Spell Hunter fr-1 Read online

  Knife rubbed her temples, trying to silence her nagging headache. Just a few more pages, she told herself…I had thought at first that she would be pleased with my good fortune, but her own sad experience Outside (of which I still know little) had filled her with misgivings, and she all but pleaded with me not to go. “You are already skilled at your craft,” she said, “and have no need to learn another. Why venture among the humans, when you might serve the Oak as well by remaining here?” and with many other such flattering words she sought to persuade me. She spoke earnestly, and I knew that her concern for my welfare was sincere; yet to follow such counsel would be madness, and I fear I was quite short with her in making my excuses. Since then she has been cool toward me, and it seems that our friendship, such as it was, has come to an end. As has this, the first of what I hope shall be many diaries; I shall leave it behind with the other relics of my life in the Oak, and begin a new volume when I reach my destination. Till then, dear reader, farewell!

  That’s all? thought Knife in disbelief as she turned the final page and found it empty. Heather had spent months taking lessons on every aspect of human life imaginable. She’d written freely about the struggles of learning to pass herself off as human, and how anxious she was to succeed. All that work, all that anticipation, until finally she was ready to go out into the human world-and yet she hadn’t even explained what the Queen wanted her to do there, or why it was so important!

  On the other hand, it didn’t seem as though Heather was deliberately trying to hide the truth about her mission; it was more like she’d assumed her readers already knew the answer, so there was no need to tell them. Knife closed the book and propped her chin on her hand, thinking. What had she read elsewhere in the diary that might help her understand why Heather had to leave the Oak?

  Then she remembered Jasmine’s words: You are already skilled at your craft, and have no need to learn another…

  So Heather was going out to learn a new skill. Something she couldn’t learn by staying in the Oak…

  Galvanized by a new idea, Knife snatched up her notes and began leafing through them for confirmation. What if the Oakenfolk hadn’t lost their creativity along with their magic, as she had assumed? What if they’d never been creative to begin with, and all their inspiration had come from the human world they called Outside?

  Of course! Knife had seen for herself that humans were gifted with amazing powers of invention. They always seemed to be moving forward, discovering new things-unlike the Oak, where everything stayed the same, or even went backward if the faeries weren’t careful. So that must be why the Oakenfolk had needed people like Heather, willing to go out and learn new skills and ideas from the humans, and bring that information back to the Oak.

  And yet, Knife realized as her excitement began to subside, the theory didn’t explain everything. Why had Heather said that her mission might take years to complete? Why had Jasmine’s return to the Oak caused such a scandal, even though she’d learned how to draw while she was away and was willing to share her knowledge with the others?

  I need to find the rest of Heather’s diaries, thought Knife as she slid the book under her mattress and lay down. But where do I start, when I don’t even know who gave me this one?

  “Wake up, you lazy-” Mallow’s heavy fist pounded on Knife’s door. “Do you hear me? Get up at once!”

  Knife rolled over, groaning, and winced as the morning light struck her face. How long had she been asleep? All she knew was that it hadn’t been nearly long enough. “All right, I’m coming,” she mumbled as she dragged herself out of bed.

  Mallow stood on the landing, arms folded and legs braced wide. “Do you know how late it is? While you’ve been lolling about, the rest of us are starving-or soon will be, if you don’t get yourself downstairs and do your duty!”

  “Downstairs?” Knife regarded her blearily. “What for?”

  “To guard the Gatherers, of course! After what happened to Linden, they won’t set foot out of the Oak without you, and they’ve been waiting since dawn-so you’d best hurry up, or I’ll report you to Her Majesty!”

  That was the beginning of a long and unpleasant day. Exhausted as she was, Knife soon found that her weakened wings slowed her down even more. It was a struggle just leading the Gatherers across the field, and they had barely reached the wood when she had to sit down and rest. After a little while she mustered enough strength to try hunting, but her hands shook on the bow, and she wasted several arrows before bringing down her only prey of the morning-a scrawny young robin.

  “A fine catch,” sneered Mallow when Knife brought the half-plucked carcass to the kitchen. “And I see you haven’t wasted any of your precious time dressing it either. Well, my proud lady, you’d best take out that fancy knife of yours and finish what you started, because it’s certainly not my business to do your work for you!”

  Knife had no strength to argue, much less obey. Without a word she walked out, knowing that the other workers would be perfectly willing to clean and cut up the robin even if Mallow was not. But the Chief Cook had no intention of letting Knife escape so easily. She followed her all the way down the corridor and up the Spiral Stair, cursing her laziness and incompetence in tones loud enough to be heard all over the Oak. Not until they were nearly at Knife’s door did she run out of insults and huff back down to the kitchen again.

  When she had gone Knife stopped and leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. It would have been so easy to turn around and hit Mallow right in her smug face-but what good would that have done?

  She tried to take another step, but her legs wobbled, and she had to sit down.

  “Knife.”

  She turned to see Valerian standing a couple of stairs above her, holding out a hand. Too tired to protest, she took it and let the Healer pull her to her feet.

  “You need to rest,” said Valerian, and then to Knife’s surprise she added, “If Mallow should bring her complaint to the Queen, I will intercede for you.”

  “It’s not your quarrel,” said Knife.

  “No, but neither is it yours, for all that Mallow tries to make it so.” Valerian walked with her up the last few stairs and around the curve of the landing, until they stopped at Knife’s own door. “She will never be content until you are as unhappy as she is.”

  “Unhappy! She’s in her glory down there in the kitchen, ordering everyone about, making them all frightened of her. Why should she care about me?”

  “She hates you,” said Valerian calmly, “because you make her feel unimportant. Though she could force your obedience, she could never bully you into fearing her. You have a strength and a confidence that she lacks, and though deep down she knows you have done nothing to deserve her hatred, that only makes her hate you all the more.”

  Knife frowned at the older faery. She could sense truth in what Valerian was saying-but how did the Healer know? She had never heard anyone in the Oak talk like this before, explaining someone else’s thoughts and feelings. If she hadn’t known it was impossible, she might have thought Valerian had been spending time with the humans.

  “Go and rest,” said Valerian. “I should not have told the Queen you were fit to return to duty. You are far more weary than I thought.”

  Knife felt a prick of guilt-she would have been well enough if she hadn’t stayed up all night. But how could she explain that to Valerian without telling her about Heather’s diary? So she gave the Healer a subdued nod, then went into her room, fell on her cot, and within moments was deeply asleep.

  Late in the afternoon she woke again, her stomach snarling with hunger; but when she arrived at the Dining Hall, she received only glares and a plate of limp greens. Furious all over again, Knife stalked back up the Stair to her room, wolfed down a handful of dried berries, and sat by the window, chewing.

  I should have stayed in the House, she thought mutinously. It would serve them all right if I left the Oak this minute, and never brought them so much as a road-flattened hedgehog
again.

  Swallowing her meager supper, she spread her notes across the table and began to review them-but it was no use. In the fevered concentration of last night her jottings had made perfect sense, but now she could barely read her own handwriting, let alone recall what all those hasty abbreviations meant.

  Sighing, Knife pulled over a fresh page and let her charcoal pencil wander across it. It was no use being angry at Mallow: If Valerian was right, there was nothing Knife could do to change her mind, anyway. But she could at least prove that she had not forgotten her duty.

  Her wrist relaxed and her fingers moved of their own accord, sending black lines looping across the paper. She’d get up early tomorrow, before anyone else, and hunt until she’d found some prey worth having. It wouldn’t take much, if she were lucky: all she really needed was one good-sized…

  Knife bolted upright, staring at the page. Instead of random scribbles, the lines she had drawn formed a single, coherent shape: the plump body and upraised listening ears of a rabbit.

  No, it couldn’t be. She must have imagined it. She snatched up her drawing and held it closer to the light. But however she turned the paper, it still looked like a rabbit. With no magic, no training, and hardly any effort, she had done what no faery had done for over a century: She had created art.

  Unthinkable, impossible-yet it was real, it was hers. With almost reverent care, Knife laid the drawing aside, then grabbed another sheet and bent over it, scratching furiously. Please the Gardener it hadn’t just been an accident!

  When she straightened up again Old Wormwood glared back at her from the page, wings spread and claws outstretched to strike. Not a crude likeness this time but an exact one, right down to the mad glint in his eyes; it made her wing ache to look at it.

  Instinct told her that the drawing was good, even brilliant. Yet part of her still refused to accept that this talent could be real. She needed a second opinion-but whom could she trust with a secret as enormous as this?

  There was only one answer to that, and she knew it without thinking: Paul.

  By the time it was dark enough to leave the Oak, Knife was fidgeting with impatience. She rolled up the picture of Old Wormwood and slipped it down the bodice of her tunic, then climbed through the window and launched herself headlong into the night.

  She had to rap at Paul’s window several times before he answered. “I knew something was out there,” he said as he slid it open. “But I didn’t think you’d be back so soon-come in, quick.”

  Knife ducked under the window and sat down on the inside of the sill. “I have something to show you. I need to know what you think,” she said, and she pulled the drawing out and gave it to him.

  Paul squinted at it. “It’s too small. Just a minute.” He rolled to his desk, rummaged through the drawer, and returned with a large round lens, which he held up between himself and the page. “It’s…a crow,” he said blankly.

  “Is it good?” asked Knife, her heart skittering. “I mean, it isn’t just a sort of crow-shaped scribble?”

  “It’s very good,” Paul confirmed in distracted tones, his lens hovering over the sketch. “What is it, charcoal? The stick must have been tiny-” He lowered the glass to stare at her. “You mean you did this?”

  Knife nodded.

  “I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me you were an artist?”

  “Because I’m not,” she said. “Or at least, I wasn’t, until…” Until I met you.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Paul said impatiently. “You must have had training, or at least plenty of practice. Nobody develops this kind of eye for detail overnight.”

  “I know,” said Knife. “That’s why I didn’t think it could really be any good-but if it is, then…”

  Then perhaps the Oakenfolk of Heather’s day hadn’t just borrowed creative ideas from the humans they met Outside; they’d absorbed their creative abilities as well. I have gained some little skill as an artist, Jasmine had told Heather, since I went away…

  “I don’t understand,” Paul said.

  Knife hesitated, wondering how much to tell him. Then she got to her feet and jumped off the sill, landing lightly on the end of Paul’s bed. She walked up to the pillow and sat down, tucking her feet beneath her.

  “What are you doing?” asked Paul.

  “Making myself comfortable,” she said. “Do you have anything to eat? Because I think this story is going to take a while.”

  “I had no idea,” said Paul slowly, when she was done. “I knew something must have gone wrong when you said you couldn’t do magic, but this…”

  Knife swallowed her last bite of biscuit, brushing the crumbs from her fingers. “I know,” she said. “It’s big.”

  She had said little about the Oakenfolk’s past connection to the human world; she was still trying to understand that aspect of the problem herself. But she had told him about the Sundering, how their population had dwindled and their culture decayed rapidly in its wake; and finally she had explained about her people’s lack of creativity, and why she had been so surprised to find herself able to draw.

  “And now you’re trying to find out how this Sundering thing happened?” said Paul. “So then you’ll know how to get your magic back-and maybe your art, too?”

  “That’s part of it,” she said. “I have a lot more questions, but I have a feeling they’re all connected somehow.”

  Paul drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, his gaze abstracted. “What about your Queen?” he asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Well, she must know about your people’s past-she lived through it, after all. Why isn’t she telling you what you need to know?”

  “I’ve wondered about that myself.”

  “Stop me if I’m going too far,” said Paul, “but it’s pretty strange that she was the only one who wasn’t in the Oak when the Sundering happened. Do you think she might be the one who did it?”

  “I…don’t know what to think,” said Knife. “In some ways it makes sense, but in others, it doesn’t. She might have become Queen that way, but what did she really gain? There are so few of us now, and we have so little.”

  “Hmm,” said Paul.

  Knife jumped up from the bed and brushed at her skin waistcoat and breeches, dusting off the last remnants of biscuit. “I should go. It’s late. No, keep it,” she said as Paul offered her back her picture. “I’ve got no use for it, anyway. But I am grateful-”

  “I’ve noticed,” Paul interrupted, “you never say ‘thank you.’”

  She tensed. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it means something to us that it doesn’t to you. We don’t say it lightly.” Or ever.

  He gave her a quizzical look. “So…what does it mean to you, then?”

  Knife tilted her head back, searching for words. “It means,” she said, “that the one you… thank…has done something so enormous for you that you could never begin to repay them. And that no matter how long you live, you’ll always be in their debt.”

  “Can you give me an example? Do you know anyone who-”

  “Not in my lifetime. It’s that rare.”

  Paul’s brows rose. “No wonder you don’t like to hear me say it,” he said. “All right, then: I’m grateful you stopped by tonight. Is that better?”

  “Much,” said Knife.

  With Heather’s diary finished and nothing more to read, Knife found herself increasingly restless. She could not resist the urge to draw, and night by night the pile of sketches hidden beneath her mattress grew. But what was the use of making art that no one but herself would ever see?

  The faery in her warned that she must not take advantage of Paul’s generosity, or she would end up indebted to him again. Besides, he had begun speaking to his parents now, so he might not even need to talk to her anymore. But when for the next three nights Paul’s room remained lit long after the rest of the House had gone dark, it was too clear an invitation for Knife to refuse. Soon
she was tapping on his window again.

  On her first few visits she was all business, showing him her latest drawings and asking his advice. But eventually she dropped even that pretense and came by simply to see him. By the time the Oak’s leaves turned to autumn gold, she was visiting the House every night.

  Now at last she understood why humans liked to talk to each other so much, for even if Paul could not solve her difficulties, it eased her spirit just to tell him about them. He seemed fascinated by her accounts of daily life in the Oak, even finding humor in people and situations that Knife found merely exasperating. Before long it was all she could do not to smile at Mallow’s blustering or Bluebell’s fussy ways, just imagining how funny Paul would think them.

  Meanwhile Paul himself seemed to be growing healthier, and taking more interest in the world around him. He had even pulled out his box of art supplies and begun painting. His days were mostly spent on schoolwork, and mealtimes with his parents; but the evenings he kept for art-and Knife.

  She had never felt so content, and yet deep down she knew that this happiness could never last. More than once when leaving the Oak at night she had the crawling sensation of being watched, and she knew that if she kept on seeing Paul this way, it would only be a matter of time before she was caught.

  The wisest thing would be to stop visiting the House, at least for a while. She had managed by herself before; surely she could do so again. But staying away from Paul proved harder than she had expected. Her research into the Oakenfolk’s past had come to a standstill; there was no sign of Old Wormwood and little else worth hunting; and Mallow’s latest amusement was to ruin Knife’s meals whenever she could, giving her the stalest knobs of bread and lacing her stew with bits of bone and gristle. Knife tried to take all these frustrations calmly, but it was not long before she felt she would burst if she didn’t talk to someone -so she went winging off to Paul again.