The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) (16 page)

Relative Normality

After such a fraught New Year’s Day, Lily might have imagined that the month of January was to be a horrid one, but this was not the case. The weeks passed in their usual speedy winter way, with mornings and evenings that were as dark as night, and lectures where the cold seeped into the hall and put every student into comatose slumber. Bradley Binns seemed to have fallen for Jeronomie’s ploy, and believed his excursion to the Imaginique’s private quarters to be a very vivid dream. He behaved irritatingly normally at every class and mock exam Lily took in the first few weeks of the spring term, and for this reason she never got a chance to question exactly what he was looking for when he’d intruded at the theatre in the first place.

There were plenty of theories, put about by Lily, Jazzy and Lawrence at the Imaginique’s breakfast table each morning. It was a Monday towards the end of the month when Lily was making herself some cereal, and pontificating over a new idea as to why the Nosey Professor, as they had taken to calling Bradley, might have been poking around. When she heard the familiar plod of Lawrence’s bare feet on the cold kitchen tiles, Lily began to speak without even turning around.

“I thought that maybe Nosey’s a magic freak?” she suggested, pouring milk into her cereal bowl. “You know, he might have been looking for Novel’s props to try and see how they’re done. People get really obsessed about that sort of stuff.”

When Lawrence didn’t answer, Lily turned towards the table. The poor boy was struck by sadness, his brown eyes wide and hopeless as he seemed to gaze straight past Lily, into the depths of his own desperation. Lily rushed to him, looking up at his face and snapping her fingers before his eyes.

“Lawrence? What’s going on?” she demanded.

The boy swallowed hard before he was able to answer.

“Jazzy’s sick again,” he revealed. “Like she was on Christmas Day. It’s come on overnight like it did before. She looks… I wish I knew how to stop it.”

Lily rubbed his arm comfortingly, steeling her own emotions.

“Perhaps it’ll go away again sharpish, like it did last time,” she offered hopefully.

Lawrence nodded, looking back over his shoulder to the corridor, and the direction of Jazzy’s room.

“Look,” Lily said, “how about I go and fetch Jeronomie from upstairs? She was good help last time.”

Another nod, but this time the voodoo boy seemed slightly brighter.

“She was,” he agreed.

Lily flew up the stairs, centering her powers and practising her focus as she went. In the month of January, Jeronomie had only ever been found in one of two places, so Lily checked the nearest one first. On the second floor, the door to Salem’s little box bedroom was ajar, and the sound of a hearty chuckle emanated deep within. The dull slap of a corduroy-clad thigh followed, and Lily knew exactly where her target was hiding.

“And you really just left that woman there, alone?” Jeronomie said, apparently bemused in her own disbelief.

Lily neared the door, pushing it open just as Salem replied.

“Hey, if it was her or me, then it was me getting out of there alive,” he reasoned, “Every man for himself, ain’t that the saying?”

Jeronomie shook her head, sucking at her cheeks.

“I guess every girl’s gotta learn to defend herself sometime,” she mused.

Lily’s interruption brought their conversation to a standstill, but she found herself unable to speak as she beheld Salem Cross. He had been made to sit up in bed, but he was dressed in shiny navy pyjamas instead of the stale old sweats Lily had grown accustomed to. The former shade had not yet gotten rid of his beard, but it was trimmed neatly into a style that really suited his proud, square jaw, and there was a new burst of humour in his cobalt eyes when they turned to view his new visitor.

“Lily, sweetheart,” Salem crooned, “I don’t know what this woman puts in her soup, but you gotta have some. I feel like a new man.”

“You look like one too,” Lily remarked with great pleasure, “and that’s just as well, actually.” She turned to face Jeronomie, who narrowed her eyes with interest. “Jazzy’s come down with that awful pallor and weakness again. Could you-?”

“Say no more,” the potioneer replied, raising a hand. “She in her room?”

When Lily nodded, Jeronomie got up and left the little box room without another word. Salem looked disappointed that his nursemaid had been taken away, and gave Lily a glum little smile when she took the potioneer’s place on a chair by his bed.

“You look so much better, Salem, you really do,” Lily said.

Salem cocked his head to and fro, but then he nodded.

“The dark thoughts come and go,” he admitted, “but I guess I’m more frustrated now about having to wait to get my powers back.”

“That’s got to be progress,” Lily concluded, “well done you.”

“No, no,” Salem answered, “it’s all her.” He pointed at the empty doorway, as if hoping that Jeronomie might reappear again. “That woman is relentless. When she’s got a mission in mind, she’ll stop at nothing to get what she wants from you. It’s actually a little scary.”

Lily nodded and continued to smile, but that tiny jealous feeling was back in her gut. What Salem said next didn’t help the sensation of Saint Jeronomie to dissipate either.

“It’s real good fortune that she came along to pick up the pieces, after all the trouble you caused last year.”

Salem didn’t seem to have made the remark in a harsh way, but it hit Lily hard all the same. She didn’t even have a moment to deal with the guilty truth of Salem’s words before he was speaking again, turning and smiling at her like the chatty showman he used to be.

“She’s really nosey though,” he revealed. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of questions she keeps asking me about my life. She wanted to know about the witch trials, my daughters,
everything
. You’d think she was going to write a biography or something.”

“Perhaps she just wants to keep you talking,” Lily mused. “Talking therapy… That’s a thing, isn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Salem grinned, “and we all know my favourite subject is me, so…”

He chuckled, and Lily did too, though she couldn’t shake the doubtful feelings that were churning in her belly. It was odd to have someone like Jeronomie rushing in and suddenly running your home and fixing all your friends’ problems without even involving you, and Lily didn’t like to admit that she was feeling a little left out where Salem and Jazzy were concerned. Still, if the talents of the potioneer were making them both feel better, Lily had no right to argue with Jeronomie.

Even if her instincts were starting to tell her otherwise.

February

Tales Of The Glassman

Lily opened the little white book, her fingers slipping to the place where Forrester’s invitation was keeping the page marked. She had started from this point in the book several times before, but had always been interrupted, and had to hide the volume of fairy-tales away before she could finish the story. Now, she was secluded in Bradley Binns’s empty lecture hall, a full hour before anything was due to start, and she was determined to take in the full account of the bogeyman of shadechildren: the notorious Glassman.

Once, long ago, when the two Great Worlds were still as one, there was a leader of djinnkind who called himself the Glassman. Tall and resplendent, with skin that shone clear as the sun-kissed sky, the Glassman was a mischievous soul, and one whose beauty often persuaded others to follow in his wicked wake.

The Glassman was a trickster, and his favourite pastime of all was to play ruses out on unsuspecting shades. Shadesons and shadedaughters went about their play beneath the bright white sky, little knowing that the Glassman’s ruby eyes were watching. He could travel by reflection, as all the djinnkind could, and he watched them from the shining surfaces of their homes, waiting for his moment to strike.

He watched them from the river too, and there were times when brothers and sisters went to play in the water, using their powers to lift the liquid from the flow and transform it into shapes of style and wonder. On one such day, a Little Brother who struggled with water magic sat beside his Big Sister, watching as she showed her mastery for the craft.

“It’s perfectly simple,” said Big Sister, haughty as she was. “You must learn not to concentrate so hard.”

Little Brother thought that not concentrating hard was a stupid way to learn anything, but he dared not enrage Big Sister, who was older and far more talented than he.

“I’ll try again,” Little Brother promised, sighing.

True to his word, the boy stood up and approached the riverbank. He stared into the swirling water, which moved too fast for him to see the sunken red eyes of the Glassman, who watched from deep beneath the current. The mischief-making djinn was a blurred reflection, ever-changing and shifting in the water as he let his powers brew. When the right moment came, the Glassman would strike and teach his lesson.

Little Brother rolled up his sleeves and crouched beside the water. He put his palms flat against the sprinting current, eyes closed and tense with concentration. Then, remembering his sister’s chiding words, he let his mind wander and stopped thinking at all. Little Brother heard the trickle of the water, and the rush of the current, and every other noise that the river made in between the two. He felt a tingle in his heart as it began to beat faster and, when he opened his bright eyes, he exclaimed with joy:

“I’ve done it! Look!”

Big Sister watched from her perch on the rock, and gave her brother the tiniest nod of approval. Praise was praise, however small, and Little Brother beamed as a long strand of water, thick as a rope, connected his palm to the river. He toyed with the rope like a whip, slashing it to and fro as he laughed with the childish joy of first achievements, and it was in the depths of this joy that the Glassman made himself known.

The water-rope coiled high into the air and, when it landed again, it was around Little Brother’s throat. The noose lifted him into the sky before the shadeson even had a moment to scream, and he hit the river’s surface with a slap that drew Big Sister from her own world of thoughts. She flew into the air above the river and thrust out her hands, fighting against the strand of magic that threatened to pull Little Brother below the surface.

The boy was face-to-face with the rush of the river, the rope at his throat making him splutter and stream with painful tears. But worse than this was what the boy saw within the current of the water, as the layers of liquid shifted and a face began to form. The visage of the Glassman shook and juddered in the stream, his vicious eyes seeming to bleed from their sockets. Little Brother saw the reflection of his own terrified face, coloured red within those pools of mischief and destruction, and his tiny heart gave a frantic thump as he became certain that he was about to die.

Big Sister was not about to let her brother die. For one thing, her parents would not be pleased if he perished on her watch. Her powers were greater than the Glassman could have guessed for one so young, and she raised her bony little hands above the water, summoning her fiercest strike of gravity. A tree with mammoth roots came flying from the other side of the riverbank and crashed into the water. It lodged itself right where the Glassman’s horrid face had just been, cutting the water-rope in two.

Little Brother clung to the log and turned to see his sister, who had returned to the bank with her hands on her hips.

“You stupid boy,” she chided, “you can’t even control a strand of water without drowning yourself. It’s disgraceful.”

The boy’s face was pale as Big Sister picked him up in her powers, carrying him back to the safety of the bank on a cushion of air. Little Brother hugged his arms about him, eyes wide with shock, and stammered:

“You didn’t see it? You didn’t see the face in the water?”

Big Sister let out a disparaging sigh, rolling her eyes at the shadeson.

“You always have to find a story to blame things on, don’t you?” she accused.

The Glassman’s wicked face was no fiction, and Little Brother knew it. He could never have imagined the wicked terror of the djinn who frightened him to the very edge of his life, but he knew that if Big Sister didn’t believe him, the rest of his kin wouldn’t either. And that was what the Glassman enjoyed best about his trickery. He relished in the fact that he had great and terrible power, but no shade was willing to admit that he truly existed, even when they had seen his garish beauty for themselves.

He would strike again and again, tricking shades everywhere with his ill luck and mad folly. The Glassman would haunt the shadeborn even when the world they shared was no longer the same, but he would always be thought of as a fable, and an illusion created to warn little brothers not to play too close to the water.

Until the Day of Breaking, of course. That fateful day when one of the shadeborn would rise to expose the Glassman for what he really was, and banish him from the hearts of fearful shades for good.

Lily closed the book, and it was only then that she noticed the tiny hairs standing up on her arms, and the bumpy gooseflesh that ran from her wrists all the way to her shoulders. There was something in the air that was more than the echoes of the story, and Lily felt her stomach sink as she realised what it was. High above her, in the glass-panelled ceiling of the lecture hall, a pair of eyes glanced down. Lily didn’t have to look up to know that those foul coral orbs were there, for the stomach-churning feeling of the presence of ill luck had now become unpleasantly familiar to her.

“Go on then,” she said, her voice echoing in the empty hall. “What do you want to do? Trap my nose in the book? Have a bat fly in and muss my hairdo? Go ahead and do it. Frankly, I’m getting used to you bothering me now.”

Some of what she said was true, but there was still genuine fear buried beneath Lily’s bravado. She feared that her direct challenge to the creature behind the glass might reflect badly on people like Jazzy and the troupe but, at the same time, it felt wrong to keep giving the djinn the satisfaction of seeing her suffer. Lily reasoned that, like a child in the face of a bully, not rising to the bait might be some small way of warding off the smaller mishaps at least. She waited for an answer, never once looking up to the leering bluish face that had terrified her on that fateful first day of lectures.

The hairs on her arms settled down again, and the gooseflesh receded to its usual smooth texture. Lily felt warmer than she had a moment ago, and she slipped the book of fairy-tales back into her satchel, replacing it with her notebook for the lecture ahead. When she did dare to glance to the glass-panelled ceiling of the cavernous hall, the pane of glass she focused on was just as plain and transparent as the others. Lily smiled to herself, letting out a breath of fearful relief that shook its way out of her chest.

Looks like the Glassman isn’t the only trickster around here,
she thought with pride.