MEARSIES HEILI BOUNCES BACK:

CJ’s Second Notebook

Sherwood Smith

PART ONE

ONE

“Rainy Day”

When I lived on Earth, there was a funny magazine my babysitter sometimes let me see. It was called MAD. Sometimes it had sequels of things, and they called them “Bounces Back.” Because I’ve finished rewriting this second notebook here, and because of some of the things that happened in, as well as to, Mearsies Heili, that “bounces back” pretty much fits.

Okay. When I left off in the first notebook, Clair, our queen, had finally gotten into contact with all the provinces of Mearsies Heili—except for the chopped-down forest that Glotulae Auknuge, sister to the king of Elchnudaeb, still claimed as her “kingdom.” What had once been a trade town on the Great North Road was now a city that supported the enormous palace we called the Squashed Wedding Cake, because that’s what it looked like to us. “Queen” Glotulae (nicknamed Fobo by us, because of the way she trilled her words) was always adding more decorations to it, as well as statues of herself and her son Prince Jonnicake (yes, she really and truly named her son Jonnicake), who we called PJ.

Fobo and PJ wanted to take over the rest of the country, just so everybody would bow down to them. Sometimes they were aided by the other villain we had to worry about, Kwenz of the Chwahir, who lived in the Shadowland below the cloud city that was also our capital. The Chwahir, like the Mearsieans, had come from another continent long ago, each making a colony in uninhabited land. The Mearsieans had come to escape the Chwahir, but guess who chased after them. The Chwahir like conquering. Most of their boys and men have to be warriors. Kwenz was very old, a master of black magic, which is mostly used for force.

“Black” magic is so named because it spends magic that takes ages to renew, unlike “white” or “light” magic, which is mostly used to aid life. If you think of magic like electricity, black magic zaps out the power grid in gigandor spells, but white magic uses low watts so there’s always plenty in the world. White magic takes longer to perform, and has a lot of safeguards. But it’s a whole lot safer to use. I know, because I’ve been trying to learn it so I can help Clair, when Kwenz tried magical villainy against us.

So who are we again?

There were now eight of us girls in Clair’s gang—nine with white-haired Clair Sherwood, queen of Mearsies Heili. She’d been queen for a year or two when we first met. Next was me, Cherene Jennet, serving as Clair’s left-hand splat, or princess. As I said, I used to live on Earth, but someone else got stuck in my place and I got to come here. I’m short and skinny with long straight black hair and blue eyes.

Blond-haired Sherry had been living with Clair the longest—they’d made friends when they were little kids. Freckle-faced, red-haired Faline was our joker. You’d never know she was a shape-changer by nature—at least, her people, the Yxubarecs, had been exiled for their habit of taking the forms of beautiful people and getting rid of the originals. Faline was short, wiry, her hair so bristly it stuck out like a flaming bush unless she braided it.

Seshe was the oldest, tall and calm and smart, with very long blondish-brown hair. She loved the forest land and animals. Seshe talked even less than Diana about where she came from, but she sure knew a lot.

Diana was the quietest. She also loved the forest, and knew the most about things like woodcraft and also how to get past locked doors. As I said, Diana did not talk about her past; her dark eyes would go distant and she’d fade into the shadows if anyone started nosing.

Irene couldn’t be more different. She loved to talk, she loved acting, drama, playing parts, dressing up. She and Dhana were the moody ones. But that’s all they shared—Dhana wasn’t even human, except she’d borrowed our form for a time. She actually was a water being from the strange, rainbow hot spring we called the Magic Lake, right below the cloud city where Clair has her capital.

Gwen was the newest to our gang, a small, quiet girl originally from Earth, with an amazing talent for mimicking voices.

We were all kids, including Clair, who had been studying white magic since she was little. Clair had found a spell that would keep us as kids, which meant birthdays were extra fun. We got to celebrate but not get older, so nobody would start getting mushy and disgusting about boys.

We girls had recently finished remodeling the Junky, our underground hideout. Everyone had her own room, and we’d even added some extras, in case we had visitors, and also, Clair wanted her cousin Puddlenose to have a room waiting for him if he ever came back. We thought this was a great idea.

Clair and I had recently finished the connecting tunnels (once we’d decided that the rope entrances were only fun to go down, not up) and what happens? We all end up crammed in the main room most of the time. But the big difference was, we no longer had to stay crammed up—we only did when we chose to. Somehow that made everything work out better, especially for the moody ones.

When the weather was rotten outside—as it was the day I’m about to report—it was so cozy to gather in the main room with warm goodies to eat and drink, to talk and laugh. Maybe I’d sing and Dhana would dance for us. Sometimes two or three of the girls put together skits for the rest of us to watch.

I wrote a lot of those up in my first records. All the jokes were there, even the ones we repeated a million times because it was just as funny, or almost as funny, to wait for the expected comeback as it had been the first time we heard it. But when I let a couple of people read those, I couldn’t help noticing that they skipped over those pages. I guess we’re not always as wonderful to other people as we are to ourselves, or maybe in-jokes and stuff just aren’t interesting to anyone outside the group.

But I decided to copy this one rainy day into the new notebook anyway. Partly because it is in some ways so typical of those quiet evenings, when it’s just us, and no big worries. (Because the big adventures tend to start out as big worries.) You could say that this one stands for all of them—lots and lots of lovely, fun evenings just like it. And partly because Clair so seldom told stories. That’s the non-typical part. And what she had to say, well, you’ll see.

o0o

On this particular day, a nasty, sleety rain fell in zinging arrows outside. Not even Dhana liked it. Inside, it was warm—the Fire Stick in our fireplace gave off a comforting glow. Sherry and Seshe had cooked up some of their delicious hot chocolate with whipped cream on top, and an extra bowl in the middle of the floor, for those of us who like hot chocolate-flavored whipped cream. Weird. In hot weather, ew. But cold? There is nothing better.

Diana had begun singing a stupid song I’d made up, Hoooome, home on derange, where the madhouse minions do plaaaaay ...

They didn’t know the original song, and didn’t want to. They liked my version, which had to be crooned in either a falsetto or a low, growly voice, because of the drony nature of the melody.

Where sellll-dom is hearrrrrd, a garbaceous word ...

And where piiiiies splat the villains all day!

“Iyi-yi-yi-yiiiiiiiii!” Sherry trilled in a horrible descant.

Irene clapped her hands over her ears. “CJ! Sing something that won’t break our ears!”

I’d been collecting songs here and there. On the cloud top, small as it was, two musicians’ groups existed, providing music for anyone who hired them. And in a land where there isn’t any TV and a city where there wasn’t a theater, they got plenty of business. You could walk behind the glaziers’ places and hear them practicing when the weather was nice, all the upper story windows would be open, and they considered that to be free advertising.

Anyway, the songs I liked the best had these running triplets and flourishes that kind of reminded me a little of trumpet chords, and a little of the flourishes you heard in Irish and Scottish folk songs, especially the minor key ones. I really liked those a whole lot. But, I’d discovered to my dismay, the words were usually long, silly rambles about a couple of fatwits who wanted to fall in love (splat in love is more like it) or one had fallen in love and the other hadn’t, or they both were in love but somebody else snouted in so they couldn’t get married... . Bor-ring! Why waste great melodies on mushy songs?

So I swiped the melodies and made up new words. The girls liked my versions much better—especially when I made up funny ones about the various villains, all sung to beautiful songs. Somehow, Faline kept saying, it was just that much funnier when the melody is pretty.

Their favorite was one I had recently made up about PJ and a goat at a bridge. PJ insists that the goat has to bow, and let PJ go first. Goats are not known for letting anyone go first anymore than for bowing, but you could believe that PJ would expect it. It was such a silly song that Faline and Sherry and Irene decided to turn it into a skit.

But. “I can’t sing right now, the whipped cream makes me croak like a frog,” I said.

When half the others groaned, Clair said, “Why don’t we tell stories? Before we know it the rain will be gone, and everyone can get some fresh air on patrol.”

We hadn’t heard from PJ and his gang of clucks for a long time, which made even Sherry suspicious. And Kwenz, we knew, was training his newly appointed heir, who we hadn’t yet met. But we knew he was a kid. Didn’t take master brains to figure that that boded no good for us.

“A patrol in the cold,” Faline groaned with fervor.

“And mud.” Irene pruned her face. “Some like nasty wet weather ...”

“So we’ll all go on patrol.” Diana grinned. “Wasn’t gonna argue.”

Dhana and Irene eyed one another. Irene twitched her shoulders a little (she had bunches of ribbons on each), but didn’t speak. Gwen said in her quiet voice, “How about a story from before I came?”

“You already know all mine,” I said. Sometimes they liked hearing yukky stuff about Earth, just to shudder. Parts of my Earth memories had begun to fade except for the bits they liked hearing over and over. I’d even made up some stories about Earth and put the girls in. They adored those stories the most.

Gwen looked Clair’s way, and Sherry said helpfully, “You haven’t heard all Clair’s.”

Clair made a face and looked down at her toes, which were dug into the bright blue patch in the rug. She hated talking about her life before we came, but we’d gotten some of it out of her in bits and pieces.

“C’mon, Clair, tell us some firsts.” Irene put her chin on her hands.

“Firsts?”

“First time you met some of the villains. We already know about all our firsts.”

Gwen nodded. Clair glanced her way, and hesitated. Gwen looked interested, but still too shy about asking. Gwen fit in fine—we all liked her, and she liked us—but there was so much left over from her gratitude-is-a-weapon days at that rotten orphanage, you could see Clair deciding to unclam just for her.

“Well, as it happens, some of the firsts are all jumbled together,” she said.

She took up the chocolate pot in both hands, and poured more into her cup.

Everyone waited; the room was, for the first time, so silent I could hear the soft crackle of flames from the fireplace, and the muffled thuddud of the rain on the ground overhead.

Clair wriggled her toes in the carpet, her fingers closed round her cup.

While she ordered her thoughts, I turned my attention to the others. Funny, how much respect Clair got when she didn’t ask for any. She hated titles, wouldn’t dress differently than anyone, never demanded to speak first, or last. Never went first at dinner, or took the best place in a room—all stuff that PJ did, for example. He was always watching to make sure everyone gave him his bows, and waited for him to go first, and have the best chair. He demanded (loudly) all the signs of respect, but I don’t know how much respect his followers actually felt if they always had to be reminded, or bribed with promises of rank and riches as soon as they conquered Mearsies Heili.

Clair gave us goodies—she gave us a home. None of us had to go out and prentice to work. We did have work, like patrolling, but we chose that ourselves. She had asked us to go round to the provinces and neighboring lands—but if we’d said no, she would have found a way to go herself. She didn’t make us. And she didn’t give us things to bribe us, or to buy our friendship. She gave us things because she liked to see everybody happy.

So here we all were, and she was going to tell a story. If the rest of us were thinking over our words just before telling a story, there would be jokes and snickers and conversation. But we were quiet, waiting.

Clair said, “I guess the best place for me to start is when my friend Jennet was alive. I was four or five, I forget now. Maybe five, because we’d been playing together for a while. We’d been talking about the Children’s Army—the kids left over after Kwenz pulled his Debt Day wine-spell trick. We’d rescued some of the grownups by accident, and Jennet kept talking about the missing ones. Like her parents.”

She paused, and then went on in her low, soft voice, her green gaze straying toward the fire and staying there as she described how her mom was actually having morning interviews for once, rather than sleeping, so the girls sneaked into the magic library. Clair had learned the basics of magic as well as reading—mostly by practicing on her own, once she’d had a few lessons. No one knew how far along she really was.

So no one had thought to hide any of the books. She located one that had transportation magic. She had never been permitted to leave the cloud-city, but she had sneaked away once, and saw the road around Mount Marcus that led down into the Shadowland beneath the cloud-city. Clair also knew enough about transfer magic, having seen people come and go from the Destination inside the White Palace. She knew she had to say the spell and picture a specific destination, or when the transfer magic wrenched you out of time and space in this world, you would vanish forever. So she pictured the edge of the Shadow, seen when poor Jennet had lost her family to Kwenz’s terrible spell. She took Jennet’s hand, said the transfer spell, and z-z-z-zap!

Down they went! Without the spell book, of course. But, being five, they didn’t think about getting back up.

The road leading into the Shadow under the cloud city was well flattened, the time was early morning, so no one was out. They wandered along the barren rocky road to the castle. Kwenz did have guards on the walls, but they were seldom attentive—it wasn’t as if anyone was trying to invade! Also, they had so much magic on them that they didn’t do anything on their own initiative, especially when the morning light was strong. It hurt their eyes.

It could be that if the girls were seen, they were just small girls, and no one bothered to report them. Anyway, the little girls made it to the castle. Jennet remembered the way, not that it was hard to figure out. The middle of the main part of the castle had a long series of big rooms, mostly empty.

Some servants were out and about, carrying things to and fro. They walked slowly, gazes down. The girls copied them, and no one paid them the least attention.

They were looking for that tall old man they knew was in charge. Clair had recently learned a lesson from Steward Janil: that reasonable children could discuss what they wanted, and maybe get it. Whining and yelling would never get anything except time in your room. Even if Clair’s mom wouldn’t listen sometimes, just went on sleeping, or drinking wine out of her silver cup, Janil always listened. And whatever Janil said always was true. Plus, when you listened and learned, she gave you hugs and cookies.

So the girls were determined to discuss things reasonably with that old man. Maybe then he’d let Jennet’s parents go—and even give them cookies. The girls didn’t really want any hugs, except of course Jennet did from her parents.

Well, they heard voices. One of them was familiar. It was the old man, and he was laughing. It wasn’t a nice laugh at all, but it was familiar, so on they toiled, into a vast, dark room that was full of people! Only the people were still!

Clair reached to touch the nearest outstretched hand, to discover a cold hardness, like marble. No warm skin. She snatched her fingers back as she stared up. The people had been frozen in the middle of movement, some fearful, some warding threat, some offering threat. A few were sad, looking down. And some held children in arms or by the hand—babies and children just as still and cold.

Jennet ran off to look for her parents. Clair walked more slowly. Her attention was caught by a boy who looked familiar. He had a squinched-up face, his fingers outstretched, slightly curled. Like he was reaching. He was just a little taller than she, standing in the center of the whole room, she realized, surrounded by lots of empty space.

She looked at his eyes. They gleamed and glittered in the faint light reflected from outside the stone room, looking creepily real. As if these stone eyes watched her. She backed up a step, two steps—and then heard voices.

One was the old man again, laughing. It was a wheezy laugh—a mean laugh. She hid behind the boy-statue.

“... and there you are! No, you needn’t hold him any longer.”

The new voice sounded garbled. Like someone trying to talk while underwater in the bathtub, only there wasn’t any water. The voice slowed, then stopped, while the wheezy laughter continued.

The old man said, “My brother slowed the stone spell, see, so they know what’s happening to them. Listen, you!”

A third voice was deep and husky. “Interesting. Quite interesting.”

The old man said, “Here it gets even better. Now, you! Listen to me, before you freeze to stone. There is an antidote built into the spell, yes.” He laughed again.

The deep, husky voice growled, “Well known, and easy. So you put limits on who can cause the antidote to work?”

The old man said, “Yes! And here’s the cream of the jest. Listen, you, before you freeze. The only ones who can free you are that drunken queen of yours, or her brat. Neither of whom would ever spend a heartbeat thinking about you. Or caring if they did. Neither of them will ever come seeking you. Ever! Whereas, if you had stayed in my service, you would be free right now. Think about that as time passes while you are stone, ha ha ha!”

“Lethal.” The deep voice laughed. It was a growly, scary laugh. “Quite lethal. But are they able to think?”

“My brother insists they can. He was very careful with his experiments on—”

The voices faded away. Clair looked around, fearing to see dark magic—black smoke—lightning strikes. All things that had scared her when she was littler, because she was scared now. The lesson about the difference between black magic and light magic made sense now.

That old man wasn’t going to listen to reasonable children. And he certainly wasn’t going to smile and offer people cookies. Not if he could laugh while turning someone to stone, and call Clair’s mom bad names and say she didn’t care. She did care, she did! She was just ... not always well enough to care, but when she was, she did!

Clair stomped in a circle, mired in unhappy thoughts until Jennet pattered up, her eyes huge.

“Did you hear that?” Clair asked, whispering now. “What he said about Mama?”

Jennet nodded. “He called you a brat. You’re not a brat.”

“He’s icky. I don’t care if he calls me a brat. What it means,” Clair realized as she turned around, “is that I can free them. I think.”

“Let’s try one!”

They looked around, avoiding the tall men who all looked so angry. Clair picked one of the women holding a child. She touched the top of that cold stone hand, saying, “Ala! You are now awake!”

But nothing happened.

She struck the stone hand harder—and then tried giving the statue a hug. Then tried the ‘clear-away-illusion’ spell, which is one of the simplest there is, illusions being temporary as well as unreal. But nothing happened.

Clair scowled, remembering those words about ‘easy’.

Jennet said, “They are staring at us, Clair. Try their eyes.”

Clair had noticed that the gleams of the dim light outside made the eyes look real, though that could be the smoothness of the stone over the eyeballs. In any case, she disliked the idea of touching someone’s open eye, even on a statue, but anything was worth trying once. So she stood on tiptoe, just barely able to reach the woman’s face, and lightly tapped each eye.

And the statue made a weird crackling noise, then shuddered.

Quickly Clair touched the baby’s eyes so the woman wouldn’t be holding a stone baby, and they both wriggled and moved, the baby sinking with a sigh against its mother. The woman squinted down at Clair as if she had a terrible headache, but then tears welled up in her eyes. Her real eyes, that blinked and moved.

Clair hated to see tears. She felt even worse as the woman dropped to her knees, murmuring broken words of gratitude. That made Clair feel hot pricklies because she didn’t feel she’d earned such praise, so she said, “How’d you get froze?”

“I refused to remain in the Shadowland to serve in the kitchens of Kwenz of the Chwahir.”

“He’s the old man with the beard?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Stay away from him, child.”

Clair and Jennet nodded, having already come to that conclusion.

The woman looked around fearfully, took a slow step, then moved faster and faster, fading into the shadows as she made her way out.

Jennet said, “Maybe we better go away.”

“Not until I set them all free.”

Jennet said, “But my parents aren’t here. I looked at them all.”

“I’m sorry,” Clair said. “I wish they were. But I can’t leave these others as statues.”

Jennet did not argue, just followed Clair from person to person. To help Clair reach the taller men, Jennet bent over and made a turtle back for her to climb on. Soon the creak and crackle of breaking magical stone and restored flesh and blood filled the gloomy, cavernous space. Some people took off without speaking, others found the girls to thank them. Many lingered, telling one another their stories; if they were young, Clair asked, for she saw that the adults tended to speak to one another.

All had refused to serve Kwenz, and some said he had gloated about saving them for a full generation’s time, till everyone they knew was dead, and they’d be a fresh crop of servants. By then his brother would find will-binding spells.

When Clair came to the boy—she’d saved him for last—he shook himself all over. Jennet laughed, saying, “He reminds me of a puppy!”

Clair laughed. The boy blinked, squinted, then said, “You have to be Clevarlineh Sherwood.”

“Yes.”

“Hi, cousin!” He grinned.

“I do remember you, Puddlenose,” Clair said happily. Then looked puzzled. “But you went away.”

He made a face. “That’s because Uncle Doumei came after me again. It was after the last nephew disappeared.”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind,” he said, eyeing the five-year-old. He was about eight, then, and felt that life in the Land of the Chwahir wasn’t anything his five-year-old cousin needed to hear about. “Let’s get out of here,” was his next thought. “While we can.”

“... and so he showed us the way out, explaining that he’d been sent to Kwenz to be taught a lesson, but he suspected it was because someone had broken into Shnit’s magical wards over Narad, his capital. It was, and probably still is, the worst warded city in the entire world,” Clair said, sitting back, then sipping her now-cold chocolate. “Puddlenose says that nothing will grow in that city, there’s so much black magic leaching away at life and light.”

“So he got turned into stone? How grotty!” Gwen exclaimed.

“Oh, he kept making jokes about it. Insisting it was a good day’s rest, but heavy on the dreams. Stuff like that. Maybe it was better than life with King Shnit.” Clair pinched her nose on the word ‘Kwenz.’

“Isn’t that about the time you met Rosey?” I asked.

Clair grinned. “Oh yes. He kidnapped us, you see. Right afterward.”

Gwen snapped upright, jaw dropping.

Faline chortled. “Wish I coulda met him. Even if he is a villain.”

“If he is.” Clair made a face. “The more I think about those days, the more I think that whatever else he was, he was not a real villain.”

Gwen looked from one to another of us, and I sensed that our knowledge and her lack were dividing us, so I pointed upward. “That rain is louder than ever. We’re not patrolling any time soon, so why don’t you tell us about Rosey, Clair?”

Clair gave us one of her question-looks.

“I always like hearing about Rosey.” Seshe leaned forward. “He is such a mystery! Just when you think you know how villains will act—you get someone like Rosey.”

Irene still had her chin in her hands. “Why don’t we see him now?”

“I hope nothing horrible has happened to him,” Clair said. “The more I learn about magic, the more I think he’s actually Shnit’s enemy, though he seems to be Kwenz’s friend. I don’t know how that could be—”

“Euw!”

“Pshooie!”

“Glug!”

“I didn’t even think you could be friends with a villain,” she said doubtfully.

“You can’t,” I pronounced, bulling in. “You can’t trust ’em, so why be friends?”

“Okay, now I’m really curious,” Gwen admitted.

“Well ...” I could tell Clair was relieved that the rest of us weren’t bored. “Remember that deep, growly voice I mentioned?”

Nods all around, as above us the rain roared. Seshe got up to make some more hot chocolate, and Sherry gave the whipped cream a brisk stir.

“It was right after we started out of the castle. See, it was then that I realized I had no way to get us safely back up to the white castle. I was pretty sick with worry. My cousin said, ‘Which way out? Seems to me we should wander on up to Aunt Mearsieanne’s.’

“‘We can’t,’ I said, and I was trying hard not to cry. Jennet was already upset because we hadn’t found her parents among the statues, and here was my cousin—the very one who’d been stolen away so long ago. I had truly messed everything up.

“And just then, this massive, dark-bearded man loomed out of the darkness. I think now he was coming down to the statues, and Puddlenose was sure that Rosey was going to steal him away, maybe to ransom against Shnit, but anyway, there he was, booming out, ‘What have we here? Some hostages, hah hah hah!’ It was the deep, growly voice! ‘It seems my over-confident friend needs a lesson in caution.’ And next thing we knew we were transported a long distance ...” Clair sat back, that far-away look making her smile a little as the firelight leaped and gleamed in her eyes.

She went on to describe how awful they all felt after the long transfer. They came out of it hearing the booming-voiced fellow saying things like You’re all my prisoners now, ha ha, ho ho! Now you must learn how terrible the Chwahir are, and a lot of similar threats.

“He said he was going to throw us in a cell, which turned out to be a small bedroom. Not much was in it but a bed with an old quilt, and a tiny window that looked straight up a rocky cliff-side. He brought us all what he called prisoner-slop—saying we’d have to get used to it, and the like, but what he gave us was boiled grain with honey and milk, and biscuits with a hunk of cheese and some tasty greenstuff put into each. We gobbled the food down, drank the milk he left in a big bowl—we shared, a sip apiece until it was gone—and then we all jumped up onto the bed, and in the middle of trying to figure out where we were and what was going to happen, we fell asleep.”

When the little kids woke up, the man let them out. Rosey’s house was indeed a small house built high on a cliff. It overlooked a vast distance, a quilt of farms and forests, all embroidered by the twinkling blue of rivers, streams and a couple of small lakes.

He was a big, stout man in a black robe, with a bristly black beard and unkempt hair. The house was comprised of the main room, which had walls solid with books, and upstairs of a kind of loft with two small bedrooms, one of which the kids had been put in.

Rosey claimed they were his prisoners, and he would ransom them because King Shnit of the Chwahir wanted to get his hands on them to make them statues, or make them scrub all the floors in his giant castle, and as soon as they were done to start again, never pausing to eat. All scary things to five-year-olds. Puddlenose knew the king was far worse, and for a time he teased the girls by making even more dire threats—he was a little jealous of their easy life.

But a little bit of conversation ended that pretty fast, when he found out why Jennet was living with Clair, and why Clair had so much free time. He was able to put together the clues about Clair’s mom better than the girls at the time, so he soon started making up stories to get them to laugh, and promising that as soon as the black-beard fellow put them to work or threatened them, he’d show them how to run away.

The growly-voiced villain left them alone for a time, and they explored outside—discovering soon that the mountainside was far too steep to get away on foot. Obviously the fellow came and went by magic.

Next time Blackbeard showed up, Clair asked his name. The deep, rumbling voice mumbled something that sounded like ‘Mount Rose’ or Mondros, which soon became Rosey to the kids. At first they didn’t use it to his face, but when he heard it, he laughed and said that that was close enough to his name, and he liked it right fine.

The thing was, after putting a good scare into them about the Chwahir, and about kids who didn’t learn their transport magic before using it, and such-like, he left one of his books open after a day or two—and right there on the page was the transport spell. It took several subsequent kidnappings for Clair to realize that it was the white magic spell, not the faster, but far more dangerous black spell—but Rosey explained his having a white magic book by saying that one ought to always know one’s enemy.

Clair took that as a lesson, as she did the one about magic. When they got home, she applied herself earnestly to her studies, and at first, the other two played happily enough. But Puddlenose soon got restless, as he always was going to do. And since there was only a five-year-old girl to play with, he took to wandering farther and farther, just to explore, he’d explain. He’d be gone longer and longer. Clair and Jennet missed him, but as Clair’s mom didn’t seem to notice him whether he was right there at the dinner table or gone, there was no one to stop him—and then came the day that stretched into two, then three, then a week, and then a year. And longer.

Clair set her cup down, and sat back.

Everyone tried to guess whether Rosey was a villain or not, and why he might kidnap Mearsieans just to let them easily escape. “I think it’s because he’s Kwenz’s old friend, and hates Shnit,” Clair said at the time.

We know a lot more now, of course.

But there’s more about Rosey way, way further along in the records, so I’ll stop the rewrite of this one just where it ended when I first put it down, not so long after I came.

“Hey, the rain is stopped,” Sherry yelled—breaking into her own story of her first clash with Kwenz, which wasn’t all that interesting (though it had been awful at the time).

Kwenz, the Shadow, Sherry’s fumbling attempts at being a housemaid (causing Kwenz to fire her from the job and send her out—she wasn’t even worth turning into something!), all were forgotten at the prospect of running around in the fresh air.

We all raced up into the brisk wind. The sun was just emerging from the clouds, birds trilled again, rain dripped from the trees—and we just had to run around and have a mud fight, leaving storytelling for another day.

What happens next?

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Copyright © 2011 by Sherwood Smith

ISBN: 978 1 61138 066 8