Charmain went into the pantry and leaned across the laundry bags, where sure enough she found an old pie dish with half a dozen brown eggs in it. She took one of them carefully back to the study. Since her glasses were dangling on their chain, she failed to notice that The Boke of Palimpsest was now open at “A Spell to Find Hidden Treasure”. She bustled over to the study window, where the flower petals were ready to hand on a hydrangea bush that was one half pink and the other blue. She laid those beside the egg and rushed to the bathroom, where she collected the six drops of water in a tooth mug. On the way back, she went across the passage to where Waif was now curled up like a meringue on Great Uncle William’s blankets. “Excuse me,” Charmain said to him, and raked her fingers along his ragged white back. She came away with quite a number of white hairs, one of which she put beside the flower petals and added to that a red hair from her own head. As for the pearl buttons, she simply ripped two of them off the front of her blouse.
“Right,” she said, and put her glasses eagerly on again to look at the instructions. The Boke of Palimpsest was now open at “A Spell for Personal Protection”, but Charmain was too excited to notice. She looked only at the instructions, which were in five stages. Stage One said, “Place all ingredients except quill and paper in a suitable bowl.”
Charmain, after taking her glasses off to stare searchingly around the room, and finding no bowl, suitable or not, was forced to go off to the kitchen again. While she was gone, lazily and slyly, The Boke of Palimpsest turned over another couple of pages. When Charmain came back with a slightly sugary bowl, having tipped all the sugar out on to a not-too-dirty plate, the Boke was open at “A Spell to Increase Magical Power”.
Charmain did not notice. She put the bowl down on the desk and piled into it the egg, the two petals, the two hairs and her two buttons, and dripped the water carefully in on top. Then she put her glasses on and leaned over the book to discover what she did next. By this time, The Boke of Palimpsest was displaying “A Spell to Become Invisible”, but Charmain only looked at the instructions and did not see this.
Stage Two told her to “Mash all ingredients together, using only the pen.”
It is not easy to mash up an egg with a feather, but Charmain managed it, stabbing with the sharpened end over and over until the shell fell to pieces, then stirring so hard that her hair fell down over her face in red strands, and finally, when nothing seemed to mix properly, whisking with the feather end. When she finally stood up, panting, and pushed her hair away with sticky fingers, the Boke had turned over yet another page. It now displayed “A Spell to Start a Fire”, but Charmain was too busy trying not to get egg on her glasses to see. She put them on and studied Stage Three.
Stage Three of this spell said, “Recite three times ‘Hegemony Gauda’.”
“Hegemony gauda,” Charmain intoned obediently over the bowl. She was not sure, but on the third repetition she thought the bits of eggshell seethed around the pearl buttons a little. I think it’s working! she thought. She pushed her glasses back on her nose and looked at Stage Four. By this time, she was looking at Stage Four in “A Spell to Bend Objects to the Will”.
“Take up the quill,” this said, “and, using the prepared mixture, write upon the paper the word Ylf surrounded by a five-sided figure. Care must be taken not to touch the paper while doing this.”
Charmain took up the drippy, sticky feather pen, adorned with bits of eggshell and a piece of pink petal, and did her best. The mixture was not easy to write with and there seemed no way to hold the paper steady. It slipped and it slid, while Charmain dipped and scratched, and the word that was supposed to be Ylf came out gluey and semi-visible and crooked, and looked more like Hoof because the red hair in the bowl came out on the pen halfway through and did strange loopy things across the word. As for the five-sided figure, the paper slipped sideways while Charmain was trying to draw it and the most that could be said for it was that it had five sides. It finished as a sinister egg-yolk yellow shape with a dog hair sticking off one corner.
Charmain heaved up a breath, plastered her hair back with a now extremely sticky hand and looked at the final stage, Stage Five. It was now Stage Five of “A Spell to Make a Wish Come True”, but she was far too flustered to notice. It said, “Placing the feather back in the bowl, clap hands three times and say ‘Tacs’.”
“Tacs!” Charmain said, clapping hard and stickily.
Something evidently worked. The paper, the bowl and the quill pen all vanished, quietly and completely. So did most of the sticky trickles on Great Uncle William’s desk. The Boke of Palimpsest shut itself with a snap. Charmain stood back, dusting crumby bits from her hands, feeling quite exhausted and rather let down.
“But I should be able to fly,” she told herself. “I wonder where the best place is to test it out.”
The answer was obvious. Charmain went out of the study and along to the end of the passage, to where the window stood invitingly open to the sloping green meadow. The window had a broad, low sill, perfect for climbing over. In a matter of seconds, Charmain was out in the meadow in the evening sunlight, breathing the cold, clean air of the mountains.
She was right up in the mountains here, with most of High Norland spread out beneath her, already blue with evening. Opposite her, lit up orange by the low sun and deceivingly near, were the snowy peaks that separated her country from Strangia, Montalbino and other foreign places. Behind her were more peaks where large dark grey and crimson clouds were crowding up ominously. It was going to rain up here soon, as it often did in High Norland, but for the moment it was warm and peaceful. There were sheep grazing in another meadow just beyond some rocks, and Charmain could hear mooing and bells tonkling from a herd of cows somewhere quite near. When she looked that way, she was a trifle startled to find that the cows were in a meadow above her and that there was no sign of Great Uncle William’s house or the window she had climbed out of.
Charmain did not let this worry her. She had never been this high in the mountains before and she was astonished at how beautiful it was. The grass she was standing on was greener than any she had seen in the town. Fresh scents blew off it. These came, when she looked closely, from hundreds and hundreds of tiny, exquisite flowers growing low in the grass.
“Oh, Great Uncle William, you are lucky!” she cried out. “Fancy having this next door to your study!”
For a while, she wandered blissfully about, avoiding the bees that were busy among the flowers and picking herself a bunch that was supposed to be one of each kind. She picked a tiny scarlet tulip, a white one, a starry golden flower, a pale pigmy primrose, a mauve harebell, a blue cup, an orange orchid and one each from crowded clumps of pink and white and yellow. But the flowers that took her fancy most were tiny blue trumpets, more piercingly blue than any blue she could have imagined. Charmain thought they might be gentians and she picked more than one. They were so small, so perfect, and so blue. All the time, she was wandering farther down the meadow, to where there seemed to be a drop-off of some kind. She thought she might jump off there and see if the spell had made her really able to fly.
She reached the drop-off at the time when she found she had more flowers than she could hold. There were six new kinds at the rocky edge that she had to leave where they were. But then she forgot flowers and just stared.
The meadow ended in a cliff half the mountain high. Way, way below her, beside the little thread of the road, she could see Great Uncle William’s house like a tiny grey box in a smudge of garden. She could see other houses, equally far off, scattered up and down the road, and lights coming on in them in tiny orange twinkles. They were so far below that Charmain gulped and her knees
