The Magician's Tower (16 page)

“Thank you,” Oona said, her breath shaken.

Adler brushed a stray hair from her face, and though she wouldn't have thought it possible, Oona felt her pulse quicken.

“You all right there?” Adler asked.

Oona nodded, for the moment lost in Adler's blurry-looking face—the tattoos so close. She wondered briefly at their meaning, and then suddenly good manners and decency struck home. She glanced down, saw her skirt splayed around her like a disheveled bed, and pushed herself quickly to her feet, doing her best to hold her balance. She peered over the edge of the boat. The snakes, it seemed, had ceased their maddened aerial chase and had returned to the pit several stories below.

“That was fascinating, so it was,” said Adler, though whether he'd meant the ride on the winged snakes, or his and Oona's close encounter, Oona wasn't sure. She did not know what to say.

As if to break the awkward silence, Adler asked: “Where do you suppose the architect got those flying snakes from? I've never seen their like.”

Oona ran a nervous hand through her hair. It was a good question, but what concerned her more was where the others had gotten to.

“Where are Roderick and Isadora?” she asked.

Adler slowly looked upward.

Following his gaze, Oona tilted her head back and received a bit of a shock. Suddenly, she remembered seeing Isadora seemingly floating in the air. It hadn't made sense at the time, but now she understood perfectly. She shook her head, wondering what they had gotten themselves into.

Twenty feet above, she could see Roderick Rutherford, and not far above Roderick was Isadora, each of them attempting to keep their footing on what appeared to be their own slowly rising carpet. Neither of them looked very confident as the floating carpets inched their way toward the high ceiling above. Roderick wobbled unsteadily, and Isadora looked as if she might topple forward at any moment, each of them attempting to hold their balance with the aid of a pine-branch broomstick.

“Flying carpets,” Oona said, feeling both a surge of excitement and dread at the same moment. Here was something that she knew about from her history of magic
lessons with Deacon. They were quite rare objects, Oona knew—faerie-made relics left over from before the Great Faerie War—and could also be quite dangerous if handled improperly.

“Where do we get ours?” Oona asked excitedly.

“Let's find out,” Adler said, and the two of them headed to the lower deck in search of their own carpet.

They found them near the rear of the ship on the bottom deck.

Floating along the side of the riverboat were two carpets, on top of which lay one broomstick each. Oona took in a sharp breath at the sight of the beautiful enchanted objects.

She had never before seen one up close. They were exquisite in craftsmanship, which didn't come as any surprise. Anything made by faerie hands would be of only the finest quality. The pattern appeared to be woven from … not thread—at least not any sort of thread that Oona had ever seen—but from strands of light. Red and gold and black and blue, the strands formed marvelous patterns that reminded Oona of pixielike faces. She guessed that the carpets had been borrowed from the Museum of Magical History.

Hopefully
, she thought,
these things still work properly after hundreds of years of storage
.

Remembering her promise to not use magic during the challenge, Oona reasoned that since it was not her own magic, then the rule did not apply, and since everyone else was supposed to use the carpets, then they were all still on a level playing field.

“I guess I'll take this one,” Oona said, reaching over the rail and picking up the broomstick.

Adler nodded. “Ah … yeah. Okay,” he said, before climbing over the rail and gingerly placing his foot down upon the last remaining carpet. The instant his foot touched, the carpet began slowly to rise, and Adler's eyes rounded. He quickly picked up the broomstick and, like Roderick and Isadora, held it out in front of him to keep his balance. Slowly, he began to rise up the side of the boat toward the top deck.

Oona climbed onto her own carpet, testing her footing, and feeling quite unbalanced. Her first instinct, like the others, was to use the broomstick as a balancing pole, like a high-wire performer in the circus, as the carpet began its slow assent toward the roof. But because of her magical knowledge, Oona resisted the urge, and instead spread her feet farther apart, bending her knees to steady herself against the wobble of the carpet.

“Magic carpets require stimulation,” she whispered to herself.

Faeries, she remembered, had used carpets instead of horses in their war maneuvers during their battles against the Magicians of Old and the fighting men who followed them. In a book titled
The War
, Oona had seen an illustration of a thousand faerie soldiers soaring down a hillside, each of them mounted on their own magic carpet, each holding in their hands a single pine-branch broomstick.

“Why are they all holding brooms?” Oona had inquired of Samuligan one day, nearly three years ago. She had taken the book to the faerie servant, knowing that, of all beings, Samuligan would know the answer to her question, for Samuligan had once been a powerful general in the Queen of Faerie's army.

Samuligan had smiled his mischievous grin and replied: “We used them to sweep our carpets. The carpets require stimulation, you see, and the faster and steadier you sweep an enchanted carpet, the faster and steadier it will travel.”

Presently, standing on her very own flying carpet, Oona grinned as she glanced upward to see that none of the other contestants possessed the knowledge that she did. And so Oona began to sweep, slowly at first, as her balance was quite unsteady, but the more times she swept the surface of the carpet, the higher and faster she began
to climb, and so, too, did her balance improve. Indeed, the more momentum she gained, the easier it was to keep her equilibrium.

In no time at all she had passed up Adler, who was presently facing the opposite direction, fighting for balance, and did not see Oona rise up past him.

This is going quite well
, she thought, and found that it was not only a nice boost to her hopes of gaining a lead over the others, but that it was also quite fun.

From just above her, however, she heard Roderick shout: “I see what you're doing!”

Oona looked up to find Roderick peering down at her, fighting for balance as he turned his head up and shouted: “Isadora, my lady! Use the broom to sweep the carpet! That's the missing clue!”

“The missing clue?” Oona said, wondering what Roderick had meant.

When Roderick made no reply, she realized there was no time to ponder and began to sweep more rapidly in an attempt to pass Roderick before he could get his carpet moving any faster. But in her sudden panic to gain speed, her sweeping became more erratic than smooth and steady, causing her to lose her balance.

She flailed her arms as the carpet listed to the left like a raft struck by a wave. In her attempt to catch her balance, she nearly dropped the broomstick. She felt it slide
from her grip before she was able to catch it again at the very tip of the handle. In the meantime she had lost some of her momentum, allowing both Isadora and Roderick to multiply their speed above her.

Thanking her good fortune that she had managed to keep hold of the broom, Oona once again began to sweep the carpet, this time steadily increasing her pace. It was working. Her carpet was gaining on Roderick's, only now that Roderick had figured out the secret of sweeping his carpet with his broom, he was rising nearly as fast as Oona.

And now Oona could hear a third broom sweeping, and she knew precisely where it was coming from. She could see Isadora above them all, rising steadily toward the ceiling.

Oona began to sweep faster, careful not to break her rhythm. She was advancing on Roderick, her hands slipping into a powerful rhythm, which reminded her of her assent to the top of the Goblin Tower three months past, beating on a hand drum during her assent to the top of the tower: one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And now, here she was once again, traveling through the inside of a tower, only this time she was not in the company of four lazy goblins but in a race against the likes of Roderick Rutherford, whom she was presently neck and neck with, and Isadora Iree, whom they were both gaining on.

Oona's glowing carpet had begun to pulse like a beating heart, nearly surpassing Roderick's, when a fourth broom joined the rhythmic swish of the others. Adler had figured out the sweeping secret and was now working steadily away, but unless one of them made an unrecoverable mistake, Oona knew that he was too far behind to catch up.

It was now a three-way race between Oona, Roderick, and Isadora, whose lead was about to be overtaken. Oona's and Roderick's carpets rose side by side as they came up even with Isadora, the fine young lady's normally perfectly composed face now flushed red with the exertion of sweeping. Oona wondered earnestly if Isadora had ever partaken in such a domestic activity in her life, but the thought passed as quickly as a sweep of a broom.

She could see the finish line coming up fast. A round wooden walkway encircled the outer wall about thirty feet above them. Frustration gripped at Oona's insides as she realized that the exit was positioned on the side of the walkway closest to where Isadora was headed. But Oona planned to get there first.

She started to sweep so energetically that the static electricity caused her skirt to stick to the bristles of the broom each time it swooped past. This was it. She was gaining. She was going to pass them both.

And then it happened. A wobble. A jerk. And Oona
felt as if she were about to fall. Her carpet jolted to one side, threatening to throw her off, and it was all she could do to keep her balance. Her heart leapt into her throat as a cry of panic shot from between her lips. Luckily, her upward momentum was so strong that the carpet did not throw her off completely.

She took in a great gasp of air, steadying herself, and just as she began to wonder what had happened, she felt a second jolt even worse than the first. This time Oona was more on her guard, and not only did she manage to keep herself from being bucked off by the sudden violent movement, but she was able to see the cause of the carpet's malfunction—which turned out not to be a malfunction after all.

Roderick had temporarily stopped sweeping, and was instead using his broomstick to whack at Oona's carpet in an attempt to knock it out from beneath her feet.

Oona gasped. “You bloody bully! You, sir, are no gentleman!”

Roderick paid her no mind. Clearly satisfied that his attempt to knock Oona from the air had at least managed to impede her progress, he once again began to sweep his own carpet.

For a moment Oona had a good mind to take a swing at Roderick with her own broomstick, but, thinking better of the situation, she realized that that might be exactly
what Roderick hoped she would do: waste more time trying to get even, while he and Isadora gained even more of a lead than they already had.

Oona squared her shoulders, squeezed down hard on the broom handle, and once again began to sweep—long steady strokes that grew faster and more precise. She quickly realized that this was not a game of strength so much as it was one of timing, rhythm, and stamina.

Her arms and shoulders were beginning to ache, her muscles pulling tight beneath her skin like steel cables. She pushed resiliently through the discomfort, biting back the pain, and began once again to gain on her opponents. The space between them narrowed more and more, and for several seconds Oona could taste a juicy slice of hope. It was still possible that she might win.

But the taste of hope abruptly evaporated, only to be replaced by the bitterness of frustration and doubt.

Despite Oona's fevered effort, it was Isadora who reached the top first, her carpet coasting to a smooth and seemingly practiced stop along the edge of the rickety wooden walkway. Oona felt like screaming in irritation as Isadora stepped nimbly from her carpet and hurried toward the exit.

Roderick was the next to arrive at the top, but when his carpet came to a shuttering halt, he stepped leisurely to the extended walkway, not appearing to be in any
great hurry whatsoever to overtake Isadora—a behavior that Oona found most peculiar, considering how fervent Roderick's father had been that he should come in first.

Oona was in an altogether different state of mind. In that moment, she wanted more than anything to beat Isadora to the door, no matter how unrealistic it might have seemed. She could see the distance between them was too great. Isadora had too much of a lead for Oona to make up the distance, yet she leapt to the walkway mere seconds after Roderick and ran full out, shoes clonking against the planks of wood.

Isadora tried the door, but it would not open. She began fumbling with the key that the architect had given them at the beginning of the challenge, attempting to jam it into the lock before the others could catch up.