All the Birds in the Sky (9 page)

“Let’s go to the woods,” he said. “I want to see your magic Tree.”

He no longer cared if this girl was crazy. He was a bad person, and what was worse, being crazy or being evil? Plus she might be the only girl who would even consider kissing him before he turned thirty. And he was growing more conscious that he had been a dick to her.

“You want to go to the woods with me,” Patricia said. “Right now.”

Laurence nodded. He needed to fidget. He didn’t.

He thought about how dull the tiles underfoot were. Someone waxed them every day, leaving them shiny for an hour until they dried and hundreds of kids walked on them, and then the floor just looked sticky and gray with wax scum. The floor probably looked dirtier than if nobody ever waxed it.

“I’m sorry,” Patricia said. “I can’t. I have to stay on at this school, after you’ve gone on to your math paradise.”

“Sure,” Laurence said. “Okay.” He wanted to say something else, like maybe apologize, but he didn’t. And then the moment had evaporated, and they were walking to separate classes.

*   *   *

WHEN THEODOLPHUS ROSE
was fourteen, he’d slept on a bunk of mossy slate. He had mastered a hundred ways to kill a woman without awakening the man sleeping next to her. Every morning, an hour before dawn, the fourteen-year-old Theodolphus had gone for a ten-mile run with a ceramic urn full of his teacher’s urine on his head, and if a single drop spilled or he failed to complete the ten miles within an hour and a half, he would be forced to stand on his head until he saw a river of sunfire. His only meals had been the not-quite-lethal mushrooms and berries he’d been taught to pick in the thickets near the cliff-sheltered school fortress. And yet the Nameless Assassin School was a country club compared to Canterbury Academy. For one thing, he had been
learning
things, skills that he still used in his vocation, and he had taken pride in them. For another, nobody had forced him to answer multiple-choice questions on battered notebook computers. If they had given standardized tests in assassin school, he would not have lasted a day. (Theodolphus made a mental note to hunt down Lars Saarinian, the psychologist who had studied the slaughterhouse behavior of pigs and come up with an educational regimen for human children, when he finally got out of here.)

Theodolphus had spent weeks spying on these two children, listening to all of their conversations, at home and at school. He’d parked across the street from their houses and eavesdropped on the two of them, together and separately. He’d racked his brains trying to come up with a death that didn’t require his hands-on involvement—thus complying with the letter of the child-murder ban—but would still tell a good story. Something artistic. He had this notion that the children would go into the woods together, where Laurence could be bitten by a snake and then Patricia could try sucking the poison out of him and accidentally poison herself. But no, because Patricia was forbidden to go into the woods and she was the only child on earth who
obeyed her parents
. Theodolphus kept hoping Patricia would have a moment of rebelliousness, and being brutalized by disappointment.

By now, after weeks of slouching on purpose in his office chair, listening to Brad Chomner talk about his body-image issues, Theodolphus just wanted this over with. This was the longest he’d gone without killing someone in years, and his hands kept getting ideas. He sat in faculty meetings and imagined just how much of Don Gluckman’s insides he could show the math teacher while keeping him alive.

Worst of all was when Theodolphus had to give advice about puberty, something he had never personally experienced.

Lucy Dodd got a stomach flu—not Theodolphus’s work—and they needed someone to teach English for a few days. Theodolphus volunteered. It would give him another chance to study his prey, since both Laurence and Patricia took that class.

All of the kids had clearly been looking forward to having a sub so they could goof off. When they saw it was Theodolphus, wearing a crisp black shirt, matching black pants, and a red tie, they all sighed with disappointment—for some reason, Theodolphus had become the most popular faculty member at this school, and nobody felt like screwing with him. “Most of you know me,” he said, making eye contact with each surly dough face in turn.

Laurence and Patricia sat at separate tables, not talking to each other, not even looking at each other, except that the girl kept giving the boy wounded little glances. The boy glared at his secondhand
Scarlet Letter
.

Traci Burt read out a passage she’d memorized, with perfect diction and a smile full of ceramic braces. Then Theodolphus attempted to get a discussion going about Hester Prynne and whether she was unfairly treated, and got back a lot of canned answers about Puritan morality, and then he called on Laurence. “Mr. Armstead. Do you think society needs to burn the occasional witch for the sake of social cohesion?”

“What?” Laurence jumped, so that three legs of his chair left the ground. He dropped all his books on the floor. Everybody else laughed and texted. “I’m sorry,” Laurence babbled, gathering up all his stuff. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Oh yes,
Theodolphus said to himself.
You know perfectly well.

“I see.” Theodolphus made a scritch on a paper, as if writing the boy off. “How about you, Miss Delfine? Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?”

Patricia lost a breath. Then she found it again and looked up, regarding Theodolphus with a steadiness that he couldn’t help admiring. Her thin lips pushed out.

“Well,” Patricia said. “A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”

With that, Theodolphus knew how he would finish this mission, and redeem his professional self-respect once and for all.

9

THE SNOWSTORM HIT
a few weeks after Laurence more or less stopped talking to Patricia. She woke up with Berkley curled between her bent elbow and her shoulder, and looked out her window without getting all the way out of bed. The ground and the sky mirrored each other: two sheets of white.

Patricia shuddered and almost pulled the covers over her head. Instead, she took the hottest shower she could bear and put on her long johns for the first time this year. They no longer fit.

Patricia’s mother was already on-site and her father was multi-focusing with his laptop and a stack of folders, so at least Patricia didn’t have to talk to her parents. But Roberta came down halfway through breakfast and just stared at Patricia without talking, and that was creepy, and at last Roberta went off to Ellenburg High and Patricia was left hoping against hope that Canterbury Academy was having a snow day.

No such luck. Patricia got to school in her dad’s sedan, and almost broke her neck on the slushy steps. People threw snowballs with gravel in them at Patricia’s head, but she didn’t bother to turn and look—that would just be presenting a better target.

“Miss Delfine,” a smooth, deep voice said behind Patricia in the near-empty hallway. (A lot of kids had stayed home after all.) Patricia turned to see Mr. Rose, the guidance counselor with the knuckle face, looming in a pin-striped slate suit.

“Umm. Yes?”

Mr. Rose had never made much of an impression, though everybody said he was the only decent authority figure at this cruddy school. But today he seemed dark and towering, a foot taller than normal. Patricia shrugged this off as just snow-day nerves.

“I was hoping to discuss something with you,” Mr. Rose said in a deeper than usual voice. “Perhaps you could come by my office when you get a moment. I find that I have an unusually free schedule today.”

Patricia said “Sure,” and dashed off to first period. The school was half-empty, and the snow kept blinding her through the windows. It all felt like a weird dream. Her first class was Math, and Mr. Gluckman wasn’t even trying to teach—everybody just goofed off.

Her second period teacher hadn’t even made it to school, so it became a free period, after ten minutes of perfunctory waiting. Patricia drifted toward Mr. Rose’s office.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice. I will keep this brief.” Mr. Rose’s teeth clacked inside his dry white lips. This wasn’t the Mr. Rose Patricia was used to. He sat straighter in his gray chair, hands folded on his walnut desk, with its cartoon walrus pencil holder. Behind him, there was a wall of books on child development.

Patricia nodded. Mr. Rose took a deep breath.

“I have a message for you,” he said, “from the Tree.”

“The what—?” Patricia felt sure this was a dream. The pale world, the empty school—she was still in bed with Berkley.

“Well, not the Tree exactly. But the power the Tree represents. I know you’ve waited a long time to fulfill your purpose as a witch. You’ve been more than patient. So I have been tasked with informing you that your wait is almost over. The secrets will soon be yours.”

Patricia couldn’t breathe. Her hands were gripping her chair arms. She felt hot around her face and yet freezing in her extremities. Her blood was all going to her head, as if it were preparing to separate from her body. Her feet kicked each other.

“What?” she said at last. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Umm…” She was on the verge of babbling, but reined it in. This was important witch business. “Um. Who
are
you?” She would not have disbelieved, necessarily, if he’d claimed to be Merlin or something.

“I’m your school guidance counselor.” Mr. Rose smiled with one lip. “I’m just passing along a message, that’s all. This is the only time you and I will ever discuss this matter.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You will be receiving instructions soon. In the meantime, there is one task you must perform.”

“Umm…”
Stop saying umm,
Patricia told herself. “Umm, is it like a test? Or an assignment? Do I have to prove myself worthy?”

“You have already proved everything you needed to prove. No, this is merely a task. But an unpleasant one. There is a boy at this school who will grow up to be a great enemy of nature, and a persecutor of the magical community. You already know him. His name is Laurence Armstead. He may have asked to see a demonstration of magic recently. He may even have asked you to show him the Tree. Is this so?”

“Umm … yeah.” This conversation was like falling off the edge of the world, plummeting all the way around the globe, and then falling off the edge a second time. Patricia’s stomach was upside down.

“So you already know. I hate to say this, and remember I’m just the messenger. I regard all human life as precious and irreplaceable. But Laurence Armstead must die. And you must be the one to kill him. Nobody else can do it. As soon as you complete this task, you can begin your training.”

Patricia couldn’t remember what she said after that—it probably had a lot of “umm” in it. She didn’t say she would kill Laurence, and she didn’t say she wouldn’t. She may have thanked Mr. Rose for the message. She wasn’t sure. She was in an upright coma for the rest of the day. Even Roberta hanging from the banister upside down and staring at her after dinner barely registered. Roberta’s dark brown hair hung straight down and her eyebrows twitched, but she said nothing as Patricia walked past.

Patricia found herself in Roberta’s room an hour later, right before lights-out. “Bert,” she said, using her old nickname. “Could you kill a person? If you absolutely had to?”

Roberta was painting her toenails candy-apple green, in her white cotton PJs. “Wow, Trish. Morbid much?” She laughed. “For your information, the answer is yes and no. Yes, I would be willing, if I felt it was necessary and whatever. But I probably couldn’t go through with it. I would be too much of a wuss to look at someone and take them out. Even if I was sure it was the right thing.”

“Umm, okay. Thanks.”

“But Trish,” Roberta called after Patricia as she turned to go to her own room, across the hallway. “If you
do
ever take someone out, I get to watch. I want to see you do it.”

“Umm, okay.”

Laurence was back at school the next day, in a good mood for a change, swinging his arms in the wet hallways like he owned the place. He was back to not talking to Patricia, but he smiled at her without looking right at her. She could so easily end him, just push him in front of one of the senior citizen tour buses the school used as transportation. It would look like an accident. Patricia found herself studying his twitchy head and slender wrists, trying to imagine if it could be true: Was he going to become an enemy of magic? He was already hostile to it, that was for sure. Maybe the grown-up Laurence would be some kind of monster, for all she knew, persecuting her kind. Maybe this was part of what witches did—regretfully, sorrowfully—snuffing out people who would threaten the balance of nature?

She watched him in the cafeteria. Punishing his food. She watched him running wind sprints up and down the hill behind the school, shivering in his track uniform. She tried to imagine him launching a vendetta. Persecuting her friends, if she ever actually had friends. She couldn’t make herself believe it, and she couldn’t do it unless she did. She could imagine killing him, that was shockingly easy—one shove, into the big wheels—but she couldn’t imagine him deserving it.

Whenever she tried to talk to Mr. Rose, he was either busy or absent. She finally caught up with him in the hallway near the teacher lounge and tried to mention the Tree. He looked at her as if she was speaking gibberish. One brow raised.

At home, she asked CH@NG3M3, “Will Laurence become an enemy of magic?”

CH@NG3M3 responded, “Do you think Laurence will become an enemy of magic?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Why are you asking me?”

She couldn’t get to sleep for ages, even with Berkley scrunched along her rib cage—but then she finally slept, and dreamed she was carving Laurence open with a big knife. His skin parted to reveal a shining portal to a magical land full of kind wizards who gave her a wand of her own. She dreamed she lured him to the Wadlow River cliff, where the high-school kids partied, and shoved him off the edge onto the sharp, slippery rocks.