Read Online Ordinary Magic by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway - Free Book Online Page B

stinks,” I said.
    Fred shrugged, his eyes on the carpet. “I’m not surprised. I’m not. I don’t know, I guess it’s hard on them.”
    Alexa scoffed at that, and Mom elbowed her with a stern, “Alexa Eleanor.”
    “That’s no excuse,” I said.
    “Well, I am an ord,” Fred said.
    “That still doesn’t make it okay.”
    That got us talking about being ords, and about our Judgings. I told Fred about mine, and how it stunk, and I asked if he found out when he was Judged too. And Fred told me he had suspected it for a while but hadn’t been sure. One time he and his brothers had been babysitting their young cousin while their parents were hosting a charity banquet. Apparently they started roughhousing and his older brother threw a spell at another brother and it hit Fred on the arm when it shot by.
    “Arthur panicked,” Fred said. “He thought he nailed me, that I was going to turn into a freak or something.” Fred paused and cleared his throat. “But I was okay, so he thought …”
    “That he hadn’t hit you,” I finished.
    “But he did, I felt it. They got Peggy. Our cousin. They got her less than me, and
she
disappeared.” He snapped his fingers. “We were still tearing up the attic, looking for her, when ourparents got home. She ended up as an umbrella stand in the foyer.” Fred smiled, but it looked out of place. “That was the second-worst day of my life.”
    He hadn’t known for sure until he was Judged this past winter. They asked him to leave school right afterward, just like me, so he’d been out much longer and he was worried about classes. “I tried to read more,” he said. “I went to the library a lot. They tried to keep me out but, you know, they couldn’t.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Protective barriers. Warding spells. Force fields. None of those things work on … people like us.”
    “Ords,” Peter said.
    “Yes, exactly, ords, thank you,” Fred said. “We can walk through all that. You mean you haven’t tried it? Not even once?” I shook my head and Fred grinned. “It’s kinda cool.”
    “It’s called breaking and entering,” Mom told us, “and that’s illegal.”
    Fred nodded, chastened.
    “I—” Frances paused. We looked at her. She turned pink and whispered, “I spent a lot of time at the library, also. But I haven’t missed any school …”
    I asked how long she had known.
    “A month. My birthday is August first.”
    “So your parents really had to move fast to get you in this year.”
    “It was—”
    “Pardon?” Fred said, leaning forward.
    “ It was Mrs. Eames, actually, ” Frances said, her eyes darting backand forth like a frightened puppy’s. She had the most enormous blue eyes, they seemed to take up half her face. “My parents are very busy. They couldn’t be expected to …”
    “Who’s Mrs. Eames?” I asked.
    “She’s our neighbor. She lives across the street. I, um, lived with her after my Judging.”
    “Oh,” I said. There was an awkward, silent moment. I mean, everybody
knows
that’s what you do with an ord. You get rid of them. But my parents had kept me, and Peter’s mom kept him, and Fred—okay, his dad and stepmom had apparently tried to sell him to adventurers, but still, that meant they’d retained custody, at least.
    So I said, “I’m sorry,” but that didn’t seem like enough either. It didn’t matter; Frances had already tucked into herself again, and she didn’t answer. I turned to Peter desperately. “What about you?”
    Peter didn’t look up from his book. “I have always known.”
    “How?”
    It took a moment, but he answered. “My mom.”
    I glanced at Alexa, confused.
    “Peter is an ord because his mother is an ord,” Alexa explained, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
    “I thought that wasn’t tried and true,” Mom said.
    “It’s not,” Alexa said. “But it is very likely.”

    Originally, Rothermere was just the site of the royal palace, shaped from a single