The Key & the Flame
Contents
Chapter 1: The Wish
Chapter 2: The Announcement
Chapter 3: The Gift
Chapter 4: The Caretaker
Chapter 5: Through the Glade
Chapter 6: The Shaws
Chapter 7: The Castle
Chapter 8: Number Seven, Hodges Close
Chapter 9: Holly’s Choice
Chapter 10: The Strongest Beech
Chapter 11: The Wand
Chapter 12: A Safe Haven
Chapter 13: What Happened to the Boys
Chapter 14: Holly’s Resolve
Chapter 15: The Test
Chapter 16: The Leogryff
Chapter 17: Flight
Chapter 18: In the Tower
Chapter 19: The Audience
Chapter 20: A Nighttime Visitor
Chapter 21: Everett’s Secret
Chapter 22: The Queen
Chapter 23: Her Majesty’s Order
Chapter 24: The Elemental
Chapter 25: The Enemy of the Good Folk
Chapter 26: Morning’s Plan
Chapter 27: Sol
Chapter 28: The Agreement
Chapter 29: Knights Rest
Chapter 30: The Lesson
Chapter 31: Into the Fire
Chapter 32: The Wandwright
Chapter 33: The Stolen Wand
Chapter 34: Forging the Wand
Chapter 35: The Unlocking Spell
Chapter 36: Message from the Dvergar
Chapter 37: The Return of the King
Chapter 38: His Majesty’s Knight
Chapter 39: Lady in Waiting
Chapter 40: Jade’s Message
Chapter 41: The Joust
Chapter 42: The Vanishment
Chapter 43: In the Woods
Chapter 44: Through the Fire
Chapter 45: Teatime at Number Seven
Acknowledgments
About Claire M. Caterer
* * *
In loving memory of
Kenneth W. Caterer,
who was the first person to read me fairy tales
and for Melanie,
who still believes in them
* * *
Chapter 1
* * *
The Wish
Holly Shepard lived on a block of identical houses in the middle of the American Midwest. It might have been mildly interesting if she had lived in the exact middle, but when Holly looked it up, she saw that her suburb was off by a few hundred miles, so it lacked even that distinction. She attended a midsize school in a town that was neither bustling with glittering skyscrapers and dark alleyways nor quaint with eccentric musicians and Main Street bookshops. Everyone bought clothes at the same mall and saw movies at the thirty-theater megaplex and ate dinner at the same reasonably priced family dining establishment. Every June, the town put on a carnival with two inflatable rides and a Ferris wheel. It was the biggest event of the year.
If you were the sort who longed for more than that—if, for example, you interrupted Ms. Noring and said loud enough for everyone to hear that you didn’t see how this week’s spelling words were ever going to help you in the real world, like if you had to escape from a mountain lion or a shark—you would get a stern look and a tally mark next to your name and you would give up five minutes of recess because Ms. Noring was tired of being second-guessed every single day. You would sit at your desk during the five minutes and study the fake wood grain and wonder if anything in this school was real. You would remember, as Holly did, that the last social studies test you’d taken had earned a C because you didn’t exactly answer the essay question at the end: What was the significance of the Louisiana Purchase? Holly was supposed to write four sentences, but instead she wrote fifteen and had to use the back of the page because she’d wandered off topic and described how Lewis and Clark had fought malaria and rattlesnakes and dysentery, and how their trip was kind of like exploring the Amazon, with lots of wild animals and sometimes unfriendly native people. Ms. Noring wrote at the bottom of the page (she had to squeeze it in): Next time, answer the question. –5 points.
Thinking about rattlesnakes had led to drawing three small but vicious Chinese dragons in the margins of her test paper. Holly worked very hard on them, creating thick bodies coiled like springs, and curly forked tongues. She spent so much time decorating the dragon’s scales with alternating diamond patterns that she completely forgot to answer three of the test questions. Ms. Noring wrote: Next time, work more on your test and less on your art. –3 points.
It seemed unfair that this would be the test on which she forgot to write her name and date. Ms. Noring wrote: Next time, follow the proper format for labeling your test. –2 points.
Ms. Noring’s minuses seemed to follow Holly closer than her shadow. Her classmates looked at her as though they were tallying them in their heads. She was known primarily for what she didn’t do: She didn’t play soccer or softball. She didn’t join Girl Scouts or want a cell phone. She didn’t buy the right blue jeans or listen to the right kind of music. Worse yet, she didn’t care about any of those things. She didn’t even know the names of most of the stores in the mall; she went there to climb rocks at the Monster Rockwall and sit in a corner of the bookstore with a stack of obscure tomes about Celtic kings or arctic explorers. When she wasn’t reading she was outside, alone, wandering in the scraggly copse of trees that ran down the center of the town’s five-acre Park & Wildlife Retreat.
No matter where she went, she thought about where she wanted to be, which was pretty much anywhere else. She thought of lives she didn’t lead, fantastical lives fraught with danger and magic. Such visions played in her head on an endless loop so that she sometimes forgot just how much she yearned for something—anything—unusual to happen. Holly Shepard, age eleven, her life as dull as the peeling white paint on the back of her split-level house, wished for something extraordinary. And at last her wish—which had just been waiting for the right moment—was granted.
Chapter 2
* * *
The Announcement
Almost two months before Holly was released from Ms. Noring’s fifth-grade class at the end of May, her parents plucked Holly and her brother, Ben (thirteen months younger than she), from bed one Saturday morning to have their pictures taken. There were two unusual things about this: One, Holly’s mother almost never got up earlier than Holly herself, and two, she didn’t ask Holly to put on a dress or comb out her brown braids. It wasn’t Christmas or a special birthday, when such things were normally done, and they didn’t go to JCPenney, but to a dingy store in the strip mall called One-Hour Smile.
At first, Holly had assumed that they were taking a family portrait. But One-Hour Smile had no studio and no backgrounds of circus clowns or woodland settings. The man at the store didn’t introduce himself or wave at Holly with a hand puppet. He sat her down in a straight-backed chair, frowned, and said to Holly’s mother, “Glasses on or off?”
“On, I guess. They always are.”
“On it is.” Snap, the picture was done—one pose only. Then it was Ben’s turn. He narrowed his eyes as if squinting through binoculars (which he never did, unlike Holly). “He doesn’t have to smile, but he should have his eyes open,” said Mr. One-Hour.
At that, Ben opened his eyes so wide he looked like toothpicks were propped under his lids. Snap. Then each of Holly’s parents had the same perfunctory photos taken.
And then, a third unusual thing: After Mr. One-Hour handed them their pictures (tiny, and horrible), their parents took Holly and Ben next door to the Waffle Emporium for breakfast and let them order whatever they wanted. Ben ordered a pancake with a happy face drawn in whipped cream and sprinkled with choco
late chips. Holly had the Truckers’ Deluxe, which was two eggs over easy and hash browns and toast and sausage with two buttermilk pancakes on the side. Holly’s mother said, “You’ll never eat all that.”
“If you made breakfast for me at home, you’d know that this is not that unusual for me,” said Holly. She knew she was short and skinny for her age. “I have a high metabolism.”
Mrs. Shepard shrugged.
Even though Ben shoveled in his food without noticing anything, Holly felt that crackle in the air when something important is about to happen. Her parents kept looking at each other and not saying much. Her mother drank two cups of black coffee and ate most of her egg-white omelet, then put her fork down. Holly sat up straighter, but her father said, “Let me get into this French toast first,” and Holly waited some more. Finally, once her father had taken three bites of the French toast (he ate very slowly), her mother said, “I have an announcement to make.” Everyone began talking at once.
“Are we getting divorced?” Ben asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Holly.
“Of course not,” said Mr. Shepard.
“Kyle Langley’s getting divorced,” said Ben.
“Who is Kyle Langley?” asked his mother.
“He sits behind me in Mrs. Jenkins’s class.”
“But Mrs. Dade is your teacher.”
“But I go to Mrs. Jenkins for math because I’m in the advanced class.”
“You are?” Mrs. Shepard leaned in closer. “When did this happen?”
“Who cares?” Holly cried. “What’s the announcement?”
“We’re getting divorced,” Ben repeated, scraping the whipped cream off his pancake.
“We’re not getting divorced,” said Mr. Shepard. “We’re going to England.”
It felt to Holly like the world stood still; even Ben stopped chewing for a moment. Then he said, “Will I be in advanced math there?”
“Oh, shut up,” said Holly. “Are we really, Mom?”
“My law firm is sending me to Oxford in June for a month or so,” said Mrs. Shepard. “And your dad will be writing a series of articles about the area.”
“Do they have high-speed Internet access there?” Ben asked.
“Um, yes, I believe they do.”
“Please shut up,” Holly said, then turned red at her mother’s look. “I meant Ben, not you, Mom.”
“I still don’t like it, Holly. In this family, no matter what the circumstance, we all show respect for one another, and that means . . . ”
Holly knew that once her mother got on this topic, she’d have to be allowed to finish. About three minutes later, after Holly had apologized to Ben, who sniggered at her and then opened his mouth so everyone could see the pancake and whipped cream mushed together inside, Holly took a breath and said, “I would like to hear more about Oxford.”
“It’s a very old city, famous for its university. We’ll be renting a house in a lovely little town close by called Hawkesbury.”
“Is that why we had our pictures taken?” Holly asked.
“Yes. We’ll all need passports.”
Passports. It was a lovely, mysterious word that sent a shiver across Holly’s shoulders.
“Why do we need passports?” Ben asked.
“It’s your identification,” said Mr. Shepard. “It has your picture and your address. You carry it with you when you travel to a foreign country.”
“Do we have to go on a boat?” Ben didn’t like boats.
“No, on a plane,” Holly said. “Right, Mom?”
“What?” Ben liked planes even less than boats.
“It will be a big plane, Ben,” said Mrs. Shepard. “You won’t even notice you’re flying.”
“And you can bring your laptop,” added Holly, who was willing to say anything to change the panicky look on his face that might persuade her parents to cancel their trip.
“You’ll love it, Ben,” said his father, who didn’t really know what Ben loved, but understood exactly what Holly loved. “A whole new place to explore, with little winding streets and old shops and bookstores. The countryside has woods and rivers. We can go to London and see the Tower and Buckingham Palace. We can even take the train that goes under the English Channel and visit Paris.”
“Does Paris have high-speed Internet access?” Ben asked.
Sometimes the best thing to do when your brother won’t be quiet, and you’ve already been warned not to shut him up, is to think about something else. While Holly’s parents assured Ben that high-speed Internet access would be available wherever they went, she let her mind wander to Paris and London and Oxford and Hawkesbury. A lightness filled her chest, as if something heavy that had long been sitting there had flown away. Suddenly Holly didn’t care that she wouldn’t make the honor roll this quarter. True, her mother would frown at her grade card and then make a huge fuss over Ben’s straight As and advanced math and probably promise to send him to robotics camp. But none of that mattered now. Holly knew she was finally about to have an adventure.
What she didn’t know was that adventures are never neat little affairs like a trip to the amusement park, from which you emerge tired but unaltered. They are messy. They are dangerous. They are hungry, and what they take from you can never be recovered.
The adventure that waited for Holly Shepard was hungrier than most.
Chapter 3
* * *
The Gift
The journey finally began, eight days after school let out, with a series of waits: wait for the car to be loaded; wait for the luggage to be checked; wait for the plane to come; and the longest wait of all, inside the plane while it roared and hummed across the Atlantic. Once Holly’s stomach had caught up with her—it dawdled behind when the plane swooped off the ground—her heart thrummed in time to the jet engines while Ben whined about finding an outlet for his laptop and his mother asked a dozen times if he had his inhaler and allergy pills in his pocket. Holly plugged her ears with earbuds that were connected to nothing and kept her eyes on her book. When they landed at Heathrow, the London airport, Holly stepped a pace away from her family and hoped she would be mistaken for a British girl.
In time they found the suitcases and their rental car. The steering wheel was on the wrong side, which looked very odd, but Holly said nothing because her father was trying to concentrate. He had to remember to drive on the left side of the road instead of the right and to follow the directions that Mrs. Shepard barked at him.
Nothing around Holly seemed especially British. She saw small family cars and large moving vans and gray overpasses and scrubby trees along the highway, and then came Ben’s voice (“Mom, where’s my Battleship game?”) and her mother’s voice (“You passed the turn again”) and her father’s voice (“I’m doing the best I can”). Holly wondered if this summer were going to be as fabulous as she’d thought.
But finally they shed the London traffic, and the buildings and roundabouts disappeared. The car pulled onto a curving, hilly two-lane road in the most beautiful place Holly could imagine.
“Are we there?” Ben asked, waking up.
“Not quite,” said Mr. Shepard.
The land swelled around them in slopes of the greenest, dewiest grass Holly had ever seen. It looked like a giant had spilled his paint box over the hills until the colors had melted together—pine and Easter grass and fern and aquamarine. Long lines of flowering shrubs and stone walls bordered farmers’ properties. Through stands of trees Holly glimpsed boxlike houses with thatched roofs and deep-set windows. A white-haired man with tall boots and a long stick hiked among clusters of grazing sheep. He dropped out of sight as they drove into the valley. Ahead of them, cloud shadows rolled across the lands-wells. Even Ben, for once, was quiet.
A few minutes later the road straightened, and soon they passed a small wooden sign that read, WELCOME TO HAWKESBURY, HEART OF THE COTSWOLDS.
“That’s our town!” Ben announced.
They passed the High Street an
d a small square of shops with a covered market. “Never mind that, we’ll stop later,” said Mrs. Shepard. Then to Mr. Shepard: “Now around the other side of the green, you’ll see Charlton Road. And off that to the left is Chavenage Lane.”
“The left?”
“Right. Sorry.”
“You mean, ‘Right, correct’?”
“No, I mean, ‘Right, not left.’ ”
“What are we looking for again?”
Holly shut out the noise, and even Ben knew not to say anything during a discussion like this. Still, the roads were so narrow and twisty, and their car so slow and rumbling—and no drivers behind them honking or gesturing—that no one minded driving in circles for a few minutes. Eventually Mr. Shepard pulled down a quiet road called Hodges Close. It dead-ended abruptly at the top of a hill, and the car stopped with a little cough. In front of them was their house.
The cottage—that’s what Holly’s father called it. It was square and made of huge blocks of a softly silver stone that seemed to glow from within. The eaves hung low enough for Holly to reach up and touch the thin limestone tiles on the roof. The door was painted a glossy pine green and had a round knocker on it the size of Holly’s fist. A large brass number 1 hung next to it. Sprays of wildflowers grew up around the front path.
Ben pushed past her, yelling, “Finally! An outlet!” and bolted inside.
“Holly, come back here and get your backpack,” called Mrs. Shepard.
It isn’t easy to look around a place properly when the ordinary things of life keep interrupting. But Holly grabbed her backpack and dodged around a corner while everyone else lugged suitcases upstairs. She glanced around. No front hall, no rec room, no family room, no mudroom; and yet the cottage seemed to be just big enough. The white plaster walls rippled under Holly’s fingers. In the living room, she sank into a crimson sofa drawn close to an immense stone fireplace. She took a deep breath. The scent of a house was important to her. Lemon—that was the floor’s dark, wide planks. Soot mixed with damp, flowery air—that was the open window and the smell from the woodstove in the hearth.