Sylvanus snapped his fingers, and spring flowers bloomed on the branches of autumn-brown shrubs. A rainbow appeared in the darkening sky, and tiny winged creatures flew by. Grayling looked closely. Lambs. They were tiny winged lambs.
Useless! No wonder they had not been rooted like the others! Even Pansy had thought them not worth the effort. Anger formed a sour knot in her throat as she curled up to sleep.
“I have heard the grimoire again. ’Tis just past there,” Grayling said next morning. She gestured to where the woods were thick with great green spruces and firs, bare-branched rowans and oaks, packed tightly together, tangled with ferns and brambles and briers.
Her body taut with apprehension, Grayling led the others farther into the woods. The power that Pansy had conjured, the power that now defied her, would it be destroyed or destroyer? Grayling felt suddenly chilled.
After a time, she stopped at a break in the trees. Up a rugged, bracken-frosted rise was a great stone house, towered and turreted and spired as if trying to touch the sky.
“My mother’s grimoire is inside,” Grayling said. “Mayhap all the grimoires are there. Since the serpent is now but a bumbling boy and no longer guarding them, they are unprotected. Could not someone fetch my mother’s grimoire?”
There was silence but for Phinaeus Moon’s muttered “Bumbling? How say you bumbling?”
“I hear no one proposing to go after it.” Grayling sniffed. “Should not perilous adventures have a hero to face any dangers?”
The women looked at Sylvanus and Phinaeus Moon, who looked at each other. No one spoke.
I have been the most wary and unwilling of us all, thought Grayling. How did I become leader? But she was. She sang, and the grimoire sang back. “’Tis in there indeed. With my mother’s grimoire, mayhap we can discover how to end this bother at last.”
“In truth,” said Pansy, “there are no answers or assistance in your mother’s grimoire or anyone’s. There has not been such a force before, so there will be no remedies in a grimoire’s pages. I knew this when we began to follow your grimoire’s song, but I didn’t want you to stop trying, because I didn’t know what else to do.”
Auld Nancy, Desdemona Cork, Sylvanus, Phinaeus Moon all were struck dumb, but Grayling, her temper as frayed as her skirts, shouted, “All this for nothing? This exhausting journey for nothing? When we might well have stayed warm and dry and fed and sought another solution? Pansy, you are worse than malicious. You are wicked! A very devil!”
“I preferred you when you were timid and quiet,” said Pansy.
“Muzzle up!” said Grayling. “This all be your fault.”
“Why is she still here?” asked Desdemona Cork, pointing at Pansy. “Why do we not send her away?”
“I have promised my niece to watch over her girl and keep her safe,” said Auld Nancy. She shook her head. “It appears that the only danger to Pansy may be from herself. Still, though I have promised, we need not keep company with the girl.”
“I am here,” said Pansy. “Talk to me, not about me.”
“Do I hear a gnat buzzing?” asked Desdemona Cork.
“Clod-pated fools,” Pansy said in a mumble, and she stalked away.
“Pansy may be useful yet,” Auld Nancy said, “and she cannot do too much harm while we’re watching her.”
“If what Pansy said is true,” asked Grayling, “and there are no answers in the grimoires, what, then, shall we do? Auld Nancy? Desdemona Cork? Sylvanus, master magician?”
All shook their heads. Weary and disheartened, they sat, leaning against the trees. Grayling stormed away, disturbing Pook, who, jolted out of her pocket, landed a goat.
Somewhere near was the sea. Grayling could hear it and smell it. She knew the sea only from songs and stories, but she could see it in her mind, gray and vast and wild, surging and churning. That was just how she felt. Such turmoil within her. She could swallow it no longer. She followed the sound through a thicket of young oaks and over a rise.
And there it was, not as she had imagined it but wilder and fiercer, more magnificent and more immense. The waves racing in put her in mind of great frothy beasts attacking the shore, over and over, in endless battle. The wind, a clean wind with no trace of smoke or shadow, blew through her hair, lifted it, and danced it furiously upon her head.
As her exhilaration turned to rage, she let out a great howl: all this way and all these days and all their efforts, and still they were powerless against the smoke and shadow. Shadow and smoke. Smoke. Smoke . . . She paced many moments in thought before heading back to the others.