FOR THE SECOND time in as many days, I brought home a note for my mom to sign. This time, she wasn’t in the kitchen when I got in. Instead, I found her in her bedroom with all the lights off. She was lying in bed half propped up on the pillows, her eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. Her window of normality had lasted less than a day.
“Mom?”
Nothing.
“Mom, it’s Kalvan.”
Still nothing.
“I need you to sign another note for me.”
Silence. She was barely even blinking.
“Mom, it’s pretty important. I’m in trouble again, and I have to bring this back tomorrow signed.”
Finally, with what looked like enormous effort, she turned to look at me. “What?”
“I need you to sign something for me, Mom. I messed up big and Tanya had me write a letter acknowledging my responsibility.” I waved the paper at her.
“Oh.” She went back to staring at the ceiling.
“MOM! This is important! If I don’t get it signed, they might call and…” I trailed off as I sickly imagined what would happen if they tried to talk to my mother in this state.
“Let it go, Kalvan.” A cool hand landed gently on my shoulder—my dead aunt arriving with her typical eerie silence and a pair of very dark sunglasses. “I can sign it.” She took the paper. “I do Genny’s signature better than she does.”
What I wanted to do was cry and scream and rage at my mother. What I did was nod and follow Noelle out of my mom’s room. “Thanks. I probably should have come to you as soon as I saw the way she looked, but she was so much better yesterday and it’s hard.”
Noelle gave me a long, searching look as she signed the paper. “So, what have you done about it?”
“What?” I couldn’t have been more shocked if she’d slapped me.
“I told you that with Oscar and Nix gone the only person who can really help your mom is you. What have you done about it?”
“I’ve only known I’m an earth power for a couple of weeks and I still don’t even know how Oscar helped my mom.”
“So, nothing, then?” She raised her eyebrows challengingly.
“No. I found that big spell in the caverns under the basement and I’m trying to find out how it works. I don’t know the first thing about earth magic.” Yeah, it sounded like crap even to me, and my heart started to hammer in my chest while my stomach did a triple backflip. I soooooo didn’t need this on top of the stuff with Tanya.
“Kalvan, the clock is ticking and you really don’t have a lot of time. I won’t last long after the coming of the Summer Crown and that’s only ten days from now.”
“I can’t handle this. I just … can’t.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Kalvan, because no one else is going to handle it for you.” Shaking her head, she turned and walked away.
Noelle was right, but that didn’t mean I had any clue what to do about it. My eyes fell on the coatrack and I decided that maybe what I needed to shake up my sense of the possible was some fresh air and a change of scene.
I didn’t really have a goal when I started walking, but I eventually found myself at the Como Park bonfire pits. It was a sunny afternoon in mid-April and the weather was very fine by Minnesota standards, so there were people everywhere and the fires were active. I watched the dancing flames from a distance, hoping for some sudden inspiration. I could feel the fire in my own heart responding, but I couldn’t get any closer without joining a party I hadn’t been invited to and I still hadn’t found what I needed.
After a bit, I walked into the nearby woods. The growth was sparse along the edges of the trees, but there was a deeper and wilder place at its heart, and I wormed my way inward, ducking and twisting to get through the thickest growth, looking for … there! A limestone ridge sheltered a tiny hollow where someone had scooped out a shallow firepit.
I arranged deadwood into a loose cone, then settled on the ground. Calling fire into my hand, I leaned forward to touch the wood alight. At first, I pulled my hand back, but the fire kept calling me. I took off my jacket so I could reach both arms deep into the flames without worrying about burning my clothes.
I began to work with the stuff of fire, spinning red and gold streamers into brief flowers or the shapes of animals, soaking myself in flame. This was my true element, and even though it hadn’t shown me a solution for my problems, giving myself to the fire eased my heart and I began to believe a solution was possible. Later, after the sun had faded from the sky, I looked up and noticed a coyote staring at me across the flames.
“Lisa?”
With a shrug, she flowed from one shape into another and I was suddenly sitting across from the girl, though her eyes remained the eyes of a coyote. “That’s not the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”
“Huh?”
“Sitting here in the wooded deeps playing with magic in the most obvious way imaginable without any hint of caution or awareness of the world around you. If I were one of the Stogari, you could be dead now.”
“Stogari?”
“The delver clan your friend Cetius heads.” She shook her head sadly. “I have no idea how you’ve managed to live this long when you can’t be bothered to sort out all the players.”
“I didn’t even know there was more than one kind of delver until you mentioned it. I haven’t had a lot of time to figure things out lately.”
“For a smart guy, you make a lot of dumb choices.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Coming from Lisa, the question made me more curious than angry.
“Not watching your back. Returning to the dragon again and again. Trusting Morgan.”
“I thought she was your best friend.”
“Yes and no. It’s complicated. But then, most things are with people … if you look deeply enough.”
“You don’t seem all that complicated.”
Lisa laughed, a short bark of a sound, and her expression shifted enigmatically, becoming much less human and much more coyote in a way I found hard to describe. It was the first time I’d seen a human face do anything like it and I suddenly remembered her comment about bodies shaping minds. How much had the coyote shaped Lisa’s personality?
“Maybe that’s because I’m not entirely human, or maybe appearances are deceiving. Maybe I’m the most complicated person in your life and you just haven’t figured it out yet.”
I wanted to ask her if she was really in my life now, but that seemed too personal. Instead, I asked, “So, why are you here?”
“I was hunting and I happened on your trail. When I saw you weren’t keeping an eye out for trouble, I figured I’d better hang around and do it for you. Now that you’re paying attention, I should probably get going.” She rose to her feet in one fluid motion.
I quickly scrambled upright as well, stepping through the fire to touch her elbow. “Wait, I’d like to talk more.”
She paused and arched an eyebrow. “What would you like to talk about?”
“The Stogari, for one. How long have you known there were factions among the delvers?”
She moved away from me, turning toward the darkened wood. “Not factions, clans. And that was the wrong question.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t.” This time, her voice sounded almost bitter.
“So, help me out. What’s the right question?”
“I’ll let you know if you ever ask it.” Before I could say another thing, she leaned forward. As her palms touched the dirt, she became a coyote once more, bounding away into darkness.
I turned back to the fire, though the flames no longer drew me as they had earlier. “I am never going to understand girls.”
A voice spoke from the deepest part of the fire. “Not if you think of them that way, no.”
I more than half jumped out of my skin. “What the … Sparx?”
The hare shaped himself out of flames and nodded. “You didn’t really think I’d let you out of my sight for long, did you? Not with the way things have been going.”
I felt a bit put out that everybody seemed to think I needed watching, but I had a more pressing question. “What do you mean I’m not going to figure out girls if I think of them that way?”
“As girls first, and not simply as people. Obviously.”
“Huh?”
The hare rolled his eyes. “Don’t be an idiot, Kalvan. I’ve been to that tree-hugger colony you call a school. How many times have your teachers stressed that you need to see people as individuals and not as categories?”
“I … um … lots. But that’s not about girl and boy stuff … is it?”
“You tell me.”
“Oh.”
He leaned back and crossed his forelegs. “Now that you’re done sulking in the woods, are you ready to head home?”
“I wasn’t sulking, I was thinking. And honestly I don’t know what I want. Nothing is going like it should anymore. This time last year, the most I had to worry about was if my mom and Oscar were going to have another big fight over the way I was slacking off in class.”
“And you want to go back to that? Knowing what you know now?”
I shook my head. “No. That life was a lie. I can’t go back there. But I don’t know how to go forward, either. Truth be told, I’m not really even ready to deal with this.” I reached into the fire and scooped out a tongue of flame, holding it on my palm. “I can’t begin to handle the earth stuff on top of it, to say nothing of my mother.”
“Can’t do it or won’t?”
“Both? I don’t know…” I turned away from Sparx and the fire. More than anything in the world, I wanted to walk away. To point my nose in a random direction and keep going until I couldn’t go any farther.
“Kalvan, you’re better than this. What’s wrong with you?”
I rummaged around in my head, desperately trying to find an answer that would make him stop asking me questions, until, suddenly, I found the truth instead. “I’m scared. No, that’s not quite it. I’m freaking terrified!”
“Of what, the delvers? They’re a—”
“I’m scared of trying and failing, all right? My mom is … broken. She’s always been a little bit broken, but it’s worse now than I’ve ever seen it.”
“Doesn’t that make you want to help her?”
“Of course it does. But what if I can’t? What if I get it wrong?”
Sparx shook his head. “Then she’ll be no worse off than she is now. How is that—”
“It will all be my fault! Don’t you see? I’ve spent my whole life dealing with a mom who has problems and isn’t always there for me, who is … broken. I hate that. I want her well, more than anything. I do. But, as broken as she is, that’s just my mom. That’s the way she is, the way she’s always been. Ask Noelle. It started before I was born. Now it’s up to me to fix her. Before, she was broken because she was broken, even if my fight with Oscar made things worse. But now, if I try to fix her and I don’t get it right, or make her even worse, then … then it really will be all my fault.”
Sparx sighed. “Your first mistake is thinking in terms of fixing your mother. You fix cars or broken toys. People you help, and only to the extent they want or need it.”
I didn’t know how to process that. “So what’s my second mistake?”
“We are defined as much by the choice not to do something as we are by the decision to act. The world has put you in a place where this is your burden to bear. If you have the chance to do something for your mother and you choose not to, that is your responsibility, too. You can’t get away from it by burying your head in a fire, and pretending not to understand that’s also a choice.”
Heat blasted across my back then and the tiny clearing suddenly flared with a light as bright as day when the remaining wood in the pit flash-burned in response to my inner anguish. The darkness that followed was complete, blotting out the world around me at the same time it slithered in through the cracks in my heart.
Because, of course, Sparx was right.
Sparx hopped along beside me during the long walk home, but I hardly noticed him and I simply couldn’t find it in me to answer his attempts at conversation. I knew I had to find a way to help my mother, but I still didn’t know how. Maybe Morgan would be able to give me something when I met her at lunchtime. It was nearly midnight when I climbed into bed, but I wasn’t the least bit sleepy.
I spent the next hour staring at the ceiling and pretending to know what I was going to do when the sun came up. Sometime around one, I crawled out of bed and tried to bury myself in the heap of coins under the closet. But whatever happened when I went there in my sleep didn’t work when I was awake. The cold metal leached all the heat from my body and I quickly found myself shivering.
* * *
Morgan was waiting outside Doughboy when I arrived. “About time you got here, Monroe. Come on.” She started walking.
I fell in beside her, once again aware of how much taller she was. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere. Walk and talk for privacy. I’ll bend the winds around us so no one can hear what we say and few will even see us.”
“All right. What did you want to tell me?”
“Each thing in its proper time.” She was walking fast, and I had to half run to keep up with her longer stride as we headed off in the direction of the hospital—not an area I’d ever explored that much. “Tell me about that.” She pointed at the mark the Crown had given me.
“I … uh … it’s complicated.”
She laughed then, a bitter, silvery sound that set my teeth on edge. “Then you don’t fully trust me. Good. That’s smart. You can’t trust anyone in the world of magic. Not your best friend. Not your family. Not even yourself. Not entirely.”
“Oooookay.” Because that wasn’t creepy at all. “Are you going somewhere with this? Or, are you just trying to scare me?”
“Neither. Speaking a truth, because every so often that amuses me. The mark on your forehead is a scar left by the forepeak of the Corona Borealis. It was given to you by your stepfather, the stoneshaper and Winter King, Oscar Dalterre, though that’s not his real last name.”
I felt a pressure against my back as Sparx let me know he was still with me, though he didn’t reveal himself to Morgan. “I—how do you know … any of that? I know I didn’t tell you.”
“You dueled with Oscar at the crescendo of the Winter Carnival and defeated him. An impressive feat and a great surprise. But even though you won, you also lost. In breaking the Winter King’s power you broke the spell that helped your mother keep her wits.”
I stopped walking. “You are seriously creeping me out, Morgan.” The only people who knew the whole story were me, Sparx, and Dave. “I’m not sure this was such a good idea, and I’m not going to take another step until you tell me exactly how you know all that and why you’re suddenly telling me now.”
“Oh, Kalvan, I thought that was what I was doing. Look.” She reached into her jacket and pulled out my drawing of the spell. “You brought me this because you didn’t know what it was or how it worked. I have answers for you, answers that might save your mother, but you have to come with me if you want to get them. Leaf and feather, hawk and heather, as I am a power of air I swear that you shall end the day free and unharmed if you follow me now.”
“Sparx?” I said quietly.
The hare poked his head out of the top of my bag. “I don’t like it, but we have very little time, and that’s a binding oath with grave consequences for breaking it. Up to you.”
“All right.” I gestured for Morgan to lead the way. “I guess it’s your show.”
“Thank you.” She shook the drawing as we skirted the edge of the hospital grounds angling toward the far side of the hill behind the school. “This is the key to alleviating the worst of your mother’s symptoms. You were right about that.”
“But not to fixing her?”
“No.” Morgan shook her head. “It would be incredibly dangerous to even attempt that. Your mother’s mental illness has shaped her entire life. Removing it completely would effectively carve away a huge part of her mind. She might survive that, but she would become a different person in the process.”
I winced. “I guess I’ve never looked at it that way.” Morgan had a point—not quite the same one Sparx had made, but definitely related, and I realized I had to learn to change the way I thought about my mother’s illness. “So, what does the spell do?”
“Many things. The magic is rooted in the Corona Borealis. For your mother? It gives her the tools to sort the real from delusion and it helps her medications keep her from sliding into despair or mania.”
“You still haven’t answered how you know all this.”
“Momentarily. Here we are.” She gestured at a blank rock wall.
“Where? I don’t see…” An arched opening sort of faded into existence as I started speaking—though whether it was an illusion being pulled aside or the shape of the stone actually changing, I couldn’t say.
“After you.”
I had rarely wanted to do anything less than pass into the shadows beyond that gateway, but I remembered Morgan’s oath and went forward. A narrow passage took us perhaps twenty feet into the hill before another archway led out into a larger room shrouded in deepest darkness.
As we entered, the way back vanished completely and Morgan spoke again, “I know all about the spell because I spoke to the man who built it, my uncle Oscar.”
Light bloomed from a dozen huge crystal globes set around the edges of the great room, and I found myself facing a high stone dais, where a bald man in rags and a silver crown sat upon a throne shaped from a single block of onyx.
“Hello, Kalvan. Welcome to my temporary abode.”
Oscar looked much the worse for wear. In addition to his ragged clothing, his bald scalp was covered in rough and twisted scar tissue and I hissed in surprise as I got a better look at his “crown.”
“Do you like it?” he asked, touching a finger to the center of his forehead and the ring of bright silver that mirrored both my own new scar and the inside of the Corona Borealis. “It’s your work, a burn born of fire magic and the Crown of the North.”
I whipped around to glare at Morgan. “You promised!”
“That you would be unharmed and walk away free,” said Oscar. “Just as I told her to, and just as things will play out. I have no intention of either harming or binding you, dear boy, however much I might prefer to deal with you so.”
“I … don’t understand. If you don’t plan on hurting me…”
Sparx slipped out of my pack, dropping to the floor beside me. “Obviously, he wants something from you, and it’s not a thing he can force.”
“Ah, yes, the k*tsathsha.” The firetongue word sounded heavy and harsh in Oscar’s mouth. “So perceptive and so fierce in defense of his master. I approve. Yes, I need something from you, boy.”
“Well, you can’t have it!” I snapped. “I hate your guts.”
“The feeling is quite mutual, but immaterial. Morgan, leave us. Why don’t you hunt up Cetius and tell him that whatever he’s plotting against the boy this time, he needs to drop it until I tell him otherwise.”
“Of course, Uncle. Whatever you say.” Morgan bobbed a deeply ironic curtsy and walked forward to pass through an arch that appeared briefly behind the throne.
Oscar shook his head. “That girl is going to cause me endless hours of trouble. She’s even more willful and headstrong than you. That school of yours is to blame.”
“I’m not sure what the point of this is,” I said as angrily as I could manage—if I couldn’t hold on to being angry I was pretty sure scared half to death was the next thing on the menu. “I’ve got no interest in helping you.”
Oscar smiled—a cold and terrifying expression. “Oh, I think you’ll change your mind once I’ve explained. But if you don’t, I will at least have the pleasure of knowing your imminent death will be excruciating beyond all measure and that your soul won’t survive the failure of your body. Though I am most definitely not looking forward to the catastrophic headache the whole thing will give me.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Sparx.
Oscar spread his arms wide. “The Corona Borealis, of course. It wasn’t my intent to make you my heir when I threw the Crown in your face, but intentions and results are not always a perfect match. In ten days, that scar on your head will draw the Crown to you as a flame draws a moth, and with equally fatal results. You are too young to contain the power of the Summer King and it will burn you away from within, consuming even your soul.”
I glanced at Sparx, who made a balancing gesture with his paws. “It’s a possibility.”
“No, k*tsathsha, it is a certainty. There is no greater expert on the Crown than me, and I know for a fact the boy can’t master it. It will destroy him unless I prevent it.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked. “And how?”
“Because I want to continue as I have, the Winter King eternal. As to how, I will show you the way to shift the coming Crown to another of my choosing.”
“Morgan!” It couldn’t be anyone else.
“Sadly, yes. I had hoped she could convince you to give it to her in such a way as to keep my hand invisible in the thing. But every time I set her up to rescue you and win your undying trust, you rescued yourself instead. Beyond that, she is only barely mature enough herself, and maddeningly independent to boot, but I’ve no choice. Because of your scar and mine the Crown has become bound to our bloodlines.”
“Are you saying no one else can take the Throne now?”
“Not quite. Neither you nor I can give it to anyone else, and the only way for you to be free of it short of death is to use the spell under your house to pass it along to Morgan. Before you ask the tedious question, yes. You could also give it to your mother, but without me stabilizing her through the spell, it would destroy her as surely as it would you, if not as quickly. To say nothing of the damage a mad Queen of Summer could do.”
“Maybe I could learn to stabilize her!”
“Doubtful, seeing as you lack both earth powers and the knowledge available to one who has mastered the Crown.”
I almost blurted out that I did too have earth powers, but Sparx kicked me in the ankle as he leaped to put himself between me and Oscar. “So, if the boy agrees, what’s in it for him?”
Oscar held up a finger. “First, he survives.” Another. “Second, I will swear an oath to leave him and his mother alone in the future and to prevent the Stogari from seeking their own revenge. Third, I will create spells that stabilize Genevieve and renew them each year going forward until she dies or Kalvan figures out how to take care of her himself.”
“In exchange for that, you get to go back to being the Winter King?”
He nodded. “A small price, I would think, given the alternative. But don’t answer me now. Take a couple of days to think it over. No more than that, of course. The deal won’t be on the table forever and I’m only offering it because it’s the simplest and surest way. Also, the spell takes some time to prepare and Coronation Day is less than a fortnight off. At which point, the boy of fire will become a brief torch brightly burning and end in ashes.”