The Salamander Spell Read Free Page A

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    Grassina laughed. “Magic lessons! They aren’t lessons unless you can do magic, too. Otherwise they’re just demonstrations.”
    Chartreuse’s eyes darkened and her nostrils flared. “It’s all a game to you, isn’t it? Well, it isn’t to me. I take those lessons seriously. Greater Greensward needs a Green Witch; I have to learn how to work those spells! You don’t need to know about magic, so go play somewhere else, little girl, and leave the important work to the adults!” Turning on her heel, Chartreuse flounced out of the tree house and stomped down the ladder so hard that Grassina could feel the floor of the little house shake.
    Long after Chartreuse was gone, Grassina sat on the floor, calming the doll and the horse. Some of what her sister had said stung, perhaps because she was close to being right. Grassina had heard all her life that as long as anyone could remember, there had been only one witch in the family for each generation and that witch had always been the firstborn girl. Since she and everyone else in the family were convinced that she wouldn’t have the magic, it seemed only natural for her to make a joke out of it.
    Grassina was still stroking Marniekin’s flax hair when she realized that the doll was asleep. Hector, too, stood with his eyes closed. Moving carefully so she wouldn’t wake them, Grassina carried the toys to the wooden chest and laid them inside. “Sleep tight,” she whispered, closing the lid.
    Half the afternoon was gone, and she had yet to visit the swamp.
    Chartreuse was only two years older than Grassina, and they had once been the best of friends. But after Chartreuse decided that she had to prepare herself to be the Green Witch, she no longer had the time to waste on a younger sister. Grassina began to spend increasing amounts of time on her own, exploring the castle and the area around it. Although she had always known about the swamp, which lay just beyond the practice fields and the woods where the tree house stood, it wasn’t until she was on her own that Grassina actually visited it. On the very first visit, Grassina fell in love. After that, no one could keep her away.
    Despite her parents’ fear that she would become lost or injured, Grassina always managed to slip away when no one was watching. Her parents fought to keep her out of the swamp until the day her father had one of his men follow her to see what she did there. When he reported that she seemed to have an instinct about where to place her feet and that she was more careful than most adults, her father gave her permission to visit the swamp provided she had an escort. Her appointed escorts tried to stay by her side, yet she invariably lost them in the swamp and returned home on her own. More than one adult had to be rescued, although Grassina never did. It wasn’t long before no one would go with her. Grassina was ten years old when her parents gave up.
    The shy wildlife that Grassina loved to watch, the mysterious pools that could conceal just about anything in their muddy depths, and the graceful willows that hid her in their sheltering boughs called to her in a way that no one else in her family could understand. What Grassina considered mysterious, Chartreuse found frightening. What Grassina found fascinating made her sister turn up her nose in disgust. Unlike her sister, who reveled in the company of others, Grassina appreciated having somewhere she could go alone, away from the eyes, ears, and wagging tongues of the crowded castle, somewhere she could be free to do whatever she pleased. When she wanted to be alone with her thoughts, there was no better place to go than the swamp.
    Grassina’s first stop was a pond with cattails at one end and a pebbled bank at the other. She watched a turtle sunning itself on a log and an otter chasing fish in the shallower water. When the otter disappeared upstream, Grassina started down a path that wound across the marshy ground and was so faint that