Stealing Magic

Ellison has no birthday, no surname, and no legal existence. He was made, not born — brewed by the disgraced wizard Ferb Mike to be a servant, a weapon, and an heir to stolen power, and pronounced a failure on all three counts. Only two of his master's experiments ever worked: a wind that answers fear, and a genius for being exactly where nobody is looking. For six years he has kept a crooked tower on Detritus Lane, a faerie road ten miles long with one end in a Halifax bookshop and the other in a Vancouver washroom, fed his master's temper, and stolen everything else, mostly from the non-magical world beyond the veil, where pursuers cannot follow.

Then one market evening, sent out to lift six silver coins, he picks the wrong strongbox. Its owner is Aldous Pinch, a proctor of Avalon Academy with sixty years of watching children fail entrance examinations — and instead of calling the Guard, Pinch hands over an enrollment form paid from the Senate's larceny fund. Because the Academy's test-stone asks each child's magic a single question — what do you want? — and Ellison's magic answered with something no proctor had ever seen: not fire, not flight, but a dark that's going somewhere. A doorway.

Avalon was grown, not built, and it takes in foundlings. In the Foundlings' Hall Ellison gains a claimed bed, a deaf grey cat, and the first friends of his life: Pip, whose pockets answer when she calls them, and Cor, whose spells come out apologizing. He learns letters in the window seat, and learns to run a hillside course for a war-courier mistress who is teaching his fear-fed wind to answer to something better than terror. And he keeps the shell he rescued from his master's cupboard — a spiral seashell that whispers, a hundred rustling voices that have started counting steps and warning, night after night, that someone will not look at the seventh door.

The shell is not a recording and not a prison. It is a keepsake: the carved-out pieces of a mind, kept for twelve years inside a founders' vault — a knee-high oak door with seven hinges under the Headmistress's study, rusted shut with a stolen child counting in the dark on the far side. The pieces belong to Vincent Black, the boy from the yellow kitchen whose disappearance the newspapers filed between a murder and a kidnapping, and the man who cut them finally stands trial at the Winter Assizes. To open the vault, Ellison must set the shell on the door and trust whatever comes out of the dark. To keep what comes out, he will have to stand in a court of eight hundred strangers and say, out loud, what was done to him.

But in the well of the court, the old master turns from the dock and says, "Come here, boy" — and the leash Ferb carved into his creation does not need a cane. Unless a foundling with two names, one roof, and friends who refuse to look away has learned the lesson his maker never intended: that made things can grow, and grown things say no.