Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded Read online

  DEDICATION

  To

  Gaby

  MAP

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Map

  1. CHANTEL

  2. THE WILL-BE

  3. THE HALL OF PATRIARCHS

  4. IN SEARCH OF SORCERESSES

  5. IN WHICH CHANTEL CONSIDERS GUTS AS GARTERS

  6. WHICH IS, ON THE WHOLE, FIENDISH

  7. WITHOUT WALLS

  8. MARAUDERS

  9. THE HARBOR

  10. DIMSWITCH

  11. THE BATTLE OF MISS ELLICOTT’S SCHOOL

  12. IN WHICH CHANTEL OBTAINS THE ADVICE OF A PERSON SOMEWHAT OLDER THAN HERSELF

  13. A JOURNEY TO THE TOP

  14. IN WHICH CHANTEL LEARNS SEVERAL SURPRISING THINGS

  15. IN WHICH CHANTEL HAS A HEADACHE

  16. IN WHICH CHANTEL SEES FROM VARIOUS POINTS OF VIEW

  17. THE DRAGON’S LAIR

  18. A POSITION OF STRENGTH

  19. MISS FLIVVERS MISSES THE POINT

  20. IN SEARCH OF BOWSER

  21. MISS ELLICOTT DOES A SPELL

  22. OCTOPUS STEW

  23. THE FINER POINTS OF CRYSTALLIZED RAT URINE

  24. IN WHICH JUST ONE THING GOES VERY BADLY WRONG

  25. THE CIRCLE

  26. IN WHICH SOME THINGS CHANGE, AFTER ALL

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Sage Blackwood

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  CHANTEL

  A secret nearly cost Chantel her life, on a dark summer morning when the rains ran down the stairstepped stone streets of Lightning Pass.

  And Chantel didn’t even know, at first, that there was a secret, let alone that she had been part of it for seven years. But there was, and she had, and it was a secret that had the power to destroy the Kingdom of Lightning Pass and everyone in it.

  She found that out later, after disaster had struck Miss Ellicott’s School, and just after the bit of trouble with the snake. Let us begin a little closer to the beginning.

  Miss Ellicott’s School stood like a candle trembling in a dark storm, perched on a steep, twisting street in the peak-built city of Lightning Pass. The school was an unlikely-looking brick building crammed in between two other buildings, almost sitting on the roof of the house just below it. Fate’s Turning was the name of the street, and some of the twists in it were actually old stone stairways. Carts couldn’t come up the street, and only the most determined of horses.

  A brass plate on the door read

  MISS ELLICOTT’S SCHOOL FOR MAGICAL MAIDENS

  SPELLS, POTIONS, WARDS, SUMMONINGS

  AND DEPORTMENT

  TAUGHT TO DESERVING SURPLUS FEMALES

  Inside lived a dozen or so girls, and one boy. The boy was not a Surplus Female. His name was Bowser, and he had been left there by mistake. Miss Ellicott kept him as a pot-scrubber and general factotum.

  Chantel was the brightest of the students. There was no doubt about that. While most of them spent years learning to summon their familiars, and ended up with dust bunnies and catnip mice for their efforts, Chantel had already summoned a snake named Japheth by the time she was six. Japheth was small and green, though he had a habit of turning gold in certain lights. He often wrapped himself around her neck, and visitors thought he was jewelry until he flicked his tongue. Much of the time, however, he was off on business of his own.

  As for her spells, potions and wards, they were coming along nicely. Chantel privately thought her magic was good enough that she ought to have been sent to strengthen the city wall with the grown-up sorceresses, but she didn’t mention this to Miss Ellicott. Miss Ellicott was not the sort of person to whom one mentioned things.

  Deportment was more of a problem.

  The fact was, Chantel did not like to deport. Oh, she was good at it, on the outside. She stood up straight, and she curtseyed demurely, and she sat and listened to adults with her slim brown hands folded neatly on the lap of her green school robe. She spoke only when spoken to, although sometimes this involved gritting her teeth so hard they ached for hours afterward.

  The trouble was, sometimes she couldn’t help giving people a Look. Because sometimes, people deserved it.

  And she thought things. More and more often, as she got older, she wanted to say them. Sometimes she barely managed to stop herself.

  Thinking things and having a Look were not good deportment. Good deportment, as one learned at Miss Ellicott’s School, meant being shamefast and biddable.

  One of Chantel’s most famous failures of deportment happened the year she was ten. It happened on an icy night when a long cold rain froze the streets of Lightning Pass.

  Chantel and her best friend Anna were up on the roof, where they were not supposed to be. An ocean-scented wind slapped their school robes against their legs. Pellets of ice stung their faces. These were things that let you know you were alive.

  The moon crept out from behind a cloud. It lit the city, from the castle at the top, its dragon flag snapping in the wind, all the way down to the high wall at the bottom. The wall was called Seven Buttons. It surrounded the city, encircled it, protected it. It kept the outside out and the inside in. It stopped untoward things and strange people from happening to the city of Lightning Pass.

  The moon shone on ice-coated streets, which just begged to be slid down. And Chantel loved her city, even if she wasn’t allowed out in it very much. She couldn’t let it beg in vain.

  “If we took a big pot lid from the kitchen—” she said.

  “Don’t,” said Anna. “You’ll get in so much trouble.”

  But Chantel always wanted to know what was going to happen.

  So she sneaked downstairs, with Anna in her wake exhorting her not to do it. She tiptoed past where Bowser the pot-boy was dozing by the fireplace (not waking him, because she didn’t want to get him in trouble) and she found the biggest pot lid there was. Then, with Anna beside her imploring her not to, Chantel took the enormous brass key from its hook and opened the front door.

  The steps were so icy she slipped and went right down them, and landed painfully in the street. She had to scramble to get onto the pot lid, because she was already sliding, gliding, rattling and flying—down Fate’s Turning, thump-thump-thump over the steps, and then out into Rosewood Walk. She zoomed through streets and twisting alleys—this was being alive! She zipped over a high bridge that arched across the Green Terraces, and—

  And off it.

  Chantel flew through the air.

  But in a generally downward direction. The fact is, she fell.

  She might have had time to think, just then, about whether she could have deported herself better and whether Anna was perhaps occasionally sometimes right. But she didn’t think about either of those things. She was too busy scrambling for a spell, any spell! Everything she had been taught, almost, was meant to protect against something: fleas, winter fever, moldy cheese. But there was absolutely nothing that protected against—

  SPLUNCH.

  Chantel landed on a stone bench, set in one of the Wednesday lawns on the Green Terraces. And it ought to have been her that went SPLUNCH, but instead the bench did. It turned all soft, as if it had been made of pudding.

  Chantel picked herself up, feeling rather stunned. The bench, which had become gray blobs on the ice-spiked lawn, gathered itself up and turned into a bench again. She looked around for the pot lid.

  It came down on her head with a painful clang. And then another, and another. Raising her arms to protect herself, Chantel looked up at th
e tall, robed figure of Miss Ellicott herself. Miss Ellicott, standing in the dark garden in the middle of an ice storm. Miss Ellicott, wielding a pot lid.

  “Miss Ellicott, what are you doing here?” Chantel was startled into asking, as she dodged the next descent of the pot lid.

  “You,” said Miss Ellicott, in tones icier than the night, “are in a GREAT deal of trouble.”

  Chantel wasn’t really afraid she would be expelled. That didn’t happen to girls like her, girls to whom spells came easily, girls who had summoned a familiar.

  She told herself that.

  Still, she was extremely nervous when she was called into Miss Ellicott’s study the following day.

  The room smelled of magic and furniture polish. Miss Ellicott herself smelled of soap and magic potions. Chantel sat where Miss Ellicott told her to sit, tucked her robe neatly around her, and folded her hands in her lap. Japheth the snake was looped around her neck.

  Miss Ellicott straightened her steel-rimmed spectacles on her nose and directed a grim gaze at Chantel. “To say that I am displeased with your deportment, Chantle, would be greatly understating the case.”

  Chantel did not say It’s pronounced shahn-TELL. Miss Ellicott was a force of nature, like a thunderstorm. You didn’t correct thunderstorms.

  “Do you understand why it is particularly important for you to comport yourself in such a way as to frighten no one?”

  Chantel looked up in surprise. The idea of her frightening anyone was ridiculous. She was, at the time, only ten. And she was only Chantel.

  Miss Ellicott was waiting for an answer.

  “Er, because I’m a girl?” Chantel ventured.

  “Because you are a magical maiden. And this frightens people, Chantle. The city needs sorceresses, but it fears them.”

  Miss Ellicott looked at Chantel to see if she was taking this in.

  “Er, doesn’t the city kind of fear everything?” said Chantel.

  “Chantle!” Miss Ellicott’s eyebrows drew down like twin lightning bolts. “What a thing to say. With Seven Buttons and all our soldiers to protect us, we have no need to fear!”

  But we do, Chantel wisely didn’t say. That’s why we have Seven Buttons, isn’t it? That’s why we have soldiers. And all the spells we learn, they’re all about things we’re afraid of, aren’t they? We don’t learn to fly. We learn to hide.

  “A magical maiden must be shamefast and biddable,” Miss Ellicott went on, “so that she can learn magic without anyone being unduly upset. A magical maiden must show promise of growing into a proper and correct sorceress. If a sorceress were not proper and correct, she—”

  Japheth gave a mighty wriggle on Chantel’s neck, and Chantel reached up and grabbed him.

  “—would not survive,” said Miss Ellicott.

  Chantel froze in surprise, her fingers around the snake. “Miss Ellicott, has somebody . . . not survived before?”

  “I have warned you,” said Miss Ellicott. “There is nothing further you need to know.”

  She stared at Chantel through those steel-rimmed spectacles until Chantel looked down and said, “Yes, Miss Ellicott. Thank you, Miss Ellicott.”

  “Very well.” Miss Ellicott sat back perhaps a fraction of an inch in her chair. “Now, there is something else I must discuss with you, Chantle.”

  Chantel waited.

  “When you came to us from the orphanage, they told us how you arrived there. I waited until you were old enough, but now I feel you are ready to hear.”

  Chantel knew how she had arrived at the orphanage: the same way nearly everyone did, in a basket balanced on the narrow, uneven orphanage steps. These baskets happened often, because babies were in excess supply in Lightning Pass. At the age of five, children outgrew the orphanage and were moved on to something else . . . being a servant, or working in a factory, or sweeping the streets. Chantel knew she was extremely fortunate to have ended up at Miss Ellicott’s School instead.

  The important thing was, it didn’t sound like she was being expelled. So she kept her hands neatly folded in her lap even though her nose was beginning to itch.

  “You were left in a basket, Chantle, on the night of—” Miss Ellicott stopped and peered in the registry-book open on her desk—“July 3rd, in the seventh year of the reign of King Wiley the Warmonger, of blessed memory.”

  Chantel knew this. She’d been told it at the orphanage. The basket had a hole in it, and she herself had been wrapped in a very worn but reasonably clean dishrag. Both items had then been used around the orphanage until they fell apart.

  “Perched on the edge of the basket was a small golden dragon,” said Miss Ellicott, in the same tone in which she’d stated the date. “And when the orphanage matron came to the door, the dragon breathed letters of fire that spelled out ‘Behold the Chosen One.’”

  Chantel had not heard this part before, and she was surprised into speaking. “I didn’t know the orphanage matron could read.”

  Miss Ellicott turned a hard glare on her student. “That remark was impertinent, Chantle.”

  “I beg your pardon.” Chantel spoke politely. But Japheth, who had never been taught deportment, reared his small green head and flicked his tiny forked tongue. Chantel was pretty sure the matron couldn’t read, and this seemed to her a real hole in Miss Ellicott’s story. And there was another. Chantel stroked Japheth’s smooth, scaly skin. “My familiar is a snake, not a dragon.”

  “A snake is merely an immature form of dragon. That is neither here nor there,” said Miss Ellicott haughtily. “Do you not want to know what the message meant?”

  “Yes please,” said Chantel.

  “Chosen to save the realm,” said Miss Ellicott. “Chosen for a great destiny. Without you, the Kingdom of Lightning Pass cannot survive. Without you, Seven Buttons will crumble, and evil will rush in.”

  This was the first time anyone had spoken to Chantel of her future.

  “You mean,” she said eagerly, “I’ll go into battle and—”

  “Certainly not! Magical maidens do not go into battle.”

  “So will I cast a great spell that—”

  “I sincerely hope you will have no reason to do anything of the kind.”

  “Then what—”

  “You will do as the king and the patriarchs tell you,” said Miss Ellicott. “You will grow from a shamefast and biddable maiden into a proper and correct sorceress, and you will do your duty. That is how you will save the realm.”

  “Oh,” said Chantel. As destinies went, it sounded rather dull.

  “I am sure you must feel overwhelmed by this news,” said Miss Ellicott. “Keep it to yourself, and consider it. Do not tell the other students, as they would naturally be jealous.”

  “Yes, Miss Ellicott.” Chantel refolded her hands neatly on her lap.

  “You have years to go in your education,” said Miss Ellicott. “Now that you know the great future that awaits you, I trust you will apply yourself to your lessons, and take very seriously everything your instructresses try to convey to you.”

  Chantel thought this was unfair. She always had. Miss Ellicott, of course, hadn’t noticed. Miss Ellicott was an important sorceress, and did little of the actual teaching herself. Most of it was done by the underteacher, Miss Flivvers, who was not magical at all, and by jobbing sorceresses who lived elsewhere. The jobbing sorceresses taught the students to do small protective and household spells, and to bring light into the darkness, and to summon lost things.

  She waited to see if Miss Ellicott was going to say anything else. Once she would have asked “Can I go now?” but that sort of question was smacked out of Miss Ellicott’s students in the first year. Chantel let Japheth do the impatient squirming for her, sliding ticklishly along her collarbone.

  “There were more words that the dragon flamed,” said Miss Ellicott. “A mysterious couplet. Do you wish to hear it?”

  “Yes please,” said Chantel.

  Miss Ellicott cleared her throat and intoned, “‘Sp
eak the words that Haywith spoke, and keep the vow that Haywith broke.’”

  “What does that mean?” asked Chantel.

  “Do not tell me you are unaware of the treachery of wicked Queen Haywith. Has Miss Flivvers taught you nothing?”

  Chantel’s face burned at the accusation. Even if Miss Flivvers had taught her nothing, Chantel would still know that, five hundred years ago, Queen Haywith had opened a breach in Seven Buttons and let evil Marauders into the city. Everyone knew that. It was the reason for the saying “She’s about as trustworthy as Queen Haywith.” Which meant not trustworthy at all. Or, likewise, “I wouldn’t trust her any further than I could throw Queen Haywith.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Chantel. “I was wondering what the second part meant.”

  “It does not matter what it means. Recite!” said Miss Ellicott.

  Chantel obediently repeated the couplet. She was good at memorizing things. All Miss Ellicott’s students were.

  “Very well. Do not forget. The meaning will become clear in time.”

  Chantel wanted to shrug, but her deportment wouldn’t let her. And Japheth couldn’t do it for her. Snakes are ill-equipped for shrugging.

  “Remember what I have told you,” said Miss Ellicott. “A great destiny awaits you, and the entire kingdom will depend on you. You may go, and tell no one.”

  Chantel did tell no one, of course, except her friend Anna, and Bowser the pot-boy. And when a year later Miss Ellicott called Anna into her study and said that Anna was the Chosen One, Anna of course told Chantel.

  The three of them puzzled over it in the skullery at the back of the high, twisty brick house, which was their refuge from things Ellicott. (In most houses it would be called a scullery, but in Miss Ellicott’s School it was a skullery, for reasons that may be explained later.) This was where Bowser worked. Much of his life was spent scrubbing out burned pots with sand, and that was what he was doing at the moment.

  “Well, we can’t both be the Chosen One,” said Chantel, feeling a little miffed.

  “Maybe she thought I was you,” said Anna. “Bowser, we could do a scouring spell—”