Griffin of Darkwood by Becky Citra

face, and then made his way to the front of the shop.
    “This is going to sound crazy,” he said. “But I think I just saw Mr. Tumnus. You know, from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe .”
    “Mr. Tumnus!” said Favian. “I’ve always felt that I wasn’t alone in here!”
    “And the night we came? I saw someone through the window. I think it might have been an elf.”
    “Indeed!”
    Will watched Favian put a sign in the window advertising Vespera Moonstone’s poetry reading. Beside it was a large colour photograph of Vespera Moonstone. She was the woman from the bus!
    “Vespera Moonstone was on the same bus as Aunt Mauve and me. I didn’t know she was the poet!” said Will. “She has this amazing cat.”
    “Macavity,” said Favian. “Vespera Moonstone is our local celebrity. She just got back from a book tour in the United States.”
    “I just went to her house. I knocked, but she wasn’t home.”
    “Vespera never answers the door when she’s writing. She has an artistic temperament.”
    “My mother wrote a book. It’s going to be published this year.” Will hadn’t known he was going to say that. The words just blurted out of him. And he wasn’t even positive that it was still true.
    “Really?” Favian looked so interested that Will told him all about his mother’s book and Mr. Barnaby and Barnaby Book Publishers Inc. He shook when he told Favian that Adrienna had died.
    “Oh, my,” said Favian. “You have had a tough time. Your aunt sounds like a dragon. But you’re living in a castle! That’s one interesting thing. Your mother would approve of that.”
    “She’d love the castle!” said Will.
    “So her book is called The Magical Night ," said Favian. "Let’s think positively. I’ll order it for the shop and it will have a place of honour in the window. A mother who was a writer! How marvellous!”
    “I used to be a writer too,” said Will.
    “I suspect that once a person is a writer, they’re always a writer. I myself am a great reader, and once a reader, always a reader is what I say. The same must be true of writers, though I have no experience with it.”
    “I don’t know.” Will peeked at Favian’s paper. “If you’re not writing, what are you doing?”
    “Palindromes.” Favian’s long dour face lit up. “They’re a bit of an obsession with me.”
    “I’ve never heard of palindromes.”
    “They’re words that are spelled the same way backwards or forwards. Like the word racecar .” Favian printed it on the paper.
    “That’s so neat!” Will adored anything to do with words.
    “I enter contests all the time. You can have phrases or whole sentences too. Here’s one of my favourites.”
    With a chuckle, he wrote:
    Murder for a jar of red rum
    “I didn’t make that one up myself, I’m sorry to say. Palindromes are a pastime that is thousands of years old. Some of the most powerful magic words in medieval times were palindromes.”
    He wrote on the paper: odac dara arad cado
    “It’s from an old medieval spell book. It means fly like a vulture.”
    The ancient words gave Will a thrill. It would be cool to think of palindromes too, like Favian. “I better go," he said. "I have to buy some stuff for my aunt and then I’m meeting my friends.”
    “Odac dara arad cado!" said Favian.

Chapter Eleven
    Morgan Moonstone
    It took ages to find the items on Aunt Mauve’s list. The first shops Will went to had CLOSED signs hanging on their doors, and he was convinced that the shop owners had turned their signs around when they saw him coming. When a shop was open, no one helped him and he had to search the aisles by himself. At the end, he had some money left over so he looked for a torch.
    “Don’t carry torches,” muttered the man in the hardware shop.
    Will went back to the grocer and the woman said, “You again,” and acted like she had never even heard of torches.
    Finally, a man in a second-hand shop sold him a big silver torch. “You watch your step