A woman’s foot slid into the dark mouth of the boot. The boot sealed itself around the foot. Ignatia knew that the wearer could put the boots on and off as wanted, but there would be no removing the boots by force as long as the wearer was alive.
Well, she thought, that shouldn’t be a problem.
The boots began walking toward what looked like an animal enclosure. Whoever was wearing them did not know how to use them yet. Fancy wasting a pair of Seven League Boots as though they were nothing more than work slippers! It was a crime, she thought. A scandal.
The wearer of the boots stood by the goats, and the goats sniffed at her skirts in a fawning sort of way that Sister Ignatia found utterly unattractive. Then the boots’ wearer began to walk around.
“Ah!” Sister Ignatia peered more intently. “Let’s see where you are, shall we?”
Sister Ignatia saw a large tree with a door in the middle. And a swamp, littered with flowers. The swamp looked familiar. She saw a steep mountainside with several jagged rims along the top—
Great Heavens! Are those craters?
And there! I know that path!
And there! Those stones!
Could it be that the boots had made their way back to her old castle? Or the place where the castle had been, anyway.
Home, she thought in spite of herself. That place had been her home. Perhaps it still was, after all these years. Despite the ease of life in the Protectorate, she had never again been so happy as she had been in the company of those magicians and scholars in the castle. Pity they had to die. They wouldn’t have died, of course, if they had had the boots, as was the original plan. It didn’t occur to them that anyone might try to steal them and run away from the danger, leaving them all behind.
And they thought they were so clever!
In the end, there had never been a magician as clever as Ignatia, and she had the entire Protectorate to prove it. Of course, she had no one left to prove it to, which was a pity. All she had was the boots. And now they were gone, too.
No matter, she told herself. What’s mine is mine. And that’s everything.
Everything.
And she ran up the trail toward home.
36.
In Which a Map Is Rather Useless
Luna had never run so hard or fast in her life. She ran for hours, it seemed. Days. Weeks. She had been running forever. She ran from boulder to boulder, ridge to ridge. She leaped over streams and creeks. Trees bent out of her way. She didn’t stop to wonder at the ease of her footing or the length of her leaps. All she thought about was the woman with a tiger’s snarl. That woman was dangerous. It was all Luna could do to keep her growing panic at bay. The crow wiggled away from the girl’s grasp and soared upward, circling over her head.
“Caw,” the crow called. “I don’t think she’s following us.”
“Caw,” he called again. “It’s possible that I was mistaken about the paper birds.”
Luna ran up the edge of a steep knoll to cast a wider view and make sure she was not being followed. There was no one. The woods were just woods. She sat down on the bare curve of the rock to open her journal and look at her map, but she had veered so far off her route, she wasn’t sure if she was even on the map anymore. Luna sighed. “Well,” she said, “I seem to have made a mess of things. We are no closer to my grandmother than when we started. And look! The sun is going down. And there is a strange lady in the woods.” She swallowed. “There’s something wrong with her. I can’t explain it. But I don’t want her coming anywhere near my grandmother. Not at all.”
Luna’s brain had suddenly become crowded with things she knew without knowing how she knew them. Indeed, her mind felt like a vast storage room whose locked cupboards were all at once not only unlocking but flinging themselves open and dumping their contents on the floor. And none of it was anything Luna remembered putting in those cupboards in the first place.
She was little—she couldn’t quite place how young she was, but definitely small. She was standing in the center of the clearing. Her eyes were blank. Her mouth was slack. She was pinned in place.
Luna gasped. The memory was so clear.
“Luna!” Fyrian had cried, crawling out of her pocket and hovering in front of her face. “Why aren’t you moving?”
“Fyrian, dear,” her grandmother had said. “Go fetch Luna a heartsblood flower from the far edge of the tall crater. She is playing a game with you, and she will only unfreeze if you bring her the flower.”
“I love games!” Fyrian cried before whizzing away, whistling a jaunty tune as he flew.
Glerk appeared through the red-algaed surface of the swamp. He opened one eye, and then the other. Then he rolled both to the sky.
“More lies, Xan,” he chided.
“Good ones!” Xan protested. “I lie to protect! What else can I say? I can’t explain anything that’s true in a way they can understand.”
Glerk came lumbering out of the swamp, the dark waters shedding in great beads from the oily sheen of his darker skin. He came close to Luna’s unblinking eyes. Glerk’s great, damp mouth deepened into a frown. “I don’t like this,” he said, laying two of his hands on either side of Luna’s face, and the other two hands on each of her shoulders. “This is the third time today. What happened this time?”
Xan groaned. “It was my fault. I could have sworn I sensed something. Like a tiger moving through the woods, but not, you understand. Well, of course you know what I thought.”
“Was it she? The Sorrow Eater?” Glerk’s voice had turned into a dangerous rumble.
“No. Five hundred years I’ve worried. She’s haunted my dreams, and don’t mistake it. But no. There was nothing. But Luna saw the scrying device.”
Glerk took Luna into his arms. She went limp. He rocked back on his tail, letting the girl’s weight sink into the squish of his belly. He smoothed back her hair with one hand.
“We need to tell Fyrian,” he said.
“We can’t!” Xan cried. “Look what happened to her when she just saw the scrying device out of the corner of her eye! She didn’t get better once I took it apart—and that was a while ago now. Just imagine if Fyrian spills the beans that her grandmother is a witch! She’ll go into a trance every time she sees me—every time! And she won’t stop until she turns thirteen. And she’ll be enmagicked and I’ll be gone. Gone, Glerk! And who will take care of my baby?”
And Xan walked over and laid her cheek on Luna’s cheek, and wrapped her arms around the swamp monster. Or, at least part of the way around. Glerk, after all, was very large.
“Are we hugging now?” Fyrian said, zooming back with the flower. “I love hugging.” And he shot into the crook of one of Glerk’s arms and insinuated himself into the fleshy folds of his body, and was, once again, the happiest dragon in the world.
Luna sat very still, her mind racing at what her own memory had revealed to her. Her own unlocked memory.
Witch.
Enmagicked.
Thirteen.
Gone.
Luna pressed the heels of her hands to her brow, trying to keep her head from spinning. How many times had she felt a thought simply fly away, like a bird? And now here they came, crowding back inside. Luna’s thirteenth birthday was very soon. And her grandmother was sick. And weak. And some day soon, she would be gone. And Luna would be alone. And enmagicked—
Witch.
It was a word that she had never heard before. And yet. When she searched her memories, she found it everywhere. People called it out in the market squares when they visited the cities on the other side of the forest. People said it when they visited homes. People called it when her grandmother’s assistance was needed—in a birth, maybe. Or to settle a dispute.
“My grandmother is a witch,” Luna said out loud. And it was true. “And now I am a witch.”
“Caw,” said the crow. “So?”
She gave a narrowed eye to the crow, wrinkling her lips into a frown. “Did you know this?” she demanded.
“Caw,” said the crow. “Obviously. What did you think you were? Don’t you remember how we met?”
Luna looked up at the sky. “Well,” she said. “I guess I didn’t really think about it.”
“Caw,” said the crow. “Exactly. That is exactly your problem.”