Kobolds, for instance, which were purely bad Earth Elementals; she’d actually run some of those off when they tried to invade the abbey cellars. Then there was the neck, the brook-horse, a purely bad Water Elemental, which appeared as a handsome white horse that would try to coax you onto its back and once it had you, carry you into the nearest body of water to drown. There was one of those near the abbey, and she knew to carry a horseshoe nail with her to throw at it so that it would run away.
But others, well, she only knew from stories, or had never heard of. Dwarves . . . they could be both good and evil, and the evil ones, it seemed, were very evil indeed. She had heard of the Water Elementals, the nixe, but had not known they could be female and male, nor that they could appear as handsome humans, gray horses (like the neck) or as wizened little green-skinned creatures. And the Weisse Frau—dressed all in white, she posed as a washerwoman. If you were lost, she would help you find your way. If you were a child, she would protect you, and her kiss would make you almost indestructible. But if you had ever harmed a child . . . she would lure you near, then grab you and drag you into the water to drown. The Hayfrau, however, was entirely evil, as evil as she was beautiful. The book said that the lorelei was one of these creatures who loved to sit on dangerous rocks in rivers and lakes and on the ocean and lure the unwary to their doom.
Each of the creatures described came with at least one, and sometimes several, drawings, and a detailed depiction of its habits and how, at need, to combat it. The writing was beautiful, quite clear and easy to read. The drawings, well, she was no expert, but they looked as if they had been done by quite a fine artist. And Rosamund had mentioned getting another copy! How on earth could one person make so many duplicates?
But then she got a notion, and leafed further in. And the writing, and the style of the drawings changed, subtly. So it hadn’t been made by one person, but probably many people over a long time. And if all of the copies were the same . . . someone was duplicating them. And that was when she realized how copies were made: by magic, of course. She had watched Mother make copies of old books that way, so that she could give some in her library to Joachim. You touched the book to the blank book, you set the spell in motion, you supplied the ink, and the pages of the original would be duplicated onto the blank. That was why the book looked handmade. It was! It would have to be handmade in order to set it up for the spell. Possibly even the paper was handmade!
A lot of work, but how else to keep the lore of the Brotherhood up to date? Likely there were blank pages at the end . . .
She leafed to the end, and sure enough, there were. So if someone from the Brotherhood encountered a new creature, he would detail it all on one or more of the blank pages, and every member of the Brotherhood he met after that would duplicate the new pages into his own book by the same method. When you ran out of blank pages, you sewed in a new set, and the cycle continued.
“Oh, clever,” she said aloud, and Lebkuchen flicked an ear back at her. “I need to learn that spell.”
It was evident from the thickness of the book that she had a great deal to study. The creatures of the Air she knew, from the malevolent Rubezahl to the Four Winds . . . but of the other Elements, or the things that were not Elemental creatures, not so much. And it was becoming increasingly clear that as long as she and the show were traversing the Schwarzwald, she was going to need to be able to recognize hazards when she saw them.
So she kept her nose in the book and one eye on the road, until midafternoon, when she could see ahead that the others were turning off the road and up onto the verge and beyond. And that there was a break in the trees up there, though how much