“GONE!” the woman shrieked. “THEY ARE GONE!”
She turned and stalked toward the girl. With a flick of her left wrist, she bent the air in front of her, forcing Luna to her feet. The woman kept her left hand out, pinching the air with clawed fingers, keeping Luna in place from several yards away.
“I don’t have them!” Luna whimpered. The woman’s grip hurt. Luna felt her fear expand inside her, like a storm cloud. And as her fear grew, so did the woman’s smile. Luna did her best to stay calm. “I just got here.”
“But you have touched them,” the woman whispered. “I can see the residue on your hands.”
“No I haven’t!” Luna said, thrusting her hands into her pockets. She tried to force away any memory of the dream.
“You will tell me where they are.” The woman raised her right hand, and even from far away, Luna could feel the fingers on her throat. She began to choke. “You will tell me right now,” the woman said.
“Go away!” Luna gasped.
And suddenly, everything moved. The birds lifted from their roost and massed behind the girl.
“Oh, you silly thing.” The woman laughed. “Do you think your silly parlor tricks can—” And the birds attacked, swirling like a cyclone. They shook the air. They made the rocks tremble. They bent the torsos of the trees.
“GET THEM OFF ME!” the woman shrieked, waving her hands. The birds cut her hands. They cut her forehead. They attacked without mercy.
Luna held her crow close to her chest and ran as fast as she could.
35.
In Which Glerk Smells Something Unpleasant
“I’m itchy, Glerk,” Fyrian said. “I’m itchy all over. I’m the itchiest in the world.”
“How, dear boy,” Glerk said heavily, “could you possibly know that?” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Where has she gone? he wondered. Where are you, Xan? He felt the tendrils of worry wind around his heart, nearly squeezing it to a stop. Fyrian had perched right in between the monster’s great, wide-spaced eyes, and he began scratching his backside madly. Glerk rolled his eyes. “You’ve never even seen the world. You might not be the itchiest.”
Fyrian scratched at his tail, his belly, his neck. He scratched his ears and his skull and his long nose.
“Do dragons shed their skins?” Fyrian asked suddenly.
“What?”
“Do they shed their skins? Like snakes?” Fyrian attacked his left flank.
Glerk considered this. He searched his brain. Dragons were a solitary species. Few and far between. They were difficult to study. Even dragons, in his experience, didn’t know much about dragons.
“I do not know, my friend,” he said finally. “The Poet tells us,
‘Each mortal beast must find its Ground—
be it forest or fen or field or fire.’
Perhaps you will know all that you wish to know when you find your Ground.”
“But what is my Ground?” Fyrian asked, worrying at his skin as though he meant to scratch it right off.
“Dragons, originally, were formed in stars. Which means that your Ground is fire. Walk through fire and you will know who you are.”
Fyrian considered this. “That sounds like a terrible idea,” he said finally. “I don’t want to walk through fire at all.” He scratched his belly. “What’s your Ground, Glerk?”
The swamp monster sighed. “Mine?” He sighed again. “Fen,” he said. “The Bog.” He pressed his upper right hand to his heart. “The Bog, the Bog, the Bog,” he murmured, like a heartbeat. “It is the heart of the world. It is the womb of the world. It is the poem that made the world. I am the Bog, and the Bog is me.”
Fyrian frowned. “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re Glerk. And you’re my friend.”
“Sometimes people are more than one thing. I am Glerk. I am your friend. I am Luna’s family. I am a Poet. I am a maker. And I am the Bog. But to you, I am simply Glerk. Your Glerk. And I do love you very much.”
And it was true. Glerk loved Fyrian. As he loved Xan. As he loved Luna. As he loved the whole world.
He inhaled again. He should have been able to catch wind of at least one of Xan’s spells. So why couldn’t he?
“Look out, Glerk,” Fyrian said suddenly, swooping up and looping in front of Glerk’s face, hovering in front of his nose. He pointed backward with his thumb. “That ground up there is very thin—a skin of rock with fire under it. You’ll fall through as sure as anything.”
Glerk wrinkled his brow. “Are you certain?” He squinted at the rock stretch ahead. Heat poured off it in waves. “It’s not supposed to be burning here.” But it was. This seam of rock was clearly burning. And the mountain buzzed underfoot. This had happened before, when the entire mountain had threatened to unpeel itself like an overripe Zirin bulb.
After the eruption—and the magical corking of that eruption—the volcano had never slept soundly, even in the early days. It had always been rumbly and shifty and restless. But this felt different. This was more. For the first time in five hundred years, Glerk was afraid.
“Fyrian, lad,” the monster said. “Let us pick up our pace, shall we?” And they began tracking along the high side of the seam, looking for a safe place to cross.
The great monster looked around the forest, scanning the stretch of undergrowth, narrowing his eyes and extending his gaze as best he could. He used to be better at this sort of thing. He used to be better at many things. He inhaled deeply, as if he was trying to suck the entire mountain into his nose.
Fyrian looked at the swamp monster curiously.
“What is it, Glerk?” he said.
Glerk shook his head. “I know that smell,” he said. He closed his eyes.
“Xan’s smell?” Fyrian fluttered back up to his perch on the monster’s head. He tried to close his eyes and sniff as well, but he ended up sneezing instead. “I love Xan’s smell. I love it so much.”
Glerk shook his head, slowly, so that Fyrian would not fall. “No,” he said in a low growl. “Someone else.”
Sister Ignatia could, when she wanted to, run fast. Fast as a tiger. Fast as the wind. Faster than she was going now, certainly. But it wasn’t the same as when she had her boots.
Those boots!
She had forgotten how much she loved them once upon a time. Back when she had curiosity and wanderlust and the inclination to go to the other side of the world and back in a single afternoon. Before the delicious and abundant sorrows of the Protectorate had fed her soul until it was indolent and sated and gloriously fat. Now, just thinking about her boots imbued her with a youthful spark. So black were those beautiful boots that they seemed to bend the light around them. And when Sister Ignatia wore them at night, she felt herself full to bursting with starlight—and, if she timed it right, moonlight as well. The boots fed right into her very bones. Their magic was a different sort than was available to her from sorrow. (But oh! How easy it was to gorge herself on sorrow!)
Now Sister Ignatia’s magical stores were starting to dwindle. She had never thought to sock any away for a rainy day. It never rained in the Protectorate’s marvelous fog.
Stupid, she chided herself. Lazy! Well. I must simply remember how to be crafty.
But first, she needed those boots.
She paused a moment to consult her scrying device. At first, all she saw was darkness—a tight, closed-up sort of darkness, with a single, pale, horizontal line of light cutting across. Very slowly, the line began to widen, and a pair of hands reached in.
A box, she thought. They are in a box. And someone is stealing them. Again!
“Those are not for you!” she shouted. And although there is no way the person attached to those hands could have heard her—not without magic, anyway—the fingers seemed to hesitate. They pulled back. There was even a bit of a tremble.
These hands weren’t the child’s, that much was certain. These were grown-up hands. But whose?