The Missing Spellbook

  WITCH LESSONS

  PATTY JANSEN

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  More By This Author

  Chapter One

  There was a frog in the classroom.

  It sat on the tiles in the middle of the aisle between two tables and was the subject of the attention of a large group of students at the back of the room.

  It was a brown striped marsh frog, and it didn’t seem to be particularly perturbed by the presence of so many young faces.

  A bunch of kids sat on their knees, poking and prodding at the creature, trying to get it back into the glass jar that made Veronica certain that the students had smuggled it from Mrs. Marsh’s animal room.

  But the creature hopped away whenever they approached with the container, its throat vibrating. The boys were egging on Lucas Wood, who held the container, while his twin brother Atticus yelled at him to be quick, while Monica Moonshadow did the poking. Typically Monica. Typically Atticus.

  Typically class 1A at their twice-weekly History of Magic lesson.

  Veronica couldn’t turn her back for a second.

  She had only ducked into the principal’s office to collect the key to the spellcraft tower, and had asked the class to behave themselves while she was away for the few minutes it took to collect the key, and sign the book to let everyone know who had the key, and what she was going to do with it.

  And, of course, when she came back to the classroom, Class 1A was in chaos. Had she really expected anything else?

  There were too many students in this class, she had repeatedly told the principal, who would reply that she was aware of this, but that new classrooms and, most importantly, new teachers, didn’t come out of thin air. Not even for a school of magic.

  The Oakhurst school had a good reputation these days, thanks to the hard work of the teachers.

  Many families from town, not just those interested in witchcraft, sent their children now, which meant that the classes were full and sometimes a bit too full.

  “What is going on here, pupils?” Veronica said while walking down the centre aisle of the classroom.

  “There is a frog,” Lucas said.

  “I can see that. Where did you get it? The poor thing.”

  “Lucas took it from the Animals class,” said Monica.

  “Then it should go back to the Animals class.”

  Lucas snorted. “I only took it because I forgot to bring a subject for the Drawing class and I didn’t want Miss Penn to get angry with me.”

  It was amazing how an arts teacher could instil this much fear in a bunch of twelve and thirteen year olds, but there it was.

  Veronica said, “Get back to your seats, everyone.”

  The boys retreated to their seats, leaving the poor amphibian by itself on the floor.

  Veronica crossed the room, grabbed the glass jar off Lucas’ desk, and scooped the offending amphibian up.

  There was a certain flair to doing this, that one only developed after having dealt with frogs and snakes, and suchlike for years, and that was an experience one only gained from going to the Academy of Magic.

  The awe of the students was palpable.

  Clearly, they had expected her to scream and call the housekeeper.

  Ha. They might be a bunch of rowdy near-teenagers, but she could still impress them.

  “Class, I should punish you for this misbehaviour,” Veronica said. “I am disappointed in you. I asked you to behave and finish your work while I went to get the key for our fun excursion, but maybe you don’t deserve the excursion. Maybe I will give you an assignment on the history of modern magic.”

  Several kids in the class groaned at the same time.

  “I told you so,” said a girl called Luna.

  “Oh, shut up, you know-it-all,” said Lucas.

  “But we finished the work you gave us,” said Emory, who was usually a good kid.

  “No, you didn’t finish it,” Luna said. “You just copied it all from me, and then you started teasing Quincy about spelling ‘expedition’ wrong.”

  Veronica raised her voice. “Students! What did I tell you about teasing others?”

  “That we shouldn’t do it. I told them.” Luna sat up straight on her bench.

  “Luna, just…” Veronica spread her hands.

  “Just what?” Luna said.

  She was not only a know-it-all, but a sassy one at that. Luna Featherdale, from Featherdale’s Markets, where most of the townsfolk bought any groceries they didn’t grow themselves. Luna Featherdale, who had worked behind the counter and had dealt with petty thieves, cranky old witches and rude customers all her life. Luna Featherdale, who would now cop comments from leering men as well, seeing how she had developed into a well-endowed young woman in the past year.

  And Veronica should know better than to let herself get riled up with that behaviour.

  Quincy, not the youngest but definitely the smallest student in the class, shrank even further into his seat at the back of the room.

  “Is that true, Quincy?” Veronica asked. “Did they tease you?”

  He stared at the workbook in front of him. Then he nodded, once.

  “He can’t spell, it’s true,” said a girl called Evangelina.

  “Listen to me, students,” Veronica said, and looked around the class. “I am the teacher in this class. It doesn’t look either smart or kind for you to judge other students’ work. Only I can do that. I asked you to write a small piece for the school newspaper about going to visit the spellcraft tower.”

  “But school paper will never take Quincy’s because it’s full of spelling mistakes,” Lucas said.

  “Stop it, Lucas, before I get really angry,” Veronica said. “Never talk about another student like that. How would you feel if I held up your calculus homework in front of the class so that everyone can see the red markings across it and could see all your mistakes? Would you like me to do that?”

  Lucas shook his head, looking down at his desk.

  The students fell quiet.

  To be honest, Luna was not wrong, because Quincy’s spelling was horrendous, but the task she had given the students had little to do with spelling, or the school newspaper.

  Yes, there would be an article about the excursion. Likely, she would collect all the reports and would then collate them into an article with quotes from the students.

  “If I hear any of you say one more word in which you’re teasing anyone, you will not go on this excursion.”

  They were all quiet after that.

  “Now then, let us get ready, and let’s put our best foot forward. I want you to behave. I don’t want you talking and yelling and running in the hallway, because there are other classes in those rooms. I also want you to behave once we are in the tower. The staircase is quite narrow, and the room is not very big. Once you are up there in the tower room, I want you all to line up around the table, and squishing in so that we can all fit. I don’t want you to touch anything, because there are a lot of valuable things inside that room, which is why I have a key to unlock it. Spellcraft is quite a special magic that can be dangerous, so to go into the spellcraft tower is a privilege. And I want you to behave as if this class deserves that privilege.”

  She looked around the class, not sure that this ragtag bunch of students would ever behave like anything that could remotely be called “well”.

  They fidgeted, they giggled, they whispered, and only part of it was because the class had too many students. They were boisterous kids, most on the verge of becoming young adults. Kids with questions. Kids who were bursting out of their shell, full of energy, or kids who needed a role model, a little guidance and a kind word.

  In her heart, she was quite fond of this rabble of students, as varied from the tiny Quincy to the huge twins Lucas and Atticus, and even know-it-all students like Luna.

  She told the students to put their books and papers neatly on the desk, to close their ink jars, and to put their pens in the trays, so that they wouldn’t fall on the floor and make the housekeeper angry because she would have to scrub the ink off the tiles.

  Then she watched as the students all filed into the hallway. They were mostly silent. Of course, they were all whispering, and as they passed, she caught one of the twins snatch a snide comment at Quincy as he walked past his desk.

  “Lucas and Atticus, stop it, I tell you. Stop it, or I will send you to the principal, and she will get you to skin snakes or crush spiders in Mr. Fairweather’s potion lab.”

  That shut him up, because Atticus was scared of snakes, or spiders or, for that matter, frogs.

  Veronica picked up the jar with the frog, and set off with her class through the hallway.

  She dropped into Mrs. Marsh’s classroom on the way. r />
  The students in Mrs. Marsh’s 2C class were all working hard. They were quiet, bent over their books, like little angels. Why did she always end up with the rowdy classes? It had to be something about the number of years you worked at the school. The old teachers got all the good groups.

  They walked down the corridor, through the entrance hall, and then up the staircase on the other side. From there, they went into the spellcraft corridor, and up a second staircase to the gallery. In there, they gathered at the door to the tower. There were two steps that led up to a solid wooden door with a large keyhole in the middle.

  Veronica extracted the key from her dress pocket, and inserted it in the door. The lock creaked when she opened it.

  The spellcraft tower was perhaps just as much of a novelty for her as it was for the students. Sure, the school’s principal, Mrs. Everhart, had taken her on a tour of the school when she started working there, but she rarely had a reason to come up here.

  Veronica preceded her class up the dark and winding staircase, where it smelled of dry stone. As she passed, the glowworms in the receptacles on the wall came on and lit her way with a dim, greenish glow.

  The room at the top of the staircase was lit by filtered daylight that fell in through the tiny windows along the round room’s walls. Once, the school had been a castle, and these were the little slits were archers would sit in wait for enemies to attack.

  One of the chairs that belonged in the room blocked the aisle, so she pushed it under the table. It would be nice if people who used the room cleaned up after themselves.

  Veronica made sure that all twenty-five children were lined up around the big wooden table in the middle of the room.

  Then she started talking about the magic spellbook they had come to see.

  “This spellbook that’s in the cabinet behind me is an old treasure that used to belong to the wizard Felix Morningvale who was the founder of this school. Many people think that magic only existed since we discovered magic can power machines. But Felix Morningvale lived three centuries ago and knew of the magic properties of natural substances, but he suspected a wider range of magic properties of words said in certain order and circumstances. The spells.”

  She looked around the room at all the students crammed around the large table in the room. They were all silent now.

  “Felix Morningvale had a vision to elevate the importance of spells. He gave his best friends, who would later become the school’s first teachers, the task of finding spells by visiting all known practitioners of magic. The teachers collected those spells over many years. They tried all of them and discarded the less useful ones, and kept the powerful ones. They wrote a couple of books, but this is the most important one. The spells that you will find in this book are the ones that we use to bless children when they are born, new houses when they are built, the important days of the year, and that, indeed, the mayor will use in two weeks’ time to bless the beginning of the council year. It is important that the spells are spoken to keep our world peace, because monsters, real and imagined, always take those areas that are unprotected. It is why people from the country send their smart young students to the school so that they can learn to perform the services for their own communities. It is so that we can keep the demons and the ghouls, and the ghosts away from the places and the people we hold dear.”

  “Miss,” Luna said, raising her hand.

  “Just be quiet for a while, Luna. I am speaking about the importance of this book. There are many spells in it that have a long history of importance. The spells that were made by and for the kings, and were used at the court. This is a copy that was hand-written by the Grand Wizard himself when he started this school. And he started it so that people wouldn’t forget the spells, and the world wouldn’t descend into chaos.”

  “Miss,” Luna said again.

  “Luna. I’m talking. There will be plenty of time for questions when I let you see the book.”

  “I know, Miss, but there is no book in the cabinet.”

  Chapter Two

  Veronica whirled around. Luna was right.

  The light of the glowworms in the cabinet neatly illuminated the empty stand on the green velvet. The book wasn’t in the cabinet.

  Veronica had never seen the book out of the cabinet unless someone was using it. That someone was usually Mr. Fabricius Stone, the head teacher at the spellcraft department.

  But there was no one in the room, and the book wasn’t on the table, and it wasn’t on the cabinet against the wall, and it wasn’t on the bookshelves because it would be too big to fit on the shelves and there was no space on those shelves, anyway.

  And it wouldn’t be in the principal’s office, because Mrs. Everhart knew that Veronica was going to take the students into the tower to look at it.

  Yet someone must have taken it out. The stand on the shelf inside the cabinet had been moved a bit from the position where its feet had made depressions in the velvet.

  The door to the cabinet stood open a tiny sliver.

  “Wait,” Veronica said.

  She wrestled her way between the students and the table and ran down the stairs.

  She sped to the tiny office at the end of the corridor that was the administration of the spellcraft department. This was where she’d picked up the key, when the department’s teacher assistant, an old witch by the name of Fiona Fishhook, had been very keen to chat to her.

  But Fiona’s desk was empty.

  Mr. Stone sometimes used the desk against the wall, but he had to be teaching, and usually his class occupied the room next to the office. Each classroom door had a tiny window to allow people to see if anyone was using the room. But they clearly never wanted the kids to look through this window. Not short, female teachers, either. Only tall wizards. Veronica needed to stand on her toes to see through.

  Yes, Mr. Stone was in the room with one of the older classes. His voice drifted through the wood.

  Veronica knocked.

  The talk stopped.

  “Come in,” a male voice said.

  She opened the door and stepped into the classroom.

  Classes with older students were usually smaller than the younger classes she took as a junior teacher. The students were in their mid to late teens, and they tended to have this certain… aroma of a mixture of unwashed clothes and sweat. The way the students half-sat, half-hung in their chairs would never be acceptable for younger students.

  Mr. Stone turned to her.

  “I’m with my class in the spellcraft tower to look at the Book of Spells, but it’s not in the cabinet. Where can I find it?”

  One of the students made a remark that Veronica couldn’t hear. Several of the boys laughed. They looked at her legs where they poked out from under her dress. What? Did she have frog poo on her legs?

  Veronica’s cheeks glowed. Imagine having to work with students like these. They were all like Luna, except worse. Their deep voices intimidated her. And they stank.

  Mr. Stone looked her up and down. “I put the book in the cabinet yesterday before going home.”

  “It’s not there⁠—”

  “That is not my fault.” His expression was prim.

  “You are the head of the department. I was thinking you might know where it is.”

  “I do not. I’m teaching. And excuse me for asking, but you said you were with a class. You didn’t leave the students unsupervised in the tower, by any chance?”

  Veronica’s cheeks grew hot. “I’m just quickly checking on where the book is.”

  “Well, as I said, I left it in the cabinet yesterday afternoon.”

  “It’s not there.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, I can’t help you then. Obviously, someone took it away to do some work. If you will excuse me now, I have a class to teach.”

  “What can I do?” Veronica asked. She had a class to teach, too, and she couldn’t, because the book, which was his responsibility, was missing. And the students were supposed to be writing an essay about this excursion in the tower.

 

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