The Wizard's Map by Jane Yolen

fact that both Molly and the dog had suddenly and without explanation fallen silent beyond the wall.
    The cemetery was small, about the size of their backyard at home, and easily contained within the high stone walls. There was another ironwork gate on the other side, which led to the Eventide Home’s lawn. Jennifer could see a patch of green.
    The grass inside the cemetery had recently been cut and rolled flat. However, the forty or so gravestones were not so well tended. They seemed ancient, the inscriptions on them mostly obscured by moss or rubbed flat by the passing years. Jennifer could hardly read a word or date on each: “Drowned... 1745 ...lost at sea ... invictus... 1567 ...salvation ..." None of the stones stood up straight. They leaned like drunken old men.
    Jennifer went over to the wall that paralleled Burial Brae Road. A huge oak shaded the area, and several of its limbs overhung the wall. The comer was dark—much too dark for the time of day—and she looked around.
    A sea mist—which Gran called a haar—had come in sudden and thick and fast and was flowing over the wall. It was an odd grey, the color of stew left three days in the pot.
    The silence that Jennifer had noticed was suddenly muddied by a muffled roar, like a radio broadcast of a battle, not quite tuned in. She thought she heard faraway shouts, cries, and she turned around to see where the sound was coming from. But she was all alone in the grey mist in the graveyard.
    She kicked at the sparse vegetation under the oak with her wellies—and suddenly her foot must have connected with the little stone, for it skipped across some long slabs of rock that were laid out inside shallow depressions like four open graves beneath the tree. At that very moment the mist lifted and the radio was turned off.
    She chased after the talisman and found it lying—incised side down—in the smallest of the open depressions, which looked about the right size for a child to be buried in.
    When she picked up the stone she heard a voice gabbling at her in an unknown language. Looking up, she saw a girl not much taller than Molly but clearly twice Molly’s age.
    Sun browned and black haired, dark eyed and wiry, the girl had on a scraped leather skirt like Native Americans once wore. Jennifer had studied Native Americans in school, not once but many times, and this girl had the haunted, hunted look of some of the tribal photographs in the textbooks. Instead of a shirt or blouse, the girl had on a woven cloak held together in the front by a large silver brooch. Jennifer had seen that same kind of pin in the tourist shops on Fairburn’s High Street.
    The oddest thing about the girl, though, was that her hands and arms were covered with blue tattoos.
Real tattoos,
Jennifer thought,
not the paste-on, wash-off type.
Not so odd, perhaps, if the dark girl had been a teenager, some sort of runaway, living rough on the streets. But she didn’t look as if she were any older than seven or eight, and surely that wasn’t allowed—not in America and not in Scotland, either.
    She had not an ounce of fat on her, either.
As if,
Jennifer thought suddenly,
she was only an ounce away from starving.
    The girl stood imperiously, hands on her hips, still speaking in her strange tongue.
    â€œYou frightened me!” Jennifer said, but in a joking way. “I didn’t see you come in.”
    The girl was obviously in no mood for jokes. She held her hand out toward Jennifer and gestured at the talisman. Then she spoke a quick, sharp command. Jennifer didn’t know the words, but it was clear what the girl meant.
    Give me the stone.

Lost Child
    A howl made them both turn around. The dog was sitting at the gate but would not come in.
    â€œDark!” he was howling. “Dark!”
    Gran pushed past him, holding Molly by the hand. “Have ye got it?” she said, coming to stand next to Jennifer. “Have ye found the blessed