Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy (14 page)

Ah!
said her mother in her ear.
See how it feels to do dangerous things! I knew you’d come back. I knew you’d be brave
.

Ophelia smiled as she ran in her stocking feet. She ran through the
Gallery of Time
, filled with clocks, where the Wintertide Clock was tick, tick, ticking in the shadows. She peered into the gloom at the little gilt window and saw there was no longer a 2 but a 1. It gave her a falling feeling. It was just like the feeling she got when Lucy Coutts chose the medicine-ball teams and left Ophelia until the very end. Yes, that feeling, only one hundred times worse.

She ran through the room filled with teaspoons, the room filled with telephones, the room filled with mirrors. Her many reflections flickered beside her. She passed down the long
hallway of painted girls in party dresses, pausing briefly in front of Kyra Marinova, who seemed to smile at her in the darkness. Up the stairs and down again, across the sea monster mosaic, through the gallery of broken angels, and into the boy’s room.

“Are you there?” she whispered through the keyhole.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m so glad you’ve come. I thought …”

She saw the glint of his bright eye, knew he too was filled with relief.

“I nearly got eaten by a misery bird,” she said. “But it liked the sardines I had instead, and then Mr. Pushkinova caught me and growled at me and told me that I couldn’t help you.”

“Yes, he has been checking me more frequently,” said the boy. “He wouldn’t have meant to scare you so. Even though he is bad, he is really very good inside.”

Ophelia didn’t agree, but she didn’t say so. She took the large golden key from her jeans pocket and held it in her palm. She placed it in the golden keyhole and opened the little door hidden in the turquoise sea.

In which the boy is released from his prison after many years

They were bashful at first. The rescued and the rescuer. The boy stepped out of the room and looked out the window. He was not much taller than Ophelia. His bangs hung in his eyes. He brushed them away and smiled at her shyly. He wore very old-fashioned clothes: stockings and knickerbockers and shiny slippers. His fabulous coat was embroidered in gold, but it was very worn and tatty, and threads were unraveling at the sleeves. He plucked at one of these. Ophelia turned the key over and over in her hand.

“I didn’t know if you would,” said the boy.

“I didn’t know either,” said Ophelia.

“You’re very brave,” said the boy.

“I probably shouldn’t do it again,” she replied. “I have very bad asthma.”

“We should begin to search for the sword.”

“And then find you a hiding place,” said Ophelia. “Maybe
we could just run away. I mean, out the front door. I could hide you in our hotel suite. There’s this little dressing room. I could make you a bed in there until we work out what to do. If I told my father, he would listen eventually, if I told him enough.”

“I’ve tried before,” said the boy. “She always finds me. There are many spies in the city.”

Ophelia looked out at the snow falling. When she looked at the boy from the corner of her eye, she was surprised to see how faded he seemed. His edges seemed indistinct, as though he were hardly there. Yet when she looked back at him, he was perfectly normal again. She thought she’d better not mention this to the boy.

“Let’s start,” she said.

“Yes,” said the boy. “Let’s start.”

Ophelia and the boy tiptoed through
Mesopotamian Mysteries
, which contained a large papier-mâché ziggurat. They walked through
A Day in Roman Life
. They looked in the
Customs of Marriage, Religious Embroidery
, and
A Quaker Kitchen
. They picked their way through
History of Toys
. There were teddy bears and train sets and china dolls lined up to the ceiling, but there were no swords. They searched in
Taxidermy Treasures
, which was a vast hall filled with nothing but gloomy stuffed animals. Stuffed tigers and stuffed bison. Stuffed rabbits and stuffed lambs. Stuffed cats and stuffed dogs. It seemed there was nothing that had not been killed and frozen in time.

They went through
Napoleonic Wars, Colonial Expansion, Chinese Empires, Egyptian Artifacts 3000–2000 BC
, and
Life on
the Frontier
. There were no magical swords. They visited
Men’s Clothing Through Time, Japanese Ceremonial Dress
, and
History of the Incas
. No magical swords. Where swords had once been, there were only slips of paper, carefully typed:
THIS SWORD IS ON LOAN TO BATTLE: THE GREATEST EXHIBITION OF SWORDS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD (OPENING 6 P.M. SHARP CHRISTMAS EVE, WHEN THE WINTERTIDE CLOCK CHIMES)
.

They entered
Lives of Women in the Nineteenth Century
on a whim. There were commodes and potbelly stoves, fans, colorful clogs, hairbrushes, baby bonnets, and perambulators, but no magical swords.

“The problem is,” said Ophelia, “that it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“It is hidden somewhere, I’m sure of it,” said the boy.

Ophelia stopped walking.

“I can never, ever go to the seventh floor again,” she said firmly. “And I’ve glued all the doors shut so we wouldn’t be able to open them anyway. Also, what about this One Other? Maybe we should try to find him or her. Maybe he or she knows where the sword is.”

It felt good to be organized.

“We need to find the sword first,” said the boy. “Trust me.”

“Trust me,” he said again when Ophelia looked unsure. She pulled down on her braids hard.

“I’ve been trying to think of your name,” she said as they began to walk again. “I thought if I said some names to you, one of them might mean something. You might feel something.”

The boy smiled at her, uncertain.

“Here, let’s try
E
,” said Ophelia. “Ernest. Engelbert. Ebenezer. Edmund. Edgar. Feel anything?”

“Not really.”

“Elvis. Elton. Elijah.”

The boy shook his head.

“Ernie?”

“No.”

“Elliot?”

“I’m not sure it works like that, Ophelia.”

“But maybe you just haven’t heard the correct name.”

“That’s true, I suppose,” said the boy.

“I once had a teddy bear called Elliot,” said Ophelia, which made him laugh.

She was cold. She could feel a wheeze beginning in her chest. They found a re-created Edwardian parlor. There was a comfortable settee, and a fireplace with painted fire that gave the illusion of warmth.

“We should rest awhile,” said the boy.

“We should keep going,” said Ophelia.

“Just for a little while.”

“How did you know I would help you?”

“It was in your eyes. I knew it right away. I knew it was you who would.”

“Have many children come into that room and found you there?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the boy. “Over the years.”

“But I still don’t understand,” said Ophelia, and her voice faded off. “My mum believed in everything. All sorts of stuff.
She’d know what we should do now. She died, you know, not that long ago.”

“Do you miss her?” asked the boy.

“Yes,” she said.

“I miss my mother too.”

That made Ophelia shiver, to remember how far away from his home he was.

“Here, have this,” said the boy. He removed his long embroidered coat and placed it over her shoulders.

“Won’t you be cold?”

“I’ll be fine.”

She lifted her sleeve to check on her magical snow leopard wound. It still ached, although it was only a tiny scratch. The boy touched it gently with his fingertip.

“It will heal,” he said. And he sounded very certain.

They sat for quite some time, neither of them talking. The boy raised his hand. Ophelia saw immediately the jagged scar where the missing finger should be. Her small wound was puny beside it. She looked down at her own hands in her lap.

“Did it hurt?” she whispered.

“Yes,” said the boy.

“How did you do it?”

“I held it out like this for the great magical owl to eat.”

“And he gave the charm in return?”

“I’ll tell you,” said the boy.

I held my finger out just so, and the great magical owl snapped it off like a twig. He swallowed it whole, closed his eyes, looked like he enjoyed it—the taste of it, I mean. Me? I screamed
and moaned and held my bleeding hand and ripped a strip of cloth from my tunic hem and bandaged it as best I could and crouched on the ground until the first wave of pain subsided. He watched me the whole time with his cooling eyes.

The great magical owl’s magic comes from his travels and his ruminations. He witnesses a sorrow, and then he thinks and thinks and thinks, and he combs his head with his claws, preens, and remembers, sometimes for days, sometimes for years. And the charm he put on me? He told me it came from his memories of the darkest of midnights, the emptiness of a palace after a plague had come, the loneliness of cemeteries, a singular wind he had once met moaning on a plain, the empty hearts of princesses who danced all night. He made this charm in the blink of an eye, placed it inside a feather. The feather drifted free from his wing, fluttered to my feet.

I know you’ll wonder how a blessing might be made, but there is no equation for it, Ophelia. You will not find it in your science books. All his remaining magic, every last ounce of it that he had left in his body, he put inside a feather and then said, “Child, eat of me.”

His breast heaved up and down where the arrow had pierced.

So I took the small feather, for it was really very small, and I put it on my tongue and I swallowed. I coughed. My throat was very dry. Apart from that, I didn’t feel so different.

“There, it is done,” said Ibrom.

“What will happen to me?” I asked.

“You will be safe now for a small while,” said the owl. “Three
days, three hours, and three minutes. Enough for you to make it through the forest and into the belly of the mountain.”

But he was dying. Ibrom was dying, and he didn’t know the charm he put on me was much more concentrated than could be imagined. I did not know it either, not for many years. The charm he bestowed upon me was grossly miscalculated.

His eyes were no longer fiery. By giving me the charm, he had broken rank. What did it matter now? He would tell me one more thing.

“The One Other has a name,” he whispered.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“I know her,” he hissed. “Have seen her. Have heard her name spoken.”

“What is her name?” I said, and leaned closer, right beside the owl’s head.

Ibrom committed one more act of treason and whispered the name to me.

Already winter was coming behind me. There was a thin gray frost spreading over the leaves. Millions upon millions of icy splinters. There was a low, chill wind. The water in the streams grew milky skins. I stood up, Ophelia, held that name close to my heart, and began to run again.

“Well?” asked Ophelia.

“Well, what?” said the boy.

He really was exasperating. He’d probably forgotten the name. It was exactly the kind of thing he’d do. If it were she who had been given the name by a dying great magical
owl, she would have written it down carefully on a piece of paper and folded it three times and placed it in her pocket.