“Luna?” she said. “Are you well? Are you hungry? Luna?” There was nothing. Blank eyes. Blank face. A Luna-shaped hole in the universe. Xan felt a rush of panic bloom in her chest.
And, as though the blankness had never happened at all, the light returned to the child’s eyes. “Grandmama, may I have something sweet?” she said.
“What?” Xan said, her panic increasing in spite of the light’s return to the child’s eyes. She looked closer.
Luna shook her head as though to dislodge water from her ears. “Sweet,” she said slowly. “I would like something sweet.” She crinkled her eyebrows together. “Please,” she added. And the Witch obliged, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a handful of dried berries. The child chewed them thoughtfully. She looked around.
“Why are we here, Grandmama?”
“We’ve been here this whole time,” Xan said. She searched the child’s face with her eyes. What was going on?
“But why though?” Luna looked around. “Weren’t we just outside?” She pressed her lips together. “I don’t . . .” she began, trailing off. “I don’t remember . . .”
“I wanted to give you your first lesson, darling.” A cloud passed over Luna’s face, and Xan paused. She put her hand on the girl’s cheek. The waves of magic were gone. If she concentrated very hard, she could feel the gravitational pull of that dense nugget of power, smooth and hard and sealed off like a nut. Or an egg.
She decided to try again. “Luna, my love. Do you know what magic is?”
And once again, Luna’s eyes went blank. She didn’t move. She barely breathed. It was as if the stuff of Luna—light, motion, intelligence—had simply vanished.
Xan waited again. This time it took even longer for the light to return and for Luna to regain herself. The girl looked at her grandmother with a curious expression. She looked to her right and she looked to her left. She frowned.
“When did we get here, Grandmama?” she asked. “Did I fall asleep?”
Xan pulled herself to her feet and started pacing the room. She paused at the invention table, surveying its gears and wires and wood and glass and books with intricate diagrams and instructions. She picked up a small gear in one hand and a small spring—so sharp at the ends it made a point of blood bloom on her thumb—in the other. She looked back at Luna and pictured the mechanism inside that girl—rhythmically ticking its way toward her thirteenth birthday, as even and inexorable as a well-tuned clock.
Or, at least, that was how the spell was supposed to work. Nothing in Xan’s construction of the spell had indicated this kind of . . . blankness. Had she done it wrong?
She decided to try another tactic.
“Grandamama, what are you doing?” Luna asked.
“Nothing, darling,” Xan said as she bustled over to the magic table and assembled a scrying glass—wood from the earth, glass made from a melted meteorite, a splash of water, and a single hole in the center to let the air in. It was one of her better efforts. Luna didn’t seem to even see it. Her gaze slid from one side to the other. Xan set it up between them and looked at the girl through the gap.
“I would like to tell you a story, Luna,” the old woman said.
“I love stories.” Luna smiled.
“Once upon a time there was a witch who found a baby in the woods,” Xan said. Through the scrying glass, she watched her dusty words fly into the ears of the child. She watched the words separate inside the skull—baby lingered and flitted from the memory centers to the imaginative structures to the places where the brain enjoys playing with pleasing-sounding words. Baby, baby, b-b-bab-b-b-eeee, over and over and over again. Luna’s eyes began to darken.
“Once upon a time,” Xan said, “when you were very, very small, I took you outside to see the stars.”
“We always go outside to see the stars,” Luna said. “Every night.”
“Yes, yes,” Xan said. “Pay attention. One night, long ago, as we looked at the stars, I gathered starlight on my fingertips, and fed it to you like honey from the comb.”
And Luna’s eyes went blank. She shook her head as though clearing away cobwebs. “Honey,” she said slowly, as though the word itself was a great burden.
Xan was undeterred. “And then,” she pressed. “One night, Grandmama did not notice the rising moon, hanging low and fat in the sky. And she reached up to gather starlight, and gave you moonlight by mistake. And this is how you became enmagicked, my darling. This is where your magic comes from. You drank deeply from the moon, and now the moon is full within you.”
It was as though it was not Luna sitting on the floor, but a picture of Luna instead. She did not blink. Her face was as still as stone. Xan waved her hand in front of the girl’s face, and nothing happened. Nothing at all.
“Oh, dear,” Xan said. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”
Xan scooped the girl into her arms and ran out the door, sobbing, looking for Glerk.
It took most of the afternoon for the child to regain herself.
“Well,” Glerk said. “This is a bit of a pickle.”
“It’s nothing of the kind,” Xan snapped. “I’m sure it’s temporary,” she added, as though her words alone could make it true.
But it wasn’t temporary. This was the consequence of Xan’s spell: the child was now unable to learn about magic. She couldn’t hear it, couldn’t speak it, couldn’t even know the word. Every time she heard anything to do with magic, her consciousness and her spark and her very soul seemed to simply disappear. And whether the knowledge was being sucked into the kernel in Luna’s brain, or whether it was flying away entirely, Xan did not know.
“What will we do when she comes of age?” Glerk asked. “How will you teach her then?” Because you will surely die then, Glerk thought but did not say. Her magic will open, and yours will pour away, and you, my dear, darling five-hundred-year-old Xan, will no longer have magic in you to keep you alive. He felt the cracks in his heart grow deeper.
“Maybe she won’t grow,” Xan said desperately. “Maybe she will stay like this forever, and I will never have to say good-bye to her. Maybe I mislaid the spell, and her magic will never come out. Maybe she was never magic to begin with.”
“You know that isn’t true,” Glerk said.
“It might be true,” Xan countered. “You don’t know.” She paused before she spoke again. “The alternative is too sorrowful to contemplate.”
“Xan—” Glerk began.
“Sorrow is dangerous,” she snapped. And she left in a huff.
They had this conversation again and again, with no resolution. Eventually, Xan refused to discuss it at all.
The child was never magic, Xan started telling herself. And indeed, the more Xan told herself that it might be true, the more she was able to convince herself that it was true. And if Luna ever was magic, all that power was now neatly stoppered up and wouldn’t be a problem. Perhaps it was stuck forever. Perhaps Luna was now a regular girl. A regular girl. Xan said it again and again and again. She said it so many times that it must be true. It’s exactly what she told people in the Free Cities when they asked. A regular girl, she said. She also told them Luna was allergic to magic. Hives, she said. Seizures. Itchy eyes. Stomach upset. She asked everyone to never mention magic near the girl.
And so, no one did. Xan’s advice was always followed to the letter.
In the meantime, there was a whole world for Luna to learn—science, mathematics, poetry, philosophy, art. Surely that would be enough. Surely she would grow as a girl grows, and Xan would continue as she was—still-magic, slow-to-age, deathless Xan. Surely, Xan would never have to say good-bye.
“This can’t go on,” Glerk said, over and over. “Luna needs to know what’s inside her. She needs to know how magic works. She needs to know what death is. She needs to be prepared.”