Our technologies: lost telecommunication and transport systems, electricity, guns, and plastic. The technological achievements that had defined the twentieth and twenty first centuries were gone.
“And the bodies?” I asked.
Tineke gulped. “Yes.”
It was hard, thinking of the pain of those who’d died during the apocalypse and those who’d survived, and the apocalypse wasn’t over. Not yet. Not till we reached some equilibrium the Faerene pursued. Given Lajos’s lessons on the Rift and the danger of damaging Earth’s shield, I even understood the Faerene’s thinking.
When I’d participated in killing the men attacking the Apfall Hill roadblock and threatening Digger and me, I’d acted as the Faerene did. The degree was different, but not the justification. Threats to the safe home I protected had to be eliminated. For the Faerene migrants to Earth, humans were that threat.
“Thank you for sparing us mass graves,” I said quietly to Tineke.
She hugged me tight, then whirled away, vanishing into the darkness less by magic than by the silent swiftness of her departure.
I lifted the tent flap and walked into a raging, whispered tumult.
The twenty three women inside weren’t tucked up in their beds, asleep. Instead, a number of them paced up and down, a few huddled together, and all of them turned to observe my entrance.
“Finished crawling to the masters, then, Amy?”
I let the tent flap fall and focused on my bed. The futon was still rolled and stacked with the blankets against a tent wall.
“Did you not hear what that elf told us?” The short, stocky woman pushed into my personal space and waved a finger up at my face. “They as good as told us we are to be their slaves.”
“I won’t be anyone’s slave,” Winona said. The lack of emotion in her voice was eerie.
Before I could respond to her, a second woman got into my face, sneering. “Hoping to get some perks by being that werewolf’s bitch?”
Rory and I probably had looked cozy out there, but it hadn’t been sexual. We hadn’t flirted while I told my story. I honestly hadn’t even noticed him wrap me up in a hug. I’d been talking about Apfall Hill, reliving the past few months and missing my family, and the embrace had felt natural. From Jarod I’d learned the powerful comfort of a friend’s hug. Rory’s kindness to me didn’t deserve this woman’s insult.
I didn’t either, but I refused to engage. I kept my tone level and as dispassionate as possible, hoping to defuse the situation. “The dragon who transported me to the portal at Manhattan advised me to act with goodwill. The Faerene can undoubtedly hear our conversation in here, even though you’re whispering.” A people who could cross worlds and hold off an invading horde of alien insects weren’t likely to be foiled by some tent fabric. “None of us know yet what being a familiar will mean. We should be listening and learning, and thinking of how we can help ourselves and our communities.”
The two women who were in my face began to answer, crudely.
Surprisingly, shy Mirembe spoke over both of them. “Today, Amy offered to teach me how to fall. I saw her fight. It is interesting to me that she wanted to teach me how to fall, first, before she would offer to teach me to fight and defend myself.” She sat down beside Winona. Mirembe was from a Ugandan village on Lake Victoria. Winona was from the Bronx. Their skin color was the same. Mirembe gripped Winona’s hands. “Do you know what I heard Lajos say? I heard him say that Faerene society struggles with prejudice, but that it abandoned slavery long ago. He dares not promise us equality and fair treatment from all Faerene. But I have hope. The Faerene do not want slaves. We must learn how far we have to fall, how low our position as human familiars is in Faerene society, and then, we can begin to fight for ourselves and all humanity. Most especially for those whom God gives the burden and gift of magic.”
Mirembe’s unassuming dignity and genuine resolve silenced the tent.
Winona nodded with gathering speed until she resembled a bobble head. “I can do that. I’m used to fighting for my place at the table.”
“It is better that we don’t fight each other.” With that final piece of wisdom, Mirembe returned to her futon.
I smiled at her as she passed me, thanking her silently, before I made up my bed. Then I collected my towel and birch twig toothbrush and headed for the rocky women’s bathroom. It seemed easier to breathe outside the tent, despite the chill in the air.
When I exited the bathroom, a hand shot out to grab me.
“Wanna be friendly with monsters? Be friendly with me.” The chill in the air seemed to crystallize.
My assailant was one of the men who’d fought under Rory’s supervision this afternoon. That made him one of the human familiar candidates who channeled magic for fighting purposes. The sense that the air crystallized couldn’t be good news for me. I suspected that it was how my senses interpreted the magic he aimed at me.
I opened my mouth to scream—and closed it as an orc dashed between my human attacker and me.
Frida was one of the tutors. She was also seven feet tall and angry. She pinned the man to a pine tree with one hand on his throat. I mightn’t have been able to stop the man’s magic, but Frida could and did. “Return to your tent. Do not fear. This one is leaving.”
I nodded. “Leaving” was definitely a euphemism. Candidates who exited the trials died.
My would-be rapist gurgled a plea.
I wasn’t listening to him, and I doubted Frida would, either. “Thanks,” I said to her briefly, and hurried back to the tent, leaving the man to his fate.
During the night, the rain started. It continued throughout a gray dawn. A stack of woolen ponchos waited for us just inside the tent’s entrance. I pulled one on over my wool shirt and sweater, and wrapped the scarf Melinda had given me yesterday over my head. I was grateful I’d showered late yesterday and didn’t have to get naked, wet and cold on such a miserable morning.
We ate in the food tent in shifts since sitting outside wasn’t feasible. The hot porridge was welcome and I carried a refilled mug of coffee back with me to the sleep tents. They would serve as our classrooms today, along with the food tent: two tutorial groups to each tent.
The size of individual tutorial groups was decreasing worryingly. Our group had lost two people overnight, a man and a woman. Evidently, my sleep tent wasn’t the only one that had hosted concerned discussions and despairing people last night, following Lajos’s evening lesson.
Melinda presented this morning’s lesson.
Frida was the other tutor in the tent, but she sat in a corner with her eyes closed.
“What is magic?” Melinda began. “Scholars have been arguing about the definition for centuries, and more recently, they’ve argued over how to define magic to humans. There are layers to truth. What is true at one level of understanding ceases to satisfy as a person’s comprehension improves. As our understanding evolves, the revealed truth is altered.”
I drank half my coffee, hoping the caffeine would kick in fast and help me follow Melinda’s lecture. Then I went back to warming my hands around the mug.
“Some Faerene scholars liken magic to gravity. It underpins the universe and is detectible. It is a force that can be harnessed.” Melinda scraped the floor of the tent with her hoof. “Gravity is a useful comparison, but not a true one. You could expand the idea to compare magic to electromagnetic force. But the truth that I believe will be most helpful to you is to understand that magic is memory.”
I finished my coffee and gazed forlornly into the empty mug. Physics was fine. I’d studied physics. But if Melinda was venturing into metaphysical concepts, I needed chocolate as well as more coffee. Neither were available.
“Human scientific inquiry has made you aware of quantum physics. You have some grasp of dark matter and dark energy.”
If I was uncertain of my ability to follow Melinda’s lecture, others in the two tutorial groups looked utterly spooked. A few had simply shut down. I recognized
the blank inattention of their expressions as they stared at the unicorn, feigning interest.
Melinda appeared undaunted by her audience’s response. Her tail swished jauntily.
I glanced to the side at the other tutor present.
Frida still had her eyes closed. Perhaps she was asleep.
“What humanity has yet to discover is the existence of things which are smaller than quarks.”
I wondered if Melinda had said “things” or if the translation spell had chosen “things” as the nearest translation for a word and concept we couldn’t understand.
“These things are the basis for everything in the multiverse, including dark matter. But importantly for magic, these things also remember—for a unique and complicated definition of ‘remember’—everything that they have been, but also everything they could have been but did not coalesce to become.”
Winona pressed a finger to her third eye. The pressure point between your eyebrows can help relieve a headache. Winona stabbed at hers, desperately.
“It is these memories that a magician learns to manipulate. When you channel magic, you actually channel things by priming them to be the possibilities, or memories, that align with your goal. When magicians use spells, they are codifying their intentions. This makes channeling magic more efficient. So, if you would prefer a more scientific title than that of ‘familiar’, you can justify calling yourselves ‘activating physicists’.” Melinda’s horn shone with a silver light. She literally radiated enthusiasm.
“Nooo, thank you,” Winona said under her breath.
None of us responded with an “Oh yeah!”
Melinda’s enthusiastic tail swishing slowed. Her horn ceased to glow.
Frida filled the gap. Obviously, she hadn’t been sleeping. “Thank you, Melinda.”
Melinda’s ears twitched backward in irritation.
It could have been worse. Frida could have tried to lead us into a round of applause.
“Does anyone have any questions?” Melinda asked.
A man from Frida’s group did. “Do unicorns really shit rainbows?”
Yeah. The lesson was definitely over.
After lunch, however, the underlying import of the man’s question was addressed. Humans were dangerously ignorant about the Faerene. So Lajos hosted a weird variation on a beauty parade. The rain continued, but a transparent dome protected the field. The grass remained wet, so the remaining eighty seven humans stood.
“This is Melinda, a unicorn. Tell us a little about unicorns, Melinda.”
I couldn’t help myself. My mouth started quivering with suppressed giggles. It really was like a beauty pageant.
“We do not poop rainbows,” Melinda said.
I burst out laughing, way too loudly. Fortunately, so did the rest of our group.
Melinda’s horn shone. Somehow, the emotional meaning of its radiance was always apparent. Strange magic. Faerene magic. She liked that she’d made her humans laugh.
Lajos used himself as the elf example. Tineke stayed on the sidelines, as did Magistrate Istvan, as Marton explained about griffins.
“We are not a blend of eagle and lion. The resemblance is irrelevant. Our ancestors evolved to be deadly predators. Our form retains that elegant power, even though we are now peaceful people.”
Excuse me if I was a tad skeptical of the latter claim. Istvan did not look peaceable to me.
The healer whom Chen had assisted yesterday took center stage next.
“Viola is a goblin,” Lajos said. “She is a healer, a mother and an Elysium world title baking champion.”
She gave him a scathing look. “As if my baking talent matters. Honestly, Lajos.” She refocused on her audience. “As he said, I’m a goblin. In terms of lifestyle and personality, we are considered the race most like humans. We tend to be farmers and shopkeepers. We are sociable, devious and distractible. Forget dragons. Goblins adore treasure.”
Frida was similarly blunt regarding the nature of orcs. “We like the cold. We are miners and metal workers and fighters. We seldom bother to lie, but when we do, we’re good at it.”
A nymph named Sofia shook her booty at us. “Unlike in your fairytales, nymphs are not shy. No, wait. Some are. Just as some humans are. But many of us are exhibitionists. That does not mean you should take us at face value or take advantage. We are lusty, but choosy. We prefer the natural world to towns or even to agricultural land. We are wild spirits.” As she began unbuttoning her shirt, Frida hauled the nymph offstage. “Spoilsport.”
Rory stepped up, and his opening statement banished our amusement. “I’ve been asked to demonstrate a werewolf’s three forms. We are equally ourselves and equally in control in each form. My current form, what you would call human, is what we spend most of our time in. It is the easiest to maintain.” He was stripped down, wearing a cross between a tutu and a loincloth to preserve his modesty. Perfect musculature.
Then he rippled. His form changed in a second to that of a gray and black wolf with a white front paw. But he was substantially larger than any Earth wolf. He was easily the size of a tiger. The only distracting element was the tutu-loincloth that hugged his wolf waist. He stared at me. He was no tame pet; couldn’t possibly be mistaken for an overgrown dog.
Marton had claimed that griffins had evolved as predators. Werewolves could obviously make the same claim.
Then Rory rippled a second time and assumed his half-man, half-wolf form. He stood upright, bipedal, as tall as any orc and massively muscled. His body was furred. His head and face were freakishly functional in their blend of man and wolf. His half-form was pure killing machine.
“Rory is the largest werewolf to cross the Rift,” Lajos informed us. “As you can see, his body mass changes in his different forms. This is not magic, as such, but a specialized form of energy to matter transformation.”
Rory shifted back to human and tugged his tutu-loincloth straight.
It was odd, but his fidgeting erased his alieness and made him simply Rory. I smiled.
His gaze snagged on me. He didn’t smile. Nor did his stare linger. But the facing-a-firing-squad rigidity of his stance relaxed. He was once more, just a guy; albeit a seriously buff one.
A green dragon, a centaur and a mermaid in a bath followed Rory in the Faerene parade before Lajos wrapped things up. “There are other Faerene, but this was a representative sample and prepares you for future dealings with us. Your tutors will escort you back to the tents for a meditation session. Remember to listen to your hearts. The dome currently sheltering you from the weather will be removed shortly, so, hurry.”
Lajos usually backed up his words. We hurried.
Warm and dry in the tent after a dash to the latrines, sinking into a meditative state was nonetheless difficult. I had too many new ideas jostling in my mind. There was the morning’s lesson on the nature of magic, and now, there was the Faerene themselves.
I found it disturbingly easy to see them as people, and by “people” I meant human with human instincts and values.
If I hadn’t seen Manhattan altered beyond all recognition from the modern city I’d grown up in to a wilderness, I might have been misled by the friendly aspect the Faerene were showing at the trials. After all, for those of us in Apfall Hill who’d survived the fever epidemics and outside violence, we had adjusted to the new conditions and were living well. The harvest festival had been our celebration of that fact. As far as we were concerned, the Faerene had provided sufficient warning for us to prepare for the apocalypse. You could almost say they’d been fair.
But Manhattan.
Manhattan was a warning and a symbol. Humanity’s guns, missiles and high tech were gone. We had nothing with which to resist the Faerene and their plans, other than stubbornness. The Faerene were our rulers. Like with Manhattan, the world would be remade according to the Faerene’s requirements.
I couldn’t hear my heartbeat, but I did hear the drumming of the rain on the tent slow, then cease. By the time Melinda
and Frida released us from the meditation session, the weather had cleared. There’d be a golden sunset, if we could get above the trees that encircled the field to view it. As it was, they shut out the setting sun far too early. I liked longer days and daylight. Our first winter without electricity would take some getting used to.
Deliberately, I switched my mind from thinking of home and whether I’d ever see my family again. I had to believe I would. “How far is the Black Sea from here?”
Frida had the answer. “Fourteen miles.” But she was distracted. No, unhappy. Her right hand kept rubbing her hip. She would reach for a knife or sword or some weapon that usually hung from her belt, and when her fingers closed around nothing, she poorly disguised the nervous motion by rubbing her hip.
She cleared her throat. “Everyone.”
There had been small, quiet conversations and general rustling as people eased themselves back into ordinary life after the meditation session. Frida’s hesitation silenced us.
She cleared her throat, again. “There will be no dinner and no sleep tonight. You will be fasting and keeping vigil. This is a practice of the elves, one which the Fae Council believes may work for humans.”
“Slaves,” Winona muttered. Her anger failed to disguise her fear.
Withholding food and sleep was cruel. It was torture. Tineke had told me that if…but no, the Fae Council had approved this torture, and no magistrate would go against the Faerene’s ruling body, would they?
“I am sorry,” Melinda said, stepping in when Frida fell silent. “I truly believe that the vigil will help you or I would be protesting.”
“Me, too,” Frida said, tapping her hip.
“But if the vigil can save you weeks of hardship here at the trials, it is worth the sacrifice of a night.” Melinda paused. “We will be with you. I have a healer’s training. You will be monitored for your safety.”
Stray Magic Page 12