What They Did With the Book

On Monday morning they went back to their grandmother with the spell book.

She was in the kitchen this time, making tea, and she looked at them when they came in and looked at their faces and nodded slowly, the way she did when something had happened that she had been expecting.

"Good," she said. Just the one word, but she said it warmly.

They sat at her kitchen table, the three of them, and she made tea and put biscuits on a plate and they told her what had happened. Rowan did most of the talking, which surprised Asha slightly and then did not surprise her at all, because he had had two and a half days of silence and clearly had a great deal to say.

He told her about the notes under the doors. He told her about sitting on the floor with the pencils. He told her about the moment the spell broke, how it had felt like a window opening in a room that had been closed up too long.

Their grandmother listened to all of it with both hands around her mug and her eyes going between them.

"What do we do with it?" Asha asked when Rowan had finished. She looked at the book on the table between them. "The spell book."

"That," her grandmother said, "is up to you. It was in your house. I think it belongs to you now."

"But it is dangerous," Asha said.

"Most useful things are," her grandmother said. "A sharp knife is dangerous. A car is dangerous. The question is not whether something is dangerous but whether you are careful with it."

"I was not careful with it," Asha said.

"No," her grandmother agreed. "But you were not careless on purpose either. And now you know." She paused. "The spell itself did not do any lasting harm. It just slowed things down long enough for you both to catch up with yourselves."

Asha looked at the book. She thought about the margin note. The hardest part is what you understand during it.

"I want to read all of it properly," she said. "Not to use them. Just to understand what is in there."

"That," her grandmother said, "is exactly the right reason to read a book like that."

Rowan had been quiet for a minute, drinking his tea with both hands the way their grandmother did. Now he said: "Will you tell us about the other spells? The ones you used?"

Their grandmother looked at him over the rim of her mug. One corner of her mouth lifted slightly.

"Some of them," she said. "The ones with good endings."

"How many had good endings?" Asha asked.

"Most of them," her grandmother said. "The trick is going slowly and meaning what you say."

She reached out and put one hand briefly over Asha's and one over Rowan's, the way she did when she wanted to say something without saying it.

Then she picked up the teapot and refilled all three mugs and the afternoon went on around them, warm and unhurried, the spell book sitting quietly on the table between the biscuits and the tea things, waiting patiently for whoever was ready to read it next.

***The End***