Gift of the Unmage (18 page)

But soon the days began to shake down into routine, enlivened by Mr. Siffer’s arbitrary decisions as to what was covered by the syllabus on any given day and the increasingly complex problems posed by Twitterpat in the computer lab, where the students were starting to write programming code.

For most of the students in Twitterpat’s class, intensive computer study was a fairly new thing. Computers had been used in business for nearly half a century, coming into use about the same time the Alphiri had made their presence known to humans. Personal computers in homes, however, had not become commonplace until the year that Thea herself was born, when the discovery that they were inert to spells and magic made magic-users across the world suddenly scramble to own one, in order to safely store otherwise potentially dangerous material.

In ordinary schools such as the one Thea and most of the students in Twitterpat’s class had
attended before they had come to the Academy, computer science was still considered to be very much an area of study that was of more use to those few people who were born non-mages. In circles in which Thea’s own family moved, it was considered to be perfectly adequate to be able to use just enough of a computer’s capability for it to be immediately useful, and although there were mages overseeing certain aspects of computer software, those that involved spell storage, the code for these programs themselves was written by and large by people who were not magic-users. It was almost considered beneath a mage to know precisely how his or her computer functioned. If there was trouble, one called a technician—until then, it was considered perfectly acceptable to be only just as knowledgeable about the home computer as was necessary to keep it running.

The Academy offered a choice of foreign languages, from French and Japanese to Alphiri; for a moment Thea had been terrified that there would be an actual Alphiri teacher in charge of that particular course, but in fact it was taught by a Miss Eden, a tiny woman with snow-white hair and eyes like black beads who, apparently, had lived in the Alphiri cities for a couple of
years before she returned home to the human world. Rumor in the school had it that was what had turned her hair white in the first place. There was certainly enough strangeness about her to believe that. Thea wasn’t taking the class, but anything Alphiri had taken on a patina of dread for her and she avoided the whole issue. None of her particular group had chosen to take that option, either, but every now and then some of the students who were taking the Alphiri class would show off their new mastery of the language by breaking into its liquid syllables with each other, and it always made Thea’s hackles rise when she heard it spiking through the white noise of conversations in the school cafeteria.

“You’d think that it wouldn’t be allowed,” she muttered, stabbing her chicken viciously with her fork.

“What are you talking about?” asked Ben Broome, looking up.

“That lingo,”
Thea said, pointing with her fork. “Alphiri prattle. You’d think that it would be forbidden here.”

“But the Alphiri aren’t magic,” Ben said. “Not really. They’re just…a different people. You might as well say that we shouldn’t learn
French or German.”

“They are, too,” Thea said stubbornly.

“If you’re that strict about it,” said Magpie, “we couldn’t have Signe as a teacher. But she isn’t
magic
, not herself. She’s just…foreign.”

Aside from its obvious lack of Ars Magica classes and perhaps a stricter emphasis in academic credentials than Thea was used to, school was school. But sharing her life with Magpie had been a different experience for Thea. For the first week or so Thea kept waking to Magpie’s gentle snores, but she had finally got used to having another person asleep in the room with her, and having a roommate soon ceased to be a novelty.

Magpie’s occasional nocturnal excursions were less easy to sleep through. She was a self-appointed healer of wounded creatures, and every now and then she’d bring a patient into her room to nurse back to health. The first time it had been some small nestlings in a cardboard box in her closet; Thea had lain awake for almost an hour trying to locate the source of the chirping, before Magpie, who had been out, had returned and confessed.

“You can’t tell anybody, I’m not supposed to
have them in here. Mrs. Chen would take the poor things away and it’d be the end of them,” Magpie said.

“Don’t be silly, Mag, she’s got ears, same as me,” Thea said. “If she comes in here and they don’t shut up, I don’t have to say anything.”

“They know when to be quiet,” Magpie said.

“What are they, anyway?”

“Baby blue jays,” Magpie said. “I found them on the ground; they were nearly dead.”

“Baby birds
die
, Mag.”

“Not when I’ve got anything to do with it,” Magpie declared.

Thea looked at her with a sudden speculative glance. “Healing touch?”

“Nah,” Magpie said, but she had hesitated, just barely. “They just…live, when I get hold of them.”

“You’d better not let
me
anywhere near them,” Thea said. “I kill potted plants, never mind animals.”

Magpie cuffed her on the shoulder. “Oh,
really
.”

“I’m serious, you just try me,” Thea said. “If you let me
look
at them, they might die of shock right then. It’s best if I…don’t know they’re there.”

It was a statement of complicity, and Magpie understood it as such. She flashed Thea a grateful smile, and no more was said about the baby jays. But they were followed by other things: maimed squirrels, a rabbit with a broken paw that Magpie splinted with matchsticks, a young raccoon that Magpie rocked to sleep in her arms and which nuzzled at her with its pointed little snout like an affectionate cat.

The familiar rustling of Magpie sneaking in yet another patient woke Thea from a light sleep one night in late September. The room was dark except for a wash of moonlight through the window; the curtains were open to a sky that was crystal clear with the first cool touch of autumn.

“What is it now?” Thea whispered a little crossly in the general direction of a moving shadow tucking something small and squeaking into a cardboard box in the corner of her closet. A mouse maybe. Or a bat.

“Shhh. Go back to sleep,” Magpie commanded.

But the moonlight was in Thea’s eyes, and she propped her head on her hand, staring out at the sky.

“Senic’ta,” she murmured. “Achievement and success. Harvest Moon…”

Magpie straightened. “What was that?”

Thea shifted her weight to turn and look at her roommate. “What was what?”

“I haven’t met many people outside the reservation who know that the full moon has a name,” Magpie said carefully.

“I learned,” Thea said, “from a tribal elder.” She sat up, reached for the top drawer of the dresser beside her bed, and rummaged in the moonlit shadows inside. Her fingers found the three feathers of her necklace and closed around them. She hesitated, then hauled out the necklace. “I never wear it where people can see…but he gave me this.”

Magpie padded across the room, her bare feet making almost no sound on the carpeted floor. She perched cross-legged on the edge of Thea’s bed, reaching for the necklace, and fingered the feathers curiously.

“There’s ancestral magic in this,” Magpie said. “These things stand for something. They can be used by those who know how. I thought you were supposed to be a magidim, that you couldn’t touch this stuff—isn’t that why you are here?”

But Thea answered with a question of her own. “If
you
are supposed to be such a magidim, how come you can sense that it’s ancestral magic at all?”

“I went through the rites,” Magpie said. “I went through
all
of them. I was even sent out on a guardian spirit quest, and lived in the wilderness by myself for a week waiting for my guardian to call my name—but neither animal nor tree did, or perhaps they all did and I was deafened by the cries. Either way, when I came back, they told me that magic ran through my fingers, that I could not hold it, that I had no guardian, that I would never be a medicine woman.”

“Is that what you wanted?” Thea asked softly.

“All the women of my family have been,” Magpie said, her voice small and sad. She fingered the feathers, paying out the leather thong of the necklace between her hands. “Raven—for wisdom, I presume. Eagle…for pride?” she questioned.

“For courage, Cheveyo said.”

“Cheveyo.” Magpie rolled the word on her tongue, tasting it.

“The Southwest,” Thea said helpfully.

“What tribe?”

“Anasazi.”

Magpie sat up and shot her a look full of astonishment. “The People of the Light? The Old Ones who vanished? Where on earth did you find one of them? I thought they were all dead.”

“It wasn’t a place,” Thea said carefully. “My father…I had a Pass. I went…I went
back
.”

In the shadows, Magpie’s jaw dropped. “You time-tripped? Your father must have more influence than you can possibly know—do you have any idea how expensive those Passes are?”

“I’m a Double Seventh,” Thea said, letting her head fall back into the pillow and staring at the ceiling. “I guess they thought it was worth any price to try and wake whatever it is that was asleep inside me.”

“And you agreed to go? Just like that? I would have been terrified.”

“When my father left me there,” Thea said, “I was.”

“But you went anyway,” Magpie said, stroking the eagle’s feather that she held across her palm.
Eagle, for courage
.

“There wasn’t really a choice. And anyway, after…”

“Did it work?” Magpie asked softly.

“It showed me a different sky,” Thea said after a few moments of silence. “There are many worlds, not just this one. And there are many choices within those worlds. It brought me here, in a way. Before I went to Cheveyo, I hated the very idea of coming to this school….”

“Few people
want
to come here,” Magpie said.

“Yeah, but with me it was always more than one magidim child of a magical family,” said Thea. “The way I saw it, if I came here I wasn’t just a black sheep, I was
the
black sheep, the one who could never be redeemed.”

“And after?”

“After…that last day, back on the mesa, Cheveyo gave me that third feather, the turkey feather as a reward for learning what patience I could. He told me to go home and pick my own battlegrounds for the battles I’d have to fight. After that, coming here didn’t seem like a defeat anymore. It was more like I had picked my battlefield.”

“Without magic? In a world that depends on it?”

“I spent a very brief while in a world that
flowed with it,” Thea said slowly, “and there…I was different. Things were different. Light was different. It let itself be plucked from the sky like ribbons, and it could be woven together like a braid.”

There was awe in Magpie’s face and a little envy. “I wish I could have seen it.”

She handed the necklace back without another word. They would keep each other’s secrets.

The new patient in Magpie’s animal hospital turned out to be a mouse, a tiny, timid creature that barely stirred in its nest of shredded paper in the cardboard box. It had been there only a few days before Signe announced another field trip and Magpie had to scramble to make arrangements for its care while she was away. It was a full weekend this time, with the class divided into teams mapping out the ecological profile of a river mouth, a place where freshwater met salt and where creatures shaped by two sets of very different circumstances met and mingled. By the time the class returned to the school, it was fairly late on Sunday night. The mood should have been relaxed and laid back. Instead, the place was ablaze with lights. Students hung out of res
idence windows, calling to one another, and the administration building was lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Something happened,” Signe said in her soft accent as she shepherded her charges off the school bus. “Please gather your things and go directly back to your rooms. No sense in adding to the commotion.”

“What’s going on?” Magpie demanded of the first person she met in her residence hall.

“Nothing is in the news again,” the girl said. “And this time, I think people are dead.”

“If people are dead, that isn’t nothing,” Magpie said reasonably.

But Tess was frowning. “Not nothing, Mag,
Nothing
. That’s what they called it at home. The ‘Nothing.’ I didn’t really know what they meant, not then—but Terry and I tend to avoid magic where we can, and I wasn’t really paying attention. I do know that it’s a…it’s…they don’t know what it is. It’s just a Nothing, a black shadow, and people see different things when they look at it—it’s like looking at clouds and seeing shapes in them.”

“But what is it? Where did it come from?” Magpie asked.

“Nobody knows. And it’s just there, like a blot, not actually doing anything but just hanging there in the background like it is waiting for something.”

Thea was remembering little comments dropped in passing by the adults in her family—what she had taken to be dismissive responses of “Oh, nothing!” when she asked if anything was wrong. But she had been out of circulation for some time, in a place where she had not been able to access the mainstream news or Terranet. Her parents had been talking in hushed worried tones about unspecified events—what Thea had always lumped together under a general heading of “Bad Stuff”—for a long time, even before she’d left for Cheveyo’s world. At first she had been too wrapped up in her own self-pity to notice or to care, and after she had returned home, her time had been taken up by preparations to come to the Academy and she had not paid much attention. Now, however, she could not fail to focus on the matter. As Aunt Zoë might have said, the very air she breathed smelled excited and afraid.

“A magical thing?” Thea said, frowning, aware that she should have known far more about the
subject than she did. “Or something physical?”

“No, it isn’t actually physical—the way I think I heard my mother describe it is that it’s more like the coming of a migraine, a black shadow coming over your vision.”