A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  Dove takes a tiny cup, I do, Chloris does, Zora does, Kynefrid does, looking rather astonished after an under-nose wave to get the aroma.

  “I’m sorry, Halt, ma’am, what is in this?”

  It’s a gentle smile. “Complexity, Kynefrid. The recipe takes a small book to write down. You may not like the taste, but it won’t hurt you.”

  I can’t escape the feeling that it really does make sense to trust the ancient, mighty, spider entity. It’s not even close to the weirdest thing that’s happened since I woke up in the hospital, borrowing a forest from another world is still winning, way out in front.

  I catch Kynefrid’s eye, Dove’s, Zora and Chloris come in on it, lift the cup up a bit — no way am I trying to touch rims with tired, shaky hands and tiny porcelain cups that might be older than the First Commonweal — and try to say “To learning!” like I mean it.

  I do mean it, but mostly I want to fall over.

  Everybody, Halt, too, murmurs “To learning!” back, and then we all drink.

  You know that feeling you get from drinking something very cold, something with ice in it, too fast? Your face freezes? Try to imagine that not actually hurting, starting in your extremities, and winding up in your eyes with a taste like the sound of screaming. The happy, children running around shrieking, kind of screaming.

  Wow.

  The giant spectral spider chuckles through its spiracles.

  I hear it as a kind chuckle.

  If I don’t want to gibber, I pretty much have to.

  Chapter 11

  We get the pipe and the hot water tanks — fancy constructs of foamed glass — and ourselves up to Westcreek Town, and over the North Bridge, and then along the West-East Canal track to the place we need to turn north again to go up the shallow path, up to the Tall Woods. It’s not how we usually do it, we usually come in from the west, along the ridge the long way. That’s shorter and drier.

  Halt’s eight-legged…conveyance, let’s stick with conveyance, could probably handle the ridge just fine; with the giant glass buckets empty, Eustace might be able to handle it, too. Sheep climb better than you’d think looking at them, much of the roundness is wool, and Eustance doesn’t produce an impression of delicacy. There’s no way we’d make the climb with the glass; there are some steep bits, and quicker or not, we’re all trying to stay co-ordinated and move our five-tonne pile of glass stuff without dropping it.

  Which means any two of us tripping over something at the same time is a bad thing. We manage not to do it. I’m probably going to dream about the big conveyor shape, a broad flat loop of the Power going round and round and shifting glass pipe forward, just as long as we can keep it balanced, but we make it.

  It’s early dark; there’s still a little light to the West. I’m not dead.

  I can’t stop the slow rhythm of the natural breathing, either. I can stop thinking about not being able to stop. Not in any state for the kind of thinking that’s going to help.

  “We shall all be late for the second sitting.” Halt observes this to the dark, almost as though expecting an answer. Then Halt whistles, a noise I didn’t expect.

  Eustace grumbles, but walks up closer and kneels down, so the bottom of the big glass buckets rests on the ground. “Into the buckets, children, and we should get to dinner nearly on time.”

  My brain fails to process this. It does note Zora taking a hop and a jump and doing a front roll over the lip of the right-hand bucket. Guess Zora takes not being late seriously. I’m not sure I’ll be able to manage to climb in at all.

  I don’t have to; Dove tosses me into the left-hand one.

  “Sit as low as you may, children,” Halt says, and then we’re swaying up. I’ve got my legs out flat on the bottom of the bucket, and am managing to not actually bump into Dove when Halt says “You’ve been a good boy,” in indulgent tones and there’s a noise like a varnish boiler splitting a seam and a couple of jets of purple fire start from Eustace’s nostrils.

  “Look away from Eustace,” Dove says quietly, chortling. I think that’s good advice and then we’re moving. Moving rather fast, it’s dark, I can’t really tell, even looking carefully out to the side, not enough landmarks. Eustace’s flames don’t get more than a couple metres long, but it’s really dark out here, and the purple fire makes everything strange.

  How just purple light can make the sight of Halt calmly knitting away on an eight-legged conveyance hurtling down the hillside any stranger I don’t know, but it can.

  It’s not a bumpy ride, especially, much better than I expected for the bottom of a bucket strapped to a galloping anything, but I wind up piled into Dove anyway. It’s unquestionably downhill to start with and there’s nothing to hold on to. We’re not sitting, we’re lying down flat, Dove just fits, I’ve got lots of room and one arm over my head to try not to slither around. Dove puts an arm out and grabs me round the shoulders.

  Which means I wind up with my head on Dove’s shoulder. “Consider it disinterest in getting splattered brains out of my hair, if that makes you feel better,” Dove says, and it might even have worked if I didn’t have to fight so hard not to just cling. I’m way too tired to pretend I still know who I am.

  I make a couple of spluck noises before I manage to say “Thanks.”

  Dove says “Idiot,” in friendly tones. “I’m pretty sure even Halt sneaks off into the night somewhere for a hug sometimes.”

  Spider-chuckles come out of the night, distinct and clear. They’re trying not to sound sinister, they really are.

  I stop fussing about social norms and confusion and hold on to Dove right back.

  Dove snickers at me, in the kind sort of way your friends do. “Halt takes some getting used to. Ask me in two or three hundred years if I’ve managed it.”

  “Deal.”

  And then honesty compels me to add “If we’re neither of us dead.”

  “If we’re neither of us dead,” Dove says back, agreeing, and then we’re there, Eustace starts slowing and then we’re crossing the North Bridge in a sort of thunderous trot. All I can think about is the story of the bridge-troll and the billy-goats. It would take an insanely courageous troll to say anything to Eustace, even without Halt. The angle, feet forward lying on the bottom of a thick clear glass bucket maybe a metre off the ground, and the light, snorted purple flames and some orange from the bridge-lights, turns Eustace’s threatening mass of horns into a ghastly promise of rending murder.

  Getting out of the bucket is surprisingly easy; Eustace rocks forward, kneeling, and dumps them. Lying on the bottom means we’re suddenly standing up and can just walk out.

  Ducking under the curled ram’s horns and squinting away from the purple fire, admittedly, but walking on curved glass beats trying to climb glass walls.

  Eustace, and Halt’s conveyance, walk off together; we look through the door, realize the first sitting is at the plate-stacking stage, and make haste for the washhouse. It’s more ‘douse’ than even sluice, and there’s not much to be done for our clothes, no matter how fast we can dry them, but at least we tried.

  Dinner, well, Zora and Dove have to keep prodding the rest of us to eat. Once I get a couple biscuits and some spinach and some duck into me, my appetite comes back into focus. Chloris beat me to it, Chloris is stuck in a tension between decorum and devouring when I start noticing anything. Kynefrid takes longest, but Zora’s expedient of slapping jam on some biscuits and putting them into Kynefrid’s dominant hand one at a time does the trick.

  The five of us, having looked at each other, gotten up, and gone back for thirds, receiving the dregs of the soup-kettle, some lightly scorched pumpkin cake, and some concerned looks, are managing to start something that could be mistaken for a conversation by the end. It’s mostly ‘did we really do that?’. I find this reassuring; I didn’t have any talent with the Power a décade ago, at least as I experienced it, but all of the others have known for a long time. They may not have been paying much attention to it, but they’ve
known.

  Wake walking in, and over, isn’t reassuring, particularly, even if Wake does go over to where Halt is sitting, drinking tea and knitting and talking to what I realize have to be the team leads from the glass manufactory collective Halt set up and still advises a lot, rather than straight towards us.

  Just means that we get both of them a minute later, looking pleased and benevolent, but both of Halt and Wake is a bit unsettling no matter what they do.

  “Good evening, students.” Wake looks positively jovial. “I am given to understand you had a successful day.”

  “None dead, none down,” says Dove. Chloris looks appalled; Wake looks like it’s work to keep from chuckling.

  “I acknowledge that you neither know enough to judge for yourselves, nor have any reasonable expectation that Halt would tell you that.” Wake smiles. It’s a normal, human, smile, but I don’t, can’t, forget what I saw when I really looked at Wake, just that once.

  “A short time is enough for a good start.” Wake’s smile gets wry. “Though four days may not seem like a such a short time.” We’re all nodding; your ears just make you nod when they hear “A short time is enough for a good start;” school does that pretty reliably.

  “Tomorrow, Déci, is a rest day, even for students of sorcery. You are free to do as you will, within the limitations of law and courtesy.”

  Wake pulls up a chair, and Halt’s chair is right there. It was five tables over, before Halt got up, didn’t see it move. There’s a little rustle as we very carefully don’t shift away.

  “Both law and courtesy are somewhat altered for sorcerers; you are not yet that in formal law or name, but as a practical matter it applies.”

  We all nod. After you’ve re-arranged the landscape by more than one means, it’d be really hard to argue that not having sent your forms to the Galdor-gesith would convince a judge.

  “You have no knowledge yet of any of the means of altering the thoughts of others. Nonetheless, you are highly talented, more than enough that any intent desire calls into question the ability of the less-talented to consent.” Wake’s just saying that, there’s none of the take-this-seriously emphasis I remember from teachers, but you hear it. It’s making Kynefrid and Chloris look less than happy. “Commonweal law is not less emphatic on the necessity of consent in social relations once one has become sorcerously active.”

  Chloris sighs, the way you do when you recognize being a grownup means not getting when you want.

  “Oh, nonsense, Chloris dear, while you mustn’t go pounce on a barge crew with strong intent, you can perfectly well put yourself where they might ask.” Halt sounds amused. I am starting to have opinions about the glints of, spectral, metaphorical, it has to be my brain’s best try at representing what’s really there, spider eyes much larger than my head.

  “Without ever really wanting them to ask?” Chloris sounds extremely doubtful.

  “Without putting any will into it.” Kynefrid seems certain-sure. “It’s like practicing sterilizing charms, or something, in your head; you can go through how it works as much as you like. Nothing happens until you put the will into it.”

  Halt nods. I start feeling very careful, and Halt’s not nodding at me. “That’s not doing anything. With people, you have to will that you don’t.”

  Kynefrid nods, rapidly, back. Yikes. Chloris, all of us, are nodding. Halt isn’t very far back of the grandma act.

  I swear the spider eyes twinkle at me, when I think that.

  “Grue managed to make it all the way to Independent status without an impropriety; I shall hope you shall, also.” That’s just flat stern. From Halt. Anyone else, it’d be notice of execution.

  We get a moment to collect ourselves. Wake pays a lot of attention to how we react when Halt talks.

  “Now, Zora, I know you’ve been very bothered by not helping in the kitchen, and asked if you could at least come in and help bake on your day off.”

  “I can’t do that?” Zora sounds stricken. I figure Zora plain likes to bake, it’s not merely feeling like a freeloader.

  “It’s not especially safe, Zora dear.” Halt’s walking stick performs a sort of circle gesture, including all of us. “You’re a little soon for getting absentminded and turning half the dough into vampire toads, but only a little.”

  Dove’s face ducks behind one hand. No giggle, not quite, but the smile hits Dove’s eyes and keeps right on going.

  Zora’s quivering with sheer will, and a few tears leak out anyway. We’re all too tired to have much of a grip on our faces.

  “Hush, now,” Halt says, kindly. “I had a chat with Grue; you are welcome to come bake, Grue’s making nibbles, provided you can cope with ocelotters underfoot and being around Blossom making things.”

  “Lots of hammering?” Zora’s voice has got steady again.

  “More what melts abruptly.” Wake, I don’t know what Wake sounds. “Stay where Grue puts you and you’ll be fine.”

  “Yes please,” says Zora, rather fast.

  “I’ll tell Grue, then, Zora dear,” Halt says.

  “Dove?” Wake asks.

  “Mama’s not that far upstream. There’s a strong request I present myself, so my mother can believe I still look like me, is how the letter put it.” Dove shrugs. “I can ask a barge for a lift both ways and get back for dinner.”

  “Edgar?” Halt, sounding like I’m being included out of fairness. Not anywhere for me to go.

  I shrug. “Sleep?” Even if the tent leaks, the way I feel right now.

  Wake and Halt both grin at me. “A wise impulse,” says Halt.

  “Now, one more thing, children; you are not to practise sorcery, not even your breathing exercises, without supervision. You are at the same place with sorcery new-hatched ducklings are with walking; anything at all unexpected and you’ll put your beak in the dirt.”

  We all nod about that, too. If the rest feel like I do, a day of no magic will be a vast relief.

  Chapter 12

  On the way out from dinner, I got handed a letter; Chloris had two, Zora had a bunch, half a dozen at least, and Kynefrid had two. None for Dove that I saw.

  Nobody wants to block the door, but there isn’t enough light to read in the tent, and we all know it. There’s this sort of stuck-ness until Dove, without actually saying anything, walks us all round to the bathhouse, one of the bathhouses, that go with the gean whose refectory we eat in.

  We are apparently entirely welcome to use it, I didn’t actually hear the conversation, I’ve had enough time and enough light to realize the letter is from Flaed, and it’s taken quite awhile to find me.

  I didn’t know if Flaed’d gone north or over the Folded Hills; things had moved really fast, and it’s not like we had any kind of formal understanding. None of the mechanisms of government would have kept track for us.

  There’s the part of my head that thinks ‘good to hear from her’, but it’s pretty promptly outvoted by the rest of me, Flaed, not ‘her’. Any amount of sorcery would be too much.

  It’s a quarter-hour later before I can actually open the letter; I’ve sluiced off yet again and am sitting beside the tub, not in it, because I’m just too tired to try reading in the tub right now.

  The light’s good.

  Flaed, well, it’s Flaed; concern about me and concern about being displaced and where they’ll live and what they’ll eat and what the gean, who are mostly vegetable farmers, will do, bunches of odd things seen while being displaced, and how I’m doing and what’s this about an anti-panda, am I not still with my collective?

  No actual information about which valley Flaed is in or what the postal system thinks the place is called. Hardly anywhere in the Folded Hills has an official name, I can remember seeing how blank the map was before the anti-panda happened, and Flaed would never make a name up. Wouldn’t want to bother somebody who’s probably desperately trying to learn how to weed in the new place with questions, either.

  I fold the letter back up, and put i
t back into the cover, and put that on top of my pants, and get into the tub. It’s a climb; the thing is entirely above the floor, made out of vertical wood staves, softwood, don’t know it, a rounded rectangle five metres by eight. It’s a couple metres high, too, you could teach an older infant, five or six years old, to swim in the thing. It’s meant to hold way more than five people, but there’s only one ladder, and the rule is, apparently, that you climb in and move around the tub sunwise until you would bump into somebody, then stop.

  In my case it’d be swim round the tub if it weren’t for some kind of leg-frames, which I can walk on, if I don’t mind being only thigh-deep in the water. Nobody says anything, I don’t think there’s anything at all unusual about this in the Creeks, even if nobody in the Township of Wending was much into mixed soaking tubs.

  I wind up by Dove, trying to figure out how to get the seat flipped down so I can not hang on to the side. I manage it without too much trouble, the height adjusts. I suppose there are fourteen-year-olds in the Creeks they don’t want to drown.

  Kynefrid looks asleep, and sounds it, snoring a bit. Kynefrid’s hair is solid blue, not a blue tinge, and the yellow lights in here make it look unnaturally green. Everybody else’s hair is already green; every Creek I’ve seen has two-tone hair, in ear-to-ear stripes of light green and dark green. Zora’s combing, chasing out the memory of braids, the two shades of green ripple down Zora’s hair like sun on leaves. Unbound and wet from washing, it’s too long to comb the whole length in one reach, not enough arm, it’s a seize-and-finish process.

  My hair is brown, my eyes are brown, no one will ever believe I could do the horseshoe trick even with magic.

  Dove doesn’t float at all. You can tell not floating is expected, the extra footrest things are pretty wide and there’s more than just feet would require. Have to be so you can keep yourself from sinking too far to breathe. For all I know, any of us might be able to handle not breathing next year no problem, but not today.

  The lighter green in Dove’s hair is darker than the darker shade in Zora’s; the darker green goes black in this light. Dove’s hair is kept short enough you can see the stripes, it’s not layers like woodgrain.