I will have been seven, eight at the most. I was looking at the word and wondering how on Earth did you say it? Brising, with the “i” as in brimming, or since there was only one “s”, was the “i” like the “i” in brine, and what was Brisingamen? Was it a place or a person or was it maybe an entity or a concept like honesty or loyalty? Did it have the word amen at the end of it because it was a kind of prayer? I knew what weird meant, and what stone meant, but what did they mean together and how was it that putting those two words together like that made something somehow bigger than just the sum of what the two words meant separately?
I’d taken The Weirdstone of Brisingamen off the school library shelves because one of my elder sisters had started reading over and over again another book by this writer, about some kind of church service involving owls, and I’d noticed two other books by the same name on the library shelves. Both the titles of these other books were strange, though I had flicked to the end of the book with the unicorn on the cover and discovered a word I knew really well, “Findhorn”, the name of a place just up the coast from where we lived, where there was a very good golden beach; the hippies had a commune there where they talked to their vegetables and flowers to get them to grow bigger.
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