Cerené crouched under a lower ceiling leading to a bigger room. Finally, she stopped and pointed at a furnace in the middle of the space. She looked excited.
Shew couldn’t believe Cerené was happy about this place. The smell was unbearable. Something had been burning recently, probably the children Baba Yaga ate. She wondered about the people in the Waking World who thought fairy tales were fluffy stories that made children sleep and what they would do if they knew the Brothers Grimm forged the happy stories.
Cerené patted the furnace gently then looked back at Shew, “beautiful, isn’t it?”
The furnace was rusty, brown, and covered with green sticky vines that snaked slowly around it. It had dead frogs plastered to it like stickers on a refrigerator. Its door had two holes that looked like eyes staring back at Shew. Behind the eyes, she only saw the blackness left from burning children.
Shew wanted to play along and pretend it was beautiful, but she couldn’t do it. The cellar of Candy House was the scariest place she had seen.
“I guess it’s time to show me your magic, Cerené,” Shew sighed, praying Cerené’s magic would not turn out to be something wicked. She hoped it was as fascinating as she’d claimed it to be after all they’d been through. It would be painful to discover that Cerené was just another lunatic stained by evil.
She is just like you, Chosen One. You are made from evil clay, designed to fight your own kind. In a world so bleak like Sorrow, who do you think can face the darkness and lead people to the light? Cerené with her naivety and hurt she’s suffered? Axel and Fable, two teenagers still trapped in the paradise of childhood?
“Aren’t you excited to finally see my Art?” Cerené knelt down and lay her heavy broom aside. She opened her glass urn and smelled it as if it were an exotic perfume. “Do you still remember the elements needed to conjure the Art?”
“Heart, Brain, and Soul,” Shew showed her she was paying attention. “The Heart is ashes from a Rapunzel plant, the sand is from the eyes of one of the sleeping beauties in the Field of Dreams which is property of the Sandman himself, and the lime is just chalk from school.”
“Toothpaste!” Cerené celebrated while mixing the ingredients together in the urn. She watched them glow slightly purple as Cerené decided to wipe her teeth again with some ‘toothpaste’ she’d saved.
“Now what?” Shew was curious.
“Now this,” Cerené held the iron broomstick. “You think it’s a broomstick, right?”
“It is a broomstick,” Shew dared her.
“Nah. I just had to fool the Queen of Sorrow and all the other servants into thinking it’s a broomstick,” Cerené smiled proudly. “And it’s not a witch’s broomstick either—”
“What is it then?”
Cerené cleaned the iron broom with the tip of the red dress Shew had dressed her with in the Field of Dreams—she was wearing a ragged blue servant’s dress Tabula had given her today.
After cleaning it, Cerené pulled the broom up to her mouth and blew into it, producing a sound like a heavy fart. She blew into it one more time then peeked with one eye into the hole of her tool. “You still don’t know what it is?”
Impatiently, Shew shook her head into a no.
“A blowpipe,” Cerené whispered. “The first part of the tool, the Brains, is the furnace we came all the way for. The second part is the blowpipe, a magical one, in fact.”
“What does a blowpipe do?” Shew said.
“It’s better than a magic wand!”
14
A Breath of Magic
“Better than a magic wand?” Shew wondered.
“A blowpipe is even better than a magic wand. I’ll show you in a minute,” Cerené held the blowpipe underneath her armpit and clapped her hands together three times. The furnace lit up. “This isn’t my magic by the way. I saw Baba Yaga do it.”
“At least she didn’t say ‘Open Sesame,’” Shew mumbled—another thing she’d read in one of her victims’ books. Cerené didn’t quite get what she was talking about.
Under the shimmering fire of the furnace, Cerené smeared one end of the pipe with the Heart’s purple and sticky mix. It stuck to it looking like a liquid lump. She gazed one last time toward Shew, winked at her, and pushed the sticky end of the blow pipe into the furnace, holding the other end with the two folded layers of the red dress.
Swoosh went the mixture once it met with the fire from the furnace. Slowly, it turned into a molten concoction, and the purple color turned into a hellish orange like the surface of coals on fire.
“Beware!” Shew warned Cerené as the fire flickered.
Although the blowpipe was too long and a bit heavy for Cerené, she titled her head back, smiling with a sweaty face at Shew.
“Why are you smiling in God’s name?” Shew’s face knotted.
“You care about me?” Cerené asked, almost losing balance.
Shew shrieked, but Cerené adjusted her small feet awkwardly as if walking the tight rope in the circus.
For the first time, Shew finally understood what was so strange about Cerené’s shoes. They were made of … glass.
Shew furrowed her eyebrows.
The black texture she couldn’t identify before was as flexible as rubber but looked like dirty glass in the shimmering fire. She could tell they were glass because of the way their surface reflected the shimmering light of the fire from the furnace. Momentarily, she thought the shoes were made of Obsidian stones, but no, this was glass, an unusually flexible type of glass that fooled the observer into thinking they were poor quality leather.
There was something else about the shoes, nonetheless. It was what had caught Shew’s attention here in front of the furnace. When Cerené was about to lose balance from tilting her head back and holding the heavy blowpipe, the shoes helped Cerené keep her balance. Cerené’s shoes were not ordinary in any way.
“Don’t you worry, Joy,” Cerené gritted her teeth, gripping the blowpipe with both hands as if she were pulling a stubborn fish out of the water. “I’ve done this many times.”
Having gained balance again, Cerené pulled the blowpipe out and placed it on what looked like a butcher’s table, the glowing molten mixture glued to the blowpipe’s far end.
Cerené knelt down and started blowing from her end into the blowpipe, shaping the molten into a bubbly looking mold. The molten breathed like a frog’s throat when she blew. The fiery substance looked as if it were alive; submitting to the amount of air Cerené blew into it through the pipe.
“Wow,” Shew said. “How do you do that? What is that?”
Cerené took a deep breath, tired after blowing, “You’ll see in a second,” she said. “Could you pull a rock from the floor and run it over the mold?”
“What?”
“Just do it,” Cerené said. “While I blow into the pipe, shape the mold however you like. Did you ever carve wood or work with clay?”
Shew said nothing. She felt embarrassed that she never had.
“Don’t worry,” Cerené understood. “Use your imagination to make this into whatever you like. I will see what shape you’re thinking of and then I will breathe into it to create what you’re imagining. I’m very good at it.”
“I can’t.”
“Just think of something. Make it into a vase or cup,” Cerené’s cheeks had reddened like coals from under the sticky ashes on her face.
Although Shew didn’t know what this was, she picked a rock and started molding the fiery clay-like thing. She worried briefly about the unbearable heat, but then started doing as Cerené had directed her.
The rock’s sharp edge cut through the molten like a knife through butter. Cerené rolled the blowpipe on its axis while Shew shaped her imagination into existence. She found herself creating what looked like a cup. When the molten began taking reasonable shape, she cut a bit too deep. A sticky part of the mixture thumped like thick mud onto the floor.