The Girl Who Drank the Moon(65)

“Ah!” Sister Ignatia peered more intently. “Let’s see where you are, shall we?”

Sister Ignatia saw a large tree with a door in the middle. And a swamp, littered with flowers. The swamp looked familiar. She saw a steep mountainside with several jagged rims along the top—

Great Heavens! Are those craters?

And there! I know that path!

And there! Those stones!

Could it be that the boots had made their way back to her old castle? Or the place where the castle had been, anyway.

Home, she thought in spite of herself. That place had been her home. Perhaps it still was, after all these years. Despite the ease of life in the Protectorate, she had never again been so happy as she had been in the company of those magicians and scholars in the castle. Pity they had to die. They wouldn’t have died, of course, if they had had the boots, as was the original plan. It didn’t occur to them that anyone might try to steal them and run away from the danger, leaving them all behind.

And they thought they were so clever!

In the end, there had never been a magician as clever as Ignatia, and she had the entire Protectorate to prove it. Of course, she had no one left to prove it to, which was a pity. All she had was the boots. And now they were gone, too.

No matter, she told herself. What’s mine is mine. And that’s everything.

Everything.

And she ran up the trail toward home.





36.


In Which a Map Is Rather Useless





Luna had never run so hard or fast in her life. She ran for hours, it seemed. Days. Weeks. She had been running forever. She ran from boulder to boulder, ridge to ridge. She leaped over streams and creeks. Trees bent out of her way. She didn’t stop to wonder at the ease of her footing or the length of her leaps. All she thought about was the woman with a tiger’s snarl. That woman was dangerous. It was all Luna could do to keep her growing panic at bay. The crow wiggled away from the girl’s grasp and soared upward, circling over her head.

“Caw,” the crow called. “I don’t think she’s following us.”

“Caw,” he called again. “It’s possible that I was mistaken about the paper birds.”

Luna ran up the edge of a steep knoll to cast a wider view and make sure she was not being followed. There was no one. The woods were just woods. She sat down on the bare curve of the rock to open her journal and look at her map, but she had veered so far off her route, she wasn’t sure if she was even on the map anymore. Luna sighed. “Well,” she said, “I seem to have made a mess of things. We are no closer to my grandmother than when we started. And look! The sun is going down. And there is a strange lady in the woods.” She swallowed. “There’s something wrong with her. I can’t explain it. But I don’t want her coming anywhere near my grandmother. Not at all.”

Luna’s brain had suddenly become crowded with things she knew without knowing how she knew them. Indeed, her mind felt like a vast storage room whose locked cupboards were all at once not only unlocking but flinging themselves open and dumping their contents on the floor. And none of it was anything Luna remembered putting in those cupboards in the first place.

She was little—she couldn’t quite place how young she was, but definitely small. She was standing in the center of the clearing. Her eyes were blank. Her mouth was slack. She was pinned in place.

Luna gasped. The memory was so clear.

“Luna!” Fyrian had cried, crawling out of her pocket and hovering in front of her face. “Why aren’t you moving?”

“Fyrian, dear,” her grandmother had said. “Go fetch Luna a heartsblood flower from the far edge of the tall crater. She is playing a game with you, and she will only unfreeze if you bring her the flower.”

“I love games!” Fyrian cried before whizzing away, whistling a jaunty tune as he flew.

Glerk appeared through the red-algaed surface of the swamp. He opened one eye, and then the other. Then he rolled both to the sky.

“More lies, Xan,” he chided.

“Good ones!” Xan protested. “I lie to protect! What else can I say? I can’t explain anything that’s true in a way they can understand.”

Glerk came lumbering out of the swamp, the dark waters shedding in great beads from the oily sheen of his darker skin. He came close to Luna’s unblinking eyes. Glerk’s great, damp mouth deepened into a frown. “I don’t like this,” he said, laying two of his hands on either side of Luna’s face, and the other two hands on each of her shoulders. “This is the third time today. What happened this time?”

Xan groaned. “It was my fault. I could have sworn I sensed something. Like a tiger moving through the woods, but not, you understand. Well, of course you know what I thought.”

“Was it she? The Sorrow Eater?” Glerk’s voice had turned into a dangerous rumble.

“No. Five hundred years I’ve worried. She’s haunted my dreams, and don’t mistake it. But no. There was nothing. But Luna saw the scrying device.”

Glerk took Luna into his arms. She went limp. He rocked back on his tail, letting the girl’s weight sink into the squish of his belly. He smoothed back her hair with one hand.

“We need to tell Fyrian,” he said.

“We can’t!” Xan cried. “Look what happened to her when she just saw the scrying device out of the corner of her eye! She didn’t get better once I took it apart—and that was a while ago now. Just imagine if Fyrian spills the beans that her grandmother is a witch! She’ll go into a trance every time she sees me—every time! And she won’t stop until she turns thirteen. And she’ll be enmagicked and I’ll be gone. Gone, Glerk! And who will take care of my baby?”