This is why it doesn’t pay to be brave. Bravery makes nothing, protects nothing, results in nothing. It only makes you dead. And this is why we don’t stand up to the Witch. Because even a powerful old wizard was no match for her.
I already told you this story is true. I only tell true stories. Now. Off with you, and don’t let me catch you shirking on your chores. I might send you to the Witch and have her deal with you.
9.
In Which Several Things Go Wrong
The journey home was a disaster.
“Grandmama!” Luna cried. “A bird!” And a tree stump became a very large, very pink, and very perplexed-looking bird, who sat sprawled on the ground, wings akimbo, as if shocked by its own existence.
Which, Xan reasoned, the poor thing probably was. She transformed it back into a stump the moment the child wasn’t looking. Even from that great distance, she could sense its relief.
“Grandmama!” Luna shrieked, running up ahead. “Cake!” And the stream up ahead suddenly ceased. The water vanished and became a long river of cake.
“Yummy!” Luna cried, grabbing cake by the handful, smearing multicolored icing across her face.
Xan hooked her arm around the girl’s waist, vaulted over the cake-stream with her staff, and shooed Luna forward along the winding path up the slope of the mountain, undoing the accidental spell over her shoulder.
“Grandmama! Butterflies!”
“Grandmama! A pony!”
“Grandmama! Berries!”
Spell after spell erupted from Luna’s fingers and toes, from her ears and eyes. Her magic skittered and pulsed. It was all Xan could do to keep up.
At night, after falling into an exhausted heap, Xan dreamed of Zosimos the wizard—dead now these five hundred years. In her dream, he was explaining something—something important—but his voice was obscured by the rumble of the volcano. She could only focus on his face as it wrinkled and withered in front of her eyes, his skin collapsing like the petals of a lily drooping at the end of the day.
When they arrived back at their home nestled beneath the peaks and craters of the sleeping volcano and wrapped in the lush smell of the swamp, Glerk stood at his full height, waiting for them.
“Xan,” he said, as Fyrian danced and spun in the air, screeching a newly created song about his love for everyone that he knew. “It seems our girl has become more complicated.” He had seen the strands of magic skittering this way and that and launching in long threads over the tops of the trees. He knew even at that great distance that he wasn’t seeing Xan’s magic, which was green and soft and tenacious, the color and texture of lichen clinging to the lee of the oaks. No, this was blue and silver, silver and blue. Luna’s magic.
Xan waved him off. “You don’t know the half of it,” she said, as Luna went running to the swamp to gather the irises into her arms and drink in the scent. As Luna ran, each footstep blossomed with iridescent flowers. When she waded into the swamp, the reeds twisted themselves into a boat, and she climbed aboard, floating across the deep red of the algae coating the water. Fyrian settled himself at the prow. He didn’t seem to notice that anything was amiss.
Xan curled her arm across Glerk’s back and leaned against him. She was more tired than she’d ever been in her life.
“This is going to take some work,” she said.
Then, leaning heavily on her staff, Xan made her way to the workshop to prepare to teach Luna.
It was, as it turned out, an impossible task.
Xan had been ten years old when she was enmagicked. Until then, she had been alone and frightened. The sorcerers who studied her weren’t exactly kind. One in particular seemed to hunger for sorrow. When Zosimos rescued her and bound her to his allegiance and care, she was so grateful that she was ready to follow any rule in the world.
Not so with Luna. She was only five. And remarkably bullheaded. “Sit still, precious,” Xan said over and over and over as she tried to get the girl to direct her magic at a single candle. “We need to look inside the flame in order to understand the—Young lady. No flying in the classroom.”
“I am a crow, Grandmama,” Luna cried. Which wasn’t entirely true. She had simply grown black wings and proceeded to flap about the room. “Caw, caw, caw!” she cried.
Xan snatched the child out of the air and undid the transformation. Such a simple spell, but it knocked Xan to her knees. Her hands shook and her vision clouded over.
What is happening to me? Xan asked herself. She had no idea.
Luna didn’t notice. She transformed a book into a dove and enlivened her pencils and quills so that they stood on their own and performed a complicated dance on the desk.
“Luna, stop,” Xan said, putting a simple blocking spell on the girl. Which should have been easy. And should have lasted at least an hour or two. But the spell ripped from Xan’s belly, making her gasp, and then didn’t even work. Luna broke through the block without a second thought. Xan collapsed onto a chair.
“Go outside and play, darling,” the old woman said, her body shaking all over. “But don’t touch anything, and don’t hurt anything, and no magic.”
“What’s magic, Grandmama?” Luna asked as she raced out the door. There were trees to climb and boats to build. And Xan was fairly certain she saw the child talking to a crane.
Each day, the magic became more unruly. Luna bumped tables with her elbows and accidentally transformed them to water. She transformed her bedclothes to swans while she slept (they made an awful mess). She made stones pop like bubbles. Her skin became so hot it gave Xan blisters, or so cold that she made a frostbitten imprint of her body on Glerk’s chest when she gave him a hug. And once she made one of Fyrian’s wings disappear in mid-flight, causing him to fall. Luna skipped away, utterly unaware of what she had done.
Xan tried encasing Luna in a protective bubble, telling her it was a fun game they were playing, just to keep all that surging power contained. She cast bubbles around Fyrian, and bubbles around the goats and bubbles around each chicken and a very large bubble around the house, lest she accidentally allow their home to burst into flames. And the bubbles held—they were strongly magic, after all—until they didn’t.
“Make more, Grandmama!” Luna cried, running in circles on the stones, each of her footprints erupting in green plants and lurid flowers. “More bubbles!”
Xan had never been so exhausted in her life.
“Take Fyrian to the south crater,” Xan told Glerk, after a week of backbreaking labor and little sleep. She had dark circles under her eyes. Her skin was as pale as paper.
Glerk shook his massive head. “I can’t leave you like this, Xan,” he said as Luna made a cricket grow to the size of a goat. She gave it a lump of sugar that had appeared in her hand and climbed aboard its back for a ride. Glerk shook his head. “How could I possibly?”
“I need to keep the both of you safe,” Xan said.
The swamp monster shrugged. “Magic has nothing on me,” he said. “I’ve been around for far longer than it has.”
Xan wrinkled her brow. “Perhaps. But I don’t know. She has . . . so much. And she has no idea what she’s doing.” Her bones felt thin and brittle, and her breath rattled in her chest. She did her best to hide this from Glerk.
Xan followed Luna from place to place, undoing spell after spell. The wings were removed from the goats. The eggs were untransformed from muffins. The tree house stopped floating. Luna was both amazed and delighted. She spent her days laughing and sighing and pointing with wonder. She danced about, and where she danced, fountains erupted from the ground.
Meanwhile, Xan grew weaker and weaker.
Finally Glerk couldn’t stand it anymore. Leaving Fyrian at the crater’s edge, he galumphed down to his beloved swamp. After a quick dip in the murky waters, he made his way toward Luna, who was standing by herself in the yard.
“Glerk!” she called. “I’m so happy to see you! You are as cute as a bunny.”
And, just like that, Glerk was a bunny. A fluffy, white, pink-eyed bunny with a puff for a tail. He had long white lashes and fluted ears, and his nose quivered in the center of his face.