Grayling's Song

by Karen Cushman

  The serpent opened its mouth and flicked its tongue but spat no fire.

  Breathing heavily, Grayling stepped closer, and closer yet. Slowly she reached out a trembling hand and touched it. She felt the leathery scales, the muscles beneath, but then her hand passed right through and met the solid, warm flesh of a hand grasping hers. Startled, she jumped back.

  The very air quivered, and the ground shook. A great hiss rose from the creature, which twisted and thrashed. Flames blistered her nose and singed her hair. A shower of ashes, another deafening hiss, and the snake disappeared. And there in its place stood a boy—nay, a young man, strong of arms and shoulders but pale, as if he had spent his life indoors, with hair and eyes of honey brown, and a smile, thought Grayling, bright enough to warm a winter night.

  Grayling fell back, her mouth agape, and her companions cried out in dismay. Who was this fellow? Was this another sort of glamour that made a hideous serpent appear to be a pleasant-looking young man so it could get close enough to crush them?

  “I am relieved to be released but confused and stupid with not knowing what has befallen me,” the fellow said. “Shall I thank you, fair mistress, for freeing me from this monstrous guise, or was it you who cursed me at the start?”

  “Nay,” Grayling answered, “not I. We but came upon you. I must confess I much prefer you in this condition. Who are you?”

  “Phinaeus Moon,” he said with a small bow, “apprentice paper maker from Wooten Magna, at the end of the Great Stony Road.” He gestured past the trees. “Returning from delivering a load of paper to the stationers’ guild in Lesser Beamish, my bladder was so overburdened I stopped to let my water go. A great noise came, and I felt the earth shake and a voice thundered, ‘Be you now guardian of my house and all that is in it. Let no one pass or you shall be serpent evermore.’”

  The company was struck dumb, all but Pansy, who moved to the young man’s side. “That was impressive, was it not?” she said with a smug smile. “I did labor long to word the spell just right.”

  XII

  pell?” Sylvanus spluttered. “You, you useless lump of a girl, have been meddling in magic?”

  “Urk,” said Pansy. And then, “Urk!” The girl was trembling with rage. “Do not call me a lump! Or useless! I can . . . I could tell you . . . I have done . . .” She stopped. Her eyes were dark and cold, and she clenched her lips together.

  “Pansy, child,” Auld Nancy asked, “what have you been playing at?”

  Pansy backed away. Her face was ashen, but her cheeks flamed. “I am not a child, and I am not playing!” she shouted. “I have more power than you thought I did. I played the fool and you laughed at me, but I have surprised you, have I not? You did not know I had such skills. My mother did not know. But harken to me: I took your grimoires and rooted your cunning folk. I placed a glamour spell on this boy to guard the grimoires. You never suspected me, but I did it. Me!” She put her hands on her hips and smirked in triumph.

  There was such silence that Grayling could hear her heart beating and the anxious twitching of Desdemona Cork’s skirts. Her belly grew hot with anger.

  Finally Auld Nancy darted forward and grabbed Pansy’s arm. “Why, Pansy? Why have you done this?”

  “I wanted to know what you others know, so I took the grimoires to learn. And I planted the cunning folk.” She shrugged. “I did not want to kill them, but prevent them following me.”

  Auld Nancy scowled and said, “Spiteful, careless girl. You do not deserve the power you have.”

  “My power, I found, has limits.” Pansy shook her head. “I conjured the force that comes as smoke and shadow, but it has grown ever more powerful, larger and fiercer and harder to control. I did not know what it would do next, or to whom, and feared I might be in danger. You seemed to have a plan, so I struggled to keep the force away, although it wearied and sickened me. I wanted you to succeed so I would be safe.”

  “Why was I spared? And Sylvanus and Desdemona Cork?” Auld Nancy asked.

  “You? All of you with no grimoires, no real magic, and little power? I did not bother with you, thinking you no threat.”

  Sylvanus spluttered again, but Auld Nancy waved him silent. “Where did you learn such spells? Your mother never taught you to be so selfish and careless,” she said.

  “How soon,” asked Grayling, her voice tight with fury, “can you undo the damage you have caused?”

  “And,” added Phinaeus, “retrieve my horse and wagon?”

  They all looked at Pansy, who shook her head. “I can do nothing. ’Tis grown too strong, overwhelming my spells, taking the grimoires and guarding them fiercely. ’Tis a mighty force now, and I am empty and drained and so tired.” She took a long, shuddering breath, and her lips trembled. “We may all be planted ere long.”

  Sylvanus scowled at her. “You forgot the third rule of magic: Do no magic you cannot undo.”

  Auld Nancy grabbed Pansy by an ear. “Stupid, greedy, malicious girl! I will shake you until your bones turn to butter!” She shook the girl roughly. “Then I shall send you back to your mother and tell her what you have done.” Another shake. “That you are thoughtless and dangerous and a disgrace to your family.” And another. “That you should be sent to be dung heap tender or assistant pig keeper.”

  “Huzzah!” Sylvanus broke in with a shout. “Huzzah! I have but now realized—the cheese was not useless. The lump of cheese pointed to this lump of a girl. I just did not understand. Yes, yes, I knew it! ’Tis a true soothsaying cheese!” His face fell into disappointed folds. “But now we have eaten it, and it is gone! Alas, alas. True soothsaying cheese, and we have eaten it!”

  As Grayling watched and listened, the heat of anger rose from her belly to her face. Her hands itched to thump Pansy until she bellowed. Certain that thumping Pansy would not help, for they might yet need her goodwill, Grayling closed her eyes and breathed deeply, soothing herself with thoughts of moonlight, lavender wands, and sorrel soup with dumplings.

  From somewhere behind them came an unearthly sound, a sound between a bellow and a bawl, a sound of menace and pain and despair. Grayling held her breath, prepared to face another snake.

  Sylvanus shouted, “Nostradamus!” and ran toward the sound. What was that magic word he shouted? she wondered. And why hadn’t he tried it on the serpent?

  A rustling in the trees startled her, and she turned to see. The branches parted, and there was Sylvanus and . . . his mule!

  “Nostradamus did not run far,” said Sylvanus, beaming at the mule, “and now he is with us again.”

  Only his mule! Grayling shook her head to clear it. The snake, the smoke and shadow, Pansy’s confession—they had left her most jittery.

  Now that the clearing was serpent free, Grayling gathered wood, and Sylvanus built a fire; Desdemona Cork sat beside Auld Nancy and gently rubbed the old woman’s aching knees; Phinaeus Moon studied them all in bemusement. Pansy came to sit among them, but the others turned their backs, and she slunk off to sulk alone.

  When the fire was blazing, the company warmed their toes as they emptied the saddlebags that had returned with Nostradamus and ate the remains of the ham, bread, and onions.

  Grayling jumped to her feet, shuddering. Some vermin was crawling up her arm! Spider? Rat? Flea? “’Tis this Pook, Gray Eyes,” said a small voice. And there he was, pink nose, and pink ears, and more whiskers than any mouse truly needed. “Has that horrid creature gone?” He twitched his tail, charred at the end where the flames had found the raven.

  “Aye,” Grayling said, “truly gone, and you are come back safely.” She settled back down by the fire, and the mouse curled against her neck.

  “This Pook should not have abandoned you, but it is difficult for a startled raven to stay in a pocket.” Pook twitched his nose. “Might there be a crumb of something to eat?” Grayling gave him a bit of bread, which he nibbled before climbing into her pocket. She heard a tiny sigh and then a tiny snore.

  “Was that mouse talking?”
asked Phinaeus Moon, his voice quavering with alarm, suspicion, disbelief.

  Grayling had forgotten that he was newly come. “Aye, he was,” she said.

  “A mouse? But how?”

  Grayling told again the story of the mouse and the potions. “And now whenever he be fearful or excited, the shape shifting takes him. He finds it thrilling, he says, but confusing.”

  Phinaeus Moon stared at her. His mouth hung open, and his eyes were wide as dinner plates. “Who are you folk?” he asked at last. “A lady of surpassing loveliness, a mischief-making girl with powerful magic, a weather charmer, a bearded wizard, a talking mouse, and you with the courage to face a hideous serpent?”

  So Grayling had to begin from the very beginning, with her mother calling to her. He listened and nodded until she finished.

  Sylvanus lit a pipe, and Grayling smelled dried mint, sage, and angelica root. “Until you, I had not met someone glamoured to be a snake,” Sylvanus told the young man. “Could you feel it happening? Did you know how you appeared to others?”

  “I felt little different. A bit queasy and dizzy perhaps, as if I had overdrunk of honey mead, but little different except that I moved as if through soup, a thick and warm soup—my granny’s dried pea with bacon perhaps.” Phinaeus Moon licked his lips at the memory. “Even my horse bellowed in fright and ran, the cart bouncing after him, and my companions fled. I looked into a stream and saw, oh, how very different I was. I wished I could run from me also.” He shivered. “I am no beauty, I know, but to be horrid, repulsive . . . and all thanks to this meddlesome, irksome girl.” He glowered at Pansy.

  She glowered back at him. “I could likely cast a glamour again,” she said, “so I suggest you stop calling me names.”

  “Pansy was cruel and malicious,” said Auld Nancy. “We will teach her to use her skills wisely, Sylvanus and I, or she will be put to work in the Nether Finchbeck laundry, washing the socks of adolescent magicians.”

  Said Sylvanus, “The second most important rule about magic is to know when not to use it. We shall attend to that anon.”

  Pansy frowned.

  The fire took to smoldering and smoking, and Auld Nancy coughed deeply as the smoke circled her head. “Black clouds and ashweed, begone from me!” she shouted, waving her broom. A small shower of rain fell and cleaned the air. She sat back, satisfied.

  Grayling stirred the fire and added small twigs and branches. The fire settled down, and so did they all.

  “I don’t suppose,” asked Phinaeus Moon, “any of you could conjure me a horse? I must get back to the city.” He looked around. No horse appeared. “No, I feared not. ’Tis afoot for me.”

  “What awaits you in the city?” asked Auld Nancy. “A banker? A tailor? A lover?”

  “Paper,” he said. “Fine paper that I make myself.” He stretched his hands out before him. “My hands tingle, longing to feel again the slippery rag slurry that dries into paper. That, too, is a sort of magic. My paper is unequaled in the kingdom—heavy, soft, creamy, and thick.” His eyes grew dreamy. “Paper not to be used for registers or accounts or lists of provisions: two pounds of flour, a tub of pig fat, and a turnip. No, elegant paper that should be saved for royal decrees, sacred texts, or”—here he looked at Desdemona Cork—“love letters.”

  Desdemona Cork twitched her shawl, and Phinaeus Moon blushed.

  Grayling rolled her eyes. “Can you not leave it for a moment?” she hissed to Desdemona Cork. “Must you enchant everyone?”

  Desdemona Cork pulled her shawls tightly around her. “’Tis not something I do, but something I am.”

  “Why, then, are you not something useful?” Grayling asked. “Why are none of you useful? What value is there in your magic if you can do nothing with it?” She roared in frustration. Where was the help she had expected from the others?

  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.

  Pook the goat bleated at her return, twigs sticking out between his large yellow teeth. Auld Nancy, Desdemona Cork, and Sylvanus were sprawled on the ground. But where was Phinaeus Moon? Perhaps he had already gone, back to the city. Well, indeed, Grayling thought, we have no need of him, good for nothing but gawking at Desdemona Cork.

  She cleared her throat and said, “Do you recall Auld Nancy clearing the smoke away from her with a small rain shower?” Her companions nodded. “I do wonder, if a little wet rid us of a little smoke, might not a lot of wet extinguish a lot of smoke?”

  There was silence as her listeners struggled to understand just what she meant, and then “Aha!” from Auld Nancy. “Indeed,” she went on, lifting her broom, “I shall call up rain.”

  Sylvanus stroked his beard. “The girl may have the right of it, but rain would likely be too scant. To banish the demon of smoke and shadow would require a great deal of water and no way to avoid it.”

  “I was thinking,” said Grayling, “of the sea.”

  “The sea, the sea,” the others murmured as they looked at her and each other.

  “We have followed my mother’s grimoire all this way,” said Grayling. “The force was summoned to gather the grimoires and guard them. Although Pansy’s gatekeeper has been removed, the force must guard them still. If we find some way to take my mother’s grimoire, will the force not follow to retrieve it, as it was created to do?” The others looked at each other and bobbed their heads in agreement. “We could then throw the grimoire into the sea. The smoke will pursue it and be extinguished. Might that be an answer?”