Laurence was already jumping ahead to the implications. “So if you want to accomplish something major using magic, you need to trick someone, or heal them. So you’re helpless without a patsy, or a sick person?”
“I wouldn’t say helpless. I spent years training to use these skills in lots of different situations. I can use Trickster magic to transform myself, even with nobody around. And if someone attacked me, I could ‘heal’ them so hard they’d feel it for a week.”
“Thanks for explaining.” Laurence ate the last corner of his blueberry pouch and then washed it down with the rest of the tea. He had a hundred more questions, but he wasn’t equipped to hear any more answers right now. He sank deeper into the broken upholstery of the couch. He would never, ever be able to pull his butt out of this sofa, he was just going to get dragged in deeper until he was swallowed, as if by a Venus Asstrap.
Every quadrant of Laurence’s soul was yelling for him to get the hell out of there before he lost more than his grandmother’s ring and his freedom of speech. But then he thought about the other promise he’d made the night before. The one he made of his own free will.
“I said I wouldn’t ever run away again,” Laurence said. “And I won’t.”
“Good.” Patricia let out a breath that sounded like she’d held it for ages. “More tea?”
“Sure.” Laurence found a marginally more comfortable arrangement on the couch, and Patricia handed him a fresh hot mug. They drank tea together in silence until Patricia’s roommates woke up and started giving Laurence the hairy eyeball.
22
PATRICIA HAD SPENT years wishing she could run away to learn real magic. Then one day, she turned herself into a bird, and a man came to take her to the witch academy. Dreams? Fulfilled.
Eltisley Maze had two separate campuses, and they were as different as a cloudless summer day and a blizzard. Eltisley Hall had grand stone buildings over six hundred years old, and nobody ever raised his or her voice there. Students at Eltisley walked single file along the gravel walkways, wearing blazers, ties, and shorts, with the school’s crest over their hearts (a bear and stag face-to-face, holding a flaming chalice between them). You addressed your teachers or upperclassmen as Sir or Miss and ate in Formal Hall in the Greater Building. The Maze, meanwhile, was a disorienting jumble of nine-faced buildings and looping walkways, where you could wear whatever you pleased. You could sleep all day, do drugs, play video games, do anything you fancied. Except that you would find yourself trapped in a room with no door (or toilet) for weeks, until you learned some crazy lesson. Or you would be tossed into a bottomless pit, or chased around for days by people with sticks. Or you would find yourself unable to stop tap-dancing. Or pieces of you might start falling off, one by one. Nobody told you anything in The Maze.
Once, Eltisley Hall and The Maze had been two separate schools, representing two styles of magic that were at odds, but now they were joined because magic had been united, at great cost. The passage between them was a sandy hedge-lined walkway that only opened at certain times.
Patricia would spend weeks mastering some delicate healing art at Eltisley Hall, and then they would send her back to The Maze and she would be so confused and tangled up in herself that she forgot all her fancy skills. She would solve some nonsense puzzle at The Maze and figure out how to do some clever trick, only to be sent back to Eltisley Hall, where they’d drum endless rules and formulae into her again, and she would lose the twisty shape she’d been holding in her mind.
This would have been enough to make her cry into her pillow every night at lights-out (at Eltisley) or impromptu naptime (at The Maze). But also, Patricia missed her parents, whom she hadn’t even said goodbye to. For all they knew, she was dead. Or living in some alley like an animal. She wanted to tell them she was okay, but she wouldn’t know how to explain. Not to mention, she’d left her cat, Berkley.
The Head Teacher at Eltisley Hall was a gentle old lady named Carmen Edelstein. She wore her silver hair in a dignified pageboy and always had an elegant silk wrap around her neck and shoulders. Carmen encouraged the students to come to her with any problems or questions, and Patricia soon found herself confiding in the old lady — but she learned the hard way that she must not mention her encounter with some sort of Tree Spirit a few years earlier. Magic was a practice and an art, not a spiritual belief system. You might have your own private spiritual experiences, just like any normal person — but believing you had a direct line to something great and ancient was the beginning of Aggrandizement.
“Trees do not talk to people,” said Carmen Edelstein, her usual cheer replaced by a worried scowl. “You had a hallucination, or someone was playing a trick. This is why it’s terrible that we get so many students so late, after they have already experimented on their own. Those bad habits can be a nightmare to unlearn.”
“It was probably a hallucination, sure.” Patricia squirmed in her stiff chair. “I remember I had eaten a lot of spicy food.”
The Head Teacher at The Maze was Kanot, whose face and voice changed every time you met him. Sometimes he was an elderly Sri Lankan man, sometimes a pygmy, sometimes a giant white man with a crazy neck-beard. Patricia soon learned to recognize Kanot by certain tells, like he way he rolled his shoulders or narrowed his left eye — if you failed to identify him or misidentified someone else as him, you would find yourself at the bottom of the deepest pit in The Maze (other than the bottomless one, that is). People said that if Kanot ever wore the same face twice, he would die. Whenever you met Kanot, he’d offer you a terrible bargain. Patricia did not try to tell Kanot about the Tree.
Patricia had no real friends at Eltisley Maze. She was friendly with a few of the other kids, including Taylor, who had messy mouse-brown hair and ungainly, twitchy arms and legs. But the main cliques at the school never found a place for Patricia, especially after it was clear that she kind of sucked at most of the school assignments. Nobody wanted to befriend someone who was both nerdy and bad at homework.
If you went out into the tree line near Eltisley Hall at a certain time in the late afternoon or after lights-out in the Eltisley dorm, you might have seen a teenage girl with dark brown hair and big wondering eyes looking up at the trees and saying, “Are you here? What’s your deal? Is Parliament in session?” And chattering to the birds, which just glanced at her and flew away.
You could never tell how long you would spend at either Eltisley Hall or The Maze — it could be days, weeks, or longer. At one point, Patricia spent seven months in The Maze, until she managed to hide from the teachers and the other students and they all spent a week looking for her. But instead of going back to Eltisley Hall, she was led out into a yellow-grass field, where Kanot himself ushered Patricia and some other students into a great wooden airship, which was whale-shaped except it had more fins, with an interior that was covered with rococo nuts and berries.
Today, Kanot was a heavyset bespectacled African-American man with a Tennessee accent and a bomber jacket. “Here’s the idea,” he said when they were already over the Alps somewhere. “We drop each one of you guys in a small town, someplace where you don’t speak the language. No money, no supplies. And you find a person who needs healing, someone hurting real bad, and you heal ’em. Without them knowing you were ever there. Then we come get you.” Kanot offered to let the students out of this assignment in exchange for letting him hide some stuff in their bones, but nobody went for it. So instead, he started shoving kids one by one out of the airship’s hatch, which looked like the doorway of a French chateau, a few hundred feet up. No parachute.