by Unknown
"Crocker!" Cluny leaped from suitcase to suitcase till she reached him, sitting up and rubbing his head. Springing onto his chest, she started to ask, "Are you all right?" but cracks spidering up the kitchen walls like river ice thawing stopped her. Then Shtasith was flinging himself into her, covering her with his wings, curling the both of them against Crocker and knocking her breath away.
Cackling laughter wove over and under the rips and tears filling the air. "Hang on!" Mistress Evantrue shouted, and Cluny struggled her head free of Shtasith's grip in time to see the roof burst from the house, its wooden beams bending and stretching, the whole ceiling bloating and curving into a huge sphere floating above them in the blue summer sky.
But little lattices of white-washed wood stretched up from the jagged edges at the top of the walls to connect the house to the— "Balloon?" Cluny said, her whiskers sticking straight out at the sheer volume and strength of the magic coursing through the air. "You...you can't seriously say that you're—!"
The house shook again, the little lattices tightening as the balloon rose higher, and the view outside the window shifted, the trees sliding downward. Cluny's stomach yawed like she was sailing between branches, Shtasith craning his head around, his eyes solid red.
Scurrying from his slackened claws to Crocker's shoulder, Cluny stared at Mistress Evantrue. "I hate packing," the magistrix said, settling once more at the kitchen table, Hesper again on her cushion, something about the unicorn oddly gray to Cluny's eyes. "And I sincerely doubt Haverston has an inn into whose bedding I'd be willing to entrust myself."
Full of amazement, Cluny sprang down, raced across the swaying floor, and leaped to a windowsill, the hills and forests stretching green below, a few clouds wisping away here and there through the vast blue all around, the jags of the Kesneros Mountains visible at the horizon. They were heading toward them, too, Cluny could tell, and that meant—
"Home," she whispered, and she spun on the sill, wanted to dive for Mistress Evantrue, wrap as many hugs around her as she could manage. But instead, she bowed like a proper Huxley student should and said, "Thank you so much for your efforts on my behalf, magistrix."
"Pish and tosh." Mistress Evantrue pulled a glass of some amber liquid from the air and swigged it down. "If more so-called wizards like our esteemed Hieronymous Gollantz let themselves stretch a bit, the skies would be filled with marvels like this! A little control is all it takes." She winked at Cluny. "And a little wild magic."
The feel of it was intoxicating, prickling her fur like no magical experience Cluny had ever had, like...like the first time she'd climbed to the top of a jack pine all by herself, clinging to the crooked tip swaying in the breeze, all her parents' orchards spread out below her like a—
"Your pardon, mistress," Shtasith said, and his petulant tone shocked Cluny from her reverie; she turned to see him crouched on a suitcase beside Crocker, still sitting where he'd fallen when the house had begun rising, the two of them looking at Mistress Evantrue. "But we who are lowly familiars find ourselves in a bit of a quandary."
"Indeed?" The magistrix gazed over the top of her glass, her eyes half-closed. "And what exactly has you so disturbed?"
Shtasith looked at Crocker, and he swallowed, Cluny unable to miss the touch of fear that entered his scent. "Well, ma'am, it's...it's—" He gestured to the suitcase he'd opened earlier. "My stuff's in there, sure, but these other twelve? I don't think the three of us could scrape together enough to fill even one of them!" He blinked at her. "So we were wondering where...where they came from?"
Mistress Evantrue nodded, set her glass down, and clapped her hands. "Well, let's make this a teachable moment, then, shall we?" She waved at the luggage. "Your thoughts, Sophomore Cluny, on how we might investigate the contents of these cases."
Cluny and Crocker came up with several plans of attack—none of which worked—over the next few hours, and even Shtasith got into things, breathing flame over the cases to confirm what Cluny's interrogatory spells were showing about how extensively fire warded they'd been. Mistress Evantrue sat at the table and asked questions that Cluny found largely frustrating: yes, they sometimes made her turn her thinking around and look at the problem from a new angle, but usually they just seemed to lead her down paths that in the end proved fruitless.
Still, she thought they were on to something—her first hunch that the cases were packed with books seemed to hold up under repeated query spells, and she'd just discovered that the books were all linked by subject—when a scrape and bump brought the gentle swaying of the ride to an end and Mistress Evantrue leaped to her feet. "Well, we're here!"
"Here?" Cluny looked up from the notes she'd been making to see trees again through the windows. Nut trees, she could tell, nut trees exactly like those back—
Racing to the door, she threw a twisting spell at the knob and jumped out into the early evening of her parents' south orchard, her heart light as a soap bubble in her chest. "Guys! Guys! We're here!" She spun back to see Crocker standing in the doorway of what looked like a white and blue outhouse, Shtasith on his shoulder. "C'mon!"
Crocker stepped into the dirt and took a breath, Hesper following like a cat across wet grass, Mistress Evantrue bustling out and saying, "Ah, such bucolicism! I feel more certain than ever that this vacation will prove most efficacious for us all! Don't you, Sweetness?"
"If you say so, Mother," came Hesper's flat voice.
The magistrix laughed, pulled the door to her shrunken house closed, and turned with a wave of her hand. "Lead on, Sophomore Cluny! Lead on!"
"This way!" Cluny leaped for the nearest walnut tree, dug her claws into the bark, skittered up till she was at Crocker's eye level. "Don't worry if you lose sight of me; I'll keep an eye on you! Just head north! You can't miss it!" And she scrambled up into the canopy, let her muscles stretch for what felt like the first time in ten months.
Leaping from branch to branch, she couldn't help thinking about the flight spells she knew, about the forces she would need to harness to give herself arm flaps like a flying squirrel or even wings like Shtasith's, but the plain and wonderful sensation of simply jumping drove all those calculations to the back of her mind. That sort of stuff was incredible fun, sure, but not nearly as much fun as running, clambering, sailing unassisted through the air.
The scents of other squirrels came to her, glimpses of blurred faces and tails: non-sapient cousins hiding among the leaves. She chittered the 'safety' cadences as she went and got recognition clicks in return, a few of the bigger bucks even leaping alongside her for a tree or two to chirp good-natured mating invitations; she sent every 'no, thanks' signal she knew and had to smile. A lot of town squirrels got uncomfortable around their woodland cousins, but her mother's mother had been the first sapient on that whole side of the family, and since the farm counted on the cousins at harvest time, Cluny had spent more time out in the trees than most civilized squirrels did. Which was their loss, she'd always thought...
Those below seemed fine whenever she checked, Mistress Evantrue waving her arms and speaking to a confused-looking Crocker every time Cluny stopped to make sure they were on the right path, and in less than half an hour, Cluny's ears perked to the sound of accordion music. "Yes!" she cried, whirling to scamper down the trunk of the tree she'd just leaped into. "Heads up, Crocker! I'm coming aboard!" He looked over, and she flung herself onto his unoccupied shoulder, slid down his chest into her pocket on the front of his robe. "Straight ahead!" she told his startled face.
Around one last pair of oaks, Mistress Evantrue humming a slightly out-of-tune counterpoint to the music, and they came out into the yard south of the acorn barn, Cluny's tail frizzing over her head to see tables stretched across the lawn, just about every squirrel she knew sitting or dancing or helping at the beehive-shaped ovens or the fire pits, a big Welcome Home, Cluny banner strung along the side of the barn.
"Whoa," Crocker said, and every head in the clearing snapped over, a sudden and absolute sil
ence freezing everything under the deepening evening blue. But then cheers bursting, squirrels jumping, waving their paws in the air, rushing forward to puddle around Crocker's feet; Cluny ran down his robes to hug her father, her mother, her sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and friends and everyone she could get ahold of, the back of her neck loosening deliciously as she let go the effort of being both a wizard and not a wizard, a familiar and not a familiar. Finally! She could just be herself!
Eventually, she came up for air and grinned to see that her father had taken charge of Crocker and the others, had gotten them set up on some pillows and blankets beside the bandstand, the humans twice as tall as it even when they were sitting. Leaving her Aunt Petunia at the oven where the filbert loaf was baking, she scurried over, squirrels lighting rows of torches as the twilight came down all around, and caught the tail-end of what Father was saying to Mistress Evantrue: "...always knew she'd make us proud, ma'am, and that's the honest truth."
"As she has." The magistrix waved a hand. "Cluny! Feeling better?"
"Oh, yes, ma'am!" Just the sheer scent of all these squirrels relaxed her in ways she'd forgotten she could relax. "Thank you again for arranging all this."
Father nodded and gave Cluny a hug. "So good to see you, daughter! Now, shall we get this party started?"
The aromas of cricket almandine and cashew potatoes mixing through the accordion music hummed at her whiskers. "Go ahead, Dad." She settled against Crocker's leg, looked up at him and Shtasith, then over at Mistress Evantrue. "Help yourselves, folks. We're not too formal at these—" She stopped, then, her gaze falling on Hesper, the unicorn lying with her eyes closed, her head on her hoofs, and it struck Cluny that she'd seemed out of sorts ever since they'd left Huxley. "Hesper?" she asked. "Are you—?"
"Yes, yes," Mistress Evantrue interrupted, laying a hand on her familiar's flank. "Mommy may have put a wee bit too much habanero in the chili for her poor widdle Sweetness."
Cluny's neck fur prickled, Hesper's discomfort not smelling exactly physical, but she smoothed it down, refused to let herself worry. "We've got milk, if that might help."
Hesper gave a shallow nod. "If it wouldn't be a bother."
Shtasith shifted on Crocker's shoulder, and her human friend jerked like he was coming awake. "Oh! We'll go with you, Cluny! So I can, y'know, carry the milk!"
She blinked at him, a prickliness in the warmth of his contact while Shtasith's positively jabbed at her. "Uhh, sure, Crocker. Lemme just—" She started up the hem of his robe, and he stood so quickly, she almost lost her grip, scrambling the rest of the way to her pocket and managing to turn a smile toward Mistress Evantrue. "We'll be right back."
"Thank you," Hesper said, and the magistrix patted her side again, both of their expressions oddly blank.
"OK, Crocker." Cluny gestured toward the barn. "The refrigerator's around the front of the—" But Crocker taking off at nearly a sprint made her squeak and grab hold, her breath freezing as he wove his big booted feet around the squirrels, plates in their paws, scurrying between the ovens. "Crocker! Watch out for—!"
"Attend, my Cluny!" Shtasith breathed wetly into her ear, and she snapped her head up, saw his neck stretching down from Crocker's shoulder. "Foul deeds are afoot!"
All she could do was gape at him as Crocker hurried around to the other side of the barn and pressed his back against it, as alarmed a look on his face as Cluny thought she'd ever seen there. "Mistress Evantrue!" he whispered. "She's—! I don't know what she is! But crazy would be my first guess, and prob'bly my second and third guesses, too!"
"What??" Her whiskers felt like pins sticking into her.
Crocker swallowed. "When we were walking over here and you were up in the trees, she started out giving this whole, like, nature talk. And that was OK at first 'cause she really seems to know a lot about the woods and ev'rything. But it just got weirder and weirder, and suddenly she was getting into wild magic again, and it was like...like..." He waved his hands.
Shtasith gusted steam. "I suspect the magistrix has let wild magic root itself within her, and like mistletoe or kudzu, while it appears lovely, it in truth destroys the mind and soul! We must flee for our lives and summon assistance from—!"
"No." The tips of Cluny's claws dug into her palms, the last of her good feelings crumbling to bits. "We head back out there like everything's fine, talk Mistress Evantrue into going for a walk or something, and get her away from here before—"
The ground shivered, a wave of absolute wrongness as strong as the stink of a week-old carcass, the music and the chatter of squirrel conversation from the other side of the barn cutting off as suddenly as a sword stroke. "Sophomore Cluny?" Mistress Evantrue's voice called in the silence. "Might I have a word?"
The triggers for all her spells, both offensive and defensive, bristled to the front of her brain, but she forced herself to take a breath, refused to let anything resembling panic enter into her thoughts. "Crocker, could you please take us around to the other side of the barn?"
Pushing away from the wall, he rounded the corner, the torchlight flickering over dozens of furry bodies lying in the grass. A quick detection spell told her their hearts were still beating, their lungs still working, so she turned her attention to the blankets spread beside the bandstand, Mistress Evantrue and Hesper settled exactly where she'd left them. "Magistrix?" she called. "Is there something I can help you with?"
"A small matter." Gazing at the shadowy trees, Mistress Evantrue rose into the air, her legs unfolding till her feet touched the ground; then she turned, her blank eyes and straight black gash of a mouth making Cluny's fur stand up. "I just need to devour your living flesh. Yes, I think that should do it."
Crocker's heart rate shot up behind her, and Cluny reached out with her magic, wrapped it closer around the three of them, formed a ball of calm in the face of the strange growling sort of heat she could sense twitching through the aether around Mistress Evantrue. "Might I ask why, magistrix?"
Mistress Evantrue laughed, high-pitched and completely mirthless. "You might. But I fear Gollantz has so scrubbed and whittled you away, you'd never understand the answer."
Cluny swallowed. "The wild magic."
A shudder shook Mistress Evantrue, her eyes rolling closed. "The sheer, unadulterated joy of it!" The shudder got bigger, a frown pulling at her face, her hands balling into white-knuckled fists. "But I can't...can't quite...can't—" Her voice choked off, her body bending forward like she was about to collapse, but before Cluny could invoke any of her spell triggers, the magistrix straightened up, opened her flat, dead eyes, and said, "You're the key to controlling it, I'm convinced, so I need you to be a part of me." The air around her burst like a dam giving way, burning chi rippling blue and green up from her skin.
"Shield!" Cluny shouted, and Crocker's arms shot out, Shtasith leaping into the air to exactly the height they'd practiced, the spell's skin stretching down from the tips of his horns to the ends of Crocker's fingers, and Cluny cried out the words to pour as much power into the bubble now surrounding them as it could take, Mistress Evantrue's fire lashing out—
And congealing into all those suitcases tumbling across the grass. "There's no need for melodrama," the magistrix said. A gesture, and the cases popped open, books spinning to form stars and diamonds in the air. "Let me ingest your body, and these books I've borrowed from the more esoteric stacks in Huxley's various libraries will draw the wild magic through you into me."
"Mother!" she heard Hesper wail. "Please! You have to know that this can't possibly work!"
"Pish and tosh! And don't worry, Sweetness. After the initial onslaught destroys you, I'll recreate you! Perhaps I'll even give you wings! Won't that be fun?"
Cluny could feel the power kicking up like a sudden gale even though the torches weren't guttering in the slightest, the book structures glowing, whirling faster and faster. Shtasith wheeled in circles around her and Crocker, his flight keeping the shield from collapsing against the force
pressing in on every side, and Cluny wracked her brain, tried to think of a way to push harder, to fill their little bubble with more—
"Come, come, now." Mistress Evantrue's voice rustled like beetles in decaying wood, and the unconscious bodies of Cluny's parents' whooshed up, began bobbing in the magical maelstrom just outside her shield. "I'd hate to start dismembering your relatives, but if you won't listen to reason—"
"No!" Cluny screamed, and the power hammering at her shrieked in reply, a shriek of anger and defiance, a shriek—
A shriek as incoherent and visceral as a nest of her wild cousins screaming their rage at an intruder, a shriek with nothing of thought or civilization in it, a shriek like a creature willing to tear its own leg off to escape captivity...
"Hang on, guys!" she yelled, and praying to the Squirrel Mother that she was right, she cut all power to the shield, spread her paws, chittered the recognition cadences she'd learned from working with her non-sapient cousins in the orchards for all those years as well as the overtones that meant she had come as a friend and that she wanted to help.
The power swooped to engulf her, pain and fury slashing like her every hair had burst into flame. Crocker's screams and Shtasith's bellows tore her ears, but she kept chittering, kept the rhythms going—I know you; I'm a friend; I want to help—and the power roared out of her, shot toward Mistress Evantrue, the magistrix shouting, "You will be mine! You will serve me!"
Wave after wave after wave poured through Cluny, pounded Mistress Evantrue hard as a flashflood, the magistrix's shout becoming a squeal, the book structures all exploding to shreds. One last blast sent Mistress Evantrue flying backwards, arms and legs flailing, slammed her into a tree, and she collapsed to the ground, silence crashing over the clearing, every trace of the vast wild magic vanished into the night above.
Crocker groaned, his knees buckling, and Cluny mustered enough energy to slow his fall so they could settle gently to the grass. "Let's not do that again," he rasped.