“STOP!” he cried. He had a heavily scarred face and a weapon in his hands.
The puddle of magic, compounded now with fear and surprise and worry for the child that was on the other side of this dangerous stranger, enlarged suddenly into a tidal wave. It thrummed through Xan’s bones, lighting her muscles and tissues and skin. Even her hair sizzled with magic.
“OUT OF MY WAY,” Xan shouted, her voice rumbling through the rocks. She could feel her magic rush from the center of the earth, through her feet and out the top of her head on its way to the sky, back and forth and back and forth, like massive waves pushing and pulling at the shore. She reached out and grabbed the man with both hands. He cried out as a surge hit him square in the solar plexus, knocking his breath clear away. Xan flung him aside as easily as if he was a rag doll. She transformed herself into an astonishingly large hawk, descended on the child, gripped the swaddling clothes in her talons, and lifted the baby into the sky.
Xan couldn’t stay that way—she just didn’t have enough magic—but she and the child could stay airborne over at least the next two ridges. Then she would give food and comfort, assuming she didn’t collapse first. The child opened its throat and wailed.
The madwoman in the Tower watched the Witch transform. She felt nothing as she watched the old nose harden into a beak. She felt nothing as she saw the feathers erupt from her pores, as her arms widened and her body shortened and the old woman screamed in power and pain.
The madwoman remembered the weight of an infant in her arms. The smell of the scalp. The joyful kick of a brand-new pair of legs. The astonished waving of tiny hands.
She remembered bracing her back against the roof.
She remembered her feet on the rafters. She remembered wanting to fly.
“Birds,” she murmured as the Witch took flight. “Birds, birds, birds.”
There is no time in the Tower. There is only loss.
For now, she thought.
She watched the young man—the one with the scars on his face. Pity about the scars. She hadn’t meant to do it. But he was a kind boy—clever, curious, and good of heart. His kindness was his dearest currency. His scars, she knew, had kept the silly girls away. He deserved someone extraordinary to love him.
She watched him stare at the paper falcon. She watched him carefully unfold each tight crease and flatten the paper on a stone. The paper had no map. Instead it had words.
Don’t forget, it said on one side.
I mean it, said the other.
And in her soul, the madwoman felt a thousand birds—birds of paper, birds of feathers, birds of hearts and minds and flesh—leap into the sky and soar over the dreaming trees.
19.
In Which There Is a Journey to the Town of Agony
For the people who loved Luna, time passed in a blur. Luna, however, worried that she might never be twelve. Each day felt like a heavy stone to be hoisted to the top of a very tall mountain.
In the meantime, each day increased her knowledge. Each day caused the world to simultaneously expand and contract; the more Luna knew, the more she became frustrated by what she did not yet know. She was a quick study and quick-fingered and quick-footed and sometimes quick-tempered. She cared for the goats and cared for the chickens and cared for her grandmother and her dragon and her swamp monster. She knew how to coax milk and gather eggs and bake bread and fashion inventions and build contraptions and grow plants and press cheese and simmer a stew to nourish the mind and the soul. She knew how to keep the house tidy (though she didn’t like that job much) and how to stitch birds onto the hem of a dress to make it delightful.
She was a bright child, an accomplished child, a child who loved and was loved.
And yet.
There was something missing. A gap in her knowledge. A gap in her life. Luna could feel it. She hoped that turning twelve would solve this—build a bridge across the gap. It didn’t.
Instead, once she finally did turn twelve, Luna noticed that several changes had begun to occur—not all of them pleasant. She was, for the first time, taller than her grandmother. She was more distractible. Impatient. Peevish. She snapped at her grandmother. She snapped at her swamp monster. She even snapped at her dragon, who was as close to her heart as a twin brother. She apologized to all of them, of course, but the fact of it happening was itself an irritation. Why was everyone vexing her so? Luna wondered.
And another thing. While Luna had always believed that she had read every single book in the workshop, she began to realize that there were several more that she had never read at all. She knew what they looked like. She knew where they sat on the shelf. But try as she might, she could not picture their titles, nor remember a single clue as to their contents.
And what’s more, she found that she could not even read the words on the spines of certain volumes. She should have been able to read them. The words were not foreign and the letters hooked into one another in ways that ought to have made perfect sense.
And yet.
Every time she tried to look at the spines, her eyes would slide from one side to the other, as though they were not made of leather and ink, but of glass slicked with oil. It did not happen when she looked at the spine The Lives of a Star and it did not happen when she looked at the beloved copy of Mechanica. But other books, they were as slippery as marbles in butter. And what’s more, whenever she reached for one of them, she would find herself unaccountably lost in a memory or a dream. She would find herself going cross-eyed and fuzzy-headed, whispering poetry or making up a story. Sometimes she would regain her senses minutes or hours or half a day later, shaking her head to un-addle her brains, and wondering what on earth she had been doing, or for how long.
She didn’t tell anyone about these spells. Not her grandmother. Not Glerk. Certainly not Fyrian. She didn’t want to worry any of them. These changes were too embarrassing. Too strange. And so she kept it secret. Even still, they sometimes gave her strange looks. Or odd answers to her questions, as if they already knew something was wrong with her. And that wrongness clung to her, like a headache that she couldn’t shake.
Another thing that happened after Luna turned twelve: she began to draw. All the time. She drew both mindlessly and mindfully. She drew faces, places, and minute details of plants and animals—a stamen here, a paw there, the rotted-out tooth of an aged goat. She drew star maps and maps of the Free Cities and maps of places that existed only in her imagination. She drew a tower with unsettling stonework and intersecting corridors and stairways crowding its insides, looming over a town drenched in fog. She drew a woman with long, black hair. And a man in robes.
It was all her grandmother could do to keep her in paper and quills. Fyrian and Glerk took to making her pencils from charcoal and stiff reeds. She could never get enough.
Later that year, Luna and her grandmother walked to the Free Cities again. Her grandmother was always in high demand. She checked in on the pregnant women and gave advice to the midwives and healers and apothecaries. And while Luna loved visiting the towns on the other side of the forest, this time the journey also vexed her.
Her grandmother—as stable as a boulder all of Luna’s life—was starting to weaken. Luna’s increasing worry for her grandmother’s health pricked at her skin, like a dress made of thorns.
Xan had been limping the whole way. And it was getting worse. “Grandmama,” Luna said, watching her grandmother wince with each step. “Why are you still walking? You should be sitting. I think you should sit down right now. Oh, look. A log. For sitting on.”
“Oh, tosh,” her grandmother said, leaning heavily on her staff and wincing again. “The more I sit, the longer the journey will take us.”