A Box of Gargoyles (34 page)

But what magic did Maya have left? She had just chosen not to use it. She had just chosen to pass it on.

“
Bound to make me whole
,” said the shadow. After all this time and all this trouble, the shadow of Fourcroy was still hungry. She could see that however much it managed to swallow, it would always be hungry.

She tried hard to ignore the ground, still rippling underneath. She was a Lavirotte, and they really did walk in more worlds than one. Even if she had no magic left of her own, none of the powerful kind, that was still true.

“
Bound
,” repeated the shadow.

“Yes,” said Maya.

So she walked right up to the shadowy Fourcroy, there where the gargoyles held him so tightly between them, their stone eyes thoughtful as they watched her come, and she put her hand on the patch of darkness that was his arm. Valko protested, somewhere behind her, but she ignored him. It was not the same as being swallowed, not when you chose it yourself. She rested her hand on his arm as she had rested it so many times on the gargoyles' egg in the weeks gone by, and it seemed to her the shadow became just slightly warmer under her hand.

“You bound me to make you whole,” said Maya.

“
Yes
,” said the shadow.

“I think I can still do that,” she said. “Even without my magic. But I've decided it doesn't mean what you thought it meant, when you opened that awful emergency loophole in the wall. Just going on and on and on forever isn't being
whole
.”

She could feel the shadow's uncertainty like a chill wave under her hand, but she held on and thought warm thoughts, and the cold backed off again and quieted.

“You are hungry because you're so empty,” said Maya. “But what could possibly fill someone like you? That's the puzzle.”

She leaned her head closer to him.

“There's a lot you've forgotten,” she said.

Maya turned to look up at the dragon, watching her so intently from its tree limb.

“Come down here to me, Egg, will you?” she said. She was almost shy, in front of that amazing, glittering creature. But it had recognized her a moment ago, she was quite sure of it.

“
Egg!
” said Beak-Face, shifting his wings around to see better. “Is that the besst she could do, naming our poor child?”

“Husssh,” said Bonnet-Head. “I rather like it.”

They did not loosen their grips on the shadow, though, not one tiny bit.

The dragon unwrapped itself from the tree and flew down to Maya with all the grace and loveliness of water flowing over a cliff somewhere, or ivy growing down some old rock wall, and tucked itself under her left arm, so that her hand was comfortably resting on the lacy stonework of its side.

“Look, you—Henri,” she said to the shadow. “Do you see what this is? The gargoyles' egg was also your memory stone, you know. That means this dragon holds a lot of summer in it, deep inside. I liked the you I saw in the stone.”

Under her hand she could feel the amazing skin of the
zmey
, stone as fragile as eggshell, knit together with light. It warmed to her touch as the egg used to. The dragon looked extraordinary and new, but it felt familiar, and that was comforting.

One hand on the
zmey
, one hand on the shadow's still fairly chilly arm, Maya asked for the memories back, and they came, forest and field, sailboat, kite, and whistle.

The dragon's skin rippled with images: Henri's mother, smiling that wise smile of hers, her hands quickly folding paper, shaping and sewing some child-sized marvel.

“I went back to the Summer Box, Henri,” said Maya. “Look what I found there.”

She had put that in her pocket, too: not just the baby's lock of silvery hair, but the colorful, raggle-taggle ribbons. She brought them out now (keeping her arm always close to that
zmey
).

“Do you remember what this was? It was a dragon once, you know—another kind of dragon.”

The
zmey
gave a little shimmy of pleasure (a meadow, all grass and wildflowers, and the mother unfurling a long spool of thread).

“She made it for you. I think maybe there was magic in it, the way it could fly. . . .”

A magical dragon of wind and fire and paper, a kite sailing fierce and wonderful above the meadow.

The shadow's arm was changing under Maya's hand. It felt smaller and sweeter now, the arm of a child who has wrapped himself in cold darkness only because otherwise he is so very alone facing the world.

And the dragon was glowing like a paper lantern, a knot of brightness deep within it and spilling out through the delicate tracery of its skin.

A shiver of longing went through the shadow's small and tender arm.

“There!” said Maya. “That's it, I'm pretty sure. That memory there:
that's
the heart of the
zmey
. And you can have it. It's yours. Only—”

The shadow was leaning against her now, small and trusting. For a moment Maya was reminded of James, but that thought wrenched her heart, so she had to take another breath before she could go on.

“Only you can't just eat it up, you know,” she said. “Things get ruined when you eat them up. Your mother knew that. But you forgot.”

She thought about it.

“So what you have to do is, I think, you have to let the memory swallow
you
. If you want to be whole.”

Total silence for a minute. The dragon was very still under her left arm, the child-shadow very still under her other hand. The gargoyles were as still as only stone knows how to be. The mist was lifting, and the air was quiet, still, and cold. Somewhere deep inside the
zmey
, it glowed with all the light of summer, and a little boy was flying the dragon kite that his mother had made for him with scissors and paper and so much love.

The tiniest shadowy finger traced the edges of that picture on the dragon's side.

“
Again!
” said the shadow.

And the images came rising up from inside the
zmey
, flowed right up the shadow-child's finger, flowed golden and warm into all that waiting darkness, until the shadow was hardly shadow at all, was a shining glowing ball of light balanced in the gargoyles' paws. You could see the boy running through the grass; his head was thrown back, and he was laughing, and the sphere in which he ran was only the size of an orange now—it was shrinking, it was shrinking, it was traveling away—it was a spark hidden in the gargoyles' paws, which had come together as the shadow shrank. The gargoyles, paws clasped, looked at each other and then up at Maya again.

“How odd you quick-living people are,” said Bonnet-Head, with a great stone yawn. “How tiring everything always is! But well done, dearr. An effective translation. Yes. And now we really must have a nice rest.”

“Yess,” said Beak-Face. “To be stone again, finally.”

They turned their faces to the
zmey
and said something rockslidish to it, and the dragon slithered lovingly in and around them, a bright figure eight of living rock, before springing into the air and flying off with another one of its beautiful trumpeting cries. All that lasted only a moment: the gargoyles, their paws still clasped together around the glowing kernel of memory that had once been the shadow of Henri de Fourcroy, gave Maya a last nod and somehow leaped, all at once, right into the stone monument of Antoine François Fourcroy, dived right into the stone as if it were a vertical pool of water and disappeared.

Silence. Followed by the odd clatter of something small and metallic rolling across the stones. A happy shout from Valko: it was his long-lost barometer.

“You do realize,” he said (but he was giving Maya an enormous triumphant bear hug as he said it), “that we're going to be in the worst trouble ever, when we finally get home. We're locked in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, and it's four whole hours after closing time.”

But Pauline Vian just shook her head with wonder as she packed her violin carefully away.

“They danced to my music!” she said, her frown not quite back to its regular strength. “And,
mon Dieu
, how beautiful that dragon was. But what you did with that awful shadow, that I could not entirely understand.”

The night was ordinary again. Ordinarily dark and ordinarily cold. It was almost unsettling, how unstrange everything was—the tombs just tombs, the trees just trees, the heaps of chaos left in the shadow's wake already on their way back to being earth and stone and grass. The world unbreaking.

I will not cry
, said Maya sternly to herself. It had been her choice. She had chosen to pass the magic on. (And then she thought: to my
sister
?)

Well, salamanders live in more worlds than one, and every time they leave one world for the next, their hearts must break a little. But they are strong, salamanders, and they keep moving, all the same.

“Ha! Look at his nose,” said Valko, pointing to the old bust of Antoine François Fourcroy. “That's what happened when the
zmey
swung its tail.”

Maya took a closer look. A chunk of marble had been knocked off one side of his nose, it was true. But the bust kept smiling its half smile over their heads, nonetheless.

As Maya's mother might have said, “the merest scratch.”

The thought of her mother did the trick: Maya shook herself and woke up. It was late, right?

Time for all salamanders to gather up their things and go home.

 
22
 

W
hen the bells of Saint-Peter-of-the-Big-Pebble rang the hour of two the following Wednesday, a girl and a boy stopped in their tracks on the avenue Rapp and raised their capped and mufflered heads to look at each other. They remained standing that way for five minutes or so, despite the discouraging iciness of the weather, despite having places they were really supposed to be, despite everything. Passersby with their heads more sensibly lowered against the wind kept not seeing them until the last possible minute and then having to swerve so as not to plow into them: it was not the sort of afternoon when normal people would ever stand stock-still on the sidewalk, just staring at each other, almost as if they were bracing themselves for an explosion or a shock. But once some significant length of time had passed, the boy checked his watch again and grinned.

“Aaaaaaand we're good!” he said. “One hundred thirty-seven hours, come and gone.”

The girl cheered; the boy squeezed the girl's hands, and then, because that wasn't nearly enough, they hugged each other and twirled about for a while like fools.

“What's happened, you young people?” said an old man passing by.

“Nothing!” they sang out. “Nothing! Nothing!
Rien
!”

“
Bon!
” said the old man, and he stopped and tapped the sidewalk with his cane. “Then,
mes enfants
, may your lives be always as happy for as little reason as they are at this minute!”

It was a very good blessing.

Maya carried her happiness right over to the embassy wall, where a hole in the stone (now mostly forgotten by everyone in the neighborhood) had been plugged by a salamander-like dragon of stone and light—a
zmey
—that had come plummeting out of the sky. You could see its long, sinuous form in the wall, if you looked very hard. Maya put her hand on the stones and said a silent hello and thank-you, the way she always did when she walked by.

All those awful loopholes, closed. That was truly something to be glad about. There were still places where the roots of the Eiffel Tower had broken up the sidewalk, and Maya had seen a few
vines
and
flowers
for sale in the bakery the other day, but for the most part, all the strange business of the last few weeks was fading, not just from the streets of Paris, but from all memories and all minds. Human brains were just not built to register strangeness; really, they weren't. That sort of memory was unlikely, in the end, to stick.