19

THORNMALLOW REALLY TRIES

The closer Thornmallow got to the top of the stairs, the more frightened he became. And the more frightened he became, the angrier he got. And the angrier he got, the more leaden his feet felt, until he was hardly able to drag one after the other. If he could have, he would have sunk to his knees and never taken another step again. But his body kept moving to the Master’s command.

When he reached the top step there were only five students left between him and the patchworked Beast—three boys, a girl with an orange braid, and Tansy. Thornmallow thought of a curse. Not a wizardly curse. A farmer’s curse, smudgy but heartfelt.

“Cow pucker!” he thought. And then he was shocked when the words actually fell aloud from his mouth. Glancing up, he saw that the Master had been at that very moment kicking aside a pile of empty student gowns and smiling to himself. That moment of broken concentration, with the Master so sure of himself that he’d let down his guard, had become a moment of relief. But of the six students left, only Thornmallow seemed to have noticed.

Nettles, Thornmallow thought grimly, boiled and eaten. His stomach rumbled, but he couldn’t imagine boiling or eating another person. It would have to be something else. Cut small and granulated. But he had no knife, nor any mortar or pestle with which to grind the wizard fine. And he couldn’t imagine the wizard standing still for any such operation either.

But there was something more about nettles. He thought frantically. Something was missing. It had to do with names. True Names. Other names.

Looking up from the gowns, and still smiling, the Master began to focus again on the six remaining students.

Try! Thornmallow urged himself desperately. Try to remember.

And then there were only four others ahead of him, and a bright blue patch appeared on the Beast’s right rear leg that hadn’t been there before.

The Beast shifted its great bulk, and the moonlight through the colored glass window lit two of the patches on its enormous body, a red patch and a white one.

Red, thought Thornmallow suddenly. And white. That’s it! If he could have smiled at that moment, he would have. Red Nettle. White Nettle. Those were two of the names. If I can only remember the others … He concentrated even harder and could almost see the book in his mind, his finger on the words. But he concentrated so hard, he tripped over his own feet again, knocking against the boy in front of him. That boy fell against the next boy, who tumbled into the girl with the orange braid, who stumbled into Tansy.

Tansy fell straight forward, her forehead coming to rest against the instep of the Master’s shoe. Startled, the Master growled, a sound that filled the room.

Blind Nettle! Thornmallow remembered. His hand grasped the next boy’s leg for support as the words spilled out aloud.

As if those words became suddenly real, amplified by the five children linked hand to leg to arm to small of the back to forehead against the instep of a shoe, the thought traveled. It raced across the bridge of bodies and up into the Master’s flesh until he screamed. It was an awful scream, high-pitched and full of terror. He put his hands up to his eyes, and when he took them away at last, his eyes were the color of old pearl, gray-white and opaque.

From the side of the room came an answering scream.

Squark! cried Dr. Mo in her cage.

Thornmallow tried to recall the rest of the nettle names. After Blind Nettle came … He got it!

“False Nettle!” This time he was able to say it aloud easily.

Once again the magic traveled across the span of the children, making the false wizard Nettle writhe in disgust. His wicked deeds multiplied in his mind and he dropped the staff. It clattered to the floor.

“Deaf Nettle!” Thornmallow cried out, not daring to look at the wizard, but certain he could hear Nettle’s deafness creeping up on him.

And then Thornmallow sat up, simultaneously letting go his hold on the next boy’s leg. He shouted triumphantly, “Dead Nettle!”

Nothing happened.

“Dead Nettle!” Thornmallow cried again, desperation in his voice.

Again nothing happened except that the wizard, now blind and deaf and furious, felt his way up the line of children until he came to Thornmallow.

“You!” he spat, grabbing Thornmallow’s arm. “You think you are some kind of hero.”

Thornmallow trembled in the wizard’s grasp.

“You have a magic I do not know. But I will take it from you before I quilt you to the Beast. Give it to me.”

“Please, sir,” Thornmallow said, painfully aware he was whining, “I am no hero at all. And I have no magic. I am completely tone deaf.”

But the Master, blind and deaf, could neither see nor hear his excuse. He grabbed Thornmallow up by the ears, yanking him to his feet.

From somewhere to his right, through the muffling of the wizard’s hands, Thornmallow could hear Tansy call out, “Roses in snow, Thorny. Remember—roses in snow.”

Thornmallow squeezed his eyes shut until he was as blind as the Master, concentrating on the feel of the wizard’s palms over his ears. He remembered what had happened when Magister Beechvale’s hands had covered his ears: how the heat had spread from the hands into his ears and down into his brain. But that had been a quiet, comforting heat, and this was red-hot and stinging. Still, when that red-hot stinging heat burrowed into his brain, Thornmallow opened his mouth and a proper magical tone came out. On the dominant.

He began to sing, making up both words and tune as he went, and if it sounded a great deal like a jump-rope rhyme from Hallowdale, that is not surprising:

Cut the Nettle, grind it small,

Save the day for Wizard’s Hall.

White and Bee and Hedge and Red,

Blind and False and Deaf and …

he hesitated, drew in a deep breath, and sang out loudly, “DEAD!”

As Thornmallow sang out the last word, he opened his eyes wide, staring into the Master’s face, adding, “Rule number five—Magic happens when it’s meant.”

The wizard’s pearly eyes stared straight ahead. His ears were deaf. Yet still he could somehow sense the spell. Without speaking another word, and with a look of monstrous surprise on his face, he dropped senseless to the floor. Then, as Thornmallow watched, Nettle disappeared one limb at a time: right leg, left leg, left arm, right arm, the edges fuzzing slightly like trees in a fog. Next his body went, and finally his head. The last to go were the pearly eyes, which suddenly winked out like stars behind passing clouds.

At once the heat in Thornmallow’s brain vanished, and the tone in his brain was gone as well, but the stinging on the outside of his ears went on and on and on.