“Alas, no. People know. I don’t know who told them—he or his ludicrous wife. He believes the quest to be possible, and it seems that she does, too. And others now believe the same. They all . . . hope.” He said the word as though it was the bitterest of pills. The Grand Elder shuddered.
The Sister sighed. She stood and paced the room. “You really don’t smell that?” The Grand Elder shrugged, and the Sister shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. In all likelihood, the forest will kill him. He has never endeavored such a journey. He has no skills. He has no idea what he is doing. And his loss will prevent other, more—unpleasant—questions from being raised. However, it is possible that he may return. That is what troubles me.”
The madwoman leaned as far out of the shadows as she dared. She watched the Sister’s movements become more abrupt and chaotic. She watched as a slick of tears glistened right at the bottoms of her eyes.
“It is too risky.” She took in a breath to steady herself. “And it doesn’t close the door on the question. If he should return finding nothing, it does not mean that there isn’t something to be found by another citizen so foolhardy as to take to the woods. And if that person finds nothing, then perhaps someone else will try as well. And soon those reports of nothing become something. And soon the Protectorate starts getting ideas.”
Sister Ignatia was pale, the madwoman noticed. Pale and gaunt. As though she was slowly starving to death.
The Grand Elder was silent for a long moment. He cleared his throat. “I assume, dear lady . . .” His voice trailed off. He was silent again. Then, “I assume that one of your Sisters could. Well. If they could.” He swallowed. His voice was weak.
“This isn’t easy for either of us. I can see that you have some feeling for the boy. Indeed, your sorrow—” Her voice broke, and the Sister’s tongue quickly darted out and disappeared back into her mouth. She closed her eyes as her cheeks flushed. As though she had just tasted the most delicious flavor in the world. “Your sorrow is very real. But it can’t be helped. The boy cannot return. And it must be evident to all that it was the Witch who killed him.”
The Grand Elder leaned heavily upon the embroidered sofa in the Sister’s study. His face was pale and gaunt. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. Even from her tiny vantage point, the madwoman could see that his eyes were wet.
“Which one?” he asked hoarsely. “Which one will do it?”
“Does it matter?” the Sister asked.
“It does to me.”
Sister Ignatia stood and swept over to the window, looking out. She waited for a long moment. Finally she said, “All the Sisters, you understand, are well-trained and thorough. It is not . . . usual for any of them to be overly upended by the protestations of feeling. Still. They all cared for Antain more than the other Tower boys. If it was anyone else, I’d send any Sister and be done with it. In this case”—she sighed, turned and faced the Grand Elder—“I shall do it.”
Gherland flicked his eyes to dislodge the tears and pinned his gaze on the Sister.
“Are you sure?”
“I am. And you may rest assured: I will be quick. His death will be painless. He will not know of my coming. And he will not know what hit him.”
27.
In Which Luna Learns More than She Wished
The stone walls were impossibly old and impossibly damp. Luna shivered. She stretched her fingers out, then curled them into fists, in and out and in and out, trying to get the blood flowing. Her fingertips felt like ice. She thought she’d never be warm.
The papers swirled around her feet. Whole notebooks skittered up the crumbling walls. Inky words unhooked themselves from the page and crawled around the floor like bugs before making their way back again, chattering all the while. Each book and each paper, as it turned out, had quite a bit to say. They murmured and rambled; they talked over one another; they stepped on each other’s voices.
“Hush!” Luna shouted, pressing her hands over her ears.
“Apologies,” the papers murmured. They scattered and gathered; they swirled into great whirlwinds; they undulated across the room in waves.
“One at a time,” Luna ordered.
“Caw,” agreed the crow. “And no foolishness,” it meant.
The papers complied.
Magic, the papers asserted, was worthy of study.
It was worthy of knowledge.
And so it was, Luna learned, that a tribe of magicians and witches and poets and scholars—all dedicated to the preservation, continuation, and understanding of magic—established a haven for learning and study in an ancient castle surrounding an even more ancient Tower in the middle of the woods.
Luna learned that one of the scholars—a tall woman with considerable strength (and whose methods sometimes raised eyebrows)—had brought in a ward from the wood. The child was small and sick and hurt. Her parents were dead—or so the woman said, and why would she lie? The child suffered from a broken heart; she wept ceaselessly. She was a fountain of sorrow. The scholars decided that they would fill that child to bursting with magic. That they would infuse her skin, her bones, her blood, even her hair with magic. They wanted to see if they could. They wanted to know if it was possible. An adult could only use magic, but a child, the theory went, could become magic. But the process had never been tested and observed—not scientifically. No one had ever written down findings and drawn conclusions. All known evidence was anecdotal at best. The scholars were hungry for understanding, but some protested that it could kill the child. Others countered that if they hadn’t found her in the first place, she would have died anyway. So what was the harm?
But the girl didn’t die. Instead, the girl’s magic, infused into her very cells, continued to grow. It grew and grew and grew. They could feel it when they touched her. It thrummed under her skin. It filled the gaps in her tissues. It lived in the empty spaces in her atoms. It hummed in harmony with every tiny filament of matter. Her magic was particle, wave, and motion. Probability and possibility. It bent and rippled and folded in on itself. It infused the whole of her.
But one scholar—an elderly wizard by the name of Zosimos—was vehemently opposed to the enmagickment of the child and was even more opposed to the continuing work. He himself had been enmagicked as a young boy, and he knew the consequences of the action—the odd eruptions, the disruptions in thinking, the unpleasant extension of the life span. He heard the child sobbing at night, and he knew what some might do with that sorrow. He knew that not all who lived in the castle were good.
And so he put a stop to it.
He called himself the girl’s guardian and bound their destinies together. This, too, had consequences.
Zosimos warned the other scholars about the scheming of their colleague, the Sorrow Eater. Every day, her power increased. Every day, her influence widened. The warnings of old Zosimos fell on deaf ears. The old man wrote her name with a shiver of fear.
(Luna, standing in that room reading the story, surrounded by those papers, shivered, too.)
And the girl grew. And her powers increased. And she was impulsive and sometimes self-centered, as children often are. And she didn’t notice when the wizard who loved her—her beloved Zosimos—began slowly withering away. Aging. Weakening. No one noticed. Until it was too late.
“We only hope,” the papers whispered in Luna’s ear, “that when she meets the Sorrow Eater again, our girl is older, stronger, and more sure of herself. We only hope that, after our sacrifice, she will know what to do.”
“But who?” Luna asked them. “Who was the girl? Can I warn her?”
“Oh,” the papers said as they quivered in the air. “We thought we told you already. Her name is Xan.”
28.
In Which Several People Go into the Woods
Xan sat by the fireplace, twisting her apron this way and that until it was all in knots.