John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

Buttons done up and skirts pulled down, Vanity and I, along with Quentin, made our way up to the Headmaster’s office without incident.

There was the antechamber. Mr. Sprat was not at his desk; no one was around. Beyond the door was the waiting room. As quietly as mice, we crept in. A low table of green marble squatted on heavy crooked legs of wood before the red plush length of the couch. Tall wing-back chairs, red as Catholic cardinals, looming solemnly, crowded close. The two clocks, ticking half a step out of time with each other, stood like sentries to either side of the far door. Two strips of light from the archer-slit windows, one to either side of a book cabinet with dusty glass doors, threw angular lines across the rectilinear shadows.

“This place is a tomb,” Quentin announced. “Someone is buried here.”

Vanity stole over to the other door, which was coated with soundproof leather and a pattern of studs, and put her hand on it. She pushed it open a crack. She sniffed sadly, turned, and came back.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Boggin is not there.”

“That makes you sad?”

“But Odysseus is in there!” she said. “The guy I rescued from the sea. What kind of people would do this to me? Make me read my own story about my own life as an assignment for Greek tutorial? I had to write those damn papers on the Odyssey ! They were all laughing behind their hands at me.” She looked up. There were tears in her eyes.

She said to me, “Please tell me this will work on me, too.”

I said, “The dream did not say.”

Quentin said, “I found Apsu, pardon me, I found my walking stick where you had left it in the snow on the windowsill. I must say, I was mightily confused, before I heard your story at breakfast, as to why I had left it there. When I picked it up, it was heavier than normal. That usually only happens when a True Dream, a dream from the Gate of Horn, had flown by on owl-wing. Do you remember your dream with particular clarity? If it came at dawn, it may be a Phantasma Astra, a dream of prophecy rather than a Phantasma Natura, which merely records images or eidolons passing from your passive intellect to your active intellect.”

I repeated the words the egg had spoken to me in my dream. “ ‘ Nausicaa must stand upon the boundary stone, and grant passage to the power from Myriagon, your home. Recall that thoughts are all recalled by thought and thought alone; undo the magic of mere matter, and the night of no-memory shall break.’ ”

Vanity said, “Why are we assuming he meant me to stand on a table?”

I said, “The Stone Table, the Boundary Stone Table, is what Boggin and his pals called the big green table in the Great Hall. Also, the Hundred-Hand Man said the table allowed his powers to work outside of his native land.”

Quentin asked me about the first stanza of the dream, and I repeated the words of greeting.

Quentin said, “And he said your name was Phaethusa?”

I said, “Either that, or I was supposed to pass a message along to her. Do either of you recognize that name from myth or books?”

Quentin said, “We’ve all read the same books, Amelia.”

“But we don’t all get the same grades,” I said, trying to preserve a look of dignity.

Vanity said, “Melly here would crib off me in Greek and Latin. And she did my math for me.”

Quentin looked shocked. “You didn’t do your lessons?” The idea seemed to astonish him. “I thought only, you know, kids on TV sitcoms acted that way. And Colin. But I thought he was a freak of nature, or something.”

I said, “We’re all freaks of nature.”

Vanity said tartly, “No, only I am a freak of nature. I am from the universe. You guys are freaks of Outside of Nature.”

Quentin said, “Amelia, turn your back.”

I blinked. “What? Why?”

Quentin said, “Or don’t, as you like.”

Vanity was beginning to look both suspicious and flustered.

Quentin stepped up to her, took both her hands in his hands, stared into her eyes for a long moment.

He said, “Vanity, no matter what we discover, now or ever, what I feel for you shall be unchanged and unchanging.”

“Quentin, I…”

“Hush. I am going to kiss you.”

Vanity blushed and looked at her feet. “You’ve drunk too much champagne…”

“I said, ‘Hush.’ ”

And he took her chin in his fingers, tilted her head up.

Vanity closed her eyes and pursed her lips. I have never seen a face look more sweet, before or since, than she looked at that moment. Or more trusting.

He kissed her.

I know I was really not supposed to stand there gawking, but wild horses could not have dragged me away at that moment. I had known, for months now, how Vanity felt about Quentin.

He stepped back, his eyes filled with emotion, but his face calm. The same way, earlier, I had seen an expression that made me think he was a five-year-old, now I saw what he would look like when he was twenty-five, when he was forty-five.

Quentin laughed for mere joy, and said, “Colin told me never to ‘ask’ a girl for a kiss, merely to inform her so she knows you’re doing it deliberately. I have no idea why he thinks he knows anything about women, since he’s never met any I haven’t met. But maybe he knows the right thing about women.”

Vanity’s face, all freckled and round and flushed, lit up like the sun coming out, and her smile peeped up, grew larger, kept growing. She said, “It’s not what you know about women. It’s the women you know.”

Quentin glanced at me. “You know why I did that, now?”

I said quietly, “I have a guess.”

He nodded, turned away from me, and said, “Let’s begin.”

The hand by which he held her he now raised to help her mount up to the stone. The dream had said she must stand upon it.

Vanity stood there, her black patent leather shoes turned ever so slightly inward toward each other, her hands toying with the pleats in her plaid skirt, her shoulders half raised in a shrug, her head half lowered in a blush. Even though Quentin was now standing below her, she seemed to want to look up at him, through the tops of her lashes.

My guess was this: He wanted this to be his first kiss. At the moment, it was. If the experiment worked, and he got his memory back, this memory would still contain, nevertheless, in all innocence and all solemnity, love’s first kiss.

And then I had a bad thought. What if Nausicaa was already in love with someone else? Someone whom Vanity did not remember? Homer made her out to be pretty sweet on Odysseus, as I recall.

I had been assuming the spell, if it worked, was meant for Quentin. It had come in the middle of a dream about Quentin. But what if it worked on all of us?

And what about me? What if Phaethusa was, I don’t know, a murderess or an adulteress or an environmentalist or something? Someone who couldn’t do math, or who liked Tony Blair?

Did I want to be an adult, suddenly?

I did not think too highly of adults, not the ones I had met so far in my life. They seemed like the Upside-Down Folk to me, worrying about everything trivial and blithely ignoring everything great and fine and true in life.

I thought about what Victor would say about my doubts. First, he would look skeptical, and then his skepticism would deepen into a sarcastic grimace, and he would ask: “Is this the right thing to do?”

That is what he would have said. “Sorrow is merely an emotion. Pain is merely a stimulation of nerve ends. Neither one has any necessary relationship to what we have to do in order to survive. If our enemies”—and Victor always thought of them as enemies—“if our enemies make it more painful for us to do what we must do, that merely increases the wrong they do us. It doesn’t decrease our obligations. It therefore is irrelevant to our decisions.”