9.
10 YEARS BEFORE THE WAR

Things started to change for Lotte after the strange girl had given her the drawing pad. Ever since leaving the orphanage, she focused all her energy on just surviving. She had clean forgotten about drawing, as if it hadn't meant the world to her.

Surviving was nice and everything, but without something to survive for, it was made all the harder. Now she remembered that living had a purpose, and that purpose involved creating. Thus she searched for ways to draw.

On street corners, tower steps, park benches, in the light of street-lamps, the moon or sun, Lotte drew.

Light and shadow mixed together creating shapes so real they looked like they could pop out of the page. Sometimes, her drawings looked so real, they could be confused with photographs. She sketched in grey and white the things she saw around her.

For the first time in her short life, Lotte was unafraid. She didn't fear the constables or Loureen's street gang. Drawing made it seem like nothing could touch her, as if the sheer determination of her pencil marring the perfect whiteness of the page was the power she'd never had before.

"'Scuse me, miss," said a voice, interrupting her drawing. Lotte looked up.

A well-dressed gentleman stood over her with a lady in a lacy dress hanging on his arm. "How much for the drawing of the river?"

He gestured towards a sheet Lotte had discarded on the bench by her side. It was the one she had just finished before starting the next. She no longer cared about drawings once they were done. All she cared about was to never stop drawing.

The lady on the man's arm let go of him and crouched down before Lotte, her mouth a round O. "My goodness," she whispered. "What a beautiful child. Would you look at her eyes, Henri?" She placed a hand to her chest. "Why, it breaks my heart."

Lotte had no idea why her eyes should break hearts. But, clearly, neither of these people knew what she was. Her hair grew fast, and was so long by now, it sat as steadily on her head as a hat of straw, covering the points of her ears.

The woman reached over—Lotte flinched—and moved aside the sheets of paper on the bench next to her. "Did you draw all these yourself?" she asked in a voice as soft as bird's feathers.

Lotte nodded, a glint of pride sparking in her heart.

"Oh, Henri, look at these flowers. Look at the detail. This is extraordinary. How old are you, my dear?"

Lotte put her pencil down so she could put up seven fingers.

At least, she thought that was her age. She wasn't sure since she didn't ever have a birthday.

"I can't believe it."

"I'll buy them from you," said the man. "The whole lot."

"Where are your parents, little dove?" asked the woman.

"I will pay two daies for each," said the man.

Lotte's eyes widened. Two whole daies for...for each? With just one daie, she could live for a month. With all that money, she could... she could buy paints!

Lotte nodded enthusiastically and gathered the drawings into a neat pile.

Henri took them and looked them over together with his companion.

Lotte's face grew hot and then hotter as she listened to them gasp, exclaim and praise her. Her chest felt tight, ready to explode, but it was a glorious kind of pain.

"So that's twelve daies altogether for six drawings," the man said, handing her the fortune.

Lotte was trembling when she took the paper money. It felt oddly unreal.

The lady watched her steadily with open pity, the man was a little distant, but grinned when he looked at the drawings in his hands.

"Thank you," he said, as if Lotte had done some kind of service. "Come, Sera, we must go."

"But Henri..."

"Come." He spoke firmly this time, and gave Lotte a look she wasn't sure she liked.

The woman didn't argue, which was very odd. Lotte could clearly tell there was something she wanted to say. Why didn't she just say it? Why did people who could speak, choose not to?

***

PRESENT DAY

Maloru turned back into a boy at dawn. Lotte had been up before, creating enchantments to the red glow of her eyes.

Some enchantments were better created at night. Poe had made Lotte study enchantment theory, even for enchantments she'd never be able to make. She liked all the orderly rules of theory, because in practice, on paper—or whatever else she was enchanting—nothing was ever as it seemed.

"Here, I made you something," she said, scrambling to her feet. Her legs were both asleep and she hissed as she stomped feeling back into them.

"What's this?" Maloru said, looking bleary-eyed as he took the enchantment.

"It's not very strong," Lotte said apologetically. "I don't have very good materials, you see."

"But what does it do?"

"I'll plait it through your hair," she said.

"But what's it do?" Maloru demanded as Lotte snatched it from him and was already at his hair.

"Oh... it makes you invisible."

"Really?" He nearly hopped. "Cool."

"Not really. Just...difficult to notice. I've been using these for years. When someone who doesn't know you is about to look at you, it'll force their attention away, like two opposing magnets."

"That's insane." Maloru was finally holding still so that Lotte could plait the enchantment through his hair. She'd drawn a snake's eye with a zigzag passing over it on a piece of aspen bark, through which she'd drilled holes with a knitting needle she'd happen to find in her pack. She twined strands of his coarse hair through the holes and plaited as tightly as she could. His hair was much longer than it looked. She tied the plait at the end with a piece of leftover twine, even though it held so firm that hardly seemed necessary.

"I like your hair," she said. "It's perfect for holding enchantments."

"Thanks. But what else did you make?" There was no mistaking the eagerness in his voice. Lotte remembered feeling thirsty like that when she learnt she could do magic.

"I made one for me too, since my other one was running out," she said while searching her mane of brown locks for the plait that held the latest enchantment. Her own hair tended to curl into loose springy locks at the ends, but was so thick and long that its weight straightened it around the roots. Despite never combing it much, it had that elven quality about it that meant it hardly ever tangled. She always had about a dozen enchantments woven through it at a time.

"What's the matter with him?" Maloru asked, pointing towards Fintan who was sitting on a branch to the side and sulking.

"I had to tell him off because he ate the lid off one of my jars. Honestly, I don't know why he's still cross. I let him eat my pencil sharpener and the coil that held together my sketch pad instead."

She picked up one of the paper enchantments she made. "I made a minor healing enchantment for you."

"For me?"

"I thought maybe your legs would ache after breaking the earth last night." She handed him the paper enchantment. "Put it under your shirt and against your skin."

Maloru took the enchantment tentatively, blushing a deep onyx. "Thanks, but...I thought you said that Leilan magic can't heal."

"It forces existing healing processes to be, well, more forceful."

Lotte went back to the pile of enchantments she was preparing. She'd left her best brushes at home...at what used to be her home. She wished she had had more foresight about having to leave very suddenly. She needed better things to enchant and better ink and...

"Ugh." Eyes stinging and with a kind of sinking frustration in her belly, she began shoving everything into her bag. Fintan tweeted at Maloru, insistently telling her off.

"This is what we're going to do," she said, ignoring him. "I need food..."

Maloru perked up.

"Real food," she said. "Not... mushrooms. And supplies. I can't make do with what I have. You said we're going to pass by a human town today?"

The town was too small to have the type of enchantment supplies Lotte needed. It was hard enough to find certain objects in the vast city of Raidox, but she barely found the basics.

At least her pack was filled with food and the excursion had gone without incident. The place almost seemed abandoned with the war hanging in the air.

"Why are you so moody?" Maloru asked, hours later.

"What makes you say that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's just that you keep grumbling under your breath and clenching your fists? Even Fintan's worried about you."

Lotte sighed. She hadn't even realised how nervous she'd gotten. "It's..."

She stopped herself. She was about to say that it was nothing, which was one of the most ridiculous lies in existence. She had to be mindful with lying. Poe had taught her that elves cannot lie, so it wouldn't be right to lie to Maloru when he couldn't lie back.

"I'm not good enough," she said.

"For what?"

"As an enchantress. I'm not good enough. You know, if I were more skilled, I wouldn't have to depend so much on materials. I'd be able to enchant with twigs as my brushes, rainwater as my paint and leaves as my paper and—"

"Did you ever try?"

"What?"

"Did you ever try doing it like that?"

Lotte rolled her eyes. "You can't run before you learn to walk. There's an order to things. Maybe someday I'll be good enough, but until that day comes, I might be dead. I'll never be able to reach or even survive Serades as I am now."

"Hmmm..." Maloru rubbed his chin, as if he were searching for stubble. It was quite an odd gesture for a boy so young.

"What do you mean by that?" Lotte asked, eyes narrowed.

"I didn't say anything. Seems pretty hard, that whole enchanting thing."

"It's even worse than you think," she said, hating the dark edge that crept into her voice.

Maloru didm't appear to notice. Unlike her, he was in high spirits since their talk yesterday. "I have a question, though," he said. "What enchantment are you supposed to use to summon someone into a drawing?"

"Oh, that's very advanced," she said. "First of all, the person you summon has to be asleep, right? And then, pulling their spirit to you would take so much power, you'd have to use something that could withstand it like high quality parchment made out of rincraff hide. And to have that kind of power, I'd have to mix an ink using something like dragon blood as pigment and—"

"Then how'd you do it then, when you summoned me?"

Lotte opened her mouth to answer and froze.

"And you said you flew from Raidox all the way here...how'd you do that?"

Silence.

"And then you told me that you put an enchantment on your skin to walk ten miles in the night all the way towards where I was sleeping. How?"

Her throat was dry, but she couldn't move.

"Fintan and I both think that your only problem is that you just don't know yourself very well," he concluded.

She blinked. The little dragon was sitting on Maloru's shoulder the whole time, tail looping around itself in that odd way that dragon tails always went.

It would be a bother having him on her own shoulder when her pack weighed more than she did, but it felt like a type of betrayal that Fintan and Maloru were confiding with each other behind her back.

But, more importantly, all the things Maloru was saying should've been obvious. And they weren't.

Lotte hugged herself and started walking forward. Maloru had no trouble keeping up. It was daytime, he was in his element, and he was a full-blooded elf.

"Here," Maloru said, picking up a slight twig from the ground. "I say, try something. There's a puddle of rainwater, and as many leaves as you want. Enchant a leaf."

"That's not how this works."

"Why not?"

"Because Poe said—"

"Who's Poe?"

"My...my..." There was a lump in her throat when she thought about him. "He's the person who raised me."

"Poe's an odd name for an elf. They usually have long names like Venkelosfit or Morpelnorian"

"It means guardian in elven," Lotte said, leaning against a tree. "It wasn't his real name. He said that if I go too far with my enchantments, I'll kill myself. But also, if I don't become an enchantress, I'll die."

"What does going too far mean? Did he say?"

Lotte shook her head.

"Then, how will you know?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I just, have to be careful."

"Even careful can kill you."

Lotte snorted and snatched the twig from Maloru and swiftly bent over, picking up a cracked, mud-coated leaf from the ground. She dipped the twig into water, and drew a clumsy flame on the leaf.

She held it up in the air so he could see. "Is this leaf burning?"

He shook his head.

"You can't make fire with a puddle. That would be ridiculous. You know how many enchantments I've messed up? I don't do things this way because they don't wor—ouch!"

Lotte let go of the burning leaf while shaking out her hand. The flame engulfed it completely in a mad spark. It was done in a second, ash spreading in the breeze.

Maloru snorted and even Fintan rolled over with dragon-y laughter. Lotte's cheeks were on fire thanks to no enchantment whatsoever.