Tidemagic: Ista Flit and the Impossible Key

1

The Door

Ista Flit stood with her left foot in the city she had just begun to think of as home and her right foot in a patch of shadow belonging to . . . somewhere else entirely. Somewhere that smelled of wet soil and witch hazel and pine.

A forest, overlooked by a gauzy predawn sky.

Impossible, part of her insisted. Well, it was almost dawn. The kitchen door, how-ever--a door she had used without incident every day since Pa’s disappearance had brought her to Shelwich almost three and a half moons ago--should have opened onto the narrow street that ran behind the Fabulous Fletwin restaurant. She should have been looking at the woodstore and the mailbox and the moss-covered stone trough where Padley and Giddon had planted bulbs that they said would sprout in-to crocuses when the weather grew warmer.

But now . . . no street, no trace of the snow that had been dusting the city since yesterday evening. Behind her, the Fletwin’s kitchen was as solid and cozy as ever, but through the doorway in front of her, unquestionably, was a forest. Rain-freckled creepers hung like garlands between white-barked silver birches, sturdy oaks, and elegant pines. A carpet of fallen leaves was spread in invitation, drawing her attention to a glade a little way ahead.

Fortunately, impossible was exactly what Ista had expected.

Impossible was going to help her find Pa. Finally.

And yet she hesitated, leaning into the magic that whispered around her. At not quite two hours past Low Tide, most people wouldn’t have been able to hear it. When it came to magic, though, Ista was not most people. She could read the Tide’s ebbs and flows as easily as she could sniff out the ingredients of a soup or a sauce, which was to say, with almost unfailing accuracy.

Over the past few days, she’d accidentally sniffed out rather a lot of trouble in her search for Pa, too. Now she felt the telltale prickle of wrongness in her stomach and down the backs of her legs.

A breeze stirred, ruffling her short brown hair. Not an ordinary breeze but one that reached out in tendrils, tugging at her limbs as if imploring her to get a move on. Ista glanced down at the key winking up at her from the Fletwin’s doormat. It was a small silver key, with nothing remarkable about it except for the engraved sym-bols that almost resembled musical notes.

Well, and the fact that her using it had made a forest appear at the doorstep.

Any door with a keyhole will do, Pa’s message had said--the message he’d hidden in his clarinet case, along with the key, where no one but Ista would discover them.

Ista hadn’t questioned his instructions. And she’d had no doubt that the key would work. Less than two days previously, she’d watched a boy called Tamlin use an al-most identical key to open a doorway very like the one in which she now stood.

Very like, but not the same--and this was the root of her hesitation. The doorway through which Tamlin had vanished had led to a garden, not a forest. A garden promised a house, and people--people who might know where Pa was. The forest in front of Ista made her think of stories about travelers who took wrong turns and lost themselves among the trees. . . .

She shook off the unsettling thought. Pa wouldn’t steer her wrong. He simply wouldn’t.

Then again, Pa hadn’t come back. That fact had scuttled after her like a spider all night as she’d planned and packed. Pa’s message had claimed that he would return “in good time,” that the key was just in case she needed him sooner. Yet almost a complete season had passed since he’d disappeared, and there had been no trace of him.

The impossible breeze seemed displeased that she was dithering. It twined around her ankles, nuzzling like a cat. Adjusting her grip on her bag of supplies, Ista cast a look over her shoulder to the kitchen counter and the three envelopes waiting up-on it.

One for Giddon and Padley, proprietors of the Fabulous Fletwin and as close to family as she had in Shelwich.

One for quick-thinking Ruby Mallard, who always landed on her feet--quite literal-ly, when the Tide was high.

One for Nat Shah, who was as bossy as a beagle but who never gave up on any-thing, especially the people he cared about.

She pictured a swarm of jewel-green beetles click-clacking across the rooftops--the glass-bugs--hurrying to deliver the fourth envelope to Alexo Rokis on Nimble Lane.

Four envelopes, and four identical letters, explaining in Ista’s scratchy handwriting what she was doing, and that she’d left them the key--as Pa had left it for her, alt-hough in plain sight, rather than hidden away.

If I’m not back in two days, please send help, she’d written, knowing her friends would have tried to delay her if she’d asked for their advice on how to proceed. Ruby would have been skeptical that the doorway wasn’t a trap. Padley would have said it was too dangerous to even consider. Giddon would have wanted to go in her place. Alexo would have insisted on devising one of his clockwork plans. As for Nat . . . Ista thought of his searchlight stare, of the notebook that barely left his hands. He would have had a thousand questions, and she wouldn’t have had an-swers to any of them.

But Nat and Ruby had both had their missing loved ones returned to them. Pa was still missing--and no matter how confident his message had sounded, some piece of his plan had clearly crumbled. Which meant that Ista couldn’t afford to waste time. He might be waiting for her, counting on her, precious minutes falling through his fingers like grains of sand through a timer.

She felt a pinch of doubt about leaving the key. Perhaps that had been Pa’s mis-take. What if the doorway sealed itself up after her and couldn’t be opened again?

The impossible breeze whirled impatiently, as if it really didn’t want her thinking about that. It gave Ista a nudge, knocking her off balance, and she stumbled for-ward, her left foot landing beside her right one.

That was that. She had crossed the threshold.

Ista spun back. The doorway remained, framing a neat rectangle of the Fletwin’s kitchen like a painting, the key still winking on the doormat.

Everything else was forest.

Then, with stomach-sinking inevitability, a curl of wind looped round and swung the door shut.

For a second, the shape held, as if all Ista had to do was turn the handle and the Fletwin and Shelwich would welcome her home. She reached out . . . but it was too late. The door became ghostly, its outline wavering, then it disintegrated into dusty fragments that a final lick of wind swirled away into nothingness.

2

The Path of Footprints

Its work done, the impossible breeze stilled. Quiet settled like a blanket, disturbed only by the murmur of magic.

I can’t have gone so very far, Ista told herself. The Tide and the cold both felt the same as they had only moments ago in Shelwich, and it was the same time of day.

But there was an oddness to this place. An absence. No insects, no birds.

Ista refused to panic. Just breathe, Pa would have said, and though it was because of him that she was in this mess, the advice still stood. She closed her eyes and counted to five, taking in the richness of rain-drenched earth, the lemony smell of the witch hazel, the sharp green cleanness of the pines.

She opened her eyes again, turning toward the glade she’d spotted earlier. That was where the doorway had pointed her, so that must be where Pa meant for her to go. Something stood at the center of it. An archway, perhaps double the height of the doorway through which she’d come, and made of some kind of pale stone.

Be careful, little thief. . . . Alexo’s voice tolled a warning bell in Ista’s mind.

People said Alexo Rokis was many things--a trickster, a ghost, an angel, a monster. Most people didn’t know the half of it. He had taught Ista everything she knew about getting out of scrapes. She’d imagined him--fox-faced, wolf-eyed--scrutinizing her as she’d packed her supplies, which meant that she’d come very well prepared indeed.

She took out a small ball of red wool and some foldable scissors and cut a long strand, which she tied to the trunk of the tree nearest to where the doorway had been. That precaution taken, she crept toward the glade.

The air chilled, the damp replaced by frost that pinched her nose and hardened the ground. At the edge of the clearing, she stopped. The archway wasn’t made of stone, after all, but from the trunk of a willow tree, stripped of its branches and bowed over, with veinlike ribbons of ice tracing the bark.

She couldn’t pinpoint when she noticed the music. One instant, it wasn’t there; the next, she could have sworn she’d been listening to it for at least a minute--a bittersweet, yearning, twisting refrain that kept rising, then dropping away.

Half of a duet, or a harmony line, Ista thought. Pa would have known. He was the musician. She had a topsy-turvy feeling that the missing piece of the music should be familiar to her, that she’d heard it somewhere before.

The sound was coming from the archway. Not from the other side of it, where she could see more glade and forest rolling out into the shadows, but through it, as if from down a long hallway. There were drums too. The beat pulsed in her toes, making her itch to move.

She felt it then. A silent summons woven into the music, as persistent as an under-tow.

All magic, even Alexo’s, was subject to the ebb and flow of the Tide. Ista could tell that at High Tide the call of this magic would have been hard to resist. She planted her feet, grateful that High Tide was hours away--then looked down and found she’d walked almost two-thirds of the distance to the archway without realizing it. The ground she stood on was so well trodden that a path of sorts had formed, with dead leaves flattened into the winter earth, and footprints layered over footprints, all leading in the same direction.

When they reached the archway, the footprints simply vanished, some of them cut in two as if a blade had swung across.

Were Pa’s footprints part of this pattern? Several prints looked fresh, but others were much fainter. Ista huddled deeper into her baggy black coat, which had been Pa’s coat once and hung past her knees. The key to a door of our own. That’s what he’d said he was going to bring back. That was why he’d come to Shelwich without Ista in the first place--to find work and save up for a proper home where the two of them could live together without having to rely on her aunt.

Pa was beyond the archway. He had to be. Nat and Ruby would say she was jump-ing to conclusions, that she couldn’t know with any measure of certainty. One thing was certain, though. A lot of people had walked this way, and none of them had walked back.

She suddenly worried she’d made a terrible mistake in coming here on her own.

Two days, Ista told herself. If she didn’t return in two days’ time, some or all of her friends would come for her. If she hadn’t found Pa by then, they’d find him togeth-er. In the meantime, she was Ista Flit. She was dangerous. And she needed to fig-ure out how anyone or anything could possibly have made Pa feel safe enough that he’d invited her to join him here.

She peered into the archway, feeling the power thrumming from it. The music crooked its finger at her, then retreated, delicate as spun sugar, as sly as a half-hidden smile.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said a voice behind her.

3

The Stranger

Ista’s skin prickled from crown to toe as she reeled round to see who had spoken. The stranger had propped himself against the broad trunk of an oak, his arms folded and one ankle hooked over the other as if he’d been observing her for some time.

“Who are you?” The words flew from her mouth before she could stop them.

She was usually too alert to be taken by surprise. Knowing that he had crept up on her made her jittery. Not being able to see him properly made her more so, and his face was infuriatingly cloaked in shadows.

A laugh like a chorus of bells rippled over her. The stranger moved into the light, dawn painting him in shades of purple and gray. He was a slender-bodied, long-limbed, fine-faced man, dressed in rough-spun clothes that looked right for the forest but somehow wrong for him. His gleaming brown hair and immaculate nails told of a pampered indoor life--a life in which he didn’t see much sun at all, judg-ing from his pearl-pale skin.

Ista sensed that he wanted her to find him impressive. To her irritation, she did. He didn’t simply walk; he flowed, like water. He stopped a few paces away from her, his mouth slanting with amusement, and a silent question hovering in his storm-cloud-gray eyes.

“Ah,” he said, nodding to himself. “A citysider.”

His pupils were oddly small, as if the daybreak dimness was too bright for him, and his full smile, which he showed her now, was even sharper than Alexo’s.

Instinctively, Ista stepped back.

Magic sighed up her spine, reminding her of the archway just behind her--and of the music, which had burrowed under her skin with such stealth that she’d stopped noticing its undertow pull. She leapt like a salmon, right off the path of footprints, landing in unexpectedly soggy ground.

“Interesting.” The stranger looked her up and down, as if he’d thought he’d solved her but now she’d become a puzzle again. “How did you travel here? You don’t have a key . . . Oh, but you had one, didn’t you?”

His voice was rich and low and had a magic of its own. Ista could feel it trying to chase her worries away, urging her to lean in and spill her secrets. Every cell in her body jangled with a warning that this person would take any crumb of truth she offered and use it against her.

“A key?” She frowned. “No, I . . . I don’t know how I got here.”

Not a complete lie--she didn’t know, after all, exactly how the key had brought her here--but a deliberate sidestep from the truth. The stranger seemed to sense that she was concealing something. A lightning flash of fury sparked behind his eyes, then dissolved, replaced by another sharp smile.