The Secret of Glendunny #2 by Kathryn Lasky

Author:Kathryn Lasky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Two Brains, One Spirit

On that early morning on Little Feidah, Glencora had been stirred in her sleep. It was as if something called to her in her sleep—vertu-zel. Whatever did those words mean? But she felt as though she had been blessed. As if that swan had whispered something directly into her ear. But that could not be. She was in bed in her bedroom and the swan was in the cupola of the barn.

She roused herself from sleep and at the window caught the last glimpse of the swan, her wings spread and slightly angled as she carved a turn and headed north. “Free!” Glencora whispered, and joy flooded through the old lady as she watched the swan begin to dissolve into a bank of filmy cirrus clouds. She was flying steadily on an east wind, two points or so off her right wing. That wing had healed and soon she would be able to catch the westerlies that would give her a boost of speed.

But Glencora wondered if she herself had actually somehow entered the deep schwanka, as some called the swan’s special sleep. And if this had occurred, what exactly had she glimpsed that was stirring in this swan—this nameless swan’s mind? For despite the intimacy that had brought them so close, Glencora had no idea of her name. Both she and Lachlan had simply called her “swan.” And yet in some mysterious way, a wordless way, they had shared so much. There was no denying that somehow the old woman and the swan had merged and become one, if not physically at least spiritually. Hence a peculiar transmission of thought had begun to occur. But this much Glencora knew—the swan had to return to her origins, in a place called Wyntersphree. Yes, the name had come to her as if in a dream. Wyntersphree. There, far up a fjord, was a nearby pond, and on its banks was an empty nest.

If the swan could reach this place, she would find fragments of a broken code. And when she pieced them together, she could go on to find something she might have lost. Now that was all Glencora sensed. But she herself had been a code breaker in the last great war. To break a code, one had to study the cipher, the disguised way of writing a code. There were systems for doing this, like counting how many times a letter occurred or the use of certain words. In this way a pattern could be detected, a scheme of some sort. It was a step-by-step procedure that broke down the seeming randomness of letters or symbols so that a design began to emerge and become readable. This was how code breakers worked.

Now of course for the swan, the pattern would not be letters or symbols but fragments of information—a piece of moss that had cushioned the egg when it was in the nest, a twig, sedges, plant material from the pond. These were the building blocks of the nest, and perhaps if the swan was lucky, there might be the wisp of a feather.

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