فصل 27

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.”