Sorcerer and Stone

            He wondered about it for a long time, and asked his mother once. They were walking back home, hands full of groceries, past the town hall. Tourists who came to Athy always came there first, and a woman he could tell was American – she was wearing very American shorts – stepped out holding her baby as they went by.

            She had lifted the baby over her head, and she was looking up into his face as if he was a revelation.

            “Were you happy to have me?”

            Mum considered this. ”Yes,” she said at last, slowly, as if she was trying to remember something someone had told her once and not her own life. “We thought it was wonderful, having twins. A boy and girl. A ready-made family. We took a picture as soon as we left the hospital, of our new family. Your father was holding Ashling, and I was – I was holding you.”

            He hadn’t expected an answer like that. He hefted the shopping bags so he could hurry forward a little, tin cans banging against his legs, and catch up with her. So they were walking side by side.

            He was eleven and too old for make-believe, but he told himself that if they weren’t holding shopping bags she would have held his hand.

            “Were you as happy to have me as you were to have her?”

            “Yes,” Mum said again.

            She was still speaking with difficulty, as if trying to recall the words to a long-forgotten song, but he was busy telling himself the story of how it would be. She would stop, and hold out her hand because she wanted him to hold it, and he’d be embarrassed. But he would let her, in the end.

            Mum stopped and he almost walked into her, he was walking that close. She looked down at him and his daydream faltered and faded in the cold light of her eyes.

            “That was before we knew you’d inherited the curse. After that, I wished you had never been born.”

            Gerald lifted his chin. “Of course,” he said. “That’s understood.”

            She turned around with a click of heels and a swing of plastic bags. Gerald took his usual place walking several steps behind her. 

            She’d never held his hand in her life.

            Gerald looked back at the town hall, but the mother and her baby were long gone.

*

             He doesn’t have any friends at school, of course. Ashling sees to that. They both go to St Columcille’s, and sometimes at lunchtime Gerald amuses himself by walking around and seeing the other kids drift away from him as fast as they can without seeming to do it. He’s like Moses parting the schoolyard sea.

            Ashling can’t tell people what’s really wrong. She murmurs things about defects in the family, dark murmurs in shadowed corners, and the other kids look at Gerald as at any moment if he might explode into boils, produce a withered and terrifying extra limb, or at the very least have some sort of psychotic episode in the middle of the playground.  

It hurt, and it hurt, and then it started being a little funny.

            “Oh, shoot,” Gerald said loudly into the middle of Ashling’s solo, and choir practice stuttered to a halt. “I forgot to take my pills!”

            Choir and mistress gave him identical looks of horrified curiosity. Gerald smiled back at them, eyes wide and smile easy in the way that calmed strangers and upset his whole family.

            “Oh, what am I saying,” he said. “I’m so sorry. Please go on, Ashling. I’ll be all right. Well, you know. Probably.”

            For the rest of the day he took care to cough and twitch quite a bit. The rest of the class was twitching with him by the bell.

            Ashling got him out of school by herding him like a small furious sheepdog, feinting to the right when he tried to move away from her, but not touching him. She never touched him, any more than Mum or Dad did.

            “How could you?” she demanded in a low, heated voice.

            She always seemed honestly offended by any retaliation. It had taken Gerald years to work it out: she didn’t think of herself as attacking him. It wasn’t attacking, to isolate the bogeyman who had crept out of the closet. Whatever she did to him, it was self-preservation.

            Mum or Dad would look away in the old days, when Gerald had done it again and was being punished, locked out in the back garden and crying. Ashling  would watch, though, her face set to the window. Every time he looked up he would see her, the child inside, safe and warm.

            Gerald raised his eyebrows. “I was just having fun with you, Ash,” he said, as if they were friends. “Did I take it too far? Aw, I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t even talk to me!” Ashling broke and ran for the car and their mother.

            “Don’t stay mad for keeps!” Gerald called after her.

            The other kids took their time getting to their parents’ cars, laughing and calling out nicknames, playing a game of ball before they eventually get in. Gerald’s never had a nickname, never been Gerry Lynch, the son his parents were planning on, who they loved as much as his sister. He doesn’t even want to be by now. His name is Gerald.

            He used to leave school reluctantly. The first teacher he ever had was called Miss Mulligan. She’d had hair the color of honey and a voice twice as sweet, and she used to touch him approvingly on the shoulder as she went by. She leaned against his back and praised him when he did his work well, and he made sure he always did it perfectly. He loved her so much it was hard to look at her because she filled his sight from edge to edge with light, until he thought that he would go blind. He loved her better than the sun.

            He asked if he could stay in at lunchtime when she corrected papers and she let him, and he could be perfectly happy then, curled up against a wall with his arms around his knees, just watching her in an ecstasy of pure adoration. Sometimes, on the best days, she would look up at him and smile.

            She smiled at him thirty-eight times in all.

            One day Ashling whispered something to the girl sitting beside Gerald, and the girl got up and changed seats in the middle of class, and Miss Mulligan kept Gerald after school.

            “I didn’t do anything,” Gerald had said in terror, sure that she was going to hate him. “I didn’t do it. I know I’m not allowed to do it and I didn’t – I didn’t-”

            He’d started to cry, curling up tight into a ball even though Ashling wasn’t there to see, and Miss Mulligan had done something amazing. She’d knelt down by his chair, arms out, and bundled him in somehow, so his wet snotty face was against her beautiful honey-colored hair, jammed up against her smooth cheek, and she hadn’t seemed to mind at all.

            “Gerry, honey, don’t cry,” she said, and made a hushing sound, but not as if she would be angry with him if he didn’t stop.

            She slid an arm around his small, shaking back, and rocked him for an instant. It was deep, unbelievable luxury.

            “What do you mean, Gerry?” she went on. “I don’t understand.”

            He knew he wasn’t supposed to tell, Mum and Dad had made that perfectly clear, but he loved her so much. He whispered in her ear and when she pulled back, looking at him with sweet puzzled eyes from the agonizing distance of a few inches away, he showed her what he could do.

            She knocked over a desk getting away. They said she’d moved to Dublin to teach but Gerald remembered that knocked-over desk. He knew that wherever she’d gone, what she was doing was getting away from him.

            School or home, it was all pretty much the same. Gerald had never been tempted to tell anyone the truth since then.

            That night Ashling managed to imply that Gerald had done something besides tease her, and Gerald was put out in the back garden. He could hear Mum and Dad having one of their fights. Dad was shouting about how it wasn’t his family, wasn’t his curse.  Ashling’s face was at the window watching him until they made her go to bed.

            Then it was only the moon watching him, a silent pallid witness far more friendly than his sister. He lay by the little goldfish pond and skipped pebbles, making them dance across the water and then fly back to his fingertips, fly in the air and catch the moonlight like a host of hovering dragonflies.

            It was just magic. It wasn’t like he could hurt anybody with it.

*

            The next day they all got in a car and started driving. They didn’t take Gerald on pleasure trips, so he sat there, curled up tense and tight, and thought to himself that this was it: this was the moment that they pushed him out of the car, abandoned him like an unwanted pet by the side of the road.

            Nobody pushed him. They just drove, until they reached a totally unremarkable bit of road, with fields stretching out from it and a grey ruin in the distance.

            “This is Moone,” said Dad. “That’s Killelan Abbey over there.” He cleared his throat, as he always did before undertaking the task of speaking directly to Gerald. “Why don’t you go take a look at it?”

            Gerald wanted to say something like, Gee, Dad, I sure would love to, why doesn’t Ashling come with me, but the words stuck in his dry throat. They wanted him to do it himself, to leave so they could drive off and maybe even pretend to themselves that he got lost.

            He wasn’t going to beg them. He nodded and climbed out of the car, walking stiffly. He was too aware of the bones in his legs, as if they were made of dry sticks that could snap. This must be what being old felt like.

            He kept walking towards the ruin. He did not hear the telltale sound of the car starting up and driving away. There was nothing but silence.

            And then suddenly the silence did not matter and he stopped thinking about his family, because as he neared the ruins of the abbey he felt something. Like a leap of recognition at seeing a face well-known and unexpected, but he couldn’t see anyone.  He could just feel them.

            There was someone inside that ruined tower. Gerald put his hand to the stone as he climbed in and it shifted beneath his fingers like shale on a beach, as if the ruins were trying to escape from him.

            That feeling of recognition pulled him on, and as he was crawling up the spiral stairs in the dark, feeling his way around carefully, every step rocking beneath his weight, he smelled something terrible like dust and garbage, and heard someone singing.

            “He made a harp of her breast bone,” Gerald heard, in a reedy voice more whisper than song, and then Gerald put his hand down on something that was soft and wet as rotten fruit beneath his palm and he screamed into the darkness.

            “Hush,” the voice said from above, from the top of the spiral stairs. “Hush, boy. You scream loud enough to wake the dead, and if you did that where would I be?”

            “I,” Gerald gasped out, a wet startled sound.

            “Keep climbing.”

Gerald kept climbing, over what felt like bloated old fruit and smelled like mince his mother should have thrown out. The worst was when he touched material that his brain identified as clothing, because if whatever lay beneath him had been wearing jeans – He kept climbing.

He had to crawl through an opening, too small to be called a door even by an eleven-year-old, and into grey daylight.

There was a man at the top of the round tower, his hair brown and stringy, his eyes darting about like a small animal looking for escape. He was holding a skull in his hands.

There was still some skin on it.

Gerald looked away, bile rising hot and sudden at the back of his throat, and saw his own hands and clothes covered in slime. He looked up at the man again, and felt it: that recognition. I know you.

“Did you kill these people?” he asked, and his voice shook all over the place like a little kid’s, like the bits and pieces of the dead all over the ancient stone.

“No, I didn’t,” said the man. “That’s the whole point.”

He looked at Gerald for a while longer, and then apparently dismissed him as uninteresting. He hunkered down on the floor, tucking his skull into the crook of his arm, and started to arrange the fragments of the dead.

He resumed his song.  “The strings he made of her yellow hair…”

He was organizing the dead into a pattern.

“What are you doing?” Gerald demanded.

The man looked annoyed to be interrupted. “It’s just necromancy,” he said. “Nothing to get worked up about.”

“It’s disgusting!”

“Oh well, maybe so,” said the necromancer. “I used to think so myself, I believe. But you get fond of them, you know.” He glanced at Gerald, a little shyly, and then stretched out his hand with the skull in his palm. “She was a lovely lady,” he said, low as a secret. “I just had to keep something to remember her by.”

Gerald backed into the wall and thought he felt the whole tower rocking at his touch.

The whole thing, death laid out before him like a feast of nightmares, didn’t even seem real. The tower and sky spun around him as he realized why.

“Where are the flies?” he asked, quiet and desperately calm. “There should be flies.”

“Oh, I couldn’t allow that. It would ruin the pattern.”

            The man smiled at him then, his skull still held out and his eyes friendly, as if he knew Gerald.

            No wonder they all hated Gerald. If this was what he was connected to, this place the only place magic could lead.

“Why are you doing this?” he burst out, his voice still all out of control. He couldn’t stop shaking.

The necromancer tucked his skull back into the crook of his elbow, cradled against his heart. He looked considering. “For power. Don’t you want some?”

Gerald thought of pebbles flying over the pond in his garden, glinting like shards of moonlight. He’d dreamed of breaking the whole moon into pieces, sending them flying through the sky like a thousand silver birds.

That has nothing to do with the lump of gristle and bone tucked under the necromancer’s arm.

“Yes,” he said, controlling his voice so it was just tight, careful, not shaking. “But there have to be other ways. Easier ways.”

“Oh,” the necromancer says, fitting a yellow bone with a grey, curled hand as if doing a join-the-dots puzzle. “There are. But you have to pay for luxury. Or someone else does. And this isn’t so bad. It isn’t forever.”

Gerald looked at his hands, pink healthy hands messing with the ruined remnants of the dead, and shut his eyes. “How long?”  

“A necromancer has to serve his term of apprenticeship for a year and a day,” the man said slowly. “But… the very first measurement of time, I believe, is your own heartbeat. And they see time differently now, my pretty ones. It was a miscalculation on my part.”

He sounded only mildly regretful, mostly absorbed with his little puzzle, his tongue sticking out over his teeth. Gerald’s dad was a bit of a judge of horses down at the Curragh, and Gerald had seen him check a horse’s age by looking in its mouth a hundred times.

The necromancer had teeth a deeper yellow than the bones beneath his feet and his tongue was purple and grey. It looked like an ancient, diseased slug.

 “How long have you been here?” Gerald asked in a thin voice, almost a scream.

“A year and a day,” the man answered. “But it’s lasted a long while. My time runs on as slowly as their blood, you see.”

            “W-why are you doing this?” 

            “It will be worth it in the end,” the apprentice necromancer said, but not as if he was sure. “And nobody will have suffered but me. My pretty ones are beyond the reach of pain and time, and that’s worth – I remember when I made the promise I thought it was worth anything. I remember.”

            His hands fluttered over the bones and decay, patting, soothing, like a mother.

            “What’s your name?” Gerald pursued. He couldn’t stop asking questions, any more than the necromancer could stop arranging the dead, as if they were both trying to piece together sense out of the horror.

            “Now that I don’t remember,” said the necromancer. “But I’m sure I’ll come up with a new one. There’s world enough for us, my boy, and time. Nothing but time.”

            “Us,” Gerald repeated.

The sky seemed to tilt above him, vertigo reversed. This time when he backed up against the wall he wanted the whole tower to fall down.

“That’s why you’re here,” the necromancer said, almost dreamy. “The magic’s bursting out of you, trying to find a way to get loose. You can’t imagine it now, with magic burning in your veins, but eventually that dies, everything dies, you walk through the valley of death and come out with a different magic and – peace comes. Peace comes, dropping slow.”

He was telling finger bones like rosary beads as he spoke.

Gerald edged over the bodies to a little window on the left, leading to a passage, clean of bodies, clean of the nightmarish web this man was trying to form out of the dead and trap him in.

            “I’d rather burn,” said Gerald.

He ran, his feet kicking up bones, skidding into the passage and along it, but the passage just led back to the stairs, everything led back to the dead, and Gerald had to scramble over the bodies through the darkness to get out. He pressed his lips together and crawled, breathing them in, and he felt like he would never get the dead dust out of his lungs and mouth.

Above him he heard the necromancer beginning to sing again.

“Rolled him up in a nice clean sheet and laid him out upon the bed…”

Gerald didn’t understand why it was the singing that made him start to cry, after everything that had happened, everything that he’d seen, but it was. He was stumbling and choking on tears as he ran, bawling like a little kid, and then as he ran up the slope with wild tangled grass trying to trip him up at every step it occurred to him that his family must have driven off and left him here.

The car was still there, Ashling and his parents waiting inside. When Mum saw Gerald, she put her face in her hands.

Dad gave him a look that said he was beyond even being disappointed, heavy as a stone weight pressed to Gerald’s chest until he confessed everything and agreed to anything.

“We were hoping you would do the right thing.”

“What, stay there?” Gerald gulped out, tears still running down his face. Ashling looked perfectly composed, as if she was older than him and able to cope with anything, but they would never have sent her into that. “Stay there in that – with that man, in that place! That’s disgusting!”

He shouted the words at them and Dad started the car with a grunt, not even bothering to reply. Gerald ran to fling himself in the car before they could drive away without him.

Ashling stared at his clothes, the material stiff with terrible fluids. Her lip curled.

“You’re disgusting,” she said. “Mum and Dad were just trying to show you the right path.”

Gerald wanted to say something to her, try to tell her how it had been, how she would have gone mad half-way up those stairs and died in the dark listening to the necromancer sing, but he was still crying. He jammed his dirty fist against his mouth so he wouldn’t make any noise, glared at her, and shook all the way home.

*

Gerald was being punished. He understood that. It wasn’t like Mum and Dad took him on a lot of pleasure trips anyway, he’d expected to be left in the house when Ashling said they were going to the zoo. 

He hadn’t expected to be herded into the back garden, to find himself staring around in amazement at the high wooden fences and his father’s stern face. The sky was laden with heavy, lead-colored clouds. It was going to rain.

“I’m getting tired of being put out here like a bad dog,” Gerald said, his eyes narrowing until all he saw was darkness and his father standing in the doorway, hand tight on the doorknob as if Gerald might try to force his way back in.

They were punishing him for not staying in that grave, going mad scrubbing among the bones.

“You’re safer here,” said Dad. “The rivers are closer here.”

The Barrow and the Grand Canal meet somewhere close by, Gerald knows, but he’d never thought about what that meant for him. Running water was meant to be bad for the magic.

They were putting the bad dog out in the yard and slapping on an electric collar.

“I’m safer?” Gerald asked. “What about you?”

For years, he’d thought about rescue. Mum always said it was her family, the Fitzgeralds, and so he’d thought of being swooped up by uncles, aunts, cousins, people coming with magic in their hands and sweeping him away. 

And now he’d met a magician. Now he’d seen one of his own kind, hands caressing the dead, singing. There was no rescue coming.

The rain started, cold little points of water dashing against his face and his fists. Gerald turned towards the pond and raised one of his hands, fingers uncurling, and all the stones from the bottom of the pond rose in a huge surge. The stones were a strange dark constellation clustered close above them, moving in changing patterns across the sky, casting shadows over Gerald’s head like a dark crown.

Dad took a step back.

“Gerald, stop that!”

“I won’t!” Gerald said. “You can’t keep me out here.”

“You’re safer here,” Dad said again.

The stones were spinning over Gerald’s head again, the whirling nimbus comforting him, showing them all how he felt so they couldn’t turn their faces away. Not this time.

“I don’t care. I don’t want to stay where you put me!”

A stone went hurtling through the air like a comet and struck Dad on the forehead. Dad staggered back with blood running down his face and Gerald gasped, half triumph and half terror, as he saw Ashling and Mum come running.

There were stones falling like rain now. Gerald couldn’t keep a grip on them, didn’t have the power to hold onto his shadowy crown.

He thought of what the necromancer had said, For power. Don’t you want some?

 He did. All he could think of was how much he wanted more, how much he wanted the power to make his father step back the way he had before.

Nobody was stepping back now. Mum crossed the threshold and came towards Gerald, her face blazing. It was her family, Gerald knew that, it was her shame, and now Gerald had struck out. He didn’t know what his mother would do to him to redeem herself.

He wished desperately for more magic.

That was when all the wooden fences went crashing down, as if a hurricane had descended on their home. There was wind all around them, Mum, Dad and Ashling were clinging together, and Gerald stood alone in the centre of the whirl and tried to see with the wind in his eyes.

There were two figures walking towards him from the east. At first they were just dark outlines against the stormy sky but the winds dwindled and they walked on, turning from shadows into people.

There was a tall fair-haired man, but it was the woman who caught Gerald’s eyes. She was walking a step in front, and the pale light leaking from the dark clouds caught the thick streaks of grey in her dark hair. And Gerald felt what he had felt in the tower of the dead at Moone, felt it a hundred times told. Every atom of his body was burning, pulling him towards those two, and the rush of blood in his ears was telling him: you know them.

Oh God, how he knew them, down to his bones.

Magicians.

The woman stopped in front of Gerald, and put her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her and she smiled down at him as if he had always belonged to her, as if he’d been lost and she’d been searching for him, and was now simply relieved he was here.

It was that simple.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Gerald.”

“Gerald,” the woman repeated, not as if he should have said ‘Gerry’ but as if she liked it. She had an English accent, rolling and rich-sounding. “I’m Laura. I want you to come away with us. Will you come?”

Gerald looked at his family on the doorstep, in a tight embrace that did not include him, at his father’s bleeding face and his mother’s furious eyes.

“Go then,” Mum said. “I always knew you would. I could see it in you, from when you were a year old. You were born one of them. And that means you were born evil.”

“Don’t speak to him like that,” said the man, and made a small pass with his hand.

Mum opened her mouth and no words came out at all. Gerald gave a small laugh, more startled than anything else. Ashling and Dad glared hate at him and Laura drew him close to her side. As if she was ready to protect him, just like that, at once.

“Might the girl be useful as well?” asked the man. “Could turn out a messenger.”

Dad and Mum both reached for Ashling in a swift concerted moment of terror, ready to die before they let the magicians touch their child. Gerald turned his face away from them all, against Laura’s breast. She put an arm around his shoulders.

“No,” she said, clearly. “The girl’s nothing special. Not like our Gerald. And I don’t think he’d be keen on having her along.”

“That so?” said the man. “Don’t get along with your sister, is that it? We could give her a little of her own medicine before we go, Gerald. Just say the word. What’ll it be? Take her voice as well as her mother’s? Turn her hair to snakes?”

Gerald risked a look at Ashling. He was better protected than her, for the first time in their lives. He had the power now.

He let himself think lovingly over a thousand childhood fantasies of his revenge and her pain. He looked at her wide terrified eyes.

“It’s okay,” he said, and turned his face away, leaning his head against Laura’s shoulder. “Don’t bother. She doesn’t matter any more.”

“All right, Charles, you heard him,” Laura said briskly. It was clear who was in charge.  “Let’s go.”

Charles swung to Gerald’s other side so they were flanking him like a guard, protected even from the sight of his family as they walked away. Laura’s arm was still around his shoulders.

They’d come. The other magicians had finally come to rescue him.

They walked across Emily Square and out of town past the ruins of St Michael’s.  Laura talked to Gerald as they went, asking about magic as if she was talking about school and rather proud of his progress, as if it was normal and good.

“The display with the stones was very impressive,” she told him in her measured way, as if she really meant it. “Most magicians couldn’t manage that until they reach sixteen.”

“I can do better than that,” Gerald said, eagerly pressing into her side.

“I am sure you can,” said Laura, and then she stopped and knelt in front of him, taking her hands in his.  “Gerald, I want to take you home as soon as possible. How would you feel about flying?”

“On – on a broom?” Gerald faltered, overcome by the idea: how much power it would take, to soar up in the storm clouds.

“As a bird.”

Gerald stared at her. “A real bird?”

Laura put her hand to his cheek and he began to feel different – not as if he was changing shape but as if he was filled with power, enough to convince the whole universe that he could be any shape he wanted to be. He smiled at her, dizzy with delight, and found himself smiling at a beautiful moonlight-silver bird.

He could still feel her palm against his cheek, warm and human, and hear her voice in his ear.

She said, “Not quite.”

They went flying over the sea, the three of them swooping and laughing, with enough power to fool reality and the wind rushing around them. Laura taught him how to move as if he was really a bird, and really flying. The storm clouds were breaking up into light that turned into a sparkling path cutting along the sea.

Gerald had never been so happy in his life.

*

It was night by the time they reached their destination, landing on the street and suddenly human to all eyes. They were on a tree-lined street in England, somewhere Gerald had never been before in his life, but he knew which house was the one.

It was huge and beautiful, with ivy clinging to cream-colored walls, the windows filled with warm butter-yellow light. And it was glowing with power: Gerald could taste magic on his tongue, feel it tingling to his fingertips, and he wanted to run for the house as if he was home after a long time away, indisputably home and sure of his welcome.

He wasn’t quite sure of his welcome, though, so he stayed by Laura and she took his hand and squeezed it as if that was the simplest thing in the world. They went up the stairs together.

“Everyone!” Charles called as they walked into a hall with a chandelier in it, the nicest room Gerald had ever seen in his life. “Look what we found in Ireland.”

Strangers came down the stairs and from the kitchen, about ten of them, and all of them Gerald felt like beaming at, all of them he felt he knew. Whenever he met their eyes he saw magic, and felt magic in himself stir in response. It was like looking into a mirror after a whole life of being uneasily conscious you had no idea what you looked like: it was such a relief.

It was the sense of magic that made him look up at another step on the stair, a sense of magic overpowering all other magic in the room, greater than and yet encompassing them all.

Gerald looked up at one of the tallest men he had ever seen, built like a fighter with a mane of black hair. He looked like Finn MacCool, one of the legendary heroes from the stories Miss Mulligan used to read out, looked like a knight or a king.

“This is our leader,” said Laura in his ear. “This is Arthur. Arthur, this is Gerald.”

“He doesn’t look sixteen,” Arthur said in a genial voice, so amused and friendly that it took a moment for the paralyzing fear to strike Gerald.

“Oh, please, sir,” he said on a single frantic breath. “Let me stay.”

“He’s very promising for his age,” Laura informed Arthur. “By the time he’s sixteen, who knows what he’ll be able to do? And he had parents who knew: they weren’t treating him well.”

Arthur’s pale eyes darkened, like shadows cast over ice. “The old story. Well, we can’t have that, can we? Nobody is allowed to mistreat one of our own.”

A murmur of agreement rose from around the room. Gerald stopped clinging to Laura quite so hard, warmed by the way they all accepted him, said one of their own, as if it was a matter of course.

“If you do really want to stay, youngster,” said Arthur.

“Yes. Oh, please!”

He leaned down, hands on his knees, and smiled. “Having a young magician around who isn’t part of the Circle, it can lead to a lot of trouble. Can’t be sure we can trust you with our secrets, the other magicians will be trying to recruit you… It might be safest to send you home for now, son.”

“No,” Gerald said, desperate. “I can – can’t I join the Circle? Please. Please can I?”

Arthur smiled a slow, pleased smile. “Well. If you’re sure that’s what you really want.”

“It is!”

“Come on, then,” said Arthur decisively, and he went up the stairs, so different from the dark spiral of the dead, wide and broad white marble. Laura followed in his wake with Gerald’s hand securely tucked in hers, and they went up to a landing with gold-framed pictures and through the second door on the left.

It was like the house. Gerald could tell where they were going before they went there, because he could taste the power.

He stepped over the threshold of the room and stood dazzled by magic.

There was a huge circle with criss-cross lines and circles inside it almost filling the room, save for the space where Arthur, Laura and Gerald were standing.  It was lit with a pale fire that looked like light and water as well as fire, that looked like something Gerald wanted to drink, to wrap around himself, to have forever. It looked like magic.

The man crouched at the centre of that fire looked like magic, too. It was different than the way the magicians looked. They looked as if they had magic. He looked as if he was magic.

He was tall and slim, naked chest shimmering with fire, with the kind of face that Ashling and her friends giggled over magazines about. His golden hair had crimson feathers growing in it, so bright they cast a scarlet haze on all the rest and made it look like gold dipped in blood.

His bare feet had sharp talons digging into the wooden floor instead of toenails, and when he turned to see who was at the door gold shadows unfurled from his pearl-white shoulders.

“Anzu,” said Arthur. “We have a little job for you.”

“That man has wings,” Gerald told Laura in a hushed voice, speaking so quietly he wasn’t sure she could hear it. “Like an angel.”

Apparently it didn’t matter how quietly he spoke. The magic, winged creature heard him and laughed, a terrible echoing laugh that made Gerald want to run and draw closer at the same time.

“That’s right, little man. Do you think I’m an angel?”

“Shhhh,” Laura warned him, her body next to his a little tense.

Gerald looked at all his golden and bloody beauty, the dark talons on his feet and hands, at the curl of his mouth.

“No,” he said, despite Laura’s warning.

Anzu really smiled then, red mouth unfurling into something beautiful and cruel . “Good call.”

“This is Anzu, Gerald, you’re not to be frightened of it,” Arthur said. “Think of it as a friendly household spirit. It can be a lot of help to us.”

“Honored,” Anzu drawled. “What do you want, Arthur? I like them young, but this one is too young to be any use. And I can smell a magician from here.”

He did not look as if the smell particularly appealed to him.

“He’ll be of use to us,” Arthur said. “I want my sigil on him tonight.”

Anzu tilted his head in a strange, birdlike gesture, and then came at Gerald in a swooping rush. Gerald shrank against Laura and Anzu’s rush was stopped, cut short like the flight of a bird into a pane of glass.

Laura held him close. “You have to step closer,” she urged him. “It’s only for a moment, and then you’re ours. I won’t let him have you.”

“That’s right, little magician,” Anzu purred. “Come closer.”

Arthur sounded a little bored. “What’s the matter, Gerald? I thought you wanted to stay?”

Gerald thought of the necromancer and his hands full of bones, thought of his silent mother and bleeding father. There was no way back, nothing to go back to, and so he stumbled forward onto the five sharp points of Anzu’s talons.

There was a low birdlike screaming in his head, pain erupting in his chest as if someone had put a fireball through it. He could smell material and skin burning and Anzu’s eyes filled his vision, clear as glass, like seeing his own death in two crystal balls.

The screaming filled his head and Anzu’s eyes were lost as blackness filled his vision, like a rush of dark wings.

Gerald woke in a big white bed, massive and snowy, the kind of bed you wanted to roll around in and never leave. The room stretched out before him was beautiful, with hangings and little objects that called out to Gerald that they were magic: the toys Ashling had received and he hadn’t, the toys he was always meant to have.

The windows were filled with pale early-morning light, and Laura was looking down at him. His chest stung.

“It’s done now,” Laura whispered. “Nothing will ever hurt you again.”

“Oh,” said Gerald muzzily, feeling terribly comfortable and infinitely far-away. “Good.”

“You need to sleep more now,” Laura said, a hint of magic behind her words, so his vision blurred the light. “When you wake, I’m going to tell you what everything in this room can do, and after that I’m going to show you real magic. What would you like to turn into next?”

She asked it as if offering him a treat, as if asking him what he liked to eat best. Gerald smiled dazedly up at her and she reached out and brushed back a lock of his hair. He pressed his face into the hollow of her hand.

“I wish,” he said, his voice thick with sleep, “I wish you were my mother.”

Laura smiled back at him. “I’m better than that,” she promised. “I’m one of your Circle. Go to sleep, Gerald. Don’t worry. You’re ours now, and we will never let you go.”

Part Two

“This is why we’re called the Obsidian Circle,” Laura said.

The floor of the cellar was earth, and buried a little in the earth were huge rocks. There was light streaming in from the open door at the top of the cellar steps, and when the faint light hit the surfaces of the rocks they glimmered like dark mirrors, with faces in them just on the verge of sight.

“Magicians in days long gone by used to pass obsidian ropes through their own tongues to make demons speak to them,” Laura said. “People thought of it as the earth’s blood.”

The light on the rocks was ghost-light green, and then when Gerald moved the rocks were black again, so black that the white light could only bounce off it, defeated.

“You can make knives out of obsidian that cut cleaner than steel,” Laura said. “Blood calls to blood. Obsidian is for iron strength, and we are the strongest of all the magicians.”

  The rocks were each like a dark well of power, and the mark on Gerald’s chest burned. He felt a little bit like a baby bird, turning his face up to his mother with a wide-open, hungry mouth.

“Every circle we make is a pale reflection of this circle,” Laura told him. “When I teach you to draw a circle, I want you to remember this one. It is the heart of our Circle. That means it is your heart, and mine.”

Gerald liked the idea that they had the same heart.

He memorized the way it looked, the obsidian circle, and upstairs in a bare sunlit room under Laura’s direction, he was able to form the shape of it perfectly against the wood. 

The demon rose from it the first time,  Anzu gleaming like an idol made out of gold, tattoos writing themselves along his shoulders and arms as he stood there, and then in dark shadows along his unfurling wings.  Gerald saw eagles flying with something in their talons, knives wielded and children being thrown into the mouth of a fiery god.

“I’m starving,” Anzu whispered.

“You have a job to do,” Laura told him. “We have some things to show Gerald.”

Shadows writhed and turned to monsters on Anzu’s golden skin, cast by nothing, as Laura went to a cage with a crow in it and opened the cage into the circle. The crow shrank back against the bars, but Anzu turned into smoke and shadows and came at it, filtering in through its eyes and its open beak.

The bird cawed, banged against the bars in a moment of frantic desperate struggle, and then went profoundly quiet.

“All right then,” Laura said. “Now, Gerald, I don’t want to do this for you this time. You’re carrying a sigil. You have power. So use it.”

Charles and Hannah had told him that everything would unlock, the floodgates of power would open, when he was sixteen: but that was half a lifetime away and Gerald wanted to share a heart with them all now. It didn’t matter how difficult the smallest tasks were. He could think shortcuts around and into magic. Failure was not an option.

He made his bones feel hollow first. That was the most important thing and Charles had it quite wrong: feathers hardly mattered at all.

It was vital that he did not think what he must look like, as he moved the illusion into all its different phases, building the bird by fractions. Bones growing hollow and tiny with skin draped over them as if he was melting, the shriveling of his eyes to bird eyes in a face that was still human.

Gerald figured it didn’t much matter being a monster in stages, if the end result was beautiful.

And Laura was so pleased with him when he was done.

“Your protégé is coming along quite nicely,” Arthur had said at dinner yesterday, and Laura had glowed with pride.

Gerald hadn’t much cared for Arthur treating him like a pet dog who’d done some marvelous tricks, but then he reminded himself as Arthur often reminded him that not many magicians would have let someone so young stay. It was only natural that Arthur was sometimes a little dismissive of him. It’d be different once he really proved himself, once he was a true magician.

He had stayed a month at the house of the Obsidian Circle, and he never wanted to leave. He’d even stopped fearing they would make him leave.

Now he just had to prove he belonged.

Laura nodded her approval and threw open the windows, transforming as she did so, fingers becoming wings on the latch, and the three crows flew out into a radiant blue sky.

“This is a reward, you know,” Laura told him as they swung through the air. “We’re trusting you with one of our secrets.”

Like the stone circle, the heart of the house.

Gerald began to feel a little excited, imagining all the marvels they might have, magic like hidden treasure.

Crossing through the counties of England wasn’t hard when in the air. As the crow flew, it was only half an hour to Cornwall where the fields were yellow and the land had sharp angles, and then only a few minutes before they reached their destination, which had Laura hovering even though Anzu flew on.

It was a narrow grey road with a boy running down it.

Over the last month Gerald had started to think of himself as the only child in the world, hopelessly and impossibly young. It was a shock to see someone who he thought might be younger than he was.

The boy was tall and thin, and he was running in the way the boys who were always front in the pack at school cross-country races ran, loose and easy and incredibly fast despite the heavy schoolbag that kept sliding off one shoulder.

He was just a boy. There was no taste of magic about him, nothing interesting at all. But Laura slowed her flight and glided above his red head, so Gerald checked himself as well.

The boy kept running, tireless and strange. Gerald had never been much for sports at school, and of course Ashling had seen to it that he was always picked last for teams.

The boy vaulted over the back of a garden fence without even a pause, landing on his feet like a cat, and the two people in the garden turned towards him with a strange suddenness as if they were expecting an attack.

It was a small, nice garden. There were carefully pruned bushes and a tree with a dartboard nailed to its trunk. Anzu was already in the tree, watching the garden below.

There was a deck chair with a man in it, broad-shouldered and with his red hair cropped so short the curl in it was almost lost, a pile of papers at his right hand and another boy at his left.

This boy was even younger than the first one. He was black-haired, short and stocky, and when the man’s face lit up the dark boy’s face did not change from its still, faintly unpleasant expression. He looked like nothing so much as a bad-tempered goblin.

“Welcome home, Alan,” said the man to the boy who’d come over the wall. “Can you tell me what’s wrong with coming through the front door? Not original enough for you?”

He spoke fondly, a smile irradiating his whole handsome face as he looked on Alan. It was pretty clear which child was his favourite.

Laura moved gently into the shadows of the tree, resting there hidden and safe. Gerald followed her, taking his time about it and being casual, the way she’d taught him to do most things.

He’d been the brother of the favourite child for eleven years. He found himself looking at the goblin boy with a little sympathy.

“Quicker this way,” said Alan the athlete, cheerfully. He was looking at the other boy, and not his father. “Told you football practise wouldn’t take so long. I’m back already. Did you miss me, Nick?”

Nick the goblin fixed him with a baleful stare.

Alan slung  down his bag, books spilling onto the sunlit grass,  and went over to give his brother a one-armed hug. Nick recoiled from him with a blow and a shudder, as if trying to escape from the coils of a python.

 Gerald withdrew his sympathy. He couldn’t imagine Ashling trying to hug him,

“What, no hug for your old dad?” said the father, opening his arms. “Just ignore me, I see how it is. All I do is slave every day to keep you two in clothes and food – in Nick’s case, of course, about four times the amount of food other people eat – and where is the appreciation?”

Not that it had ever been an option for Gerald, but Ashling had started restricting hugs by now, and she was a girl. Alan couldn’t have been more than a year younger than Gerald, and it was kind of shameful the way he walked into his father’s arms and hung on around his neck as if he was five.

“So how was your day, my boy?” asked the man, smoothing one big hand down his son’s narrow back. When he finally let the boy go, he ruffled his hair so the curls stood straight up on Alan’s head like a bush after a storm.

“Good,” said Alan, and launched into a monologue about full marks in his spelling test and the hilarious thing Gregory and Mary did at lunchtime and how his Latin was coming along and how Tacitus was incredibly fascinating. He walked back to his bag and started sorting through the books there, apparently on a mission to find pieces of work and interesting passages from books to show his father.

Oddly enough, Nick followed Alan when he moved and stood watching him sort through his books, standing a few paces away.

“Hey, you,” Alan said, lifting his head. “I found a book I’m going to read to you tonight. I think you’ll like it.”

He got the baleful stare again for his pains. Then he reached out, but his fingers never got within range of Nick’s face. Nick bolted backwards and glared, and Alan smiled at him.

“I got top marks in geography,” he said, glancing at his father. It was a rather anxious look, Gerald thought, and strange for a child to give a parent.

It made his father smile, and Alan grinned brilliantly back at him and began the search through his books and the speech on how wonderful and amazing his day had been anew. He spoke with total conviction but also the ease of long practise, Gerald thought, like an actor very familiar with his lines.

Nick circled like a wary animal and then moved back in to watch solemnly from a little distance away, a small sulky planet naturally in orbit around a sun.

Halfway through Alan’s chipper little monologue, Gerald worked out why Laura had brought him to this house.

It was nothing like the house of the Obsidian Circle. It felt normal at first, totally normal, but the longer Gerald sat there in the shadow of the trees the more he knew that simply wasn’t true. There was something here, trying to catch at his attention, like a glint of firelight coming from ashes that looked grey and dead except for the burning scarlet hidden at its heart.

There was power here, but hidden somehow.

“Is it some kind of illusion?” Gerald murmured to Laura, softer than the wind in the trees.

Laura laughed and said, “Oh, well done. All four of them are wearing talismans. Those are filthy charms that kill magic at a touch – unless the magic is very strong.”

Very strong magic, hidden here. Gerald looked at the house hungrily, and wondered why they couldn’t just take it.

“The Goblin Market makes the talismans,” Laura said. “Just to make our lives more difficult. And to make some cash, of course. That’s the Market’s main concern.”

If Gerald had looked over all he would have seen was the beak on a bird, but he knew Laura well enough to know her lip was curling. He’d already had the Goblin Market explained to him, people who took all the advantage they could of small magics, who lived to make money off power and associated with disgusting necromancers and pied pipers, but who hated and interfered with the higher magics. As if it was any of their business.

“So these people are part of the Goblin Market?” he asked.

“Much more than that,” Laura replied.

Gerald was evolving a theory that one of the family was a pied piper, and had stolen the youngest child’s voice, when Alan asked Nick what he wanted to do before dinner and Nick spoke.

His voice was scratchy in his throat, deep for a little boy’s voice, but definitely there.

He crept a little closer to Alan and said, “I want to play a game.”

Gerald was watching him closely, watching for magic. Nick put his hand into the pocket of his jeans and instead of magic, he drew out a knife.

The blade glinted in the sunlight, sharp and bright in that small hand.

Instead of recoiling, Alan grinned and said, “Winner gets to pick what we have for dinner.”

Then he popped something beneath one sleeve, there was a little sound, and he suddenly had a knife in his hand too. He hurled it at the dartboard affixed to the tree where Laura and Gerald were hiding.

The knife hit the bull’s eye. There were long grooves in the dartboard, Gerald noticed now, not the pinpricks left by darts but the traces of many knives.

This home only looked normal at first glance.

The man in the deck chair had his face turned away a little. He looked sad.

Alan was smiling. “Come on, Nick,” he said, and made another lunge to hug him, not seeming to mind as much when Nick slid away. “Beat that.”

Nick’s face was upturned to the sky, eyes black as shadows. Gerald saw his shoulders brace as he took aim.

He didn’t hit the bull’s eye. He didn’t hit the dartboard.

He hit the bird who was Anzu, perched at the top of the tree. The bird never gave a death cry. There was just a dark shape falling to the ground, and a dark shape streaming upwards into the sky, body and demon parted in death, and silence.

Then Nick spoke. He said, “I win.”

“Come on,” Laura said. “Time to go.”

Gerald followed her lead, grateful to get away from this strange place as he’d been to get away from the necromancer and his tower of bones. He rose into the sky, and as he went he saw the face at the window.

She was standing on the second floor of the house, still and pale. Her black hair was drifting around her shoulders like a cloud made of shadows, and her eyes were pale and empty. For a moment Gerald felt something like when he saw all new magicians, felt that twinge of recognition, of belonging and joy, but the power he saw in this woman was twisted and crushed.

“Who is that?” he called out into the sky.

“That’s the Lady Livia,” Laura’s voice drifted back to him from above. “This is the house of the Ryves family. And that is the woman Arthur loves.”

In one day, then, Gerald had been shown the heart of their house, and the heart of their leader.

#

They returned to the room and a storm of feathers. They were black feathers, as if someone had plucked every feather from every bird in a murder of crows and thrown them into the air, and they kept whirling and falling again as if Gerald was trapped in a nightmare snowglobe.

Laura put her arm around him, shielding, and her voice scythed out through the darkness.

“Anzu, stop this now!”

The feathers were suddenly falling only inside the demon’s circle, burning to ash when they hit its limits.

Dimly through the falling, burning shadows Gerald could see Anzu, lying in the circle with his hair long and hiding his face, like a waterfall of molten gold. The wings he wore were skeletal, arching over his back like tree branches naked in the dead of winter.

“You were not summoned to have temper tantrums!”

Anzu lifted his head, and the tips of his bone-wings hit the floor, skittering along the boards like huge white spider legs.

“You did not just receive a knife to the throat!”

“No, I didn’t,” Laura said sharply. “I kept myself hidden, and so did Gerald. A child knows better than you do. If you think you’re getting rewarded for this day’s work, demon, you are very much mistaken.”

The feathers were falling ever more gently, lightly. A feather fell on Anzu’s bright hair and sizzled into nothing, like a snowflake landing on a hot stove. 

“There are other circles,” Anzu said slowly, at last.

“And yet you always come back to us,” Laura told him.

Anzu was silent. Demons did not respond the same way humans did, Gerald had noticed over the past weeks. They answered questions, but any idea of feeling obliged to speak because someone else had spoken was alien to them.  Anzu just watched, the way demons did, waiting for a moment of weakness.

“There are some things I want to teach Gerald, though,” Laura continued sweetly. “Give us some power, and I think he can be trusted to let you go walkies for a bit.”

Gerald’s heart pounded hard. He’d never been allowed to release a demon before, though the forms had been one of the first things he’d learned.

Anzu’s mouth twisted, then formed a twisted smile. “I do adore a little exercise.”

Gerald glanced over at Laura, who bent her silver-shot head and said: “Go, Gerald,” softly and encouragingly.

“I am Gerald of the Obsidian Circle. I have power over you. I call on you to free you, Anzu,” Gerald said carefully. “I free you to walk a path from our circle to a window. I free you to the limits of my desire, in exchange for power. I free you: I pay you in blood.”

“Do you indeed?” Anzu laughed softly. “Whose?”

Despite the demon’s laughter, Gerald could already feel the power building and brimming in the stone circle below, flowing out to them all. There was power building warm and sweet at the centre of his chest, at the focus of his mark. It felt like love.

Anzu was moving to the edge of his circle, turning to smoke, the feathers he’d created falling through him now, his skeletal wings no more than pale outlines of light.

Gerald knew better than to ask a demon something without reason, but he did it anyway. “Why do you keep coming back to us?”

Astonishingly, Anzu answered without asking a price for his answer. He turned to Gerald with fire and hunger in his eyes, and said:

“The Obsidian Circle lost something of mine.”  He kept his gaze on Gerald even as he faded to shadow, his eyes still burning. “I want it back.”

Then he was gone, his desire hanging on the air. In the circle, feathers fell, no longer burning but settling on the floor, turning the circle into a little pool of darkness.

#

Laura used the power and turned it into luck.  They went to the races and bet on horses, seeing the flow of horses change even as they made their bets, laughing when they were handed their money.

No magician ever needed to work unless they wanted to, not at anything but magic. Gerald ended up having to stuff the old, folded pieces of paper into Laura’s overflowing handbag, into his own bulging pockets.

Luck was easy to create. Even the humans wanted the world to change around them, to bend to their desires. All Gerald had to do was think of the world between his hands, changing course just a little.

As a reward Laura gave him a book on changing the weather, and Gerald was curled up by a fire in the library reading it, nestled snug in his favourite armchair, when he looked up and saw Arthur standing in front of the fire.

Arthur was not looking at him but into the flames, his shadow cast over their leaping brightness. Firelight cast a bright pattern on his cheekbones, but mostly his profile was in shadow.

“Sir?” Gerald asked.

Arthur’s eyes swung to him. They were very pale eyes, ice pale: pale eyes were lucky among their people. Laura had told Gerald about an earlier time, before the demons started measuring out power so carefully, when they would fill you with so much magic that a magician’s eyes would change.

No longer windows to the soul, but windows to something better: shimmering silver power.

Gerald’s own eyes were grey. He would have liked to have eyes like Arthur’s, even though Laura assured him that eye colour didn’t really mean anything. The days when it had meant power were long past.

“What do you think of humans?” Arthur inquired.

“Sorry?” Gerald asked.

“I have just received your school report,” Arthur informed him. “They say you’re doing excellently. They say you’ve settled into school and are getting along well with your peers.”

Arthur didn’t sound happy about that. Gerald had thought he would be.

“Typically a young magician does not do well at school,” Arthur said. “We take them in at sixteen, or older if it takes longer to find them. By then they resent humans, loathe being trapped by their rules and forced to learn things that will never be of use to them.”

“They might be of some use,” Gerald offered in a low voice.

They’d been taught about cloud formation in school, and the geography teacher had let Gerald take out some more books on the subject. Gerald already thought it was going to help him with weather magic. Understanding something gave you power over it, and with five years to go until he was sixteen, Gerald knew he needed all the power he could lay his hands on.

“What?” Arthur snapped, and Gerald flinched back.

“Nothing.”

“We all have different views on humans,” Arthur said. “But I believe you know what happened to Rufus.”

Gerald had heard the stories. Rufus had had a human wife, not so long ago, and a child. When the child had started to display signs of power from the cradle, Rufus had told his wife about them.

She’d taken it badly. She’d also taken the child.

The Circle had been forced to pursue her, to protect the child, to protect themselves.  Arthur had been furious.

It had been an accident, of course, Laura had assured him. The Circle would never have deliberately hurt a magical child. But the human woman had been panicked and irrational. She hadn’t cared who she hurt.

Rufus didn’t have a wife or a child now. He lived with the Circle now.

“Would you describe yourself as a human sympathizer?” Arthur inquired.

Gerald stared. “No,” he said. “I know them. Sir. I can’t imagine ever wanting to get close to one.”

If they were close, they could hurt you.

Arthur looked at him. His face looked modeled, so well-formed that it seemed like a sculpture, and about as cold, but there was a faint light of approval in those ice-pale eyes.

“Very sensible,” he said. “They’re just not very interesting, are they?”

Which was just as stupid as his views on human lessons. Laura had said Arthur was raised by magician parents, branded with a sigil the day he’d turned sixteen. Magic had come easily and gone smoothly for him.

He’d never been eleven and part of a Circle with a body incapable of the highest magic. He’d never learned to use every avenue to power he could find, because he’d never been desperate. Arthur had been given so many things, the only thing he knew how to do was take.

For the first day he’d seemed like a hero. For the first week, Gerald had still been in awe.

By now, Gerald knew he was smarter than Arthur. Smart enough never to let Arthur know what he thought of him.

“I couldn’t take a personal interest in one, no,” Gerald said smoothly. He let Arthur see him peep up at Arthur, anxious for more approval.

Arthur smiled at him benevolently. “Very sensible,” he said again. “You don’t want to get into a mess like Rufus did when you’re older, eh?”

“I don’t even understand how he could,” Gerald said truthfully.

Trusting humans was stupid enough, but not all the magicians had Gerald’s experience of them, had lived with humans who knew. But how had Rufus been able to choose one of them, after he’d known about magicians? They were just faces in a teeming crowd, endless and meaningless.

It wasn’t like magicians, when you could simply look at one another and feel a rush of joy and belonging, feel the thrill of your magic racing in time with theirs, like putting your mouth to their pulse.

Arthur’s lips curled. “Some people might say you’ll understand when you’re older,” he said. “But I wouldn’t agree. It’s always different with other magicians: always better. I remember when I first saw my wife.”

Gerald shifted, remembering that woman’s pale face at the window, and Arthur nodded at him.

“Laura told me you saw her,” he said. “Livia. What did you think of her?”

“She’d have beautiful magic,” Gerald said. “If it wasn’t for that talisman.”

Arthur nodded slowly. “Humans dream about it,” he said. “About doing what we do. Flying, changing the weather, controlling the luck, and above all else walking into a crowded room and seeing just one face there and knowing. Instantly knowing.”

“Why,” Gerald began, and then knew he was being stupid, knew he couldn’t ask why Lady Livia was far away from them all, her magic crushed, in that strange house with that man and those children. He thought of a different way to ask. “Why isn’t she here where she belongs, sir?”

“Sacrifices had to be made,” said Arthur. “She’ll be here one day.”

He clasped his hands behind his back, still staring into the flames.

“Are they keeping her away from us, sir?”

“She’s confused just now,” Arthur said. “But that’s going to change. That is something you’ll understand when you’re older, Gerald. Love means never taking no for an answer.”

Gerald agreed, up to a point.

That morning he took the bus into school with Leslie and Max. He’d watched them very carefully before coming over and making friends. It hadn’t been hard. They were amazed by how much they had in common: they even had the same favourite movie. Max waved Gerald over and immediately launched into a conversation about the annoying grandmother who’d just moved in with them.

Gerald was used to being on the outside at school, watching and waiting for an opportunity to hurt Ashling. Now he had a different goal, that was all.

There was a lot to be learned from humans.

For one thing, he was learning how to maneuver people into situations where saying ‘no’ to him never even occurred to them.

It didn’t mean he had any particular feelings about specific humans. They were all pretty forgettable.

He did remember that younger boy, the one with the black eyes who had thrown the knife at the Circle’s demon and violently rejected affection from his own family, as if it simply didn’t matter to him. As if it would always be on offer.

Gerald hadn’t liked Nick Ryves.

#

“If you had one wish, what would it be?”

If it had been Leslie or Max asking that question, Gerald would have understood it and had a ready answer. Since it was Laura, he knew it was a test.

They sat together in the room for demon summoning, hands linked, the room lit by the shimmering magic of Anzu’s circle.

This was a vigil, Laura had said. It was traditional for a young magician to have one after taking the sigil, but some of the Obsidian Circle had said Gerald should wait until he was sixteen to perform it.

Gerald had no interest in waiting.

He looked at Laura, sitting cross-legged on the floor, her face serene, and then at Anzu, who looked bored. The talons on the tips of his fingers were ringed by fire, and occasionally Anzu would blow them out like a girl blowing daintily on her manicure. After a few moments the flames would flicker back into life and Anzu would run his fingers through his hair, raking fiery paths through the gold.

“I would like to reach the source of all magic,” Gerald said. “With my Circle at my back. And I could see it, and understand it completely, and measure how much we wanted, and only keep enough to control.”

“Magic once called is difficult to dismiss,” Laura said softly. “You would be utterly destroyed.”

Gerald tilted his head and gave her the smile that seemed to charm all the teachers in his new school. Laura looked mildly amused.

“I’d like to give it a try, all the same.”

“Have you thought about taking a job? When you’re older?”

Rufus worked in a bank, and Laura was a photographer, and James was an actor. Most of the other Circle magicians didn’t work, though a lot of them had specialties when it came to magic. Gerald had been thinking more about which specialties he might focus on.

“I’m really more interested in magic,” he said apologetically.

“Magic can enhance your job,” Laura said. “And the job can enhance your magical skills. Allow me to demonstrate.”

She lifted a hand and suddenly Gerald was in a desert, hot wind in his hair, a camera in his hands. It was such a little thing, but he could shape the world with it, capture it with one mechanical click. There were scarlet mountains stretching out in front of him, so vast that they stretched out into a red haze, and he felt as if he could hold them all in the hollow of his hand.

Then he was back in the darkened room, staring across at Laura.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You can get a whole new perspective on magic. And it makes illusions easier, too.”

Laura tilted her head. ‘Would it?” she asked. “How?”

Gerald searched for the power to show her, and then found he did not have half enough. He glanced over at Anzu, and saw Laura’s tiny encouraging smile from the corner of his eye.

“I am Gerald of the Obsidian Circle, and I have power over you. Go from your circle to a window, and back to me.  And share some of your magic with me in return.”

Anzu gave a languorous sigh, as if he’d been waiting too long to return to that window, and Gerald felt the magic travel from demon to circle to him.

He didn’t even notice when Anzu turned to smoke and filtered out of the room.

He was busy using his new power, combining it with his vision of something he’d never seen, and making the world shimmer around them into a variety of different images. All he had to do was use the magic to suggest something to Laura’s mind, and hers would fill in the details.

People created most of their illusions for themselves.

Gerald leaned back, triumphant. “You see?” he asked. “Aren’t you proud of me?”

He bit his lip as soon as he’d spoken.  Laura’s smile faded.

“Gerald,” she said. “I want to make this perfectly clear. I have no interest in children. Or in being a mother.” 

Gerald swallowed. “Right,” he said. “Of course.”

“The reason I came for you was because you are going to be strong,” Laura said softly. “And because I am interested to see if a boy taken young will develop in a different way than… Arthur’s usual style of magician. If you understand me.”

Gerald nodded and tried to look adult. “I think I do.”

“So if you’re looking for an emotional attachment-”

“I’m looking for a teacher,” Gerald interrupted, and watched Laura’s shoulders relax, saw that she was hearing what she wanted to hear. “And maybe,” he continued. “Maybe, when I’ve learned more. A partner in – not being Arthur’s usual style of magician.”

Laura didn’t say no to him.

#

“Open the window,” Anzu said to him the next day.

It was late afternoon, and Anzu was lying stretched out in a pool of sunlight, wings folded behind him to create a feathery pillow for his head and shoulders. The summoning circle was drawn wide, almost touching the wall on both sides of the room, and Gerald had to maneuver on the tips of his toes to get the window open without straying into the circle.

The window once open, the summer breeze came floating in, and with it the sound of a choir rehearsing.

“Were you hoping that I’d cross the circle so you could kill me, or did you want to hear the singing?” Gerald asked.

Anzu grinned at him, mouth and teeth red as if he’d been drinking blood.

“Can’t it be both?”

Since demons could not lie, Gerald thought that was interesting.

“You like music?”

“I have an affinity for birds,” Anzu said, moving from prone to a crouch in one liquid movement. He cast a look at his own wings curling above his head, and then a scornful look at Gerald. “Others might have guessed that by now.”

“And why’s that?” Gerald asked.

Anzu’s eyes narrowed, bright and terrible. “Because birds are kept in cages,” he bit out.

“So be free,” Gerald said. “From this circle to a window. In exchange for power.”

He was not expecting Anzu to tip back his head and laugh, a low terrible sound like a riptide roaring in his ears.

“Third time,” he said.

“So?” Gerald said uneasily. “So what?”

He knew it was nothing. Demons liked to unsettle humans. They tried every way they knew how. That was all.

Anzu was only smiling at him like that to upset him.

Anzu leaned down, as if he could lean across the limits of the circle and whisper in Gerald’s ear. His eyes were like funhouse mirrors, throwing a reflection of Gerald’s face back at him, pale and warped.

“Pride goes before a fall, little magician,” he murmured. “And after you fall, there’s me.”

He snapped those bloody teeth in front of Gerald’s face, and laughed when Gerald jumped. Then he dissolved into smoke and wind, and sped away on his errand, and Gerald forgot the dark moment and felt power slide sweet through his veins.

He hadn’t even particularly needed the power. He’d just wanted the rush.

He remembered that, that it had been a whim, that it had been a careless wish for power, that evening when he was sitting in the garden and making the flowers trade places with each other in their beds, when a shadow fell over him and the flowers stopped dancing under his hands.

He looked up into eyes like doors into the dark, in the face of a stranger.

It was the opposite of seeing a magician. His skin felt as if it was in revolt, wanting to creep away and leave him nothing but bones and exposed flesh. This is not one of your kind, his magic told him.

But there was power there.

Power, and something else familiar.

Gerald was sure he’d never seen this woman before, but she stood staring at him as if she knew him, her fluffy blonde head tilted like a bird’s.

Like a bird’s.

Gerald made a small sound. He wanted to flatten himself on the ground, like a mouse fearing an owl had spotted him.

The small blonde woman tilted her head back in a silent laugh, and then her whole face twisted, bulged grotesquely, teeth falling out of her mouth and her lips and nose melting terribly together to form an approximation of a bird’s beak.

The transformation was shaking her body apart, and the neck of her shirt fell open a little.

Gerald saw a sigil there. Not the sigil of the Obsidian Circle, another sigil, a symbol of a heart in a fire, but it marked the woman as a magician.

She had been a magician, one of his own, Gerald’s body was telling him. But she wasn’t anymore.

The woman lunged at him, snapping her beak in his face. The same way Anzu had only hours ago.

Gerald screamed, then. He couldn’t help it. He screamed and ran and she chased him, silent and awful, and the other magicians must have intercepted the demon, he didn’t even see them, he was crying openly and he couldn’t let anyone see him break down.

He raced into his room and opened the wardrobe door, and climbed in. It was small and dark and safe there. The clothes he’d been wearing when the magicians took him away were hanging up there, and he put his face against his jeans and thought about going back to Ireland.

That necromancer with his hands overflowing with the dead. He’d known where being a magician led. He’d chosen to do something else.

Nobody will have suffered but me.

Gerald curled into a tight, tight ball. Someone had suffered for him, though, someone had suffered in his place so he could have the magic he felt coursing through his body right now.

There was no way back to Ireland. That door was closed to him. And Laura had made it perfectly clear that he was no use to her without magic. There was nowhere to go, and nobody to be but himself, cold and alone in this dark place, thinking about the woman with the demon inside her.

Gerald had let Anzu have her. One of his own.

He pressed his forehead against his knees and rocked back and forth in the tiny space of the wardrobe, trying to think, trying to make a plan, find a way out of all this. He didn’t seem able to do anything but cry.

Nobody came for him this time.

Nobody had come for him the first time, not really. Laura had come for herself: he understood that now.

Gerald laid his wet, heated cheek against the wood at the back of the wardrobe door. His swollen eyes ached, and he could not stop shaking.

There would be no rescue, not ever.

#

It took the woman four days to die. She sat down to dinner with them, and the whole Circle was thrown into unrest. Gerald got the impression that demons usually stayed as far away from magicians as they could.

Anzu was tormenting him deliberately. But Gerald had been tormented before. He knew how to make it a lesson for himself.

The first dinner, Gerald had to run away and vomit, helplessly, into a toilet, and then lie on the bathroom floor and cry.

By the fourth dinner, the woman’s hands were moving slowly, the skin over them stretched tight and mottled. She was rotting from the inside out, her black eyes still bright and fixed malevolently on Gerald.

Gerald smiled at her and passed her the bread.

On the morning of the fifth day, Gerald woke up to dawn light and Anzu back in his summoning circle, being punished by Arthur and Laura.

Gerald stood at the door watching them for a little while, and then spoke.

“He does it on purpose,” he said. “He chooses magicians, even though humans would be easier to get at. Because he hates us.”

“He takes whatever he can get,” Arthur said contemptuously. “And he delights in causing annoyance or pain. That’s all it is.”

“Why not stop him?” Gerald asked in a quiet voice.

Laura had been pacing around the circle, grey dressing gown flaring, looking less calm than usual. She glanced at him sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“My friend Max at school has a grandmother who’s very old and who annoys his whole family,” Gerald said. “They all wish she’d go away. And she probably doesn’t have long to live as it is.”

He had not expected Laura and Arthur to look at him the way they did then. Laura’s hand clutched at her dressing gown in an almost spasmodic movement.

“All we have to do is send the demon to a specific window,” Gerald continued uncertainly.

“We never do anything like that,” Arthur barked at him.

“But if the demon’s going to possess and kill people because of us, then we should-”

“It’s the demon’s business what it does!” Laura said sharply.

“But-”

Laura shook her head firmly, her gaze turned away from him, and Gerald suddenly recognized that look. His mother looked the same way whenever he did magic, making it something she was forbidding and didn’t even want to see at the same time, as if she couldn’t bear its existence.

“We have nothing to do with what the demon does when we let it go,” Laura informed him. ‘Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Gerald answered slowly. “Yes, I understand perfectly.”

The room at this time of day was all shadows and pale light. They were all staring at each other, tired and rumpled.

Except for the demon, of course. Anzu was standing in a ray of dawn light, looking young and pale and pure, wrapped in soft white. His wings were like snow, gently wrapped around himself.

And the low, dark sound of his laughter was coiling throughout the room. Gerald saw Laura shudder.

“Oh, that’s rich,” Anzu said. “Hear our little boy. Let’s feed frail old ladies to demons. Nobody will miss them. How quickly they grow.”

“Shut up, demon,” Arthur commanded.

“What lovely little monsters this Circle makes,” Anzu purred. “You must be so proud.”

“Shut up!” Laura almost screamed. She walked over to Gerald quickly, and slid her arm around him, holding on a little too tight, slipping a hand briefly over his ear as if to block out the demon’s words. “Shut up,” she repeated, and rocked Gerald against her for a moment. “Let’s go get breakfast,” she said. “And let’s talk no more about this.”

Arthur led the way, as he always did.

Gerald lingered with the demon.

Anzu had stopped laughing, but he still looked amused, his dark smile the only thing marring the illusion of angelic innocence, light shimmering all around him. Death would be beautiful, when Gerald sent it out. The humans might welcome it.

This made perfect sense. He didn’t know why Laura had looked the way she had.

“I’m waiting,” Anzu murmured, low and cold.

There was no way back. There was no other path to choose. And the power was waiting for him. Gerald lifted a hand and began to speak the form that would release the demon.

“I am Gerald of the Obsidian Circle,” he said. “And I have power over you.”