Chapter 27
PANDORA’S DIARY
Regret for not stealing Leo’s chocolate sables: Yes
Albert’s lips thinned when the four of us entered the library. He looked ruffled, with his hair mussed and his brow furrowed, clearly upset by the chaos in the village. Still, he wasn’t too out of sorts to offer a book to Shrig.
“Mr. Shrigley,” he intoned. “I’ve been saving this for you.”
Deja barked a laugh. “Ha! The Ethical Slut, that’s right up your alley.”
Shrig took the book politely. “Thank you, Albert. I’m sure I’ll find it illuminating.”
“Speaking of illuminations.” Leo nodded toward the stairs. “We’re going to have another look at the manuscript.”
“By all means,” Albert said. “However, take care. There is an unsettling amount of… gravity to that manuscript. As if it is drawing in magic from the surroundings.”
“Gravity?” Leo asked.
“More importantly,” Albert said, glancing at the front door of the library. “Have any of you seen Hattie since the ruckus in town?”
“She was here yesterday,” I told him. “She congratulated me on getting my gift. Though she didn’t look happy about it.”
Albert shot me a brief, disdainful look. “Precisely my point. She stops in most mornings. Yet there’s no sign of her today and she doesn’t answer her phone.”
“Knock on her door,” Deja suggested. “You live right around the corner. Oh!” She turned to Shrig. “Isn’t your sinkhole near her house?”
“Sinkhole?” Albert pressed his spidery fingers to his chest. “Oh dear, I’ll close the library immediately and check on her.”
“Immediately?” Leo echoed, a little panicked. “What about the manuscript?”
“Here!” Albert shoved the library keys at Leo. “Lock up when you’re done.”
Albert bustled off and the overhead lights dimmed, leaving only daylight streaming through the windows. The front door opened and closed, then Leo led us up the creaky back stairs.
“So this is the book that’s making you itchy?” Deja asked him.
“No, that’s another one,” I told her. “He hasn’t found that one yet. It’s not making him itch much anymore.”
“Because this one is stronger,” Leo explained. “It makes me woozy.”
I glanced at him. “Are you going to faint again?”
“I didn’t faint! I just feel books too keenly sometimes. Most of them sort of tug at me, but Albert’s right. This one feels more like a vacuum. Like it’s absorbing all the ambient magic nearby.”
“Sure,” I say, giving him a flat look. “A gravity vacuum.”
“Well, I don’t know! I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“Do you think it’s dangerous to let Shrig read it?”
“It’s definitely less dangerous than staying ignorant.”
None of us could disagree with that, and Shrig couldn’t wait to check out a brand-new language.
Or a brand-new ancient language, as the case may be.
We reached the top floor and shuffled into my redecorated receiving room, which still contained Mom’s throw rugs, curtains, mosquito netting, bed linens, and figurines.
Shrig did a slow turn, checking the decor. “I need your mother to decorate my bedroom. Apparently it was employed as a distillery while I was away.”
Shrig and Deja shared the guest house on their parents’ property, which was little more than a large kitchen with two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom.
“Five years is a long time,” Deja said, unrepentant for taking over her brother’s room.
“She’d be delighted,” I told Shrig.
Leo cleared his throat. “Can we please focus? Deja, would you grab the manuscript? You’re the least likely to react to it.”
“That sounds like an insult, but sure,” Deja said. “Where is it?”
Leo pointed to the shelf where the leather-bound manuscript was hidden behind a span of non-fiction volumes stacked between bookends that looked like forest pixies.
“Oh, is this what I keep smelling?” Deja asked, after she grabbed the manuscript. “I thought it was Grace’s candles.”
“What does it smell like?” I asked.
Deja brought the manuscript to the center table. “Hyssop and fatalii pepper.”
“And what are those, for anyone lacking your gift?” Shrig asked, gazing at the manuscript, his eyes tracing the patterns on the cover.
“Oh.” Deja thought about it. “Licorice and spicy citrus.”
“Like the fae,” Leo mused.
“Say what?” I asked.
“That’s what the fae smelled like,” Deja explained.
Shrig gestured toward the manuscript. “Can I touch it?”
“One second.” Leo pulled a bottle of hand sanitizer from his pocket. “Use this first.”
“No white gloves?” I asked.
“Not anymore. Our fingertips are so sensitive, they’re much gentler on old materials than covered hands. They just need to be clean.”
When Shrig opened the manuscript, my breath caught anew at the illuminations of strange flora, snaking vines, pixies and gnomes—and the ancient language we didn’t understand.
“Holy faerie-fuck,” Deja said. “I can smell the pictures! Tulips and jasmine—and even those leather boots on the furry gnomes.”
“I’ve never seen a language like this,” Shrig said, his eyes shining.
“I’ll take pictures while Shrig looks at the text,” Leo said. “Pan can check the music.”
“What should I do?” Deja asked.
“Sniff it,” Shrig said. “Like a bloodhound.”
As they bickered, I started turning pages.
Leo took photos with his phone, and Shrig finally focused on the text without seeming to notice the ornate trellises and sly brownies and fantastical flowers.
His gaze traced the rune-like letters and skipped the pictures of forest glades in which gnomes built spiral stairways around tree trunks and pixies played tag between moss-draped branches.
And Deja actually did inhale deeply. “I’ve never smelled moss like that.”
“… more of a puzzle than a language,” Shrig murmured. “Only one tense? What if an equivalent of prosodic intonation is reflected in the letterform… Oh!”
“What?” I asked.
“The music notation could be the key to deciphering this. Many languages rely upon tones to make meaning, so if you play the music—can you read it?”
“Pretty much. I, uh, was playing the neumes when I got my gift.”
“Perfect. I need a toehold. One intelligible thing to ground my gift. And music might work.”
“Um,” I said. “All the weirdness on the island started after I played the first time.”
“The weirdness on Beane Island started long before you were born,” Deja said.
“Maybe just don’t use your recorder?” Leo said to me.
“I don’t even have my recorder,” I told him.
“So we agree,” he said.
I shot him a look. “I can hum if you want. As long as we take it slow.”
So as Shrig focused on another line of ornate text, I tentatively hummed a line of neumes, groping toward the correct tune. I repeated the phrase a few times, more confident with each repetition, before Shrig asked me to turn to the next page.
We did that for three more pages, and the melody sharpened in my mind. I heard echoes of the song I’d played on my recorder. I heard echoes of faerie-kin memory and imagination as I flipped to the last page of the manuscript.
“Huh,” Shrig said. “This text appears to be affiliated with those notes—what did you call them? The neumes. Could you hum this part, Pandora?”
I rested my palm against Leo’s shoulder and leaned closer.
The musical notation spiraled around a column of text, and I felt almost dizzy as my eyes tracked the notes.
I hummed the melody, my fingers warm against Leo.
Here, on the final page, the song built to a crescendo.
The melodic tension rose and the tune stretched to a breaking point.
I felt the music as if it were tangible, like I could pick it up and bend it through space and time.
Back, back into the past. Remembering the dreams of fae, and that endless, depthless current of magic that flows beneath the surface of the world.
As I hummed, the current swelled along with the music.
The current rose around us, overflowing into the world, into the room.
And I knew.
I finally knew what my gift was.