The corollary event that probably made me happiest about the whole affair was how angry Audra was that the cautionary statuary on the promenade looked just like her, with a few enhancements. “You could have turned him back into Morben before you turned him into stone forever,” she said a few days after the incident was concluded.

“I could have, if I had wanted to risk dying for your vanity,” I agreed. “I only had time for one spell. I chose to incapacitate him, not de-beautify him.”

“What if he breaks free of enchantment?” Dernwerd asked in a fretful voice. “What if he comes back to life and kills us all?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t too worried about it. A wizard’s spell generally will last for that wizard’s lifetime, so I, at least, should be dead before Morben had any reasonable chance of resurrection. “Get out the sledgehammer and shatter him to bits,” I said. “Grind him into dust and let the wind blow him away. It’s all the same to me.”

“But are we just to leave him like that forever?” Xander asked. “It seems so indecent, somehow. What kind of lesson does that present for the students?”

“Not to try to kill the Headmistress,” I said over my shoulder, for I was bored with the conversation and already walking away. “I don’t know that they need to learn anything else while they’re here at Norwitch.”

And, come to think of it, I’m not sure any of them did.

The Boy Who Chased Seagulls by MICHAEL ARMSTRONG

The old man walked along the beach on his lifelong mission to collect trash and other cast-off stuff. In town the children called him the Beachcomber, or Old Man, or (not to his face) Creepazoid, but he had his own name, he thought, a name he would share if anyone asked. Hardly anyone did, and so only the beachcomber knew his true name.

Uncle, he thought of himself. I am Uncle.

Uncle walked the beach with steps firmer and longer than on the often icy streets of the town, an Alaska fishing town, hard on its luck and struggling to keep profit ahead of pride. On the beach he could walk as his true self, ancient and unbowed to time. Not whole, though. The beach had taken pieces of him and only rarely gave them back.

He used an old bamboo staff, crushed smooth at the end and split in parts, for balance and defense. Like almost everything about him, he found it on the beach-given to him by the beach, he liked to think. Uncle wore old tennis shoes with heavy socks, canvas duck pants cut off below the knees, red long johns, a wool shirt, a rumpled old dark green rain slicker, and a big floppy wool hat. His white beard hung to his chest, and his white hair poked out from under the hat.

Uncle carried a battered old canvas back slung around one shoulder, a plastic grocery bag inside for wet or disgusting items he found on the beach. He saw it as his own special mission to collect trash. Secretly, he looked for treasure, but he found that if he had it as his stated purpose to collect trash he would find treasure that much more easily. And he had to collect everything.

Yes, Uncle had his rules. He must pick up all plastic, anything of human manufacture, unless it was so heavy he couldn’t carry it; and then he flung it above the high-tide line so that someday someone else could pick it up. Glass bottles he broke and ground into the rocky sand, to be turned into beach glass.

Of beach glass he had some rules, too. Only worn beach glass could be picked up. No edge should be shiny, no surface unground. Pieces smaller than a fingernail should be left to return to sand. Intact glass floats, of which he had found only a dozen in all his life, he could take. Broken floats must be returned to the beach.

Paper that would rot away he could leave if he had no room to carry it, unless he found the paper offensive, as with most fast-food wrappers. Uncle did not see it as his mission to clean up trash near parking lots or trash left by teenagers at beach parties. He picked up the faraway trash and left other trash for good citizens or bad boys on community service to haul away. He would not pick up gross diapers or tampons, used bandages, or anything similarly disgusting.

Of natural treasures, old bones he could take, except whale bones, and seashells and interesting rocks. Sometimes he made little sculptures, like spirals of gray rock split with quartz. Uncle did not take feathers, not off the beach, except feathers of birds who stayed the winter. Certainly he did not take eagle feathers, not because that was against the law-he did not give a shrew’s ass about the law-but in respect for the eagle. He called the eagle “Uncle,” like him, for that is what his name meant, and the raven “Grandfather.” Even though ravens wintered, he never, ever touched their feathers. Eagle feathers he might move, binding them to the highest branch of a driftwood log, or sticking them point down into the beach.

Of seagull feathers, he never saw them, and so didn’t touch them, even though they were there. Uncle and seagulls did not get along, not since that time long ago.

– 

On one of his walks he saw the boy chase seagulls. As an old man, an elder, Uncle saw it as his duty, right, privilege, and honor to correct the behavior of boys. Sometimes he hit them, although he hadn’t done so in a long time, and sometimes he yelled at them. In his old age, though, he had come to berate them through jokes and stories.

The boy ran ahead of Uncle on the low tideflats, out where the seagulls clustered in great flocks. The boy ran carefree in the fading summer, that month before the huge storm tides that would wipe the beach clean. Already big swells had rolled in, bringing in trash from far out to sea: soap bottles, plastic lids, broken buoys, and tangled nests of fishing line. Uncle had a bagful of trash and headed home to his driftwood beach shack up a ways on the Spit. The boy, no more than ten, ran on the flat sand, jumping over puddles and great rafts of kelp. He saw the seagulls and ran toward them. The seagulls held their ground until the last minute, then roared up in a great flight of cackling and rustling, settling down a hundred yards away. The boy did this again and again, each time making Uncle madder and madder. What had the seagulls done to the boy? Didn’t they deserve their rest?

Soon the boy’s path intercepted Uncle’s. Usually kids turned away from Uncle, but this boy who chased seagulls also dared to challenge the old man. He came up to Uncle with that nasty gleam in his eye, that puny little chest thrust forward and his chin high in the air. Oh, Uncle had seen hundreds of punks like him, and they did not scare him at all. He could sweep out with his bamboo staff and knock them off their feet so fast they wouldn’t think it happened.

Uncle thought of doing so right then. A boy who chased seagulls like that deserved a good beating. In his meaner days, he would have done just that, only there were laws against old men beating up boys, and while Uncle didn’t care for the laws, he did care for the inconvenience. So instead he told the boy a story.

“Hullo, Beachcomber,” the boy said.

“Hullo, Boy Who Chases Seagulls,” Uncle said.

“Ha!” The boy loved that, glad someone had noticed his mischief.

“Why do you chase seagulls?”

“Because it’s fun.”

“You wouldn’t think it fun if you knew what happens to boys who chase seagulls.”

“Oh, crap,” the boy said.

“What is your name?” Uncle asked him.

“Travis,” he said.

“Well, Travis, I knew a boy who chased seagulls once, and you know what happened to him? The seagulls ate him.”

“Crap,” the boy said again.

“No, no, this is true,” Uncle said, smiling. “I bet you.”

“What?”

“If you don’t believe my story, I will give you this,” and he opened up his hand and showed him a rare blue piece of beach glass.