Grayling's Song(29)

She glowered back at him. “I could likely cast a glamour again,” she said, “so I suggest you stop calling me names.”

“Pansy was cruel and malicious,” said Auld Nancy. “We will teach her to use her skills wisely, Sylvanus and I, or she will be put to work in the Nether Finchbeck laundry, washing the socks of adolescent magicians.”

Said Sylvanus, “The second most important rule about magic is to know when not to use it. We shall attend to that anon.”

Pansy frowned.

The fire took to smoldering and smoking, and Auld Nancy coughed deeply as the smoke circled her head. “Black clouds and ashweed, begone from me!” she shouted, waving her broom. A small shower of rain fell and cleaned the air. She sat back, satisfied.

Grayling stirred the fire and added small twigs and branches. The fire settled down, and so did they all.

“I don’t suppose,” asked Phinaeus Moon, “any of you could conjure me a horse? I must get back to the city.” He looked around. No horse appeared. “No, I feared not. ’Tis afoot for me.”

“What awaits you in the city?” asked Auld Nancy. “A banker? A tailor? A lover?”

“Paper,” he said. “Fine paper that I make myself.” He stretched his hands out before him. “My hands tingle, longing to feel again the slippery rag slurry that dries into paper. That, too, is a sort of magic. My paper is unequaled in the kingdom—heavy, soft, creamy, and thick.” His eyes grew dreamy. “Paper not to be used for registers or accounts or lists of provisions: two pounds of flour, a tub of pig fat, and a turnip. No, elegant paper that should be saved for royal decrees, sacred texts, or”—here he looked at Desdemona Cork—“love letters.”

Desdemona Cork twitched her shawl, and Phinaeus Moon blushed.

Grayling rolled her eyes. “Can you not leave it for a moment?” she hissed to Desdemona Cork. “Must you enchant everyone?”

Desdemona Cork pulled her shawls tightly around her. “’Tis not something I do, but something I am.”

“Why, then, are you not something useful?” Grayling asked. “Why are none of you useful? What value is there in your magic if you can do nothing with it?” She roared in frustration. Where was the help she had expected from the others?

Sylvanus snapped his fingers, and spring flowers bloomed on the branches of autumn-brown shrubs. A rainbow appeared in the darkening sky, and tiny winged creatures flew by. Grayling looked closely. Lambs. They were tiny winged lambs.

Useless! No wonder they had not been rooted like the others! Even Pansy had thought them not worth the effort. Anger formed a sour knot in her throat as she curled up to sleep.



“I have heard the grimoire again. ’Tis just past there,” Grayling said next morning. She gestured to where the woods were thick with great green spruces and firs, bare-branched rowans and oaks, packed tightly together, tangled with ferns and brambles and briers.

Her body taut with apprehension, Grayling led the others farther into the woods. The power that Pansy had conjured, the power that now defied her, would it be destroyed or destroyer? Grayling felt suddenly chilled.

After a time, she stopped at a break in the trees. Up a rugged, bracken-frosted rise was a great stone house, towered and turreted and spired as if trying to touch the sky.

“My mother’s grimoire is inside,” Grayling said. “Mayhap all the grimoires are there. Since the serpent is now but a bumbling boy and no longer guarding them, they are unprotected. Could not someone fetch my mother’s grimoire?”

There was silence but for Phinaeus Moon’s muttered “Bumbling? How say you bumbling?”

“I hear no one proposing to go after it.” Grayling sniffed. “Should not perilous adventures have a hero to face any dangers?”

The women looked at Sylvanus and Phinaeus Moon, who looked at each other. No one spoke.

I have been the most wary and unwilling of us all, thought Grayling. How did I become leader? But she was. She sang, and the grimoire sang back. “’Tis in there indeed. With my mother’s grimoire, mayhap we can discover how to end this bother at last.”

“In truth,” said Pansy, “there are no answers or assistance in your mother’s grimoire or anyone’s. There has not been such a force before, so there will be no remedies in a grimoire’s pages. I knew this when we began to follow your grimoire’s song, but I didn’t want you to stop trying, because I didn’t know what else to do.”

Auld Nancy, Desdemona Cork, Sylvanus, Phinaeus Moon all were struck dumb, but Grayling, her temper as frayed as her skirts, shouted, “All this for nothing? This exhausting journey for nothing? When we might well have stayed warm and dry and fed and sought another solution? Pansy, you are worse than malicious. You are wicked! A very devil!”

“I preferred you when you were timid and quiet,” said Pansy.

“Muzzle up!” said Grayling. “This all be your fault.”

“Why is she still here?” asked Desdemona Cork, pointing at Pansy. “Why do we not send her away?”

“I have promised my niece to watch over her girl and keep her safe,” said Auld Nancy. She shook her head. “It appears that the only danger to Pansy may be from herself. Still, though I have promised, we need not keep company with the girl.”

“I am here,” said Pansy. “Talk to me, not about me.”