The Familiars: Animal Wizardry

“Holy dragon eggs!” exclaimed Jack. “I can understand you. Say something else.”

“Um, OK: I… like… fish!”

“Wow! It worked. Now I suppose you can tell me your name.”

“I’m Aldwyn.”

“Nice to meet you, Aldwyn. I’m Jack,” he said, before turning to the others. “His name is Aldwyn! He just told me.”

“That is amazing,” teased Marianne. “What else did he confide in you? That he likes chasing balls of wool?”

“You forget how excited you were when Gilbert first spoke to you,” Kalstaff admonished her. “You nearly fainted.”

“It’s true,” recalled Dalton. “Kalstaff had to carry you over to the runlet and splash water on your face.”

Marianne blushed, and Jack let out a laugh.

“Pretty cool, huh?” said Gilbert to Aldwyn. “Kalstaff waves his wand a couple of times and next thing you know, your loyal gains the ability to understand what you’re saying.”

“It’s a lingual divination spell,” explained Skylar. “It only works between you and your loyal. It allows human spellcasters like Dalton or Jack or Marianne to commune with their familiars, even though they can’t speak animal tongue the way elder wizards, like Kalstaff, are able to.”

“I understand it’s some of Ebekenezer’s best work,” said Aldwyn, taking the small titbit of knowledge he had overheard in the familiar store and claiming it as his own.

Skylar nearly sprained her neck, so severe was her double take.

“Horteus Ebekenezer,” clarified Aldwyn, “The great forest communer.”

“I didn’t realise your studies were so advanced,” said Skylar.

“Well,” replied Aldwyn. “I may not know so much about juniper berries, but I do know my communers.”

Kalstaff got up from the lichen-covered rock he was sitting on.

“Jack, this is the beginning of a long journey that you and Aldwyn will be taking together,” he said. “No wizard can accomplish true greatness without a devoted familiar at their side. I know I couldn’t have if it hadn’t been for Zabulon, may the Gods rest his spirit.”

Jack nodded, then looked at his new feline companion. Aldwyn glanced back up, saw the pride in the young boy’s eyes and, to his surprise, felt a little proud himself.

“All right, time for bed,” said Kalstaff to his three apprentices. “We leave for our walkabout at sunrise.”

Everyone helped rinse the pots and pans and douse the firepit. Jack, the last to finish his chores, scooped up Aldwyn and headed for the cottage. They went straight to Jack’s bedroom, which the boy shared with his sister and Gilbert. After a quick survey, Aldwyn decided the room was a bit confined for his taste. There were two straw cots placed side by side, while a small trunk rested against the wall, stuffed with all of Jack and Marianne’s clothes. On a nearby table, a pear-shaped globe was slowly spinning on a needle, showing the lands of Vastia and beyond.

Gilbert fell asleep on a pillow at the foot of Marianne’s bed and within two minutes was snoring loud enough to wake a hibernating cave troll. Jack folded up a blanket on the floor for Aldwyn to sleep on, then, after saying good night, got into bed himself.

Hardly a moment had passed before Jack whispered in the dark, “Aldwyn, are you awake?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask you something? Do you ever get seasick?”

“You mean like on a boat?”

“A boat, or a sailing skiff, or on the back of a travelling whale.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been on any of those things. Why?”

“I was just thinking, after my wizard training is complete, we’ll be going on a lot of adventures together. And I’d hate for you to get all green in the face every time we take to the water.”

“Shhhhhh!” said Marianne from her neighbouring cot.

“Sorry,” replied Jack before continuing in a whisper. “My mum and dad were Beyonders, you know. When I was a baby, they were sent on a secret mission to retrieve stolen treasure taken by the queen’s jewel-keeper and his wife, who had raided the Palace Vault that they’d sworn to protect. My parents were lost at sea, but I’m going to find them one day.”

“You never knew them?” asked Aldwyn.

“No. Marianne did. Just a little, though.”

“I didn’t know my parents, either. At least you have your sister. I never had any family.”

“Well, you do now,” said Jack.

Jack’s hand reached down and stroked Aldwyn’s back. Aldwyn immediately cosied up to his touch. He never would have expected to feel such a strong kinship with a boy who’d been a total stranger a mere two sunrises ago.

“Good night, Aldwyn.”

“Night, Jack.”

Moments later, Jack’s breathing became heavy. The boy had fallen into a peaceful slumber.

Aldwyn tried to get comfortable, but unlike the first night, when he’d been too exhausted to care where he slept, tonight he simply couldn’t fall asleep with a roof over his head. He decided he needed a breath of fresh air and crept to the hallway. As he passed Dalton’s neighbouring room, he could see through the crack in the door that the boy was still awake, studying a scroll by candlelight.

Entering the living room, he spotted a window that had been left ajar and quickly made his way towards it, passing the hammocks strung up in front of the fireplace. The room was much darker now, since the lightning bugs had gone to sleep in their hive. Hopping up onto a large oak table, Aldwyn paused to look at a framed painting of what appeared to be Kalstaff in his younger years, accompanied by another man wearing a robe just like Kalstaff’s and a beautiful, imperial-looking woman in a long white dress. He recognised her as a younger Queen Loranella—there was a statue of her in front of Bridgetower’s courthouse that Aldwyn used to sleep beneath on hot summer afternoons. Each of them was joined by what had to be their familiars: Kalstaff’s bloodhound, the wizard’s turtle and the queen’s grey rabbit. Aldwyn continued along the table, past an enchanted quill that was busily copying Kalstaff’s lesson plans for the next day, before bounding out of the window.

He immediately looked for the fastest route to the roof and spotted an orange tree whose branches brushed up against the tiles atop the cottage. As Aldwyn walked swiftly across the yard, he noticed that one of the spell library’s windows was open. He didn’t think much of it until he saw Skylar exit with a small leather-bound book tucked under her wing. He ducked out of sight as Skylar pushed the window shut with her beak before flapping off into the woods. Aldwyn found her actions curious and decided to follow her.

He stepped quietly through the dense underbrush on the edge of the woods until he arrived at a clearing. Fallen leaves of orange and green carpeted the ground, and at the centre, Skylar was perched upon a tree stump, the borrowed—or was it stolen?—book open before her. Aldwyn hid in the darkness, peering through a narrow gap between two massive oaks. Skylar flipped the pages of the book with her wing, looking purposefully for a passage of interest. Then she seemed to have found it. Aldwyn watched with growing curiosity as she plucked the carcass of a large beetle from her shoulder satchel and placed it beside her on the stump. Her eyes sped across the page of the book and then her clawed foot dived back into the satchel, removing a clawful of silver powder. She sprinkled some onto the beetle’s carcass and read aloud from the tome.

“Mortis animatum!”

Aldwyn felt a chill tickle his ear, almost as if the air was whispering to him. Then, on the tree stump, the beetle’s legs began to twitch. Aldwyn was quite certain the beetle had been dead just moments ago, so how could it be moving now? Skylar looked like she expected something more to happen. When it didn’t, she buried her beak back into the spell book, and as she read, a gust of wind blew some of the leaves up off the ground, exposing what lay beneath them: a scattering of elk bones, left behind by forest-dwelling wolves. The same breeze sent the excess powder from the stump sprinkling down onto the gnawed skeletal remains. Skylar, still searching the text, failed to notice the bones of the great elk starting to reassemble themselves behind her. Aldwyn watched aghast and fascinated as the jigsaw puzzle of hooves and antlers pieced itself together, one cracked bone at a time. What kind of dark magic is Skylar dabbling in? Finally, she looked up, just in time to see the skeletal elk reborn. She seemed terrified and at the same time thrilled by what she had accidentally brought to life. Then the creature charged. Skylar instantly took to the air, as the reborn elk galloped blindly forwards. It was only then that Aldwyn realised that the creature was heading straight towards him. He braced himself as the skeleton collided with the trunk of the tree behind which he was hiding. When it hit, its bones shattered; rib cage, vertebrae and antlers split apart once more, dropping back down to the ground in a lifeless heap. Skylar, rather unbothered by it all, returned to the book and her beetle, but Aldwyn had no intention of sticking around to see what spell she would cast next. He high-tailed it out of there before he was spotted, thankful to still have his limbs intact.

Aldwyn ran for the cottage without looking back and leaped up the orange tree he had spotted earlier, effortlessly climbing up the bark and across the branch to the safety of the rooftop. Heart still beating, he sat himself down next to the weather vane, took a deep breath and peered out over the Aridifian Plains. Far, far away in the distance, he thought he could make out the light at the top of Bridgetower’s spired watchtower. As he stared, Aldwyn thought of what this night would have been like back home: sleeping with one eye open, his paw clutching the scraps of food he had scrounged that day, guarding against other alley strays who would attack him for even the smallest morsel of fish. It had been the only life he’d ever known, orphaned as a kitten, with no memories of his mother or father or what kind of alley cats they must have been. But here in Stone Runlet he would walk a very different path, one that was dangerous and unpredictable, but also filled with a sense of purpose, of something larger than himself.

Aldwyn’s eyes began to close. Both of them. So here he would stay. He would learn to be Jack’s familiar, magic skills or no magic skills. Familiar. How strange that word sounded in his head, when in fact there was nothing familiar about this world to him at all.

FIVE (#ulink_7d0f212c-6c22-5ae7-9c7b-83352a2e5325)

Walkabout (#ulink_7d0f212c-6c22-5ae7-9c7b-83352a2e5325)

“Aldwyn!” cried Jack. “Aldwyn, where are you?”