Unbound (14 page)

Frustrated, he got up to fetch a worn sock from Sachie’s clothes hamper and crawled under the bed to tear it to shreds. Cotton didn’t feel as nice between his teeth as bone and flesh or a good stick did, but he hadn’t hunted in weeks. There were other things under the bed that he’d destroyed in moments of lonely irritability – both of Detective Bower’s slippers, a homework assignment Sachie had been meant to hand in a week ago and had had to reprint at the last minute, an old toilet roll he’d swiped from the bathroom, a hideous fringed mustard lampshade of Granny Florence’s that he’d always hated. He’d pushed the debris all up against the far wall, in the shadows.

He ripped the sock into tiny little pieces, holding it down with his paws and relishing the noise it made as it came to bits, then closed his eyes with a sigh and decided to take a nap.

Sachie and Eli’s feet on the stairs woke him. He scrambled out from under the bed and followed them up to the attic, where Sachie showed Eli Granny Florence’s books.

“Oh yeah,” Eli said, looking in a dusty box and sneezing. “I forgot these were up here. I helped Mom and Mickie pack them up after Granny died.”

“Was she just really eccentric?” Sachie asked.

“Nah,” Eli replied. “It’s apparently really hard to learn practical magic from books, but I hear it can be done. These are actually sort of important. You should think about donating them to the town library or something, so everyone can read them. Our section on magic history is really good, and so is our gardening section, but there’s pretty much nothing on practical magic that we don’t learn in class with Professor Seybold.”

Sachie stared at him for a long moment, looking like he wanted to say something possibly quite rude. Finally, he settled on: “What?”

“Oh, yeah,” Eli said, obliviously. “Most witches and druids and shamans do apprenticeships after they finish high school to learn the advanced stuff, if that’s what they decide they want to do, rather than being an accountant or lawyer or whatever. But with these books you could probably do it on your own. That’s why they’re so important – only, no one’s published any in years and most of the old copies are lost or in private collections or something.”

Sachie blinked. “Is that what you’re going to do?” he asked, and Ranger could tell from the way he enunciated that he was picking his words carefully so he wasn’t offensive. “An apprenticeship with a witch?”

“Oh, no,” Eli said. “I can’t do magic at all. I did an aptitude test when I was twelve, and nothing. Not a drop of magic in me. Alyssa’s thinking about it, though. She comes from a long line of witches on both sides.”

“Do many people have magic?” Sachie said.

Eli shook his head. “Not many, no. It doesn’t happen in places like Boston or New York or Los Angeles or anything. You’ve got to be near a god, and they’re all bound to trees and stuff out in the wilderness. Except here. The White Wolf of the Woods is bound to the Old Hemlock Tree out in the cemetery.”

“Is it really?”

“She, not ‘it,’” Eli corrected him, mildly. “Weren’t you paying attention in class?”

“You’re not the first person to say that to me,” Sachie said, tilting his head and frowning, and looking a little like a confused dog as he did it. “So, funny thing. I was reading one of these books a few weeks ago and I was
sure
that I made these pebbles levitate. Except it was really late at night and I haven’t been able to do it since, so I might’ve been dreaming.”

“You’re probably just trying too hard,” Eli told him, quite seriously. “You did it once and then you started overthinking it and nothing really works right when you overthink it.”

“I thought you said you couldn’t do magic?”

Eli shrugged, smiling brightly. “I can’t. But Alyssa can, and I listen sometimes. Hey, were you using this book here?” He shifted a bestiary and picked up
A Beginner’s Guide to the Arcane
. “Cool. They used to print these at the turn of the century but they went out of favor around the time of the war, and I’ve only ever heard about them. How did I not find it while we were packing up?”

“I guess maybe Mickie or your mother packed it,” Sachie said, holding his hand out for the book. Eli passed it over, and Sachie flipped through it. “Look, this is the spell I was trying.”

Eli peeked at it, but there was no recognition in his gaze. “All right,” he said. “I guess that’s a levitation spell. I’d have no idea. You wanna try a different spell?”

Sachie bit his lip, looking doubtful, and made an indecisive noise. Ranger nudged his knee firmly.

“Oh, fine then,” Sachie acquiesced. “Let’s go back downstairs though. It’s freezing up here. I can try the weird-looking-‘E’-spell.”

“Sure.” Eli led the way down back down, saying: “I think you have a draft.” If he thought the idea of a
weird-looking-‘E’-spell
sounded odd, he didn’t comment.

“Not our house, not our problem,” Sachie said, cheerfully.

“True enough. But keep an eye out for leaks in the roof, because those books are treasures.”

Sachie set one of the little floral pillows that sat on the couch on fire by accident, simply through using the power of his mind, repeating a verse he said sounded funny, and wiggling his fingers
just so
, sort of in the shape of a jagged ‘E.’ A lot of yelping and panicking followed, ending only when Eli threw the cushion out the back door into the snow, where it hissed and steamed and went out.

Both boys stood in the doorway, faces pale, chests rising and falling rapidly as they panted. Ranger brushed past them to wander down the porch steps to sniff at the pillow. Smoke and burnt feathers and the electric tang of old magic tickled his nose, and he sneezed explosively and rubbed his muzzle against his paw.

It was a good thing, he supposed, that the pillows on the couch were old and tattered and threadbare.

“Uh,” Sachie said to Eli. “Do you think Dad’s gonna notice that cushion is missing if we chuck it out?”

“Probably. He’s a detective,” Eli said. “They’re supposed to notice things. Unless your Dad is actually super unobservant or something.”

The wolf didn’t think Detective Bower
would
notice. He still hadn’t realized that the lampshade from the downstairs side table was missing. Neither had Sachie, for that matter.

Sachie’s shoulders drooped. “No, Dad sees and knows everything and I’ve never quite worked out how. Well, it was only a cushion, anyway. It might’ve been the house that went up. But I think I’d better not try any more fire spells unless I know what I’m doing,”

“I’d second that,” Eli agreed, staring at the smoldering couch pillow. “Hey! Now we know for certain that you can do magic, though. How cool is that?”

“It’s awesome!”

The wolf decided that he didn’t have the strength of character to watch Sachie practice more magic spells with Eli, so he loped across the yard and into the woods towards the cemetery. When he neared it, though, he turned away and headed instead towards Oxbow Court, skirting carefully around the fairy mounds. As he went, he crossed and re-crossed fox tracks in the snow. He could smell wild magic.

A flutter of white caught his eye. Runa Merrill was in the woods, and he sped up to catch up to her.

She was dressed in a flowing white gossamer gown so fine it might’ve been woven from spider’s silk, her bare feet leaving no impression upon the snow. She was muttering quietly to herself, her beautiful face stricken.

“My darling wolf,” she said, without looking at him as he drew near. Her eyes were fixed on something high in the trees, and when he looked he saw the severed head of a dead raven, tied to a branch with its own entrails. Fresh blood dripped down onto the snow beneath it.

“Did you know him?” Runa asked, still staring at the crow.

It had a misshapen skull, and one of its eyes was milky blind.

The wolf felt sick, even before the powerful stench of sweet rotting death washed over him and he retched on Runa’s toes. She didn’t seem to mind, but she’d never been bothered by that sort of thing.

“I suppose you did not know him. A wolf cannot know every crow in his forest. His name was Kyran. My daughter nursed him back to health after his injury, in the spring three years ago. It was very dear, watching her with that bird.” She sighed to herself, closing her beautiful eyes. “Walk with me awhile and help me find her. I must tell her of her friend’s death. As we go, you might aid me. The terrible creature putting up these curses never leaves just one – you can help me find the others.”

Runa meandered through the forest. She didn’t seem to do more than stroll, but Ranger was hard-pressed to keep up with her at a steady lope.

“You probably know this,” Runa said, as they went. “Your mother will have told you, but she died a long time ago and you’ve spent as long in the woods, so I will tell you again – the White Wolf of the Woods is not my god. I belong to the Goddess Danu, who is bound to an ancient tree in the Black Forest in Germany, near the headwaters of the Danube River which was named after her.”

The wolf remembered. He remembered sitting in his mother’s lap as she told him the tale of the Tuatha Dé Danann – the fair folk – one evening in early spring, while the snow was still melting. The Goddess Danu had been one of the earliest gods to be bound, after the God of Many Names and None.

“I worry,” Runa continued. “I fear for my child. She has never known Danu. She was born here, in this forest. If she weren’t so connected to this ground, to these trees, I would take her back to the Black Forest with me. But I am afraid she will never see my home – I fear she will be hunted and killed before then.”

Ranger whined softly and she glanced at him. Her eyes were the color of glacial runoff, and he noticed for the first time the flower of wood aster twister into her hair behind her ear. It was late in the year for aster, but the fair folk had always had a way of singing to plants and encouraging them to grow, even at the wrong time of the year.

“If the person sacrificing people manages to unbind Lupa and set Her upon us, then we will be obliged to try and kill Her,” Runa said. “No one here knows how to bind, not any longer. Not since Florence died.”

The wolf knew that gods could be killed. His mother had told him the stories of the old days, from the years of strife before Mim-in-the-North gave the mortal spellcasters the knowledge of binding, and the time of high magic ended. Gods had fallen, then, their golden blood flowing down into the dirt, lost forever.

Binding might’ve been a sin, but killing was a greater sin, and Mim had seen it as the only way – after all, the younger gods had bound up the primordial titans, colossi that roamed the world before them, burying them away so deep within the earth they might as well have been in the Underworld.

Ironically, Mim-in-the-North had been bound up to a twisted pine only three centuries later.

Ranger had always felt an unbearable sense of loss that he would never see an ocean parted, or a full-grown tree pulled up from the earth at the will of a man. All of the high magicians had been dead and gone for generations, the art of high magic lost. Only the fair folk remembered. Perhaps if the town of Tamarack had a spellcaster capable of high magic, they might’ve been able to kill the angry god that came nine years ago and so many people wouldn’t be dead and rotting in the ground.

Runa and the wolf walked in silence for a time, until they reached the cemetery, where she paused and looked out at the headstones, a pensive expression on her face.

“We are holding a ritual to cleanse the deer buck on the next full moon to remove the curse. Then we shall inter it in consecrated ground,” she said. “The curse
will not
affect Cern.”