Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  “Do you have any idea as to who’s supposed to be ‘whipping you into shape’?” Zoë asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Thea said. “I just heard them talking. Why?”

  “It might not be so bad, depending on whom they choose,” Zoë said. “You’ve done such things before, you know. Like Madame Bellaria, for example, or last year, when—” She closed her mouth with a snap.

  Thea looked up. “What?”

  Zoë bit her lip. “Nothing.”

  “No, what?” Thea said, her blood thoroughly up. “Madame Bellaria taught me the violin, or at least tried to until they figured out I just didn’t have the perfect pitch that was required, and last year…What do you mean?”

  “Well…,” Zoë said unwillingly. She didn’t want to lie, not baldly, and yet giving Thea any kind of hard-to-take truth right now wasn’t going to help. “Let’s just say that Bellaria is a Chanter Mage as well as a competent violinist, and that was the year you sang yourself to sleep every night, and they thought that music magic might be your path. And last year, when they sent you to stay with your Aunt Sarah…you know your Uncle Adam is a Class One mage, don’t you? And he did spend a lot of time with you that summer.”

  Thea stared at her. “They never said anything to me,” she said. “Although it makes sense now that Uncle Adam made me practice incantations every night before bedtime. He said it would help me…sleep.” Her expression became thunderous again. “Nothing happened, of course,” she said. “Maybe, if they’d told me what they were doing…”

  “There are plenty of people out there who do private lessons, as it were, and some of them are a lot of fun,” said Zoë gently.

  “Some fun,” Thea said. She captured a stray strand of hair with the corner of her mouth and chewed on it furiously. “They tried it the cheating way and obviously it didn’t work. Now they’re going to make me go to slave camp. You know what it’s going to be like. It’s going to be a whole wretched summer of frying my brain trying to make cubes turn into spheres or levitate stones. And the cubes are going to stay cubes, and the stones are going to stay firmly on the ground, and then I’ll come home from wherever it is that I’ve been, and Dad’s eyes…”

  “I’ll talk to your folks,” Zoë said. “I’ll see what I can find out, okay? I’ll come back and tell you. In the meantime…”

  Thea shot her another mutinous look. “What?”

  “It might be an idea to try extra hard for the rest of the school year,” Zoë said. “If you manage to keep your Ars Magica teachers placated with just small things, they may let you…”

  “No, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said bleakly. “Mom and Dad won’t let that happen. It was okay for Frankie to repeat a year—but not me. Never me. They won’t let them hold me back. Frankie merely sucks at it. With me…it’s different. There’s a point to prove. I can either do it big like I’m supposed to, or they’ll make sure I don’t do anything at all. It’s all magic or no magic for me. I’m a Double Seventh; if I fail, I totally fail. I can’t be a flicker—I must be a bonfire, or I must be out….”

  “Thea,” Zoë began, a little alarmed, but Thea extracted a hand from her anorak pocket, pushed her wayward hair back behind her ears, and tossed her head. The gesture appeared almost angry, but when she looked up again her eyes were full of tears and there was so much misery on her face that Zoë bit her lip and simply gathered the girl into her arms. Thea clutched at her aunt’s anorak collar with both hands and wept into her shoulder.

  “Daddy’s eyes,” she sobbed. “I can’t come home again and look into Daddy’s eyes…. I swear, Aunt Zoë, I’d rather die than make him go in and have to tell everyone that he’s finally given up all hope in his oh-so-special daughter…. I can’t help it, I want to do well, I want to do well so badly….”

  “I know, hon. I know.”

  Zoë rocked Thea against her, letting her cry herself out.

  2.

  As it happened, Zoë knew exactly what Thea meant. There was something in Paul Winthrop’s eyes when he looked at his youngest—there was hope and frustrated love and bitter disappointment he tried very hard to hide but sometimes didn’t quite manage to tuck in behind his usual screen of calm acceptance. Zoë could remember that hope and a fierce pride that had burned in those eyes on the day that Thea had been born—one could even catch a glimpse of it in that famous front-page photograph that had started the Thea Book as he stood beside his wife and their squalling bundle of potential glory.

  He had still been a Howler man then—a trained tamer of feral libraries gone wild in the wake of a carelessly uttered word or phrase. Grimoires were temperamental books, sometimes with a life of their own, unpredictable and often dangerous; they were usually kept well apart from the main part of any library, but even so accidents happened every so often and the consequences could be dire. An ill-chosen word, a set of syllables that somehow fit into some arcane spell, that was all it took—and it was almost impossible to keep a tight guard on one’s tongue every moment of every day. Allowed to drop too close to a grimoire that had its “ears” tuned to that particular combination, such utterances would accidentally release ill-focused and sometimes downright malicious spells and cantrips into the world.

  Zoë remembered the first time she had met Paul. She had been visiting the remnants of one such library as a sophomore in high school—her teacher had taken her whole Ars Magica class out to the warded building, under the protection of a Class Two mage, for the students to experience firsthand the repercussions of magic gone bad.

  The first thing that greeted them, carefully pointed out by the teacher, was a gargoylelike face newly warped into what had been a perfectly ordinary door when the class had arrived at the library. It looked frozen in an expression of pure defiance, only its eyes mobile, following the class with a malevolent glare as they had filed past it—and that had been just the beginning.

  There had been a lot of whispering and pointing as they crowded in. Most libraries had a back section carefully watched over by its own reference librarians, a place where books related to magic and spells were kept, and where the presence of neophytes or unsupervised students was frowned upon. Not many of the students in this particular class had even been allowed near those stacks. The rumors and weighty warnings that surrounded them like a miasma of peril were actually visible to someone like Zoë, a purple fog in which things rumbled and flashed dangerously like rolling lightning in a thundercloud. She had always had a healthy respect for that particular section in any library.

  But now there was a patina of that purple, a ghostly echo of it, everywhere. The entire interior of the library was one bizarre thing after another: peacocks with human faces flitting in between the stacks, an odd sort of whimpering coming from the forbidden bookshelves in the back, a strange flickering in distant corners. The walls had been upholstered in striped wallpaper, and whole sections of vertical stripes had braided themselves into complicated designs, turned into leering faces with eyes that followed the visitors around the place with unnerving concentration, or had shredded themselves into smaller pieces that were trying hard to form themselves into writing. Zoë and one of her classmates had seen a particular wallpaper stripe detach from the rest, curl into a circle, extrude eight spindly legs, drop to the floor, and start scuttling down the carpet toward the girls’ feet. The classmate had been unable to suppress a small scream; the shepherd mage had turned to deal with the problem, but before he could do anything a man simply stepped out of the wall and squashed the stripe-spider with his shoe.

  “Not to worry,” he said cheerfully. “They can’t hurt you. Not anymore. The place is warded against mischief, and all that remains is to shut it all down. I’m working on it.”

  “I thought you were done, Paul,” Zoë’s teacher had said, a little sharply. “I wouldn’t have brought the children if I’d known you were still working on it.”

  “Nearly done,” Paul said, and actually winked at Zoë.

  Her lips parted in a smile, and s
he dropped her eyes. She was fifteen years old, and he was dark-haired, bright-eyed, and devastatingly handsome.

  “Just don’t go into the back of the stacks,” Paul said to the teacher, his manner brisk and businesslike again. “Anywhere else is fine. I left the elevators to the last, because they got rather creative. They’re safe now, you might want to show the kids. I think they’d enjoy it.”

  Zoë’s classmate, the one who had screamed, had looked up at Paul and simpered.

  He merely caught Zoë’s eye again, smiled, and waved a hand in the direction of the teacher. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll just be tying up a few loose ends in the back.” Something scampered past the nearest set of shelves, and darted into the shadows. Paul whipped his head around. “HEY!” he bellowed. “Come back here!”

  He loped off after the intruder, and Zoë’s simpering classmate’s smile broadened into simple adoration. “Isn’t he something!” she said in a small breathless voice. “That’s Paul Winthrop. My father was in the same class at Amford with his dad. We know the family—seven sons, he’s the youngest—and they’re all flat-out gorgeous….”

  “Don’t you ever think about anything else?” Zoë had snapped.

  Paul had been right about the elevators—the class had spent a hilarious half hour riding up and down the chatty pair of elevator cars that had acquired the personalities of bickering four-year-olds. They’d snatch at passengers with a sulky “Mine!” and made people promise on a ride up that they wouldn’t take the other elevator down, and then whimper in an injured manner if people broke their word. They could be effectively distracted by singing a nursery rhyme in the elevator car, or by any sentence that started with “Once upon a time.” The shepherd mage opined that this was what came of having a children’s section of the library opposite the elevators; and the Ars Magica class teacher had suggested archly that the situation might have been far worse. By the time the class left the area, the elevators had degenerated into telling each other knock-knock jokes on the top floor, and then falling down laughing all the way to the subbasement.

  The second time Zoë had run into Paul Winthrop had been maybe a year later, when she’d tagged along with her older sister Ysabeau to an open lecture at Amford University. She had actually been pointing at him, telling Ysabeau about the occasion of the library visit, at precisely the moment that he’d turned around and happened to look at them. Scarlet with embarrassment, Zoë had wished that she could drop through the floor. But, incredibly, he had smiled, and then he’d come over, and somehow she wound up introducing her sister to the Howler man…and the next thing she knew she was carrying Ysabeau’s flowers at her wedding, and everyone was talking about the marriage of the two seventh children and the glittering possibilities of their progeny.

  Zoë wouldn’t have wanted to swear to it, but despite the protestations on both sides that they’d simply fallen head over heels in love with one another both Ysabeau and Paul had decided to marry each other with a solid dose of clearheaded pragmatism.

  The whole seventh-child thing was hardly a science. The purest combination of that would have meant the union of a seventh daughter and a seventh son and there would have been no eighth child (like Zoë) in either family to potentially mess up the bloodlines—this would have been practically guaranteed to produce a prodigy. But everyone felt it was close enough, and even this much was a rare event; while families with strong magical bloodlines produced the required seven children, the meeting and union of a seventh and a seventh didn’t happen very often. So there was a lot of encouragement from both families when Paul and Ysabeau got together. The young couple’s first child, a son, arrived less than a year after their marriage—and was doted on by everyone, as was only natural for a firstborn. But as the years passed and Ysabeau dutifully delivered son after son, it became increasingly obvious that it was something quite different that the pair were waiting for.

  That something became flesh on the day that Galathea Georgiana was born. A child who should have been gifted beyond all dreams of power, as her weighty and sonorous name was meant to reflect. But somehow, over the years, the only magic that she had ever performed had been simply the transformation of her own person from the glittering Galathea so full of shimmering promise into the plain, solid, totally glitterless Thea. With not enough magic in her blood, apparently, to fill a thimble.

  Thea had never been one to drown her troubles in an ocean of tears. She had given way in the solitude of the woods, but then it was over—and she extricated herself from Zoë’s arms and hunted in her pockets for a tissue.

  Zoë produced one out of her own pocket, keeping diplomatically quiet about its being no more than pocket lint and thin air a moment ago, and wiped her niece’s nose in the businesslike manner a mother might use with a small child.

  “Aunt Zoë,” Thea protested, grabbing at the tissue and turning her head to get the nose out of her aunt’s way.

  Zoë let go, smiling, and Thea blew her nose and wadded up the tissue in her hand.

  “I suppose we’d better go home,” she said at last.

  “You sure? We can go down to the creek and see what the falls are doing….”

  “I have to go home sometime,” Thea said pragmatically. “I live there. Besides, I forgot my hat, and my ears are cold.”

  The instant they stepped into the house, they heard Ysabeau’s voice. “Zoë? Thea?”

  At the summons Thea slipped out of her anorak, leaving it in Zoë’s hands, and sidled down the corridor toward her room.

  “You talk to them,” she hissed back in Zoë’s direction. “You promised.”

  Smiling a little crookedly, Zoë hung Thea’s bright red anorak up beside her own forest-green one on the coat tree in the entrance hall, and followed the sound of her sister’s voice.

  “Hey,” she said, strolling into the kitchen and opening the fridge door to peer inside. “Anything to eat around here? It’s crisp out there and I’ve worked up an appetite.”

  “Where’s Thea?” said Ysabeau, inclining her head toward the fridge. The door tugged itself out of Zoë’s hand and shut with a small self-satisfied thud. “Supper is in an hour; you’re welcome to stay if you want to, but I wish you wouldn’t undermine us and just give in to all her whims.”

  “Me? Give in to Thea’s whims? Thea has whims?” Zoë leaned against the fridge, crossing her arms. Her tone had been flippant, but her expression was very serious, and her next words confirmed that. “She’s miserable, Ys. She’s been listening at doors, probably, and hearing a lot of stuff she shouldn’t have. She’s drawing all kinds of conclusions, and feeling pretty awful about everything. She said you guys were planning on taking her out of school and transferring her to Wandless.”

  “We are,” said Ysabeau shortly.

  “What?” Zoë said. “I thought she had extrapolated that one. Are you serious? Has it really come down to that?”

  “Zoë, what else are we to do?” Ysabeau turned her back on her sister, gripping the kitchen counter with both hands, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. The bread dough that she had been rising with a quick incantation began to subside with a small sigh. “I can’t bear to watch either of them anymore—Paul whenever the report cards come in, and Thea’s face as she hands them to him. And we all know what they say. There’s another exercise she hasn’t completed or a transformation she hasn’t done or a potion she’s botched. We’ve done all we can….”

  “What’s this about summer camp?”

  “What summer camp?”

  “She seems to be under the impression that she’s going off somewhere to be mercilessly drilled in Ars Magica this summer,” Zoë said.

  “Not summer camp,” Ysabeau said. “Paul called in a favor. We’re trying something completely different. Maybe that will trigger whatever it is that’s stuck.”

  “What?” Zoë asked.

  “There’s a letter,” Ysabeau said, “in Paul’s study. It’s in the top drawer of his desk.”

  Zoë pushe
d off the fridge, took a step toward the kitchen door, and then appeared to change her mind about leaving. She reached out with her right hand instead, and a moment later a piece of handwritten parchment was in her palm.

  “It wouldn’t have killed you to have walked across the hall,” Ysabeau said, staring at her dough in a meaningful fashion, but not unaware of what had just happened behind her back.

  It had been a quick desperate rustle of shuffling feet outside the kitchen door that had decided Zoë against physically going to the study.

  “Easier,” Zoë said laconically, fingering the parchment. “I would have had to come back here and interrogate you about it anyway.” She scanned the letter; it was only a handful of lines. “Send her to me before Grass Moon wanes, else it will be too late to begin the work,” she read. “Grass Moon? What is that? When is that? Who is this…” She skimmed down to the signature. “Who is this Cheveyo guy anyway? Never heard of him.”

  “April, Paul says,” Ysabeau said, slapping at the bread dough as though it had offended her. “Cheveyo is…It’s complicated, Zoë. Paul hasn’t told me everything. I do know that it isn’t just a question of putting her on a plane to New Mexico—there’s more to it than that. Paul says he’ll have to take her himself. He didn’t want me to know, but I saw an e-mail—he’s been talking to the Thaumaturgy Agency about a Pass.”

  “A Pass?” Zoë echoed, staring at her sister. “Where is he taking her? To the…?” She paused. “Ye Gods,” she said finally.

  Thea, she said fiercely in her mind, closely focused and aimed at her spying niece, get back to your room right now. I promised to tell you, and I will, but I will not have you skulking out there and leaping to your own conclusions. I’m serious, Thea.

  There may have been no magic in Thea, but she could hear mindspeak, if the person talking to her was a member of her own immediate family. She had never really verbalized a reply in the same manner of communication, but she managed to respond well enough to convey her reaction to the mindspeaker’s words. There was an echo of a grumble in reply to Zoë’s rebuke, but Thea obeyed her aunt’s instructions. Zoë sensed her withdrawing down the corridor and drew a deep breath.