The Mage and the Magpie Read Online Free PDF Page A

she could make herself, away from the world and invisible, and the habit stuck.
    Her father didn’t approve. “When you do a thing for too long you become it,” he would say, but Brinley was not quite thirteen‌—‌far too young for anything like that to happen.
    Brinley walked to the foot of the church and peered carefully up into the ramshackle bell tower.
    It was empty.
    She stared at it a while, wondering what that meant. Maybe there had never been a bell. Maybe the people who built it had never got around to putting one in. Then again, the place had been abandoned for so long…was it possible that there could have been a bell here years ago when her father had found her? She looked around the church, thinking that it may have just fallen out and rolled away, but there was nothing.
    Eventually, she gave up the search and decided to draw. The sun had crested the trees now, and that magical hour of morning light had begun. Few people knew about that secret, she thought. Painters, and photographers, and movie makers, perhaps. They were the only people who seemed to know how the morning light made everything look different, special, alive. Walking past the church to sit on the shoulder of a fallen pine tree, her imagination started to run wild. She would let it loose like this sometimes; it was a relief, like dropping something heavy that you have been carrying for too long. She gazed around and saw the friendly ghosts of days long gone. Of all her secret places, Morley was her favorite; it was easy to imagine things in a place like this.
    She pulled out her sketchbook and started working. The empty door, the steps, a basket. How many times had she drawn this picture? Too many to remember. She never finished it. She never knew how to draw her mother walking away. She tried this time, formed the loose lines of a head and body turning away from the basket. She stopped abruptly, changed it into her father instead, turning toward her. She wondered again about the bell that had brought him to Morley that night. Why had she never thought to ask him about it before?
    She shrugged the thought away and looked around. For most people there wouldn’t be much to see, but her father worked for Fish and Wildlife Services, and she had practically grown up in the forest. She found the birds. She came here often enough that she knew where to look. She began sketching, writing their names beside each one: Black Swift, Downy Woodpecker, Hummingbird, Red-Tailed Hawk, Magpie. She squinted up at the magpie. He was a new addition. She looked back down and added a few extra details to her drawing so that she could recognize him in the future‌—‌if it was a him. She didn’t know how to tell with magpies.
    Eventually she finished with the birds and looked up at the church. Images of what it used to be like flooded her mind, and she drew. Morley had been abandoned for less than seventy years, but by the looks of it, it might have been five hundred. She could see the old miners and their families, and she drew them coming out of the church on a Sunday afternoon. They had built the structure with their own money, and now it was practically the only evidence left that they were ever here.
    After three hours her stomach growled and she checked her watch, surprised at how much time had passed already. She held her drawing up to check it against the real Morley Church, squinting at it appraisingly. Something wasn’t quite right about the empty bell tower. She added some shade to the left side, then set it down and rummaged in her bag for a sandwich. She put her back against a tree and ate. Twenty minutes later, she had drifted to sleep in the warmth of the sun.
    She woke to the sound of a magpie.
    “Are you the one I drew earlier?” she said, rubbing her eyes. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she regretted it. Everything went quiet at the sound of her voice. That happened sometimes when she was out in the woods: Wild things forgot