A Lonely Magic (14 page)

Gaelith dipped her head. “Indeed to my grandmother, I am still the veriest youngling. But on my last birthday, I celebrated three hundred and twelve years.”

Three hundred and twelve.

Fen blinked. And dropped back to her knees on the cushion.

“You’re…” Fen stared at Gaelith.

No, that made no sense. Gaelith looked like she was in her mid-thirties. Okay, maybe a well-maintained forty, but no older.

“But then, how old…”

There wasn’t enough air in the room.

Fen stopped talking, closed her eyes and breathed.

Panic attack on its way.

She could feel the flushing, the blood racing, the tingling in her hands and legs. Her heart pounded in her ears,
da-dat-da-dat-da-dat
.

“Are my brothers?” Gaelith didn’t appear to notice. “Kaio shall celebrate his two hundredth next year. In ordinary times it would be a cause for much celebration. He would choose his path for his next score. A new skill, a new art, or perhaps revisiting a past art to explore the changes time might bring. I know the choral master would welcome his return. His voice is so exceptional.”

Breathe, Fen, breathe
, Fen told herself. Gaelith’s words were floating past her, barely skimming the surface of her brain.

Kaio. Two hundred. New path. Got it.

“And Luken is just gone forty,” Gaelith continued. “It was much to our mother’s dismay that he chose Watching as his first path. And on his first tour to be so grievously injured. Now this.” She shook her head. “Perhaps it is the duty of the youngest to make his mother mad with worry, but one wishes Luken would take the task less seriously.”

Three hundred and twelve. Almost two hundred. Forty.

Jeez, forty?

She’d made out with an old man.

Fen would have laughed through her panic but instead her breathing started to slow and her hearing to return to normal. “It wasn’t Luke’s fault,” she managed to say. “He saved my life. He got shot saving me. And the guy who shot him showed up on the island. We weren’t safe there.”

“Indeed?” Gaelith gestured at the food with an open hand. “Eat. You need your sustenance. And while you do, tell me the story. Luken was less than coherent.”

Fen picked up her bread. She wasn’t going to think.

Nope, no more thinking.

Questions were pushing at the back of her mind—fears, uncertainties, confusions—but she was going to ignore them.

She’d worry later.

She’d panic later.

Right now, she’d take care of herself. She’d eat and she’d tell Gaelith the story.

She ripped off a bit of bread and stuck it in her mouth, chewing carefully before she swallowed. Then she lifted her chin, straightened her back and told Gaelith what had happened on the island, her voice calm, her words interspersed with bites of bread and dips.

“Most interesting,” Gaelith murmured when Fen finished. Shifting in her seat, she reached into a pocket under her tunic and pulled out Fen’s blue crystal. “Luken charged me to take care of this. I believe I should return it to you.”

She placed it on the table between them.

Fen looked at it.

It was a little blue rock.

Harmless. Nothing special, nothing incredible about it.

Just a little blue rock.

She picked it up, her mouth dry, and tucked it into her own pocket. “Thank you,” she said, pulling her hand away immediately, not letting her fingers caress the crystal the way she wanted to.

Her eyes met Gaelith’s. The woman smiled at her, eyes steady, lips curving in an expression that held encouragement and a touch of mischief and said gently, “Remember to think softly.”

Fen wanted to ask questions—what did think softly mean?

But Gaelith gave her a tiny negative signal, a bare drift of her head from one side to the next, before saying, “Come now. I shall give you the pattern we discussed. And perhaps one other that might be of use to you.” Gaelith picked up her pouch and stood. “Might I also examine your art?”

Fen looked down at her bedraggled dress. Immersion in salt water and ensuing events hadn’t been kind to it. But she still wore a bathing suit underneath it, so she shrugged and said, “Sure.”

As she reached for the hem and pulled her dress over her head, Gaelith worked some magic with the room. The central table and cushions melted into the floor, leaving behind the cloth and the items that rested upon it. Fen dropped her dress to the ground, as Gaelith, with fine disregard for the dishes or spills, gathered up the edges of the cloth and bundled everything into the picnic basket.

Fen turned her back to Gaelith and bent her head forward to show off the phoenix that danced across her shoulder blade, wing stretching onto her neck.

“Lovely.” Gently, Gaelith traced a finger across the phoenix’s bright tail. Fen didn’t jump. She was floating in overload, the post-panic-attack haze where unbreakable glass separated her from reality. “Not functional but easily could be.”

“I have another on my side, my first.” Fen turned, framing the lotus on her hip with her fingers. She’d gotten that one underage, from a guy she knew who wanted the practice. He’d needed it, too, unfortunately.

“Hmm.” Gaelith didn’t say anything more but Fen heard disapproval in the sound.

“And then this one,” Fen said, angling so Gaelith could see the ivy climbing up the back of her leg.

Gaelith crouched next to her. “Ah, fine work on this. It would take but a moment to render it active.” She stood again. “A healer’s table and chair, please.”

Fen didn’t even blink as a cushioned, jointed table rose out of the floor, a stool next to it. The table folded itself into a chair-like structure and Fen dropped into it, lying back as Gaelith seated herself on the stool.

“Would you like me to repair all your art?” Gaelith inquired.

Fen closed her eyes.

The chair was so comfortable.

She wanted to sleep.

The day—this day—had been too much. Much too much. Maybe it was all a dream. Not entirely a nightmare, though. That glider. The island. Parts had been fun.

“Fen, dear?” The question sounded as it came from far away.

“Whatever,” Fen answered. The glass that kept reality away from her wasn’t breaking. She was completely safe behind it, completely sheltered.

And so tired.

So, so, so tired.

Fen opened her eyes.

Gaelith was gone.

The lights were dim and the table she’d fallen asleep on had turned into a bed, complete with sheets and blankets and comfortable pillows.

Fen sat up.

She stung. A throbbing pain in her wrist, a deeper ache on her hip, a tingle on her shoulder blade and little stabbing pinpricks along the back of her leg.

“Gaelith?”

Information flowed into her mind. “The third and oldest surviving child of Cyntha Del Mar, currently in her fourteenth score, her third sequential score as a healer-artist. Ranked first in the city in—”

“What the hell?” Fen jolted out of the bed, catching herself before she fell flat on the floor and landing in a standing position.

The words in her head broke off and there was momentary silence before she heard, “Null query,” in a voice that sounded exactly like hers if she were vaguely disgruntled. “Clarify, please.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Data access pattern created by Gaelith Del Mar, year 9925.”

Fen took a deep breath. “Are you in my head?”

Another moment of silence before a tentative voice said, “Access pattern placed on left hip?” as if it were a question.

Fen looked down at herself. She was still wearing the bikini she’d worn all day, but her lotus flower tattoo had been transformed. The crude black lines had become an intricate pattern of pink and white, with winding lines and crisscrossing zigzags.

“Oh, my God,” Fen breathed the words. “What did she do?”

“Assumptions: given context, the antecedent of the pronoun ‘she’ is the aforementioned Gaelith Del Mar. Contingent upon said assumption, Gaelith Del Mar provided subject with multiple patterns, including a traditional interpreter pattern and a non-traditional data access pattern, variable within established parameters.” The voice now sounded bright and cheerful, relieved of its uncertainty.

Fen fell back on the bed. She held up her wrist and stared at it. In the dim light, she could barely make out the design.

“Lights?” she said. Obediently, the room brightened.

A Celtic knot decorated her wrist. It was a fresh tattoo. The surrounding skin was bright pink, oozing slightly, the way skin did after a tattoo. The tattoo itself—oh, it was pretty. But it was nothing special.

It was a fucking Celtic knot.

She sat up and looked at her hip again.

Yep, tattoo. Different, definitely. She could see the original black ink, but it was almost invisible under the colored lines. But it was still just a picture inked into her skin.

She craned her neck, trying to see her phoenix but when she failed, she kicked up her leg, looking at the back of it. Ivy. Just ivy. Her ivy. Nothing different, except for an outline of deeper green around some of the leaves.

She flopped down onto the bed.

Dream, this was all a dream.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“The city-state of Syl Var,” the voice in her head responded promptly. “One of the seven cities of the Sia Mara, located at—”

“Stop,” Fen said. The voice stopped.

What the hell had Gaelith done?

Classic Elf Crap

“Can you answer all my questions?” Fen asked.

“No.” The reply was immediate. “Data access is restricted to Library Level One.”

“So you’re like a reference librarian? In my head?”

There was a moment of silence before the voice said, “Information retrieval service, yes. Information transmittal, however, is accomplished via mechanotransduction and the stimulation of auditory cells to produce electrical signals which depolarize—”

“Stop, stop.” Fen didn’t understand a word the voice was saying. Well, maybe the little ones. “Call it magic. That works for me.”

She lifted her arm to look at the tattoo on her wrist again. It hurt the way tattoos did, not an agonizing pain, but a definite sunburn-like sting. If she were dreaming, wouldn’t the pain wake her up? No, this was no dream.

“How do I get out of here?” she asked, sitting up and swinging her legs off the side of the bed.

The voice in her head didn’t answer.

Fen scowled. What use was it if it couldn’t tell her what she most wanted to know?

“All right, what about clothes? Can you tell me how to get something clean to wear?” she asked. Her dress was draped across the end of her bed but she didn’t want to put it on over her bikini. By now it probably smelled of sweat and fear and nightmares.

Again, the voice didn’t answer.

“A toilet? Can you handle that one? If I need to pee, where do I go?”

“In spaces created using nanomite-infused materials, modifications are accomplished through directed attention and specific communication,” the voice responded.

“What the hell does that mean?”

If Fen was going to have a voice in her head, she wanted one that spoke plain English. Okay, sure, maybe she was better off than the homeless people she knew in Chicago who couldn’t get their voices to quiet—at least hers had followed a direct order to shut up—but still, the geek speak was damn annoying.

“Successful nanomite direction requires concentrated will and…”

“Enough,” Fen snapped. “Tell me in English or not at all.”

The voice fell silent. And then, carefully, it said, “The ability to work with magic depends upon a confluence of factors impossible to measure in isolation. A novice magician must test her skills by trial-and-error.”

Ugh, that was supposed to be plain English?

“How do I test my skills?” Fen asked.

“Try them.”

Fen blinked. For once, the voice’s answer seemed straightforward. “Tell the room what I want, the way Gaelith did?”

“Not the room, but the magic that infuses it,” the voice corrected her.

Fen rolled her eyes. Why did the distinction matter? Gaelith spoke and the walls and floor listened to her. Call it the room, call it magic, call it nanomites, what difference did it make?