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Mashu’s Missing Piece
The next day Eliza arrived at breakfast after Melissa and Faye, who were serving themselves pancakes with maple syrup. Eliza told them quickly that she had suspected Professor Kent and after speaking to him last night she had come to the conclusion that he knew no more than they did. All she succeeded in doing was getting confirmation that the victims were not connected in any way other than the missing objects. Faye looked entirely unsurprised by this, and Melissa had the good grace to thank Eliza for her effort. Eliza was just pouring syrup over her own pancakes when Mashu came jogging in with sobering news.
“Someone spiked my tea last night,” he said, gruffly. His huge hands were shaking and his eyes were darting around nervously. His white hair stuck up in a mess, like he hadn’t bothered to comb his head that morning.
“What?!” cried the girls at once.
“I went to the herbalism room to mix myself a tea for stronger focus. I wanted to spend the night studying for a test I have tomorrow. But the last thing I remember is drinking one gulp of the concoction and then nothing. I woke up in my bed with no memory of how I got there.” He remained standing, too agitated to join them at the round table.
Eliza paled. “Is anything of yours missing?” she asked.
The expression that crossed Mashu’s face told all. The girls gasped.
“What?” asked Melissa, “What did they take?”
Mashu held out a furry hand. The fur was white as snow, the skin black as coal, and each finger ended in a dark brown claw. Each finger except the index finger, whose claw had been cut clean off close enough to the finger to cut a vein.
“Can you still do magic?” asked Melissa.
He removed his wand from the holster at his belt with a wooly hand and did a complicated little movement toward a coffee cup. The coffee shot skyward and arched back down elegantly, a little coffee fountain.
“Whoever took your... um... nail, hasn’t had a chance to complete the curse yet,” breathed Melissa.
Eliza closed her eyes and allowed her mind to reach out to Pal who was still sleeping in a ray of filtered sunlight in their room. He stirred when he felt her probing him. Someone drugged Mashu and took a claw from his hand. They haven’t performed the curse yet. We need to find them. Now. She felt the cat send her a message of understanding and she knew he would shortly be dashing from their room to spread the word among the animals of the school. It was essential they find one eyewitness who could indicate the culprit in time to prevent the curse being performed.
“We’ll find them before they can perform the ritual. Please, sit down,” said Eliza to Mashu, who continued to rock on the balls of his feet. As an afterthought, she added, “I wonder why you are being targeted?”
Melissa gasped and struck herself on the forehead, “Oh—listen! There’s nothing connecting the victims. Eliza, that’s what Professor Kent told you. Principal Crinwere basically said the same thing to me; all different backgrounds, different ages, different levels of magical power, different genders.”
Melissa took a deep breath, her voice trembling slightly. “What if the one thing uniting all the victims is that no two are alike?” She tried an apologetic look to Mashu. “You’re...something else. It’s like whoever is doing this is testing the magic on as wide a pool of witches and warlocks as they can. They’re experimenting.”
Melissa’s expression became temporarily puzzled. “Although...If that’s the case, why wasn’t your group the first targeted? The general sentiment is that the three of you... Not my words, don’t belong here. Mixed breeds and an old—I mean... older student. A lot of people don’t think you three should study alongside them. And if I wanted to test a new theory of magic, you three are very much representative of a diverse group. And no one would miss you if you left.”
A shiver ran up Eliza’s spine at this uncharacteristically dark assessment by Melissa. She’d always been too honest for Eliza’s taste, but this was missing Melissa’s usual positive spin. A hint of something dark stirred in Melissa’s usually bright blue eyes.
Eliza locked eyes with Faye, wondering which of them would be next on the criminal’s list. Faye hadn’t yet said a word, and Eliza saw that she was stiff as an oak. She appeared to be grappling with an emotion stronger than she could bear. Eliza exclaimed as Faye’s gentle, almost imperceptible, flickering stuttered and the girl disappeared entirely from view for a full two seconds.
Eyes wide, Faye took deep breaths to steady herself. The flickering continued to sputter without rhythm or pattern until, slowly, she returned to her usual immaterial, constant presence. Mashu patted Faye’s shoulder reassuringly, his own hand still trembling.
“We’re going to stop them. Today,” declared Eliza, and she meant it. It was one thing when mere acquaintances were being affected, but Mashu was one of her only friends at Kentree. It was no longer a question of playing at being the hero. This time, it was personal.
None of them went to any of their classes that day. Eliza and Mashu, who were better equipped for spellcasting, spent the morning trying every tracing spell they could find in order to locate the lost claw. Faye said she would go out to the forest and communicate with as many magical creatures as she could find. She would ask them if they had seen anything unusual. But first, Faye said with shaking voice, she had to go check on something in her room. She glided out of the hall with unnatural speed. Melissa, who was unable to perform magic and had exhausted the resources available for research, merely disappeared without a word to any of them. Presumably, she was searching manually.
Faye returned at lunchtime shaking her head, which was decorated lightly with snow. Eliza and Mashu had not uncovered anything, either. Melissa merely shrugged when she arrived in the hall and joined them as they discussed options for a new strategy. Mashu was still able to perform magic, so they knew they still had a chance of catching the culprit red-handed. They had just decided to enlist Principal Crinwere’s help when Pal appeared from under the table. He bounded up onto an empty chair, and gently deposited a little mouse on to the table next to Eliza’s hot chocolate. The mouse was unharmed apart from being wet with Pal’s saliva.
“He has something to tell you,” said Pal. Eliza looked down at the little mouse. He was squeaking slightly, indicating Mashu, holding his little paws up and doing a weird little dance. Then, the mouse mimed drinking from a cup and fainted dramatically onto the table. Eliza reached out to the mouse but in a flash he was back on his feet and stooping into a deep bow.
Everyone at the table stared at the little mouse in bewilderment. The mouse looked at Eliza expectantly, looking very pleased with itself.
“I—I only know how to speak with you,” she told Pal. “I don’t speak mouse.”
Her cat fixed her with a condescending expression, “Why don’t you try to listen instead of letting your mind tell you that you can’t?” His tail flicked in irritation.
Pal gave the mouse a slight nod and the mouse began his story again. Eliza let her mind enter a middle state of awareness and meditation. She was trying to recreate the state of mind she had been in when, while weeding in her garden on hands and knees, she heard Pal speak to her for the first time. A state of mind she had sometimes heard referred to as ‘flow’. There she began to hear the mouse’s words.
“A strange figure cloaked in heavy fabric approached the Yeti boy and emptied a small bottle of potion into his cup while he was waiting for it to cool. The boy was so focused on his book he did not notice, and the figure retreated to the shadows. The boy drank from that cup and—!” the mouse swooned one more. He picked himself up, dashed in an excited little circle, Pal watching with body tense and pupils wide, and the mouse stopped to look expectantly at Eliza again.
“The figure was cloaked, you couldn’t tell anything about them?”
A bang startled Eliza and the mouse. Searching for the cause, Eliza noticed Melissa double over in pain. “Ouch,” Melissa said, clutching her knee. “Sorry, a nervous twitch. I had no idea you could speak to animals,” exclaimed Melissa.
Eliza turned her attention back to the mouse as he began to speak again. “Yes, they were smaller than an adult human. And they smelled of cream of leek soup,” the mouse licked his lips and whiskers, apparently remembering the delicious smell. Eliza nodded, everyone had been served cream of leek soup the night before for supper.
“Did you see what they looked like?” asked Eliza. “Was it a boy, or a girl?” Mashu, Melissa, and Faye leaned forward in anticipation.
“I did not see what they looked like, I was eating a piece of ginger biscuit someone had dropped on the floor, and the figure was cloaked.”
Eliza deflated, disappointed, “And did you see them take anything from Mashu? Or where they went after?”
“No, once the boy fainted—” the little mouse mimed fainting again, “the figure drew out a large staff. I stopped eating my biscuit to admire it. It was a fine thing, carved with five interlocking pieces of wood. I smelled oak, yew, elm, maple, and elder. They were fused together by metals, weaving around them and crystals—so many crystals I could not count them for you. For nearly every inch of this exquisite staff was adorned with their magic. The staff struck the floor thrice, and the Yeti boy began to float. Well—,” the mouse corrected itself. “He didn’t quite float, he was dragged along the floor with an invisible force the staff-bearer controlled. They left, and I returned to my biscuit.”
Eliza thanked the little mouse. He stuffed his cheeks full of Eliza’s leftover ham sandwich and, surprising everyone at the table, the mouse permitted Pal to pick him back up by the scruff of the neck and carry him away the same way he had arrived.
Faye looked shocked at the display, “You weren’t kidding about your cat being willing to make any alliance to get information! What did the mouse say?”
Eliza repeated the mouse’s story to everyone, trying to remember every detail. Mashu looked increasingly uncomfortable. He barely touched his food and kept casting little spells every few seconds to check that he was still able to. Faye watched him with heartbreaking pity. She gently touched his shoulder. “Nothing’s going to happen to you,” she promised. “If they were going to take your magic, they would have done it by now.”
“How do you figure?” asked Mashu, more aggressively than was necessary. “How could we possibly know that? Some spells only work by moonlight. It might be a potion that takes months to brew. Most of the kids who lost their powers lost them over Christmas break, maybe it’s something to do with the solstice and they’re collecting from people for a June blitz. You’ve found nothing in your weeks of research, so we can’t possibly know that I’m not going to lose my powers. I’ll have to go live in the forest as an under-grown yeti runt who left his people to bring back knowledge and instead returned without a drop of magic.”
“I—oh, I don’t know,” said Faye miserably. “But I really feel like you have nothing to worry about! Call it intuition. I think they didn’t complete the spell, and more importantly they won’t. It’s only worked on humans as far as we know!” Mashu shook his head and stood up from his seat. He left the Grand Room without a word, but Eliza suspected he was holding back tears. Faye cast a glance between Melissa and Eliza, and addressed them both in a lowered voice, “Mashu is a cross between yeti and bigfoot.” Her voice was a barely audible whisper. “There was a breeding program to improve the genetic diversity of the two species. The resulting offspring were unpredictable. Well, you’ve seen Mashu. They are extraordinary and as diverse from one another as they are from witching folk. A regular hex or curse that could hurt a human might have a very different effect on him.”
“But that’s a good thing. We could still stop them,” said Eliza bracingly.
Melissa tutted uncharacteristically, “You’re talking like once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. Where was this urgency a week ago? Twenty students have dropped out and lost their magic! Have we not been working under the impression that the magic can be recovered? You’re all gung-ho about stopping Mashu from losing his powers. What if he lost them? What if he had come to us this morning and had no powers? Would you give it up as a bad job and leave him to live a new life without magic? Are you guys gonna just abandon us to mundane life while you all get to live your fairytale fantasies? Oh, but if one of you two—” she indicated Eliza and Faye, “—gets threatened, then I suppose you’ll take this whole thing seriously again.” Melissa pushed herself up from the table, scraping her chair loudly against the floor. “Forget you and your group of misfits,” she spat. “I’ll fix it myself.” With that, Melissa tore out of the hall, several heads turned to watch her go.
“If she still had magic, her hair would be crackling right now,” commented Eliza, concerned that Melissa was losing her mind along with her magic.