Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy (11 page)

There were only three great magical owls. The wizards told me that. Then they told me what to do if I should meet one, but I wasn’t listening. There was a cloud, you see, in the shape of a bear, floating past the window and I watched it pass, and by the time it was gone, the advice had been given and I’d missed it.

There are Ibrom and Abram and Alder. I have learned that since, from Mr. Pushkinova, who not only keeps the keys but knows everything there is to know about the Queen’s army. He sometimes comes in the night and speaks through the keyhole, when he cannot sleep for his rheumatism, and he tells me such things.

Ibrom was the most magical of all, it is said. There are many minor magical owls, nearly always haunting houses and hospitals where people are about to die, but they are of no consequence, you see. When the spell coating me washed away with my tears, Ibrom smelt me. If it had been Alder or Abram, who are less magical but much more vicious, then perhaps I wouldn’t be here today.

The strangest thing I have learned is that it’s impossible to know what’s inside someone. The wizards didn’t teach me this, but I have learned it myself. Those who appear tall and straight and very good are sometimes rotten on the inside, and others, huge and clawed and apparently very bad, sometimes contain a pure and sweet form of goodness. The biggest trap is to judge a person by their outer casing. Their skin. Their hair. Their snow-white feathers.

Have you ever read about the great magical owls? Are they in your science books? Probably not. They are misunderstood and are horribly dangerous but also terribly sad. It is their sadness that gives them their magic. They find and keep the sorrows for the Queen. And the Queen needs the sorrows to exist. She needs them the way that others need air.

You see, Ibrom could hear someone crying in another land if he so chose. A boy, say, lost in a city or a woman wailing for that same child. He could sense all these things from high above. He could smell tears.

A great magical owl lives for many centuries, and Ibrom had lived for several. His magic allowed him to move freely between worlds and times. He had been witness to many sufferings: the sinkings of ships, swords, tanks, machine guns, torture, bombs, infernos, massacres. Untimely deaths, countless separations, endless grief. All these sufferings Ibrom related to the Snow Queen. They were recorded in ink on white paper. All the great tragedies and all the small tragedies, in columns neatly and exactly measured, town after town, city after city, hour after hour, day after day, year after year.

They were cross-referenced. Cataloged. Filed away. Kept.

And they are the Queen’s proof that the world is terrible, and they are her proof that all her arguments are right. That everything should remain frozen and that death should reign supreme. Each day she walks in her library and touches these memories, and they make her stronger.

And she likes above all to destroy good things, delicate
morsels of innocence, which she puts in her machine. She extracts their souls and drinks the ruin of them in a cup. It was the three great magical owls who hunted her these things.

That day, when I left the kingdom, Ibrom was circling high in the sky. He could smell the huge cloud of fear that rose above the crowd on the road, grief too—the grief of hasty goodbyes—but this was not what he was looking for. He turned sharply, again and again, searching for me.

And there I was below, crying over hard bread and cheese.

There were great spikes of sadness rising up into the sky.

He found me quite quickly, as you can imagine.

He looked down on me, crying like a baby, through the trees.

I didn’t know he was there. I had moved on in my thinking and was now lamenting the fact that I had forgotten which tree I was meant to use for making a strengthening tea. And there I was expected to remember many things and carry a magical sword, and I couldn’t even remember the simplest of things. It made me cry all the more. Ibrom circled just above the forest canopy.

What could he see? Me untying my laces to examine my blisters. The crown of my hair, my brown face. He kept quiet, that great magical owl, until he could keep quiet no more. He let out one long screech and plummeted down through the trees.

I looked up and saw him. He was coming straight toward me. He was as large as me, maybe larger, his wings—huge
white, glittering sails—blotting out my vision. I rolled to the side and he barely missed me.

Now, what was it that the wizards had told me about the owls? There was something I was supposed to remember. If only I had listened to that lesson. The owl swooped steeply back up through the trees to take his position. I felt for the sword, dragged it from its scabbard, but it immediately nosed to the ground. It was so heavy, my hands shook just trying to hold the thing. And already Ibrom was descending and screeching again.

This time I somersaulted beneath him, and he held my ankle briefly in his great talons. I rose in the air with him before twisting free. The owl shot upward again toward the trees.

I pulled the one arrow from my quiver—yes, one arrow, another fact to lament—and drew my bow.

I stood the way the wizards had taught me. Felt the earth through my bare feet. I wished more than anything that the wizards had taught me something magical. Now I was going to be eaten by an owl and I was only a short way from the town.

Earth, bare feet. If you ever have to shoot a great magical owl with an arrow, you should remember this, Ophelia. Everything is connected. If you touch the ground, you touch the tops of the trees. If you touch the trees, you touch the wings of birds.

The arrow thrummed free from my bow. It flew straight and true, upward, upward, upward until it lodged in Ibrom’s
breast. The great magical owl fell to the ground with a thump. The forest floor shook, the leaves whispered, a curious stillness descended.

Does it seem too simple to you? I was so shocked that he fell that way, my arrow through his heart. How could it be? Ibrom lay on his side, lifting one wing helplessly. I went toward him. What was it they had told me about magical owls? Was it that I was never, under any circumstances, meant to kill them? But the wizards
had
taught me to always assist those in need.

The owl stared at me. He was not dead, only terribly injured. Looking into his eyes, Ophelia, I felt like I was looking into a flame.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. Then I remembered. “I mean, hello. I mean, I come in friendship and mean you no harm.”

Which seemed an awful thing to say, considering what I’d just done.

“I am a boy chosen by a protectorate of wizards from the east, west, and middle to deliver this sword so that the Snow Queen may be defeated.”

Ibrom closed his fiery eyes and opened them again. “Yes, yes, yes, I know all this,” he whispered. Flinched. Raised his great wing.

“What should I do?” I asked. “Should I take the arrow from you?”

“No,” said Ibrom. The owl’s voice was so deep, the forest trembled beneath my feet. “Come closer, so I can see you.”

I crawled forward. Ibrom lifted his huge feathered head, but it fell back again.

“Much is spoken of you,” said the owl. “How you have been sent to save the world. You are small. Smaller than I imagined. But you smell delicious. If I had caught you, I would have taken you by the shirt so as not to mark your skin. I would have taken you to my nest and gazed at you all night before educating you in the ways of misery.”

Which are terrible words, are they not? But I could tell he was not all bad.

“You see, I can look forward in time just as well as your wizards can,” he continued. “And I have seen the One Other, who is just as small and just as puny. I have spent nights beside her bedroom, looking upon her. I know that she will never be of use to anyone, not against the Queen. Not against snow and sadness.

“The hopelessness of it—two such beings entrusted to save all the realms. None of it is possible.”

“What would give you comfort?” I asked. “I shouldn’t have shot that arrow. It’s just that you were going to—”

“I travel the world,” Ibrom interrupted. Even his whisper made my body shake. “I have seen great, unthinking machines made by men to perform horrible deeds. I have seen guns as huge as elephants and bombs that have laid waste to whole cities. I have seen battlefields where dying men are eaten by crows. I have seen immeasurable sorrows. The Queen desires you, and it was my task to find you and take you to her.”

I looked into his unearthly eyes.

Ibrom gazed back. His body vibrated with unused magic. “Come closer,” he said. “I have a proposition for you. If you
will give me a small part of yourself, I will give you a portion of myself in return. This exchange will provide you with a charm. This magical blessing will keep you safe from the Queen for just a little while, long enough for you to make it to the valley forest, where the wolves will not follow you. The Queen will be unable to harm you in this time, and if she does, she will harm the whole of her army. So tightly are we bound together by her misery.”

What should I do? Should I believe such a creature? What would you do, Ophelia, in such a situation? The owl closed his eyes and waited. Is that what the wizards had taught me? Never, under any circumstances, trust a dying owl?

“Which part will I give you?” I asked.

“A finger, perhaps?”

“Will it hurt?”

“Only for a while.”

So I looked at my fingers for a long time while the owl took terrible, shuddering breaths. I wished I could make decisions. The world was so full of things I had to decide. If I made the wrong decision, everything would be wrong. Everything. And it wasn’t fair again, you see. I needed my fingers. I needed them to hold sticks, and to fish, and to pick up stones from the river and skip them across the bright morning water. I thought of all these things; then I held out my hand to the owl.

“Shush,” said Ophelia. She held her own hand, protecting her fingers against nothing. “Don’t tell me any more.”

“Mr. Pushkinova will be back with my lunch soon anyway,”
said the boy. “What about the third key? That’s what is important now. We don’t have much time. And this magical tar you speak of?”

“It’s superglue,” said Ophelia. “And it’s not really magical. I’ll go now.”

“Be careful,” said the boy.

Which is all very well to say, thought Ophelia, when you have to enter a room containing a magical beast that likes to eat people. “I’ll be back soon,” she said.

She raced to the sword workroom, where Mr. Whittard was holding a rusted rapier in his hands. He was looking at it as though he were holding the greatest of treasures. Sometimes he had looked at Ophelia’s mother in this way. When Susan returned from a walk, for instance, and her cheeks were pink and her hair wet with rain and she was so full of stories that she glowed.

Ophelia waited patiently beside her father until he stopped looking at the sword and noticed her.

“There you are,” said Mr. Whittard. “Are you feeling better? How were the dolls? It was very nice of Miss Kaminski to organize all that. She really is very kind.”

Ophelia didn’t like the way he said
Miss Kaminski
. He said
Miss Kaminski
as though he were thinking of something special. And he knew Ophelia certainly didn’t like dolls.

“I’m feeling much better, thank you,” she said. “But I need some superglue.”

“Whatever for?”

“Well, it’s a surprise, really.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Please, Daddy. I promise it’s for nothing bad. I’m meeting Alice,” she lied. “She’s having her picture painted, remember? And the superglue … is for something I’m working on. Miss Kaminski is letting me fix some of the old doll furniture while I watch. She said I looked like the kind of girl who could help with such a job. I’ll be gone for ages. Portraits take a long time, you know.”

“Well, in that case,” said her father. He looked around, then opened and shut a few drawers. “There were a few huge tubes here, actually.”

Finally he located a drawer containing several large yellow tubes with extra-long nozzles.

Ophelia was surprised by how easily she lied. She had two stolen keys in her pockets, and the lies were sliding off her tongue. Soon she’d probably be shoplifting. She expected that was how it started.

At the foot of the staircase, she turned to her father. “You haven’t seen that sword, have you?” she asked. “The one with the wooden handle and the closed eye? The magical one?”

“No, but if I find it, I will tell you,” said Mr. Whittard, and calling after her, added, “Wait, we’re having dinner tonight with Miss Kaminski, so I’ll need you and Alice back here by five o’clock sharp. Alice has promised me she’ll take you to buy a dress.”

Dresses, thought Ophelia as she raced up the stairs. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn a dress. She certainly didn’t own one. Why on earth was her father trying to
get her to wear a dress? Her mother would never have tried. Her mother would have said, “I hope you didn’t take those jeans out of the dirty clothes basket?” And if Ophelia had, she would have shaken her head and said, “There is no hope for you, O. Really, there is no hope.”

Ophelia stopped walking and closed her eyes. This happened sometimes when she thought of her mother. She felt she couldn’t move, not another step; couldn’t take another breath. That must have been what it felt like for the boy, when he thought about the bread and cheese. She could almost sit down on the stairs and begin to cry. But she didn’t.

Instead she started ascending the stairwell again slowly. She tapped her left-hand pocket. She felt the two keys there, her puffer, the museum map, the tin of sardines. She looked down at the tube of superglue in her hand. She inhaled a deep breath of the fusty museum air, steeling herself for what she had to do.

In the dinosaur hall Ophelia slipped the superglue inside her coat. She looked at the elevator with the large cross on the doors and shuddered. She pretended to look at some dinosaur knee bones. The old guard watched her every move and took almost twenty minutes of furious knitting to fall asleep.