Spells in Silence

Chapter 5: The Woods

A gap existed in the line that no one sought to close, and it was in this space that Hazel stood, a blue and yellow bird on her shoulder and a bag of trail mix in her hand. With every handful she gave the sunflower seeds to her new friend and saved the raisins and chocolate bits for herself. It was a decent way to fill their stomachs and pass the time as they waited to enter the park before her.

When she had charmed her little bird to join her, she had had no idea just what kind of bird he was nor what he needed to eat. She was no bird-scientist, after all, and it was not as if she had ever made birdwatching a hobby before she left Privet Drive for the road. Thankfully, she did not need to be. A library was conveniently between Stonehenge and her next destination, and not only was that a nice place to wash her clothes and hole up through the storm that came blowing through the day after Christmas, it also gave her a chance to check on the needs of her new friend.

According to all the bird books she could find, she had as her new familiar a European blue tit, and a healthy specimen too if his bright colors were any indicator. She did not actually know for sure if the bird was a boy or a girl – all the books said the genders looked similar unless she used ultraviolet light, which was just so common around her – so in an effort not to name him or her something super silly she had instead decided on the name Morgan.

She took another handful of the trail mix and split it between them, doing her best to ignore the guilt that welled up with each bite. Needless to say this bag of food was one she took rather than bought, but she was not sure what else she could do. After paying for her five lighters, she had a grand total of thirty-eight quid to her name from the money she took from Aunt Petunia. With no way to get more short of finding it or taking it from somebody else, the only options she had to feed herself was to take the food instead. It was not as if she could go out and get a job even if she wanted to be stuck somewhere forever.

The fact that it was a necessity did not make her feel any better about sneaking in and taking things, though.

The people around her started moving again, and it was easy to let the crowd all but carry her to the entrance of Shervage Wood. The library in Greater Whinging had some information on this place, but the library in Nether Stowey had been much more helpful in confirming her information. According to the stories she read, there once had been a massive serpent or dragon called the Gurt Wurm living in this forest and the hills nearby, one that ate sheep and cows in the nearby fields and would do the same to anybody who tried to enter its woods. No one had been brave enough to fight the creature until one old woman tricked a woodsman into going into the forest to chop down some of the trees. While taking a break from his chopping, the fallen log he sat on started moving, and he hacked it in half with three blows from his axe before he could realize that he was sitting on the snake rather than a tree. She would think that the first blow would have been enough to figure out this was a flesh-and-blood creature and not a log, but the story also said he was drinking heavily before he went into the woods, so she supposed that was as good an explanation as any.

And supposedly the creature had laid a mighty egg sometime before its death.

Hazel knew the chances of finding an unhatched dragon egg were slim to none at best, and even if she did find it, she would want to stay far, far away. Regular eggs went rotten after a short time out of the refrigerator, and this all happened several hundred years ago. What she really wanted was to find something, anything, that could serve as proof that dragons really did exist back in the day. They for sure were all gone like the dodos, that much she knew. Giant bloodthirsty fire-breathing flying lizards were one of those things that would be hard for anyone to miss. It was more that if she could prove even to herself that such creatures once lived, it was a sign that smaller, less obvious magical beasts and monsters might still be around.