12

THE STORY OF THE BEAST

I guess I’d better tell you the story of the Master and the Beast, then,” Magister Hickory said. “Come into my room and sit down. The story is long and not at all pleasant.”

“Will … he … be back?” Tansy asked.

“The Master? No, not until tonight. He did what he came to do—to trade threats with me,” said Magister Hickory. “As you well know, so much of magic is in the head. And this visit has drained him.”

“He didn’t sound drained to me,” said Gorse.

Magister Hickory managed another, smaller smile. It didn’t reassure any of them. “Remember your first lessons in appearances, child.”

The others nodded uneasily, but Thornmallow did not. Magister Hickory’s hair was still hanging limp on his shoulders and his fingers kept trembling at his sides. For all the wizard’s talk, he was the one who looked drained. As a farm boy, Thornmallow knew to check such things as hair and limbs. Didn’t his dear ma always say, A cow’s tail tells you more than her mouth. If that was the appearance of what the Master could do …

The magister’s room was not what Thornmallow was expecting. It was not the office of the evening before but a bedroom, warm and homey. There was a small slant-top desk against a window overlooking a rolling hillside. A pair of red plush slippers sat heel-to-toe under the four-poster bed. Magister Hickory had obviously been reading in bed, for there were three open books lying on the quilt. Thornmallow could see that one was a book of spells, one a book of numbers, and one was about herbalry, for the picture on the page was of a bunch of dill plants crowned with lavender flowers.

On the wall next to the bed were a dozen portraits. Thornmallow recognized a few of them as magisters. One picture especially drew his eye. It was of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, her dark hair cascading down either side of a heart-shaped face, framing it. He turned to ask about the picture and saw that the others were already sitting down, Gorse on a footstool, Tansy on a hassock, and Will on the floor. Magister Hickory had settled into a large overstuffed chair. Hastily Thornmallow folded himself cross-legged next to Will.

“The story starts, my children, back before you were born. Back at the beginning of Wizard’s Hall,” Magister Hickory said. The words rolled out of his mouth like a chant. As he spoke, the life seemed to return to his eyes, and his hair began to lift ever so slowly, strand by strand, from his shoulders.

Thornmallow remembered what Register Oakbend had said. Words mean something. And clearly, as Magister Hickory spoke, the very act of speaking the words, telling the story, re-creating another time, gave him life. Just as the words spoken by the awful Master had brought him a kind of death.

“Wizard’s Hall was begun by fourteen of us, magic-makers from all over the Dales. I had just graduated in spell-making from the Castle of the Divine. Magister Briar Rose had been a simple herbwife of some fame in Shepardston. Register Oakbend had been a necromancer of no small knowledge in Seddingham-over-the-Hill. And then there was Magister Morning Glory.” He turned his head toward the pictures on the wall, and the portrait of the beautiful woman seemed to smile ever so slightly.

“Morning Glory was a Doctor of Divining,” Magister Hickory said, his voice soft with remembering. “And she was the most accomplished of us all. In fact it was she who had the idea for Wizard’s Hall and she who sent out the original Call, a Call so strong and so pure that we thirteen—a wizard’s dozen—who answered it all agreed it could not be denied.” He sat up straight in the chair, then leaned forward toward them.

Thornmallow glanced over at the portrait of Magister Morning Glory. The smile was gone.

“What was begun in harmony ended in tragedy,” Magister Hickory said and then slowly sank back against the chair.

“What happened?” asked Will into the silence.

“What indeed.” Magister Hickory’s voice was now so quiet, the four children had to lean toward him to hear. He took an enormous pocket handkerchief from the air, flourished it once, and blew his nose loudly, a sound unaccountably like a trumpet. At a second blow, the handkerchief disappeared. “What indeed.”

“What indeed …,” prompted Gorse.

Magister Hickory drew in a deep breath and sat up straight once again. This time his hair stood out around his head like a lion’s mane, and his eyes were fierce.

“One of our original members was a wizard named Nettle from Overton-Across-the-Waters. Though he was an accomplished magician, he was well named. He was prickly, both outside and in. At first he was quiet, well-mannered even. But soon enough, we learned his real character. His words stung, and he loved to use them in anger. Still, we were thirteen, and he was one. But when we voted him out of the Hall, he began to study the black arts long into the night. In his nightwork he conjured up a Beast from the black side of our souls. Bit by bit, he quilted that Beast together, until it had swallowed up—”

“Excuse me,” said Thornmallow, his voice soft with fear, “but I don’t understand.”

Magister Hickory nodded. “Of course you don’t, young Thornswallow. You have only been here a few days.”

“I mean—wouldn’t it be a good idea to lose the black side? That way, your souls could shine all pure as gold? And it’s Thornmallow. Sir.”

Magister Hickory smiled indulgently. “By ‘black,’ my prickly friend, I do not mean evil. Or wicked. I mean dark and deep, as in the black water of the deepest lakes. All those strongest of emotions that—if used improperly—tempt us to wicked, evil deeds. For example, ambition, which can become greed. Or desire, which can become gluttony. Or admiration, which can become envy. We are all made up of such deep and dark emotions, and as we grow more mature, we learn to control them.”

Thornmallow nodded, remembering how often his dear ma said, Good folk think bad thoughts; bad folk act on ’em.

Magister Hickory nodded back. “Even love can have a black side. Even love.”

“So what happened?” Gorse asked.

“Those of us with smaller black sides, smaller emotions, we lost little and could still function, if somewhat less sharply than before,” said Magister Hickory. “Why, once you could hear me from one side of the Hall to the other. And Magister Briar Rose—her laughter could lift a tree. But now …” He shook his head. “Still, we had little to lose compared to our dear Morning Glory. And she—well, she disappeared.”

They all spoke together.

Will said, “You mean …”

Gorse said, “Then where’s …”

Tansy said, “Is that why …”

But it was Thornmallow’s question that rang out above the rest. “So has she gone entirely?”

“Gone—and not gone,” Magister Hickory said. He rose suddenly and walked over to the wall, where he plucked down the picture of the beautiful woman and stared at it “Gone—and not gone.”

“But she couldn’t have had a worse black side than the rest of you,” cried Thornmallow, who was already half in love with the picture.

“She had more ambition, more insight, more desire than all of us,” said Magister Hickory, shaking his head. “And more love.” He placed the picture facedown on the little table by the chair. “And tonight when the Master—who was once the wizard Magister Nettle—comes with the Quilted Beast by his side, he will loose his powerful spells. And he will slowly leach out the rest of our strong emotions, feeding them to his Quilted Beast, making it grow huge with our stolen feelings. If we cannot stop him, we who are the best and the brightest in the land, he will make us all disappear, and he will then own Wizard’s Hall. From there, why, he could go on to own all of the Dales.”

Thornmallow leaped to his feet, filled with unaccountable bravery. He was thinking of his new friends here in the room. He was thinking of the magisters and Register Oakbend and the little white creature in the cage. He was thinking about his dear ma, no longer safe in her cozy home. What he was not thinking about was what he was going to say. It just popped out on its own.

“Tell us what to do!” he cried. “We will not fail you.”

Magister Hickory’s head, like a clockwork figure’s, began to shake back and forth, back and forth. “Oh, my dear children,” he said in time to each shake. “It may be we who will fail you—for, though we know we need one hundred and thirteen students to break the Master’s hold, we do not know what to do.”