Half Title

Title Page

Dedication

To Mom and Dad, for setting the course and making sure I never strayed far from the path

Part One

Chapter One

Henry Leach the Eighth held the wand between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand with a delicate touch. The Wandmaker’s Guidebook lay open beside him on his bed, propped against a pillow. The moon-and-stars pattern of his sheets framed the book, forming a natural extension of the page on which the constellations were illustrated.

He frowned as he focused, a pair of tiny thought lines bunched at the bridge of his nose. The book and bedsheet became one as his concentration intensified. It would work this time! He knew it would …

“Whatcha doin’, Henry?” Brianna’s shrill voice cut right through his concentration.

Henry yelped as he jumped off the bed, instinctively tightening his grip on the wand, afraid of dropping it.

“Get out, Brianna. This is my room.” He squeezed the words out in a hush. At eight years old, Brianna was like a loose tooth that would never quite fall out—attached by an invisible thread, useless for doing anything, yet refusing to go away.

“Try and make me.” She folded her arms across her chest. Henry looked down and imagined roots sprouting from her bare toes, embedding themselves in the carpet.

He relaxed his grip on the wand and gazed at it, wondering, What if it really is capable of doing amazing things? For all his practice, he’d seen no evidence that the wand was anything more than a fancy-looking stick, but maybe—just maybe—there was a little magic in it. All he needed was a little bit, and he could make her disappear.

“Let me see that,” Brianna demanded as she reached for the wand.

Contamination!

His guidebook had explained the consequences of letting the wand out of his possession. Contaminated wands did bad things. And while he wasn’t certain exactly what it took to contaminate a wand, he was pretty sure his sister could do it.

Henry quickly snatched the wand out of her reach and hid it behind his back.

“I’ll tell Mom you’re not sharing.” A devilish smirk teased the corners of her mouth.

If there was anything more annoying than the way she snuck up on him, it was her tattletale voice, always threatening him with some parental punishment for crimes he didn’t commit.

Henry wanted so much to believe there was magic in the world. What harm could it do to try?

The first full moon of spring hovered outside the window in a country-clear night sky. Henry focused on his wand and waved it over Brianna’s head.

“Brianna is a pain in the rear.

Make Brianna disappear!”

He finished with a flourish and snapped his wrist, hoping to give the spell extra power.

Nothing.

Well … not nothing.

Brianna’s smirk disappeared.

Her bottom lip puffed out.

Her blue eyes slowly sank into rising puddles of tears.

“Don’t, Brianna,” Henry pleaded. “Please?”

Too late. She inhaled deeply, and Henry knew he was in for a good one. He often thought of her as a volcano, gathering steam below the surface and …

“WAAA!”

There she blows.

“Henry!” his mother yelled from the bottom of the staircase.

“You brat!” he hissed, which served only to crank up her volume even higher.

Heavy footsteps tromped up the stairs toward Henry’s room. They were not the footsteps of a small woman. Henry shoved the wand into his pocket.

“What’s going on in here?” their father asked sternly from the doorway.

“Daddy!” Brianna squeezed out a few fresh tears before running to him. “Henry won’t share.” She flipped her long chestnut hair back and fluttered her eyes at him—the full look-at-poor-little-me treatment.

Henry cringed and braced for the worst.

Their father didn’t say anything for a long moment, though. Instead, he sniffed the air from the doorway and gave Henry a curious look before finally turning his attention to Brianna. “Okay, Breezie. Why don’t you go see Mommy for a minute?”

Brianna blinked. Henry could just about imagine her bewilderment—her time-tested tactic of getting him into trouble hadn’t worked! Even stranger, no one had called her Breezie since she had come home from school in first grade and said it made her sound like a baby.

“Go on,” their father urged. “Mommy has something for you.” If he had mentioned what the “something” was, she might not have gone. But Brianna never could contain her curiosity. She left without another whimper, sticking out her tongue at Henry as she turned the corner.

Henry prepared to plead his defense. “Dad, she—”

“I know,” his father said calmly. He grabbed a comic book from Henry’s dresser and casually flipped through it as he looked around Henry’s room. His nose twitched and continued to sniff the air. As he sat on the edge of the bed, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, something Henry had noticed him doing a lot lately—as if he were constantly tired. “Come here, Henry,” he said, patting a place on the bed next to him.

There were times when Henry imagined he had a sixth sense like Spider-Man and could tell when something bad was about to happen. Not this time—his Spidey-Sense wasn’t tingling.

But he wasn’t quite ready to let his guard down. Brianna’s tears had always brought him misery.

Seeing Henry’s hesitation, his father smiled. “No lecture tonight. We just need to talk for a minute.”

Henry hopped onto the bed. Side by side, Henry was struck, as he often was, by how much more he took after his mother. His light brown complexion and short-cropped black hair, courtesy of his mother’s Navajo roots, were in sharp contrast to his father’s fair Irish skin and reddish mop of curls.

“Dad, Brianna was—”

“How is your wand coming along?” his father interrupted.

Henry was surprised by the question. Since his father had gifted him the guidebook some weeks ago, he hadn’t shown much interest in whether Henry was reading it or not, much less whether he was following its instructions for crafting and personalizing a wand. In fact, Henry had taken the task very seriously—but he knew adults had a tendency to dismiss such things as flights of boyish fancy.

He pulled the wand from his pocket, holding it lightly in his fingers—like the conductor of an orchestra with a baton—just as the book had instructed.

He’d taken steps over the last several weeks to infuse it with his personality. The bottom third of the wand was hollow, allowing him to insert several objects that reflected his interests:

A feather from a blue jay, his favorite bird.

A gray rock with a vein of pink quartz running through it—quite extraordinary.

A small vial of water from the fish tank in which he’d raised tadpoles into frogs. He reasoned that there must be something special about the water where such an amazing transformation had occurred, and he wanted to capture that quality in his wand.

He had also stained the wand, quite cleverly. From his room, he sometimes watched blue jays eating chokecherries in a tree tucked into the far corner of the backyard. He had gathered some berries that had fallen to the ground, mashed them into a paste, and rubbed the juice into his wand. He thought that this would form a further connection with the blue jays. And after all, purple was his favorite color. A good thing too, since it took weeks for the color to wash off his skin.

“It’s looking fine, Henry.” An odd gleam flashed in his father’s eyes, for only a second. “In fact, it’s looking better every day.”

Henry twirled it delicately between two fingers, thinking about all the work he’d put into personalizing it. He was pleased with how it looked. He just wished that it would do something.

A quick spark prickled his fingers, like a shock from static electricity. He jumped, and for the second time that night almost dropped the wand. A curious smell drifted up—somewhat like the scent of charred wood.

“Careful, son,” his father whispered in a strange voice. “You have something very special there.”

Henry wanted to reply, but he was mesmerized by the tingling sensation in his hand.

Yes, thought Henry, my wand is very special.

His father’s voice continued to drone, murmuring sounds like musical notes. Henry’s vision became fuzzy around the edges, while the wand remained in perfect focus. From the blurred edges, his father’s hand emerged, slowly reaching toward the wand.

Henry frowned. Something was not right.

The musical vibration of his father’s voice changed to a lower, ominous pitch.

This time his Spidey-Sense did tingle. Contamination!

Something in his subconscious mind reacted, and a feeling like pins and needles raced down his arm and into the wand. A single spark jumped from its tip, and Henry was suddenly aware of his surroundings again. In one fluid motion he whipped the wand out of his father’s reach and stared at him in surprise.

For a brief instant, Henry caught a glimpse of a swirling cloud—a miniature galaxy of spinning stars and vapor—that had replaced the whites of his father’s eyes.

A gasp, or possibly a hiss, escaped his father’s lips, and he rose quickly from the bed. Three long strides and he was at the window, his outline framed in moonlight.

Henry was frightened. But the fear was laced with curiosity.

“What was that?” he asked his father. “Was that … magic?”

From the day he’d been given the guidebook, Henry had dreamed of making a wand that would give him exceptional power. Things like transforming Billy Bodanski into a toad for bullying him on the school bus. Like turning Mary Cooper’s tongue into a frying pan when she stuck it out at him for getting a higher score in math. Like changing toilet paper into enough money to buy his mother a new car, or at least a better one. And if there was still enough magic left, he’d poof a few dozen comic books for himself.

But things like that didn’t happen for people like Henry. They happened in movies.

Theatrical special effects. Computer wizardry.

Yet maybe not.

Henry’s father stared at him from across the room, holding his glasses in his hand. His eyes were soft and caring—and normal. Henry could easily have imagined the whole thing. If there was one thing he had an abundance of, it was imagination.

He looked down at his wand again.

“Henry.” His father nudged him with an elbow.

Henry shifted his eyes from the wand to his father, who was sitting beside him on the bed. How had he gotten there from across the room so quickly?

And as he gazed into the swirling mass of stars that had reemerged within his father’s eyes, an answer formed within Henry’s eleven-year-old mind.

It never happened …

Musical intonations of his father’s voice played softly in Henry’s ear.

It never happened …

His father was smiling and nodding his head as if to confirm Henry’s thought.

It never happened …

The music stopped.

Henry blinked as if he had just awoken from a midday nap.

He looked around the empty room, his eyes coming to rest on the wand, which was tucked neatly into The Wandmaker’s Guidebook.

Someday he would get it to work.

Chapter Two

Almost as an afterthought, Henry decided to check his spelling by using the dictionary, and he was glad he did. Very carefully, he copied the note onto a fresh piece of paper, changing pane to pain. He had nearly made a fatal blunder—calling Brianna a piece of glass. With a mistake like that, Coralis might throw the letter away without answering it.

Henry stuffed the letter into a plain white envelope, addressed it simply to Coralis, Grand Wand Master, and sealed it shut. He felt very important sitting at his father’s desk in his home office, writing a note to the Grand Wand Master himself! And he didn’t think his father would mind that he used a sheet of his finest stationery for such an important occasion.

He stared at the envelope. Coralis had to be out there … somewhere. But all Henry had to go on was the guidebook that the Wand Master had written—and he hadn’t chosen to share many personal details. In addition to instructions on the care and keeping of wands, Coralis’s guidebook included fantastic information about the power of nature and exciting stories of the Wandbearers who had harnessed it. Yet there was virtually nothing about Coralis himself.

And despite Henry’s best efforts, he’d found no information anywhere else. First he’d tried the library, but there were no records there for any other books written by Coralis—and in fact, the guidebook itself was missing from the library’s database, as if it didn’t exist. Next he’d used his computer time in science class to search for Coralis using every keyword he could think of. It had gotten him nowhere and cost him dearly—a D on a pop quiz the following day. Since science was his strongest subject, his teacher had been “concerned and disappointed.” But Henry had kept his silence on his secret project and accepted the extra homework to make up for his poor grade.

It was almost as if Coralis didn’t want to be found. And how could he mail a letter to someone who couldn’t be found?

A slight breeze blew in through the open window, ruffling a few stray pieces of paper. Henry tucked a corner of the letter beneath a leather-bound book that lay on his father’s desk.

The book itself caught his eye then. The walls of his father’s office were lined with shelves full of books—impressive volumes of brown leather and gold lettering. But something about this one stood out. It appeared ancient, its cover and spine adorned with a mysterious symbol. There was no title or author name—at least, not in any language he’d ever seen before.

He briefly considered copying the fancy symbol onto his letter in an attempt to impress Coralis. He tried to focus on it, but every time he thought he had it, it would blur and squiggle in his vision—sunlight and shadow playing tricks on his eyes. Probably a bad idea anyway, he thought. For all he knew it might be a symbol for something like ballet, or cake mix, or even coffee, which his father had never liked in the past, but more recently couldn’t get enough of.

Scanning his father’s office, he found three other books that appeared of a set with the one on the desk. They were tucked out of the way on the tallest shelf. After a moment’s consideration, Henry pulled his chair over and stood on it, retrieving them and stacking all four together upon the desk.

He ran his hand over the textured surface of the nearest book. Despite the warmth of the office, it felt cool. He glanced toward the open doorway, almost expecting to see his father standing there. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was seeing something he shouldn’t see.

But that was silly. After all, they were only books. And wasn’t he encouraged to read?

All the same, his hand shook slightly with anticipation as he lifted the cover. The spine crackled loudly. Even Henry, with as active an imagination as any eleven-year-old boy ever had, could not have anticipated what he would find when he opened the cover. Scrolled onto the endpaper in elaborate calligraphy were six unexpected words:

Yes, Henry, these are for you.

It wasn’t the usual inscription of To Henry, love, Mom that many of his other books had. The way it was written, it was as if someone had anticipated this very moment, granting him permission to take them.

And he had never seen the handwriting before in his life.

It took several trips. The books were oversize and rather heavy. But he managed to carry them up to his room without any interference. He closed the door behind him and wedged a chair beneath the doorknob to lock out unwanted visitors named Brianna.

At the foot of the bed sat a green metal chest. It had belonged to his great-great-grandfather, who had been a brave firefighter many years ago. The name Henry Leach IV was stenciled on the footlocker in large block letters. He’d been thrilled when his father had given him the chest and told him the story of how Henry Leach the Fourth risked his life during the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Sharing his name with a true American hero made him proud.

Henry spun the combination lock to its secret code and slowly opened the lid. The chest contained many of his favorite and prized possessions. Some, like his rare mineral collection and Millennium Falcon yo-yo, he just didn’t want Brianna to touch. But other items were ones he wanted no one to touch—like the wand secured within the guidebook.

Henry kept his guidebook neatly wrapped in the remains of a blanket he had carried everywhere with him until he turned four. The blanket’s edges were frayed and torn. Stains from long-forgotten meals had turned the light beige to a mottled gray, not unlike the color of his cat. But it was still as precious to him as any treasure he owned. One of the first things he had added to his wand was a piece of thread from the blanket.

As he moved the bundled guidebook to make room for his new tomes, he had a sudden thought. He’d recently learned about a page in the beginning of every book that contains all kinds of information about the book’s publication. Mrs. Verrity, the local librarian, called it a copyright page. Maybe Coralis’s address was on that page in the guidebook!

Henry searched the book in vain. There was no copyright page, no information about who printed the book, nothing about the author. He wondered where his father had even purchased it. It was altogether unlike anything he’d ever found at the library: old and cracked, with handwritten advice scrawled in the margins.

“Henry!” Brianna called up to him from the backyard.

He looked out the window, ready to yell at her to leave him alone. Unfortunately, he could tell by looking what had happened.

Brianna held a sneaker by the shoelace at arm’s length, pinching her nose with her other hand. “I stepped in poop, Henry,” she whined. “Come clean it off.”

It was a request he could not refuse. He had begged for a pet cat and had finally gotten his wish. (Actually, he had begged for an owl, but an emphatic no from both parents slammed that door closed rather quickly.) They had picked out a three-year-old cat from the animal shelter. The man from the shelter had not lied when he said the cat was housebroken. What he didn’t say was that it hated to use a litter box, preferring instead to use the great outdoors. The whole backyard was its litter box, and it was Henry’s responsibility to keep the yard clean.

“I’ll be right down. Just don’t try to wipe it off!” All she ever succeeded in doing was grinding it into all the tiny crevices that formed a flower shape on the sole of her shoe, making it that much more difficult to clean.

He quickly rewrapped the blanket around the guidebook and tucked it back into the chest, then closed and locked it before running outside to help his sister.

After the cleanup, as Henry hurried past his father’s office on the way to wash his hands, he saw a sudden movement from the corner of his eye. He immediately reversed course and caught a brief glimpse of tail feathers leaving through the open window. He dashed into the room, arriving at the window just in time to see a large bird zoom around the corner of the house and out of sight. It had been much bigger than a blue jay, with gray, orange, and white markings.

He turned back to the desk to reach for the letter …

The letter! It was gone!

He rubbed his hand along the stubble of his crew cut, a subconscious habit that flared up whenever he became confused or flustered.

He was sure he had weighed it down. Quickly, he searched the room—over, under, and around the few pieces of furniture—believing a stiff breeze must have dislodged it.

Nothing. The letter had vanished.

Again Henry rubbed his head. Could the bird have taken it?

No, that was his imagination getting the better of him again. It had to be here somewhere …

“Henry!” He jumped as Brianna managed to sneak up on him. “I did it again.” She held a soiled sneaker up, pinching her nose from the stench.

“Come on, Brianna! I just cleaned the whole yard!”

“You missed one,” she said with her devilish grin. “And I found it.”

Chapter Three

Some time later, at a remote castle in the forests of Romania, a woman was shouting at a bear.

“Sophia!” Gretchen yelled sharply.

The large brown bear pulled her nose out of the compost heap too quickly, spraying bits of rotted vegetables into a nearby flower patch. Caught in the act, she pleaded with a series of grunts to be allowed to finish her midday snack.

“Bah!” Gretchen scolded. “You get too fat. Soon you will need a bigger cave to sleep.”

Sophia snorted a reply that was just as insulting (if only Gretchen spoke bear!) before slinking away. She struggled fitfully to squeeze through the hole in the wall.

“Ha! You see? It is not the hole getting smaller. It is your bottom getting wider!” Gretchen laughed.

Sophia popped out the far side, then stood tall on her hind legs and roared—at either the hole or the woman on the other side of it—before ambling off into the surrounding forest.

“Ach, what am I to do with that animal?” Gretchen softly muttered a few curses in her native German before tending to the mess Sophia had left behind.

Gretchen’s garden occupied a relatively small area of the expansive courtyard. Castle Coralis had been built thousands of years ago during an age of enlightenment. Though it was originally conceived as a center for learning, its outer structures had undergone significant change over the millennia, as men waged battle with increasingly sophisticated weaponry.

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