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Chapter Three: The Curse Jar - Part Four
Rowan
“How can you not like libraries?” Rowan asked Calla incredulously as they and Olive carried their ingredients in two large planting pots and one smaller glass jar for Olive.
“I just don’t,” the other girl said, with a shrug. “I guess I’m not much for reading anyway but, if I’m going to get a book, I’d just as soon buy.”
“But why?” He just didn’t understand it. “It’s free to borrow.”
“Well,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “what if I end up really liking that book? I find something I love and then have to give it back?”
“You can always buy a copy later,” he suggested. “Or just borrow it again.”
Again, the Aussie girl shrugged. “Call me possessive, but I just don’t like the idea of an unknowable amount of unknowable people touching my stuff.”
“Will we see Leander?” Olive asked, obviously bored with their argument.
“I assume so,” Rowan answered. Unless the boy disappeared again, leaving without so much as a word.
Which was, of course, assuming that the boy had even come back.
“You’re sure it’s even open?” Calla asked. “Didn’t you say Lenten locked it before?”
“I asked Flax about it this morning,” Rowan said, which wasn’t exactly true. In truth, it’d been Flax who — with a mocking, arrogant grin — had told him that the library was open again and that Leander had been looking for him, if he was interested.
Rowan was, as he had a few more books he wanted, so he’d ignored the odd Yank’s idea of an inside joke and gathered up Calla and Olive after breakfast.
Rowan stopped in front of the library’s large, oak door. He reached out to turn the latch, only half-sure that it would turn. He smiled with satisfaction and ushered the others through the door. “Hello?” he called out. “Leander? Are you here?”
There was a scurrying sound across the room.
“Leander?” Rowan headed toward the noise. “It’s Rowan. I was here before.” He kept his voice low and soft and soothing, much like he had with Poppy. “Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 8,” he reminded, thinking that the boy reminded him much of a skittish animal.
“In A minor,” a quiet murmur said behind him.
Rowan turned around with a smile, grateful the boy hadn’t run from him like Poppy had. “The first of two sonatas Mozart wrote in the minor key.”
The boy was standing — half-hiding behind a bookshelf — with his hands curled around the wood.
“Hello, Leander,” Rowan greeted with a slight bow of his head. “I hoped you’d be here.”
“Really?” the boy said, his wide, blinking eyes hopeful even as his voice still held hesitant reserve.
Wondering why the boy seemed so unsure, almost frightened, Rowan just nodded. “I was hoping you might be able to help us with a little project.”
“What kind of project?” the boy, little more than a voice in the shadows, asked.
“Magic,” Calla murmured in a low, insinuating tone before letting out a few long, ghoulish moans that made Olive giggle.
Rowan rolled his eyes at Calla. He knew that she thought this was all just one big joke — as if magic were just a fairytale and the spell with Mei was just a fluke. She didn’t understand, but she was willing to help, so he supposed that was something. At least, enough. “Why don’t you and Olive set everything for the potion up while Leander and I try to find a book to help with the translation?”
“Come on, Olive,” Calla said, waving the girl her way, “girls against the boys. I bet we can get set up before they find their dusty, old book.”
Smiling at the conspiring girls, Rowan turned toward Leander who still hid behind his books.
Studying the boy who blended in so well with the shadows, Rowan realized that he’d never really gotten a good look at Leander. Sheltered among his shelves, his form was only the faintest outline, making him seem insubstantial and spectral. Only the whites of his eyes, brilliant — almost luminous — in the darkness, were clearly visible.
Rowan reached out a hand to the boy, letting his voice settle into a smooth, soothing tone. “Why don’t you show me where the language section of the library is?”
“It won’t be there,” the boy told him as his head turned behind him.
Rowan looked at him puzzled. The dictionaries wouldn’t be in the language section. “Well,” he asked with a game shrug, “where would they be?”
Without a word, the boy turned and hurried off into the dimly lit aisle on quick, bare feet.
“Wait!” Rowan called.
“Odd kid.” Calla smirked while she measured out the lemon juice Olive was enthusiastically, if messily squeezing. “Better catch him.”
Frowning disapprovingly at Calla, Rowan turned to follow the other boy.
Leander wasn’t odd.
Okay, so he was a little unusual, more often than not mumbling to himself as he prowled through the labyrinthine library. All right, yes, Leander was perhaps a little different.
But then so was Rowan. As Widdershins, he’d been born undeniably different. And though he’d been all but completely sheltered at the castle, rarely leaving — only four times in his life, when he’d required hospitalization for injuries too severe to treat at home — he’d met enough people who hadn’t known him, hadn’t understood what he was, and had made him feel like a freak. They’d laughed when he tripped over bedpans or yelled when his bad luck spilled over onto them.
Being Widdershins didn’t make him odd and neither did Leander’s being… whatever it was that he was.
“Leander?” he called, hoping the boy hadn’t heard Calla or at least wasn’t offended. “Leander?”
“Odd,” he heard Leander quietly mutter to himself, “from the Old Norse oddi, meaning to have a sense of three.”
Rowan turned past some books on ancient Arabic numerical systems and saw him hunched near compilations of old Irish limericks.
“As in being one more than even. Extra. Spare. Outside. Odd man out.” Suddenly, Leander looked up at Rowan, stealing his breath with the intensity in his slate-colored eyes. “Odd.”
Slowly stepping closer, afraid to startle the skittish boy, Rowan moved to crouch on the wood plank floor next to Leander. He bent his head, trying to catch the boy’s gaze. “Calla shouldn’t have said that,” he apologized as Leander turned away from him and into the bookshelves. “I’m sorry.”
Not seeming to listen, the boy mumbled something to himself about the origins of the word sorry, but Rowan couldn’t quite make it out.
Not knowing what to do or say, Rowan sat down cross-legged on the floor. Turning, so they sat parallel to each other, both looking out down the long library aisle, Rowan said conversationally, “You know, I don’t think you’re odd.”
“A British study found that college-aged males lie, on average, six times a day,” Leander quoted, bitter distrust hardening his voice.
Rowan smiled at the way Leander’s puzzle-like mind worked. “I’m not lying,” he assured.
“But you’re laughing at me,” the boy stated in that same stiff, matter-of-fact tone.
“Not at you,” Rowan amended. He shrugged. “I just think you’re interesting.”
“Meaning odd.”
“Meaning interesting,” Rowan repeated.
The boy bit his unusually large lower lip thoughtfully.
Rowan gazed at him, thinking that interesting was a very good word for this boy. Everything about him seemed unusual, almost disjointed and disconnected. Even the look of him. He was a collage of features. With limbs too long for the body they branched from, he looked about seventeen or so — some awkward age existing between a boy and a man. His shoulders were incongruously wide, tapering down into thin, bony hips. He had a curly, wild mane of untamed hair. His gray eyes were wide and wide-set, taking up too much of his face. He was a chimera, a mix of features taken from a dozen different people and pieced together to make something that — if he wasn’t beautiful — was certainly interesting.
Rowan scooted closer to the boy, letting just the skin of his arm to brush the boy’s shoulder. “Do you think you can help me find something?”
The boy squirmed, making Rowan think that he was shrinking away from his touch, but instead he just wrapped his long arms around his knees seeming to snuggle deeper within himself. He nibbled his lip thoughtfully before he asked, “What do you want to find?”
“A dictionary,” Rowan answered. “A Gaelic-to-English one. My grandda taught me a lot of words from the Old Books we had in the castle — which had a Gaelic root, or Gaelic has its root in it; I’m not really sure — but I can’t quite make out everything in the books we found earlier. And I’m hoping we can context-clue our way through the trickier bits of the text. Do you think The Elysium might have one? It’d help if it was one from the sixteenth century.”
The boy nodded with pride as he turned to look at the magician. “The Elysium library has everything.” Pushing himself to his feet, he quickly sprinted off toward one of the library ladders in the corner of the room. “Come on,” he called over his shoulder, waving at the boy still seated on the floor. “This way.”
Rowan watched him push the ladder toward him before scuttling up it, his arms giving him the long-reach of some arboreal dweller.
“Oh,” he heard the boy moan woefully from high atop the ladder.
“What is it?” Rowan called up to him. “Did you find it?”
With a worried expression clear enough to see on his face from the distance between them, Leander said, “I found one, but it’s not from the sixteenth century.”
Rowan frowned. He sighed. “Well,” he said resignedly, “when was it written?”
“In 1607.”
Rowan narrowed his gaze, trying to determine if the boy was taking the piss, but the innocently worried look on his face told him Leander was serious.
“Is that okay?” the too-literal boy asked.
“Yeah,” Rowan assured with a little laugh, “it sounds fine.”
The boy smiled brilliantly. “Heads up,” the boy called out before he dropped a book down from one of the top shelves of a very tall case.
Instinctively, Rowan curled further into his corner and away from the hurtling object, knowing that it wouldn’t matter. He could be on the other side of the room and the book would find its way to him. Rowan, rather resignedly, watched the book tumble end over end down, striking the edge of a shelf only to careen toward him, trapped within the walls of texts.
“Ow,” he said with a wince as the book’s sharp corner bashed him in the temple, sending him to the floor again. “Ow,” he repeated just for good measure. He rubbed his sore bum that had landed less than softly on the hardwood.
He heard the old but sturdy wood shake when Leander scurried down the ladder, stammering only barely coherent apologies. Dropping the last five rungs to bound down crouched and sorry next to the fallen boy, Leander, with worry and regret clear in his shiny, stone-colored eyes, stated, “According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hospitals report approximately 300,000 mild to moderate brain injuries each year, with young men between sixteen and twenty-five representing the majority of cases.” His gaze narrowed at what Rowan would imagine was a fairly impressive-looking bump on his temple. “While there have been proportionally few deaths, swelling and increased intracranial pressure in the brain due to a concussion can prove potentially fatal. Symptoms can include headache, migraine, temporary memory loss, nausea—”
Cutting off the nervously rambling boy, Rowan shook his head only to still instantly, regretting the reckless movement. “I’m fine,” he told Leander, “I promise. It wasn’t your fault.” He rubbed his temple, the area still sore — he’d probably get a bruise there later. “If it’s anyone, I suppose the blame is mine.”
Leander, still biting his lips in consternation, looked at him questioningly.
“I’m what’s called Widdershins—”
“Widdershins,” the boy repeated, easy as an encyclopedia, “Gaelic term meaning to take a course counter to the apparent motion of the sun or, for the heliocentric culture, to move in a way opposite the norm. Often associated with bad luck and hardships.”
This time it was Rowan who eyed Leander with open curiosity.
“I read it in a book, so I looked it up,” the boy answered. Then he ran back up and down the ladder quick as a mouse. “I saw it in this one,” he said, handing Rowan another book.
Rowan took the soft leather-covered book from Leander, a feeling — so sharp it was almost painful — shooting up his arm.
It wasn’t a book.
Not exactly.
It looked like a diary. A familiar one.
Opening the cover with shaking, reverent hands, Rowan gasped when he saw the familiar print.
It was his Aunt Gilly’s large, looping hand. The first eighty or so pages were filled with gardening tips and notes, recipes, and the everyday of her life.
But then the pages changed. Her handwriting, that’d been so easygoing and free flowing, had become tight and tense, cramped together as if confined.
He read the date on the page. A week after the Midsummer. Rowan read with shock and hurt and a mad mix of relief while his aunt described Paddy’s funeral and the chaotic days that had followed his death and Rowan’s disappearance. He read about his mother’s worry. About his father’s furious fits of helpless fear. He quickly skimmed the pages, learning how Gilly’s son Jack and Rowan’s brothers had gone out to look for him, covering every inch of the forest, the neighboring towns, everywhere in a three-town radius. But, of course, they’d found nothing, not even the slightest clue as to his whereabouts.
With panicked breath, Rowan read about the attacks attempted on the castle since he’d left. The fire that destroyed Willow’s room, that left his sister in hysterical tears while she watched all her art — drawings, paintings, and sculptures — that she’d been making all her life burn. The rocks thrown through the library’s stained glass windows one day when Whalen had been reading, striking him in the face, breaking his nose before knocking him unconscious.
He read about the taunts and threats that followed them all whenever they ventured out of the castle, forcing them to huddle together in their keep and away from the danger outside.
And all this, we could handle — as we are Drurys and we are strong. But to have lost Paddy. To have lost Rowan. To have Paddy taken so violently and to be left wondering what happened to Rowan, if they wanted to torture us, to inflict the harshest of pain, they succeeded too well.
“That’s you,” Leander, reading over his shoulder, said as if he’d just made the connection. “Rowan Drury,” he repeated as if testing the words. “Rowan. Drury.” Then he turned abruptly to face Rowan. “They miss you.”
Rowan nodded. “That’s why I have to get back.”
“Back?” the boy asked, his voice suddenly both shocked and scared.
“Yes,” Rowan replied, “I have to get back home so I can help them.”
Snatching the book back from Rowan’s grasp, Leander looked at the other boy with horror in his shining, gray eyes. “Can’t go back.” He shook his head, the wildly spiraled mass of his hair like a storm cloud over his head.
“Leander?” Rowan cried out as the boy — quicker than silver — shot away from him and half-way up the ladder.
Hanging from his perch, Leander leaned off the side of the ladder. “Page one-oh-seven, paragraph six, sentence two,” he said before he began to recite Aunt Gilly’s words from memory, “ ‘In the era of science and technology, the Burning Times are back. They — whoever they are — are targeting us one by one. First Paddy. Then Rowan. They’ll keep coming after us until we’re all gone, another dead culture wiped from this world.’ ” Pouting, he said firmly, “See, can’t go back. Can’t leave. You’re safe here in The Elysium. There is salvation in The Elysium.”
Rowan studied the boy, curious about his strange, emphatic reaction. After a long pause, Rowan asked quietly, “Is that why you stay? For salvation? You need someone to save you?”
Leander looked away sharply and shrugged stiffly. “Everyone needs saving.”
Rowan looked at him and wondered what the long-limbed climber needed to be saved from. That he did, Rowan didn’t doubt. He could read the fear and worry in the boy’s eyes. He was afraid. For himself. And for Rowan.
The boy was going to be trouble. Rowan could feel it. He couldn’t afford such a distraction, worrying about whether and what the boy was frightened of. He couldn’t afford to get involved. He ought to just walk away.
Rowan sighed and studied Leander. His large lips — thick, in an almost unnatural yet almost intriguing way — quivered as he squirmed under the intense attention. His skin, so smooth over his lithe form, shone like glassy agate in the sunlight that spilled in through the tall library windows that stretched high over the bookshelves. The gleam flashed as he moved in and out of the shifting shadows. His wide shoulders bunched together tensely as he clutched Rowan’s aunt’s journal to his chest, his thin but strong arms wrapping around the book.
Yes, the boy was a roadblock, Rowan would not — could not — allow himself. About to turn to leave, Rowan stopped when something caught his eye. “Your necklace,” Rowan said, surprise in his voice
One of the boy’s long-fingered hands touched the pointed rock dangling from a braided leather cord around his neck. Looking down, he grasped the small stone. “Arrowhead.” In a tone as surprised as Rowan’s, he added, “Small, triangular stone, sharpened to form at least one pointed tip. Usually attached to the shafts of arrows or long staffs to form weapons for protection and food.”
Rowan studied the rough, pointed, three-sided stone still held between the tough pads of the boy’s fingers. He sighed. Sacred stones. A sign — like the one that had pointed him to The Elysium. Rowan wondered what it said. “Yes,” he agreed slowly, hoping the ominous rock knew what it was talking about, “everyone needs saving.” He looked the cowering climber over and tried to see in him what Fate did. “My family needs to be saved too,” he told the boy, who — obviously — was so much more than he appeared. “And I need to get back so I can help.” He pursed his lips before looking into the boy’s conflicted, granite gaze, “And to do that, I need you. Will you help me?”
He watched Leander look down at the floor, his shoulders slumped and his brows furrowed. For a long moment, Rowan honestly worried that the boy would run off, his aunt’s journal tucked under his arm protectively. He let out a relieved sigh when the boy slowly made his way on leaden, bare feet. Never meeting his gaze, he held the book out to Rowan.
Grateful for the gesture, Rowan took Aunt Gilly’s diary. “Thank you, Leander. I really appreciate it.”
“Fortieth century, Novitis-Romanuis philosopher Richard Whent said in his paper on religion in a godless world, ‘Sollaus dex profondia ascenddia salviena,’ ” he replied, still not looking up at Rowan.
“Which means?”
Leander looked up, his slanted, slate eyes hard with warning, “ ‘Only from the deepest depths of despair comes salvation.’ ”
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