Rain paused. Glinda held the book down to her like a tray of canapés. From under those horrid flea-bitten bangs of hers, Rain looked up at Glinda. Then with a hand scratched by thorns and ignorant of soap, she cracked the code of the disguise charm without even trying. The Grimmerie took on its original aspect—broader, darker, more opaque; handwritten, on this page, in inks of silver and iodine blue. A narrow design seemed to be contorting around the margins, writhing. Glinda felt faint. “How did you do that?”

The thunder made a menacing comment, but it was comfortably distant. Rain turned to a page about two-thirds through.

“You can’t read this. Can you?”

Rain peered. “Everything’s hitched up and kicking.”

“Yes yes, but can you read it?”

Rain shook her head. “Can you?”

How mortifying. Glinda looked. A heading of some sort was squeezing like a belows; at ful extension it seemed to suggest To Call Winter upon Water.

“It’s about dressing warmly enough. Sort of,” she said. She slapped the book closed. “Why did you open to that page?” Rain murmured, “I was remembering something once. About a goldfish.”

Suddenly Glinda was tired of Rain. Tired, and a little scared of her. “Would you run tel Miss Murth it’s time for my tea? And no touching this book unless I ask you to. Do you understand?” Rain was out the door, on to the next thing in her stunted little life. “Sure,” she caled, disingenuously no doubt.

Glinda carried the volume to her escritoire. She opened it again, but now she couldn’t even fan the pages. The book fel open to the page it preferred. To Call Winter upon Water. How had Rain caled this spel up out of the book?

I chose to be the patron of arts festivals over dabbling in the science of charms, she thought. But there’s no help for it now. I am stuck here with a book of magic that won’t let me go.

She read a little bit of the charm, as best she could, and then sat back, exhausted. Thought about the Grimmerie, and its wily ways. Perhaps she shouldn’t read too much into Rain’s capacity to hone in on the tome. She was learning to read, after al. Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page—but then the world is the same way, isn’t it? The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

How does anyone learn to read? she thought. How did I?