscar woke up, got dressed, laid out food for the cats, and got water. He swept the shop and dusted the shelves, in case any dirt had accumulated overnight, and then surveyed the store and set to work restocking whatever needed restocking.

When Oscar opened the back door, the smell of fresh bread greeted him like an embrace. A basket was waiting for him. Oscar took it in, and the cats began to circle pointedly. He divided up a loaf for them and set the pieces on the floor. And then he saw the piece of paper at the bottom of the basket:

Oscar,

I expect you can read this note.

Please come see me, as soon as you can.

Your baker,

Malcolm

Oscar rubbed his chest. Malcolm had tried to warn him, tried to tell him not everything was as it seemed.
Magic is big and beautiful and terrible. The wizards understood, but no one understands anymore.
Oscar could have asked more questions, could have paid more attention. Malcolm had told him, but Oscar hadn’t heard.

A familiar feeling burned deep in his stomach, like a pestle grinding into his gut. Maybe he would have heard Malcolm if only he knew how to listen.

Oscar perched the little cat on a shelf below the counter and then opened the shop, peeking his head up the path to check for Callie’s dark head bobbing toward him. It did not, but two villagers came in a few minutes later, and soon Oscar could think of nothing but customers.

In the first two hours the shop was open, Oscar sold six different protective items. It wasn’t until he sold the seventh—a thick leather chain Caleb had made that you tied on your doorknob to protect the house from hexes, robbers, and bear attacks—that he noticed the pattern.

“Something else has happened.”

The buyer was Master Christopher, who owned the marketplace tavern. He raised his eyebrows. “And a good morning to you. To address your comment, no, something has not happened. Several things have happened. You should watch yourself.”

“What?” Oscar breathed. “Tell me!” He knew enough now to realize he was not supposed to talk like this to customers. But in this particular moment he didn’t feel like figuring out how to say anything other than what he meant.

“You should watch your tongue, too! Someone’s been prowling the marketplace at night, little hand, attacking our wares. Madame Aphra hung twenty yards of cloth to dry outside last night, and do you know what she woke up to?”

“Bits?”

Christopher narrowed his eyes. “Hmmm. Yes. A small pile of bits. Same thing with Madame Alexandra’s leather, the pieces she had just enchanted. And”—he looked around, though he and Oscar were the only ones in the shop—“Madame Catherine says the Most Spectacular Goat is missing.”

Oscar stepped back. No.

“Better protect the shop while you can, little hand. Someone is sabotaging the marketplace.”

Pictures arranged themselves in Oscar’s mind—the sack of Wolf, then the gardens and the glass house, then the cloth and leather in bits. “What if it’s not sabotage?” Oscar asked.

“What else could it be? A very enormous bear?”

“The pieces don’t fit,” Oscar said.

“What an odd thing to say,” Master Christopher said.

In the early afternoon, a gentleman and a Wolf-age young man from the City came in. They seemed to be father and son, and neither of them looked troubled in the least. Oscar surreptitiously looked over the young lord. He did not seem to be suffering from any illness, unless there was a disease that made someone’s left nostril flare in a perpetual slight sneer.

Following closely behind them was Master Thomas, the blacksmith, who bobbed his head at Oscar and headed toward the wards. A farmer was in the shop, too, looking at animal repellants. The father and son went over to the gaming shelves and began browsing through decks of cards.
Strictly for entertainment,
Caleb had labeled them. Magic was illegal in Asteri’s game houses—Caleb had invented a detection system for the house proprietors and then a way to mask the magic on his own goods.

Soon, a man and a woman from the village came into the shop, heading directly for the counter. “Is Caleb back?” the woman asked.

“No,” Oscar said flatly, and then crossed his arms.

The man grunted.

“Do you know when he intends to return?” the woman said.

“He didn’t tell me,” Oscar said. And then added, for Callie’s sake, “Is there something I can help you with?”

The man crossed his arms and straightened up. He was very tall. “Yes,” he said, staring down as if Oscar were something he was contemplating squashing. “When he gets back, you can tell him that someone’s attacking us, and he needs to care more about the village and less about his wealth and fame.”

“Giles,” the woman muttered, “he’s just a boy.” She turned to Oscar. “I’m Mistress Eliza. My husband and I make jam.” She looked over at Master Thomas, who had stepped closer to the group. “We were in the northwest strip of the woods looking for berries this morning, and the oddest thing happened. We were in front of one of the wizard trees, and suddenly the whole thing . . . faded. Except for the stump.”

Oscar went cold.

“What?” the farmer said.

“We looked around at the other wizard trees,” Eliza continued. “And at first they looked fine, but when you looked directly at them, the same thing happened. And then one disappeared entirely right before our eyes. Again, just the stump was left.”

“Just the stump,” Mister Giles repeated. “And not a fresh one, either.”

“This is an assault!” Master Thomas said.

“The tree had been chopped down,” Mistress Eliza said, eyes wide, voice breathless. “Some time ago. And four other trees seem to be the same. Ghosts.”

“There’s another magician,” the farmer proclaimed. “That’s who’s attacking us.”

Master Thomas folded his arms and considered. “That does seem a likely theory,” he said, speaking carefully.

The older City gentleman called out, “Does that mean his magic is better?”

Giles turned, glaring. He took a step toward the man and opened his mouth, but just then the gentleman’s son pointed at the counter. At Oscar.

“Look,” he exclaimed. “The little boy’s crying. Over trees!” He laughed.

Now Mistress Eliza was glaring at the father and son. Everyone in the room was still as a cat before pouncing.

“Well, I think it’s time to go,” the gentleman said, putting his hand on his son’s shoulder. “We’ll be taking our business elsewhere.”

The pair left the shop, slamming the door behind them. Oscar put his hand to his wet cheek.

“I don’t understand who would do this,” the farmer said. “They must be trying to harm us. Drain the Barrow.”

And then the villagers were rumbling again, so loudly it seemed the shelves might shake. Oscar just stood there shivering, slowly turning to ice.

“Do you think it hurt?” Oscar asked, his voice cutting through the noise. “The trees?”

Everyone turned to look at him.

So it was not a normal thing to say, it was not a normal thing to think, but Oscar thought it anyway, and he needed someone to answer.

Giles eyed the farmer and Master Thomas. He gestured to the door, and they all moved toward it. Eliza went back to the counter. “No,” she told Oscar, cushions on her words. “I don’t think they felt a thing.”

“Just tell Caleb to come by as soon as he can,” Giles called, voice now gentle, “and we’ll tell him everything we saw. . . . Remember, Giles and Eliza, all right?”

Mistress Eliza put her hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It will be all right.”

“How?” Oscar asked.

“What?”

“How will it be all right?”

Mistress Eliza blinked. “It just will.”

She gave Oscar a smile, and the trio walked out the door, leaving Oscar alone.

He stood in the store for one minute, not able to think, not able to move. Then suddenly he was at the front of the shop locking the door. He was not being loyal; he was not working hard. But it was very difficult to know how to function in the world when every truth turned out to be just an illusion.

So he slipped out the back door, walked down five buildings, and tucked around to the front of Madame Mariel’s.

Callie opened the door, her hair tied up on her head, her gray apron on top of her dress. She seemed surprised to see Oscar—to be fair, Oscar was surprised to see himself there.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, voice low. “There’s another one.” She motioned him inside.

At first he thought she meant another tree, but when Callie led him through the front parlor into the back room of Madame Mariel’s, he saw a City boy lying in the small cot. The boy’s face was covered in some kind of scaly rash. Oscar stiffened.

A lady in a cream-colored dress with a purple-and-gold bird printed on the skirt stood in the corner. The bird was not on fire.

“This is Oscar,” Callie explained to the lady and the boy. “He can help.” She turned to Oscar. “This is Jasper, and his mother, Lady Foster. Jasper fell ill overnight.”

Oscar leaned in close to Callie. “I have something to tell you about the wizard trees,” he said.

Callie started slightly. “All right,” she whispered. “We’ll talk more about that later.” She went over to the stool by Jasper’s bed, motioning him to follow. “Could you come look at Jasper’s rash, please? I’m hoping we can make him more comfortable. I’ve been using some agrimony and yellow dock,” she added, motioning to the mixture at her side.

Oscar looked over at Jasper. The boy blinked back at him. He looked like he didn’t understand anything, either. And the rash—

“It’s really scaly!” Oscar said.

Callie coughed. The boy glanced at her. The rash
was
really scaly—almost like bark falling off a tree.

Callie turned her attention back to the boy and began to rub the salve into his right arm. “This is just a couple of herbs,” she said to him, voice like aloe. “It will help your skin. And then we’ll figure out what’s going on.
We’ll help you feel better.”

“But”—Oscar looked at Callie—“we don’t even know if it’s the plague yet! How can—”

“Oscar!” Callie sprang up and knocked the stool over.

“The plague?” exclaimed the lady.