Gift of the Unmage (14 page)

Thea opened her mouth to speak and time froze. The presence of the two women watching her faded into sudden background as swift thoughts swam through her mind. Grandmother Spider’s unequivocal acceptance of Thea’s gifts, and of the reasons that they had never shown themselves in her world. Cheveyo’s voice:
You pick the battleground
. The memory of that rich golden voice:
Where you are and where light is, I will always be with you
. The ribbon of sunset light:
Who knew you’d be a true weaver….

She shrugged, and the moment splintered into the present once again.

“No,” she said carefully, “not…really.”

Ysabeau slowly closed her eyes.

“Mom, it’s okay,” Thea said. “I’m fine. Really I am. With everything. I do have stuff to tell you, but later, when I’ve…sorted it all out.”

“With the rest of the world in the state that it’s in, I really wanted for this one thing to go right,” Ysabeau said plaintively.

“It will,” Thea said. She had not really known what she would do next, after she came home, but she knew what she needed: time to settle back into this world, to see how much of Cheveyo’s world and of Grandmother Spider’s world could be brought here, had a place here. “I’ll go to the Academy.”

Zoë glanced up, an eloquent eyebrow raised. “So all this summer did for you was to finally convince you that you’re ‘incurably incompetent’?”

“What?” Ysabeau said, turning to her sister.

“Thea talked to me about this, before she went away, Ys. ‘The Last Ditch School for the Incurably Incompetent’—that’s what she called the Academy. It smelled awfully like a place where derelicts are sent to die and decay, the last time she said it. As I recall, she felt like you were trying to get rid of her, bury her out of sight, sweep her under the carpet, forget she existed….”

“Thea?” Ysabeau turned to her daughter, trying to understand. “You don’t believe that we would ever do anything like that?”

“No,” Thea said, her eyes locked on the hands she had folded in her lap.

“Come to think of it, it does have a different taste in the mouth this time around. So—what changed?” Zoë asked quietly. “You?”

“Well…maybe it’s for the best, after all,” Thea said. She lifted her gaze and met her mother’s eyes squarely, without flinching, sticking out her chin with a mixture of bravado and defiance. “I can always do something
different
. Something I can be really good at.” She suddenly remembered her own mental analogy, back in the First World, awash with images, ideas, information that needed sorting, cataloging, collating. “Computers, maybe,” she said, and then smiled with just a touch of sadness. “I’ll leave the non-transformation of pinecones to Frankie.”

“Oh, Thea,” murmured Zoë.

Thea bristled, wanting to demand that Zoë should stop feeling sorry for her—but it was not pity that gleamed in Zoë’s eyes as her gaze rested on her niece.

“I’ll talk to your father,” Ysabeau said faintly.

Thea had thought that she would spend days talking about her time with Cheveyo when she got home, especially to Zoë, with whom she’d always
had a special rapport. But as soon as she could, she had tried, surreptitiously, reaching out for the light as she had done with such apparent ease in Cheveyo’s world, and had discovered that here in her world, she could still not do anything that could be called magic, anything that she could show to the adults in her family as proof that what she had to tell them was the truth. So she let the days slip by and found herself saying as little as she could get away with, until such time as she could find the answers to the rest of her questions and with them the true path to the abilities she now knew she had. Before she could be sure of that, she was back in the same circumstances that she had been plucked from to go to Cheveyo in the first place. The circumstances in which she had apparently chosen to keep her magic lying low, out of sight. It seemed a good idea to continue doing so until she knew just exactly whose sight she was keeping it out of, and if the other polities—most specifically the Alphiri—wanted something from her, she could think of no better place than the Academy to keep out of their way until she was ready to face them.

Her father had asked, outright, later, and would have been less than he was if he had not
realized that her account was riddled with lies of omission.

“Thea,” he said, sitting in one of the leather armchairs in his office and leaning earnestly in toward his daughter with his elbows on his knees and the fingers of his hands laced together, “you need to tell me everything—I can’t help if you’re keeping things back from me.”

“What did you expect to happen, Daddy?” Thea asked.

Paul had looked away. It was just for an instant, before his eyes came back to rest on Thea, full of love, full of unqualified support. “Whatever happened,” he said, “I need to know.”

But it had been enough, that moment, and the old hurt had been back—perhaps he hadn’t been expecting his daughter to return as a full-fledged mage, but he had been expecting…something. And now he wanted to know what had happened, back in that place where she had gone alone, where he could not have followed. Part of him had wanted to cradle his little girl in his arms and never let her go—but that part of him that did let her go wanted her to bring back something, anything, that would have justified
his own decision to send her away in the first place. And she was still not quite meeting those expectations.

But it was his very expectations that somehow made Thea wary, held her back. She told her father about her experience without quite telling him the most important lessons she had learned. Not then. Not yet. Not until she could lay it all at his feet, the whole glittering prize, and see him take it from her hands and see that fierce light of pride shine again in his eyes.

Paul had known when he was defeated, and was canny enough not to pursue the direct approach. Thea’s mother had wheedled, next, in the artless way that usually got results simply because her children could not believe that she had expected her transparent intentions to be less than utterly obvious to them. Aunt Zoë had simply waited, and looked as if she would wait for as long as it took, and that was the hardest. All of Thea’s life she had regarded Zoë as not so much an aunt as a slightly older and wiser best friend—sometimes, during particularly lonely parts of Thea’s growing up, an only friend. Thea hadn’t even realized how much she would have valued Zoë’s advice until her
instincts told her not to ask for it.

School was due to start in the second week of September. There had been a summer-school program at the Wandless Academy for people like Thea who were transferring from other schools, who needed to be brought up to speed on subjects other than Ars Magica—but that was almost over by the time Thea had returned home.

“Will they still take me early?” Thea had asked, wondering if the dormitories would be open before the fall term began.

“Yes, but there would be no point in—”

“Then I’d rather go now,” Thea said. “It’s only another week or so until school starts. I could do some catch-up work on my own.”

“But you could do it here at home, sweetie,” Ysabeau had argued.

“I’d rather go,” Thea said.

It was a hard thing to explain, but Thea felt something changing in the air around her. The newspapers and the television news were full of apparently random bad news—but Thea’s every instinct told her that the randomness was fake, a setup for something even worse that she could not wholly grasp yet. It was all very ominous and
full of nameless dread, and the worst of it, perhaps, was that Thea was acutely aware that she was seeing all of this through very different eyes from before. It was hard to figure out what had really changed, her world or herself.

She said some of this, carefully, to Zoë, but for once her aunt was not helpful.

“It’s always been a nasty world,” Zoë said to Thea. “It smells of putrid things all the time—politicians’ promises are always a pile of rotting herring. Have you been listening to late-night talk shows again?”

But Thea was uncomfortably aware that it wasn’t just the late-night talk shows. It was everywhere. It was everybody…but, in particular, it was everyone who held magic, in whatever way. It was just a nagging feeling, an insistent little whisper at the back of Thea’s mind—something like a persistent headache. If she were to believe that little whisper, she already had answers in her possession without being aware yet that they added up to anything whole.

2.

P
arting with everyone only a few weeks after her homecoming had been harder than Thea had
anticipated. Her mother had cried as though Thea were leaving home for good. As for her brothers, Anthony (thankfully) had not been home for the farewells, so Thea had been spared his barbs; Frankie looked subdued and a little frightened as he hugged her good-bye, as though he was bracing himself to go down the same path; the others sounded vaguely bewildered at yet another sudden departure. It was Ben—gentle, quiet, studious Ben—who had taken her aside and thrust one of his own books into her hands.

“Take that with you,” he said. “It will remind you of home if you get lonely.”

“What is it?” she asked, glancing down.

“Spell primer,” he said, with a tiny twist to his mouth.

“But I’m not allowed…you know I can’t…”

She had tried to thrust the book back at him, but he had folded her hands around it. “It’s in Swedish,” he said. “You couldn’t do any damage if you wanted to. But I just wanted you to remember us. Even Frankie. Now him, I couldn’t give this to him. He’d manage to read a sentence backward, turn it into Hungarian, and produce a fire-breathing dragon when he was trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat.”

Thea hiccuped, half crying, half laughing, and suddenly hugged him tightly, full of fierce affection.

“They’ll just take it away from me at the school,” she said, clutching the book with both hands as if someone wanted to snatch it from her right there and then.

“If you tell them about it,” Ben said smiling, peering at his little sister with an almost comical air of conspiracy. “You’ll be fine. And if you’re not, just call me.”

Zoë had hugged her, too, and reiterated her promise. “If you’re in trouble, I’ll know,” she whispered. “And I’ll come get you.”

“You didn’t, in the summer,” Thea said. She didn’t mean it as an accusation—there had been no way Zoë could have possibly kept her promise that summer—and she suddenly heard Cheveyo’s trenchant voice:
Don’t whine
.

“Well, I will this time,” Zoë said sturdily.

It was with those words ringing in her ears that Thea turned her back on them all and slipped into the passenger seat of Paul’s car.

Paul drove Thea to the school. Even this gesture was an admission of failure; everyone owned cars in their world, but more as an indi
cator of social status that as a necessity or an essential means of transport. Cars were used to drive to the theater or even just the grocery store, places where they might be shown off, noticed, admired—not as the only available means of transport. The necessity to drive to a place like any mundane being without an ounce of magic in their blood was particularly galling—but Wandless was that isolated from magic. Not only did it turn its back on Ars Magica in its curriculum, but there was no way to gain access to it other than by humdrum, grounded ways without any sparkle of enchantment to them—no portals, no slipways, no transfigurations, nothing of the sort. No working of magic was permitted inside the grounds of the school.

They boarded the commuter ferry that would take them to the small town on the Olympic Peninsula that was home to the Wandless Academy. Paul seemed to want to talk, but Thea wasn’t ready to discuss Cheveyo with her father—not fully, not yet. There, on the ferry, suddenly aware that she would be far away from home for a long time, Thea began to miss her father even before he left her behind. It was a fierce feeling, colored by the absence that had
gone before, by the fact that she had barely had time to reconnect with him before she was gone again from her home and her family.

Perhaps perversely, she dealt with the emotions by simply going off by herself to the back of the ferry and standing there, leaning on the railing, watching as the gap of ocean widened between her and home.

She had thought herself alone, but she slowly became aware that there was another person on the ferry’s back landing with her, a young man nursing a plastic cup of something that smelled like coffee, his head bare and the sharp wind ruffling his sandy hair, his feet encased in snakeskin cowboy boots with impossibly narrow tips, incongruously dusty for the location they were in. Dusty with earth of a different color…

“I’ve a bone to pick with
you
,” the young man said, sounding aggrieved.

She knew that voice. Her eyes snapped to his face, now turned toward her, the expression in his golden eyes half amused and half annoyed.

The last time Thea had seen Corey the Trickster, he had been flapping away on raven wings from a trio of very annoyed Alphiri.

“How did
you
get here?” Thea asked, pan
icked, looking around for any Alphiri he might have brought with him.

“
You
pushed me,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get back home ever since, but somehow it’s been…quite difficult. It was as much as I could do, for a long while, just to get back to my shape. And even now…” He glanced down at his hands, and Thea realized he was wearing gloves. They appeared innocuous, until she noticed a couple of raven feathers sticking out in the gap between one glove and his sleeve. “I can’t get rid of all of them,” Corey said. “I didn’t plan on turning into that raven, and the shape is remarkably perisistent when you’re forced into it.”

“Hey,” Thea said, “you would have handed
me
over without a qualm, and I can’t turn into anything.”

“Looks like you can do many other things,” Corey said conversationally.

Thea threw a covert frightened glance back toward the other end of the ferry, where her father was.