Gift of the Unmage (15 page)

“Not much I can do,” Corey said wolfishly, “not out here, not with raven feathers still sticking to me, but I can still do little things. Don’t worry, nobody will come to interrupt. I can’t
hold it long, but I can hold it long enough.”

Thea suddenly lost her temper. “What do you
want
?” she demanded. “Just what
did
they promise you for delivering me?”

“More than enough,” Corey said, and there was a glint of greed in his eye. “The offer still stands.”

“So they
do
want me,” Thea murmured.

Corey threw her a quizzical look. “But you knew that.”

She met his gaze squarely. “Why?”

“Why what, child?”

“Why do they want me, Corey? What do they want with me?”

“How should I know?” His eyes had slid off hers and he appeared deeply interested in the contents of his coffee cup, which he lifted to his lips. “But we’re not done yet….”

“Unless you’ve got a posse of Alphiri behind you ready to hand me over to,” Thea said, “I think we are. And from here on…I am aware of you. And of them.”

A metallic door opened and closed somewhere behind them. Corey threw a startled glance in that direction, and a stray black feather suddenly popped up beside his eye.

“Wait a minute,” he protested, “I didn’t release—”

“Thea?” it was Paul’s voice. “Is everything all right?”

Another feather materialized beside Corey’s nose, and then the nose itself did a disturbing woggle between being an actual nose and a yellowish beak.

Corey let out a small squawk.

“This isn’t over,” he said, or tried to say—it was hard to talk with the beak getting in the way. An outraged growl rumbled deep in his throat, and he turned on his heel and sidled out of sight behind a bulkhead just as Paul came up to stand beside his daughter.

“Who was that?” he inquired conversationally. “He wasn’t from around here, was he?”

“Nobody,” Thea said quickly.

Too quickly. Paul threw her a sharp glance. “Thea, you aren’t telling me…,” he began firmly, apparenly choosing this moment to get everything out in the open.

But Thea was aware that Corey was close by, somewhere—close enough to overhear things and, being Corey, to offer what he heard for sale.

“I will, Dad,” she said, letting a swift side
ways glance dart back toward the bulkhead that had hidden Corey from her. “But not now. Not now….”

Thea could see mountains marching by on either side of her as they docked into the ferry bay—the Olympic range on the one hand and the Cascades on the other, snowcapped ramparts rearing high into the sky, edging both horizons.

By the time they drove onto the school grounds, the mountains were barely visible, only the distant Olympics gleaming with white ghost light. The campus itself was almost bland, set into its own acreage on the outskirts of town, a handful of redbrick buildings in a parklike setting full of mature trees. It looked exactly like what it was—a school with a history and a reputation.

If only everyone didn’t know just exactly what the reputation was.

They had been met by a Mrs. Chen, the teacher in charge of the girls’ residence.

“Galathea Winthrop?”

“Thea,”
Thea murmured mutinously, eyes downcast.

Mrs. Chen’s hearing, honed by years of being housemistress in a boarding school, was sharp. “Thea? Okay. Mr. Winthrop, the principal is
expecting you both. You can leave her luggage at the girls’ hall, and I’ll be over there when you’re ready, to help settle Thea in.”

The meeting with the principal was brief, and then Thea had been excused while he and her father remained closeted together for another quarter of an hour or so. And then Paul was out, shaking the principal’s hand at the door of the office.

“Let me know if there is anything we can do to make Galathea’s stay here a rewarding one—as is our wish for
all
the students who enter our school. It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Winthrop.”

They made their way back to the girls’ hall and then stood awkwardly for a moment, facing each other. Paul, standing beside the car with his hands by his sides, looked almost trapped.

“Do you have everything?” he asked, his voice strange, distantly polite.

“Yes, Daddy,” said Thea, suddenly moved to the diminutive again. She hadn’t called him Daddy for a long time. Not since he had left her with the Alphiri guardian of the Portal that would take her to Cheveyo.

Her father gave her a swift hug and turned
away, pouring himself into the driver’s seat of the car, turning on the ignition with an almost savage little motion, and driving away with an acceleration that was not quite necessary.

Apparently Mrs. Chen had been watching through the curtains for Paul’s departure, for she emerged to stand at Thea’s side as the car leaped forward with an angry little motion and then sped, with Paul driving way too fast for the school speed limit, down the curved road and out of sight behind a copse of trees.

“Your things are already in your room,” Mrs. Chen said. “Your roommate isn’t there just now, so you’ll have a chance to do most of your unpacking in peace.”

“Roommate?” Thea had not thought further than getting here. She had always had her own room—except for the months in Cheveyo’s house, but that had been different.

“Ah, it won’t be that bad,” said Mrs. Chen. Thea had almost, but not quite, succeeded in concealing her misgivings in the tone of her voice, but the expression on her face, apparently, was quite enough for Mrs. Chen to read between the lines. “You’ll like Magpie. You’ll see. You two will be good for each other. That’s what I
do, you know,” she said, pushing her short silvery-white hair back behind her ear in a gesture that Thea would quickly begin to find very familiar. “All of us have pieces of spirit—of personality—that we lack. We can’t help it, it’s the way we are. I’m here to find the best matches. To help our students graduate from here as whole as we can make them.”

A heavy silver medallion hung around Mrs. Chen’s neck. It looked oddly familiar to Thea, but she had not paid close attention to it earlier. Now something in the way she had described her position in the school made Thea focus closely on the medallion for the first time. What Mrs. Chen had just said had a nuance to it—the words might have been innocuous enough, but somehow they had
sounded
magical, and the medallion confirmed it. It was silver, dark with age and embossed with an insignia Thea suddenly recognized. Her eyes snapped back to Mrs. Chen’s face. The woman was smiling, an expression that managed to conceal more than it revealed.

“Mage, First Class,” Thea said, nodding at the medallion. “But I don’t understand. I thought this place was positively
warded
against magic.”

“Mage, First Class,
retired
,” Mrs. Chen said with light emphasis on the last word. “You are right, no magic is practiced here. But Thea, in order to know what it is that we do not do here, we have to be aware of what can be done. Many of the teachers here have volunteered to come here after a lifetime of service to the magical world. Some come once their gifts start fading with age—that happens sometimes. Others come because they have renounced their talents, for whatever reason—that happens, too. Most of us at least know what it feels like to practice magic, and some of us even still
do
, outside these grounds, of course. That is more important than you realize, in a place where magic is not permitted.”

“My father has a medallion like that,” Thea murmured.

“I know,” Mrs. Chen said. “We even worked together for a while. But he is still active in the field and I…I just decided the time had come to bow out. Magic can be exhausting, you know, very wearing on body and mind. It isn’t for the very old.”

It would have been very rude to ask, and Thea had been brought up to be polite. But something about Mrs. Chen put Thea in mind of
Grandmother Spider. She did not flow and shift and change as Grandmother Spider did, but Mrs. Chen’s white hair framed a smooth, unlined face, with only a hint of laugh lines crinkling the corners of her eyes.

“Older than you think, dear,” Mrs. Chen said with a smile, aware of the scrutiny and of what lay beneath it. “I’m
much
older than I’ll ever admit to being. Trust me, you’re safe here—and you’ll enjoy Magpie.”

“Magpie?” Thea repeated blankly. Mrs. Chen had said it before, but repetition didn’t make it sound any less odd.

“Everyone calls her that,” Mrs. Chen said, waving her hand in dismissal. “Her given name is Catherine, but I don’t think she’s answered to that in years.”

There was magic in names. Here, where there was no magic, names did not matter. People could choose their own identity and not have one thrust upon them.

Thea found the concept strangely liberating.

The room she was to share with the girl called Magpie was a mess. One of the beds was obviously in use, although it had been rather sloppily made. The chair beside it and the dresser that
belonged on that side of the room were draped with discarded clothes and piled with stuff that glittered or gleamed, giving Thea a sudden insight into what had given Magpie her nickname. The dresser mirror was almost obscured by a quantity of gold-sprayed plastic pearls, the kind used for carnival beads or to adorn Christmas trees. There were four bottles of different-colored glitter ranged on the windowsill, for what purpose Thea could not tell. A prism hung in the window, throwing rainbow light into the room.

The other bed, the one that was to be Thea’s, had been obviously used as a repository and only halfheartedly cleared. Debris remained on it: an inside-out T-shirt, a dog-eared book, a sketch pad, and a half dozen colored pencils. A string of the golden plastic pearls was draped across the headboard of Thea’s bed, like an offering.

“Having another person in here will be good for Magpie,” Mrs. Chen said. “She has a tendency to fill any vacuum she is given access to. That side’s yours, the drawers are clear, that closet in the corner is for you. I’ll be back when Magpie returns, to do the introductions. There’s a leaflet in the drawer, there, that tells you a bit
about the rules of residence—laundry days, and all that. It should all be pretty simple and self-explanatory, but shout if you have any questions. Welcome to the Wandless Academy, Thea.”

Mrs. Chen knew who Thea was, who she had been expected to be. Her welcome was commendably free of pity or condescension. As far as the people in this school were concerned, no student would ever be made to feel inferior by having arrived here—that attitude had been made very clear to the Winthrops in the principal’s office.

Thea knew her choice to come to this school had been the right one. There was something waiting here for her to stumble across and make her own.

She gathered up a few stray items of clothing belonging to her roommate and deposited them back on Magpie’s bed, clearing her own space, but she didn’t have much to unpack and was almost done by the time the door opened again, maybe an hour later, and a voice said, “You must be Thea.”

The voice fit with the cheerful untidiness of the room—it bubbled with laughter just under the surface, like water running over pebbles in
the streambed. Thea realized with a wince she could not quite hide that Magpie was going to be one of those annoying people who were always irrepressibly chirpy first thing in the morning.

Magpie showed no sign of having noticed it. She was short, maybe five foot two in her stocking feet, her face surrounded by untidy black hair, her eyes round and dark. She was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt with a scattering of sequins on it, her narrow brown feet thrust into a pair of plain sandals.

“I’m here because I’m useless at ancestral magic,” Magpie volunteered.

It seemed that the introduction ritual in this place involved just that: getting the awkwardness out of the way. Wandless Academy had a good academic reputation, but the name spoke eloquently of all that it was not, and people usually arrived here for reasons other than the pursuit of a sterling academic record. It was ironic, because actual wands had not been used in contemporary magic for generations, so even the common, everyday magic of Thea’s world was at least technically “wandless.” But here in the school, it had been a name deliberately chosen to emphasize its identity.

A nickname, in a way. Just like “Magpie.”

Thea had offered the usual comfortable excuse as a response to Magpie’s words. “I’m here because I can’t do any magic at all.”

Magpie had given her a sympathetic look but had not pried. That, too, was in the unspoken rules. One did not ask for what was not freely offered. Thea didn’t ask further about “ancestral magic,” either—somehow understanding that if Magpie felt so inclined, she would share any relevant information.

“Sorry about the mess,” Magpie said with a grin, seamlessly shifting the topic of conversation.

That had been all in the way of introductions. Somehow, here, it was easy to accept.

It was strange at first for Thea, having a roommate. The room at the Wandless Academy’s girls’ residence was not large, and they had both had to adjust their personal space to fit the circumstances; Thea soon took to picking up anything she could not identify as belonging to her and leaving it on Magpie’s bed. It was harder to remember not to leave stuff of her own lying around, particularly if it was shiny or sparkly. It
wasn’t that Magpie was a thief, but the nickname was definitely there for a reason. She was fatally attracted by glitter, and if Thea left a pair of earrings on the dresser she would likely find them stuck into the woven blanket that Magpie had draped over her bed’s headboard. Not because she had stolen them or particularly wanted them, but because they looked pretty there.

But as a roommate Magpie was soon simply a part of the whole place, her presence almost unnoticed unless Thea happened to be looking for a favorite pair of earrings that were missing again.

The golden moon of August, Sunyi’ta, the Moon of Green Corn, faded quickly as the days fled by, and then it was September, the end of summer, with another moon trembling on the verge of something—not quite round, not quite full, but very quickly it would be. It would hang low in the sky: a bleached white circle, casting cold light. Cheveyo would have called it Senic’ta, the Harvest Moon.