The girl shrugged again. Her shrugs were a caution against committing herself, Glinda saw. She wanted to reach out and press her palms on those insouciant shoulders. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Mum.” The voice was smaler, but more honest.

“That’l do, then. Off you go. Remember, Rain. Tiptoe. Tiptoe, whisper, glide. But if they see you, you are just playing. Can you act as though you’re just playing?”

“He’s teaching me to read off my letters,” said Rain. “Nobody never teached me to play.”

I4.

While she was waiting for Rain’s report, Glinda had another thought. (A flurry of thoughts! A squal of them!) Perhaps the Grimmerie could supply a spel that would send Cherrystone and his men packing.

After al, if she could use a spel to conceal the book itself, maybe her talents at magic had improved through time.

But, like any fool girl in any fool tale, she’d been bested by the magic. Now that the Grimmerie was disguised as a novel, she had no access to its spels. She could open the squat volume and turn its pages easy as you please, but the spels therein were hidden from view behind hedges of dense print. Why did people write such fat books? Where was the magic in that? Perhaps she needed spectacles, as she couldn’t realy make out the prose, though perhaps she also needed to try a little harder, which she wasn’t inclined to do.

She replaced the book on the shelf. What had she done? She’d hidden the Grimmerie so wel through that concealing spel that it might never again come in handy as a book of magic. Eventualy Glinda would flail and fail and die, and fly off to the arms of Lurlina, or be absorbed like condensation into the cloudy dubiousness of the Unnamed God, and Miss Murth would find the damn thing and read it to distract herself from Glinda’s death, and then she would dump the book in the bin, or give it to a church jumble sale.

I5.

Glinda was trying to master the art of peeling a hard-boiled egg. The little grey-brown flecks of shel kept driving themselves under her fingernails, which she was beginning to see were too long for kitchen work. Rain popped up next to the table in the makeshift sculery they had sorted out in Glinda’s bathing chamber.

“Goodness, child, you startled me.” An egg roled off the table onto the floor and cracked its own shel quite efficiently.

“I did the thing you wanted me to do.”

Glinda looked this way and that. She didn’t dare risk incriminating Puggles or Murthy. But they weren’t to be seen. “Very good of you. What did you find out?” Rain smirked a little. “It was hard to see because it was so dark.”

“I’m sure you found a way.”

“I waited til the men goed to lunch and then I opened the hay door up top.”

Glinda waited.

Oh, the girl required another compliment. Glinda wanted to hit her. “How cunning of you. Go on.”