Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  If only everyone didn’t know just exactly what the reputation was.

  They had been met by a Mrs. Chen, the teacher in charge of the girls’ residence.

  “Galathea Winthrop?”

  “Thea,” Thea murmured mutinously, eyes downcast.

  Mrs. Chen’s hearing, honed by years of being housemistress in a boarding school, was sharp. “Thea? Okay. Mr. Winthrop, the principal is expecting you both. You can leave her luggage at the girls’ hall, and I’ll be over there when you’re ready, to help settle Thea in.”

  The meeting with the principal was brief, and then Thea had been excused while he and her father remained closeted together for another quarter of an hour or so. And then Paul was out, shaking the principal’s hand at the door of the office.

  “Let me know if there is anything we can do to make Galathea’s stay here a rewarding one—as is our wish for all the students who enter our school. It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Winthrop.”

  They made their way back to the girls’ hall and then stood awkwardly for a moment, facing each other. Paul, standing beside the car with his hands by his sides, looked almost trapped.

  “Do you have everything?” he asked, his voice strange, distantly polite.

  “Yes, Daddy,” said Thea, suddenly moved to the diminutive again. She hadn’t called him Daddy for a long time. Not since he had left her with the Alphiri guardian of the Portal that would take her to Cheveyo.

  Her father gave her a swift hug and turned away, pouring himself into the driver’s seat of the car, turning on the ignition with an almost savage little motion, and driving away with an acceleration that was not quite necessary.

  Apparently Mrs. Chen had been watching through the curtains for Paul’s departure, for she emerged to stand at Thea’s side as the car leaped forward with an angry little motion and then sped, with Paul driving way too fast for the school speed limit, down the curved road and out of sight behind a copse of trees.

  “Your things are already in your room,” Mrs. Chen said. “Your roommate isn’t there just now, so you’ll have a chance to do most of your unpacking in peace.”

  “Roommate?” Thea had not thought further than getting here. She had always had her own room—except for the months in Cheveyo’s house, but that had been different.

  “Ah, it won’t be that bad,” said Mrs. Chen. Thea had almost, but not quite, succeeded in concealing her misgivings in the tone of her voice, but the expression on her face, apparently, was quite enough for Mrs. Chen to read between the lines. “You’ll like Magpie. You’ll see. You two will be good for each other. That’s what I do, you know,” she said, pushing her short silvery-white hair back behind her ear in a gesture that Thea would quickly begin to find very familiar. “All of us have pieces of spirit—of personality—that we lack. We can’t help it, it’s the way we are. I’m here to find the best matches. To help our students graduate from here as whole as we can make them.”

  A heavy silver medallion hung around Mrs. Chen’s neck. It looked oddly familiar to Thea, but she had not paid close attention to it earlier. Now something in the way she had described her position in the school made Thea focus closely on the medallion for the first time. What Mrs. Chen had just said had a nuance to it—the words might have been innocuous enough, but somehow they had sounded magical, and the medallion confirmed it. It was silver, dark with age and embossed with an insignia Thea suddenly recognized. Her eyes snapped back to Mrs. Chen’s face. The woman was smiling, an expression that managed to conceal more than it revealed.

  “Mage, First Class,” Thea said, nodding at the medallion. “But I don’t understand. I thought this place was positively warded against magic.”

  “Mage, First Class, retired,” Mrs. Chen said with light emphasis on the last word. “You are right, no magic is practiced here. But Thea, in order to know what it is that we do not do here, we have to be aware of what can be done. Many of the teachers here have volunteered to come here after a lifetime of service to the magical world. Some come once their gifts start fading with age—that happens sometimes. Others come because they have renounced their talents, for whatever reason—that happens, too. Most of us at least know what it feels like to practice magic, and some of us even still do, outside these grounds, of course. That is more important than you realize, in a place where magic is not permitted.”

  “My father has a medallion like that,” Thea murmured.

  “I know,” Mrs. Chen said. “We even worked together for a while. But he is still active in the field and I…I just decided the time had come to bow out. Magic can be exhausting, you know, very wearing on body and mind. It isn’t for the very old.”

  It would have been very rude to ask, and Thea had been brought up to be polite. But something about Mrs. Chen put Thea in mind of Grandmother Spider. She did not flow and shift and change as Grandmother Spider did, but Mrs. Chen’s white hair framed a smooth, unlined face, with only a hint of laugh lines crinkling the corners of her eyes.

  “Older than you think, dear,” Mrs. Chen said with a smile, aware of the scrutiny and of what lay beneath it. “I’m much older than I’ll ever admit to being. Trust me, you’re safe here—and you’ll enjoy Magpie.”

  “Magpie?” Thea repeated blankly. Mrs. Chen had said it before, but repetition didn’t make it sound any less odd.

  “Everyone calls her that,” Mrs. Chen said, waving her hand in dismissal. “Her given name is Catherine, but I don’t think she’s answered to that in years.”

  There was magic in names. Here, where there was no magic, names did not matter. People could choose their own identity and not have one thrust upon them.

  Thea found the concept strangely liberating.

  The room she was to share with the girl called Magpie was a mess. One of the beds was obviously in use, although it had been rather sloppily made. The chair beside it and the dresser that belonged on that side of the room were draped with discarded clothes and piled with stuff that glittered or gleamed, giving Thea a sudden insight into what had given Magpie her nickname. The dresser mirror was almost obscured by a quantity of gold-sprayed plastic pearls, the kind used for carnival beads or to adorn Christmas trees. There were four bottles of different-colored glitter ranged on the windowsill, for what purpose Thea could not tell. A prism hung in the window, throwing rainbow light into the room.

  The other bed, the one that was to be Thea’s, had been obviously used as a repository and only halfheartedly cleared. Debris remained on it: an inside-out T-shirt, a dog-eared book, a sketch pad, and a half dozen colored pencils. A string of the golden plastic pearls was draped across the headboard of Thea’s bed, like an offering.

  “Having another person in here will be good for Magpie,” Mrs. Chen said. “She has a tendency to fill any vacuum she is given access to. That side’s yours, the drawers are clear, that closet in the corner is for you. I’ll be back when Magpie returns, to do the introductions. There’s a leaflet in the drawer, there, that tells you a bit about the rules of residence—laundry days, and all that. It should all be pretty simple and self-explanatory, but shout if you have any questions. Welcome to the Wandless Academy, Thea.”

  Mrs. Chen knew who Thea was, who she had been expected to be. Her welcome was commendably free of pity or condescension. As far as the people in this school were concerned, no student would ever be made to feel inferior by having arrived here—that attitude had been made very clear to the Winthrops in the principal’s office.

  Thea knew her choice to come to this school had been the right one. There was something waiting here for her to stumble across and make her own.

  She gathered up a few stray items of clothing belonging to her roommate and deposited them back on Magpie’s bed, clearing her own space, but she didn’t have much to unpack and was almost done by the time the door opened again, maybe an hour later, and a voice said, “You must be Thea.”

  The voice fit with the cheerful untidiness of the room—it bubbled with laughter just under
the surface, like water running over pebbles in the streambed. Thea realized with a wince she could not quite hide that Magpie was going to be one of those annoying people who were always irrepressibly chirpy first thing in the morning.

  Magpie showed no sign of having noticed it. She was short, maybe five foot two in her stocking feet, her face surrounded by untidy black hair, her eyes round and dark. She was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt with a scattering of sequins on it, her narrow brown feet thrust into a pair of plain sandals.

  “I’m here because I’m useless at ancestral magic,” Magpie volunteered.

  It seemed that the introduction ritual in this place involved just that: getting the awkwardness out of the way. Wandless Academy had a good academic reputation, but the name spoke eloquently of all that it was not, and people usually arrived here for reasons other than the pursuit of a sterling academic record. It was ironic, because actual wands had not been used in contemporary magic for generations, so even the common, everyday magic of Thea’s world was at least technically “wandless.” But here in the school, it had been a name deliberately chosen to emphasize its identity.

  A nickname, in a way. Just like “Magpie.”

  Thea had offered the usual comfortable excuse as a response to Magpie’s words. “I’m here because I can’t do any magic at all.”

  Magpie had given her a sympathetic look but had not pried. That, too, was in the unspoken rules. One did not ask for what was not freely offered. Thea didn’t ask further about “ancestral magic,” either—somehow understanding that if Magpie felt so inclined, she would share any relevant information.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Magpie said with a grin, seamlessly shifting the topic of conversation.

  That had been all in the way of introductions. Somehow, here, it was easy to accept.

  It was strange at first for Thea, having a roommate. The room at the Wandless Academy’s girls’ residence was not large, and they had both had to adjust their personal space to fit the circumstances; Thea soon took to picking up anything she could not identify as belonging to her and leaving it on Magpie’s bed. It was harder to remember not to leave stuff of her own lying around, particularly if it was shiny or sparkly. It wasn’t that Magpie was a thief, but the nickname was definitely there for a reason. She was fatally attracted by glitter, and if Thea left a pair of earrings on the dresser she would likely find them stuck into the woven blanket that Magpie had draped over her bed’s headboard. Not because she had stolen them or particularly wanted them, but because they looked pretty there.

  But as a roommate Magpie was soon simply a part of the whole place, her presence almost unnoticed unless Thea happened to be looking for a favorite pair of earrings that were missing again.

  The golden moon of August, Sunyi’ta, the Moon of Green Corn, faded quickly as the days fled by, and then it was September, the end of summer, with another moon trembling on the verge of something—not quite round, not quite full, but very quickly it would be. It would hang low in the sky: a bleached white circle, casting cold light. Cheveyo would have called it Senic’ta, the Harvest Moon.

  Senic’ta, the moon of September—the moon under whose bright light you were supposed to reap what you had sown. And here was Thea’s harvest—with herself ensconced in what she had once called the Last Ditch School for the Incurably Incompetent. This place—the only place free of magic in a world where magic ran free—was this really the only place where someone like Thea could hide, in plain sight, from those who waited to use her for their own ends?

  Cheveyo had been a last resort. Thea had been sent to him in order to break a seemingly impregnable barrier, to bring down the wall that stood between her and the gift of magic that ought to have been hers by right. The ruse had succeeded better than anyone could have dreamed—but it had also given Thea a knowledge of danger that nobody had banked on her having. Now she could see the perils that lurked in the illusion of that golden dream held out to her like a shiny bauble to a child.

  Whatever it was that she had, the Alphiri wanted. And they were waiting for it. She had thought she had been right not to mention her fears and suspicions when she had returned home, but that had been before she had encountered Corey on the ferry. Thea sometimes found her heart beating very fast, as though terrified, at some thought she had not quite pinned down in her own mind. And it was about the Alphiri, always about the Alphiri….

  Back on the red mesa, Thea had asked the single important question: What do I need to know?

  It was astonishing how alive and vivid Cheveyo’s catechism was, here, beyond his world, beyond anything he had ever known. Thea allowed herself a small smile as her hand went to the three feathers that hung around her neck.

  Patience, Catori…

  If there were answers, and if she dared not use magic to seek them, the orb of the full moon rising in the heavens would turn a new page for Thea. Things that might have been hidden under a veneer of magic in the world that she knew could well be exposed when that magic was removed…and the only thing left behind would be the stark facts behind the choice she had made long ago.

  HARVEST MOON

  1.

  WITH JUST A HANDFUL of students, the Academy was a quiet and dignified place, its stately buildings shaded by ancient trees. Those students who were present strolled without hurrying, drifting through the woods and courtyards, taking their time. It all changed almost overnight with the beginning of the new school year.

  The returning students began to arrive as the merest trickle, a week or so before school officially started, much as Thea herself had done. That trickle turned into a steady flow, and then into a torrent. The windows on the redbrick buildings resembled wide-open eyes, as though the entire school had just been shaken awake from its summer slumbers by the slamming of car doors, the scraping of trunks and suitcases being carried up the stairs, by the shrieks and shouts as friends encountered each other in corridors.

  Thea, together with a handful of other new people, lurked self-consciously at the fringes of the student body, in the wake of the first student rush. For Thea this lurking-on-the-fringes thing was nothing new, really—she had done something like this all her life. The pattern, however, was different this time. The fringes had usually been achieved after she had first been cultivated by those eager to gain social cachet by hanging around celebrity—what Thea had once, in a bleak little heart-to-heart with her Aunt Zoë, called Seventhology. It usually lasted just long enough for the groupies to discover that they weren’t getting what they thought out of the bargain and begin drifting away. Meanwhile, all sorts of other groups, the kind Thea might have wanted to join and be a part of, passed her by, apparently without so much as being aware of her existence. She had had only a bare handful of people in her life who were what she thought of as friends, and even they hadn’t lasted longer than a couple of years apiece.

  But there was something at Wandless Academy that Thea had never had the advantage of before: a roommate like Magpie, who seemed to know everybody and who, in turn, seemed to be on everyone’s “To Do” list when it came to rekindling friendship connections for a brand-new school year. Thea was introduced to half of her classmates before classes started and was already accepted as Magpie’s sidekick at lunch on the first day of school.

  “Hey! Tess! Over here!” Magpie yelled, half rising from her seat beside Thea, and waving vigorously at a dark-haired girl with elegant gold-rimmed eyeglasses who had just walked in with lunch tray balanced in one hand and a bulging book bag in the other. The girl waved awkwardly with the bag, barely managing to avoid dumping the contents of her lunch tray on top of an oblivious student seated at the next table, and started to thread her way to where Magpie had cleared a space for her. Depositing the bag on the floor with an alarming thud, Tess slid the tray expertly onto the table with one hand while swinging her legs over the bench.

  “Hey,” she said. “New year. New idiots. I’ve already had to start training people in etiquette.”

&n
bsp; Magpie giggled. “What did they bring in this time?”

  “A bag of Sweet Spells,” Tess said. “This one newbie gave a handful to my roommate. She’s yet another newbie, and she doesn’t know any better, and she offered me one—and I suppose I should have known better and recognized them but, hey, my mind was elsewhere, so I had one. At least I scared those two good and proper. Good thing Mrs. Chen was right there.”

  “You okay?”

  “Still have this,” Tess said, pushing up a sleeve and showing an angry red rash on her forearm.

  “You allergic to candy?” Thea said.

  “To magic,” Magpie said laconically. “That’s why she’s here. If she eats anything made with an ingredient of magic, content or process, she might choke to death.”

  “I thought magic wasn’t supposed to work here,” Thea said to Magpie.

  “It can work here, it’s just that there are rules against it being here. For obvious reasons,” Magpie said. “You and I, we’re exiles from that world. We don’t fit, we don’t belong, we can’t perform magic. With Tess it’s far more serious. The stuff can kill her. This place is more than a haven for magic refugees. It’s a sanctuary.”

  “You mean you can’t leave this place?” Thea said, turning to Tess.

  “Sure I can. My family is pretty good about things,” Tess said. “But they know. We don’t eat anything prepared with magic. My mother makes her own bread, with real flour and real yeast, and she kneads the dough herself. My brother and I couldn’t go trick-or-treating at Halloween, because people will give out Sweet Spells or Enchantmints, or even just apples with a gigglespell put on them. The first and last time we went—I think we were five or so at the time—my dad was with us, and if he hadn’t been there to do first aid I could have died right there.”