The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(46)

Finch stuck a hand into his bag, pulling out the first thing he touched—the spyglass from Hansa’s cottage—and placing it on an open square of countertop.

Grandma June’s brusque air dropped away. Her hand shot out to grab it, then stalled midway. Carefully she plucked and lifted it, like her palm was a grocery scale.

“Well? Did I do good or what?” Iolanthe’s eyes crinkled.

June ignored her. “I’ve seen the seed before the bloom. I’ve seen the babe before the bones. But I’ve never seen one of these.”

“What is it?” Finch asked, itching now to snatch it back. He wasn’t sure, suddenly, that he wanted to sell.

The woman handed it over. “Look through it.”

Finch already had, in the Hinterland, but now he tried again. “Nothing.” He executed a slow turn. “It’s not even magnified.”

She took it back and touched an invisible catch, and the thing snapped open, revealing a second section. “Now look.”

Finch peered through it dutifully, and gasped. He felt like he had the first time he’d ducked his head underwater while snorkeling with his parents in the Seychelles: from the mundane surface to a riotous world of colored fins and scattered light. Just like that.

“How am I seeing this?” he said. “What am I seeing?”

“That’s the past,” she said, her voice disembodied, floating. “You might be looking at yesterday, or a year ago, or ten.”

“Longer,” Finch said. He was watching a girl with milk-glass eyes, tracking her path through a transformed shop—brighter, tidier, full of different unnameable things. She was fourteenish, light as a dragonfly, her skin the color of buckwheat honey. She perched on a cluttered tabletop, then turned. Impossibly, she fixed Finch with her pale green gaze. It sparked like an ice cube down his back, and he dropped the spyglass to his side.

“Well?” June said hungrily. “What’d you see?”

“A girl. Really, really pretty, with eyes like yours. I think she might’ve seen me.”

“That was me!” she crowed. “I thought you looked familiar. I was pretty, wasn’t I? Too pretty for anyone’s good, least of all my own.

“One more thing,” she said, taking the spyglass back and opening it to reveal a third section.

“The future.” She narrowed her eyes. “Look if you’d like, but keep your findings to yourself. I’m old enough to have a fair guess as to what’s next for me.”

Finch made to take it, then shook his head. “I believe you.”

“Clever boy. The spyglass alone is worth plenty on its own, but let’s see what else you’ve got.”

The next few hours were full of wonders. Iolanthe sat cross-legged on the floor, grinning, as the old shopkeeper showed Finch what his treasures could do.

She showed him how to prick his finger on the frail golden needle he’d taken from a crumbling tower, then laughed at his panic as the thing spun around him, weaving a shirt right onto his back. The child’s boot was a charm, for the health of the child who wore it. If you polished the mirror it would show you what your true love was looking at right that second; Finch’s heart flip-flopped, and he pushed it back without peeking. When Iolanthe put out a hand to look into it herself, Grandma June snatched it away.

“Not you. Not here.”

Iolanthe’s lips thinned before she made herself laugh. Finch noted the odd exchange, filed it away.

The walnut the old woman shook her head at.

“Unpredictable. There could be a dress of stars inside it, or a cloak of ashes. Or a white cat. Or just a walnut.”

She picked up the silver pen carefully, tapping its point with the ball of her thumb. When she wrote with it, the words disappeared into the paper, each swallowed up as she wrote the next. She clapped her hands.

“Oh, this is good. It’s a general’s pen.”

“A what?”

She knew he didn’t know anything, she just liked making him ask. “Generals use them to write reports back to their king or queen without fear of interception. You can write a letter to anyone, on anything, and one way or another, the letter will find them—and never fall into the wrong hands. It doesn’t leave a mark on your end, either. Of course they’re used more commonly for trysts, or separated lovers.” She smirked at the look on his face. “Well, well! If I didn’t know better, I’d say I just convinced the boy to keep it for himself.”

He shrugged, like, what can you do? and put it into his pocket. “You never know when you might get a chance at a tryst.”

“Wise words,” she said. “Now look: these scales are used by sailors in storms. Often lead to drownings among the lovestruck, but summoning a mermaid is the most reliable way to change an unfriendly tide…”



* * *



Finch was paid for his treasures in bound stacks of leaf-green paper, tissue-thin.

“What is this?”

“We call them fairy gold,” said Grandma June. “It’s a joke that stuck. Whatever world they’re in, they become that world’s currency. And they keep their form till they’ve passed through seven times seven pairs of hands.”

“You’re telling me that after … forty-nine people have touched them, they turn back into little pieces of green paper?”