“No, no, it’s only Grundo. Please stay!” I said.
“Talk he growl like deep earth,” said the small one. “Booming strong magic. I go.”
And to my great disappointment he went. He flipped aside a fold in the harebell patch, slipped around it, and vanished. “What did you have to interrupt for?” I said to Grundo.
He sat up and rolled his eyes to get the kinks out of them. “Because you were being stupid,” he said. “He was trying to tell you that raising the land—whatever that is—is going to destroy the whole balance of magic here and probably in most other worlds as well. That’s why he was so anxious to make you understand. I think he meant only do that if the outside-path magic doesn’t work. Whatever that is.”
“Then we’ll do the other thing— Oh, I wish you hadn’t frightened him off!” I wailed.
“He’d told you what he thought anyway,” Grundo said.
“Yes, but he wanted to practice his human language,” I said. “You must admit he needed to. He’d have stayed for hours if only you’d kept quiet.”
“Then we’d have missed lunch,” said Grundo. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Always thinking about food! I thought. “Don’t you even feel how marvelous it is to have talked to one of the Little People?” I said.
“No, not as the main thing,” Grundo grunted. “If you think like that, then you’re treating him like something in a museum, not as a person. And I’m going back for lunch. Now.”
Do you know, Grundo is right! I was thinking of the small person that way. Even though he gave us some excellent, if terrifying, advice, I still had to try hard as I followed Grundo across the hillsides not to think of the Little Person as something very rare and strange that I had been to stare and marvel at. I think it would have been easier to see him as a real person if he’d agreed to speak his own language.
FOUR
We tried to call help from the dark paths that afternoon. We sat in the grass above the manse while I called up the flower files and thought through them to find the knowledge I needed. I knew it was there somewhere, but I was quite surprised to find it under Mullein as a branch of speaking with the dead. I suppose that put me in a bad mood. I hoped, very strongly, that the person I found to help would not be dead. That would be no help at all.
Then I was put out again, when I looked in the right branch of the file, to discover that the file names were not simply names of flowers, but quite often the plant you needed for most of the workings in the file. This ought to have been obvious from Harebells this morning, but I didn’t see it until that afternoon. It took practice to get used to the hurt lady’s knowledge.
A torch of mullein held in the hand is necessary for all the dark paths, this branch said. And could we find mullein? We could not. I got more and more impatient, and underneath I was just so anxious because while we searched about on the hillside and round the manse, Sybil and her friends were getting merrily on with their plans. We could be too late. I had only the haziest idea what mullein looked like anyway. Grundo knew. He had looked at the pictures in nature study lessons because of not being able to read as well as me. He said he thought it looked a bit like evening primrose. But when he added that any old plant would probably do just as well, we very nearly quarreled.
“Or try waving a turnip!” Grundo called over his shoulder. He went stumping off in disgust down to the chapel.
I ignored him and found rosemary and privet and ragged robin. Privet and ragged robin were two of those plants that my files had tagged as Use only with great care, along with briony, campion, hellebore, and lily of the valley. I was looking at them nervously, wondering what made them so dangerous, when Grundo came stumping back.
“There’s a fuzzy plant covered with caterpillars against the back wall of the chapel,” he said. “Come and look. I think it may be mullein.”
It was, too. I knew as soon as I looked at it. It had pale, furry leaves and pale yellow flowers in clusters all down its stem, and as well as being covered in caterpillars, it was tall as a hollyhock. Grundo knocked the caterpillars off and handed me the flower with a
Court bow. “There. Have you got them all?”
“I need dock,” I said.
“By the chapel gate,” he said. “A big bundle of it. And then?”
“Well, asphodel and periwinkle would help, too, but I’ve got all the main ones,” I said. “Let’s go to the top of the hill. I need to face clear sky.”
All the way up the hill I could tell Grundo was brooding. When we got to the top, he said, “If doing this magic makes you like Alicia all the time, I’m not going to help you anymore.” He sat himself down facing toward the manse and humped his shoulders at me.
In the normal way I’d have been furious with him for even thinking I was like Alicia, but my head was so full of what I had to do that all I said was “Be like that, then!” and left him sitting there.
Oddly, as soon as I started the working, it was almost as if Grundo was not with me. There came a tremendous burst of energy from the bundle of plants in my fist, and from that moment on I seemed to be alone on the top of the mountain, walled off from the world. This made me less embarrassed than I would have been if Grundo had been standing beside me. The spell was a rhyming one. The files told me what to say in the hurt woman’s language, and then they told me what the words meant. I had to put the words into thoughts and then into more words that rhymed. I felt really silly, waving a withering bundle of plants about and calling out, “Feet on the stony way, eyes that can’t see, wizard man outside the worlds, come and help me!” Over and over. It felt pathetic. And futile.
I was quite sure it wasn’t working until I saw a dark space open in front of me. It felt like a window into emptiness at first. “Help me,” I finished feebly. I nearly staggered away backward when the darkness flickered blue, showing rocks and wetness, and someone came stumbling from around a corner toward me.
The first and most important thing I noticed about this person was that he had a little blue flame sitting on his forehead, the way our wizards do on important occasions. “Oh, good!” I said. “You’re a wizard.” But I was very nervous, because he was real and because he was somewhere else entirely.
I knew he could see me and hear me. But he didn’t seem any too certain that he was a wizard. He mumbled something about being a beginner or just learning. My heart sank rather. He was more or less the same age as me. I could tell he was, although the blue flame distorted his face terribly. He looked demonic, with pits for eyes. But, I thought dubiously, perhaps this is how people from another world do look. In Blest, I would have said he was from India. I think. Anyway, he was dark and a lot taller than me.
Then I told myself that he had to be right. He was the one the mullein spell had summoned, so he had to be. The flower file was most insistent that the next thing you did was to get the person to say his or her true name. So I asked him his name, and he said it was Nichothodes. It sounded very foreign to me. And he was sort of frowning at me, as if he thought—rather like Grundo—that I was being very bossy and busy with my own troubles, which I was, but I couldn’t help it. So I told him my name and tried to make a joke that we both had mouthfuls for names.