Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy Read Free

everyone knows unicorns and dragons aren’t real. But you may believe in ghosts?”
    “Maybe,” she said.
    “Good, I must tell you many things,” he said. “If you choose to help me, you must find the key to this door. We need to find my sword, which is magical, and the One Other, who will know how to wield it. On the Wintertide Clock there is a number in the little window at the very bottom of the face, just below the door of chimes, that will tell us how much time we have.”
    Ophelia bit her bottom lip.
    “I told my father I’d only be gone a little while,” she said.
    “Please, Ophelia,” said the boy.
    Of course she couldn’t save the world. She was only eleven years old and rather small for her age, and also she had knock-knees. Dr. Singh told her mother she would probably grow out of them, especially if she wore medical shoes, but that wasn’t the point. She had very bad asthma as well, made worse by cold weather and running and bad scares. Ophelia thought thisshould have all been proof that she couldn’t possibly help. She leaned away from the keyhole.
    Everything was meant to be simple. Mr. Whittard was to work, and Alice and Ophelia were to ice-skate. They’d go to the rink in the city square beneath the giant Christmas tree. A foreign city was meant to take their minds off terrible things. Ice-skating would help them forget some of their sadness. Now here was a boy asking her to do impossible things. He was making everything unsimple.
    “After you have been to the Wintertide Clock, you must find the elevator in the dinosaur hall,” said the boy. “That will take you to the seventh floor. You will need to take the left corridor. The right corridor leads to the Queen’s chamber. The left corridor is where the misery birds are kept—you must be careful not to wake them. At the very end of the corridor, there will be a small white cupboard with a small white drawer. You must bring the key that is in that drawer to me.”
    He’s full of orders, thought Ophelia. Check the clock, take this elevator here, get that key there.
    “Why were you chosen by a protectorate of wizards?” she asked. The best way to get to the bottom of things was with questions. “And how can someone take your name from you? I don’t think that’s really possible.”
    The boy sighed. The sigh of someone who is in a hurry but who knows he has to stop and go back to the very beginning to get anywhere.
    “Sit closer,” he said. “And I’ll tell you.” Through the keyhole, the boy said:

    You might think things fade with time. Memories, I mean. But they don’t. They grow stronger. I can still see the river beside the city, where I played with Julius and Rohan and Fred. We skipped stones there and built rafts and sailed all the way to the weir.
    When I was chosen, people didn’t understand. They said, “Why, him—he’s nothing but an ordinary boy.” But the wizards, they were never ones to listen to such talk. They always know exactly what they are doing because they learn it from standing very still and thinking for hours.
    The wizards had asked for every boy child, aged twelve, to be brought to the town square.
    “There is a boy child who shall undertake a treacherous journey to deliver a magical sword to the One Other so that the Snow Queen may be defeated,” the Great Wizard said in his calm, low voice.
    “We have dreamt him,” the wizards said together. “We have seen him in our visions.”
    My mother, on hearing this, was not impressed at all. “I think we’ll go fishing instead,” she said.
    All day we went about the forest and caught spangled trout, a whole bucketful, and even when I was tired, she wouldn’t go home. Of course, I know now it was because she sensed the boy to be chosen was me.
    While we were gone, the boys lined up in the square. There were some girls too, dressed as boys, because some mothers desire their children to do great things and thought there mightbe some benefits that came