by Diane Duane
Oh, finally started paying attention, did you? said the tree. As if one of them isn’t enough, messing up someone’s fallen-leaf pattern that’s been in progress for fifteen years, drawing circles all over the ground and messing up the matrices. Well? What’s your excuse?
Nita sat there with her mouth open, looking up at the words the tree was making with cranky light and shadow. It works. It works! “Uh,” she said, not knowing whether the tree could understand her, “I didn’t draw any circles on your leaves—”
No, but that other one did, the tree said. Made circles and stars and diagrams all over Teleri-larch’s collage, doing some kind of power spell. You people just have no respect for artwork. Okay, so we’re amateurs, it added, a touch of belligerence creeping into its voice. So none of us have been here more than thirty years. Well, our work is still valid, and—
“Wait, listen, do you mean that there’s a, uh, a wizard out here somewhere, doing magic?”
What else? the tree said, all its leaves hissing with annoyance. And let me tell you, if you people don’t—
“Where? Where is she?”
He, the tree said. In the middle of all those made-stone roads. I remember when those roads went in, and they took a pattern Kimber had been working on for eighty years and scraped it bare and poured that black rock over it. One of the most complex, most—
He? Nita thought, and her heart sank slightly. Talking to boys wasn’t exactly one of her specialties. “You mean across the freeway, in the middle of the interchange? That green place?”
Didn’t you hear me? Are you deaf? That other one must be, not to have heard Teleri yelling at him. And now I suppose you’ll start scratching up the ground and invoking powers and ruining my collage. Well, let me tell you—
“I, uh—sorry, I’ll talk to you later,” Nita said hurriedly. She got to her feet, brushed herself off, and started away through the woods at a trot. Another wizard? And my God, the trees—! Their laughter at her amazement was all around her as she ran, the merriment of everything from foot-high weeds to hundred-foot oaks rustling in the wind as she passed—grave chuckling of maples and alders, titters from groves of sapling sassafras, silly giggling in the raspberry bushes, a huge belly laugh from the oldest hollow ash tree before the freeway interchange. How could I never have heard them before!
Sweating with exertion and embarrassment, Nita stopped just under cover of the trees at the freeway’s edge to make sure there were no cars at all in sight in either direction before she headed out to cross. The interchange was a cloverleaf, and the circle formed by one of the off-ramps held a stand of the original pre-freeway trees within it, in a kind of sunken bowl. When the road was completely empty Nita dashed across the concrete and paused a moment, breathless, at the edge of the downslope before starting down it slantwise.
This was another of her secret places, a spot shaded and peaceful in summer and winter both because of the pine trees that roofed in the hollow. But there was nothing peaceful about it today. Something was in the air, and the trees, irritated, were muttering among themselves. Even on a foot-thick cushion of pine needles, Nita’s feet seemed to be making too much noise. She tried to walk softly and wished the trees wouldn’t stare at her so. When the slope finally bottomed out she stopped, looking around her nervously… and that was when she saw him.
The boy was holding a stick in one hand and staring intently at the ground underneath a huge larch on one side of the grove. He was shorter than she was, and looked a little younger, and he also looked familiar somehow. Who is that? Nita thought, feeling more nervous still. No one had ever been in one of her secret places when she came there.
The boy just kept frowning at the ground, as if it were a test paper and he was trying to scowl the right answer out of it. He was a very ordinary-looking kid, with straight black hair and a Hispanic look, wearing a beat-up dark-green hooded jacket and jeans and sneakers… and he was holding a willow wand of a type that Nita’s book recommended for certain types of spelling.
He let out what looked like a breath of irritation and put his hands on his hips. “Maldito,” he muttered, shaking his head—and halfway through the shake, he caught sight of Nita.
He looked surprised and embarrassed for a moment. Then his face steadied down to a simple worried look as he simply stood regarding Nita. With something of a shock she realized that he wasn’t going to yell at her, or chase her, or call her names; and he wasn’t going to run away, either. He was simply going to let her explain herself. Nita almost didn’t know what to do next. It didn’t seem quite normal.
“Hi,” she said.
The boy looked at her uncertainly, as if trying to place her. “Hi.”
Nita wasn’t sure quite where to begin. But the marks on the ground, and the willow wand, seemed to confirm that a power spell was in progress. “Uh,” she said, “I, uh, don’t see the oak leaves. Or the string.”
The boy’s dark eyes widened. “So that’s how you got through!”
“Through what?”
“I put a binding spell around the edges of the place,” he said. “I tried this spell once or twice before, but people kept showing up just as I was getting into it, and I could never get it finished.”
Nita suddenly recognized him. “You’re the one they were calling crazy last week.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed again. He looked annoyed. “Uh, yeah. A couple of the eighth graders found me last Monday. They were heading into the woods to shoot the place up with air rifles, and they came across me while I was working. When they couldn’t figure out what I was doing, at lunch the next day they said—”
“I know what they said.” A bunch of the older boys had put together a badly rhymed rap about the “retard kid” who snuck off into the woods to play with himself; they performed it in the cafeteria, a lot of kids got video of it on their phones, and there’d been much discussion about whether it was worth putting up on YouTube. Nita remembered at the time feeling vaguely sorry for the subject of their mockery, whoever he was, and thinking that boys could be nearly as cruel as girls sometimes.
The boy let out a relieved breath. “For a moment there I thought I blew the binding ,” he said. “You surprised me.”
“Maybe you can’t bind another wizard out,” Nita said. That was it, she thought. If he’s not one—
“Uhh … I guess not.” He paused. “I’m Kit,” he said then. “Christopher Rodriguez. I hate Christopher, though.”
“Nita Callahan,” she said. “It’s short for Juanita. I hate that, too. Listen—the trees are really pissed off at you.”
Kit stared at her. “The trees?”
“Uh, mostly this one.” She looked up into the branches of the larch, which were trembling with more force than the wind could lend them. “See, the trees do—I don’t know, it’s some kind of artwork, with their fallen leaves—and you started doing your power schematic all over their work…”
“Trees?” Kit said. “Rocks I knew about, I talked to a rock last week—or it talked to me, actually—though it wasn’t talking, really…” He looked up at the tree. “Well, hey, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know! I’ll try to put things back the way I found them. But I might as well not have bothered with the spell,” he said, looking again at Nita. “It got caught. It’s not working. You know anything about this?”
He gestured at the diagram he had drawn on the cleared ground, and Nita went to crouch down by it. The pattern was one she had seen in her book, a basic design of interlocking circles and woven parallelograms. There were symbols drawn inside the angles and outside the curves, some of them letters or words in the Roman alphabet, some of them the graceful characters of the wizardly Speech. “I just got my book yesterday,” she said. “Not sure I’ll be much help. What were you trying to get? The power part of it I can see.”
She glanced up and found Kit looking with somber interest at her black eye. “I’m getting tired of being beat up for my accent,” he said. “The idea was to attract enough
power to me so that the older kids would just let me be and not start anything. An ‘aura,’ the book called it. But the spell got stuck a couple of steps in. When I checked the book it said that I was missing an element.” He looked questioningly at Nita. “Maybe you’re it?”
Nita shook her head. “I don’t know. I was looking for a spell for something different. I got beat up and the kids who did it stole my favorite pen, my space pen–you know, the kind astronauts used to use, it writes on anything. It was a present. I always took all my tests with it, always passed when I used it. I want it back.” She stopped, then added, “And I guess I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t get beat up anymore, either.”
“We could make a finding spell and tie it into this one,” Kit said.
“Yeah? Well, we better put these needles back first.”
“Yeah.”
Kit stuck the willow wand in his back pocket as he and Nita worked to push the larch’s needles back over the cleared ground as evenly as they could. “Where’d you get your book?” Nita said.
“In the city, about a month ago. My mother and father went out antique hunting. There’s this one part of Second Avenue where all the little shops are—and one place had this box of secondhand books. I stopped to look at them because I always look at old books, and this one caught my eye. My hand, actually. I was going after a Goosebumps book underneath it and it pinched me.”
Nita laughed. “Mine snagged me in the library,” she said. “I didn’t want Joanne—she’s the one who beat me up—I didn’t want her to get my pen, but I’m a lot more glad she didn’t get this.” She pulled her copy of the book out of her jacket as Kit straightened up beside her. She looked over at him. “Did it work for you?” she demanded. “Does it really work?”
Kit stood there for a moment, looking at the replaced needles. “I fixed my dog’s nose,” he said. “A wasp stung him and I made the swelling go down right then. And when I talked to that rock, it talked back. No mistaking it.” He looked up at Nita again, and his eyes were alight with the excitement of it. “C’mon,” he said. “There’s a place in the middle where the ground is bare. Let’s see what happens.”
Together they walked to the center of the hollow, where the pine trees made a circle open to the sky and the ground was bare brown dirt. Kit pulled out his willow wand and began drawing the diagram again. “This one I know by heart,” he said. “I’ve started it so many times. Well, this time for sure.” He got his book out of his back pocket and consulted it, beginning to write symbols into the diagram. “Would you check if there’s anything else we need for a finding spell?”
“Sure.” Nita found the necessary section in the index of her book and checked it. “Just an image of the thing to be found,” she said. “I have to imagine it while you’re spelling.” For a few moments more she watched him draw, and then said, “Kit, do you have any idea why this works? Leaves, pieces of string, designs on the ground…. It doesn’t make sense.”
Kit kept drawing. “There’s a chapter on advanced theory in there, but I couldn’t get through it all the way. The magic’s supposed to have something to do with the way things interrupt space—”
“What?”
Kit shrugged. “Listen, that’s all I could get out of it. There was this one phrase that kept turning up, ‘spatial claudication.’ I think that’s how you say it. It’s something like, space isn’t really empty, it folds around objects—or even words—and if you put the right things in the right places and do the right things with them, say the right things in the Speech, then the magic happens. Where’s the string?”
“This one with all the knots in it?” Nita reached down and picked it up.
“Must have fallen out of my pocket. Stand on this end, okay?” He dropped one end of the string into the middle of the diagram, and Nita stepped onto it. Kit walked around her and the diagram with it, using the end of the string to trace a circle. Just before he came to the place where he had started, he used the willow wand to make a complicated sort of figure-eight mark—a “wizards’ knot,” the book had called it—and closed the circle with it. Kit tugged at the string as he stood up. Nita let it go, and Kit coiled it and put it away.
“You’ve got to do this part yourself,” Kit said. “I can’t write your name for you—each person who’s working with a spell has to do their own to make sure they get it right. There’s a table in there with all the symbols in it.”
Nita scuffed some pages aside and found it, a long list of English letters and numbers, and all the symbols in the Speech that were their direct equivalents. She got down to look at Kit’s name, so that she could see how to write hers, and group by group began to puzzle the symbols out. “Your birthday’s August twenty-fifth?”
“Uh-huh.”
Nita looked at the symbol for the year. “You’re in that special track at school,” she said. “Advanced placement.”
“Yeah. Hate it,” Kit said, sounding entirely too cheerful. Nita knew that tone of voice—it was the one in which she usually answered Joanne, while trying to hide her own fear of what was sure to happen next. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they were my age,” Kit went on, looking over Nita’s shoulder and speaking absently. “But they keep saying things like ‘If you’re so smart, ‘ow come you talk so fonny?’“ His imitation of their imitation of his slight accent was precise and bitter. “They make me sick. Trouble is, they outweigh me.”
Nita nodded and started to drawing her name on the ground inside the spell circle, using the substitutions and symbols that appeared in her manual. Some of them were simple and brief; some of them were almost more complex than she believed possible, crazy amalgams of curls and twists and angles like some insane kind of shorthand. She reproduced them carefully and tied all the symbols together, fastening them into a circle with the same wizards’ knot that Kit had used on the outer circle and on his own name.
“Done?” Kit asked. He was standing up again, tracing the outer circle around one more time.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He finished the tracing with another repetition of the wizards’ knot and straightened up; then he put his hand out as if to feel something in the air. “Good,” he said. “Here, come check this.”
“Check what?” Nita got up and went over to Kit. She put out her hand as he had, and found that something was resisting the movement of her hand through the air—something that gave slightly under increased pressure, like a mattress being pushed down and then springing back again. Nita felt momentarily nervous. “Can air get through this?”
“I think so. I didn’t have any trouble the last couple of times I did it. It’s only supposed to seal out unfriendly influences.”
Nita stood there with her hand resting against nothing, and the nothing supported her weight. Slowly a big grin spread across her face as the last of her doubts about the existence of magic went away. The contents of the wizard’s manual she might possibly have imagined or purposely misread. She might have dozed off and dreamed the talking tree. But this was daylight, the waking world, and she was leaning one-handed on empty air!
“Those guys who came across you when you had this up,” she said, “what did they think?”
“They didn’t understand what was happening.” Kit laughed at the memory. “Not only couldn’t they get at me, they thought it was their idea to stop and yell at me from a distance. They even thought they were missing me with the airguns on purpose, too, to scare me.” His grin grew nearly big enough to match Nita’s. “It’s true, what the book said: some people couldn’t see a magic if it bit them.” He glanced around the finished circle. “The manual says there are other spells like this that don’t need drawings after you do them the first time, and when you need them, they’re there really fast—like if someone’s about to try beating you up. People just kind of skid away from you.”
“That sounds so great,” Nita said, with relish. Thoughts of what else she might be able to do to Joanne flickered through her head, but she pushed them aside f
or the moment. “What next?”
“Next,” Kit said, going to the middle of, the circle and sitting down carefully so as not to smudge any of the marks he’d made, “we read it. Or I read most of it, and you read your name. Though first you have to check my figuring.”
“How come?” Nita joined him, avoiding the lines and angles.
“Two-person spell—both people always check each other’s work. But you check your name again after I do.”
Kit was already squinting at Nita’s squiggles, so she pulled out her book again. and began looking at the symbols Kit had drawn in the dirt. There were clearly two sides to the diagram, and the book said they both had to balance like a chemical equation. Most of the symbols had numerical values attached, for ease in balancing, and Nita started doing addition in her head, making sure both sides matched. Eventually she was satisfied. She looked again at her name, seeing nothing wrong. “Is it okay?”
“Yeah.” Kit leaned back a little. “You have to be careful with names, it says. They’re a way of saying what you are— and if you write something in a spell that’s not what you are, well…”
“You, mean… you change … because the spell says you’re something else than what you are? You become that?”
Kit shrugged, but he looked uneasy. “A spell is saying that you want something to happen,” he said. “If you say your name wrong—”
Nita shuddered. “Wow, okay. And now?”
“Now we start. You do your name when I come to it. Then, the goal part down there—since it’s a joint goal, we say it together. Think you can do it okay if I go slow?”
“Yeah.”
Kit took a deep breath with his eyes closed, then opened his eyes and began to read.
Nita had never heard a voice speaking a spell aloud before, and the effect was strange. Ever so slightly, ever so slowly, things began to change around her. The tree-sheltered quiet grew quieter. The cool light that filtered through the canopy of branches grew expectant, fringed with secrecy the way things seen through the edge of a lens are fringed with rainbows. Nita began to feel as if she was caught in the moment between a very vivid dream and the awakening from it. There was that feeling of living in a body—of being aware of familiar surroundings and the realities of the daylight world waiting to be resumed—yet at the same time seeing those surroundings differently, colored with another sort of light, another kind of time. On one level Nita heard Kit reciting a string of polysyllables that should have been meaningless to her—words for symbols, pieces of words, babble. Yet she could also hear Kit saying casually, and, it seemed, in English, “We need to know something, and we suggest this particular method of finding the information…” And the words didn’t break the expectancy, the listening silence. For once, for the first time, the dream was real while Nita was awake. Power stirred in the air around her and waited for her to shape it.