The Real Boy (4 page)

The girl shrieked and grabbed on to her mother’s skirt. Her mother yelled at Pebble. Pebble growled with a note of finality, then sprang up and darted out of the room.

The lady’s eyes narrowed. “What is that filthy creature doing in here?” she asked.

“That’s Pebble,” Oscar said. “She lives here.”

The lady huffed. “Caleb will hear about this. Have him call on me, as soon as he gets back. Tell him it’s urgent.” She tossed a card on the counter, made a sniffing noise, and grabbed her daughter by the arm. “Come on.”

The door slammed—the lady was gone. But her card lay on the counter. Oscar shrank. If a City lady complained about him, it was all over.

Suddenly, Callie was by him, rolling her eyes again. “They think they’re in charge of everything,” she muttered.

Oscar blinked. Weren’t they?

“Don’t worry.” Callie palmed the lady’s card and crumpled it in her hand. “He’ll never know.”

Oscar inhaled sharply. The smooth white card turned into a ball in front of his eyes. “You can’t—”

“I just did.”

“What if someone tells? You’ll be in trouble!”

“It’s worth it.” She looked around the room and then whispered, “I have to go now. Madame is expecting me back. You’ll be all right. Just . . . try to pretend.”

And then she picked up her parcel of herbs from the counter, set down some coins, and left—Oscar watching her the whole time. She didn’t even know Oscar, but with one squish of her hand she’d taken his troubles away.

The shop had cleared out while the lady and her daughter had been there. The remaining villagers made their purchases and left. Crow tucked herself into the cupboard underneath the counter, and more City people started to come. For them the day was just the same as the day before. No one asked Oscar about Wolf. No one speculated about bears. They just tilted their heads and eyed him, like they were trying to make the pieces fit together but couldn’t quite.

Finally the last of them left; it was time to close. Oscar had work to do so they would have something to sell tomorrow—he would have to spend the night chopping and mashing and pulping and grinding. And though he would be up all night, though he had been up all night the night before, though he felt like a tap squeezed of its last drip, some small part of his mind settled at the thought.

He moved to the door to lock it. And then, a knock.

Customers.

Late.

“Closed!” Oscar yelped, just as it opened.

“It is only I,” said the man who walked in. His features blurred and then clicked into place: Mister Malcolm, the baker. Oscar went to his shop on Wednesdays and Sundays. He loved going there; it smelled so warm, and familiar, and peaceful—like how a real house might smell, if you lived in one.

Malcolm was tall and thin and at least two decades older than Caleb. His skin was like bark, his hair was the color of iron but touched with white—it was only a couple of years ago that Oscar had realized that it was not because he had flour in his hair.

“Why are you here?” Oscar asked.

“Is that the way you talk to customers?” said Malcolm. The words were hard, but his voice was not.

Oscar looked up, settling his gaze just below the baker’s cheek. His shoulders collapsed. “I don’t know,” he said.

“A precise question requires a precise answer,” Malcolm said. “I am here because you did not come by today to pick up your bread.” He held up a cloth bag with several loaves in it.

“Wolf’s dead.”

Malcolm regarded him for a moment. “I heard. It sounds like the circumstances were . . . troubling.”

“They think it was a bear. Or some spell that went awry.”

“I see. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Oscar said, trying not to look shifty. “Everybody bought all the protective spells today. I don’t have any left.”

“I do not need any spells, my boy,” Malcolm said, though that was not really why Oscar had said it.

“But,” Oscar found himself saying, “I could give you something. We—Caleb has things you could use. He has things that can make bread rise faster, that can make it keep for longer. He can give you something for prosperity or for luck or to keep out thieves.” Oscar could not stop himself from talking. Mister Malcolm had brought him bread, and it seemed suddenly so important to give the baker some magic, if only just a little bit. “Caleb has all kinds of things. Or I . . . I could make a decoction for you.”

He stopped dead. His cheeks burned. He was a hand, not an apprentice.

Malcolm raised his iron-colored eyebrows. “I do not need any spells, my boy. But you need bread.” He handed Oscar the bag then and turned to go. “There are some extra buns in there,” he added. “In case anyone else is hungry.”

Oscar held the bag close, let it warm his chest. The smell pulled at him like a wish.

Malcolm left, and Oscar was alone again in the big hollow building. He sat at the kitchen table and cut himself a piece of bread, trying to push everything else away. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything that had happened today, why people said the things they said or did the things they did. He didn’t understand why everyone else seemed to understand one another and no one understood him.

Oscar took his bread downstairs with him. Though he had so much work to do, all he wanted was to go to his room and lure in as many cats as possible.

But that would not happen. For when he got to the cellar, he heard footsteps echoing down the hallway and the sound of a door closing.

Caleb was back.

CHAPTER FOUR

Scraps

O
scar ducked into his pantry, where Bear was waiting for him.

“How long has he been back?” Oscar whispered.

The big white cat didn’t answer, merely rubbed herself on Oscar’s legs. Oscar crouched down and petted her guiltily. It was evening; Oscar was supposed to be in the pantry keeping her company. That was the way it had always been.

“I couldn’t get away,” he explained. “There were so many people.” He tore off a chunk of bread and fed it to her.

Hugging himself, Oscar leaned against the pantry wall. For two days all he had wanted was for Caleb to come back, and now he was back and Oscar had made a mess of things: he had angered half the customers and confused the other half, and the coin boxes did not look as they should, and shining people were complaining about him, and he couldn’t look at anybody, and Wolf was dead, and Oscar was odd.

“What if he doesn’t keep me?” Oscar said to Bear.

Oscar gulped. The cat twitched her nose. Oscar looked into her blue eyes, took a breath, and then walked through the main cellar and down the corridor, his heart dragging behind him.

The door to Caleb’s workroom was closed, and Oscar could hear the magician moving around inside. He lifted his hand to knock, but then he stopped. He could go neither forward nor back, so he simply stayed that way—hand frozen in the air.

And that was when the workroom door opened.

“Oscar!” said Caleb, stepping into the hallway. “What are you doing?”

Caleb was so tall that Oscar always felt like he was looking up at a tree when he was standing next to him. And there was something about his face that looked sculpted and slightly weathered, like bark—though he was one of the younger shopkeepers in the market and had no flour streaks in his black hair.

Oscar’s breath fluttered in his chest. He focused on Caleb’s chest. “You’re back,” he said, lowering his hand slowly.

“Indeed. Were you looking for me?” Caleb closed the door behind him and stared down at Oscar.

“Um . . . I . . .”

“Yes?”

“Did you just get back?”

“I returned a few hours ago,” Caleb said.

“Oh,” Oscar said. “All right.” His hand flew to his chest and rubbed it, as if to soothe something.

“Is there anything else?”

Yes. There was a lot else. There was so much else it was going to come crushing down on top of their heads. And since Caleb was taller, all that else would hit him first, so really the magician should have been concerned, far more concerned than he was acting.

“Wolf’s dead,” Oscar said.

“I know,” said Caleb.

“He went off into the forest and got killed.”

“I know,” said Caleb.

“He was very very dead when they brought him back.”

“I know,” Caleb said.

“He was in a bag,” said Oscar.

“Yes,” Caleb said. “I have a letter from Master Robin.”

“Oh,” said Oscar. He paused to allow Caleb to continue. Caleb did not.

Oscar rubbed his arm. “Do . . .
you
know what happened to him?” he asked quietly. It was a silly thing to ask. But Caleb was Caleb, and so he asked it anyway.

Caleb regarded him. “I have theories,” he said after a moment. “Wolf had his talents, but he was reckless. I thought this quality might develop into potential. But I fear he delved into matters beyond his power. I am a magician; I should have been more careful about whom I brought into this house.”

Oscar swallowed.

The magician cleared his throat. “Oscar,” he said, voice suddenly formal, “you’re a hand. You’re no apprentice.”

Oscar’s eyes flicked to the floor. No, he was not.

“I did not make you my hand so you could work the shop,” Caleb said. “Your uses lie elsewhere. You have not had much experience with people, and it shows in your manner. Wolf is gone. This makes things very difficult. I have much that calls me in my workshop, and urgent dealings on the continent. I have to know the shop is running smoothly.”

Oscar closed his eyes. Caleb knew how to persuade people of things; Oscar had seen it countless times. People left the shop with twice as much as they’d come in to buy, and then they came back with their friends. You would think that, after years of watching, Oscar would have picked up something of this magic, just a touch—a way to smile, a word or two.

But Oscar was no magician.

“Yes, Master Caleb,” said Oscar. “I understand.”

“So I’m going to need you to serve in Wolf’s stead for a while.”

Oscar’s head snapped up.

“When I am gone and you are in charge of the shop, you will have to do the best you can,” Caleb went on, as if what he’d said was completely reasonable. “The situation is very delicate right now. I do not want to bring in a new person, and I do not want to bring in the wrong person. When I must be away, I need you to keep the shop open as much as you are able to. We don’t need the duke poking around.”

The best you can.
Oscar gulped.

“You’ll be fine,” said Caleb. And there, there was the smile, the magic one, that warmth spreading out like an embracing cloak. “You can do this, Oscar. I know you can.” Oscar could not remember a time when Caleb had spoken to him with such soft words. He felt like he was holding a basket of newly baked bread. “Later, when things calm down, I’ll find a new apprentice, and you can go back to your pantry.”

“I can?” said Oscar.

“Of course you can. This will all smooth over soon.” He smiled his cloaking smile, and Oscar folded himself up into it. “It will be like it never happened at all. I promise. Now, I’ll need you to go into the forest tomorrow and gather some items for me. It’s a long list, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll remember,” said Oscar.

“I know you will.”

After Caleb gave Oscar his instructions and disappeared back into his workroom, Oscar walked slowly to his own room—the room that would still be his tomorrow. Pebble was there already, bathing herself on the bed. Oscar closed the door and she looked up, pink tongue hanging slightly out of her mouth.

Oscar leaned in, eyes wide. “He’s keeping me,” he whispered to the kitten.

Pebble chirped. Oscar’s eyes flicked to the books underneath his bed. They called out to him:
Misfit. Orphan. Idiot.

Oscar coughed and shifted his eyes back to Pebble. “He thinks I can work the shop,” he added. Pebble cocked her head. He hadn’t meant for that sentence to sound like a question. “He said he knew I could do it.”

Wolf:
He didn’t see you work the shop. He doesn’t know. Just wait until he hears.

“He wants me to do the best I can.”

Wolf:
If only he knew how bad that was. He’ll know soon.

Oscar clenched his hands into fists and squeezed his eyes shut. Then, with a long exhale, he sat down on the edge of the bed and began to scratch Pebble on the neck. He shifted, and then shifted again, but he could not get comfortable.

“Master Caleb’s not worried,” Oscar told Pebble. “About Wolf. He said . . .” Oscar stopped. What had Caleb said, exactly? Not what he thought had happened, quite. There had been an answer, but not one you could hold your hand around and squeeze when you needed to.

“I’m not going to disappoint him,” Oscar said. He repeated himself once more, in case the words themselves had any power. “I’m not.”

Oscar and Crow were out in the forest before the shop opened the next morning. Maybe, he thought, if the customers from the last two days didn’t lay eyes on him, they would forget he’d ever been there, and never say a thing to Caleb about his odd little hand.

And then maybe Caleb would go on thinking Oscar could do this. For at least a little while longer.

Oscar pushed the thoughts away. He was in the forest now; everything was exactly where it was supposed to be. As Oscar concentrated on the list of plants Caleb had asked him to gather, the map of the forest spread out in his head, and the locations of Caleb’s plants lay themselves on top of the map like pins. Oscar would be in the forest for hours.

“We’ll get the honey mushrooms first,” he told Crow.

It wasn’t the natural place to begin, but that grove of little red mushrooms grew underneath the biggest wizard tree in the forest. If you looked at the map of the trees in your head, you would see this one right in the middle of the Barrow. Most of the wizard trees had towering trunks that stood majestically straight, as high as the eye could see, but this one split off a few yards up into six thick branches that spread out from the tree like petals on a flower. If Oscar had been a little taller and a lot braver, he could have climbed up the tree and sat in the cradle the branches made, right in the heart of the forest.

Instead, he picked the mushrooms at its feet.

With the canopy of low, thick branches just above, you felt perfectly protected around this tree, like you could live underneath these outstretched arms and nothing could ever harm you. Oscar collected mushrooms, and everything buzzing and agitating inside him eased.

He worked though the morning, making his way around the forest, gathering berries and leaves and bark, trying to hold everything that had happened in the last two days in his mind at once. Crow kept him company until the baneberry bushes, where she darted off chasing her lunch.

She always had plenty to choose from. In addition to the ravens and owls and buzzards who lived in the trees, the forest was home to red-eyed white mice and red-tailed black rats and spiders the size of a man’s fist that looked like miniature fanged octopuses. Wolf had gotten bitten by one once and then poured an entire packet of capsaicin down his throat. Afterward, his face turned red and his eyes popped and he sweat for three days straight.

Wolf.
Oscar grimaced.

As if summoned, the Wolf in his head spoke up.
I died out here,
he said.
Shouldn’t you be scared?

“You were reckless,” Oscar muttered, shifting. He rubbed his chest. The Barrow was his home, he had trees watching over him—why would he be scared out here?

It’s not your home, Orphan.

Biting his lip, Oscar looked around the green world. No. He was not
from
here. Not like everyone else. Oscar had grown up across the river in the Children’s Home. Eastern Aletheia had no magic, no forest—just farmland and the Eastern Villages and the sea all around.

Maybe, he thought, that was why he could not understand anyone here. Maybe people in the Eastern Villages were just different. Oscar didn’t remember—it was five years ago, and it was all so fuzzy. His life before coming to Caleb was just shadows of moments and a burning, grinding sensation that seized him whenever he thought of it.

There had been a day, once, when Caleb came across the river to the Home to pick his hand. Maybe all the young boys and girls had lined up. Maybe he asked them questions. Maybe he gave them herbs to grind. Maybe he could just tell who would be able to look at plants and know how to listen to them, who would be able to carry long lists of plants in his head. He was Caleb, after all. He would know who would be useful to him.

And on that day or one soon after, Caleb must have taken Oscar across Eastern Aletheia. Across the river. Across the plaguelands—the dead swath of land that surrounded the Barrow, where the plague had taken every last thing that grew or thrived, had killed the land so badly that now even magic could not survive crossing it.

But all Oscar could remember of that day was the sight of the front of the Home growing smaller and smaller and then disappearing. You’d think one would remember the rest, it seemed odd not to remember. Maybe all that really mattered of the Home was the leaving of it.

Wolf:
You don’t even know where you came from.

Oscar collected his last berries and headed back toward the marketplace. After a time, Crow slipped next to him. That helped. He mapped out the rest of the day—go back, sort his harvest, dry the berries, grate the bark, then work on replenishing the herbs that had been bought out the day before.

A normal day. Everything in its place.

Just as Oscar could sense the smells of the marketplace working their way into the wind, his eyes flicked over an Oscar-sized rock. There, in the shadow—a flash of something that didn’t seem to belong.

“Wait,” he said to Crow.

Crow let out an impatient trill.

“I just want to see what it is,” Oscar said, moving over to the rock to investigate. He found a small pile of wood scraps, nothing more—just discarded pieces from someone’s project. Yet the arcs and blocks and triangles and angles and little scraps and bits seemed to call to him. Like if he sat down and concentrated hard enough he could put them all back together again.

“What do you think this was?” he called to Crow.

Crow sat on the ground and began licking her paw, as if she couldn’t hear him. Oscar turned back to the pile of wood.

There was a piece on the side of the pile a little bigger than Oscar’s hand. He picked it up and ran his fingers over the bumpy edges, then opened his satchel and dropped it inside.

He looked at Crow and shrugged. “Because I feel like it, all right?”