فصل 35

35.

In Which Glerk Smells Something Unpleasant

“I’m itchy, Glerk,” Fyrian said. “I’m itchy all over. I’m the itchiest in the world.”

“How, dear boy,” Glerk said heavily, “could you possibly know that?” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Where has she gone? he wondered. Where are you, Xan? He felt the tendrils of worry wind around his heart, nearly squeezing it to a stop. Fyrian had perched right in between the monster’s great, wide-­spaced eyes, and he began scratching his backside madly. Glerk rolled his eyes. “You’ve never even seen the world. You might not be the itchiest.”

Fyrian scratched at his tail, his belly, his neck. He scratched his ears and his skull and his long nose.

“Do dragons shed their skins?” Fyrian asked suddenly.

“What?”

“Do they shed their skins? Like snakes?” Fyrian attacked his left flank.

Glerk considered this. He searched his brain. Dragons were a solitary species. Few and far between. They were difficult to study. Even dragons, in his experience, didn’t know much about dragons.

“I do not know, my friend,” he said finally. “The Poet tells us,

‘Each mortal beast must find its Ground—

be it forest or fen or field or fire.’

Perhaps you will know all that you wish to know when you find your Ground.”

“But what is my Ground?” Fyrian asked, worrying at his skin as though he meant to scratch it right off.

“Dragons, originally, were formed in stars. Which means that your Ground is fire. Walk through fire and you will know who you are.”

Fyrian considered this. “That sounds like a terrible idea,” he said finally. “I don’t want to walk through fire at all.” He scratched his belly. “What’s your Ground, Glerk?”

The swamp monster sighed. “Mine?” He sighed again. “Fen,” he said. “The Bog.” He pressed his upper right hand to his heart. “The Bog, the Bog, the Bog,” he murmured, like a heartbeat. “It is the heart of the world. It is the womb of the world. It is the poem that made the world. I am the Bog, and the Bog is me.”

Fyrian frowned. “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re Glerk. And you’re my friend.”

“Sometimes people are more than one thing. I am Glerk. I am your friend. I am Luna’s family. I am a Poet. I am a maker. And I am the Bog. But to you, I am simply Glerk. Your Glerk. And I do love you very much.”

And it was true. Glerk loved Fyrian. As he loved Xan. As he loved Luna. As he loved the whole world.

He inhaled again. He should have been able to catch wind of at least one of Xan’s spells. So why couldn’t he?

“Look out, Glerk,” Fyrian said suddenly, swooping up and looping in front of Glerk’s face, hovering in front of his nose. He pointed backward with his thumb. “That ground up there is very thin—a skin of rock with fire under it. You’ll fall through as sure as anything.”

Glerk wrinkled his brow. “Are you certain?” He squinted at the rock stretch ahead. Heat poured off it in waves. “It’s not supposed to be burning here.” But it was. This seam of rock was clearly burning. And the mountain buzzed underfoot. This had happened before, when the entire mountain had threatened to unpeel itself like an overripe Zirin bulb.

After the eruption—and the magical corking of that eruption—the volcano had never slept soundly, even in the early days. It had always been rumbly and shifty and restless. But this felt different. This was more. For the first time in five hundred years, Glerk was afraid.

“Fyrian, lad,” the monster said. “Let us pick up our pace, shall we?” And they began tracking along the high side of the seam, looking for a safe place to cross.

The great monster looked around the forest, scanning the stretch of undergrowth, narrowing his eyes and extending his gaze as best he could. He used to be better at this sort of thing. He used to be better at many things. He inhaled deeply, as if he was trying to suck the entire mountain into his nose.

Fyrian looked at the swamp monster curiously.

“What is it, Glerk?” he said.

Glerk shook his head. “I know that smell,” he said. He closed his eyes.

“Xan’s smell?” Fyrian fluttered back up to his perch on the monster’s head. He tried to close his eyes and sniff as well, but he ended up sneezing instead. “I love Xan’s smell. I love it so much.”

Glerk shook his head, slowly, so that Fyrian would not fall. “No,” he said in a low growl. “Someone else.”

Sister Ignatia could, when she wanted to, run fast. Fast as a tiger. Fast as the wind. Faster than she was going now, certainly. But it wasn’t the same as when she had her boots.

Those boots!

She had forgotten how much she loved them once upon a time. Back when she had curiosity and wanderlust and the inclination to go to the other side of the world and back in a single afternoon. Before the delicious and abundant sorrows of the Protectorate had fed her soul until it was indolent and sated and gloriously fat. Now, just thinking about her boots imbued her with a youthful spark. So black were those beautiful boots that they seemed to bend the light around them. And when Sister Ignatia wore them at night, she felt herself full to bursting with starlight—and, if she timed it right, moonlight as well. The boots fed right into her very bones. Their magic was a different sort than was available to her from sorrow. (But oh! How easy it was to gorge herself on sorrow!)

Now Sister Ignatia’s magical stores were starting to dwindle. She had never thought to sock any away for a rainy day. It never rained in the Protectorate’s marvelous fog.

Stupid, she chided herself. Lazy! Well. I must simply remember how to be crafty.

But first, she needed those boots.

She paused a moment to consult her scrying device. At first, all she saw was darkness—a tight, closed-­up sort of darkness, with a single, pale, horizontal line of light cutting across. Very slowly, the line began to widen, and a pair of hands reached in.

A box, she thought. They are in a box. And someone is stealing them. Again!

“Those are not for you!” she shouted. And although there is no way the person attached to those hands could have heard her—not without magic, anyway—the fingers seemed to hesitate. They pulled back. There was even a bit of a tremble.

These hands weren’t the child’s, that much was certain. These were grown-­up hands. But whose?

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.