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mind raced.
    Why had her memories hidden themselves from her? And why had Zosimos hidden the castle?
    She didn’t know, but she was certain where she would find the answer. She knocked her staff against the ground three times, until it produced enough light to illuminate the dark. And she walked into the stone.

11.
    In Which a Witch Comes to a Decision
    Xan gathered books by the armload and carried them from the ruined castle to her workshop. Books and maps and papers and journals. Diagrams. Recipes. Artwork. For nine days she neither slept nor ate. Luna remained in her cocoon, pinned in place. Pinned in time, too. She didn’t breathe. She didn’t think. She was simply paused. Every time Glerk looked at her, he felt a sharp stab in his heart. He wondered if it would leave a mark.
    He needn’t have wondered. It surely did.
    â€œYou cannot come in,” Xan told him through the locked door. “I must focus.” And then he heard her muttering inside.
    Night after night, Glerk peered into the windows of the workshop, watching as Xan lit her candles and scanned through hundreds of open books and documents, taking notes on a scroll that grew longer and longer by the hour, muttering all the while. She shook her head. She whispered spells into lead boxes, quickly slamming the door shut the moment the spell was uttered and sitting on the lid to hold it in. Afterward, she’d cautiously open the box and peek inside, inhaling deeply as she did so, through her nose.
    â€œCinnamon,” she’d say. “And salt. Too much wind in the spell.” And she’d write that down.
    Or: “Methane. No good. She’ll accidentally fly away. Plus she’ll be flammable. Even more than usual.”
    Or: “Is that sulfur? Great heavens. What are you trying to do, woman? Kill the poor child?” She crossed several things off her list.
    â€œHas Auntie Xan gone mad?” Fyrian asked.
    â€œNo, my friend,” Glerk told him. “But she has found herself in deeper water than she expected. She is not accustomed to not knowing exactly what to do. And it is frightening to her. As the Poet says,
    â€˜
The Fool, when removed
    from solid ground, leaps—
    From mountaintop,
    to burning star,
    to black, black space.
    The scholar,
    when bereft of scroll,
    of quill,
    of heavy tome,
    Falls.
    And cannot be found.
’ ”
    â€œIs that a real poem?” Fyrian asked.
    â€œOf course it is a real poem,” Glerk said.
    â€œBut who made it, Glerk?”
    Glerk closed his eyes. “The Poet. The Bog. The World. And me. They are all the same thing, you know.”
    But he wouldn’t explain what he meant.

    F inally, Xan threw the doors of the workshop wide open, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. “You see,” she explained to a very skeptical Glerk as she drew a large chalk circle on the ground, leaving a gap open to pass through. She drew thirteen evenly spaced marks along the circumference of the circle and used them to map out the points of a thirteen-­pointed star. “In the end, all we are doing is setting a clock. Each day ticks by like the perfect whirring of a well-­tuned gear, you see?”
    Glerk shook his head. He did not see.
    Xan marked out the time along the almost-­complete circle—a neat and orderly progression. “It’s a thirteen-­year cycle. That’s all the spell will allow. And less than that in our case, I’m afraid—the whole mechanism synchronizes to her own biology. Not much I can do about that. She’s already five, so the clock will set itself to five, and will go off when she reaches thirteen.”
    Glerk squinted. None of this made any sense to him. Of course, magic itself always felt like nonsense to the swamp monster. Magic was not mentioned in the song that built the world, but rather had arrived in the world much later, in the light from the stars and moon. Magic, to him, always felt like an