Gift of the Unmage (17 page)

“This isn’t working,” Thea said, frowning at her screen.

“Wrong software,” Tess said, peering at Thea’s computer. “You can do it with that, but it’s harder than it should be. Try the other spreadsheet.”

“Which?” Thea said.

Tess reached out with a pen and tapped an icon at the bottom of Thea’s screen. “That one.”

“I don’t know that one,” Thea said, staring at the screen that came up, pulling down menus to examine their contents.

“Easy,” Tess said. “Just pretend you’re playing hopscotch.”

Thea shot her a startled look and then sat forward, face cupped in the palms of both hands, and stared at her computer. Things seemed to blink and rearrange themselves—on screen or in her mind—and her frown suddenly cleared. “Oh!” she said. “I get it!”

Terry looked over and smiled wolfishly.

“Oh, just ignore him,” Tess said instinctively, not even turning to look at her brother.

Twitterpat bade them farewell at the end of class with promises of doing something far more interesting very soon, once he had had a chance to look at their work.

The next class was mathematics, where the twins and Thea were joined by Magpie, who had another protégé in tow—a tall, thin boy with a shock of dark red hair and an expression of lugubrious resignation on his long face.

“This is Ben Broome,” Magpie said. “He’s new this year, too. I saw him moping by himself just outside Latin on the way over here and he seemed lost, so I steered him in the right direction. His dad’s Bernard Broome. The chemist who won that prize last year, for the new fuel, remember? When the Alphiri sold us that great fuel that only worked for six months and then never again? Ben’s dad figured out what the matter was and fixed it. They’re making a whole new kind of car for it now.”

“Hi, Ben,” Thea murmured.

Terry uttered something between a greeting and a growl. Tess just smiled.

Mr. Siffer, the mathematics teacher, had iron-gray hair cropped close to his skull, wire-rimmed glasses, and a frown that seemed genetically coded into his face.

“For those new to the school,” he barked, “I can’t stress this often enough—we teach
real
mathematics here. The science of numbers. None of that mathemagic drivel that you might be used to in all those soft schools you went to. No spell-solving of equations, no cheating, no number demons or fractionators, no transformations—other than those defined by the laws of geometry. Nothing but old-fashioned number crunching. Anyone I catch cheating will regret it. Is that clear?”

The class nodded mutely, as one.

“Good. Then we shall all get along very well. I reiterate, no cheating will be tolerated.”

“If most of us could cheat in the way he thinks, we wouldn’t be here,” Tess muttered. “He has a reputation, you know.”

“For what?” Thea said.

“They say he was once a very promising mathemage,” Magpie said. “And then he walked past a construction site minding his own business one day and a beam fell from a crane and hit him in
the head. He’s never been quite sane since….”

“Chattering shall cease,” Mr. Siffer said with a cold stare. “Now. We have a lot to do.”

“He’ll be sweet as brown sugar tomorrow,” Ben Broome volunteered in a low whisper.

Magpie looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Oh?”

“I heard about him. He’s been here forever, and there are tales…later,” he said hurriedly, as Mr. Siffer turned gimlet eyes in his direction.

“Mr. Broomstick, is it?” he inquired silkily.

“Broome, sir,” Ben said in a small voice. There were a few titters in the back of the classroom.

“Well, Mr.
Broome
,” the teacher said, “one more word out of you—or your cronies over there—and you will all be given detention. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m afraid he’s stuck you with a nickname, all right,” Magpie said later, as they left the mathematics classroom, with a few whispered catcalls of “Hey,
Broomstick
” following them out of the room. “Now what’s this about him being sane tomorrow?”

“Not sane. Sweet. He won’t even remember calling me ‘broomstick’ tomorrow. Aw,
blow.
He
won’t remember, but everyone else will.” He kicked the toe of his sneaker against the scuffed wall.

“Never mind.
We’ll
still call you Ben. It won’t be a total clean sweep,” Magpie said with a not quite innocent smile.

Tess snorted, and even Terry let out a guffaw. Ben glowered at her, and then realized he was being teased. He grinned back wanly and wrinkled his nose, screwed his eyes shut and froze, holding his breath. The others held theirs for a moment, too, and then Ben unscrewed his face and sniffed, his eyes watering.

“What was that?” Magpie said, her own nose twitching in sympathy.

“Thought I’d sneeze,” Ben said. “You know how it ambushes you sometimes just behind your nose, and then you don’t. Something’s been tickling my nose all morning, and I can’t tell you what. And it shouldn’t, not here. I can smell magic, but here it should be clean. Back in my father’s lab…”

“Back in the lab, it was the Alphiri magic you could smell, right?” Thea asked.

Ben shot her a startled look. “That’s how it started, yeah,” he said. “Then it all fell apart,
real fast. Six months after that first whiff I caught, I suddenly couldn’t stop sneezing. I was in Ars Magica class at my old school, and the smell made my sinuses want to explode. I was homeschooled one year, because I couldn’t go to school anymore. It’s been really bad in the past couple of months. My father sometimes puts a block on me for a few hours, but then it’s back, and it’s worse than ever. And then even that didn’t work anymore because my dad would come home from the lab and I’d smell him as soon as he came inside and start sneezing like a maniac.”

“So you’re allergic to magic, too?” Tess said.

“No, it isn’t that,” Ben said. “Not really, not quite. It’s just that it’s getting worse, and they thought putting me here might help desensitize me. I don’t know what triggered it, unless it was that one time when Dad was redistilling that damned fuel for the twenty-fifth time, and something went wrong, and it escaped into the lab and I got a whiff of it. But so did he, and a lab assistant, and at least one of the cleaning staff. And
none
of them got it. Just me.” He sniffed again. “And I can smell something…
something
…. I don’t know. It isn’t really there,
maybe it’s just a memory of it….”

“You smell what? Magic?” Magpie was fascinated. “You do know most of the teachers would get the whiff of it—old Siffer himself was a mathemage, you said so yourself—but none of them have used it, not for years. Maybe it’s just that: the
memory
of magic.”

“If that’s it, then I’m doomed,” Ben said morosely. “If just the memory of magic is enough to set me off, I will never be fit for decent society again.”

“And who’d be decent society?”

The voice was unfamiliar, but came from within their group—it took Thea a moment to realize that it was Terry who had spoken.

“Welcome back,” Magpie said, smiling. “Look what you’ve done, Ben—you got him talking. Now he’ll never shut up again.”

“Sorry,” Ben said, glancing up at Terry. “Um, present company excepted….”

“Sometimes magic is so over
rated
,” Tess said, tossing her hair back. “Think of it this way—by the time Siffer is done with us, if the magic in the world went away tomorrow we could still figure out how to calculate the square root of minus one, and nobody else in the world would be able
to do it—not without mathemagic.”

“You
can’t
calculate the square root of minus one,” Ben said earnestly. “Not even mathemagic…”

“Lighten up, Sneezy,” Magpie said, cuffing him on the shoulder. “She knows. Well, I’ve got Environmental Studies after the break. What about you guys?”

It turned out that they had all taken that particular elective. Their teacher was a willowy blond woman with narrow hands, long fingers, and ears so pointed she could almost have passed for Alphiri. Certainly Ben seemed startled by her, and Thea felt a distinct urge to start looking over her shoulder again. The teacher, whose quiet voice ensured silence as everyone strained to hear her, spoke with a soft foreign accent and introduced herself as Signe Lovransdottir.

“Norwegian?” Tess wondered in a whisper.

“Icelandic,” Ben hissed back.

“Woodling,” Magpie murmured with authority.

A girl sitting in front of Magpie overheard her comment, and whipped her head around.

“
What?
What’s she doing out of her tree?”

“What on earth is she doing
here
?” Tess whispered.

But that question was quickly superseded by the things that Signe was saying in that lilting accent.

“A lot of our work will be done outside,” she said, her moss-green eyes somehow giving the impression that she was focused on every individual student. “We will be looking at environmental impact studies and reports on many different regions. But we also have at least three national parks within striking distance, as well as threatened areas close enough for us to investigate or even adopt and rehabilitate. All of that provides plenty of opportunity for honest-to-goodness fieldwork, which means you might have to give up the occasional weekend to your academic pursuits. In fact, I thought I’d start the school year off with a field trip. We’ll be spending the next week or so studying the temperate rainforest phenomenon, and then later we’ll go and investigate a real rainforest—a day-trip to the Hoh forest.”

A murmur swept the class.

“Background reading assignment,” Signe said. “Section Four, starting on page twenty-eight of your textbook…”

After class, Magpie found herself the center of
a small but fascinated audience.

“The Quilcah elders, back at the reservation, claim that the forest was full of them,” Magpie was saying. “There was a time that Woodling wives were a prize. They were quiet and hardworking and they gave a man his space because they had to go back to their tree every so often….”

“How often?” someone asked. “Every year? Every week? Every day…every hour?
That
would be a bummer.”

“They could last for a month without returning, I think,” Magpie said.

“And if they didn’t?”

“They’d, I don’t know, wilt and die,” Magpie said. “I was told these stories years ago. I don’t remember it all. But in my great-grandfather’s time they were everywhere.”

“But not anymore,” said a bronze-skinned boy with dark hair who looked very much like Magpie. “Even the tribal elders haven’t seen many of them in the last forty years, and younger folk barely remember them. A Woodling wife would be something that people would pay to see.”

“She smells odd,” Ben volunteered. They all
turned to look at him, and he flung out his hands defensively. “I don’t mean she
smells
, not like that. I can just…”

“He has a nose for magic,” Magpie explained.

“Yeah. And she smells…she almost doesn’t smell of anything. There’s just a whiff, like a memory of a scent. Like she once touched the source, but she’s been away from it for too long.”

“Well, she can’t be a true Woodling,” Tess said. “You couldn’t employ one in any kind of real job. They’d be in and out of their tree, probably at all the most inconvenient times. And unless her tree was close enough, it would be impossible—she couldn’t get to it fast enough to survive.”

“But what are they? Something like a dryad?”

“I guess that’s one of their names,” Magpie said. “My people have always called them Woodlings. There are different kinds, you know—cedar Woodlings were common around here, they’re dark, and they sometimes look too much like us to tell who they really are.”

“So what would Signe be?” someone asked.

“Hard to tell. Remember, most of us have never even
seen
one. But I’d say something graceful and silvery and light—willow, maybe, or silver birch or aspen….”

“Remember the Woodling wives?” Thea said. “Did they have children? Could she be half-Woodling, or maybe even less, with just enough of the blood to get Ben’s nose twitching but not enough to need a personal tree?”

“Could be she’s a foreign Woodling, too, with that name and that hair,” Magpie said. “Even Faele get exiled sometimes.”

“But if she was exiled, then what happens when she needs to get back to her tree?”

“I’d have to ask my grandmother,” Magpie said. “I think the exiles were given a twig and a leaf of their tree, and that was all they would have of their home, all they could ever have again…but I think I’m mixing it up in my head now.”

“Woodlings are Faele?” Thea asked sharply.

“They’re related, I think,” Magpie said, glancing at her. “Why?”

“Not important. I thought…she might be Alphiri, that’s all,” Thea said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. She could not possibly have explained the sudden unraveling of tension deep inside her, something utterly impossible to put in rational terms, the sense of having just been saved from an enemy who had breached the defenses of her fortress. The idea of an Alphiri
inside the school had, for a moment, chilled her with a cold and gripping fear.

Magpie gave her a long appraising look, but didn’t pursue it further.

The discussion petered out, and Tess sighed, perusing her class schedule.

“First day, and I’ve already got more homework than I know what to do with,” she complained mildly.

“And cheating,” Terry said, his voice an almost perfect imitation of Mr. Siffer’s peevish tones, “will not be tolerated.” He grinned and the smile transformed his face, making him seem almost mischievous.

Thea found herself grinning back.

It was going to be a good year.

2.

T
he work piled up ever higher; the first week of high school disappeared in a flurry of new classes, classmates, and teachers. There were highlights—like that first field trip they took, during which Magpie kept half her attention on her work and the other half on trying to see if Signe ever disappeared from sight while a particular kind of tree was nearby. But Signe avoided
classification, and all that happened was that Magpie managed to get herself messily involved with a couple of huge slugs she had been too distracted to notice, so she was nicknamed “Slugpie” for the rest of the trip.