The Wizard's Map by Jane Yolen

Author:Jane Yolen [Yolen, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Twelve

Into the Woods

Oh, Peter!” Jennifer cried, putting her arms around him and helping him sit up.

“Sorry, Jen, I didn’t mean to blub like that. It’s just ... it’s just I feel so helpless.” He looked at her with a strange, stunned expression.

“So you said. Before.”

“Before what?” He was clearly puzzled.

“Before you played the games.”

“What games?”

Only then did Jennifer realize that for Peter the last half hour—the three games of Patience, the changes in the map, and all their conversations in the attic—had not occurred. When Michael Scot had taken over Peter’s body and mind, Peter hadn’t felt a thing. Nor did he now remember any of it. It was like the time he’d fallen from the top of the slide at the town swimming pool onto the concrete and gotten an awful concussion. Everything that happened right before—and right after—the accident was gone. Forever.

Patiently, she explained what had happened.

“Jen, this sounds crazy. You sound crazy.”

“Any crazier,” she asked, “than stealing Molly away from the kitchen while we watched?”

Peter shook his head miserably. That he remembered. “So what can we do?”

“Do?” She had no answer.

“Maybe we should take the map, the cards, the turban, and the key and go downstairs and find Gran and Da. After all, they seem to know more about this ... crazy stuff than we do.”

She searched his face for any traces of the wizard, in case he was trying to manipulate her, but the eyes were Peter’s. The voice, too.

“You’re right,” she said.

***

They raced down the stairs and into the kitchen, but no one was there. No one was in the family room or the dining room or anywhere else in the house, either.

“But they wouldn’t have just disappeared without leaving us a note,” said Jennifer.

“Unless..." Peter said, “unless they were disappeared by force.”

“Or by—magic.”

Magic.

The word hung in the air between them. For a moment it silenced them both.

“Then what should we do now?” Peter asked at last.

“Call the police.”

“Right—and say that a thirteenth-century wizard just stole our little sister and our parents and our sort-of grandparents in the hopes of making a trade for a map that makes crop circles when it’s not being a magic bank. And that same wizard made me play three games of Patience and he has a demon that likes to have beardless boys for ... for pudding? They’ll put us both in a Scottish loony bin.”

She had to admit that he was right. “Then..." She paused. “Then it’s up to us to find them by ourselves.”

“How?”

They were back to that again. And they might have gone around and around, trying to figure out a logical next step and getting nowhere, but a strange sound outside the kitchen door suddenly broke through their argument.

Peter peered out the window. “Jen—there’s a white cat out there, rolling around in the grass and making funny noises. Look.”

Jennifer crowded next to him and looked. There indeed was the white cat, on its back, wriggling about in the raised herb garden.

“Catnip,” she said to Peter.

“Catnip?”

“Gran told me she’d planted it.

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