Gift of the Unmage (3 page)

The whole seventh-child thing was hardly a science. The purest combination of that would have meant the union of a seventh daughter and a seventh son and there would have been no eighth child (like Zoë) in either family to potentially mess up the bloodlines—this would have been practically guaranteed to produce a prodigy. But everyone felt it was close enough, and even this much was a rare event; while fam
ilies with strong magical bloodlines produced the required seven children, the meeting and union of a seventh and a seventh didn’t happen very often. So there was a lot of encouragement from both families when Paul and Ysabeau got together. The young couple’s first child, a son, arrived less than a year after their marriage—and was doted on by everyone, as was only natural for a firstborn. But as the years passed and Ysabeau dutifully delivered son after son, it became increasingly obvious that it was something quite different that the pair were waiting for.

That something became flesh on the day that Galathea Georgiana was born. A child who should have been gifted beyond all dreams of power, as her weighty and sonorous name was meant to reflect. But somehow, over the years, the only magic that she had ever performed had been simply the transformation of her own person from the glittering Galathea so full of shimmering promise into the plain, solid, totally glitterless Thea. With not enough magic in her blood, apparently, to fill a thimble.

Thea had never been one to drown her troubles in an ocean of tears. She had given way in
the solitude of the woods, but then it was over—and she extricated herself from Zoë’s arms and hunted in her pockets for a tissue.

Zoë produced one out of her own pocket, keeping diplomatically quiet about its being no more than pocket lint and thin air a moment ago, and wiped her niece’s nose in the businesslike manner a mother might use with a small child.

“Aunt
Zoë
,” Thea protested, grabbing at the tissue and turning her head to get the nose out of her aunt’s way.

Zoë let go, smiling, and Thea blew her nose and wadded up the tissue in her hand.

“I suppose we’d better go home,” she said at last.

“You sure? We can go down to the creek and see what the falls are doing….”

“I have to go home sometime,” Thea said pragmatically. “I live there. Besides, I forgot my hat, and my ears are cold.”

The instant they stepped into the house, they heard Ysabeau’s voice. “Zoë? Thea?”

At the summons Thea slipped out of her anorak, leaving it in Zoë’s hands, and sidled down the corridor toward her room.

“You talk to them,” she hissed back in Zoë’s direction. “You
promised.
”

Smiling a little crookedly, Zoë hung Thea’s bright red anorak up beside her own forest-green one on the coat tree in the entrance hall, and followed the sound of her sister’s voice.

“Hey,” she said, strolling into the kitchen and opening the fridge door to peer inside. “Anything to eat around here? It’s crisp out there and I’ve worked up an appetite.”

“Where’s Thea?” said Ysabeau, inclining her head toward the fridge. The door tugged itself out of Zoë’s hand and shut with a small self-satisfied thud. “Supper is in an hour; you’re welcome to stay if you want to, but I
wish
you wouldn’t undermine us and just give in to all her whims.”

“Me? Give in to Thea’s whims? Thea has whims?” Zoë leaned against the fridge, crossing her arms. Her tone had been flippant, but her expression was very serious, and her next words confirmed that. “She’s miserable, Ys. She’s been listening at doors, probably, and hearing a lot of stuff she shouldn’t have. She’s drawing all kinds of conclusions, and feeling pretty awful about everything. She said you guys were planning on
taking her out of school and transferring her to Wandless.”

“We are,” said Ysabeau shortly.

“What?” Zoë said. “I thought she had extrapolated that one. Are you serious? Has it really come down to that?”

“Zoë, what else are we to do?” Ysabeau turned her back on her sister, gripping the kitchen counter with both hands, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. The bread dough that she had been rising with a quick incantation began to subside with a small sigh. “I can’t bear to watch either of them anymore—Paul whenever the report cards come in, and Thea’s face as she hands them to him. And we all know what they say. There’s another exercise she hasn’t completed or a transformation she hasn’t done or a potion she’s botched. We’ve done all we can….”

“What’s this about summer camp?”

“What summer camp?”

“She seems to be under the impression that she’s going off somewhere to be mercilessly drilled in Ars Magica this summer,” Zoë said.

“Not summer camp,” Ysabeau said. “Paul called in a favor. We’re trying something com
pletely different. Maybe that will trigger whatever it is that’s stuck.”

“What?” Zoë asked.

“There’s a letter,” Ysabeau said, “in Paul’s study. It’s in the top drawer of his desk.”

Zoë pushed off the fridge, took a step toward the kitchen door, and then appeared to change her mind about leaving. She reached out with her right hand instead, and a moment later a piece of handwritten parchment was in her palm.

“It wouldn’t have killed you to have walked across the hall,” Ysabeau said, staring at her dough in a meaningful fashion, but not unaware of what had just happened behind her back.

It had been a quick desperate rustle of shuffling feet outside the kitchen door that had decided Zoë against physically going to the study.

“Easier,” Zoë said laconically, fingering the parchment. “I would have had to come back here and interrogate you about it anyway.” She scanned the letter; it was only a handful of lines.
“Send her to me before Grass Moon wanes, else it will be too late to begin the work
,” she read. “Grass Moon? What is that?
When
is that? Who is this…” She skimmed down to the signature.
“Who is this Cheveyo guy anyway? Never heard of him.”

“April, Paul says,” Ysabeau said, slapping at the bread dough as though it had offended her. “Cheveyo is…It’s complicated, Zoë. Paul hasn’t told me everything. I do know that it isn’t just a question of putting her on a plane to New Mexico—there’s more to it than that. Paul says he’ll have to take her himself. He didn’t want me to know, but I saw an e-mail—he’s been talking to the Thaumaturgy Agency about a Pass.”

“A
Pass
?” Zoë echoed, staring at her sister. “Where is he taking her? To the…?” She paused. “Ye Gods,” she said finally.

Thea
, she said fiercely in her mind, closely focused and aimed at her spying niece,
get back to your room right now. I promised to tell you, and I will, but I will not have you skulking out there and leaping to your own conclusions. I’m
serious,
Thea.

There may have been no magic in Thea, but she could hear mindspeak, if the person talking to her was a member of her own immediate family. She had never really verbalized a reply in the same manner of communication, but she managed to respond well enough to convey her reac
tion to the mindspeaker’s words. There was an echo of a grumble in reply to Zoë’s rebuke, but Thea obeyed her aunt’s instructions. Zoë sensed her withdrawing down the corridor and drew a deep breath.

“With all the troubles right now, with the Faele acting up and the Alphiri being all mysterious…?” Ysabeau made a face at that, and Zoë raised her hands defensively, correcting herself. “Well, okay, more so than usual, for Alphiri, these days. Don’t you read the papers? There’s stuff going on on the borders right now that is certainly none of
our
doing, and there’re rumors from the Senate about cutting back inter-polity trade, even. But that…”

“The longer we know the Alphiri, Paul says, the less we know about them,” Ysabeau murmured.

“And thinking that, Paul is actually considering sending Thea to one of the other polities?” Zoë spoke in a low, intense voice. Thea might have pulled back from the keyhole but she still had perfectly good hearing and a better-than-usual facility for hearing her own name spoken.

“Don’t think we haven’t discussed it before,” Ysabeau said, and Zoë’s eyes widened in real
shock. Ysabeau lifted her own eyes to meet Zoë’s gaze levelly. “Think about it. She should have been born a mage, by all that’s known of human magic. But nothing—not a spark, nothing at all. We tried the different kinds of known magic, hoping that she was simply specialized—but…”

“Bellaria and the violin lessons,” Zoë murmured.

“And others,” Ysabeau said with a heavy sigh. “When she was four or five we took her to Kitto out on the islands—we thought maybe colors, or painting…but she simply daubed a four-year-old’s vision onto a blank page, and it was empty of magic. Then there was Bellaria, and the music; for a moment we thought there might have been something there, because she did seem to hear more things in the music than should have been there—but in the end, it didn’t work out after all. We tried another handful of the specialized magics—Ilmo’s water magic, an honest-to-goodness cauldron witch up in the mountains…even Sorcha and Seonaid.”

“The Shapechangers?”

“They only had her for half a day—they liked her a lot, and they enjoyed having her around, but there was nothing in her that responded to
that kind of transformation,” Ysabeau said. “We’re running out of options, Zoë.”

“But—the Pass…”

“It isn’t for any of the other polities,” Ysabeau said. “From what we know of them, all that the Dwarrowim might be able to teach her is how to write stirring poetry. And there’s always been enough trouble with the other two that I don’t think even Paul is ready to turn his precious daughter over to the Faele, or the Alphiri—for all the interest the Alphiri have always shown in her. No, not the other polities.”

“What, then? Who is this Cheveyo guy?”

Ysabeau tossed her head. “I’m not sure,” she said at last, after a pause sharp enough that Zoë, with her own peculiar sensibilities, saw it shimmer into existence as a glowing neon-blue slash in the air between the two sisters. “Zoë, it isn’t just a general travel visa. Paul doesn’t need that anyway—he’s got both the ability and the right contacts to cross polity borders, even to take others with him—a Pass is different. It’s like having to get permission.”

“Permission to do what?”

“I’m not sure, exactly. Permission to go…not where, but
when.
But he wouldn’t tell even
me the details of the whole thing—not everything.”

“But you did some digging,” Zoë said. She knew that defiant little twist to her sister’s lip; it had been there since she was a child, every time she had gone against some grown-up’s authority in pursuit of some purpose of her own.

“Some,” Ysabeau said at last, almost unwillingly. “I have to say I am no longer sure who he’s trying to save, his daughter or himself.”

“
Who
, Ys?”

“I think it’s a Time Pass,” Ysabeau said slowly. “He’s taking her
back,
Zoë. This Cheveyo…he’s of a time long gone, a time when magic was much closer to the world, much stronger. I don’t even know if Thea can handle that much primary magic—she’s generations away from the rawness of it, the purity of it, and she’s a
child
, Zoë….” She paused, lifting one of her floured hands to push a strand of hair off her face in a gesture that suddenly twisted Zoë’s heart because she had seen Thea make exactly the same gesture in the woods not an hour ago. Locking eyes with her sister, Ysabeau seemed unaware that her fingers had left a streak of flour on her temple and powdered her hair. There were
many things in her gaze—uneasiness, frustration, real fear. “I can’t be certain, but I think Cheveyo is of a people who have long been extinct in our world,” she said. “He’s Anasazi.”

1.

“W
ELL, THIS LOOKS
like it, cookie,” Paul Winthrop said as he brought the rented Chevrolet to a stop on the edge of an otherwise deserted road. The sun had barely gone down, but already the bright sunset was a memory and the sky was darkening into purple and an odd shade that was almost dark green.

Thea looked around, her arms crossed defiantly over her chest.

“There’s nothing here,” she said.

“Give it a moment,” Paul said. He was edgy, ill at ease, both hands resting heavily on the steering wheel. One of them had fluttered as if wanting to reach out to his daughter, but then dropped back into place without completing the motion.

“

Thea felt an icy dagger of fear lodged in her heart. There was a time she would have run to her father for solace, but it was he who had brought her to this place. She felt an odd sense of betrayal. The little child in her wanted to clutch at his arm and ask why he didn’t love her anymore. Her older self, however, was acutely aware that it had been love that had been behind the half-formed motion of his hand, love tempered by his need to protect her balanced against his frustration and disappointment about everything she almost was but had never quite managed to become. Her failings were somehow his failings, too, and he was desperate now, willing to try anything to awake her dormant gifts.

Zoë had kept her word and had briefed Thea on as much as she considered herself at liberty to tell her.

“I think that it might be a more exciting summer than you know,” she had said, sitting on Thea’s bed like a teenager, with her long jeans-clad legs crossed and silver rings glittering on every finger.

“I knew it. They’re sending me to the Alphiri,” Thea said.

“What? Where did you…?”

“I
heard
it,” Thea said stubbornly. “I heard Dad talking about the Alphiri, and a Gate—”

“Thea,” Zoë interrupted sharply, “when will you ever learn that eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves? I
told
you to quit spying. They would tell you what you need to know.”

“When?” Thea demanded.

“When you need to,” Zoë said. She stared at Thea in a loving and helpless way; her heart was with her niece, but her loyalties were still, in matters of child rearing, with the adults in the family. “Don’t worry, Thea. You
know
I’ve always been able to sense what you’re thinking and feeling, even when you’re far away. If I get any inkling that you’re desperately unhappy or in trouble, I’ll come and get you. Or make sure that somebody does. I promise.”

But then January slipped into February, and things suddenly began to move far too fast. Something had happened, and almost overnight it was not summer being talked about anymore; only a handful of weeks after the episode with the untransformed cube, Thea found that everything was happening
right now
. With little warning, she was suddenly given a few tough exams at her school—as though she was being prepared
for extra academic credits or being given a chance to make up work that she had missed…or would miss. Less than a week after she was done with those, Thea found her bag being packed. Her mother remained tight-lipped about her destination, but her simmering anxiety did not fail to register with Thea. By the time she and her father were finally alone together, they were in an airplane bound for Albuquerque, New Mexico, and her father seemed more inclined to treat her like a little girl and call her “cookie,” a name he hadn’t used since she was about four years old—and for some reason this sudden tenderness spooked Thea into silence.

Unable to broach the subject that scared her, she sank deeper into this fear of the unknown as Paul loaded her duffel bag into the back of the rented car and drove them into the back country. If she had not been so afraid of the immediate future, Thea was distantly aware that she would have found this place beautiful, particularly when the sun started going down and the rich golden light painted the hills and mesas improbable shades of orange and dark red. But she was too preoccupied to pay much attention, and then the sun was gone and darkness was falling.

Her father stopped the car. Thea remained inside as Paul got out and retrieved her duffel bag from the trunk. She felt helplessly mutinous, wondering what would happen if she threw a tantrum as she might have done back when she was truly her Daddy’s “cookie,” if she sat there and wailed that she wanted to go home. But Paul said nothing, did nothing, made no demands on her. He simply waited quietly beside the car, the duffel bag at his feet, as dusk faded into evening and the stars, bright and vivid in a night sky untainted by any artificial light, started winking into existence. To Thea, who was used to her father’s forceful and direct presence, this patient stillness was doing nothing to calm her own fears.

He was barely more than a shadowy shape outside when she finally saw him stir, look at the sky, straighten up and gaze somewhere out into the horizon, and then pull something out of his jacket pocket with his right hand. With the left, he knocked gently on the window of the car.

“Come on, hon.”

Thea reached over and opened the window a crack. “I’m not…,” she began, and then swallowed hard and peered outside, trying to read
her father’s face in the dark. “Where are we going?”

“Not far,” he said. “Look.”

He appeared to be pointing, and Thea squinted in the direction indicated by his outstretched arm. At first she could see nothing, but then she noticed a distant shimmer out in the empty darkness, as if a handful of stars had fallen down to the earth and were huddling together on the ground. The shimmer grew larger, or maybe closer; Thea’s mouth was suddenly dry.

“Daddy…?” she said in a small voice.

“Come on, hon,” he said again, this time reaching out and opening the door.

“Where are you taking me?” Thea said, sitting frozen in her seat.

“It’ll be all right, I promise. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you more, but that was one of the conditions that he…Come on, cookie, I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Thea swung her legs out of the car but did not stand up; she was staring, mouth open, at the shimmer that was now the size of a Newfoundland dog or a small pony.

“What is it?” she whispered.

Paul took one of her hands and folded it around the thing he had taken out of his pocket earlier. “Don’t lose that,” he said, “and come on. It’s time.”

Thea opened her hand reflexively and stared at what her father had given her. It appeared to be a medallion of some sort. She could not see much detail in the starlight, but her fingers told her that the surface was not smooth, that it had been worked into a symbol or writing. It was attached to a thin, strong chain that poured out between her fingers and hung from her hand, glinting gently.

“You’d better wear it,” Paul said, “it’s safer.” He reached out, took the medallion from her hand, and looped it around her neck. It hung halfway down her chest, heavier than she had thought it would be.

The shimmer was coalescing, growing, coming closer, until Thea finally saw it shape itself into a glowing portal, a door opening from the starlit darkness into bright white light beyond.

And there was someone…or something…coming out of it.

Thea gasped.

“It’s just the Guardian,” Paul said. “He won’t harm you.”

Thea had filled in the blanks of the emerging Guardian with monster shapes, and it was with an odd sense of disappointment that she realized that the Guardian was an Alphiri, a race with whom she was familiar, whose language she studied at school. To be sure, this one was a little taller, a little larger—but he still had the tall, thin frame of the Alphiri, their knot of white hair piled up on the back of the head, and the golden eyes and long, pointed ears of all their kin. He wore the customary winged sandals that were the uniform of an Alphiri messenger.

It was an injection of the familiar, and Thea actually managed a small smile as she stood beside the car watching the Guardian approach.

“Greetings,” the messenger said, inclining his head briefly to Paul Winthrop and favoring Thea with a small sharp glance. “You have the Pass?”

“She wears it,” Paul said.

“Good. We will be collecting the fee as arranged. Galathea Winthrop, come with me.”

Thea turned to Paul.

“Honey,” he said, coming down on one knee beside her, “trust me on this. You’re going to a friend.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?” Thea asked,
aware that she was sounding like a lost child but completely unable to stop herself from doing so.

“No, Thea,” Paul said gently. “The Pass is for one. It will get you back through when you’re done on the other side—don’t lose it. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. I’ll be back for you soon. But he’ll be there to meet you on the other side of the Portal.”

“Who will…? Who will meet me?”

“Come,” the tall Alphiri said, his golden eyes glowing in the starlight. Thea tore her eyes off her father for an instant to look at him, and when she returned her gaze to where her father had been he was suddenly not there anymore—or, rather, he was small and distant, lost in the dark, and the bright light of the Portal was all around her as she stood beside the impassive Alphiri Guardian, her bag at her feet.

She screamed then, a thin, terrified scream; she would have run back to where the figure of her father was getting smaller and darker until he finally disappeared into the night. She would have run except for the weight of a hand on her shoulder, the heavy hand of the Guardian.

Thea knew about Portals—there was constant traffic between polities, for trade and tourism, it
was a part of her everyday world. She hadn’t known that it was Alphiri who Guarded them, but it made perfect sense, in context. They would have made it their business to get something out of the opportunity. The Portal Guardian had taken on a commission and he would deliver on it, according to the Trade Codex of his race. Full service for full payment. The Alphiri were all about trade and gain and making a profit.

It was like a recitation of something familiar, something she knew, something she could latch on to and pretend that she was still in a world that made sense. The rest of it was disintegrating around her, shattered into the Portal’s splintered light—the Portal that was taking her from the known world to the unknown.

And her father had sent her here.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed out loud, unable to help herself. “I’m sorry I can’t be what you want me to be…. I’m sorry….”

2.

T
he sudden tears momentarily blinded her, and when she blinked them away it was to discover that everything had changed. The Portal light was gone. So was its Alphiri Guardian. It was
still night, but the air was colder than the place she had just left, cold enough to make Thea shiver. Hanging large and heavy in the sky, shepherding the stars, was a waxing moon, nearly full and bone-white, flooding the empty country with a wash of ghostly light. Thea’s bag lay at her feet, and she stared at it blankly, trying to remember what was in it and just why it had been thought necessary for her to have luggage. It wasn’t as if she had been going on a holiday somewhere.

Thea wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and looked around. She appeared to be quite alone, except for a distant cry of what she supposed was a coyote.

“So,” said a voice behind her. “You are here.”

Thea whirled, stumbling over the bag and nearly falling backward. She flailed for a moment to regain her balance, feeling a flash of pure resentment at being blindsided like this, and then stared at the man who stood before her.

He was not tall, but managed to give an impression of looking down from a great height. His hand rested on a wooden staff, polished to a pale burnished shine. It wasn’t a crutch or a cane; the thing was half again taller than he was,
with two feathers—one black, one black-and-white—hanging from the tip on a leather thong. He somehow gave an impression of being ancient, but his hair was long, black, and so glossy it reflected the moonlight. His face was a strange mixture of chiseled and round, with high cheekbones and a hooked nose below a broad expanse of forehead and eyebrows that cast his eyes into shadow. He was wrapped in a cloak made from what appeared to be a mixture of fur and feathers, reaching almost down to his mid-calf, but his feet were bare and thrust into a pair of sandals.

Thea clung to the resentment because it gave her courage.

“Who are you?” she demanded, in a voice that sounded much stronger and more self-confident than she actually felt.

“Cheveyo,” said the man, as though that one word stood for everything. “You are Galathea.” His accent gave her name an odd, unfamiliar lilt.

“Thea,” she said stubbornly.

“No matter. Here you will have a different name; I will find out what it is in due time. Come, the Whispering Wind Moon is almost full. They sent you early. This is good.”

He turned and began walking away, without looking back.

He simply assumed she would follow.

For an instant Thea contemplated sitting down on top of her duffel bag, and staying put. But this night, this place, made her feel utterly alone. Some part of her knew that her family, her friends, were no longer an easy plane ride away—that even Aunt Zoë’s comforting promise of coming to get her if things got tough would prove to be impossible to fulfill. They were all lost to her here, in a different world. Here, she was all she had. Herself, and the man walking away from her, knowing she had no choice but to follow.

They had told her nothing, given her no clue as to what was supposed to be happening to her, other than the ongoing hints about “private lessons.” And it seemed that this was it, that her instructor was that taciturn man in a feather cloak whose long stride was even now taking him farther and farther away from her.

The coyote howled again, somewhere in the distance, and Thea scrambled for her bag, stumbling in Cheveyo’s wake. He made no effort to slacken his pace or adjust his stride for her, and
she was almost running by the time she caught up to him.