Her head hurt. That hidden grain of sand—tiny and infinite all at once, both compact and expanding. She thought her skull might shatter.
Another sheet of paper flew from the sheaf and landed on her hands.
There was no first word in the sentence—or not as it appeared to her. Instead, it looked like a smudge. After that, the sentence was clear: “. . . is the most fundamental—and yet least understood—element of the known universe.”
She stared at it.
“What is the most fundamental?” she asked. She held the paper close to her face. “Show yourself!”
And, all at once, the grain of sand behind her forehead began to soften and release—just a bit. She stared at the word, and watched as letters uncurled from the tangle of haze, mouthing each one as they appeared.
“M,” she mouthed. “-A-G-I-C.” She shook her head. “What on earth is that?”
A sound thundered in her ears. Bursts of light flashed behind her eyes. M, A, G, I, C. This word meant something. She was sure it meant something. And what’s more, she was sure she had heard the word before—though, for the life of her, she couldn’t remember where. Indeed, she could hardly figure out how to pronounce it.
“Mmmmm,” she began, her tongue turning to granite in her mouth.
“Caw,” the crow encouraged.
“Mmmmm,” she said again.
“Caw, caw, caw,” the crow squawked joyfully. “Luna, Luna, Luna.”
“Mmmmmmagic,” Luna coughed out.
26.
In Which a Madwoman Learns a Skill and Puts It to Use
When the madwoman was a little girl, she drew pictures. Her mother told her stories about the Witch in the woods—stories that she was never sure were true. According to her mother, the Witch ate sorrow, or souls, or volcanoes, or babies, or brave little wizards. According to her mother, the Witch had big black boots that could travel seven leagues in a single step. According to her mother, the Witch rode on the back of a dragon and lived in a tower so tall it pierced the sky.
But the madwoman’s mother was dead now. And the Witch was not.
And in the quiet of the Tower, far above the grimy fog of the town, the madwoman sensed things that she never could have sensed before her years there. And when she sensed things, she drew them. Over and over and over again.
Every day, the Sisters came into her cell unannounced and clucked their tongues at the masses of paper in the room. Folded into birds. Folded into towers. Folded into likenesses of Sister Ignatia, and then stomped upon with the madwoman’s bare feet. Covered over with scribbles. And pictures. And maps. Every day, the Sisters hauled paper by the armload out of the cell to be shredded and soaked and re-pulped into new sheets in the binderies in the basement.
But where had it come from in the first place? the Sisters asked themselves.
It’s so easy, the madwoman wanted to tell them. Just go mad. Madness and magic are linked, after all. Or I think they are. Every day the world shuffles and bends. Every day I find something shiny in the rubble. Shiny paper. Shiny truth. Shiny magic. Shiny, shiny, shiny. She was, she knew sadly, quite mad. She might never be healed.
One day as she sat on the floor in the middle of her cell, cross-legged, she had chanced upon a handful of feathers left behind by a swallow who had decided to make her nest on the narrow windowsill of the cell, before a falcon had decided to make the swallow a snack. The feathers drifted in through the madwoman’s window and onto the floor.
The madwoman watched them land. The feathers landed on the floor right in front of her. She stared at them—the quill, the shaft, each filament of down. Then she could see the smaller structures—dust and barb and cell. Smaller and smaller went the details of her vision, until she could see each particle, spinning around itself like a tiny galaxy. She was as mad as they come, after all. She shifted the particles across the yawning emptiness between them, this way and that, until a new whole emerged. The feathers were no longer feathers. They were paper.
Dust became paper.
Rain became paper.
Sometimes her supper became paper, too.
And every time, she made a map. She is here, she wrote, over and over and over again.
No one read her maps. No one read her words. No one bothers with the words of the mad, after all. They pulped her paper and sold it at the marketplace for a considerable sum.
Once she mastered the art of paper, she found it was ever so easy to transform other things as well. Her bed became a boat for a short time. The bars on her windows became ribbons. Her one chair became a measure of silk, which she wrapped around herself like a shawl, just to enjoy the feel of it. And eventually she found that she could transform herself as well—though only into very small things, and only for a little while. Her transformations were so exhausting that they sent her to bed for days.
A cricket.
A spider.
An ant.
She had to be careful not to be trodden on. Or swatted.
A waterbug.
A cockroach.
A bee.
She also had to make sure she was back in her cell when the bonds of her atoms felt as though they were ready to burst and fly apart. Over time, she could hold herself in a particular form for slowly increasing durations. She hoped that one day she might be able to hold her form as a bird long enough to find her way to the center of the forest.
Some day.
Not yet.
Instead she became a beetle. Hard. Shiny. She scuttled right under the feet of the crossbow-wielding Sisters and down the stairs. She climbed onto the toes of the timid boy doing the Sisters’ daily chores—poor thing. Afraid of his own shadow.
“Boy!” she heard the Head Sister shout from down the hall. “How long must we wait for our tea?”
The boy whimpered, stacked dishes and baked goods onto a tray with a tremendous clatter, and hurried down the hall. It was all the madwoman could do to hang on to the laces of his boot.
“At last,” said the Head Sister.
The boy set the tray on the table with a tremendous crash.
“Out!” the Head Sister boomed. “Before you destroy something else.”
The madwoman scuttled under the table, grateful for the shadows. Her heart went out to the poor boy as he stumbled out the door, clutching his hands together as though they were burned. The Sister inhaled deeply through her nose. She narrowed her gaze. The madwoman tried to make herself as small as possible.
“Do you smell something?” the Sister asked the man in the chair opposite.
The madwoman knew that man. He was not wearing his robes. Instead he wore a fine shirt of lovely cloth and a long coat of the lightest of wool. His clothes smelled of money. He was more wrinkled than he had been the last time she had seen him. His face was tired and old. The madwoman wondered if she looked similar. It had been so long—so very, very long—since she had last seen her own face.
“I smell nothing, madam,” the Grand Elder said. “Except tea and cakes. And your own excellent perfume, of course.”
“There is no need to flatter me, young man,” she said, even though the Grand Elder was much older than she. Or he looked much older.
Seeing her next to the Grand Elder, the madwoman realized with a start that after all these years, Sister Ignatia had never seemed to age.
The old man cleared his throat. “And this brings us to the reason I am here, my dear lady. I did what you asked, and I learned what I could learn, and the other Elders did the same. And I did my best to dissuade him, but it was no use. Antain still intends to hunt the Witch.”
“Did he follow your advice, at least? Did he keep his plans a secret?” There was a sound inside the voice of the Head Sister, the madwoman realized. Grief. She’d know that sound anywhere.