The Evil Wizard Smallbone (19 page)

His feet felt warmer.

Magma reminded him of volcanoes, which reminded him of seeing
The Return of the King
on TV and how scared he’d been when Gollum fell into the Cracks of Doom. Behind his closed lids, he saw the heaving mass of red and black and molten gold, with Gollum sinking into its depths. His body shook with the trembling of the earth beneath his feet. He smelled sulfur.

A familiar voice cut through the crackle of bubbling lava. “That’s enough, Foxkin. You can open your eyes now. Land o’ Goshen, Foxkin — STOP!”

Nick forced his lids open. It didn’t help much, since all he could see was fire.

A freezing load of soft snow landed on his head, sliding icy fingers down his chest and neck. He gasped and shuddered and swiped it out of his eyes. “What was
that
for?”

Smallbone brushed the snow off his hands. His hat looked slightly singed and the hem of his coat was smoldering. “You needed cooling down.”

Nick looked up. The Lantern was burning brightly, and the branch it hung on was charred black.

“I’m going to have to move it,” Smallbone remarked. “That branch won’t hold. When I told you to call fire, Foxkin, I didn’t mean a thousand burning suns.”

It was the nicest thing Nick had heard Smallbone say. He grinned. “I was thinking of a volcano. I sure lit the hell out of that Lantern, didn’t I?”

“You durn near lit the whole tree on fire,” Smallbone said drily. “And don’t say ‘hell’— it ain’t manners.”

Despite the chill wind, Nick was burning hot and his head felt light. He tumbled off the stone into the snow and lay still. “So, is Smallbone Cove safe now?”

A cool hand felt his forehead and withdrew. “Well, it should slow them down, anyway, which is all to the good. You didn’t do bad at all, though you need to work on that Control. When you get your strength back, we’ll make a start on the Wall.”

Nick smiled weakly and passed out.

I
t took Nick three days to get his magic back, and that was without using any at all.

“Control, Foxkin,” Smallbone told him. “Hardest thing to learn for a trickster like you. It’s like spinning a good yarn: you need to know how to stop before you hang yourself.”

Ever since Nick had relit the Lantern, Smallbone had been treating him like a real apprentice. Which seemed to mean wasting a great deal of time making sure Nick knew the Rules.

Nick hated the Rules. Nothing about them made any sense. They were confusing and ambiguous and annoyingly restrictive. Apparently every wizard worth his pipe knew them, even though they weren’t written down.

“So how do I know if I’ve broken one?” Nick asked.

Smallbone chuckled. “Same way you know you’ve walked off the edge of a cliff.”

“You
die
?”

“If you’re lucky.”

“So how do you know what they are?”

“You hark to your elders.” The old man sighed. “Go away and take the dogs with you. I’ve had my belly full of company for one day.”

Nick went down to the bookshop. “I want to know more about the Rules,” he said.

A good-sized book sailed down the aisle.
Not written down, huh?
Nick thought smugly.
I guess the old coot just doesn’t know how to ask
. And then he saw the title:
Glamourama: The Magic of Illusion and Disguise
.

Ever since
Animal You
, Nick had known that the bookshop had its own agenda. It gave him what it wanted him to have, not what he asked for. If it had been a person jerking him around like that, Nick would have been mad, but he couldn’t be mad at the bookshop.

Unlike
Animal You
, this book got down to the good stuff right away. Right in the first chapter, he found a spell for making a spoon look like a flower.

Nick went to the kitchen, took a wooden spoon out of the dresser, and said the spell while imagining a flower, just like he was supposed to. The handle of the spoon turned green and the bowl turned pink.

Maybe if he imagined a particular kind of flower. A tulip, maybe. Tulips were easy.

An hour later, all he’d managed was a slightly pointy pink blotch sticking out of a pair of long green splinters.

Disgusted, he left the spoon on the table and started dinner.

When Smallbone came down, he was amused. “Strange color, that. Can’t say I’ve ever met it before, outside a box of Crayola crayons. What was you aiming for, anyways? A sow’s ear?”

Nick scowled. “A tulip.”

Smallbone sat down. “You’re going at this all barse-ackwards, Foxkin. Before you cast a glamour, you got to know how to recognize one.” He picked up the spoon and frowned at it. A perfect scarlet tulip bloomed in his hand. He handed it to Nick. It felt like a wooden spoon. “Don’t believe your eyes. Look with your magic. The tulip should start to shimmer like water just on the boil. Then you’ll see the spoon and the tulip at the same time, only the tulip will be hazy and the spoon will be solid.”

Nick stared at the tulip until his eyes stung. “It’s not working.”

“You’re trying too hard,” Smallbone said. “Cross your eyes a little and think of nothing.” He gave a dry chuckle. “That should come easy.”

Nick tried again. The image of the tulip shimmered, brightened, thinned into a scarlet mist around a solid wooden spoon. “I saw it!”

Smallbone shoveled chipped beef onto his plate. “Now remove the glamour so I can see it, too.”

Nick concentrated on the scorches on the handle, the slightly lopsided shape of the bowl, the ding on one side. A moment later, a wooden spoon lay on the table.

“Good,” said Smallbone. “Do it again.”

Next morning Nick woke, as usual, to Tom’s whiskers tickling his nose. He opened his eyes, and Tom yawned, displaying a curled pink tongue and all his teeth.

Nick sat up like he’d been spring-loaded.

Don’t believe your eyes
, Smallbone had said. And Nick didn’t. He really didn’t.

Nick scooped up the little cat, and Tom mewed indignantly, giving Nick an excellent view of one human tooth, flat as a Chiclet among sharp white thorns.

Still in his nightshirt, Nick ran down to the kitchen.

Mutt and Jeff greeted him with bouncing, slobbering, tail-swishing joy. “Sit!” Nick commanded. Two furry bottoms hit the wooden floor; two sleek black heads cocked sideways; two mouths opened in goofy doggy grins. Nick grabbed Mutt’s muzzle, lifted the velvety upper lip, and unfocused his eyes. The tooth next to one long canine was square, crooked, and a little yellow — unmistakably human. Jeff, on the other hand, was all dog.

Nick hadn’t thought about Smallbone’s other apprentices for weeks. He’d figured they’d been turned into animals and never restored, but he’d assumed that the old man had then let them go to live out their animal lives in the woods or between the walls — or even given them to Hell Cat to play with, as he was always threatening to do to Nick.

He’d never thought Smallbone would keep them as pets.

Or else, he thought glumly, he just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

He didn’t really want to now, but he couldn’t help it. What about the farm animals? When he groomed Groucho, was he really combing a boy? When he gave Ollie his slops, was he feeding some poor kid potatoes, carrots, and bran mixed with sour milk?

And what about Hell Cat? Would Smallbone have a girl apprentice? Or the hens? It was bad enough that Nick had been shoveling transformed-apprentice dung all this time without worrying about maybe eating an egg laid by one.

He refused to think about milking the goats.

When he got to the barn, he examined every animal in turn with unfocused eyes, looking for nonstandard body parts. As far as he could tell, the barn animals were all just animals, except for Ollie, whose human ear lay small and flat against his massive head.

Nick gave the nearest hay bale a good solid kick. Now that he knew the truth, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t. He had to turn the apprentices back. It’s what he’d want them to do, if their positions were reversed. Tom and Mutt and Ollie were human beings, and nobody had asked them whether they wanted to be animals or not.

Besides, the bookshop seemed to want him to.

Breakfast was a tense meal. Nick was so agitated he turned the fire up too high and burned the fried eggs black. Smallbone threatened to turn him into a cabbage and boil him for dinner, and Nick asked if he was a cannibal, and Smallbone said he might be if Nick didn’t make him something fit to eat right soon. This time Nick broke the yolks, but Smallbone ate them anyway, then went upstairs, grumbling like a thunderstorm.

Nick left the dishes to the animals and went to the barn.

“I know about Smallbone’s apprentices,” he said, “and I’ll turn them back. I just want to know if it’s the same spell as the one in
Animal You
.”

It wasn’t. The new book was called
Curses and How to Lift Them
. The spell it gave him wasn’t particularly complicated and it didn’t call for a lot of energy.

There’d been a lot of rain the past few days, and the snow had been fretted down to dirty lumps and tattered patches of white scattered across the muddy barnyard. Nick put on a sou’wester and whistled to the dogs, who exploded out the door as soon as he’d opened it, ears flapping wildly. He scooped Tom off the rocker and was stowing him in one oversize pocket when Hell Cat jumped down from her perch over the stove and gave Nick her blue-eyed glare. She’d turned into a spitting ball of claws and teeth when he tried to examine her earlier, and he didn’t think she was anything but a cat. But he didn’t want to make any more mistakes.

“I’m going to turn these guys back,” he said, feeling foolish. “You can come if you want to.”

Hell Cat’s tail shivered, and she trotted past Nick and toward the barn.

Nick closed the door and followed thoughtfully.

The barn was warm and shadowy and familiar. Nick brought out his chalk and string, drew a pentagram, and settled inside it.

According to
Curses and How to Lift Them
, animal-transformation spells were the easiest kind of curse to lift — for another wizard, anyway.
A living thing wants to return to its natural shape. All you have to do is create the conditions for that to happen
.

The spell was short and repetitive, easy to learn. Nick shut his eyes and started chanting, carefully feeding magic into the words bit by bit. Control didn’t give him the rush of full-out spell casting, but it was oddly satisfying, like executing a perfect layup. As Nick chanted the last phrase, he felt his magical basketball swish right through the hoop.

There was a moment of silence, and then the barn erupted in panic-stricken squawking, baaing, and screaming.

Screaming?

Nick opened his eyes and saw a little kid in short pants and a frilly shirt sitting on a hay bale. Ginger-red hair the color of Tom’s fur stuck out around his head, and he was howling like a strong wind.

While Nick was still taking this in, a hard body cannoned into him. “Grr!” the attacker said fiercely. “Bark! Bark!”

Nick squirmed, turned, and shoved him off. The boy who had been Mutt fell over sideways and floundered. Before Nick could get up, a second apprentice jumped on his back. This one knew how to fight. Teeth fastened themselves on Nick’s ear and something sharp burned a line of fire across his cheek and lip.

At Beaton Middle School, kids got into fights all the time. They windmilled at one another with their fists and rolled on the ground. When one got a bloody nose or started to cry, most of them accepted that the fight was over, except for the inevitable trip to the principal’s office.

Nick wasn’t most kids. Nick never cried. Nick went berserk.

Twisting like an eel, he grabbed the apprentice who had scratched him by a fistful of cloth, and cocked back his arm for a good, hard, satisfying punch.

A pair of furious blue eyes glared up at him. They belonged to a skinny girl in a shapeless cotton dress and an even more shapeless gray sweater.

She showed her teeth and hissed. “Evil wizard!”

“Hell Cat?”

Nick dropped his hand and backed up a step. His mom had always told him he should never, never, not for any reason, hit girls or little kids — not even if they started it. He had promised he wouldn’t, he never had, and he wasn’t going to begin now, even though he really wanted to.

He could, however, set the record straight. “I am
not
an evil wizard!”

Hell Cat smoothed her sweater, turned up her nose, and stalked off to sit by Tom. If she’d still had a tail, she would have wrapped it around her feet.

Mutt crawled up to Nick and bumped his head against Nick’s leg. “Arf!”

It was then that Nick realized that he hadn’t given any thought to what he would do with the apprentices once he’d freed them.

A rustle drew his attention to the pigpen, where a boy was leaning over the rails. He was older than Nick, maybe sixteen, with a body like a barrel and a face like a cheese thatched with yellow hair.

“You must be Ollie,” Nick said.

The boy who had been the finest Yorkshire on the coast of Maine scratched his belly and blushed like a sunset. “Dunno. Sounds familiar, anyways. Who the Sam Hill are you?”