“Be careful of your sorrow,” he had said. He was so old then. Impossibly old. He was all angles and bones and papery skin, like a cricket. “Your sorrow is dangerous. Don’t forget that she is still about.” And so Xan had swallowed her sorrow. And her memories, too. She buried both so deep that she would never find them. Or so she thought.
But now she remembered the castle—she remembered! Its crumbly strangeness. Its nonsensical corridors. And the people who lived in the castle—not just the wizards and scholars, but the cooks and scribes and assistants as well. She remembered how they scattered into the forest when the volcano erupted. She remembered how she put protective spells on each of them—well, each of them but one—and prayed to the stars that each spell would hold as they ran. She remembered how Zosimos hid the castle within each stone in the circle. Each stone was a door. “Same castle, different doors. Don’t forget. I mean it.”
“I won’t forget,” she said at thirteen.
“You will surely forget, Xan. Have you not met yourself?” He was so old then. How did he get so old? He had practically withered to dust. “But not to worry. I have built that into the spell. Now if you don’t mind, my dear. I have treasured knowing you, and lamented knowing you, and found myself laughing in spite of myself each day we were together. But that is all past now, and you and I must part. I have many thousands of people to protect from that blasted volcano, and I do hope you’ll make sure they are ever so thankful, won’t you dear?” He shook his head sadly. “What am I saying? Of course you won’t.” And he and the Simply Enormous Dragon disappeared into the smoke and plunged themselves into the heart of the mountain, stopping the eruption, forcing the volcano into a restless sleep.
And both were gone forever.
Xan never did anything to protect his memory, or to explain what he had done.
Indeed, within a year, she could barely remember him. It never occurred to her to find it strange—the part of her that would have found it strange was on the other side of the curtain. Lost in the fog.
She peered into the gloom of the hidden castle. Her old bones ached, and her mind raced.
Why had her memories hidden themselves from her? And why had Zosimos hidden the castle?
She didn’t know, but she was certain where she would find the answer. She knocked her staff against the ground three times, until it produced enough light to illuminate the dark. And she walked into the stone.
11.
In Which a Witch Comes to a Decision
Xan gathered books by the armload and carried them from the ruined castle to her workshop. Books and maps and papers and journals. Diagrams. Recipes. Artwork. For nine days she neither slept nor ate. Luna remained in her cocoon, pinned in place. Pinned in time, too. She didn’t breathe. She didn’t think. She was simply paused. Every time Glerk looked at her, he felt a sharp stab in his heart. He wondered if it would leave a mark.
He needn’t have wondered. It surely did.
“You cannot come in,” Xan told him through the locked door. “I must focus.” And then he heard her muttering inside.
Night after night, Glerk peered into the windows of the workshop, watching as Xan lit her candles and scanned through hundreds of open books and documents, taking notes on a scroll that grew longer and longer by the hour, muttering all the while. She shook her head. She whispered spells into lead boxes, quickly slamming the door shut the moment the spell was uttered and sitting on the lid to hold it in. Afterward, she’d cautiously open the box and peek inside, inhaling deeply as she did so, through her nose.
“Cinnamon,” she’d say. “And salt. Too much wind in the spell.” And she’d write that down.
Or: “Methane. No good. She’ll accidentally fly away. Plus she’ll be flammable. Even more than usual.”
Or: “Is that sulfur? Great heavens. What are you trying to do, woman? Kill the poor child?” She crossed several things off her list.
“Has Auntie Xan gone mad?” Fyrian asked.
“No, my friend,” Glerk told him. “But she has found herself in deeper water than she expected. She is not accustomed to not knowing exactly what to do. And it is frightening to her. As the Poet says,
‘The Fool, when removed
from solid ground, leaps—
From mountaintop,
to burning star,
to black, black space.
The scholar,
when bereft of scroll,
of quill,
of heavy tome,
Falls.
And cannot be found.’ ”
“Is that a real poem?” Fyrian asked.
“Of course it is a real poem,” Glerk said.
“But who made it, Glerk?”
Glerk closed his eyes. “The Poet. The Bog. The World. And me. They are all the same thing, you know.”
But he wouldn’t explain what he meant.
Finally, Xan threw the doors of the workshop wide open, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. “You see,” she explained to a very skeptical Glerk as she drew a large chalk circle on the ground, leaving a gap open to pass through. She drew thirteen evenly spaced marks along the circumference of the circle and used them to map out the points of a thirteen-pointed star. “In the end, all we are doing is setting a clock. Each day ticks by like the perfect whirring of a well-tuned gear, you see?”
Glerk shook his head. He did not see.
Xan marked out the time along the almost-complete circle—a neat and orderly progression. “It’s a thirteen-year cycle. That’s all the spell will allow. And less than that in our case, I’m afraid—the whole mechanism synchronizes to her own biology. Not much I can do about that. She’s already five, so the clock will set itself to five, and will go off when she reaches thirteen.”
Glerk squinted. None of this made any sense to him. Of course, magic itself always felt like nonsense to the swamp monster. Magic was not mentioned in the song that built the world, but rather had arrived in the world much later, in the light from the stars and moon. Magic, to him, always felt like an interloper, an uninvited guest. Glerk much preferred poetry.
“I’ll be using the same principle as the protective cocoon that she sleeps in. All that magic is kept inside. But in this case, it will be inside her. Right at the front of her brain, behind the center of her forehead. I can keep it contained and tiny. A grain of sand. All that power in a grain of sand. Can you imagine?”
Glerk said nothing. He gazed down at the child in his arms. She didn’t move.
“It won’t—” he began. His voice was thick. He cleared his throat and started again. “It won’t . . . ruin things, will it? I think I rather like her brain. I would like to see it unharmed.”
“Oh, piffle,” Xan admonished. “Her brain will be perfectly fine. At least I’m more than fairly sure it will be fine.”
“Xan!”
“Oh, I’m only kidding! Of course she will be fine. This will simply buy us some time to make sure she has the good sense to know what to do with her magic once it is unleashed. She needs to be educated. She needs to know the contents of those books, there. She needs to understand the movements of the stars and the origins of the universe and the requirements of kindness. She needs to know mathematics and poetry. She must ask questions. She must seek to understand. She must understand the laws of cause and effect and unintended consequences. She must learn compassion and curiosity and awe. All of these things. We have to instruct her, Glerk. All three of us. It is a great responsibility.”
The air in the room became suddenly heavy. Xan grunted as she pushed the chalk through the last edges of the thirteen-pointed star. Even Glerk, who normally wouldn’t be affected, found himself both sweaty and nauseous.