The Girl Who Drank the Moon(47)

“Hello?” Luna called. “Is anyone here?”

No one answered. No one but the crow.

“Caw,” said the crow. Though it sounded more like For crying out loud, Luna, let’s get out of here.

Luna squinted at the books and papers. They looked as though they were the scribbles of a crazy person—a tangle of loops and smudges and words that meant nothing.

“Why would someone go to all the trouble of making a book full of gibberish?” she wondered.

Luna walked across the circumference of the room, running her hands along the wide table and the smooth counters. There was no dust anywhere, but no fingerprints, either. The air wasn’t stale, but she could detect no scent of any kind of life.

“Hello!” she called again. Her voice didn’t echo, nor did it carry. It seemed to simply fall out of her mouth and hit the ground with a soft thump. There was a window, which was strange, because surely she was underground, wasn’t she? She had gone down stairs. But even stranger, the view outside was of the middle of the day. And what’s more, it was a landscape that Luna didn’t recognize. Where the mountain’s crater should have been was instead a peak. A mountain peak with smoke pouring from the top, like a kettle set too long to boil.

“Caw,” the crow said again.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” Luna whispered. The hairs on her arms stood at attention, and the small of her back began to sweat. A piece of paper flew from one of the sheaves and landed on her hand.

She could read it. “Don’t forget,” it said.

“How could I forget when I didn’t know to begin with?” she demanded. But who was she asking?

“Caw,” said the bird.

“NO ONE TELLS ME ANYTHING!” Luna shouted. But that wasn’t true. She knew it wasn’t. Sometimes her grandmother told her things, or Glerk told her things, but their words flew from her mind as soon as they were said. Even now Luna could remember seeing words like tiny bits of torn-up paper lifting from her heart and hovering just before her eyes and then scattering away, as though caught on a wind. Come back, her heart called desperately.

She shook her head. “I’m being silly,” she said out loud. “That never happened.”

Her head hurt. That hidden grain of sand—tiny and infinite all at once, both compact and expanding. She thought her skull might shatter.

Another sheet of paper flew from the sheaf and landed on her hands.

There was no first word in the sentence—or not as it appeared to her. Instead, it looked like a smudge. After that, the sentence was clear: “. . . is the most fundamental—and yet least understood—element of the known universe.”

She stared at it.

“What is the most fundamental?” she asked. She held the paper close to her face. “Show yourself!”

And, all at once, the grain of sand behind her forehead began to soften and release—just a bit. She stared at the word, and watched as letters uncurled from the tangle of haze, mouthing each one as they appeared.

“M,” she mouthed. “-A-G-I-C.” She shook her head. “What on earth is that?”

A sound thundered in her ears. Bursts of light flashed behind her eyes. M, A, G, I, C. This word meant something. She was sure it meant something. And what’s more, she was sure she had heard the word before—though, for the life of her, she couldn’t remember where. Indeed, she could hardly figure out how to pronounce it.

“Mmmmm,” she began, her tongue turning to granite in her mouth.

“Caw,” the crow encouraged.

“Mmmmm,” she said again.

“Caw, caw, caw,” the crow squawked joyfully. “Luna, Luna, Luna.”

“Mmmmmmagic,” Luna coughed out.





26.


In Which a Madwoman Learns a Skill and Puts It to Use





When the madwoman was a little girl, she drew pictures. Her mother told her stories about the Witch in the woods—stories that she was never sure were true. According to her mother, the Witch ate sorrow, or souls, or volcanoes, or babies, or brave little wizards. According to her mother, the Witch had big black boots that could travel seven leagues in a single step. According to her mother, the Witch rode on the back of a dragon and lived in a tower so tall it pierced the sky.

But the madwoman’s mother was dead now. And the Witch was not.

And in the quiet of the Tower, far above the grimy fog of the town, the madwoman sensed things that she never could have sensed before her years there. And when she sensed things, she drew them. Over and over and over again.

Every day, the Sisters came into her cell unannounced and clucked their tongues at the masses of paper in the room. Folded into birds. Folded into towers. Folded into likenesses of Sister Ignatia, and then stomped upon with the madwoman’s bare feet. Covered over with scribbles. And pictures. And maps. Every day, the Sisters hauled paper by the armload out of the cell to be shredded and soaked and re-pulped into new sheets in the binderies in the basement.

But where had it come from in the first place? the Sisters asked themselves.

It’s so easy, the madwoman wanted to tell them. Just go mad. Madness and magic are linked, after all. Or I think they are. Every day the world shuffles and bends. Every day I find something shiny in the rubble. Shiny paper. Shiny truth. Shiny magic. Shiny, shiny, shiny. She was, she knew sadly, quite mad. She might never be healed.