Wrede, Patricia C - Enchanted Forest 01 (10 page)

“All right, then,” Therandil said. “As long as you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Cimorene assured him fervently. She saw him to the mouth of the cave and pointed him toward Gomul’s cave, then returned to the kitchen. She gathered up the jars and bottles she had been planning to check, except for the copper jar with the jinn inside, and took them back to the treasure vault.

Then she fetched an ink pot, a quill pen, and a sheet of paper from the library and began writing out a warning to attach to the copper jar. She didn’t want anyone else to open it until the eighty-three years were over and the jinn could go home without killing anyone.

She was just finishing when she heard Alianora’s voice calling from the rear of the cave. “I’m in the kitchen!” she shouted. “Come on back!”

“You’re always in the kitchen,” Ahanora said when she poked her head through the door a moment later. “Or the library. Don’t you ever do anything but cook and read?”

“Look at this, Alianora,” Cimorene said, handing her the warning she had been writing. “Do you think it’s dear enough?”

“ ‘
WARNING:
This jar contains a jinn who will kill you if you let him out too soon. Do not open until at least one hundred and five years after the date when the Citadel of the Yellow Giant was destroyed,’ “ Alianora read aloud. “That’s, let's see, eighty-four years from now. It seems clear to me. You’d have to be pretty stupid to ignore a warning like that.”

“Maybe I ought to show it to Hallanna and see what she says,” Cimorene said, frowning. “I wouldn’t want anyone getting into trouble by accident, just because I didn’t make it plain.”

“It’s plain, it’s plain,” Alianora said. “Cimorene, what on
earth
have you been doing? How do you know there’s a jinn in this bottle?”

“Therandil,” Cimorene said, waving a hand expressively. “I was looking through some of the bottles from Kazul’s treasure room, to see if any of them happened to have hens’ teeth in them, and Therandil came in and wanted to help.”

“And he opened it?” Alianora said. “Oh, dear.”

“Exactly,” said Cimorene. “But it came out well in the end. I think I’ve gotten rid of him for good. I sent him off to rescue Keredwel.”

“You
did?
What if he doesn’t beat Gomul?”

“Oh, he’ll win. The jinn gave him a wish, and he wished to defeat a dragon.” Cimorene looked apologetically at Alianora. “I suppose I ought to have sent him to rescue you, but ...”

“That’s quite all right,” Alianora said hastily. “Getting rid of Keredwel will help a lot. And after everything you’ve told me about Therandil, I don’t think I’d want to have him rescue me.”

“That's what I thought,” Cimorene said. “Oh, and I got the jinn to give me some powdered hens’ teeth, so we can finally try that fireproofing spell.”

“Good,” Alianora said. “Let’s do it right now!”

So Cimorene got out the spell and the ingredients she had collected, and she and Alianora spent the next hour on various necessary preparations. First they had to boil some unicorn water and steep the dried wolfsbane in it. Then the mixture had to be strained and mixed with the hippopotamus oil and the powdered hens’ teeth. Cimorene did most of that, while Alianora ground up the blue rose leaves and the piece of ebony.

Grinding the ebony took a long time, but fortunately they didn’t need much. When Alianora finally had enough, Cimorene mixed it with the blue rose leaves and more of the unicorn water in one of Kazul’s recently shed scales. Each mixture had to be stirred three times counterclockwise with a white eagle feather. Then Alianora dipped the point of her feather in her mixture and began drawing a star on the floor of the cave.

“Is this going to be big enough for both of us?” she asked, scratching busily at the stone with the tip of the feather.

“I think so,” Cimorene answered. “Don’t try to make it too big, or you’ll run out of liquid and we’ll have to start over.”

Alianora did not run out, though she had used nearly all her mixture by the time she finished. “There!” she said. She sat back on her heels and studied her diagram to make sure there were no gaps, then set her dragon scale and feather aside and stood up. “Your turn.”

“First we have to get into the center of the star,” Cimorene reminded her. “Be careful not to smudge the lines!”

“Smudge them, after all that work?” Alianora said in tones of mock horror. She lifted her skirts and stepped carefully into the middle of the diagram. Cimorene followed, carrying a small mixing bowl half full of something that looked like brown sludge with a white eagle feather sticking out of one side. “It smells awful,” Alianora said, grimacing.

“It doesn’t matter what it smells like, as long as the spell works,” Cimorene said. “Ready?”

“As ready as I’m ever going to be,” Alianora re plied, shutting her eyes and screwing up her face as if she expected to have a glass of cold water poured over her head.

Cimorene plucked the eagle feather out of the bowl and raised it quickly over Alianora’s head before it could drip on the floor. She let four large drops of the brown gunk fall onto Alianora’s hair, then brushed the end of the feather across her forehead twice. She finished by drawing a circle with the feather on the palm of Alianora’s left hand.

“That tickles!” Alianora complained.

“Well, you can do it to me now,” Cimorene said. Alianora took the bowl and feather from Cimorene. “You’re right,” Cimorene said a moment later. “It does tickle.”

“Now what?” Alianora said.

“Set the bowl down and shut your eyes,” Cimorene instructed. When Alianora had done so, Cimorene closed her own eyes and said:

“Power of water, wind and earth,

Turn the fire back to its birth.

Raise the spell to shield the flame

By the power that we have tamed.”

“Oh!” said Alianora. “That feels
peculiar.
Can I open my eyes now?”

“Yes,” said Cimorene, opening her own. “We’re finished.”

“Did it work?” Alianora asked, cautiously opening one eye and squinting at Cimorene.

“Well,
something
happened. We both felt it,” Cimorene said. “And your hair and forehead don’t have brown gunk on them any more.”

Alianora promptly opened both eyes and studied Cimorene. “Neither do yours. What does that mean?”

“It means we go back to the kitchen and test it,” Cimorene said. She bent over and picked up the mixing bowl. “We’ll clean up later. Come on.”

B
ack in the kitchen, Cimorene and Alianora quickly determined that the fireproofing spell had indeed worked. First Cimorene, then Alianora tossed a pinch of feverfew into the air and recited the spell-verse, then put a hand into a candle flame and held it there. Neither was burned at all, though Alianora claimed that the candle tickled almost as much as the eagle feather had done.

“How long does the spell last?” Alianora asked.

“I’m not sure, exactly,” Cimorene said. “At least an hour, but I’ll have to do some tests to pin it down beyond that. I hope Kazul gets back soon. I want to see if it works with dragon fire.”

“You’re going to have Kazul breathe fire at you, just to see if the spell works?” Alianora said, horrified. “What if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll talk to Kazul, and we’ll go see Morwen, and the three of us will try to figure out what to change to make the spell work for dragon fire, too. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to stand in front of Kazul and have her breathe fire at me. I’ll just stick out a finger, the way we did with the candle.”

This was not enough to convince Alianora, but Cimorene was determined. “The whole point of trying this spell was to make ourselves immune to dragon fire,” she said. “If it doesn’t work, I don’t want to find out for the first time when one of Kazul’s guests gets mad and breathes fire at me because he doesn’t like the way I cooked his cherries jubilee.”

Alianora had to admit that this was a good point, but she was still disposed to argue. The discussion was cut short by Kazul’s return. At first the dragon was more inclined to agree with Alianora than with Cimorene, but after Cimorene proved her invulnerability to candle flames, lighted torches, and the fire she had built in the kitchen stove, Kazul agreed to the trial. She insisted, however, on working up to full firepower in gradual stages, and Cimorene was forced to agree.

Before they began, Cimorene threw another pinch of feverfew into the air and recited the couplet again, just to be sure the spell wouldn’t wear off in the middle of the test. Then Kazul lowered her head nearly to the ground, and Alianora watched nervously as Cimorene lowered her hand slowly into various intensities of dragon flame. Finally, Cimorene stood right in front of Kazul while the dragon breathed her hottest. The spell worked perfectly every time.

“There!” Cimorene said when Kazul stopped at last. “Now we know it works. Aren’t you glad?”

“I’m glad,” Alianora said fervently. “And I hope I never have to watch anything like that again as long as I live. I didn’t dare blink for fear you’d go up in smoke while my eyes were closed.”

“Why don’t you try it yourself?” Cimorene said mischievously.

“No!” said Alianora and Kazul together.

“Watching you was bad enough,” Alianora went on with a shudder. “I believe it works. I don’t see any reason for me to test it.”

“Besides, I’ve done more than enough fire-breathing for one day,” Kazul added. “I’m starting to get overheated.”

“All right, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to,” Cimorene said. “If we’re all done, I’d better go tidy up.”

Alianora stayed to help Cimorene finish cleaning up the traces of the spell, by which time she had calmed down considerably and was very nearly her usual self again. Cimorene gave her a pouchful of dried feverfew before she left and made her recite the words that activated the spell several times, to make sure she had memorized them correctly.

“Remember, you only have to repeat the first half of the verse to get the spell going, now that it’s been set up,” Cimorene said. “Can you do it?”

“It’s only two lines, and they rhyme!” Alianora said, laughing. “How could I forget that? My memory isn’t that bad!”

“Maybe not, but say it anyway,” Cimorene said. Alianora laughed again and did so. At last she set off into the tunnels, and Cimorene went back to the main cave to see what Kazul and Roxim had found out about the Caves of Fire and Night.

Kazul was somewhat out of temper, and Cimorene thought privately that she had been telling the truth about getting overheated. Rather than annoy the dragon further, Cimorene asked if she could read the book Kazul had borrowed from Morwen.

“It’s in the treasure room,” Kazul said. “Read it there. And I hope you see something in it that we didn’t.”

Cimorene nodded, picked up her lamp, and hurried off before Kazul could change her mind. The book was lying near a pile of sapphires, next to an ornate gold crown. She picked it up, went over to the table, which was large and very sturdy because it was intended for counting piles of gold and silver coins, and sat down to read.

It was even dryer and duller than Kazul had said. There were a great many “mayhaps” and “perchances” and “wherefores,” strung together in long, involved sentences that compared the strange and wonderful things in the caves to obscure philosophical ideas and odd customs from places Cimorene had never heard of. After a few pages, Cimorene put the book down and went and got a quill pen, an ink pot, and some paper, so that she could write down the things she thought were important. She didn’t want to have to read
A Journey Through the Caves of Fire and Night
more than once.

*
         
*
         
*

For the next three days, Cimorene spent bits of her spare time in the treasure room, taking notes on the DeMontmorency. It took her that long because she could never manage to read for more than a little while without getting so bored that she nearly fell asleep. Her persistence gained her several pages of notes about the caves, but nothing that seemed as if it might be of particular interest to wizards.

Alianora came to see her a few days later, looking very cheerful.

“It worked!” she announced as she came into the library where Cimorene was going over her notes. “Keredwel’s gone. Therandil rescued her, just the way you said he would.”

“Good,” Cimorene said. “I’m glad something is going right.”

“What’s the problem?” Alianora asked, seating herself on the other side of the table from Cimorene.

“This,” Cimorene said, waving at the paper-covered table. “Kazul is sure that the key to what the wizards are after is somewhere in that dratted book she borrowed from Morwen. I copied out everything that looked interesting, but none of it seems like anything a wizard would care about.”

“How do you know that?” Alianora asked curiously.

“I don’t,” Cimorene said. “I’m just guessing. That's the problem.”

“Oh.” Alianora picked up the sheet of paper nearest her and frowned at it. “What on earth does this mean?”

Cimorene looked at the page Alianora was holding. “ Thus these Caves of Fire and Night are, in some sense, indivisible, whereas the Caves of Chance are, by contrast, individual, though it is preposterous to claim that these descriptions are true of either group of caves in their entirety ...’ That’s one of the bits I copied word for word; the whole book is like that. I think it means that if you have a piece of something magical from the Caves of Fire and Night, you can use it in a spell as if it were the whole thing.”

“I can see why you wouldn’t be sure,” Alianora said. “Do you think it would help you figure things out if you stopped for a while?”

“I have stopped,” Cimorene pointed out. “Or did you have something more specific in mind?”

“I’m almost out of feverfew,” Alianora said, looking down at the table. “I was hoping you’d come with me to pick some more.”

“You’re almost
out?
” Cimorene said in surprise. “How did that happen?”

Alianora shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve been working that fireproofing spell every hour or so for the past two days,” she admitted. “Woraug has been getting more and more unpredictable, and I don’t feel comfortable otherwise. Hallanna was visiting yesterday when he came in—in the middle of the afternoon!— and he was roaring and dripping little bits of flame when he breathed. She was terrified, and I don’t blame her. If it weren’t for the spell, I’d be scared to death.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me anything about dragon politics or wizards or what he’s been getting so worked up about. He’s not like Kazul.”

Cimorene frowned, considering. “Maybe Kazul will have some idea what’s bothering him. I’ll ask her this evening. In the meantime, let’s go get that feverfew. You’re right to say that I could use a break.”

“Oh, good,” said Alianora in tones of considerable relief. “I’ve never picked herbs before, and I’m not sure what feverfew looks like. I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d said you wouldn’t come.”

Cimorene put her notes away and got two wicker baskets and a small knife from one of the storage rooms “Up or down?” Alianora asked as they left the cave.

“Up,” Cimorene said. “The other way is the ledge I told you about, and I wouldn’t be surprised if bits of it are still invisible.”

*
         
*
         
*

The path through the Pass of Silver Ice twisted and turned past the openings of other dragons’ caves. Most of the rocks around the caves had scorch marks, and Cimorene and Alianora didn’t see much growing among them.

“At this rate, we’ll have to go nearly all the way to the Enchanted Forest to find any grass, much less herbs!” Alianora complained.

“Wait a minute!” Cimorene said. “Look over there, through that crack in the rocks. Doesn’t that look like something green?”

Alianora’s eyes followed Cimorene’s pointing finger. “Yes,” she said without enthusiasm. “It looks green.”

The rock Cimorene had indicated was a large boulder at the bottom of a steep slope. The slope was covered with gravel and looked as if it would be impossible to climb down without skinning a knee or an elbow at the very least. The boulder itself was in two pieces, with just enough space between them for someone to squeeze through, provided the someone was not very large.

“Come on, let’s get a better look,” said Cimorene. She walked to the edge of the slope and wrapped her skirts tightly around her legs. Then she sat down with her basket in her lap and slid down the slope, raising an enormous cloud of dust and sounding like an avalanche in process. She reached the bottom in safety and stood up, brushing at her skirt. The dust was so thick that she could hardly see, and when she tried to call to Alianora, she coughed so hard that she could barely speak.

“Cimorene! Are you all right?”

“It’s just the dust,” Cimorene said in a muffled voice. She had taken out her handkerchief and put it over her mouth and nose to keep the dust out. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped a great deal. “Come on, it’s your turn.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t just go around?”

“Stop stalling. It’s not that bad.”

“That’s what you say,” Alianora muttered, but she wrapped her skirts around her, clutched her basket, and slid down the slope. She made even more noise than Cimorene had. When she got to the bottom, she was coughing and choking. Cimorene handed her the handkerchief, and they waited for a moment while the dust settled.

Crawling through the split boulder was easier than they expected. The crevice was wider than it had looked from the path, and the bottom of the crack was so full of dust and gravel and dead leaves that it was almost flat. Cimorene and Alianora had to walk single file, and there were one or two spots where they had to turn sideways in order to get through, but it was not really difficult.

On the other side of the boulder, the two girls found a lush, green valley. It was bowl-shaped and not very large, but flowers and grasses stood waist-high between the random clumps of bushes that dotted the valley floor. A squirrel, which had been sunning itself on a ledge near the entrance, leaped for a small tree as Cimorene and Alianora appeared.

“My goodness!” Alianora said, looking around with wide eyes. “This place looks as if no one but us has ever been here before. There aren’t even any scorch marks on the rocks.”

Cimorene blinked. Alianora was right. Lichens covered the weathered gray rocks that rose above the valley, and small plants grew in cracks and crevices that showed no sign of the touch of dragon fire.

“That’s odd,” Cimorene commented.

“Why?” Alianora asked.

“Those mountains aren’t tall enough to keep dragons from flying over, and they’re right in the middle of the dragons’ territory. So why haven’t the dragons been here? They usually keep a dose eye on everything that belongs to them.”

“Maybe they have been here, but they never found anything to breathe fire at,” Alianora said.

“Well, I’m going to ask Kazul about it when I get back,” Cimorene said as she waded into the grass. “Why don’t you take that side, and I’ll look over here? We’ll cover more ground that way.”

“First you’d better show me what I’m looking for,” Alianora said apologetically. “I’m afraid I couldn’t tell feverfew from carrots if there was a dragon chasing me and my life depended on it.”

Cimorene nodded, and they started off. They had not gone far when she saw a patch of the white buttonshaped flowers she was looking for. “Here,” she said, showing them to Alianora. “This is feverfew. The younger plants are the best, the ones that haven’t blossomed yet.”