Blue Magic

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Your boss is being magnanimous, sweetheart,” Teo said. “Don’t spoil the moment.”

  “You seem to think Astrid has something to apologize for,” Ev said. “She didn’t stick you here, Teoquan.”

  “So I’m supposed to let her dick around as she pleases, dishing out freedom by the teaspoon?”

  “I’m hearing that you’re angry, but—,” Will said.

  “Oh, let the well wizard speak for herself,” Teoquan said.

  “I’ll look for Lilla, and I’ll speed things up as much as I can,” Astrid said. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. When do you start letting us out?”

  “Out?” Ev coughed.

  Teoquan laughed. “What? You thought we’d stay on this barren little reservation forever? Locked away and cozy?”

  Astrid drew in a slow, whistling breath, and Ev glanced at the shrinking pebble of letrico powering her healing chantment. “Bramblegate’s right there. From what I hear, you control it, not me.”

  “Don’t you have enough problems, kid?” Ev objected. “Letting this … hothead into the real isn’t going to help matters.”

  “You may not like his attitude, Ev, but this ain’t no Garden of Eden,” Patience said.

  Ev blushed. You couldn’t fault her loyalty.

  “No prisons, Pop,” Astrid said. “Remember?”

  “I got every right to want out.” Teo strode to the edge of the gate, easing his arm through, then cursing and backpedaling. His hand reemerged, covered in icicles, frozen solid. “You’ve booby-trapped it.”

  Astrid shook her head. “Not me.”

  Teo turned, taking them all in—and then he bellowed: “Eliza!” The roof of ice above them shivered and cracked. Blue snow drifted down. Sprinting to the bone bridge, Teo vanished. Moments later, they heard shouting in the Roused tongue.

  “What’s that about?” Ev said.

  Patience squinted, translating. “Eliza’s afraid the Roused will be hunted down in the real. And she needs people for the rescue effort.”

  “It’s up to her?”

  “The strongest faction of Roused is holding the gate shut. Teo’s saying she won’t be in charge for long.”

  “It’s true.” Astrid rubbed her gut. “Grumbles say that when Teo has enough allies, he’ll push through the Chimney. There’s a fight. Fire, murder, Bramblegate burning—”

  “Don’t worry,” Ev said, suddenly bitter. “It’ll all be okay, remember?”

  “Pop.” Unexpectedly, Astrid hugged Ev again. This time, she slipped something into his palm. “For Eliza,” she whispered.

  Ah, Ev thought. She hadn’t told Will about their scheme.

  “I’m going to go see Jacks now,” she said, walking into the golden light. Will followed, leaving Ev standing uncomfortably close to Patience, with nothing to say and every reason to wish he’d stayed on Pucker Hill.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ASTRID PRESSED HER HANDS against the massive vitagua wave. Jacks was there, hands burning like embers, just under the ice.

  The grumbles of the unreal rose around her. The glacier and the people trapped within it were in some sense a consciousness: a linkage of spirits and the knowledge their thousands of minds contained. It held an incomparable body of knowledge, and it knew its future as well as its past.

  That mind’s sole goal was to get all those people out, and it had misled Astrid more than once. To the unreal, she was both ally and jailer, someone to be indulged but never trusted.

  “If I die, the well will close,” she reminded it now.

  That’s not how it happens, the grumbles replied. Not by poison, not by flame.

  “But I am poisoned,” she insisted.

  Her memory shifted, her sense of time lurching so hard, her stomach bumped. Suddenly it was the terrible day when she’d killed Jacks’s father. He had stuck her with a sea-glass knife.

  She tried to push the memory away—she couldn’t relive Jacks’s death, Sahara’s betrayal.

  The knife fell, immolating when it struck the spilled vitagua on the mantel. It won’t be poison. Death is sharp, a blade, drawn fast …

  Old news. The Chief had stabbed her ages ago. “I don’t want to die, Jacks. How can there be a Happy After for me if I’m in Limbo? Can I save myself—is there time?”

  An ice cream headache blew down her spine, and she remembered the false Sahara again, back in Atlanta.

  Someone muttered—oh, it was her. “Mouse magic.”

  It was too confusing; she broke contact.

  “Sorry, Jacks. I know you’ve got your own problems.” She kept talking: about Sahara’s trial, about Olive, the volunteers. “And … I’m supposed to be falling for Will.” She looked for some reaction, any reaction.

  Nothing. He might as well have been dead.

  The pain in her side worsened—she was running out of letrico. She found Will, who was waiting at the edge of the wave, out of earshot.

  “You get any answers?”

  “I don’t die by poison or by fire.”

  “That’s all he had to say?”

  “Mouse magic.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not sure. Something to do with the people Sahara’s been contaminating with her blood.”

  “Mouse magic,” Will echoed. “Very helpful.”

  “Let’s just focus on showing you how to make chantments.” They headed back to Bramblegate. “How do you feel?”

  “Strange,” he answered. “Like I have a new lung, some organ meant to fill and empty…”

  “Yeah,” she said. She pulled a drop of vitagua, suspending it in midair, and said, “Can you feel this?”

  He reached out, not touching it, and the droplet shivered. His fingers twitched, miming the action of pulling a string, and it followed. Astrid held on too, like a parent balancing a kid on a bike, as he practiced making it circle.

  “Good,” she said. “Ready to make contact?”

  He eyed the blob, as if it were a venomous spider, then closed his fist around the droplet.

  He opened his blue-stained hand. “I don’t hear voices.”

  “It’s a tiny amount,” she said, relieved.

  “I’m officially on the magical mystery tour, no going back now.” He looked her in the eyes, seeming to consider it, and then kissed her.

  Happiness glimmered, brighter than the growing pain in her side. “Thank you, Will.”

  They continued on to the Chimney. A traffic jam of filled shopping carts was waiting, each piled high with unchanted objects: plastic bottles, cutlery, hats, ski equipment.

  Will frowned. “You can chant while you’re injured?”

  “It hurts a bit.”

  He gave her that keen interrogator’s look.

  “Okay, it hurts a lot. But this stack of things is for you. When you’re starting, look for things that are receptive to magic. With Dad it was antiques. He called it—”

  “Sparkle. I remember.” Will looked over the pile. After a second, he picked out a baby’s wooden block. Next it was a rag doll, a music box, a plastic tiara, and a dirty rake and pail.

  Toys, noted Astrid. Toys, his kids trapped in dreams … how much room was there for romance, for either of them? She wondered how Will’s children would fit into After. They would be chanters one day, the grumbles said. What about ordinary life, the part where she was their father’s … girlfriend? Their mother loved Sahara—the Alchemites called her the Filthwitch.

  Will hefted the kid’s block in his hand. “I need to break the skin, right? Let the vitagua out?”

  “You cut yourself during the initiation,” She pointed to the slice he’d made with the scalpel. “Pull the magic here.”

  He frowned, concentrating, and after a second, the small puncture turned blue. He pressed it to the block. Then his back straightened.

  “You okay? Will?”

  “I wasn’t ready for the rush.”

  She threw her arms around him. “You did it!”

  He held up the bloc
k. “Any idea what it does?”

  She grazed it with her fingertip. “B is for beluga … it emits whalesong.”

  “B for bizarre,” he said. “Not very useful.”

  “Time and practice, that’s all it takes.” Pain made her gasp. Will gave her a fresh letrico crystal, and she healed herself, beating it back.

  “Astrid? Sorry to interrupt.” That was Pike, calling from the base of operations at the hotel.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Someone’s been dumped in the forest, north of Bigtop.”

  “We’ll be right there.”

  They arrived to find a crowd of Springers gathered at the edge of town, at the base of a massive poplar. Two volunteers were descending from the canopy, rappelling down with a large bundle.

  “It was Alchemites. They dropped him here,” Mark said.

  The volunteers set the bundle down gently. Kneeling, Astrid opened the sheet with shaking hands.

  He wasn’t one of the volunteers. It shouldn’t have been a relief, maybe, but it was. He was black, and his face was clawed to ribbons. His hair was long, curled, starling-patterned—Sahara’s.

  Mouse magic, the grumbles repeated.

  “Madre de Dios!” Aquino pulled her out of reach. “It’s that Fyreman!”

  “From the trial?” Igme said. “Landon something?”

  Astrid felt a pang of remorse. “It’s the guy from Atlanta, who attacked us. We knocked him out and the Alchemites got him.”

  He wasn’t quite dead.

  “Alchemite atrocities,” Astrid said. She’d hoped the grumbles had misspoken.

  “Can we save him?” A curly-haired woman with a Bronx accent and the first hint of a whiskered seal’s snout cut off the babble of the volunteers.

  “We’re gonna try.” Janet pulled letrico into her magic mitten, pressing it against the shredded flesh of the man’s shoulder.

  The Fyreman began to scream.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HEALING THE FYREMAN WASN’T working.

  The obvious signs of torture cleared up fast enough: the knob of his dislocated shoulder popped back into place, and the rope burns on his wrists and ankles disappeared. As his torn face knitted itself back together, Will saw it was indeed the Fyreman from Atlanta, the one who’d poisoned Astrid.

  His head was clear for the first time in months. He felt rested, calm, in control of both body and mind, filled with a pure, inexhaustible energy he remembered from childhood. And so far, he had made only a single chantment.

  Small wonder, Will thought, that Astrid has been able to run the town, oversee the volunteers and their projects.

  He turned the new acuity on his own problems: curing Ellie, seeing that Astrid recovered from the poisoning, and now, dealing with this new arrival.

  The Fyreman was badly contaminated. Spiral horns jutted from his forehead, and a mane had grown under his chin. Starling pinfeathers sprouted from his temples; he seemed to be turning into two animals at once.

  Seeing Astrid, the man stopped shrieking. “If it isn’t my dearest, most loyal friend.”

  “Sahara? What have you done to him?” Astrid reached out. The man thrashed, trying to head-butt her. “Listen,” she pleaded.

  Janet did something and the guy went limp. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t touch the homicidal zealots.”

  “Will?” Astrid beckoned. “Put your hands on him.”

  He obeyed, laying a palm on the guy’s forehead between the still-growing horns.

  “Sense anything?” Astrid asked.

  “It’s like touching a stove.”

  Astrid ran her fingers up one of the twisting horns. “Sahara’s gang infected him with vitagua—and with her blood. He’s cursed, turning into some kind of … antelope?”

  “Kudu,” one of the volunteers said.

  “Kudu, thanks,” Astrid said. “Sahara’s in there too, trying to make him over into herself.”

  “Possession?” Janet asked. She was binding the unconscious man’s hands with a strip of fabric. “That’s a world-class sick thing to do.”

  “We’ll have to euthanize him,” Mark said.

  “No!” Astrid was visibly horrified.

  “I get that you want to save every last man, woman, child, barn owl, bumblebee, and plague flea if possible—”

  “Can the sarcasm, Mark. You’re talking about murder.”

  “Astrid, he almost killed you. If you can’t muster up some resentment, at least recognize that he’s dangerous.”

  Astrid’s lip curled. “Are you gonna execute him? Or were you going to ask Jupiter to do it?”

  “You’re accusing me of not doing my own dirty work?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Will asked.

  “Nothing.” Astrid waved the question away. “This is what Sahara wants. Us fighting, another Fyreman’s death on my hands.”

  She was evading again, Will thought. He looked to Olive, and her gaze skittered away.

  Olive and Mark had been among Astrid’s first recruits. There was an inner circle: these two, maybe the project manager, Pike? Even now, Will thought, she was keeping secrets from him.

  “Part of him is Sahara,” Mark said. “It’s creepy. We can’t have him around.”

  “There’s gotta be some way,” Astrid said.

  “To do what?” Will asked. “Get her out of his head, or reach the Sahara within?”

  She made that infuriating gesture of dismissal, her standard response whenever he raised the issue of Sahara.

  “Why infect him?” Olive asked. The sober cast of her face showed, suddenly, how much Jacks Glade had resembled her.

  “They wanted Fyreman secrets.” Astrid still had a hand on the man’s horns. “With Sahara in his head, he had to tell them.”

  He had to go, they all agreed on that much. There was a babble of suggestions from the group: Put him out of his misery, flash-freeze him and send him to the unreal, exile him to dreamland, give him back to the Alchemites. Clancy, the old man who drove the strike team trolley, kept insisting they’d agreed not to keep prisoners.

  “Let’s talk to Wendover about returning him,” Will said.

  That triggered a chorus of dismay: “Excuse me?”

  “Hand the guy over to the government?”

  “He’s a Fyreman,” Will said. “His name’s Landon. There’s another Fyreman named Landon working with Roche. We have to contact them.”

  “That sounds like a fantastic way to get captured,” Mark said.

  Stifling exasperation, Will said, “If Roche starts taking us seriously—”

  “We don’t want him taking us seriously,” Pike said. “The more of a joke we are, the fewer bombs they drop.”

  “What are we, people?” Will asked, hiding impatience. “Roche says terrorists.”

  “No,” protested a half-dozen volunteers.

  Will faced them squarely. “Who believes what we’re doing is right, believes in Astrid’s Happy After?” Hands shot up everywhere. “So everything we do is driven by prophecy. Does that make us a cult after all, like the Alchemites?”

  No answer.

  He took a breath. “Well? What are we doing?”

  “We’re rescuing people,” Olive said. “In the real and the unreal.”

  “Preventing a catastrophe,” Astrid said. Her voice rang with confidence. “The well is open, the magic is spreading. We’re just holding back the flood.”

  “Delaying Boomsday,” agreed Mark.

  “Will’s right. We’ll return this man to his family.” Astrid looked straight at Clancy. “No prisoners.”

  Will said, “So we call Wendover?”

  “We’ll approach that marshal,” Astrid said. “The cute one.”

  Igme said, “You just want the woman’s cell number.”

  “Try one eight hundred hot butch,” said Pike.

  The tension eased a bit.

  Mark sighed. “Astrid made a chantment so Katarina and the off-site science teams could
teleconference. We’ll use that.”

  “Perfect,” Will said.

  “What’ll we tell ’em?” Mark said.

  “The truth, of course,” Will said. “Alchemites dumped the Fyreman here. We want to return him.”

  “And then?” Mark asked. “Load up the strike team and roll into a trap?”

  “One problem at a time,” Will said.

  “That’s another thing,” Mark said. “Astrid, you’re off the strike team. We can’t afford to lose you.”

  “I’m not the only chanter anymore,” Astrid said. “Will’s learned how.”

  There was a collective murmur of relief.

  Mark crossed his arms. “Yeah, Astrid? Is he as good as you?”

  “It’s his first day.”

  “You know how the president and the vice president never get to fly together.…”

  “In the first place, I’m not the president of anything, and in the second place, the two of us may be becoming an item, Mark—so you can just give up on keeping us separated.”

  “Becoming an item,” Pike said. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

  Janet clucked. “What’ll that cute marshal say?”

  The last thing Will wanted was to have the meeting devolve into public discussion of his love life. “Folks! Calling Roche?”

  “Am I allowed to make phone calls, Mark?” Astrid asked.

  “Only if you look healthy,” Mark said. “They can’t know you’re wounded.”

  “We’ll all clean up,” Will said. “Legitimacy, remember?”

  “Meeting the Roach,” Astrid said, her tone disbelieving. Then her attention wandered; she crouched down, hands cupped.

  “What is it?”

  “Mouse magic.” She stood, coming up with a mouse. It was alchemized; a blue spatter colored its tail, and it was the size of a softball. “Something the grumbles said … I guess I figure it out later.”

  “Astrid? Cleaning up? Taking a meeting?”

  “Right.” She held out the mouse. “Can someone find a cage for this little guy?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Janet, taking it. “Good plan, Forest.”

  “Uh … thanks.”

  “You’re off to the baths?” Mark asked.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Astrid said. “I need to catch up with a couple projects.”