“How do I fix it?” I asked, my voice shaking with fright. I’d never seen anything like this before.
“Breathe slowly.” Mom’s voice was calm and soothing, and her hands on my shoulders helped ground me again. “This is your energy. You control it, and you can direct it anywhere that you want it to go.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but I slowed down my breathing, and then I thought about directing the energy like she said. It was part of me, but it wasn’t like a hand that I could just control automatically—was it?
I felt the energy swirling around me. I pictured it flowing smoothly, unrestricted, all over my body. And then as I watched, the snarls uncurled themselves, the blockages disappeared—and so did my pain.
I grinned, and Mom smiled back at me. “What else can I do?” All of a sudden, I was curious about experimenting with this new power. What were the limitations? Could I only affect myself, or other things as well?
“Look around you,” she said, dropping her hands and taking a step back. “Everything has its own magical energy if you look closely enough, which is why we can use inanimate objects to create magitek. You can alter them directly. Try something.”
I immediately thought of special effects that I’d seen depicting magic in movies. Could I just wave my hand around and make anything happen? I held out my hand and concentrated on a pen resting on the counter, imagining it flying to me.
Nothing happened.
Mom chuckled under her breath. “Are you trying to get the pen? Do you see its energy?”
Well, no, I couldn’t, but how much energy could a pen have? I concentrated harder. Then I saw a faint gray outline around it. But what good could that do me? A pen didn’t have the ability to fly.
“Touch it with your magic,” Mom prompted.
It was like stretching out fingers that I didn’t have. It was hard, at first, sending the magic farther away from my body. But gradually two tendrils unfurled from the aura around my hand and snaked out to the pen. When my pink magic touched its gray outline, it felt like I was holding the object in my hand already: the smooth surface, the slight weight.
Then suddenly, the pen leaped off the counter and soared through the air until it actually did land right in my outstretched hand. I was so surprised that I almost dropped it.
I squealed with delight and looked up at my mom. “I’ll never struggle to get books off the top shelf at the library again!”
“Good.” Mom’s eyes were gleaming with pride—and maybe something else. Why did she really want me to learn magic?
I tipped my head to one side and watched as her aura rippled as she spoke, hoping for some clue. “What are you going to teach me next?”
She grinned. “Oh, we have so much ground to cover, and so little time to do it. If you’re feeling better, then we’ll get right to work. Think of this as your magic boot camp.”
9
Keep Silent
Rosamunde
Weaving an entire cloak out of nettles turned out to be hard work.
Dandelion gave me gloves to wear when he showed me how to pick the nettles, to protect my hands from the sting. Since nettles were best picked in late summer, and every season existed simultaneously in the Otherworld, we only had to find a patch of nettles where the leaves had died off but before they started their new growth for the fall. They weren’t hard to cut with gardening shears. We bundled up as many as we could carry, tying them into long bunches with twine, and took them back to the Fae’s house.
I remembered his home from my visit a few months before. Although it looked like a modest cottage on the outside, it was bigger on the inside, and filled with just the kind of brightly colored, ostentatious decorations that only someone with Dandelion’s unique taste could enjoy. Stained glass windows turned the sunlight into a multitude of colors that danced across tacky patterned upholstery on his hand-carved wooden furniture. This time I also noticed the bookshelves lining his walls: all of the books seemed to be from the mortal world.
Dandelion saw me looking at them, and I hoped he would tell me more. It was so hard not to talk. But he just shook his head and beckoned me down a hallway. “Don’t get distracted. We’ll soak the nettles in the bathtub overnight to rett them.”
Overnight seemed like an arbitrary time period, given that time didn’t seem to pass at all in the Otherworld. But Dandelion claimed to be able to track the passage of time in the mortal world from the other side of the Veil—a trick that he hadn’t taught me yet. All I could do was trust his judgment, so I followed him into the bathroom.
He pointed for me to fill the tub with the nettles and then turn the water on. I opened my mouth to ask who did the plumbing in the Otherworld—they didn’t seem to have many of the mortal industrial comforts, since he had candles instead of electric lights—but he just shook his head again. “No talking,” he reminded me.
I resisted the urge to groan aloud. I hoped this whole process wasn’t going to take long, because not being able to talk felt even more frustrating than the time I hadn’t been able to use my magic because Mom bound my powers to keep me from snooping in her business, or the time I lost my hearing when a spell backfired.
The two bundles of nettles, folded in half to squeeze in length-wise, took up almost all of the space in the tub. Even with the tap turned on full blast, it took a long while for the tub to fill with enough water to cover all of the nettles. At last I turned the water off and looked up at my patron expectantly.
“Now you go home and wait,” he said with a shrug. “Will you be able to find your way back?”
I nodded.
“Good. See you in twelve hours,” he promised.
I left his house, and the dragon scale necklace guided me back to the right gate. I entered the mortal world at five-thirty in the afternoon. It was already growing dark, and the crowd that had been at the castle for the court hearing was long gone. So I had to fly home alone in the cold on my broom.
Dad was waiting for me at home. “How was the arraignment?”
All I could do was shrug.
He frowned. “You don’t want to talk about it?”
I shook my head.
“Okay.” He sighed and opened the freezer. “Does chicken sound okay for dinner?”
We had a very quiet meal together. I found it easier not to talk if I kept my eyes down and focused on my food. If I made eye contact with Dad, he tried to start a new topic of conversation, and it was so uncomfortable for me to keep shaking my head. We usually talked about how our day went, an attempt to copy the happiness of our former family dinners together. Now it just looked like I was ignoring him for some reason.
At last, he asked if I was upset. I looked down at the floor and shook my head.
As soon as dinner was over, I escaped to my room. In private, I felt angry at the guardian’s orders to stay silent. How was I concentrating my energies on weaving the cloak right now, when the nettles weren’t even ready for me to do anything? I was just sitting around waiting. There was no good reason for me not to talk, even to my own dad.
Dandelion knocked on my bedroom window at five a.m., an hour earlier than I usually woke up to get ready for school. “I said it would be about twelve hours,” he said apologetically. “Get dressed now, and if we hurry through the gate, there’s still time for you to make school.”
I scrambled into my school uniform, grabbed my bag, and then shrugged into the heavy coat that I wore to fly in during the winter. I couldn’t ask how he’d traveled to my house, because he didn’t seem to have a car. He perched on the back of my broom and put his arms around my waist to keep his balance as I flew us up the mountain to the castle. Normally, I didn’t let just anyone get that friendly with me, and only a few close people had gotten rides from me, but he’d been my friend since I was a little girl. It didn’t feel weird to have him there, and he helped keep me warm on the pre-dawn flight.
I glanced at my phone when we touched the ground. It was almost six already. I couldn�
��t afford to take too much time in the Otherworld, because my first class started at seven-fifteen, and it would take me almost half an hour to fly to the school.
We stepped through the gate easily and arrived just outside his house. Inside, I found that the water in the tub was a little brackish and green, but fortunately, none of the nettles had started rotting yet.
“Drain all of the water out, then fill it again,” Dandelion said over my shoulder. “They’ll need two or three more days to soak, but you’ll only have to check them once a day from now on, so you can come by whenever it’s convenient for you.”
I turned around, put my hands on my hips, and gave him a look that said all the fuss would be much more convenient for him to take care of.
He waggled his finger at me. “Oh, no, witchling, this is your spell. I’m only going to show you what to do the first time, and then you have to do all of the work yourself. Of course, if you’d like, you could take the next batch of nettles back to your house, and let them soak in your own tub so you wouldn’t have to run back and forth.”
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. In the little rental house, Dad and I shared the only bathroom, which had a combination shower and tub to save space. If I filled it with nettles, not only would we not be able to bathe, but Dad would have a million questions that I couldn’t answer.
“Then if you’re going to accept my generous donation of my bathtub, you can’t expect me to do any of the work for you.” He turned and left the room.
I sat on the floor, bored, while I waited for the water to go down the drain. There wasn’t anything to do but look at my school books, and I’d rather watch paint dry than do extra homework or studying. So I poked at the nettles. Their sting was gone, but they felt woody and hard to the touch, and they smelled like the forest after a heavy rain.
The last of the water gurgled away. I plugged the drain and waited for the tub to fill again.
When I’d finished, I got up to leave. Dandelion waved to me as I went out the door, but said nothing. I wanted to give him an earful, to tell him how pointless and silly the whole process was, but I wanted to keep my promise. So hurried off to see how late I would be for school.
Although it had felt like a long time in the Otherworld, when I stepped back through the gate, my phone synced up to the network and told me it was still only six-thirty. Plenty of time to make it to school. I hopped on my broom and flew a little slower so the wind wouldn’t cut so cold.
School was a whole new mess to navigate. Not only was I prevented from speaking, but Zil and Marzell were out on bail. Would they be in class? I looked around nervously and spotted them at a distance in the parking lot. I ducked my head and hurried inside to avoid a confrontation.
Kai caught me in the hallway. “Hey, Rosa,” he said with a half-hearted smile. “I never got the chance to talk to you yesterday. Do you have a minute?”
What could I do? He would ask me about getting back together, and there was no way I could explain my doubts about that without words. So I just frowned and shook my head.
His face fell. “Are you still mad at me?”
I shrugged and gave another slight shake of my head. I was still upset at his immaturity, but I didn’t have the energy to be very mad about it anymore. After all, his mom had warned me that he would be a long time growing up. He couldn’t help it that kitsune aged so much more slowly than humans—but they got a much longer lifespan out of the deal. By the time he was actually ready to settle down with a partner, I’d be long dead and probably forgotten.
Kai stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. “I wish you would at least talk to me about it. I want to make it up to you, but I don’t know how with you constantly running off.”
There wasn’t body language sufficient to answer that. I stood silent and stared off into the distance. If only I could be anywhere else right now.
He looked back up at me with his puppy dog eyes. “Are you already seeing someone else?”
I shook my head “no” again.
“Well, then, I guess you just need some time,” he said, hope returning to his voice. His head perked up.
How to answer that without giving him mixed messages and letting him hope for something that should probably never happen again? I would need to be an expert mime to play out those kinds of charades. I just shrugged and walked away before he could ask me any more awkward questions.
My next encounter was Glen, Ashleigh, and Heather, who all arrived together. Odd, because students who rode the bus were often the last ones to get to school in winter, sometimes even getting there late when the roads were particularly bad. Heather must be getting a ride with Glen, and that made me wonder all over again about the current status of their relationship. But he was still driving Ashleigh, too, which just made it weird and complicated.
Glen put a reassuring arm around my shoulder. “Zil and Marzell have been instructed by my grandfather not to speak to you or attempt to approach you in any way on school grounds,” he said in a low voice. “Our teachers should have gotten a memo about it, too, so they’ll keep an eye out for you.”
I smiled at him with relief. Zil was already staring at me from across the hallway, and let’s just say that if looks could kill, I would have been a corpse before I even entered the school building. Not having to actually talk to her—or not talk, as all of my conversations had suddenly become rather one-sided—took one worry off of my mind.
“We’re going to keep you safe until the trial,” he said. Then he looked at me sidelong. “What happened yesterday with your Fae friend?”
Oh, great. I stared back at him and shook my head slowly.
Glen frowned. “Nothing happened, or you can’t tell me about it?”
I was going to get a crick in the neck from shaking my head so much. I opened my eyes wider, trying to convey the truth.
Ashleigh popped up on my other side. “Rosa can’t talk?”
I nodded “yes.”
Now her eyes widened. “Why? Did you lose your voice? Are you sick? Did another one of your spells backfire? Are you under some kind of oath not to speak?”
I kept shaking “no” at each suggestion she rattled off, until the last one. I put my finger on my nose: nailed it.
Heather leaned closer, suddenly interested in the conversation. “Are you under orders from the Queen of Faerie like that weird guy?”
Well, no, not exactly. My instructions came from the guardian, and her orders came from the Queen. But Dandelion had implied that he worked for the Queen without mentioning the dragon as a middleman, and my friends had stopped pestering him, so maybe I could do the same thing. I tentatively nodded my head “yes.”
Now all three of my friends exchanged an odd look. I couldn’t tell if they were worried about me potentially working for the most powerful Fae, or questioning my sanity for claiming to have seen the Queen myself.
Glen turned back to me with a frown. “How long do you have to keep silent for? Are you still going to be able to testify at the trial next week?”
I shrugged to say that I didn’t know. I had no idea how long the spell would take me. Dandelion mentioned that the nettles would still need to soak for a few more days, and I didn’t even know what steps came after that.
They exchanged another look, and all of them looked unhappy. “You’re the only one who saw everything that happened firsthand,” Ashleigh said. “If you don’t testify—”
“Then practically all of the Unseelie are going to go free,” Glen finished for her.
I hung my head. I knew how bad things could be if I wasn’t a witness. Everything that I’d worked for over the past two months was about to fall apart. But I’d promised Kaorinix, and there didn’t seem to be any way to get out of it, so I just had to make sure that I finished the spell before then.
The bell rang, making all of us jump. We had only a couple of minutes to get to class before it started, so there was no more time to argue right then.
Ashleigh h
urried ahead of me, but she called back over her shoulder, “I’ll tell the teachers that you can’t talk today.”
I smiled gratefully back at her. Political discussions aside, I knew that I could rely on my friends.
10
Making the Cloak
Rosamunde
During lunch break at school, eating went fast when I couldn’t chat with my friends at the same time, so I was done early. I stopped by the school library to get Internet access on one of the computers and ran an online search on making clothes out of nettle fibers. It took me a while, but eventually I found a few detailed tutorials that gave me a decent idea of the work ahead of me.
Some of the information that I found was discouraging. For starters, one or two bundles of nettles weren’t going to give me a lot of fiber to work with. I would have to pick a lot more and get them started soaking, which was a difficult way to get the woody bark to separate from the fibers since the nettles could rot easily, but drying them out only worked in the summer when it was hot and dry. But where would I find space for all of them?
Secondly, weaving required a loom, which looked like one of the most complicated contraptions that I’d ever seen. Way too many moving parts. A much easier way to make cloth would be to spin or roll the nettle fibers into yarn, and then knit or crochet that into a thick fabric. Even better, it looked like using bigger needles would lead to a loose fabric—one that I could easily add other herbs and plants into later—and the working would go that much faster.
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