“Beauty told you? What does she know about any of this?”
Noa felt like strangling him. “Julian, just once in your life, will you pay attention! Look at this place! If this isn’t an island that’s been turned inside out, I don’t know what is.”
She watched Julian pause, watched him actually consider what she was saying. “But how?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “You’re the high and mighty Dark Lord—can’t you guess?”
She hadn’t meant to say that. It just came out, like a hiccup. After all, Julian had been distant since the council meeting, buried in his books, and he’d barely listened to the lecture she’d given him about not turning people into shadow-eyed ghouls. She couldn’t help being frustrated.
Julian’s brow furrowed. “‘High and mighty’?”
“Look, how many hundreds of grimoires have you read?” Noa rushed on. “Surely there are spells to turn things inside out.”
“What would be the point of turning things inside out? I mean, I suppose there are laundry spells in Salt that help—”
“There you go!” Noa said. “Think of the island as a big inside-out sweater. A sweater with a lot of pockets. You can’t find the Lost Words, because they’re in one of those pockets. You have to turn the sweater right side out first before you can get at them. Does that help?”
“Yes, Noa. Imagine the island as a sweater. Your magical advice is always appreciated.”
“Well, the magic bit is your job,” she huffed. “I just figure things out.”
Julian pressed his hand against his eyes. She thought at first that he was overcome with frustration, but when he took his hand away, he was smiling. Not the detached, cruel smile he sometimes wore when dealing with his underlings, but an actual grin. Noa’s heart gave a happy skip. She had always loved Julian’s smile—it filled his eyes with mischief and made him look younger, more like the Julian who used to read with her late at night after their mother thought they were asleep, while the palace cats snored at the foot of the bed and a fire crackled in the hearth.
“Noabell,” he said, “you are an absolute genius.”
11
Julian Scares Everyone
Julian stayed on Evert for the rest of the day, pacing and muttering strange spells and generally unnerving everybody. Left to their own devices, his mages wandered around like headless chickens, some trailing after him with ideas that he either ignored or viciously shot down, others flitting back and forth between the two islands with books and papers he demanded and then tossed aside unread when they were handed to him.
Shortly before sunset, he ordered everyone back to Astrae. Then he gathered up all the earth mages and had sailors row them to Evert, stopping a distance from shore at evenly spaced intervals around the island. They all chanted the spell Julian had given them, and Evert rattled and shook horribly and sent huge waves crashing against Astrae. But it didn’t change at all.
Julian spent the night there, along with a handful of his poor mages, who were fetched in the morning looking bedraggled and wild-eyed. Whatever strange spells Julian had been testing in the dead of night on that barren rock seemed to have satisfied him, for he ordered the earth mages back into boats, along with an equal number of fire mages. They ringed the island once again and began chanting something that sounded like the crackle and clamor of a blacksmith’s shop. Evert began to shake so hard that even Astrae was rocked by the waves, and Noa had to sit down on the beach to avoid falling over. Then Julian summoned a cloud in Squall, and stepped on top of it. It lifted him high above Evert, so high Noa felt herself grow dizzy. There came a boom of thunder, and then a strange glowing substance that looked like mist made of fire reached down and wrapped around the island.
And then, with a pop, Evert turned right side out.
It was the worst pop Noa had ever heard, a pop that echoed off the breakers and rattled her teeth, like a billion balloons exploding at once. But once the echoes died, and Noa and everybody else were able to unplug their ears and pull themselves to their feet, they found themselves looking at an entirely new island.
It was still roughly the same shape, though lumpy in new places and flat in others. It must have been forested before the mages turned it inside out, but now the trees lay in crushed heaps, as if a horde of giants had stamped all over them. A cloud of pollen steamed off the island, and the waves around it were strewn with bits of trees and flowers and other rubble. Once the sea had calmed, Noa waded out and retrieved several flattened orchids that had been blasted all the way to Astrae. She felt a little sorry for Evert, which had the look of a mangy dog that had grown used to mistreatment.
Julian returned to Astrae that afternoon with a stormy look on his face and a book tucked under his arm. It wasn’t a book Noa had ever seen before—it was twice the size of a normal book, with a plain black cover. Julian held it carefully, for the book was old and falling apart. Noa didn’t get more than a glimpse of it before he stomped past her and into the castle, but there was something about the book she didn’t like. Looking at it made her throat feel scratchy, as if she was coming down with a cold.
“Is that it?” she demanded of Renne, who was just stepping out of the boat Julian had abandoned. “Is that the Lost Words?”
“Probably,” Renne said. “One of them, anyway. We discovered the book in a cave. It was easy to find, but I suppose the mages didn’t need to bother coming up with a good hiding spot given that they
