The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon (best books for students to read .TXT) 📗

El looked hurt. “I might know something. Just a little bit.”

“It’s nothing personal.”

At first Pip liked the oldest witch, Missus Clay. Her spine was so bent that she seemed even smaller than she really was, but her smile had genuine warmth. A man called Helios also seemed friendly. Everyone else was . . . not exactly rude, but not exactly welcoming, either. He could see the glances they cast at him when they thought he wasn’t looking.

There was a lot of talk about different types of spells and magic, which began to bore him, and his mind drifted off. He had a slight headache, which was gradually getting worse, but mostly he was worried that Clovis might start panicking. The last thing they needed was for Clovis to cause another Rupture.

The first request the witches had made was that he show them the Heart. He had taken it out of his pocket and slowly placed it in the middle of the table. All the witches stared at it as if he had put a scorpion in front of them. Amiable hissed.

“It doesn’t look like anything, does it?” Oni said to break the silence.

“An evil thing,” said Juin in a hollow voice. “An evil, evil thing.”

Pip had an overwhelming feeling that he ought to defend the Heart. “It’s not its fault,” he objected.

“One of us destroyed herself to make this,” said Potier. He was looking very somber.

“And Clovis,” said Pip. “She destroyed Clovis, too. She cut out his heart while he was still alive.”

Helios blinked. “That can’t be true,” he said. “No witch would do that.”

“It is true,” said Pip. “I saw it.” His jaw jutted out belligerently as he stared at the witches around the table.

“That’s . . . that’s terrible,” said Potier. He sounded shocked.

“We all heard her,” said Missus Clay harshly. “‘I have done a dark thing, in a time of terrible darkness.’”

All the witches stared down at their hands, as if they were ashamed.

“He was just a vessel for the Specters,” said Amiable. “And who cares what happens to royals, anyway?”

“Amiable, be quiet,” said Potier.

“Now is not the time to argue,” said Missus Clay. “Yes, Old Missus Pledge did an awful thing, but the good and the bad of it doesn’t concern us here.” She looked at the Heart, her expression unreadable, and then looked away. “What we have to decide now is what to do about it.”

The witches then cross-examined Pip about the casket. They were particularly interested in how he had taken out the Heart.

“I just opened it,” said Pip. “It was a bit tricky —”

“A bit tricky?” said Amiable. “It was spell-shut by one of our best witches!”

“Nobody could have opened that casket without a counterspell,” said Missus Clay.

Now everyone was looking at him suspiciously. Pip flushed. “I don’t know about that,” he said, shrugging. “I just opened it.”

“Maybe the spell was about keeping the Heart in, rather than keeping anybody out,” said Missus Clay.

“Maybe there wasn’t a spell at all. I just told you what I did. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”

“How do we know that he’s not with the Specters?” said Juin. “We don’t know anything about him.”

Pip flushed with anger and opened his mouth to argue.

“He just asked the box nicely,” said El, before he could say anything. “And then it opened up for him.” There was a short, skeptical silence.

Amina gave Pip a warning look, then turned to Juin. “That’s a ridiculous suggestion,” she said. “I’ve known this boy for years.”

“We have to destroy it,” said Amiable. “And with it, everything the Specters are.”

“But we can’t,” said Missus Clay patiently. “Destroying the Heart would have no effect on the Specters, and it could open a Rupture that swallows everything.”

“We have to get the casket back and return the Heart to it,” said Amina. “It will be in the Office for Witchcraft Extermination, most likely. Though there’s a tiny chance that it might still be at Olibrandis’s shop.”

No, said Clovis. No, no, no . . . And he started to cry.

Pip’s mind flooded with fear and sorrow. He felt, as sharply as if he had been punched in the stomach, the desolation of the imprisonment that Clovis had suffered for years, trapped inside Old Missus Pledge’s spell.

“Someone should check the shop. What does it look like?” Helios turned to Pip.

Pip, struggling with Clovis’s despair, didn’t respond at first.

“Pip?” said Amina. “What does the casket look like?”

He started. “I can’t remember,” he said.

“Yes, you do, Pip,” said El. “It was silver, with a red dragon on it, and purple stones. It was very pretty. About so big.” She measured out a space with her hands.

Pip glared at her. He could feel Clovis trembling, like a small animal crouched inside a burrow hearing a predator scratch at the entrance. The prince’s fear was like a heart beating inside Pip’s own heart.

He was beginning to realize that the witches were more afraid of Clovis than sorry for him. Amina had said, when she first told them about the Specters, that what happened to Clovis wasn’t his fault, but even she was ready to punish him with the cruelest thing in the world. Worse, most of the witches were looking at Pip with horror and pity in their eyes, as if Pip himself were part monster.

This led to an even more uncomfortable thought. Pip was pretty sure the Heart had been an empty shell since the night before. It wasn’t changing temperature anymore, and there was no responsive pulse when he touched it. As he had told Oni, it was just an ordinary unliving thing. He thought now that Clovis wasn’t just talking inside his head: maybe, after Pip broke Old Missus Pledge’s binding spell, Clovis could move wherever he liked. And perhaps he had moved and now lived inside Pip.

Which sounded a lot like what Specters did, except that Pip didn’t think that Clovis was trying to eat his soul. He was just there, kind of being a nuisance.

If the witches