Grayling's Song(30)

“Do I hear a gnat buzzing?” asked Desdemona Cork.

“Clod-pated fools,” Pansy said in a mumble, and she stalked away.

“Pansy may be useful yet,” Auld Nancy said, “and she cannot do too much harm while we’re watching her.”

“If what Pansy said is true,” asked Grayling, “and there are no answers in the grimoires, what, then, shall we do? Auld Nancy? Desdemona Cork? Sylvanus, master magician?”

All shook their heads. Weary and disheartened, they sat, leaning against the trees. Grayling stormed away, disturbing Pook, who, jolted out of her pocket, landed a goat.

Somewhere near was the sea. Grayling could hear it and smell it. She knew the sea only from songs and stories, but she could see it in her mind, gray and vast and wild, surging and churning. That was just how she felt. Such turmoil within her. She could swallow it no longer. She followed the sound through a thicket of young oaks and over a rise.

And there it was, not as she had imagined it but wilder and fiercer, more magnificent and more immense. The waves racing in put her in mind of great frothy beasts attacking the shore, over and over, in endless battle. The wind, a clean wind with no trace of smoke or shadow, blew through her hair, lifted it, and danced it furiously upon her head.

As her exhilaration turned to rage, she let out a great howl: all this way and all these days and all their efforts, and still they were powerless against the smoke and shadow. Shadow and smoke. Smoke. Smoke . . . She paced many moments in thought before heading back to the others.

Pook the goat bleated at her return, twigs sticking out between his large yellow teeth. Auld Nancy, Desdemona Cork, and Sylvanus were sprawled on the ground. But where was Phinaeus Moon? Perhaps he had already gone, back to the city. Well, indeed, Grayling thought, we have no need of him, good for nothing but gawking at Desdemona Cork.

She cleared her throat and said, “Do you recall Auld Nancy clearing the smoke away from her with a small rain shower?” Her companions nodded. “I do wonder, if a little wet rid us of a little smoke, might not a lot of wet extinguish a lot of smoke?”

There was silence as her listeners struggled to understand just what she meant, and then “Aha!” from Auld Nancy. “Indeed,” she went on, lifting her broom, “I shall call up rain.”

Sylvanus stroked his beard. “The girl may have the right of it, but rain would likely be too scant. To banish the demon of smoke and shadow would require a great deal of water and no way to avoid it.”

“I was thinking,” said Grayling, “of the sea.”

“The sea, the sea,” the others murmured as they looked at her and each other.

“We have followed my mother’s grimoire all this way,” said Grayling. “The force was summoned to gather the grimoires and guard them. Although Pansy’s gatekeeper has been removed, the force must guard them still. If we find some way to take my mother’s grimoire, will the force not follow to retrieve it, as it was created to do?” The others looked at each other and bobbed their heads in agreement. “We could then throw the grimoire into the sea. The smoke will pursue it and be extinguished. Might that be an answer?”

“It might,” said Auld Nancy, “but ’twould be most dangersome.”

“No matter. I, Phinaeus Moon, shall find the grimoire for you and hurl it into the sea,” said the young man, returning with a load of wood in his arms. “I would be the hero of this adventure.”

Grayling shook her head. “Nay. You cannot sing to the grimoire nor hear it singing back.” She looked at frail Auld Nancy with her aching bones, sweetly scented Desdemona Cork with her frivolous enchantments, and white-bearded, wise, but ineffectual Sylvanus. Though they each had a portion of magic, the grimoire would sing to none of them. Only to Grayling. Only to her.

“I fear it must be me,” she said.

As Phinaeus Moon started a fire, the others nodded somberly. Who else indeed. I must, she repeated to herself, I must, though every part of her wanted to run, to hide, to disappear. Instead she curled herself near the fire and tried to sleep. A biting-cold wind arose from time to time, but whether it was natural or a sign that the force was protesting her plans, Grayling could not say.





XIII





rayling watched the sky lighten from murky dawn to the bright blue of a fine autumn day. The sky should not be blue this morning, she thought, but cloudy, dark, and ominous.

She stirred the embers of the fire and sat beside it, reluctant to face what was to come. One by one, the others woke, stood, and stretched, until only Desdemona Cork still lay on the ground, curled around herself like a puppy.

She raised her head. “I am sore afraid,” she said. “For myself, for Grayling, for us all. This is nothing I can enchant away.” Auld Nancy dropped creakily down beside Desdemona Cork and took her hand.

“What if she does not succeed?” Desdemona Cork asked. “What if we all are rooted? I can almost feel my skin harden into bark.” She shuddered.

It proved the seriousness of their plight, thought Grayling—the bold and bossy Auld Nancy, who mistrusted enchanters, bringing a measure of comfort to Desdemona Cork, no longer arrogant and assured but doubtful and in need of solace.

Grayling inhaled deeply. She would do what she could—for her mother, for the other rooted folk, for all those in peril. Taking the sleeping Pook, once more a mouse, from her pocket, she asked, “Will one of you safeguard Pook while I am occupied?”