Stolen Magic by Gail Carson Levine
DEDICATION
To Karen Romano Young
for her thoughtful edits and for staying power!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Rosemary Brosnan for insight, thoroughness, insistence on excellence
To Renée Cafiero for your care, for what you teach me about the important nitty-gritty, like flapping dependent clauses and the comma splice!
CHAPTER ONE
As if she were narrating a mansioners’ play, Elodie spoke across the strait. “And so our heroine”—she blushed at calling herself heroine—“young mistress Elodie, returns to Lahnt, the island of her birth. Five weeks earlier, she departed, a humble farmer’s daughter, but now, unexpected by all, least expected by herself, she has become—” She broke off as the deck of the cog groaned behind her and the sour odor of rotten eggs reached her nose.
Her traveling companions joined her at the bow railing while the cog rose and fell in moderate swells. On her right, His Lordship, Count Jonty Um, an ogre, who rarely spoke, said nothing. His dog, Nesspa, a tawny, long-haired mountain hound—a big dog for a person but not for an ogre—sat at his feet, panting.
On Elodie’s left, her masteress, the dragon Meenore, creator of the foul smell, drawled in ITs nasal voice, “I believe I see a pimple on the horizon, Lodie.”
“Elodie.” She breathed through her mouth. She had come to like ITs stench, but the adjustment always took a few moments.
“Do not correct your elders, Lodie.” IT used her full name only on grand occasions when she’d won ITs approval. “And certainly not your employer.” IT was a detecting dragon, and she ITs assistant.
A winter wind straight from Lahnt attacked the cog. She clutched her cap—newly bought, hardly worn by its former owner, mainland made, pink with red roses—and squinted into the distance. Might that dot be Lahnt? she wondered. Right now at Potluck Farm, smaller than a pinprick in the dot, Mother would be dressing under the coverlet, while Father, already in his tunic and hose, added a log to the fire. His helper, her friend Albin, would be imploring the sun to stop rising and grant him more sleep. It was Albin who’d taught her to mansion—act.
If she were there—if she’d never left home—she’d be laughing at Albin, jumping up for Father’s morning hug, eager for Mother’s pottage and even for her tart chiding, but dreading another day herding geese.
When she returned, however, she’d have the happiness of home and the joy of the people she loved. The geese would be bearable, since they were no longer her fate.
“What should we know of your native land, Lodie?”
She leaned back against the bulwark railing and addressed ITs ugly face, the long snout covered in brown-and-orange scales and the lipless mouth over which hung two crooked yellow fangs. “Just mountains and farms and tiny villages, Masteress. Few own anything worth caring about if it’s lost.” IT excelled at finding lost items. “Lahnt has brunkas, though.”
“Brunkas . . . Brunkas . . .” ITs smoke rose in puffs. “Brunkas . . . Ah, yes. Not human or fairy or elf. Certainly not dragon or ogre. Residing on the island of Lahnt and nowhere else, and not numerous even there. One lives on every mountain, and one in each village. A bevy dwell together in the north, where the children—”
“Brunkles,” Elodie said. “That’s what young brunkas are—”
“Neither interrupt nor correct your elders, Lodie. Where the brunkles are born and raised. Brunkas are short creatures even when full-grown, kindly, oddly willing to sacrifice their comfort for others. Calm and rarely rattled. Possessed of sharpened senses: sight, hearing, and smell.”
Count Jonty Um boomed—he could speak softer than a boom only with effort—“They can make rainbows, can’t they, Elodie?” He always used her full name, and she always had his approval.
She craned her neck up at his pleasant, enormous face. “Most can just flick out little ones, but I’m told High Brunka Marya can send hers across a whole valley.”
IT wrinkled ITs eyebrow ridges. “They have their flaws, too, do they not? Good, but faultfinding. Uncompromising.”
Elodie rushed to their defense. “They help the deserving!”
“And decide who that is, Lodie.”
She shrugged. “Some say they’re the best thing about Lahnt.”
Others disagreed.