Much Ado About Magic

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  MUCH ADO ABOUT MAGIC

  by: Mette Ivie Harrison

  Copyright 2012 Mette Ivie Harrison

  Smashwords Edition

  Chapter 1: Bee

  It wasn’t as if I had warts or a female mustache. I didn’t smell. I had clean clothes on, and they actually matched. I’d purchased them over the summer at one of the stores with the Hero clan logo on the front, approving them for the whole clan to buy from. My shirt had a nice bit of lace around the collar and my jeans were snug but not indecent.

  Yeah, maybe I wasn’t a size 0, but what was wrong with that? I looked perfectly fine. I had checked myself in the mirror that morning. Long red hair in a single braid down my back, a few freckles on my nose and cheeks, green eyes and a pointed chin. A little too pointed, but it suited me.

  But here was Leanata, staring at me like I was a witch from Macbeth. She stared for a long minute, her gaze lingering on the parts I guess she thought were the most objectionable. My nose, apparently. Also, my hips and my tennis shoes. I liked tennis shoes. They didn’t hurt my feet. So they weren’t beautiful. So what?

  “I can give you some pointers with the beauty spell,” offered Leanata then, her voice smooth and sweet. I wasn’t fooled for a moment. There was nothing sweet about her or her suggestion. “A little one-on-one practice. If that’s what you need, Beatrice.”

  I hated that name. It sounded ancient. My real friends called me Bee, but Leanata wasn’t one of my real friends.

  “Maybe I could give you some pointers on how to be nice, Leanata,” I said.

  Leanata was the demi-head of the Hero clan, in charge of everyone in the clan at our high school. She had demanded that I come to school early, the first day of my junior year. She’d called my parents and threatened them with expelling me from the Hero clan if I didn’t show up.

  That kind of stuff always frightens them. We weren’t close blood relatives of the Heros. We were affiliates and we didn’t matter. My grandparents on both sides had worked hard to get into the Hero clan. My parents remembered what it was like to be clanless, to try to figure out how to use magic without any access to the regular spells. If it works, it doesn’t work well, and there’s no guarantee it will ever work again. Magic is fickle if you don’t know the spells.

  “You’re making the whole clan look bad,” Leanata said.

  Now we were getting down to it. “You mean I’m making you look bad, Leanata? Did you lose a boyfriend this week or something? You think it’s my fault for scaring him away?”

  Leanata had a reputation for dating multiple guys at once, because she was the Hero demi-head and figured she could get away with it.

  “I can stand to lose a boyfriend here or there,” said Leanata. “I know how to get one again. I’ve had dozens of boyfriends. Unlike you.”

  “Well, some of us have standards,” I said.

  “And some of us have a love life,” said Leanata back to me.

  “Oh? You’re in love with all of them, are you? And here I thought you were the kind of person who could never really love anyone but yourself.” I knew I was on the edge here but Leanata had been riding me the last year, and I was tired of it.

  “At least I know that the person I love loves me back,” said Leanata, her eyes narrowing as she waited to see my reaction.

  Yeah, that hurt. But I couldn’t let her see it. “And do you bring your mirror along on all your dates, just in case the boyfriend you’re with doesn’t give you enough compliments? You can just tell yourself how beautiful you are?”

  “Are you asking me for advice for when you go on a date?” asked Leanata. “When do you think that might happen next? In twenty years or so?”

  I swallowed hard at that. “Well, I’m waiting for someone who doesn’t think all Heros are like you. I guess it might take that long.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You’re going to do the spell, Beatrice,” she said. “Right now, while I’m listening.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you want? More competition?” I said.

  Leanata raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow. It wasn’t plucked or anything. It would never grow back the wrong way, not so long as she used the beauty spell on a daily basis. She didn’t have to spend hours getting her makeup on in the morning the way my mom says she had to when she was a teenager, before she was in the clan. She’s burned all the photos of herself because she says they were too painful to remember.

  But my dad has shown me photos of himself in high school, too, and he looked pretty awful. Not just the pimples and the bad teeth, but the funny way his hair went in the morning, no matter how he tried to comb it, and the asymmetry that made him look like he was standing crooked. It’s all fixed now and he looks normal. But he and Mom are always saying that I don’t understand how bad it is to be clanless, that I’ve never been invisible and ugly at the same time.

  I wonder, though. Mom and Dad fell in love in high school before they got into the Hero clan. They’ve stayed in love for all the years since then and I didn’t believe it was because of how they looked now. They still really loved each other, deep down. I could see it in the way they looked at each other, even when they were sick, or in the mornings before they used the spell. They teased each other like only really old friends can, and they kissed each other with their eyes closed. So it wasn’t about how they looked. It wasn’t about the Hero clan spell at all.

  I don’t know of anyone else in the Hero clan who has stayed together for so long. They were usually a lot like Leanata, sometimes getting married and getting divorced three or four times in a year. You don’t have to get married inside the clan, but it happens a lot. Which I think is weird, because can’t you see through the beauty in other people when you have to do the spell yourself every day? Apparently not.

  When Heroes married people outside the clan, it seemed to me like those marriages didn’t have any more chance of lasting. If a Hero wasn’t married to someone who was beautiful, they were always paying attention to them. That didn’t help a marriage any. And I suspect that people who married Heroes figured out pretty quickly that you didn’t want to stay married to someone so superficial for long. Or maybe they were just as superficial and found someone else as easily. I don’t know. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to, growing up as a Hero.

  In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that my parents would be hurt, I would go clanless now. Get myself thrown out in some quiet way, and never have to bow to Leanata or any of the other Hero clan-heads, demi or otherwise, again. The only problem would be that if I got thrown out of the Heros, I couldn’t get into any other clans. I’d be clanless forever, with no second chances like my parents had since they were clanless from the beginning.

  “I don’t think that you would be competition for anyone,” said Leanata. “Even if you said the beauty spell every minute of every day with that big mouth of yours. The beauty spell can only do so much, after all. It doesn’t change your personality.”

  Ouch! That might actually have made me feel bad, if I’d still been in elementary school.

  “Yeah, well, maybe you could share the spell that you used to transfer all that inner beauty to the outside,” I said.

  “The only people who talk about inner beauty are people who are ugly,” she sneered.

  “And the only people who talk about outer beauty are people who are void inside, heart and mind,” I said.

  “That’s your problem, Beatrice. You think that boys want to hear you use big words. They don’t like talk; no one does.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, Leanata,” I said. “But ‘void’ actually has only one syllable. Four letters. But maybe that seems big when you’re as small at heart as you are.”

  She opened her
mouth, closed it, and then clenched her jaw. “And you wonder why Pedro wasn’t interested in you last year? He had to go across the Atlantic Ocean to get away from you, and it took him three months to get up enough courage to get back.”

  “That’s not true,” I said automatically. Which was a mistake. I usually let myself run off at the mouth and say whatever I pleased, but when it came to Pedro and what happened last year, I needed to use caution. Think first.

  “And you’re an expert in truth now, are you?” said Leanata. “Because of that truth spell that Benedick Padua used on you? Tell me, how did it feel to say something out loud that you’d been keeping hidden for years?”

  “It wasn’t years,” I let out. And it hadn’t felt good.

  “No? I thought you were the one with such restraint.”

  “Look, I’ll use the beauty spell, all right?” I said. I hated backing down with her now. But I’d do anything to stop talking about Pedro and Benedick Padua’s truth spell from last year. Leanata knew where I was vulnerable and she’d stabbed me right there. I guess she wasn’t as vapidly beautiful as I thought. She was also mean.

  “You must have always known there was no hope for you with Pedro. You, a nobody who could never be beautiful enough to capture an Arragon and a clan head.”

  “Pedro isn’t like that,” I said.

  “Obviously, he is,” said Leanata.

  I pressed my lips tightly together to try to keep them from giving me away again.

  “I want to hear you say the beauty spell. Now,” said Leanata, standing next to me so that we were both looking into the same mirror.

  She was gorgeous, I admit it. She had the perfect face, full pink lips that seemed to pout, eyes that were wide and bright blue, cheekbones that were hauntingly hollow, and a heart-shaped face with dark, curling hair above. Not to mention the rest of her, which probably had some mathematical formula to describe its balance.

  But I didn’t want perfection. I really didn’t.

  I wanted to be me, not to look like everyone else in the Hero clan. Like a cookie cutter of beauty. I wanted to sound like me, too. And if that wasn’t enough to get the right guy to fall in love with me, then he wasn’t the right guy. I just had to keep looking, forever if that was what it took.

  And I would. As soon as I got over Pedro. Like next year.

  “Don’t know the meaning of ‘now’?” asked Leanata. “You need a dictionary for a three letter word?”

  “No,” I muttered, and took a breath, ready—

  But right then the door opened and about ten girls from the Florentine clan stepped in. They were on the tennis team, and they looked it. Muscly arms, thick legs and strong butts, flat stomachs.

  They probably couldn’t remember the spell after hearing it once, but these days with cell phones and recording devices everywhere, you never knew when it was dangerous to be overheard.

  “Oh, dear. I’ve waited too long. Now it’s not safe,” I said.

  “Go in a stall,” said Leanata. “You don’t have to see yourself to say the spell.”

  That was true, although most Heros did enjoy looking at themselves, and some people said it helped focus.

  Feeling defiant, I went into a stall and started saying the spell really loudly. It didn’t rhyme and it didn’t make any sense. The sounds were almost random and they were the same the world over. I don’t know how anyone figured them out, if they originally were part of some long-dead language. It takes days for most children to learn the spells the first time at the age of eight, and that helps protect the clans from theft.

  “Keep it down,” said Leanata, pounding on the stall door.

  “I’m just trying to make sure I’m doing it right,” I called out, smiling to myself. It felt good to rebel against “the man,” even if in this case, it was a woman.

  “Just get on with it,” she grumbled.

  Instead, I made a couple of mistakes on purpose, trying to waste time. Maybe Margaret and Ursula would show up and talk Leanata out of this campaign of hers against me. They were my only friends inside the clan, and for some reason, Leanata didn’t hate them like she hated me.

  Leanata corrected me and made me start over. “It’s no wonder it never works properly on you,” she said. “You have to do it precisely right. What’s wrong with your parents?”

  “What’s wrong with yours?” I flung back at her. But I said the spell right all the way through the next time. I didn’t want my parents getting in trouble because of me. If I got kicked out of the Hero clan, it probably wouldn’t get them kicked out—unless they tried to defend me. But it wouldn’t make them look better, either.

  When I finished saying the spell, I looked down at my hands. The freckles on my hands and arms went away immediately. There were still some calluses on my fingers. Those would take a few more spells to get rid of.

  And after that, if I kept saying the spell day after day, the effects would multiply. That’s the way the spell worked for Heros. The more often you said it, the more wide-spread the effects. Eventually, I knew my fingernails would grow out perfectly, and my fingers would get a little longer and thinner. I would be tall and voluptuous, a size D bra instead of a size B. My hips and stomach would shrink and I’d have to get out my old pants from last year. Which was when I’d stopped saying the spell, because I didn’t want to be the girl who had fallen in love with Pedro Arrogan and been so horribly embarrassed by Benedict Paduan’s truth spell.

  I opened the door to the bathroom.

  Leanata waited until I had washed my hands and then she clung to me as we walked out the door. She put her mouth close enough to my ear that there could be no mistake as to what she said.

  “We’re not finished with this, Beatrice. You will start using the spell morning and night or I will know about it. And there will be consequences.”

  I headed to my locker and wondered what the world would be like if there were no clans. The five clans had passed down the only five workable magic spells in the world for generation after generation, the last thousand years. There weren’t any other spells to this day, just the five. But that was because the clans were so possessive of the spells. And the World Council has been ruling over the magic for centuries, making sure there are no infractions and no innovations. Unlike technological advancements that get cheaper and more widely available year by year, the clan spells are all the same.

  Anyone who is known to leak a clan spell disappears and the World Council makes a statement of condolence that everyone knows is really a warning. Don’t mess with the clans or the spells, and you survive.

  Chapter 2: Ben

  The morning we were headed home to the States from the summer spent in Europe, Pedro stepped away from the breakfast table and muttered the money spell under his breath. He really should have gone into another room and locked the door. Not that he couldn’t trust Claudio and me, but it was his clan spell and he was a demi-head. He was supposed to set a good example, and he was responsible for making sure the spell didn’t get out. I thought he had gotten too lax lately but I hadn’t brought it up with him. I would never have used the truth spell so openly that anyone could have heard it.

  He checked his wallet and held out a sheaf of hundred dollar bills. “OK, we’re ready to go,” he said.

  “You ever wonder what it was like before the spell made bills?” asked Claudio. “When it was all gold and silver coins?”

  “That was when your people were more useful,” said Pedro, patting Claudio on his ample shoulder. “You got to carry around the hordes of gold.”

  “Wait a minute. I thought the spells hadn’t changed in thousands of years,” I said.

  “The spells didn’t. But the money did. No one knows why,” said Pedro. “Just like the beauty spell doesn’t change, even when standards of beauty do.”

  “The truth spell never changes in any way,” I said.

  Pedro raised his eyebrows. “Oh, really?”

  “The truth doesn’t change from one year to th
e next.”

  “You keep on thinking that. You’re so innocent,” said Pedro.

  He was annoying me. “I’m not innocent.”

  “Uncorrupt, then,” he said.

  “You can’t change the truth,” I insisted.

  “Maybe not, but you can change what people think of as the truth.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Well, what about someone who swears he didn’t kill someone else because he doesn’t understand that he infected him with the plague?” said Pedro.

  “Or someone who says he didn’t steal something because he thinks that all money is rightfully his?” I said, needling Pedro.

  A flash of pain crossed his features and I regretted it immediately. The money from the spell had to come from somewhere. Pedro just didn’t know where. It might come from a bank vault when it appeared in his wallet. That’s what he imagined when he said the spell. But it also might come from some random person walking down the street who looked into his wallet and suddenly saw his money was gone. He had permission to use the spell on our trip to Europe, but that didn’t necessarily make him feel better about it.

  “None of the spells are without their costs,” said Claudio. “If you think about them too long.”

  “Then what is the cost for strength to others?” I asked. It seemed the least socially damaging of the five spells, as far as I was concerned.

  “You never think about what it means for only one group of people to be stronger than others? The way that the Florentines were paid off by one clan or another just to be left alone? Or the wars that the Florentines encouraged because it gave them more power? The way Florentines still bully and threaten, even in the World Council?” said Claudio.

  He was usually a pretty quiet guy, and it surprised me to hear him talk so thoughtfully about his own clan magic. He was deeper than I sometimes gave him credit for.

  “I guess we all have to live with a certain amount of guilt when we use our magic,” I said.

  We packed up and Claudio carried our luggage down to the taxi waiting out front. He was loading everything when suddenly a man ran right into Pedro. Short but heavy-set, he knocked Pedro over and there was a great deal of apologizing, all in Italian. Then the man got back up and began to move past us.