Kendra Kandlestar and the Shard From Greeve Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t help her find her brother and, in her mind, there was nothing more important than that.

     



EVEN THE GREATEST OF HEROES needs a moment to pause on the road to adventure, to rest, to rejuvenate, to reflect. So, as summer slowly turned to autumn in the land of Een, this is exactly the pause that Kendra was granted. Her life settled into a quiet routine of tutelage under the watchful eye of her uncle, but her young heart grew restless. She was desperate to seek her brother, and yet Uncle Griffinskitch was adamant that they wait until spring before renewing their search.
    Adding to this frustration was the fact that Kendra missed her friends. Even though Ratchet and Oki had moved into her house, she rarely saw them. They seemed to spend every hour of the day out in the woods, working on some secret project that Ratchet had dreamed up (“No magic involved,” he promised). Whatever this new invention, it consumed all of the animals’ energy, for every night Ratchet and Oki came home covered in dirt and sawdust and drained of strength.
    Ratchet, who was usually all too boastful about his ideas, wouldn’t talk about the project. All he would say was, “Oki and I have been cooking up this idea for a while. You won’t believe it when you see it, Kendra.”
    She tried to convince Oki to tell her what it was all about, but he wouldn’t say a word either. She even tried finding the location of this secret project, but with no luck. Whatever it was, it was well hidden.
    Kendra couldn’t help feeling envious. Her two best friends spent all their hours together, while she spent every day in the company of Uncle Griffinskitch. And if the old wizard seemed impatient and ornery as an uncle, he was doubly so as a teacher. As the weeks rolled on, Kendra began to feel her enthusiasm for magic wane.
    Maybe I’m not cut out for this, after all, Kendra thought one warm October afternoon as she stood out in the garden with her uncle. The old wizard was trying to teach her how to use her Eenwand to pluck a leaf from a nearby branch, but it was going poorly. Kendra, of course, had used magic before in her life, but mostly with Ratchet’s inventions. The raccoon’s magic involved very little work—at most, you might have to memorize a few simple lines of enchantment, but usually you just had to sprinkle a powder and let it go to work. Using the Eenwand was a completely different matter. Try as she might, Kendra could not seem to summon any magic from the tiny twig of wood.
    “Humph!” Uncle Griffinskitch huffed as he watched her flounder in her lesson. “Your problem, Kendra, is that you can easily imagine using magic. What you have to do now is imagine the magic itself.”
    “I don’t understand the difference,” Kendra said. “I can’t get anything out of this wand. Maybe it doesn’t work.”
    “Humph!” Uncle Griffinskitch grunted. “The wand is perfectly fine. You keep expecting the wand to give you something. But you have it backwards. The energy has to come from you. ”
    “Energy?” Kendra asked.
    “Aye,” Uncle Griffinskitch said. “What is magic if not energy? It’s everywhere, all about us. It’s in the rustle of the leaves, in the glint of the sun on the River Wink. It’s in the fragrance of the morning mist.”
    “Then it’s like nature?” Kendra asked.
    “You can think of it that way,” her uncle said. “But the mystery of magic is deeper than that. It’s across the world, the universe, even time. Your job is to channel that energy. The wand can help you do that, like a magnet, like a tuning fork. Still, you have to do it, not the wand.”
    Kendra tugged one of her braids in frustration. “But how?”
    “Open your mind. Block out the world around you.”
    “But I thought you said the energy was in the world!” Kendra cried. “How can I find it if I block out the world?”
    “Ah!” Uncle Griffinskitch said. “There’s the trick. Block out the world, but not the energy. You must