Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded Read online

  Chantel yanked the door open and charged through the skullery, pausing only to grab a frying pan. She could hear the others behind her. The snake inside her head was a mighty hooded cobra, all fangs and venom. She hardly had time to take in the scene—all the girls lined up, except Leila, who was standing before them wielding the ladle. Mrs. Warthall was swinging a belt.

  Chantel rushed in and hit Mrs. Warthall with the frying pan.

  In a story, the frying pan would have clanged and Mrs. Warthall would have dropped to the floor, unconscious.

  In real life, the frying pan hit Mrs. Warthall edge-on in the face, opening a gash. And since Chantel wasn’t used to hitting people with frying pans, the momentum made it fly out of her hand. It struck the brick floor with the world’s loudest clang. Mrs. Warthall didn’t even fall down. She grabbed Chantel by the hair and wrapped the belt tightly around Chantel’s neck.

  Chantel dug at the belt with her fingers, but it just drew tighter. Everything went gray at the edges. Through the ringing in her ears she heard Mrs. Warthall bellow, “Nobody move, or this brat dies.”

  And then suddenly Chantel and Mrs. Warthall fell together to the floor. The belt slackened for a moment, and Chantel struggled furiously. Then hands were pulling at her, yanking. She fought back.

  “Stop it! It’s me!” Anna yelled.

  Anna? Fighting? But there was no time to think about that, among all the yells and smacks and clangs. Chantel’s part in what came next was not much, because she found she could only sit and hold her throat and gasp. She felt as if she would never get enough air. She watched as the little girls, Anna, Franklin, and Bowser fought back. Mrs. Warthall had seized up the frying pan and was laying about her, but people kept coming at her from behind. Leila’s ladle was grabbed away from her.

  Leila fled first, out the skullery door, and when Mrs. Warthall saw her lieutenant leaving, she admitted defeat and ran for her life.

  “The door!” Chantel rasped. “Lock it! All the doors! Windows. Wards. Anna, wards.”

  But Anna wasn’t as good at wards as Chantel was, so Chantel had to stagger to her feet and help her. Franklin, meanwhile, began tending to the little girls’ injuries with surprising expertise. He was ordering Bowser to bring him things.

  “When Mrs. Warthall had that belt around your neck, Franklin came up behind and kicked her legs out from under her,” Anna explained, as they sealed the roof door.

  “I want to know where Miss Flivvers is,” said Chantel, when they got back to the kitchen. It still hurt to talk.

  “Locked into Miss Ellicott’s study,” said Daisy. “After Mrs. Warthall sent Frenetica away.”

  “They locked her in?” said Anna.

  “No, she locked herself in,” said Holly. “When it started.”

  “Owl’s bowels!” Chantel swore. The little girls stared at her, impressed. “Well, come on,” she said. “It’s time for her to come out and face us.”

  They all tromped upstairs and crowded into the hallway. Through the heavy paneled door, they could hear Miss Flivvers reciting, in hushed, desperate tones, the 17 Steps to Curtseying Correctly. Chantel knocked, grimly.

  Miss Flivvers stopped reciting, but didn’t answer. Chantel felt the snake in her head tense, still and alert, as if it were about to tackle a field mouse.

  “Miss Flivvers, open the door,” said Chantel. “I know you’re in there.”

  No answer.

  “Miss Flivvers, open up. It’s me, Chantel.”

  Silence. Then, timorously: “You don’t sound like Chantel.”

  Chantel looked to the others for help.

  “It’s true, Miss Flivvers, it is Chantel,” said Holly. “And Mrs. Warthall is gone, and so is Leila.”

  Pattering of feet in thin-soled shoes. The door opened and Miss Flivvers peered out. Dismay paled her face at the sight of everyone waiting for her.

  “They’re gone,” said Chantel. Her throat still hurt; was that why Miss Flivvers had said she didn’t sound like herself? “And we’ve sealed the doors. But that’s not going to be the end of it. So we’ve got to decide what’s going to happen next, and we need you to come along and . . . and act your age. Please.”

  “Chantel, I am absolutely shocked by the state of your hair and your robes,” said Miss Flivvers. “Go and repair yourself at once.”

  “I can’t right now,” said Chantel. “This is an emergency. And it’s an emergency with you in it, Miss Flivvers. Come on.”

  They gathered in the largest classroom. The snake in Chantel’s head seemed to feel that Chantel’s place was at the teacher’s podium. So she went there, taking a large mug of water that Daisy had fetched for her aching throat. Miss Flivvers made a dismayed little gesture of protest, then went and sat on a student bench.

  “The first thing we need to consider is Mrs. Warthall,” said Chantel. She took a long gulp of water.

  “She’s going to go straight to the patriarchs,” said Bowser.

  “Who are the patriarchs?” said Franklin, in his twangy, Marauder drawl.

  Miss Flivvers sat bolt upright and stared. “Chantel! Who is that!”

  She did not point, because Miss Flivvers was the very model of deportment, but her nose quivered in consternation.

  “This is Franklin,” said Chantel. “Franklin, Miss Flivvers.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Franklin distractedly.

  “Chantel, that is a boy. You have brought a boy into this school, among all Miss Ellicott’s magical maidens. A boy.”

  “Yes, Miss Flivvers,” said Chantel. “Bowser’s a boy too, and he’s always been here. Could we talk about this later, please?”

  “This boy has a most unusual manner of speech,” said Miss Flivvers. “I fear he may be a savage influence upon poor Bowser.”

  Bowser looked annoyed. He turned to Franklin. “The patriarchs are a bunch of rich guys who run everything in Lightning Pass.”

  “Run everything?” Franklin frowned. “I thought you guys had a king.”

  “We do,” said Bowser. “But he doesn’t really run things. The patriarchs just let him think he does.”

  Miss Flivvers had subsided back to looking shocked. Although, Chantel noticed, she also looked rather fascinated. Well, it couldn’t be very interesting, being Miss Flivvers on a day-to-day basis. This was at least a change.

  Chantel thought about what Bowser had said. She’d seen the king, walking in procession under a velvet canopy borne by four patriarchs.

  And kings killed other kings so that they could be king. No one exactly said so, but it was clearly what happened.

  But it did seem that whenever anything was actually getting done, it was the patriarchs who were doing it.

  Right. Well, now the patriarchs were surely going to come to the school. And the girls would be sold, and the school would be closed.

  “We have to have something we can offer them,” said Chantel.

  “Other than to come along quietly?” said Anna.

  “We could give them the rhyme,” said Bowser.

  “We already offered them that, and you saw what happened,” said Chantel.

  “But don’t you actually have the Buttoning spell now?” said Anna. “I mean, you opened that passage—”

  “What are you children talking about?” said Miss Flivvers.

  Anna briefly explained.

  Miss Flivvers paled. “You went out into the Roughlands? Without asking permission? That was a terribly wrong thing to do.”

  “Miss Flivvers, there was a fiend chasing us,” said Anna, sounding slightly impatient.

  “If you must contradict someone, say ‘I beg your pardon,’” Miss Flivvers instructed.

  “I beg your pardon, there was a fiend chasing us.” Anna turned to Chantel. “Anyway, you opened Dimswitch; can’t you seal it, now that you know where it is? You’re good at wards.”

  “The spell is more complicated than that,” said Chantel. “It’s not a simple ward. It’s intricate. Even though Dimswitch looked like
just one spot, it’s connected to the other switches and they’re all part of the wall.”

  “How do you know all that?” said Bowser. “You didn’t know it before, did you?”

  “The wall sort of told me,” said Chantel. “I had this idea of, kind of, a circle.”

  “You mean the wall?” said Bowser.

  “Maybe it was the wall.” She didn’t think the wall was what she meant. The idea that a circle had spoken to her had only just come to her and, infuriatingly, it was wriggling away already.

  “Then—” Miss Flivvers looked like someone desperately trying to keep up. “Can’t you ask the circle how to do the spell? Not that it isn’t rather forward on your part to ask—”

  “I can’t ask it,” said Chantel. “It was telling me stuff, but once we were through and the button closed, it stopped telling me.”

  “Chantel, you interrupted me. I am becoming very concerned about your deportment.”

  Chantel ignored this. “Anyway, the main problem is what we do when the patriarchs get here.”

  “What if we told them we were still looking for the spell?” said Anna. “What if you gave them the rhyme, and —there’s that bit about lost lore, right?”

  “What are you girls talking about?” said Miss Flivvers.

  “‘This remains from long lost lore. The rest is gone. We know no more,’” Holly recited.

  “When we did prognostication with Miss Ellicott, and you saw into the Ago—” said Anna.

  “I just saw a bleeding crown,” said Chantel. “That’s no help.”

  “But you really can see the Ago,” said Anna. “Not like the rest of us. If you could convince the patriarchs that you were looking in the Ago for the right way to do the Buttoning, then maybe they’d leave us alone while you looked. And that would give us time to find the sorceresses.”

  “How can we find them?” said Chantel. “Lord Rudolph says the Marauders without the gates took them.”

  Miss Flivvers gasped in dismay. “Marauders! Poor Euphonia!”

  “Who’s Euphonia?” said Bowser.

  “Miss Ellicott to you,” said Miss Flivvers. “Oh, poor dear Miss Ellicott, alone with all those hairy, unwashed Marauders!”

  “She’s not alone. They took all of them,” said Chantel.

  “And we do bathe,” said Franklin.

  Miss Flivvers turned on him. “Well, young man? Where have you taken them?”

  “Nowhere,” said Franklin.

  “There are different kinds of Marauders, Miss Flivvers,” said Chantel.

  Miss Flivvers shuddered at the thought. “How do you intend to find out which ones have taken poor Miss Ellicott, then?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chantel. “But if we tell Lord Rudolph I’m searching the past for the spell, that will at least give us time to look.”

  “Seems like that would work for a while,” said Franklin. “But eventually you’d have to come up with a spell.”

  “Well, so we would come up with it,” said Anna. “If Chantel looks through the Ago, maybe she can find the long lost lore—”

  “This is only going to work,” said Bowser, “if Chantel can stop acting like she has a snake in her head.”

  “True,” said Anna. “Chantel, you need to use your deportment.”

  “That was precisely my point,” said Miss Flivvers sniffily.

  “I mean use it,” said Anna, frowning at Miss Flivvers.

  “But,” said Chantel. “If they get hold of the whole spell and figure out how to do it, then they’ll strengthen Seven Buttons, which is the exact opposite of what the Marauders told them to do, and the Marauders will kill Miss Ellicott and all the other sorceresses.”

  “What?” cried Miss Flivvers. “Chantel, you can’t possibly know this.”

  “I do, because I asked Lord Rudolph. He told us that the sorceresses had been kidnapped by the Marauders,” said Chantel. “And that the Marauders want the wall taken down, or they won’t return them alive.”

  “You questioned Lord Rudolph?” Miss Flivvers looked shocked. “Chantel, I want you to recite for me, right now, the 42 Rules of Hierarchy and the 19 Signs of Modesty.”

  Chantel ignored this. “Miss Flivvers, don’t be so—so helpless. Please. We need you to act like a grown-up when the patriarchs come. Let us do the talking but . . . but act like a grown-up. Because if you don’t—” She thought of a threat that might work. “Mrs. Warthall will come back.”

  Miss Flivvers looked horrified. She began to sob softly.

  Chantel remembered that Miss Flivvers had once said something quite spirited to Miss Ellicott about pedestals. There had to be more to Miss Flivvers than met the eye.

  Chantel hoped it would show up soon.

  From down below, there came a knock at the street door.

  11

  THE BATTLE OF MISS ELLICOTT’S SCHOOL

  It was not so much a knock as a banging, a pounding, a yanking, a thoroughgoing effort to rip the door from its hinges.

  The crowd of girls parted to let Chantel through. She opened the door.

  Four city guards stood on the steps, resplendent in the purple uniform of the Order of Watchful Sentinels of Lightning Pass. They wore swords and daggers and carried spears tipped with shiny-sharp blades.

  “Yes?” said Chantel.

  “You’re under arrest,” said the captain of the sentinels.

  He made a grab at Chantel. They all watched as his arm hit an invisible rubbery wall and bounced back.

  Of course, he was the sort of person who doesn’t feel he has to believe something just because it’s happened. He shot his arm out again, and it came boinging back and punched him in the nose. The smaller girls laughed, and Chantel heard Anna behind her hushing them.

  “Please tell Lord Rudolph,” said Chantel, “that I have an offer to make.”

  Instead of answering, the captain surged through the doorway—for about two feet. Then the shield bounced him back, throwing him down the steps to land on his rear in the street.

  Again Anna hushed the little girls’ laughter.

  “Please tell the patriarchs—” said Chantel firmly.

  The captain was back on the top step. “You there, boy! What’s your name?”

  “Me? Bowser.”

  “Can you make these girls see sense?”

  “No sir,” said Bowser.

  The man cursed, and turned to Franklin. “What’s your name?”

  “He can’t talk,” said Bowser hurriedly. “He’s my cousin. His name’s Rob.”

  “Well, I have no orders to arrest him,” said the captain. “He can be in charge of the females until we send another manageress to look after them.”

  “You’re not arresting anybody,” said Chantel, struggling for deportment. The snake inside her head was wriggling furiously. “You can’t come in here, so you can’t arrest us. We’ll only talk to Lord Rudolph. Please send him up here.”

  And she closed the door gently, although the snake was urging her to slam it.

  She looked around her. Miss Flivvers had stayed upstairs.

  It became a very long day.

  More guards arrived—dozens of guards. They tried all the windows and doors, including the roof door, which they reached by dropping down from the roof of the house above. They tried to knock bricks out of the wall, which really worried Chantel, and she had to run around putting wards on the walls themselves.

  Meanwhile the younger girls were doing adhesion spells to stick the guards’ boots to the street, and gelid spells that turned puddles to ice on which they slipped and fell.

  It was dusk by the time the men finally went away. It had been a long, cranky, hungry day in which nobody had had time to cook anything, and anyway there was very little food in the house.

  Finally Lord Rudolph climbed the many stairs of Fate’s Turning and knocked on the door of Miss Ellicott’s School. He came accompanied by six sentinels and his clerk, Mr. Less.

  “Only Lord Rudolph comes in,” said Bowser. He
had suggested that he do the talking, because of Chantel’s snake problem.

  Miss Flivvers stood behind him. Chantel and Anna had insisted on this. Miss Flivvers’s job was to look like a grown-up.

  And Franklin was there simply because Miss Flivvers didn’t want him wandering around the school, being a boy all over the place.

  Lord Rudolph opened his mouth to protest, but Mr. Less spoke first. “That seems fair. After all, sir, we’re not afraid of children, are we?”

  “Of course not,” said Lord Rudolph. “But we don’t allow children to set the terms of discussion, either. Leila, take down the ward.”

  And to Chantel’s utter fury, Leila stepped from behind the guards.

  The snake in Chantel’s head reared. Patriarchs upset the snake, Miss Flivvers and Mrs. Warthall and Franklin upset the snake, but nothing made it angrier than the treachery of Leila.

  Leila began a spell. Using magic against her own school and classmates! Chantel was furious. She wanted to scream. She wanted to break things.

  But she had to stop Leila instead. Quickly she made the eighth sign with both hands. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Anna doing the same.

  The patriarch turned to Leila. “What’s the matter? Can’t you do a simple spell?” He reached out and pushed at the ward.

  Leila abruptly stopped. “It’s two against one!” she said.

  Miss Flivvers pushed Bowser aside. “Really, Leila. I’m shocked to hear you address a patriarch in those tones. Where’s your curtsey?”

  “I already curtseyed, you old—”

  “Leila, I think you should copy down for me the 140 Lesser and Greater Reasons for Good Deportment,” said Miss Flivvers.

  Chantel and Anna took advantage of this distraction to extra-stengthen the ward.

  “You seem like a reasonable woman,” said the patriarch approvingly. “Will you let us in?”

  “Only him, Miss Flivvers,” said Anna. “Not the guards. And not Leila.”

  “Anna, I will not be instructed by you.” Miss Flivvers curtseyed to Lord Rudolph. “We would be honored to welcome you and your clerk into our humble school, Lord Rudolph. I’m afraid we lack sufficient accommodations for those other gentlemen.”