Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Good…GRAVY,” Dunder hissed. “Ms. Wright, that might be the best, most effective firebolt spell I’ve ever seen! Scratch that, that I’ve ever heard! It was so hot that the flame was invisible until impact! How the devil did you do that?”

“Old family trick,” Isis said.

“T-teach me how to do that, please,” Zachary muttered as his turn came. Isis pretended not to hear him as she moved to the back of the line.

Gorfin, the brownie who had been placing the balloons, appeared alongside her after placing the last one for Mr. Zachary. “Filled her with hydrogen, just like you said,” he whispered. “Almost worth it just to see old Dunder jump, but Ari said there’d be something in it for me.”

Isis pulled out a gold coin–one of her very last-and gave it to him. “Hopefully I only have to do this once,” she said.

“And how did you do it, lass?” Gorfin said. “Was real enough to set your sleeve on fire, at least.”

With a quick look around–everyone was watching Zachary flail about with tiny sparks, trying and failing to hit the balloon–Isis pulled back her sleeve. Rather than her dead yew wand, she had a small pistol in her hand, still smoking from the muzzle. The five other rounds of incendiary tracer .32 ACP that she’d loaded were still visible, their blue noses nestled in the cylinders.

“You’d think they’d have noticed,” Gorfin said. “These rich kids strike me as the kind who go duck hunting.”

“People see what they want to see,” said Isis with a shrug and a smile.

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“Come on, now,” Mr. Dunder said. “It’s the basis for all offensive spells. If you can’t master this, you can’t master any of them.”

Isis seemed to shrink into her robe.

“When I said she wasn’t very hot,” someone whispered behind her, “I didn’t think I was this right.”

Another: “Can she…can she not do it? I’ve been casting fireballs since kindergarten.”

“Okay then,” Dunder said. “Step aside, Ms. Wright. See me after class.”

“Mr. Dunder!” Isis barked. “Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did,” he sighed. “But yes, what is it?”

“I would rather you not see the wand motion I do for this. Can I cast the spell from my sleeve?”

“I…what?” Dunder said. “I mean, technically, yes, but why would you want to-”

A bright, sharp crack followed, and the balloon was vaporized in a puff of violent flame even as the students instinctively ducked and covered their ears. The reaction was so intense that one of Isis’s sleeves caught on fire, and she hurriedly patted it down before turning around and beaming, her academic robe still smoldering in the sunlight.

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“The deal was that you fudge the records to get me in, and help me in my search,” Isis replied. “I haven’t seen much help, now have I?”

“Ha!” Ari laughed. “Listen to you, negotiating like you’re Cyrus Ember himself with a wandworks to run. Haven’t helped you? You’re here, aren’t you? Hasn’t my girl in the records office fudged it up right and proper? Didn’t my friend in the principal’s office play along with your little crow earlier? And aren’t I here, now, not turning you over to that same Mr. Ember for infiltrating his precious exclusive little school with malice aforethought?”

Isis bit her lip. “I guess you’re right,” she muttered. “But I could use more help.”

“Aye, couldn’t we all?” said Ari. “But if Ember or Maxine or any one of them suspects I’m aiding you, I’ll be out of a job and perhaps banished from the material plane. You’re already asking a lot, and it’s gonna cost you to get more.”

Isis pulled out the gold coin and gave it to Air. “Here,” she said. “This should tide you over until you get your real payment.”

The brownie bit the coin, nodded, and tucked it into a fold of his vest. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“But when the actual gold comes, you owe me an extra favor. As you said, extra pay for extra work.”

“Did I, now?” said Ari. “Well, we’ll see about that when the payment actually gets here.”

“But we’re good for now?” said Isis.

“Yeah,” Ari said, after a pause. “We’re good for now. You’re lucky the idea of pulling a fast one on those stuffed-shirt slavedrivers is so hilarious.”

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“Begging your pardon,” the brownie said. He fluttered into the room on a veined rainbow of insectoid wings before alighting in front of Isis. “I require a moment of Ms. Wright’s time.”

Isis stared at him, the hair on her neck prickling. “Is it…important?” she asked.

“A mere trifle, a matter of laundry. It seems one of your shirts was damaged in the wash and I’ll need to arrange a replacement.” Ari’s eyes, however, told a different story. Intense and focused, they broadcast that this was VERY important, and that Isis needed to drop what she was doing and come NOW.

“Excuse me please,” she said, following Ari out.

“Of course. Remember, they owe you a better shirt than the one they ruined, and it comes out of their own pay!”

Once Ari had led Isis to the small–and at this hour, deserted–laundry that was part of the dormitory, he rounded on her with all his prior affect of meekness dropped away.

“Your payment,” he said, “is late.”

Isis took out her smartphone, and checked the balance in her banking app. It was still healthy, though not nearly as healthy as it had been when Isaac had left her everything he owned, and there was a pending transfer in the amount of Ari’s weekly bribe. She held it out as proof. “No it’s not, see?”

Ari batted the phone aside. “The check may be in the mail, but the rent is due now,” he said. “We agreed that the payment was to be in gold, Wright. I ought to have leprechauns sniffing around, yet there’s not one to be seen.”

“Look,” Isis said. “It takes time to convert the money into gold, if you’ll just be patient…”

“Patient!” Ari spat on the floor. “Girl, I am patient every moment of every day as these magical dullards born with a silver foot in their mouth dance around and order me to plumb their toilets. I’ve got none left to spare for you unless you make it worth my while.”

Isis reached into her pocket, where the reassuring weight of a gold coin waited, patiently, for an emergency. She had only a handful, and didn’t want to waste them.

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“What in the world…!” Ember rose from his seat and strode toward the source of the disturbance. Throwing the door wide, he was confronted with a whirl of feathers and fierceness.

Isis leapt into action. She grabbed for the handles of the file cabinets behind the principal’s desk, only to find that they were all locked. The cabinets on the other side of the room were as well, and the keys were visibly bouncing on a chain attached to Ember’s belt as he tried to calm the raging, distracting, Rowan.

Frantcially, Isis looked through the principal’s desk. Every drawer was locked, so shw pawed through the papers atop it, looking for anything she could find. A pair of publications–the “Wickerby, Driftwood, and Ember Company Directory” for the current and previous year–caught her eye. She swept it, and as many papers as she thought might not be missed, into her bookbag before carefully rearranging the desk to look as messy as it had earlier before dropping back into her seat.

A moment later, Ember reappeared, his wand aimed squarely at Rowan, who was suspended in the air stuck in a rather comical position, wings spread and talons out.

“Your familiar, Ms. Wright?” he said.

“Oh no! How dare you cause trouble for the principal! Bad crow!” Isis said. “I’m so sorry, sir, I really am. I will see to it he is disciplined, sir.”

Ember flicked his wrist, releasing the bird. After another moment of squawking, he fluttered over and perched on Isis’s outstretched arm.

“That thing is as mean as a summer day is long,” said Ember. “Have you thought about trading him in? We offer very affordable familiar rental plans.”

“Oh no, I have to keep him,” Isis said. “Old family tradition.”

“Yes, well, I understand. My grandfather was quite adamant I come to Magnolian with his old badger as a familiar. Thing was angrier than an atheist in a cathedral and about as useless, but luckily it died just before I started.”

“Am I free to go, sir?” Isis said.

“Oh? Yes, go back to study hall, then. And please let my office know if you remember any additional advanced magic you might have picked up. For your own sake.”

After getting a poisonous look from the brownie secretary, still trying to set her office back in order after a crow attack, Isis was back outside in the hallway.

“Did you get into his files?” Rowan asked. “Do I get extra peanuts if you did?”

“No, all the good stuff was locked up. I did swipe some stuff from his desk, though. I’ll look it over later in the dorm.”

“That doesn’t sound like quite the peanut-granting jackpot I hoped it would be.”

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A moment later, Isis pushed open the door reading “CYRUS EMBER – PRINCIPAL” and smiled at the secretary there.

“The principal wanted to see me?” she said.

The secretary was a brownie, one of the small fae creatues that were used by the faculty and students of Magnolian for any labor that had to be both menial and magical, and she sat at a half-scale desk with her iridescent wings occasionally fluttering behind her.

“Yes, you’re expected,” she said. “Go right in, but leave your familiar.”

“Cause a distraction in about five minutes, and there’s more peanuts in it for you,” Isis told Rowan.

“How much of a distraction are we talking, and how many peanuts?”

“Big enough to get the principal out here but not enough to get us expelled,” Isis replied. “I want to look at his files.”

“You got it,” Rowan told her. “Assuming you can meet my rate of peanuts per chaos,”

The bird hopped off Isis’s arm and into a familiar cage in place for that purpose; she purposely left the latch slightly open and entered the principal’s office.

Inside, the furnishings were enormously plush, with antique furniture and all manner of magically animated whirligigs and contraptions, including a perpetual-motion Newton’s cradle and a drinking bird toy with an abdomen that seemed to be filled with liquid mercury. It was every bit the office of one of the most repsected sorcerers in the state of Mississippi, and one of the three co-owners of the great Wickerby, Driftwood, and Ember wandworks.

“Ms. Wright, was it? Come in, come in.”

Perched in an enormous chair in fornt of a desk piled high with papers, Cyrus Ember was eighty years olf if he was a day, with a long curly beard and his long hair gathered up into a puffy ponytail. Clear blue eyes peeked out over reading glasses, while he wore a finely tailored dress shirt and tie under his deep crimson academic robes.

“Please, sit.” Ember gestured to a chair in front of him.

Isis, her hands clasped demurely in front of her, sat in the chair. A moment later, its animated legs walked it closer to the desk, until her knees were dangerously close to barking against the wood.

“Ms. Maxine tells me you pulled off a nifty bit of sorcery in class today,” he said. “Levitating your wand…with itself? As your very first practical test in Alterations?”

“Yes, sir,” Isis said. “I wanted to make a good first impression.”

“Indeed? Well, that’s a very advanced piece of magic, especially for someone so young. Ms. Maxine said you declined to answer, so I’ll ask you again: how did you come to know it?”

“Old family secret,” said Isis, again. “I’m sure you understand, sir.”

Ember sighed and leaned back in his chair, drumming out what sounded like the opening bars of a drum solo on his paunchy belly. “I understand you preferring not to speak of such things,” he said. “When I was your age, I knew a cantrip for lighting fires that I was definitely not supposed to have learned yet. And I set the rug on fire in my dormitory as a result. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“I’m not planning to levitate my dormitory,” said Isis. “I promise.”

Ember chucked, but there was no mirth in his eyes. “How long have you been here, Ms. Wright? A week? Two? Long enough to notice, I think, that all our students come from varied magical backgrounds. Some have been casting magic with adult wands at an early age, while others are just now beginning to unlock the latent potential of their bloodlines.”

“Do you think my…bloodline…has a latent potential for making things float?” Isis asked.

“I think it’s necessary for me, and my faculty, to know if our students have any advanced magical knowledge that could pose a danger to themselves or others.”

Ember drew his own wand from its holster on his ornate belt and waggled it in front of Isis. It looked like some kind of very light wood, maybe beech, with gold and mother-of-pearl inlays.

“I’m not going to try casting Greater Truthification on you, but I want an honest answer,” said Ember. “Do you know any other magic that is advanced and possibly dangerous?”

“Absolutely not, sir,” Isis said. “I do not know a single spell that I think could harm my fellow students.”

“Uh-huh. And that levitation trick?”

“That’s all it is, sir. A trick. I can’t do anything else like it.”

“I see,” Ember said. “Well, if nothing else, I’m glad we had the opportunity to finally chat one on one. Have you had the chance to-”

The principal was interrupted by a crash and a scream in the other room. Through the frosted windows, the silhouette of a brownie and a crow engaged in furious, impromptu aerial combat could be seen.

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As Isis sank back into her seat, relief washed over her, somewhat diminishing the cold sweat she’d been feeling. She couldn’t even hear Mr. Zachary, her compatriot at the end of the alphabet, stumbling through his own levitation of an empty snail shell. So far a combination of written exams and being at the end of the alphabet with Zachary had meant Isis had been called upon to do relatively little magic. This had been her first public test, and she had pulled it off flawlessly and fooled everyone.

Once Zachary was done and the class had broken up for the next period, which was study hall, Ms. Maxine beckoned Isis over. “I shared your little trick with some of the other teachers on our group text,” she said, “and Principal Ember wrote back that he would like to have a word with you during study hall. Will you go to him now, please? Here’s a hall pass.”

The teacher thrust an ornately engraved and quite ensorcled scrap of paper at Isis, who took it with a smile. “Of course, Ms. Maxine,” she said with a slight curtsey. “I’ll go there right away.”

Instead of coatracks, the classroom had a series of cages where the students kept their familiars during class. Some world watch with great interest, others would sleep or play.

Then there was Rowan, Isis’s familiar.

“So I couldn’t hear what was being said,” the crow croaked in his hollow voice as he hopped onto Isis’s arm. “Permanent aura of silence on the cage and all. So I passed the time by making up funny things that matched the way peoples’ lips were moving. You shoulda seen it when your teacher said ‘scratch the purple worm, dummy, and then eat it raw!'”

Rowan wasn’t a real familiar, of course. Isis couldn’t afford a real familiar anymore than she could afford a real wand in place of the stick of dead wood she waved around. No, Rowan was just a crow from her old neighborhood that she had befriended with peanuts and kindness, wearing the small band common to all the familiars that allowed them to have an instinctive, telepathic link with their students.

“Did you see me in there? How they ate it all up?” said Isis. Well, it was more of a thought rather than speech, but it seemed as much with Rowan, anyhow.

“You made that twig float like it had wings,” said Rowan–again, more of a thought, but still. “How the heck did you pull that off?”

Isis rolled up her right sleeve and held out her arm–they were walking through an empty hall toward the principal’s office, after all, with no one to see or hear.

“Old family secret,” she said, grasping a bit of monofilament fishing line that was tied to the wood. It was magic, of a sort: the sleight-of-hand that street magicians used. The sort that her brother Isaac had taught her and that they’d practiced endlessly together into the night. At least, until he’d died.

“I’m amazed they didn’t see through that,” Roman croaked. “I thought this was supposed to be a school for smart people.”

“People see what they want to see,” Isis said. Isaac had been right about that much, at least so far. “Besides,” she added. “It’s a school for people who are gifted at magic, not who are smart.”

“From what I’ve seen it’s a school for stuck-up rich people who waste food,” Rowan replied. “Care to offer an unsalted peanut to a bird in need?”

Isis produced one from the folds of her robe and Rowan greedily seized it. “Just be sure to take some water soon, too, okay?”

“Yeah,” Isis said. “I was really hoping for more.”

“It’s to be expected,” said Rowan. “If the principal really does have a document that says ‘we killed Isaac Wright and are proud of it’ they’re probably not going to leave it just lying around, are they?”

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Taking a deep breath, Isis nodded. “I’m going to use my wand,” she said.

Scattered giggles in the class as Ms. Maxine’s spell wore off, and whispers of “Isis Wrong” as well.

“Yes, yes, my dear, you will be using your wand to do levitation. But what will you be levitating? You may use my pencil, if you like.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Isis said politely. “I meant, Ms. Maxine, that I’m going to be levitating my wand.”

“You’re going to levitate your wand…with your wand?” Ms. Maxine said, cocking her head. “Are you sure that’s wise, my dear?”

“Or…possible?” Mamie O’Sullivan added. Lips pursed, Ms. Maxine hurled another silence spell at her, but Mamie simply mouthed the words “worth it” to her posse, who tittered in agreement.

Isis held out her left hand, the sleeve of her academic robes dangling, and laid her wand on top of it. Then, hovering her right hand over it, she whispered the incantation she’d already memorized for the paper test.

“Leviatrix!”

Slowly lifting her hand, the wand moved with it, levitating beneath her undulating fingers. The class was dead silent. Holden’s mouth fell audibly open, his next wisecrack stillborn on his lips.

After a moment of miming intense concentration, Isis reached down with her right hand and seemingly snatched the levitating wand out of midair.

The sight of such “magic” being performed on a wand rather than with a wand led to amother moment of dead silence in the class before it erupted in pandemonium. Students were hooting and hollering, cheering and screaming, at the mindblowing sight while Isis beamed a relieved smile.

“SILENCE!” Ms. Maxine roared. She followed it up with a bellowed “Silencio maximus totalis!” and every sound in the classroom was momentarily deadened.

“That’s better,” she said. “Though if you engage in such a disgraceful display again, class, it’ll be demerits for the lot of you.”

Turning to Isis, the teacher gave an impressed, if exasperated, smile. “That was very impressive, my dear,” she said. “Would you care to share with the class how you managed it?”

“Old family secret,” replied Isis, beaming.

“Ah. Well at any rate, well done. That just leaves our Mr. Zachary to demonstrate.”

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Isis Wright stood up before her Basic Alteration class at the Magnolian Academy to perform a simple levitation. It was a simple spell, and a dozen of her classmates had performed it flawlessly. There was only one problem confronting Isis as she felt her eighth-grade classmates’ gaze upon her and her hand tightened around her yew wand.

She couldn’t use magic. Not a single solitary spell. In fact, Isis Wright was at the Magnolian Academy for Sorcerers and Sorceresses under entirely false pretenses, and she was already beginning to feel sweat pricking the back of her neck. She was one public blowout away from revealing her status as a dullkin, the sort of mundane folk that the wealthy students of Magnolian lorded over.

“Come on now, Ms. Wright,” said the Alterations teacher, Ms. Maxine, peering over her reading glasses. Every few minutes she’d flick her own wand at her face to cast a spell of Myopia Ward, only for it to wear off and force her to use the glasses again. “Let’s see your Elementary Levitation.”

“She’s got stage fright, Ms. Maxine!” cackled Mamie O’Sullivan, seated in the back with her posse as always.

“Can’t get it up,” giggled Holden Buford, sitting nearby.

Ms. Maxine silenced them both with a flick of her wand, silver-wrapped ebony as it was. “You passed the written part of the exam with flying colors, so come on now,” she said. “I’d hate to fail you over a case of simple stage fright, Ms. Wright.”

Isis could only look around as she felt the class examining her under a microscope. It was an unpleasant, burning feeling, one she knew all too well from her previous school. Public schools might have been underfunded and falling apart compared to Magnolian, and with not a wand or magic-user in sight, but they did have that much in common at least.

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While terminology may differ internationally, in this country those with magical talent are generally called sorcerers or sorceresses while those who are incapable of practicing magic are often referred to as dullkin. Both sets of terms have their critics.

For one, there is no gender-neutral term for a sorcerer or sorceress. While some have proposed the term sorcerex, it has failed to catch on and the generally conservative magical community is wary at best of anything but the most traditional conceptions of gender.

For another, there can be no denying that the term dullkin as used to refer to those who are not magically gifted can be seen as an insult. There are some dullkin who have embraced the term, generally couching it as an anti-elitist move. Others have attempted to encourage the use of the more palatable nullkin in its place. Nullkin, meaning those with no (or null) magic, has gained in popularity of late, but many still see it as unnecessarily divisive, while others argue that there was nothing wrong with the term dullkin in the first place.

Regardless of these differing viewpoints, Magnolian Academy officially endorses the term dullkin and it is in common use among its students and faculty. While there are many dullkin that work in the school, as janitors, as cooks, and the like, they are always labeled as such and generally made to wear a distinctive uniform or name tag. The city of Greenford, too, uses dullkin in its official business – in the town charter, for instance, which sets a four-dullkin limit on the nine-member city council that elects the mayor from among its number. Every dullkin attorney, doctor, or police officer must be specially licensed by the city, while sorcerers and sorceresses have no such requirement.

Of course, the ability to use magic unquestionably makes lawyers, doctors, and cops better at their jobs, so this is rarely enforced. But even in Greenford, which has attracted a large population of sorcerers and sorceresses who are Magnolian alumnae and have settled nearby, the percentage of residents who are dullkin hovers around 90%.

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