Fyrian shut his eyes. He did not put down the Sorrow Eater. Great tears poured from beneath his clenched lids and fell in steaming dollops to the ground.
Luna looked deeper, past the layers of memory wrapped around the heart-turned-pearl. What she saw astonished her. “She walled off her sorrow,” Luna whispered. “She covered it up and pressed it in, tighter and tighter and tighter. And it was so hard, and heavy, and dense that it bent the light around it. It sucked everything inside. Sorrow sucking sorrow. She turned hungry for it. And the more she fed on it, the more she needed. And then she discovered that she could transform it into magic. And she learned how to increase the sorrow around her. She grew sorrow the way a farmer grows wheat and meat and milk. And she gorged herself on misery.”
The Sorrow Eater sobbed. Her sorrow leaked from her eyes and her mouth and her ears. Her magic was gone. Her collected sorrow was going. Soon there would be nothing at all.
The ground shook. Great plumes of smoke poured from the crater of the volcano. Fyrian shook. “I should throw you in the volcano for what you did,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. “I should eat you in one bite and never think of you again. Just as you never thought of my mother again.”
“Fyrian,” Xan said, holding out her arms. “My precious Fyrian. My Simply Enormous boy.”
Fyrian began to cry again. He released the Sorrow Eater, who fell in a heap on the rock. “Auntie Xan!” he whimpered. “I feel so many things!”
“Of course you do, darling.” Xan beckoned the dragon to come close. She put her hands on either side of his enlarged face and kissed his tremendous nose. “You have a Simply Enormous heart. As you always have. There are things to do with our Sorrow Eater, but the volcano is not one of them. And if you ate her you would get a stomachache. So.”
Luna cocked her head. The Sorrow Eater’s heart was in pieces. She would not be able to repair it without magic—and now her magic was gone. Almost at once, the Sorrow Eater began to age.
The ground shook again. Fyrian looked around. “It’s not just the peak. The vents are open, and the air will be bad for Luna. Everyone else, too, probably.”
The woman without hair—the madwoman (No, Luna thought. Not the madwoman. My mother. She is my mother. The word made her shiver) looked down at her boots and smiled. “My boots can take us to where we need to go in no time. Send Sister Ignatia and the monster with the dragon. I’ll put the rest of you on my back, and we’ll run to the Protectorate. They need to be warned about the volcano.”
The moon went out. The stars went out. Thick smoke covered the sky.
My mother, Luna thought. This is my mother. The woman on the ceiling. The hands in the window of the Tower. She is here, she is here, she is here. Luna’s heart was infinite. She climbed aboard her mother’s back and laid her cheek against her mother’s neck and closed her eyes tight. Luna’s mother scooped up Xan as tender as could be, and instructed Antain and Luna to hang on to her shoulders, as the crow hung on to Luna.
“Be careful with Glerk,” Luna called to Fyrian. The dragon held the Sorrow Eater in his hands, extended as far from his body as they could be, as though he found her repellant. The monster clung to his back, just as Fyrian had clung to Glerk for years.
“I’m always careful with Glerk,” Fyrian said primly. “He’s delicate.”
The ground shook. It was time to go.
46.
In Which Several Families Are Reunited
The people of the Protectorate saw a cloud of dust and smoke speeding toward the town walls.
“The volcano!” one man cried. “The volcano has legs! And it is coming this way!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” a woman countered. “Volcanoes don’t have legs. It’s the Witch. She’s coming for us at last. Just as we knew she would.”
“Does anyone else see a giant bird coming closer that kind of looks like a dragon?—though of course that’s impossible. Dragons no longer exist. Right?”
The madwoman skidded to a halt at the wall, letting Antain and Luna tumble from her back. Antain wasted no time, entering the Protectorate’s gates at a run. Luna stayed as the madwoman gently set Xan down on the ground and helped her to her feet.
“Are you all right?” the madwoman said. Her eyes darted this way and that, never settling on one place for very long. Her face cycled through a myriad of expressions, one after another after another. She was, Luna could see, quite mad. Or, perhaps, not mad at all, but broken. And broken things can sometimes be mended. She took her mother’s hand, and hoped.
“I need to get high up,” Luna said. “I need to make something that will protect the town and its people when that thing explodes.” She pointed at the volcano’s smoking peak with her chin, and her heart constricted a bit. Her tree house. Their garden. The chickens and the goats. Glerk’s beautiful swamp. All of it would be gone in a few moments—if it wasn’t already. Consequences. Everything was consesquences.
The madwoman led Luna and Xan into the gates and up onto the wall.
There was magic in her mother. Luna could feel it. But it wasn’t the same as Luna’s magic. Luna’s magic was infused in every bone, every tissue, every cell. Her mother’s magic was more like a jumble of trinkets left in a basket after a long journey—bits and pieces knocking together. Still, Luna could feel her mother’s magic—as well as her mother’s longing and love—buzzing against her skin. It emboldened the power surging inside her, directing the swells of magic. Luna held her mother’s hand a little bit tighter.
Fyrian, Glerk, and the nearly unconscious Sorrow Eater alighted next to them.
The people of the Protectorate screamed and ran from the wall, even as Antain desperately called out that they had nothing to fear. Xan looked up at the smoking peak. “There’s plenty to fear,” she said grimly. “It just doesn’t come from us.”
The ground shook.
Antain called for Ethyne.
Fyrian called for Xan.
“Caw, caw, caw,” said the crow. “Luna, Luna, Luna,” he meant.
Glerk called for everyone to hush a moment so he could think.
The volcano sent forth a column of fire and smoke, swallowed power un-swallowed at last.
“Can we stop it?” Luna whispered.
“No,” Xan said. “It was stopped before, long ago, but that was a mistake. A good man died for nothing. A good dragon, too. Volcanoes erupt and the world changes. This is the way of things. But we can protect. I can’t by myself—not anymore—and I suspect that you can’t on your own. But together.” She looked at Luna’s mother. “Together, I think we can.”
“I don’t know how, Grandmama.” Luna tried to surpress a sob. There were too many things to know, and not enough time to know them. Xan took Luna’s other hand. “Do you remember when you were a little girl, and I showed you how to make bubbles around the blooms of flowers, holding them inside?”
Luna nodded.
Xan smiled. “Come. Not all knowledge comes from the mind. Your body, your heart, your intuition. Sometimes memories even have minds of their own. Those bubbles we made—the flowers were safe inside. Remember? Make bubbles. Bubbles inside of bubbles. Bubbles of magic. Bubbles of ice. Bubbles of glass and iron and starlight. Bubbles of bog. The material is less consequential than the intention. Use your imagination and picture each one. Around each house, each garden, each tree, each farm. Around the whole town. Around the towns of the Free Cities. Bubbles and bubbles and bubbles. Surround. Protect. We’ll use your magic, the three of us together. Close your eyes and I’ll show you what to do.”
With her fingers curled into the fingers of her mother and grandmother, Luna felt something in her bones—a rush of heat and light, moving from the core of the earth to the roof of the sky, back and forth and back and forth. Magic. Starlight. Moonlight. Memory. Her heart had so much love, it began pouring forth. Like a volcano.
The mountain shattered. Fire rained. Ash darkened the sky. The bubbles glowed in the heat and wobbled under the weight of wind and fire and dust. Luna held on tight.