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“Never mind. Maybe I can make one.”
I dumped the hookah on the ground, ignoring Larch’s wince, and tossed some fabric bundles onto a statue of a unicorn. I grabbed the carved wooden box now on top and the—yes, it really was a yellow rubber ducky—fell, bouncing off my foot. Darling shot out of the shadows and pounced on it, batting it across the ground.
“I’m not even going to contemplate that one,” I muttered to myself.
Larch retrieved the duck, earning a displeased look from Darling, and reverently added it to the pile of jeweled pears he was making, by way of emptying the copper fire pit. I opened the box. Nothing inside.
“Any reason I can’t monkey with this?” I asked him. Larch frowned up at me. “Empty wooden box?” I demonstrated, shaking it upside down.
“Well, does it look valuable to you?” He pointed in disdain.
“No, but neither does the rubber ducky, other than as evidence that I’m experiencing a psychotic break rather than an honest-to-goodness trip to fairyland.” I paused under his solemn gaze. “Which, when I say it out loud like that, just makes me realize there’s no point in worrying which one it is. This box will work then.”
I needed ink, too. Or something to put ink in. I examined a cloisonné bowl that I might be able to fill with water that could be magicked into ink.
“How about something like a quill?” I caught Larch’s bewildered look. “Something to dip in ink to make pretty designs with?” Larch looked dubious, but handed me a handful of paintbrushes he dug out from behind a pile of furry things.
Darling swatted the yellow rubber ducky out of the bowl and batted it soccer-ball style to my feet. Obligingly, I added it to my pile of things. Yep—looked, felt and even smelled like a regular rubber duck. Maybe Darling had a point. If the ducky had traveled from my world to this, it might contain a clue toward reversing the path.
By the time Larch and some of his fellows carried in the copper fire pit, I had started my notes, the rubber ducky sitting on the workbench next to me, Darling curled up sound asleep with one paw on it.
I’d managed to change the box into a blank book and filled my bowl with water turned to ink. The book still looked largely like a box, as I’d kept the wooden sides intact all around. It gave it a satisfying grimoire look. I even contrived to create the pages with a thick parchmenty feel. It wasn’t the graph-paper-filled lab book my high school chemistry teacher taught me to use, and which I’d used for lab notes until I switched to a computer, but I found I liked the feel of the vast blankness of the page.
The first page I titled Dr. Jennifer McGee’s Big Book of Fairyland. It made me smile to see it.
Knowledge is power.And this would be my first step. Perhaps through the process of cataloguing all my observations, I could begin to make sense of this world. And find a way out of it.
A little judicious wishing got the tip of the brush hardened sufficiently for reasonably neat printing, though the bristles didn’t hold ink as well as I’d like. I labeled several pages with headers such as Rules of Magic, Rules of Bargaining, Faerie Species Identified, The Black Dog, Flora and Fauna, Objects with Magical Properties, etc. I left generous pages between headers, expecting to fill them all eventually. I devoted an entire section to Rogue, though I was perversely tempted to make him a sub header under Flora and Fauna. If I could have ensured he’d see it, I would have done it, too, if only to take his ego down a notch.
No dwelling on Rogue.
I flipped to Rules of Magic, made a subsection for Sex & Magic, and began writing out what had happened at the dryad’s tree. Larch and the guys brought in the copper fire pit, plopping it where the bathtub had stood.
“Right here, please.” I gestured to a spot I’d cleared next to the bench. Larch gave a sigh of the long-suffering and they heaved it over to my chosen location.
“Thank you, boys,” I said with an effort at charm. The other Brownies blushed and smiled, but Larch frowned at me suspiciously.
“What task are you engaged in, my lady?” he asked.
“Oh, this and that, puttering about.” I flipped to the title page, reflexively keeping my ruminations private.
His eyes fell on the book.
“What is this?” He peered at it, then touched the page gently with a stubby fingertip. He reminded me of Isabel poking at her cat food with a testing paw, as if dubious that it wouldn’t bite back.
“I’m making notes—organizing my thoughts.”
He looked puzzled.
“You know, writing things down?”
He shook his head, as if shooing away gnats. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, my lady.”
“Books? Writing?”
Larch continued to shake his head. He looked suspicious, even superstitious. “No, Lady Gwynn, this is a powerful magic beyond my ken.”
Interesting.
