Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  They had told her nothing, given her no clue as to what was supposed to be happening to her, other than the ongoing hints about “private lessons.” And it seemed that this was it, that her instructor was that taciturn man in a feather cloak whose long stride was even now taking him farther and farther away from her.

  The coyote howled again, somewhere in the distance, and Thea scrambled for her bag, stumbling in Cheveyo’s wake. He made no effort to slacken his pace or adjust his stride for her, and she was almost running by the time she caught up to him.

  “You might wait for me,” she panted, trying to catch her breath, and only half aloud.

  “I don’t wait,” Cheveyo said, without breaking stride.

  Thea stumbled over an unseen obstacle in the dark. “Ow,” she said plaintively. The muscles in her calves were burning; it felt like they were going slightly downhill and she was constantly braking, so as not to tumble down the slope. “Wait a minute. I think I have a stone in my shoe.”

  “You do not,” Cheveyo said calmly.

  “Just wait a minute!” Thea said. “I’m cold and I’m scared and I don’t know where I am or why I’m here…. Well, I do know that, I’m being given a last chance to show some…”

  “Here,” Cheveyo said, “forget about what was. Here, you are not special. Stop thinking of yourself as set apart, as unlike any other. I will make no allowances for that.”

  “It isn’t my fault. I was born ‘special.’ Everyone keeps telling me that,” Thea said, limping after him. It really did feel like she had picked up a pebble in her sneaker. With every step, her right heel felt as though it was being sliced to ribbons.

  Cheveyo turned his head fractionally to look at her, his eyes still mostly hidden in shadow but catching enough moonlight to show a tiny glint that might have been sardonic.

  “Perhaps,” he said dryly, “that is the problem.”

  “Hold up,” Thea said crossly. “I’m limping, I’m cold, and I’m hungry. Where are we going?”

  “Don’t whine,” he said. “Follow.”

  Thea walked in stubborn silence. Whine. She didn’t whine. She had never whined.

  In Aunt Zoë’s manner of speaking, Cheveyo smelled just plain arrogant.

  The terrain changed, at first subtly enough for Thea to barely notice, but it quickly became obvious that they were climbing and had been for some time. The ground turned into mostly coarse sand and loose scree, black as old bloodstains in the white moonlight. Thea tried to control her breathing, but she could not help the tears that came to her eyes, or the sob that escaped her, loud in the night. Cheveyo paid no attention to it. He climbed almost without slowing, using the staff to pole himself up a steeper slope when he needed to, leaving Thea to scramble behind.

  Just as she was about to cry out that she could go no farther, he stopped in front of what seemed to be a solid rock face. Something sparked, and suddenly Cheveyo stood with a small tongue of flame apparently burning on the palm of his free hand. Its ruddy light softened the cliff before them into the lines of a dwelling carved from the living stone, and for the first time illuminated Cheveyo’s face well enough for Thea to be able to take it in.

  He appeared to be much older than she had taken him to be at first sight, back in the desert night—at least if the faint lines she now saw radiating from his eyes were any indication. There was something inexorably ancient, too, in the dark eyes that bent their direct gaze upon her. They were the eyes of a raptor, of an eagle, of a wild creature who has never known a chain or a cage. His thin-lipped mouth was stern, but Thea thought she could see a very faint smile curving the edges. But his voice, when he spoke, bore no trace of the kindness that ghost of a smile might have implied.

  “There is a corner of the house to your right, behind the arras,” he said. “That is where you will sleep. We will talk tomorrow.”

  He sent the flame from his palm and it floated expectantly in front of Thea. When she took a step toward it, it moved a step away, lighting her path. She stared at Cheveyo for a long moment, and then veiled her eyes with her lashes, tightened her grip on her bag, and followed the light into the house.

  She was tired—far more tired than that walk through the night should have made her. It was partly an exhaustion of the mind, a reaction to all the fear and the uncertainty of the past few days. Still, she felt as if she had been physically put through a bone crusher. Every part of her ached—particularly, and most especially, her heart. She pushed aside the curtain that Cheveyo had been speaking of, the arras, without taking stock of the rest of the place; behind the arras there was a sleeping pallet covered with a single blanket. There was also something that looked like a lamp of sorts, a small, shallow dish made of rough pottery with a thin cord stuck wicklike into an oily substance. The guiding flame touched itself to the wick, lit it, and then winked out.

  Thea threw her bag down beside the pallet and collapsed onto the blanket, the sputtering light of the small lamp casting wavering shadows on the wall behind her. The wall appeared to be solid rock. There was a rustle in her pocket as she curled her feet up toward her to take off her sneakers, and she stuck a hand into it to investigate, coming up with a half-empty bag of M&M’s she had been eating on the plane. She was suddenly ravenous, and Cheveyo apparently didn’t provide dinner; she stuffed a handful of the M&M’s into her mouth with one hand while fumbling with her laces with the other.

  Cheveyo had been right, there was no pebble in her shoe. Her feet felt bruised anyway, and she threw her sneakers into the far corner of her cubicle with furious defiance, feeling the tears come again. For a moment she allowed herself to wallow in the agony made up of equal parts resentment and self-pity, and then she heard his voice, as clear as if he were standing right beside her, whispering into her ear.

  Don’t whine.

  She stripped down to her underwear and burrowed under what bedclothes had been provided. The pallet felt strange, hard and uncomfortable, and the blanket seemed pitifully inadequate for the bite she had felt in the air outside, but despite being utterly convinced that she would never go to sleep, missing her own warm bed and soft pillow, Thea was out almost as fast as she cradled her cheek in the hollow of her folded arm.

  It was perhaps inevitable that the first person she met in her dreams was the Alphiri Guardian of the Portal.

  The tall, white-haired Messenger kindred had been the first of the three polities to begin open trade relations with mankind, about forty years before Thea was born. They had been turning a tidy profit on the venture ever since, particularly in the early days of the relationship, before their human trading partners had gotten over their astonishment at finding that a race that looked so utterly ethereal, the embodiment of the noble Elves and everything that they stood for in human legend and imagination, were so completely pragmatic and shrewd in matters of business. It was hard to think of them in terms of trade, at least in the beginning, and it was twice as hard to have them constantly quoting what appeared to be the book that guided their civilization, a book they referred to as the Trade Codex and which provided numberless aphorisms with which Alphiri conversation was peppered. “Full payment for full service” was their favorite catchphrase, and one that they absolutely believed in.

  “Full service for full payment,” the Guardian of Thea’s Portal said in her dream, turning the familiar phrase inside out, standing at the same Portal she had just passed through or one very much like it. As he uttered his words the Portal shimmered and disgorged a gaggle of simpering Faele, distant kin to the Alphiri but far less honorable a breed, full of trickery. Agreements with the Faele had to be carefully scrutinized because they had a habit of taking everything quite literally—and if something wasn’t specifically described as unavailable in the agreement they would find a way to assume they were somehow entitled to it.

  Faele were also prone to giving out what they called Blessings. They would cluster at a place where a child was being born, and unless they were bodily shooed away they would insist
on bestowing “gifts” on the child, gifts in the guise of benedictions that had a habit of coming true in awkward and sometimes dangerous ways.

  There must have been more than the usual handful at Thea’s own birth, unusual as it was—but it had never been spoken of, and whatever gifts they had bestowed had not been passed on to Thea herself. When she was younger, she had thought that they had simply been chased away before they could do any real damage. But here they were in her dream, some half dozen of them, sparrow-boned and narrow-faced and slant-eyed with their long fingers and straw-thatch hair. They hovered over a baby in a cradle, smiling their little sharp-toothed feral smiles and fiddling with the multitudes of tiny Faele-silver charms that were strung on silken cords around their necks.

  The baby was a generic cherub with big blue eyes and a fine down of fair hair, but somehow Thea knew she was looking at herself.

  “She will be a little princess,” one of the Faele said, casting down a small crown.

  “She will be pretty as a flower,” said another, adding a tiny silver daisy.

  “She will have everything that her heart desires,” said a third, and a silver heart joined the pile of charms.

  “But she will never know what her heart’s desire is,” said a fourth, throwing down something that looked remarkably like the cube Thea had been supposed to turn into a perfect sphere in Ars Magica class not too long ago.

  “She will conquer nothing.” The voice was still Faele, but it was darker, lower. There was a curious echo in the air, the words fading as though they had been uttered far away in space and time. Conquer nothing…conquer nothing…

  The Alphiri Guardian smiled as the Portal closed, taking the Faele with it, and there was something in his smile, a knowing—but he was Alphiri, and the knowledge could be had only for a price. And all that the baby in the cradle had—and the baby was Thea herself in the dream—was a pile of charms that were Faele-silver and would melt away to nothing in the bright light of the noon sun. Baby-Thea in the crib gathered them in chubby hands anyway and offered them to the Alphiri, and Thea’s own voice spoke from the baby’s lips, “Tell me. Tell me!”

  But the Portal’s light was fading and so was its Guardian, with nothing left in the end except the memory of the knowledge in his smile.

  Thea woke with a start and realized there was a pale light filtering into her room around the edges of her arras. She blinked, rubbing her eyes, unsure for a moment where she was, and then it all came rushing back—the Portal, the starlit night, the man who called himself Cheveyo. She sat up with a gasp, looking around.

  The rock wall behind her, against which her pallet had been laid, sloped up and above her head in an arch of living stone. The curve of it was so fine and smooth and regular that it looked like it had been hewed out of the cinnamon-colored cliff with a gigantic ice-cream scoop. Thea, momentarily distracted by her surroundings, found her mind playing with the possibilities of what might have happened to the round boulder that had been removed to create this space, indulging in a whimsical vision of a cinnamon rock sundae sprinkled with mint, but then she focused on something else, something far more important, and the whimsy was quickly replaced by wary caution.

  Her duffel bag seemed to have disappeared. Her sneakers, too, were gone and in their place, laid neatly beside her bed, was a pair of sandals like the ones Cheveyo had worn. Beside them, instead of the jeans and sweatshirt she had taken off before going to bed the night before, was a plain tunic, and underneath that a cloak that looked like it had been made out of rabbit fur. She found herself gratefully thanking her lucky stars that she had kept her underwear on the night before—or that, too, might have been confiscated.

  “Breakfast,” said Cheveyo’s voice from beyond the arras as Thea continued to sit on her pallet and stare at the items of clothing in blank astonishment.

  Because she had no other choice, Thea finally scrambled out of her bed and put on the garments that had been laid out for her. In the absence of a comb, she ran her fingers through her hair and patted it down into some semblance of order, feeling grateful that the rock room boasted no mirror to show her the mess she was making of it. And then she emerged into the main room of the house feeling awkward and self-conscious, aware of the scrawny pale limbs that poked out from underneath the tunic and the oddness of her fair hair. She felt as if she had been forced to leave her personality, all that she was, behind somewhere in that moonlit desert last night. She was not, in some strange way, the person she had been, and she was not yet someone else, caught in a moment of transition, and she had a quick and quite unexpected flash of empathy for Frankie’s halfway-thing between cube and sphere. The image made her wince.

  “Can I have my own clothes, please?” she said politely. Well, it was worth a try.

  “You’ll be more comfortable with those. You will get used to their freedom very quickly.” Cheveyo was stirring the contents of a small pot that stood over the cooking hearth as he spoke. He took up a smaller pottery bowl and ladled something out into it. He turned, holding the bowl out to Thea. “Breakfast,” he repeated. “Come eat.”

  She almost asked what it was, feeling a vivid yearning pang of longing for bacon and eggs or pancakes dripping with maple syrup, but something stopped her and she quietly stepped up to take the bowl from Cheveyo’s hand. She even remembered to murmur a thank-you, but he didn’t acknowledge it. He spooned some food into a dish of his own and sat down cross-legged next to the cooking hearth.

  “Eat,” he said. “You’ll need your strength. Today we go on a journey.”

  “Where?” Thea said. She didn’t know what she was eating, but it tasted like corn, and it was warm, and it was good.

  “Knowing which question to ask,” Cheveyo said, “is having half the answer. You ask questions that will answer themselves. Patience. And wisdom. These are things that you need to learn, Catori.”

  Thea lifted her head. “What?”

  “That is your name in this new world you have entered. Catori. Spirit. Learn it, and answer to it.”

  “My name is Thea,” she said, her eyes snapping.

  “Not here,” he said. He had a maddening way of staying utterly unruffled by anything she said. It was so completely opposite to Thea’s own quick tempers that she saw his calmness as a sort of personal challenge.

  He sensed the brewing rebellion and looked up, his dark eyes inscrutable.

  “I know why they sent me here,” Thea said, putting her bowl down.

  “Perhaps,” Cheveyo said.

  “You’re supposed to make me find my magic.”

  Cheveyo’s eyebrow lifted. “I am not supposed to make you do anything at all,” he said.

  “Just so you know,” Thea said. “Nobody else has been able to teach me anything.”

  “You have a high opinion of yourself, Catori,” he said tranquilly, putting away his bowl. “You stand alone, untouchable, unteachable. Is that your vision? I told you, you are nothing here except what you bring with you. You came into this world through your own sipapu, but that wasn’t your own doing—don’t let it make you think too highly of yourself.”

  Thea blinked. “What’s a sipapu?”

  “The navel of the world, the place where a people comes out of the womb and takes their place in the overworld.” Cheveyo nodded. “That at least is a good question. It asks something you do not already know and that cannot be learned by doing.”

  Thea fingered the medallion that still hung around her neck. She had not taken it off the previous night as she went to sleep, and she spared a moment to be profoundly grateful for that—her father had said, “Don’t lose this.” The medallion might be her only way out of this place.

  “You will leave this place,” Cheveyo said, as though he could read her mind, “when I let you go. When I say you are ready. That which you wear is a Pass to let you cross the threshold back—but the only way to that threshold lies through me. Remember that.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Thea said abruptly.<
br />
  “Perhaps you should be,” Cheveyo said. “Sometimes fear is a good thing. All sane people have a little bit of fear. The only people who are completely unafraid are gods or fools, people who cannot be hurt and people who will not believe that they can be hurt. The rest of us do well if we know when it is good to be afraid.”

  He got up and walked to where his feathered cloak hung on a rock protuberance on the wall, and flung the cloak around his shoulders without haste. His staff stood leaning on the same wall and he took it up with his left hand, turning his head fractionally to glance at Thea.

  “Get your cloak,” he said. “The day grows no younger, and we should begin.”

  “Begin what?” Thea said, and then pressed her lips together as Cheveyo’s eyebrow rose fractionally. She was asking the wrong questions again. Without further words she stumped mutinously to where her own rabbit-fur cloak had been laid, and shrugged into it.

  Cheveyo was waiting for her outside the cliff dwelling, his face lifted to the sky, as if he were scenting the wind. For some reason Thea’s mind leaped to her aunt, to Zoë’s strange juggling of senses. It seemed for a moment that Zoë and Cheveyo might have quite a bit in common.

  But Cheveyo was not Zoë. There was nothing about him to suggest Zoë’s affection and her bright spirit, and the resemblance quickly shredded away.

  “Come,” was all he said when she emerged, clutching the rabbit cloak about her.

  There was a bite to the thin air, but the cold was dry and sharp, laced with smells totally alien to Thea; there was no rich aroma of fir forests, no smell of damp earth, nothing that she knew or was passingly familiar with. Her feet were bare except for the sandals, and the wind nipped at her ankles and at the exposed shins that stuck out below the rabbit-fur cloak. Thea curled her toes in the sandals and shivered once and then straightened her shoulders, lifting her eyes to Cheveyo’s face in what was almost a challenge.