Free Spellbound: The Books of Elsewhere by Jacqueline West Page B

demanded, backing away from him until she was stopped by the lilac bushes. She and Rutherford were almost exactly the same height, so Rutherford’s eyes, which were watching her intently from behind his dirty glasses, were very hard to escape.
    “I was looking for you, naturally,” Rutherford answered. “My school schedule just came in the mail, and I thought we could compare and see if we’ll be having any classes together.”
    “It came already?” Olive cast a dismayed glance at the paper in Rutherford’s long, paint-speckled fingers. “But school is weeks away!”
    “I’ll have American history, Spanish, general math, art, and physical science during the first semester,” Rutherford recited. “I’m a bit disappointed that it has to be physical science instead of geology or biology; even botany would be more useful to my possible future career, but I suppose that they don’t allow those kinds of choices until high school . . .” he rattled on, jiggling from foot to foot.
    As horrible as the thought of school was, it couldn’t quite push the other thoughts out of Olive’s mind. Her eyes drifted back to the windows of the big stone house, flicking from room to room: the steamy kitchen window, the stained glass of the dining room, the gauzy curtains of her own bedroom, the little round porthole of the attic. Somewhere, behind one of those watching windows, was the book that she was looking for.
    “Have you found it yet?” Rutherford asked suddenly.
    Olive jumped. For a second, she was sure Rutherford had been reading her mind—but maybe he’d only been reading her face. “Found what?” she asked warily.
    “The grimoire,” said Rutherford, jiggling with increasing excitement. “Have you finished searching the library?”
    Olive hesitated. Something that didn’t make sense—something she’d been too distracted by the promise of the spellbook to notice—rushed to the forefront of her mind, like a roadside construction worker waving a PROCEED WITH CAUTION! sign.
    “Why are you so interested?” she asked slowly. “And how did you know about grimoires in the first place?”
    Rutherford blinked back at her. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, how did you know that I should look for a book of spells? You said, ‘Every witch has one.’ How did you know that?”
    For the first time since Olive had met him, Rutherford seemed to be searching for the right words. He stopped jiggling. His eyes drifted away from Olive’s, toward the rustling lilac leaves behind her. “Well,” he said, speaking much more slowly, so that his words came out only slightly faster than most people’s “. . . The practice of witchcraft was apparently quite common in the Middle Ages. Stories of magic and sorcery, like Merlin and Morgan le Fay, and . . .” He trailed off, his skinny fingers turning the class schedule around and around. “Later, when writing became more widespread, witches were known to keep books of spells, but most of them would never let you—I mean, let anyone else—” Rutherford broke off again. When he began the next sentence, his voice had resumed its usual pace. “ Grimoire is a French word; it comes from grammaire , which is French for grammar, so the word grimoire really implies a set of rules for language.” His eyes flicked back to Olive’s. Behind their smudged lenses, they looked wide and slightly alarmed, but more than anything else, they looked hopeful . “Have you found it?” he asked.
    Olive looked back at him for a long moment. “No,” she said at last. “I’ve been looking. But I haven’t found it.”
    Rutherford nodded. “If you do find it, I would really like to see it. Even just as a historical artifact, it would be fascinating . . .”
    Olive shuffled her feet in the long grass. “ If I find it,” she said noncommittally, looking away from him again.
    “Well, I’d better be going,” said Rutherford after a brief pause. “The silver paint on my model of Henry Tudor,