The Familiars: Secrets of the Crown

“Gustavius rescutium,” incanted Dalton, and Aldwyn could detect a hint of panic in his voice.

It was a simple wind-gust spell. One that Aldwyn had heard him cast a hundred times. But nothing happened.

Then, suddenly, the cages that had held the tremor hawks disappeared, allowing the dangerous birds to go free once more.

Aldwyn watched as Sorceress Edna waved her arms frantically on the ground, but there was no ethereal helping hand to save them this time.

As the wizards and their familiars continued to plunge downwards, gathering momentum with every second, Gilbert tumbled out of Marianne’s pocket.

“Gilbert!” Marianne reached out to grab him just as a tremor hawk tried to snatch him out of the air with its beak. Fortunately, the bird mistimed its attack, and Gilbert landed on the hawk’s back, clutching its feathers in his webbed hands.

“Ahhhhhhh,” he shrieked.

Skylar seemed terrified as well, but if she was screaming, it must have been on the inside. She grabbed at Dalton’s shirt with her talons, trying in vain to slow his descent. Fortunately, her loyal was heading straight for the black ivy-covered hedge wall, which would spare him from a bone-shattering impact. Marianne looked to be headed for a safe landing too, as she was tumbling towards the reflecting pool. Jack and Aldwyn didn’t appear to be so lucky; they were on a collision course with the barren ground. Thinking fast, Aldwyn concentrated as best he could, given that he was hurtling towards his death, and focused on the nearby garden canopy.

Move, move, move, Aldwyn repeated in his head. He wasn’t exactly an expert in this whole telekinesis thing yet. He had only recently discovered that he was a Maidenmere cat, one of the legendary black-and-white felines who had the power to move things with their minds. And while each day for the last four weeks he had continued to hone the skills born out of this revelation, he wasn’t in full control of his magical abilities yet.

At the very last second, Aldwyn managed to make the entire canopy and the frame beneath it drag across the dirt, and he and Jack landed safely on the cloth top. The frame collapsed beneath their weight, and boy and cat rolled to the ground. A nearby splash signalled that Marianne had had her own fall softened by the reflecting pool. And Dalton was climbing out of the shrubs with nothing more than a few cuts and bruises. In the distance, Aldwyn could hear the faint sound of Gilbert screaming from the tremor hawk’s back.

“What has happened to my magic?” wondered Sorceress Edna, who was hurrying, or rather waddling, towards them.

There was no time to ponder the question, as the tremors were growing louder. All six hawks were in attack formation now, and they were flying lower, heading straight for the manor, with Gilbert flailing atop the one leading the way. The day’s exercise of capturing and releasing these normally reclusive creatures of the sky would have been routine – a simple and safe class lesson. But given the fact that the human wizards had suddenly been rendered powerless, the enraged birds had become deadly foes.

As the sky-shaking predators swooped down over the reflecting pool, the columns that lined its sides began to vibrate, cracking from the base to the top. The fissures of dark energy left in the hawks’ wake finished the job, toppling large chunks of the pillars into the water. Marianne had to dive beneath the pool’s surface to avoid the crumbling debris.

The bone-rattling birds flew over the group’s heads, and Aldwyn could see Gilbert still clinging to the neck feathers of the lead hawk.

“Somebody get me off here!” Gilbert shrieked.

“Without the ability to cast spells, we’re powerless to stop them,” said Edna.

“We might be,” said Jack. “But Aldwyn’s not. His telekinesis moved the canopy.”

“Yes,” Edna concurred. “It appears whatever curse has affected us human wizards has no hold over the familiars.” She turned to Aldwyn. “If you don’t do something quickly, they’ll destroy all of Black Ivy Manor.”

Marianne had barely pulled herself out from the pool, and Dalton had only just dropped down from the hedge wall, when the tremor hawks came back around for another onslaught.

“Don’t worry, we’ll handle this,” said Skylar.

“What can we do to help?” asked Dalton.

“Just stay back. It’s too dangerous for you,” replied the blue jay. Upon hearing Skylar’s words, Aldwyn couldn’t help but think how strange it was to see that the roles between humans and animals had been reversed yet again. Normally, it was the wizards telling their familiars to stay out of harm’s way. But now it was Dalton, Marianne, Jack and Sorceress Edna who were forced to take cover behind a tall topiary.

In unison, the hawks let out another scream that sent a seismic blast reverberating through the air, causing the trees to bend and sway.

“You need to get Gilbert off the back of that hawk,” said Skylar to Aldwyn. “I’ll see what I can do about our rude guests.”

Aldwyn nodded and looked up at Gilbert, who had an expression of true terror on his face. His eyes were bulging even more than usual. Aldwyn glanced over at Jack, then back to Gilbert.

“Gilbert, help is on the way,” Aldwyn called out. He used his telekinesis to rip the flight wand out of Jack’s hand and make it fly like an arrow towards Gilbert. “Catch it!”

As the hawk made a sudden dip, all Gilbert could do to grab the wand was shoot out his tongue. He snatched it out of the air, and the wand magically jerked Gilbert upwards, off the tremor hawk’s back and into the sky.

“How dugh I uthe thith thing?” screamed Gilbert, tongue-tied.

“Don’t look at me,” Aldwyn shouted back. “I was just supposed to get you off that hawk.”

Meanwhile, Skylar had perched herself on the edge of a garden fountain, her wings outstretched and trembling. That could only mean one thing: she was preparing to cast another illusion. And indeed, a second later, a baby lamb was limping across the grounds, stopping atop the fallen canopy. And like vampire leeches drawn irresistibly to a pool of blood, the tremor hawks came down, eyeing the feast in front of them. Once they converged, the lamb disappeared. The hawks screeched angrily, clearly confused.

“Aldwyn!” shouted Skylar.

He knew just what to do. Aldwyn turned to the canopy and narrowed his eyes. A moment later, the cloth fabric was ripped telekinetically from the collapsed metal frame and was quickly wrapped into a bundle, trapping the birds inside.

Just then from above, Aldwyn heard Gilbert, whose tongue was still wrapped round the wand, shouting, “Looooo ouuuu!” Although his friend was difficult to understand, Aldwyn knew enough to get out of his way.

Gilbert was coming in for a landing, and if he had any ambition to do it gracefully, he was failing miserably. The wand jerked him left and right, up and down. The tree frog smacked against shrubs and branches before hitting the ground, bouncing along the dirt as the wand magically dragged him to a stop.

Gilbert coughed up a mouthful of mud and dust as his tongue let go of the wand. Then he looked around dizzily. “Whoa. My life just flashed before my eyes. I’ve spent a surprising amount of time picking flies out of my teeth.”

Sorceress Edna and the children came out from behind the topiary and rejoined the familiars. The tremor hawks remained tied up in the canopy cover.

Aldwyn could see by the look on Edna’s face that she was deeply unsettled. She stared blankly at the garden fountain, which was no longer flowing. Dalton was watching the topiaries, which were now motionless, standing as still as any common shrub. Jack’s attention was on the sky.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a pillar of grey smoke that was rising into the blue in the distance.

Curious and with a growing sense of dread, Aldwyn hurried to the hedge wall and scaled it. From the top, he surveyed the Vastian countryside. It was worse than he had feared: the enchanted dam that stood beyond Black Ivy Manor was gone, and water from the lake above had flooded the grazing fields. Cows and horse carts drifted aimlessly, while fish swam in and around stalks of corn. Further in the distance, the floating torches of Bronzhaven, which were always magically held aloft as a symbol of Queen Loranella’s great power, had fallen, igniting the palace walls. And lightning storms and thunderclouds, normally held at bay by the queen’s weather-binding spells, were forming over the lush green hills to the south, moving in on the great expanse of plains west of the Yennep Mountains and east of the Ebs River. This stretch of grassland, once known for its tranquillity and peacefulness, was in ruins.

Aldwyn felt his stomach do a somersault for the second time today. But unlike before, it wasn’t adrenalin or gravity that was twisting his insides. It was the realisation that something terrible had befallen Vastia: all the spells and enchantments that wizards had cast upon the land had vanished. Human magic was gone.

“Have there been any reports of humans casting magic since the green flash?” Queen Loranella enquired of the council and the concerned citizens who had gathered in the grand hall of the New Palace of Bronzhaven. Not a single voice called back from the room – the only response was a shaking of heads and anxious murmurings.

Aldwyn sat in Jack’s lap in the back row of the high-ceilinged chamber, alongside Dalton, Marianne, Skylar and Gilbert. The six of them had travelled here with Sorceress Edna, who had received word of the emergency meeting from one of the queen’s courier eagles shortly after the disenchantment. By the time they had taken to the roads, most of the water released by the dam had sunk into the earth, so at least the group was spared having to swim to the palace. Instead, they made the short trip on foot, witnessing some of the profound effects already being felt by the loss of magic: the enchanted scythes that were responsible for chopping down the wheat and corn crops lay lifeless on the ground, awaiting human hands to manually use them; healing wizards were turning away sick patients from their doorsteps, unable to help them; and rock beetles were pouring out from the ground now that the bug plugs were broken – an unpleasant nuisance to everyone but Gilbert. While their old teacher, Kalstaff, would have surely kept his concern and worry hidden from his young pupils, Sorceress Edna wasn’t shy about sharing her own. “This is bad, very, very bad,” she kept repeating until they had reached the castle, whose walls were charred and smoking from the fires caused by the fallen torches.

Aldwyn looked to the front of the grand hall, where the queen was standing at the head of a long, crescent-shaped table, five chairs to her left, another five to her right. The men and women occupying the chairs wore different-coloured wizarding robes, all distinct to their local region. Each was accompanied by their familiar – ranging from the common pot-bellied weasel to the truly bizarre wall-crawling dingo.

“Those ten sitting on either side of Queen Loranella are the council elders,” Dalton whispered to Marianne. “They represent each of the ten provinces of Vastia.”

The room itself was grand, with high-vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows, the largest of which depicted a swirl of silver dust rising up above the Peaks of Kailasa. Hundreds of notables had gathered to fill the benches that stretched in long rows across the hall. Wizards and non-spellcasters alike sat side by side, waiting impatiently for answers.

“The spirits from the Tomorrowlife have come back to curse us,” a voice shouted from the crowd.

“No, it’s an estriutus burst,” another citizen interrupted.

“I’ll wager my goat farm that those ore miners in Kailasa struck a spell vacuum – sucked all the magic out of the world!” said a country villager. Aldwyn thought his theory even more desperate than the first two.

“I’m afraid it’s worse than that,” said Queen Loranella in a steady voice that was comforting in spite of the gravity of the situation. “This is neither a cosmic event nor an accident. It’s a purposeful attack, and a focused one at that: not all magic has been displaced from Vastia, only that cast by humans. And it is no coincidence that animals have retained their gifts. I am certain that it is an animal who is responsible for bringing this dispelling curse upon our land.”

Aldwyn knew just who the queen was talking about.