Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  “You brought change with you,” he commented conversationally. “I smell thunder. It is Chuqu’ta, the Thunder Moon; there will be rain today.” He nodded in the direction of the entrance to his home. “Breakfast. One hour.”

  With no further word, he turned and strode off along the path that snaked behind the mesa, using his feathered staff to anchor his steps.

  But didn’t he leave that back at the Barefoot Road? Thea thought, confused, as she watched him disappear behind the boulders. She shrugged philosophically and ducked into the house. There was little point in trying to second-guess Cheveyo.

  She rummaged, one-handed, in the storage niches in the back room. One of the first things that Cheveyo had taught her was how to make flat unleavened bread from ground cornmeal and bake it in the embers, and Thea supposed that was what he meant that he wanted for breakfast. Her other hand still clung to the thin ribbon of First World light, so bright that it illuminated the whole of the inside of the house, its incandescent fire wound painfully about her fingers. She had noticed that the fire on the cooking hearth was banked, almost out. Muttering to herself, she thrust the ribbon of Tawaha’s light into the ashes.

  The light writhed for a moment like a living thing, coiling like a serpent, and then the almost-dead fire burst into golden-red tongues of flame. It looked, perhaps, like any other hearth fire—but Thea stared, fascinated, caught up in the play of colors as the fire danced and flickered. The earthenware pot of cornmeal was forgotten on the ground near her foot as she crouched beside the hearthstones. She had called something extraordinary from the First World to take up residence on this hearth, used for such everyday purposes as baking flatbread or roasting ears of corn.

  Thea could see the sunlight in this fire—but not just the molten heat of the desert summer. There was also the high cold white sun of the far north, frozen light cuttingly sharp in the brittle sky; there was the scintillating sunlight sparkling off the surface of the sea or caught at play in the tumble of a waterfall; there was the filtered green sunlight so familiar to Thea, drifting through the firs in the green-gold haze of summer. Touched by Tawaha, the little fire blazed and danced in first morning of the month of the Thunder Moon….

  Cheveyo had explained the moons to her. Now Thea reached back into her memory, sorting her thoughts, retrieving the information. Thunder Moon, Chuqu’ta, carried within it the dangers of overoptimism, even hubris, but also the gift of reason by which such rash impulses could be checked. If caught in time.

  A dry chuckle behind her startled Thea to her feet. She kicked the cornmeal pot at her heel and overturned it, scattering meal on the ground.

  Cheveyo stood watching her with amusement crinkling the corners of his dark eyes.

  “Do you realize,” Cheveyo said, tilting his chin in the direction of the fire, “what you have done?”

  “I was trying to make flatbread,” Thea said lamely, dropping her eyes to the scattered cornmeal.

  “With sacred fire?” Cheveyo said.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “I know,” Cheveyo said. “That’s why I brought these.”

  He handed her a bag he wore over his shoulder, and Thea took it, looking at him quizzically.

  “Breakfast,” he said. “Berries. And then we can talk.”

  “Grandmother Spider said you still had many things to tell me,” Thea said. “She also said that time was running short. Why did they really send me here, Cheveyo?”

  “I would have thought you got a lot of answers to questions like those in the time you spent in the First World,” Cheveyo said.

  “In the First World, I can make gates between worlds,” Thea said. “Here, I can weave a ribbon of light. Back home, I can’t do anything. You still haven’t taught me to do anything that I can take with me when I—”

  Cheveyo’s eyes snapped, a spark of black fire. “I expected more of you than that,” he said curtly. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said to you since you’ve been with me, Catori? I haven’t spent a single moment teaching you how to do. I’ve been teaching you how to be.”

  “That’s not true!” Thea said. “You’ve been trying to get me to walk on the Barefoot Road—and that’s doing. What of the weaving?”

  “None of that matters,” Cheveyo said calmly. His serenity had regenerated, as though someone had thrown a stone at the still surface of the deep pool that was his spirit, and the surface stilled again after the ripples died away, giving no indication that it had ever been disturbed. “None of that matters, because every action you have taken has been based on a change in yourself, in the spirit you brought here to me to be healed of what it believed were its faults. But now you know better, don’t you?”

  “I may know,” Thea said, “but I don’t understand.”

  Cheveyo nodded. “Very good,” he said. “That is an important distinction. What makes you think you lack understanding?”

  “I know the where,” Thea said. “I know it’s something to do with the world of my home, and the way that world and I affect one another. I know the when—it’s been going on all my life. But I knew all of that long before I came here.”

  Cheveyo waited in silence. Thea’s eyes were sparkling with frustrated fury, with a glint of tears.

  “I even know who,” she said. “It’s the Faele and the gifts they gave me at birth, and the Alphiri who seem to think that these gifts are valuable, and the family who wants so much from me, and all the people who waited while I grew up and failed to do what everyone expected. Most of all it’s me and some strange choice that I made when I was born, before I was born. What I don’t know…”

  “Yes,” murmured Cheveyo, “the last two questions.”

  “I don’t know the how, and I don’t know the why,” Thea said. “And I’m supposed to be going home, with no more than that. I come back and the situation remains exactly the same, doesn’t it? I’ll still be me, and I’ll still be bound by my choices.”

  “But not by your world,” Cheveyo said.

  “What does that mean?” Thea said. “When I go back home, I go back to the same world that I left to come here. Don’t I?”

  “If you say so,” Cheveyo said, annoyingly calm, reaching out for another handful of berries.

  “Well, I do say so,” Thea said. “It’s all very well to know that I don’t do magic back home because I have for some reason chosen not to. But why, Cheveyo? Why did I choose not to? And just when exactly was it that I chose that—I can’t remember making that choice. I can’t imagine making that choice—not with my family, not with what I was born as! They expect so much…and all I know is that I have somehow deliberately turned my back on those expectations. What do I tell them, when I go home? That I am still Thea, the One Who Can’t? What do I tell my father?”

  “The one thing that you can take back from this place,” Cheveyo said, “is the sure knowledge that, when there is a battle to be fought, it is you who can choose the place of the battlefield. I cannot tell you why you chose what you chose, but you are going back to your home with weapons with which you can break the bonds those choices have forced upon you. The answers you have gained—the answers to your who and when and where—you may have had all the pieces before, but you had no idea how they fit together. It’s like that spilled cornmeal. Now, after the time you have spent here, you know it belongs in a pottery jar.”

  “Thanks,” Thea said, unable to stop a wry grin. “Can I take the jar back home with me when I leave so I can stuff all my troubles in it?”

  “If you think that it would hold them,” Cheveyo said. “But you are your own jar, Catori. You hold all your questions, all your answers. This place has been a way station, not a destination—you were never sent here to become one of my people or to be adopted into my tribe. You were not meant to live out your days in the mesas and the red sand, however beautifully they reflect the light. Tell me, have you ever paid conscious attention to the patterns into which you weave your light?”

  “I
think I…” Thea shot Cheveyo a look full of astonishment. “I thought I did,” she said, correcting herself. “And yet, now that you ask, I can’t seem to remember a single pattern I ever did—it’s as if they just come by themselves and decide what needs to be woven.”

  “It is no different with the things that you weave to shape your life,” Cheveyo said. “Do you believe your light weaves have meaning?”

  “Of course they do!” Thea said, so emphatically that she stopped, startling herself into a reflective pause. “But if I didn’t know the pattern,” she murmured, “how do I know it is significant?”

  “Because in another context, seen from a different angle or a different point of view or simply distanced from you by time and experience, many patterns that seem formless and without meaning suddenly become something that shapes your very existence. What you have woven here in the desert with me—what you have woven back in the First World with the Old Ones who breathe life and spirit into us all—all of this is now in the pattern of your life. All of this will mean very different things to you when you return to your home.”

  “My answers?” Thea said, her voice almost plaintive.

  “To more questions,” Cheveyo said gravely, “than even you can think to ask. But I think you need to prove something to yourself first, before you leave my home to return to yours.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Come,” he said, rising. “We will walk.”

  “We’re going back to the Road, aren’t we?” Thea said, scrambling to her feet, wiping berry juice off her chin.

  “You are going back,” he said. “You will lead me.”

  “But the last time,” Thea said, “your staff—”

  “Yes,” he said, and held out his staff to her. “This will show you the way.”

  “But it’s…but that is…I can’t take that!”

  “No, you couldn’t, not if I were unwilling,” Cheveyo agreed, his usual faintly aggravating self-possession back in full force. “But you are not taking it, you are borrowing it with my blessing. That is a very different thing. Now come, this is Chuqu’ta. If we do not do this before the clouds bring the rains this afternoon, we may have to run for cover. These are the male rains, the summer storms—they do not last very long, but they are violent, and even I respect their power. They and I try not to argue too often because I am not certain that I win enough times to make it worth the fight. Take it. Let us go.”

  Thea reached out hesitantly for the staff. For a moment both their hands rested on it, side by side, Cheveyo’s large, calloused fingers and ridged nails and skin tanned almost into leather from years of exposure, a stark contrast to Thea’s, smooth, pale, long-fingered, full of a feminine grace even given the grime underneath her nails and the red welt across the fingers that had held the ribbon of Tawaha’s fire. And yet there was something very alike between them, too. They were kin from afar, separated by their different worlds, different times, but linked in the bond of power, of that fundamental magical sense that Thea had for so long bitterly reproached herself for lacking.

  She had it. She had it. All she had ever needed to learn is why she had never tapped into it.

  “Well?” Cheveyo murmured.

  Without another word, Thea turned, gripping Cheveyo’s staff firmly, and began walking.

  2.

  Thea had not forgotten the early treks that Cheveyo had taken her on when she had first come to his house. Sometimes they had caught the barest glimpse of the Road as it stretched out into the horizon, insubstantial, teasing the edges of vision like a hallucination. Sometimes she could see the Road taunting her from just beyond some impassable hedge of thorns or a wilderness of sharp stones, solid and real and as far away as if it had been on another planet. Sometimes, many times, they had failed to find it at all and spent fruitless hours walking in the heat, searching for what seemed to be no more than a fevered dream.

  And yet she had stood on it once, stood firmly on the level hard ground, finally feeling the power of it through the soles of her bare feet.

  The day she had been carried from it when her spirit had quailed at the power of what she had done.

  This time it did not take very long at all. It was as though the Road was no longer a wild thing hiding from Thea, playing games with her mind. She had been allowed to step upon it, had stood on it, had been invited to return. By every sacred law, it was hers now, a part of her, something she could claim as her own.

  Even so, she hesitated for a long moment as she came to a sudden unexpected stop at the wall of unshaped stone that bordered the Barefoot Road here, which had apparently decided that it would choose to exist less than an hour’s easy walk from Cheveyo’s front door. The Road stretched as far as Thea could see, absolutely and precisely straight from horizon to horizon, some thirty feet wide, its surface smooth and bare of stray blades of grass, as even and flat and hard as any paved highway of Thea’s own world. It looked as though it had been slapped into shape and kept clear by a thousand years of passage, by many thousands of reverently bare feet set upon it.

  “Where does it go?” Thea finally asked quietly, her eyes resting on where the Road met the horizon.

  “To where it needs to take you,” Cheveyo said. “You can give me back the staff now. You don’t need it anymore.”

  As once before, when he had taken her to the mesa from which she had stepped into the First World, his voice came from behind her. Thea turned her head, realized that she had somehow taken that step onto the Road or it had stretched to enclose her, that she stood with her feet bare upon it and Cheveyo’s staff resting lightly on the ground by her toes. She glanced down, curled her feet against the Road, felt its solidity beneath her soles, and then looked up at Cheveyo again.

  “You aren’t coming, are you,” she said.

  “The Road takes no two people to the same place,” Cheveyo said. “It was my task to bring you here. Where you choose to let the Road take you now, I cannot follow.”

  “Can it take me home?” Thea asked a little wistfully.

  “It can take you anywhere,” Cheveyo said, “although it may choose its own manner of achieving that destination. Give me the staff.”

  “Is this good-bye?” Thea said, hesitating, clinging to the staff for another moment, her eyes unexpectedly bright. At the moment of parting, she suddenly knew that she would miss Cheveyo—his dry humor, his brusque good mornings followed by precise orders of what the day’s activities would be, his apparent inability to give quarter in anything he asked her to do, and his quiet pride when she did succeed in her tasks, even the aggravating quiet serenity that was his shield against the trials of the world. He had taught her everything without seeming to teach her anything at all.

  Thinking back, she was astonished and a little ashamed at how she had wronged him when she had first arrived. He had not been the ending of anything at all—he had, in fact, been the beginning of everything….

  For some reason Thea’s mind latched fleetingly on the duffel bag she had brought with her when she had stepped out of the Alphiri Portal into Cheveyo’s world—the duffel bag that was still pretty much packed exactly as it had been when she had carried it into Cheveyo’s house and left it slumped against the wall behind the curtain that divided her space from his in the single room. How little she had needed its contents. How lightly she abandoned them, as she set her face toward home.

  Cheveyo allowed her the moment of reflection. When she looked up again, it was with a sense of something powerful and new within her—an echo of Cheveyo’s own serenity, perhaps.

  She held out the staff. “Thank you,” she said. There was nothing more she wanted to say, nothing less. She didn’t feel the need to ask a single question.

  Cheveyo took the staff, bowed his head in acknowledgment.

  “I will never forget you,” Thea said, lifting her hand in a gesture that was farewell, taking a single step away from the edge of the Road, ready to start walking.

  “I know,” Cheveyo said,
“because I have something for you. Wait.”

  He unfastened the two feathers that had always been tied to the head of his staff with a leather thong, the black feather and the black-and-white. Then he took something from around his neck, threading the two feathers onto a new thong that had been his necklace and already had something hanging upon it. When he was done, he held his handiwork out to Thea.

  “These two you know,” he said, nodding at the two feathers he had just taken from the staff. “You have seen them every day, for as long as you have lived in my house. For once, I am giving you an answer to a question you never asked—what they mean. The black-and-white feather is an eagle’s; the black one is from a raven. They were given to me by my own teacher, many, many years ago, and now I pass them on to you because they are symbols of things you already have, of things you brought here with you—the eagle’s feather for courage, the raven’s feather for wisdom. The third feather is a gift from me to you, one I have carried with me for many weeks in the knowledge that this day would come.”

  Thea stared at the third feather, her vision a little blurred with tears. It was a long one, barred gray and white, and one she could not identify. “Whose is the third feather?” she whispered.

  “My people take animals as totems of our faults and virtues,” Cheveyo said. “One of them is the wild turkey, and it is from a turkey’s wing that this third feather on your necklace comes. It will serve, I hope, to remind you of one of the most important lessons you have learned while in my care.”

  Thea felt the beginnings of laughter bubbling within her. “And what is that?” she said.

  “Patience, Catori,” Cheveyo said with one of his rare smiles. “Patience.”

  Thea ducked her head to let him place it around her neck, and then, after another long moment, they stepped away from each other, Thea farther onto the Road, Cheveyo into the desert scrub at his back, the stone wall between road and desert suddenly a solid barrier between them. He lifted a hand in blessing and farewell.