dear Charmain,
Thank you for so kindly agreeing to look after this house in my absence. The elves tell me I should be gone for about two weeks. (Thank goodness for that! Charmain thought.) Or possibly a month if there are complications. (Oh.) You really must forgive any disorder you find here. I have been afflicted for quite some time now. But I am sure you are a resourceful young lady and will find your feet here quite readily. In case of any difficulty, I have left spoken directions for you wherever these seemed necessary. All you need do is speak your question aloud and it should be answered. More complex matters you will find explained in the suitcase. Please be kind to Waif, who has not been with me for long enough to feel secure, and please feel free to help yourself to any books in this study, apart from those actually on this desk, which are for the most part too powerful and advanced for you. (Pooh. As if I cared for that! Charmain thought.) Meanwhile I wish you a happy sojourn here and hope to be able to thank you in person before very long.
Your affectionate Great-Great Uncle-by-marriage,
William Norland
“I suppose he is by-marriage,” Charmain said aloud. “He must be Aunt Sempronia’s Great Uncle really, and she married Uncle Ned, who is Dad’s uncle, except that he’s dead now. What a pity. I was starting to hope I’d inherited some of his magic.” And she said politely to the air, “Thank you very much, Great Uncle William.”
There was no reply. Charmain thought, Well, there wouldn’t be. That wasn’t a question. And she set about exploring the books on the desk.
The fat book she had in her hand was called The Book of Void and Nothingness. Not surprisingly, when she opened it, the pages were blank. But she could feel under her fingers each empty page sort of purring and writhing with hidden magics. She put it down rather quickly and picked up one called Wall’s Guide to Astromancy instead. This was slightly disappointing, because it was mostly diagrams of black dotted lines with numbers of square red dots spreading out from the black lines in various patterns, but almost nothing to read. All the same, Charmain spent longer looking at it than she expected. The diagrams must have been hypnotic in some way. But eventually, with a bit of a wrench, she put it down and turned to one called Advanced Seminal Sorcery, which was not her kind of thing at all. It was closely printed in long paragraphs that mostly seemed to begin, “If we extrapolate from our findings in my earlier work, we find ourselves ready to approach an extension of the paratypical phenomenology…”
No, Charmain thought. I don’t think we are ready.
She put that one down too and lifted up the heavy, square book on the corner of the desk. It was called Das Zauberbuch and it turned out to be in a foreign language. Probably what they speak in Ingary, Charmain decided. But, most interestingly, this book had been acting as a paperweight to a pile of letters underneath it, from all over the world. Charmain spent a long time going nosily through the letters and becoming more and more impressed with Great Uncle William. Nearly all of them were from other wizards who were wanting to consult Great Uncle William on the finer points of magic – clearly, they thought of him as the great expert – or to congratulate him on his latest magical discovery. One and all of them had the most terrible handwriting. Charmain frowned and scowled at them and held the worst one up to the light.
Dear Wizard Norland (it said, as far as she could read it),
Your book, Crucual Cantrips, has been a great help to me in my dimensional (or is that demented? Charmain wondered) work, but I would like to draw your attention to a small
discovery of mine related to your section on Murdoch’s Ear (“Merlin’s Arm? Murphy’s Law?” I give up! Charmain thought). When I next find myself in High Norland, perhaps we could talk?
Yours alluringly (“allergically? admiringly? antiphony?” Lord! What writing! Charmain thought),
Wizard Howl Pendragon
“Dear, dear! He must write with a poker!” Charmain said aloud, picking up the next letter.
This one was from the King himself and the writing, though wavery and old-fashioned, was much easier to read.
Dear Wm (Charmain read, with growing awe and surprise),
We are now more than halfway through Our Great Task and as yet none the wiser. We rely on you. It is Our devout Hope that the Elves We sent you will succeed in restoring you to Health and that We will again shortly have the Inestimable Benefit of your Advice and Encouragement. Our Best Wishes go with you.
Yours, in Sincere Hope, Adolphus Rex High Norland
So the King sent those elves! “Well, well,” Charmain murmured, leafing through the final stack of letters. Every single one of these was written in different sorts of someone’s best handwriting. They all seemed to say the same thing in different ways: “Please, Wizard Norland, I would like to become your apprentice. Will you take me on?” Some of them went on to offer Great Uncle William money. One of them said he could give Great Uncle William a magical diamond ring, and another, who seemed to be a girl, said rather pathetically, “I am not very pretty myself, but my sister is, and she says she will marry you if you agree to teach me.”
Charmain winced and only flipped hastily through the rest of the stack. They reminded her so very much of her own letter to the King. And quite as useless, she thought. It was obvious to her that these were the kind of letters that a famous wizard would instantly write and say “No” to. She bundled them all back under Das Zauberbuch and looked at the other books on the desk. There was a whole row of tall, fat books at the back of the desk, all labelled Res Magica, which she thought she would look at later. She picked up two more books at random. One was called Mrs Pentstemmon’s Path: Signposts to the Truth and it struck her as a trifle moralising. The other, when she had thumbed open its metal clasp and spread it out at its first page, was called The Boke of Palimpsest. When Charmain turned over the next pages, she found that each page contained a new spell – a clear spell too, with a title saying what it did and, below that, a list of ingredients, followed by numbered stages telling you what you had to do.
“This is more like it!” Charmain said, and settled down to read.
A long time later, while she was trying to decide which was more useful, “A Spell to tell Friend from Foe” or “A Spell to Enlarge the Mind,” or perhaps even “A Spell for Flying,” Charmain suddenly knew that she had crying need of a bathroom. This tended to happen to her when she had been absorbed in reading. She sprang up, squeezing her knees together, and then realised that a bathroom was a place she had still not found.
“Oh, how do I find the bathroom from here?” she cried out.
Reassuringly, Great Uncle William’s kind, frail voice spoke out of the air at once. “Turn left in the passage, my dear, and the bathroom is the first door on the right.”
“Thank you!” Charmain gasped, and ran.
CHAPTER THREE
In which Charmain works several spells at once
The bathroom was as reassuring as Great Uncle William’s kindly voice. It had
