Page 33 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)

Thirty-Three

Open wide the witch’s door

and burn with magic evermore.

But to gain, you must surrender

remembrance of the witch forever.

—Origin unknown

Local Legends and Superstitions, Tempest Family Grimoire

I fall through the floor after him, ending up not in a pit but back outside again. “The house…ejected us?” I sputter, revolving in a circle. The door we entered is different now: the Nothing to See Here has changed to Leaving So Soon? and the carved owl has altered, too, its wings lifted in flight. Morgan is staring straight ahead.

I follow his gaze.

The ground is scarcely visible under a thick layer of brilliant autumn leaves, and the still, golden air around us tastes of smoke and cider, mist twisting between the dark forks of red maples in full plumage. Across a dirt road is a sprinkling of very old buildings, medieval but perfectly preserved, as if we’ve just stepped back in time.

“Was all of this invisible to us before?” I say.

Morgan shakes his head slowly, indicating he has no idea, no room in his head to process what it is that we’re seeing. Surely, this is the same forest we’ve been walking through all day. But just as surely, it is not. The shape of the trees, and the colors, are not the same. It is enhanced, like the art in a children’s storybook; scarlet trees climb the sky like burning towers, their leaves reflecting a bright sunlight that can’t be detected elsewhere. You’d think by looking at them that the sun must be high in the sky, but the coloring is more like evening. Soft and rosy.

He hitches Forte’s sling higher on his shoulder. “What do we do?”

“We’re explorers, aren’t we? We explore.”

We have found ourselves in a small village, and in the hub of this village there is a fountain with troughs for horses and linen-scrubbing, as well as a cluster of trade stalls. There are no people, but the stalls bear a great deal of fresh food: smoked meat, snow-white apples, figs, sweet potatoes, stews that are still steaming. A rich bounty of berries. Colorful vegetables.

I lean in to catch the aroma of blackberry pie, hot from the oven. “Who cooked all this? Seems like a bunch of people ought to be here, but there’s nobody.”

“Maybe the people are invisible,” Morgan suggests.

Wooden arrows point down various trails called Elderberry Flood, Widow’s Walk, and Bear’s Bellow. Along this road are houses, a hat shop, a tavern half-timbered and studded with river stones. Hanging from the tavern’s eaves is a sign shaped like an open book, with a curled-up purple dragon painted on. Beneath that, in tinfoil-silver lettering: The Drowsing Dragon . Its windows are ablaze with lamps.

As soon as Morgan pushes the door open, a crackling fire spurs to life in the hearth, flinging its comforting warmth across the room to greet us like a friend. There is so much to see that I’m overwhelmed and stand frozen for a few moments. Morgan, of course, starts springing about, touching everything he possibly can.

Herbs and dried flowers string the rafters like holiday garland, hanging squarely over a wooden table so rough-hewn that it’s still got a couple tree branches sticking out. A mortar and pestle lie atop, as well as a carpetbag. The carpetbag’s design is that of a mountainous forest sprinkled beneath a castle, yellow moon embroidered behind its tallest turret.

There’s a spinning wheel along one wall, next to a woodbox heaped with rotten, fungus-covered logs. Bits of straw are scattered on the floor. I crane my neck to see up a staircase but don’t dare climb it, because what if the stairs are magicked just like the spooky cabin was, and they lead me to a different place or time?

The Drowsing Dragon doesn’t smell musty or neglected, but cheery and alive, lived-in, as if its occupants have stepped outside for a minute and plan to be right back.

“Stunning, spectacular, sensational,” Morgan is raving, rooting through feathers, candlesticks, lumps of quartz, pouches containing items that whine or sob, a kettle that’s heating itself up on the stove right this second without being asked. “Zelda, why aren’t you moving? Hurry up and be nosy!”

“My brain is moving,” I reply. “I’m giving it a head start before my legs join.”

He laughs to himself, grinning wide. “It all looks so old! But new! Where are we?” He moves to examine the fireplace, which is perhaps the most extraordinary feature in the tavern. The hearth has been blasted a deep glittering purple from what I can only imagine must be years of exploding enchantments. Moss clings to the fireplace’s stonework. A braid of vines as thick as my neck roots down the chimney and across the walls to bloom moonflowers like living art.

Slowly, I drag a finger over the lip of a copper cauldron in the fireplace. It’s filled with water, reflecting not my own face but rather the image of a dilapidated black cabin—the same one we walked into minutes ago. Whoever peers into this cauldron can see the comings and goings around that cabin.

“Look at these.” Morgan waves me over. Now that I’ve accepted my environment as real, and not a dream, my normal sensibilities come trickling back in and the whole world twinkles with Find Out , Find Out .

He’s analyzing potions. By their milky coloration, I suspect most of them have soured. One cupboard consists entirely of fatal tonics. Two bowls sit under the table, one filled with pet kibble and one with water.

And then—

“Books!” My heart soars, and so do I, over to a bookshelf crammed with clothbound volumes. I eagerly begin flicking pages, all jam-packed with graceful handwriting. Spells for ridding gardens of pests and plant diseases. A dual-purpose charm that softens grief and chases away dogged sensations of bad tidings to come. The instructions are most confounding.

Use a bellows to summon a sail of wind. Add mourning bride and asphodel. Crush to a juice. Let drain through cheesecloth into a goblet of rice wine and give to a party of your choosing.

There are notes in the margins, words walled between question marks. A half-finished sketch for a possible fear-banishing draught takes up the last page, calling for a simmer of snakeskin, ghoul-light, and the bones of a gray rabbit skinned in spring . I snap the book closed, leaving it on the table, and start poking through an odd sort of mulch piled up on a shelf.

“Now, that’s not very polite, is it?” somebody pipes up. “You of all people should know that when you’re finished with a book, you put it back in its proper place.”

I leap in fright, spilling the mulch into the cauldron, and there, occupying a chair at the table as if he’s been there all this time—and perhaps he has been—is a young man.

“Hello, Zelda,” he says amiably. “I see you’ve found Hither again.”

—

The man taps the glass of his pocket watch and a mug of tea appears next to his hand. It’s hard to tell if he’s in his twenties or thirties—he’s got a youthful face and thick, rumpled brown hair, but his pale blue eyes wear the weight of the world.

“Hither?” Morgan repeats, as I say, “Again?”

“I created this village quite a long time ago. I call it Hither, and this will be the third time you’ve visited.”

As if in a dream, I look down to see myself dragging over a stool, seating myself opposite—but I don’t feel any of the physical matter I touch, as I am so out of my body. “I’ve never been here before.”

He magicks up a second cup of tea and slides it across the tabletop. Morgan quickly sits down beside me. “Can I have a coffee?” he asks.

The man makes him another tea.

“You ran away when you were little,” the man tells me, stretching out his legs. “Your grandmother was worried about you because you didn’t have many friends or an easy way of social things. But I could smell the magic on you—a particularly wild magic, that, by nature, gave you a predisposition for going off on your own. I still can’t tell exactly what your gift is, but obviously it’s something to do with running around the woods.”

“My gift is that I can see paranimals,” I manage to reply, the words wobbly. “Enchanted creatures. Are they yours? Are you the Black Bear Witch?” I’m floored. “I thought the Black Bear Witch was a woman.”

He smiles. “That isn’t your gift from magic itself, that is your gift from me . It’s been a while since I’ve been out in your world, in the way I used to be, but I’ve still got quite a lot of power left in me. When you were a little girl and found my village, you needed a bit of cheering up so I gave you the ability to see the true nature of my animals. But then you found me again, some time later, after one of our four-legged friends was struck down by a car.”

“Katrina.”

“Yes. I explained to you that my creatures cannot actually die, they merely turn into other creatures or dreams or spells—magic cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, and all that—which made you feel better. But you wouldn’t remember any of that now, naturally. I had to remove your memory of my home, and then I gave you another memory spritz to discourage you from coming back into the woods. Please forgive me. I had to make you afraid of exploring Falling Rock all by yourself. You were always wandering around here, and I worried you’d get hurt.”

Morgan leans forward. “So you’re the one who gave Zelda her powers?”

The man tilts his head, studying him. “She already had her own powers. What those are, only Zelda can tell us—but the ability to see my enchanted animals as they are and not how ordinary people perceive them; that part is a present from me.”

“But why do you enchant the animals?” Morgan asks.

The man shrugs. “Why not? I like to experiment in my spare time, which I happen to have quite a lot of.”

I’m still thinking about She already had her own powers , and what that means. What are my natural-born powers, then?

“The ability to hear brays,” I say at once. “That’s my real power.”

“You can hear them?” The witch sets his cup down, blue eyes alight with interest. “That’s extraordinary. What do they say?”

“A lot of nonsense.”

Morgan is practically halfway across the table, so far is he leaning toward him. “Sir. You have no idea how grateful I would be if you’d give me a power, too.”

“It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid.”

Morgan’s energy is palpable, a froth of fear, distress, hope. “But you gave some of your magic to Zelda. Couldn’t you do that again? It doesn’t need to be big. I’d be happy with elemental magic, or divination, alchemy, healing. Knotting. Water-bending. Whatever you’ve got on hand.”

The witch cuts off his plea. “I’m sorry.”

Morgan’s hairline is slick with perspiration. He has to hold himself back from desperate begging, as it might put the witch off more. “ Please. ”

I slide an arm around Morgan’s shoulders. “Can’t you give him something ?” I ask. “We came all this way, looking for the Black Bear Witch. And that’s you, right? You know how the legend goes: you find the lair, the witch gives you magic. Well. Morgan found the lair, so…”

The man shakes his head at him sadly. “It isn’t your time.”

Morgan badly wants to argue. I can see it. But he resists. “What does that mean?”

“It means that your time hasn’t come yet.”

“But it will? When?”

“If it does, you will find out then.”

Morgan sinks a couple inches, not saying a word as he frustratedly combs over this, twiddling with the frayed stitches of the carpetbag.

“And this is not the lair,” the man adds carefully, watching us. He folds his hands behind his head, reclining. “When the town was young, my lair was disguised as an ordinary stagecoach inn. The family inhabiting that building now is rather unusual, and I suspect it’s because of all the magic I left behind.”

I’m confused. “So this village isn’t your lair?”

“No. It’s an experiment I had to abandon, unfortunately.” His mouth twists, wry. “I’d intended for it to be a ghost town in the literal sense. A place where ghosts could come and be corporeal again. Eat and drink and live satisfying lives. But it turns out that the magic in this place can only work for the person who created it, and the poor old ghosts who find their way in are still as invisible as ever.”

He rises to his feet, draining the last of his tea. The man is tall and well-built, clothed in older fashions: a loose linen shirt with a dropped shoulder seam, twill trousers held up by leather suspenders. “Now. I’m very sorry to cut this short, but I have some business to attend to.” He gives me an evaluating look, a small smile lifting his lips. “It feels nice that you believe in me again.”