The Real Boy (5 page)

The cat turned around and began to trot ahead, and Oscar followed suit.

The noises of the marketplace greeted him—doors opening and closing, people calling out to one another, and someone ranting very loudly about fish heads. Oscar carried the bag to the back of Caleb’s shop. And then he stopped. In the path in front of the shop stood a girl with curtains of dark curly hair, wearing a bright red cloak.

Callie.

She had her arms wrapped around her chest and was tapping her boot against the stone. Her eyes lit on the boy standing frozen behind the shop. “Oscar,” she called. “Can you come here?”

Her hand crumpled up his thoughts and threw them away. All he could do was obey.

Callie was almost a head taller than Oscar, and he was not entirely sure how to manage. To look up at her would involve craning his head awkwardly. But to look straight ahead would mean he was looking at her neck, and that was probably strange, too. Oscar compromised and looked at her chin.

“What’s all that?” Callie asked, pointing to Oscar’s bag.

“Oh,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Well, it’s baneberry, foxglove, willow bark, red clover—”

Callie coughed.

“—white pine needles, walnuts, honey mushrooms, dragon’s blood—”

“That’s good enough,” Callie said.

“You asked,” Oscar muttered, shifting.

“So, do you know why the shop is closed?”

“What?”

“The shop,” she said, motioning to the front en-trance. “It’s closed today. Well, to us. . . . It’s open for City people.”

There was a slight force to the way Callie said
C
ity
, as if she were using the word to elbow someone.

“That’s . . . weird,” Oscar said.

Callie tilted her head. “Yes. It
is
weird. So . . . do you know what’s going on?”

“No!” If anything had become clear over the last two days it was this: he had no idea what was going on.

She studied him, her right boot tapping harder. “So, is he going to open up for everyone at some point? Because, you know . . . we might want to buy things.”

“I—I don’t know.”

Callie paused then, like he was supposed to say something else now. But she gave no clue as to what.

“Oscar,” she said finally, “if we need something, how are we supposed to get it?”

“Oh! Do you . . . need something?” Oscar asked.

Callie exhaled. “Yes! I—that is, Madame Mariel—well, we have someone who has hives. And so Madame Mariel sent me to find some treatment. For hives. He said he touched some Barrow ivy, and . . .”

Oscar closed his mouth emphatically. Barrow ivy was unique to the forest and made people magically itchy. He could see the ingredients on his shelves, see them combine:
catclaw, licorice, yellow dock
. He could make it for her, crumple her problem away. But Callie would never believe it; she was an apprentice, and he was a hand.

Callie blinked at him. Oscar half smiled, keeping his eyes on her chin. Callie blinked some more.

“The patient’s waiting. He’s extremely itchy. Do you think Caleb might come out, or . . . ?”

“Look,” Oscar said, feeling suddenly out of breath, “I’ll go in, all right? I’ll ask Master Caleb for whatever you need. And I’ll bring it out for you. How’s that?”

“Thank you!” Callie said. She stepped back, as if to make room for Oscar to go in the front door. Oscar’s eyes went to the door, imagining the bright shining buzz of City people, with Master Caleb at the center.

“I’m just going to go around back,” he said.

He ducked around the shop before she could say anything, and slipped in the back door. In the pantry his hands reached for the right jars automatically. This was Oscar’s lair, after all. A scoop here, another one there, and he was done. And a little extra, too, just in case. He might not know how to talk to Callie, but at least he knew how to help her.

When Oscar got back, he handed the pouch to Callie, hands shaking just a little. She took it and looked inside.

“It should help,” Oscar said quickly. “Caleb says.”

“Thank you, Oscar,” Callie said. “You are very kind.”

“I am?” He pressed his hand to his chest.

Just then, the door to Caleb’s shop swung open. Oscar started and stepped back. He had been so nervous to go in he’d forgotten anyone might come out.

A boy from the City appeared, one not much younger than Oscar. He wore a fitted black velvet coat with a tasseled gold belt wrapped around his waist. A little white collar peeked out from underneath the coat. His black hair lay perfectly flat on his head, and he stood up so straight, like he had been posed, like his whole skeleton was made of different stuff from Oscar’s.

The boy looked right at Oscar and Callie and then walked uncertainly over to them, as if that were the sort of thing that happened, as if a young City boy always stopped to talk to two Barrow kids on the marketplace street. Oscar’s skin itched. How was it possible for anyone ever to be so clean? He shifted backward, trying his very best to look like he wasn’t there at all.

“Can you help me?” the boy asked. “Do I know you?” Even for a City child, the boy spoke strangely, as if each word needed to be chewed on a little.

Oscar could feel Callie’s eyes snap to him and then away. “What do you mean?” she asked. Her voice sounded different, too. Like she’d polished it.

“Do we know each other?” the boy said. He took another step forward. Oscar glanced at his face. His eyes had something odd behind them, something completely out of place in a City child. Oscar looked away.

“I don’t think so,” Callie said, giving the boy her full attention. “Have you ever come into the healer’s?”

“I don’t know. Mum says Master Caleb should help me remember things. But it’s all gone. I don’t remember anything.”

Oscar watched the boy, trying to make sense of the words on his face It was all so strange—this City boy didn’t remember where he came from, either.

“That’s terrible,” said Callie.

“Can you help me?” the boy said, eyes widening. “I need help.”

Callie had leaned closer to the boy, so her hair fell around the sides of her head as if creating a space just for her and him. “Did Master Caleb help at all?” she asked softly.

“Who is Master Caleb?”

The shop door opened again, and a City lady glided out. She had even bigger hair, bigger skirts, shinier jewels than the rest of them.

“She says she’s my mother,” whispered the boy.

“You’ve even forgotten we don’t talk to wretches,” muttered the lady, not very softly. “Come on, Ronald.” A sweep of skirts, and then the lady had her hand on the boy’s back and was pushing him ahead, back through the courtyard.

Oscar gasped. “You’re not a wretch!” he said hurriedly, turning his head slightly toward Callie.

Callie glanced at him. “Well, thank you,” she replied. “That’s the duchess. I suppose it makes sense that she’s ruder than the rest of them. Though I would have thought . . .” Callie shook her head, and with it shook the end of the sentence away. “Usually when City parents come in to Madame Mariel hysterical about something being wrong with their kids, it’s because an eyelash is out of place or they forgot to use the right fork. But he . . . he seemed like he really didn’t remember, didn’t he?” Her eyebrows knit. “He looked so frightened!”

“He did?” Oscar asked, before he could help it. His ears went red. “Master Caleb will fix him. I know it.”

“He didn’t look fixed to me,” Callie muttered. She fingered her apprentice pin and looked away. “I wish I knew how to help him. . . .”

Oscar studied her face. It had shifted; this was a different Callie now. He had nothing to say to make it better, he was made up entirely of a complete lack of words. Of course: he was useless to her up here.

But the cellar was tugging at him. Maybe down there, underground in the shadows, he could help.

CHAPTER FIVE

Magic and the Mind

T
he rest of Oscar’s day went just as he’d mapped out—
sort out the harvest, dry the berries, grate the bark, work on replenishing the herbs.
But after leaving Callie he’d added another step:
go to the library.
Day turned to night, Crow turned to Bear, and Oscar could hear the sounds of Caleb closing up the shop above. Soon, Caleb was passing the pantry on the way to his workroom. His voice wandered back toward Oscar—probably murmuring something to Cat, who patrolled the hallways in the evenings.

Bear picked herself up with a yawn and slowly stretched out her long white back. Time to stop working. After meticulously putting the pantry to bed for the night, Oscar went to his room to wait.

One hour. Two. Three. He sat on his bed, one hand on Pebble, and watched the hand of the clock on his wall creep forward, one half breath at a time.

Four.
Oscar picked himself off the bed, grabbed his satchel, and headed for the library.

He’d spent so much time in there, but still it contained whole universes of books he’d never visited. There were ladders that went all the way to the top of the shelves, but Oscar had never been able to climb up more than two rungs—no matter how tempting the undiscovered country of books above seemed. The shelves were so very much taller than he could even dream of being, and Oscar firmly believed people shouldn’t go any higher than they already were.

The shelves were organized by subject, and Oscar had spent much of his time in one corner reading about botany, herbs, and plant magic. These hours in the library were stolen things, and he had to be as careful as a thief about how he chose to spend them.

But tonight he wandered around the library, while the cats dozed on the chairs, to see what else it had to offer.
Next to the plant books there was an enormous history section. Oscar looked up as far as he could. On the high shelves were histories of the broader world, the one beyond the sea, so far out of Oscar’s imagining:
The Mad Kings of the Meridies
and
The Cold Collective: The Formation of the Northern Alliance
and
The Really Not That Great Schism
. And there, just above his eye level, an entire section on Aletheian history:
The Peculiar Isle: Discovery and Early Settlements
and
A Natural History of Magic
and
Ode to an Aletheian Duke
and
The City on the Hill: A Disquisition
. There was a small green book with no title, and Oscar started to reach for it when his hand touched a thickly bound volume—
The Chronicle of the Plague in Aletheia
.

Oscar did not know that much about the plague, except that it had come from the continent and swept across the island. Though the toll was great, Aletheia had not been ravaged like the continent, where it had killed more than half the population. It was the magic that saved Aletheia from that fate; it kept the island, protected its people, while the rest of the world was destroyed. Everyone knew that much.

What still lingered were the plaguelands. Oscar’s nightmares told stories of that place, of sickly ravenous ghosts and skeletons bursting through the ground at night, of an eternal wasteland empty of everything but death.

History held no answers for him. Oscar glanced over the shelves and kept wandering around the room, traveling through the library’s well-ordered countries of knowledge, shooting glances at the ladder occasionally as if it might be following him. The history shelves stretched on and on, the books as big as the world itself. Then, astronomy—books of matters even bigger than that.

There were sections on mathematics and metaphysics, natural and supernatural philosophy, anatomy and bestiaries, and theories of practically everything. There was horticulture and agriculture and climate studies and exotic zoology. The bottom few rows of Caleb’s shelves contained everything you could want to know of this world, of the things you could touch, of everything sensible and effable.

But these world-bound things were not what Oscar was looking for. He needed things beyond sense. He would have to climb up.

So he approached the big wooden ladder. It was so very tall, really surprisingly tall. Ladders were not inherently dangerous, he told himself, people climbed them every day, and most of them lived. And the really high parts of this one were attached to the wall by a sliding mechanism to keep the ladder from falling backward and crushing anyone who happened to be on it at the time, and that was probably pretty secure—though Oscar had no idea when the last time was that anyone had checked.

But still. Callie said he was kind. And so he had to go up.

With a deep breath, he put his foot on the bottom rung, grabbed on to the one by his shoulders, and pulled himself up. One rung. Then two. Then three and four. He was eye level with a small book called
The Fortunate and the Fallen.
He closed his eyes for a moment and then moved up another rung. And another.

He did not look down or up, just straight ahead, watching as the subjects of the books changed from plant magic to theories of luck and fortune to small enchantments to magical creatures and beasts. The higher he looked, the fewer titles he could read—some were written in Latin, others in languages he didn’t even recognize. There were even entire alphabets he’d never seen before.

If there was a book to help Callie help the boy, it would be here.

Oscar gulped and went up two more rungs, so he was now several Oscars high. His heart seemed like it was going to give up on him and leap back down to the floor. But the books called to him. This was no plant magic; this was the stuff of the heavens, of demons, of forces Oscar couldn’t even imagine. This was wizard magic:
Curses and Hexes
;
Creating and Maintaining Illusions
;
Metamorphosis and Animation
;
Old Enchantments, New Magic
;
Theories of Vivification
;
Secrets of the Wizards
.

And this:
Magic and the Mind
.

Gripping the ladder with his right hand as tightly as anything had ever been gripped, Oscar pulled the book off the shelf and put it in his satchel, next to the block of wood he’d picked up earlier that day. And, because he couldn’t resist, he took the one about the wizards, too—he could put it under his bed, where it could keep the misfit books company.

That done, he climbed back down—which did not seem at all less treacherous than going up, really, especially when you had a stolen spell book and the entire history of local wizardry in your bag.

When he got down, he settled himself in a chair and began to flip through
Magic and the Mind
.

It was nothing like a plant book, which had careful illustrations and intricate diagrams and easy explanations, the sort of thing you could study and then keep in your head to refer to whenever you needed it. Some of those books were organized by plants, some by the kind of magic—prosperity, luck, beauty, health, protection, love . . . But no matter what, the pages were so clear: when someone named a problem or Caleb told Oscar to prepare an herb, the image of the page popped into his mind unbidden. They were all there, like there was a compendium in his head, and all he had to do was sort through and find the right one.

This book was all nonsense, with still more nonsense scribbled in the margins. The sentences stretched out and then tucked back into themselves, and then turned around again and wandered off in a different direction. There were no instructions, not that he could see—just strange scribbles and diagrams that meant nothing, and words that meant even less.

With the plants, there was a system—cultivate them, pick them, dry them, prepare them. There were rules, ritual, patterns. And there were things you could hold in your hand. If there was any system to the magic in this book, it relied on rules in languages Oscar didn’t even know.

All he could make out were some of the labels of spells, and even those didn’t necessarily make sense: the Black Mirror, Unbinding Powers, Blood Calling, the Breath of Life, and Living Enchantments. There were spells to make a man think he was haunted, spells to make him forget, spells to make him believe, spells to sicken his mind. Oscar could see no spell for restoring memories—but there was one for implanting them. A strange thing, to plant a memory, like a lily in a vegetable garden.

Oscar closed the book. What had he been looking for, exactly? A spell that a hand could find that the only true magician in the Barrow did not know about? A spell an apprentice could do and Master Caleb could not? He’d been pulled along by a whim, like a distant flicker in a labyrinth.

Orphan. Misfit. Idiot.

Oscar squeezed his arms around his chest and glanced over at the sleeping cats. No spell for memory. No way to help Callie. And—it was funny—a whole book on magic and the mind and there was nothing in it about fixing a boy who was not quite right.

When Oscar woke up the next morning, he laid out the map of the day in his mind. He got dressed, ate some bread, gathered water, and ran his errands in the marketplace—it was Friday, and that meant getting cheese from Madame Catherine and her Most Spectacular Goat. He spent some time dusting and sweeping in the shop, as a good hand does. The shelves looked fuller, happier than the last time Oscar had seen them. Caleb had clearly been busy the last two nights preparing potions and charms. There was even a new shelf with thick, folded blankets. Oscar snuck a peek at the information card:
Will obscure what lies beneath.

Then he went back to the cellar and got to work. He had found no answers last night, but he was in his pantry doing the things he was good at, where the questions did not need answering. That was why he was here, why Caleb had picked him in the first place. And Caleb was in the shop, watching over it like a wizard tree in the forest. As long as it stayed that way, everything would be all right.

After a few hours in the pantry, Oscar went back up the stairs to the back room to use the still, to extract some oil from the harvest of the day before. Crow came up with him, for she had an innate sense of when it was Most Spectacular Goat Cheese Day.

As he worked, voices tumbled in from the shop, a cloud of noise. They were Barrow voices, rumbly and rough like bark. Twice, someone asked Caleb whether he planned to get a new apprentice soon. “My daughter is showing some aptitude . . . ,” they each said.

Even when Wolf was alive, lots of Barrow parents would come in proclaiming their children were showing evidence of a gift, though such gifts were rare. The duke paid parents of apprentices handsomely for giving their children to the service of the magic—after charging the magic smiths an even more handsome fee. Still, Oscar did not understand why anyone would bother lying—the duke wouldn’t certify an apprentice with no magic.

The voices kept floating in. Most of the people who weren’t trying to sell off their children told Caleb that they were sorry about Wolf, he’d had such potential, a shame he’d had to go messing with things beyond his ability.

“Yes,” Caleb said. “A shame.”

“I was worried at first,” one woman said. “That there might be something out there.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Caleb replied.

“I am certainly relieved to hear you say that. I know you’ll keep us safe.”

“It is my duty and my honor,” Caleb said, mouth spreading across his face in a smile that existed only for her.

Oscar could always tell without looking when the shining people entered the shop. They just sounded different, like the words cost them nothing to say, not even a thought. The air gave way for their voices—it was their land, after all—and the words glided their way to Oscar. A man wanted a charm to give him luck at cards. “I don’t seem to have any of my own,” he said, with a laugh.

Oscar frowned at the eucalyptus he was chopping. It was hard to believe that a City person wouldn’t have luck. Why wouldn’t they, when they had everything else?