Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  Eleanor nodded, still not really certain.

  “Eat some porridge,” Martin said, serving her up a large bowl and adding a dollop of honey. “I’ll start teaching you about earth-power tomorrow.”

  ***

  MAGI, MARTIN SAID, drew their power from one of the four elements—earth, air, water, or fire. Eleanor’s foster-mother had drawn her powers from water; water had shown her the future. Martin and Eleanor, on the other hand, drew their powers from the earth. “Water isn’t very fond of us,” Martin said. “Earth likes to contain water, to make it do things it doesn’t want to do. It’s a rare earth-magus who can do anything useful with a scrying-bowl other than make porridge in it.”

  Eleanor laughed a little. She had realized fairly quickly that Martin liked to make her laugh.

  “Earth-magi can heal,” he said. “We can make things grow. We can build.” Rosebushes climbed the walls of Martin’s house, creating a cascade of red outside his window. The herb garden planted around the sides and back of the house flourished, even where the orange trees and the Baron’s wall made deep shade. “When you start to draw on the earth powers, Eleanor, you’ll understand what that priest was talking about when he said that you had power.”

  Martin started Eleanor out meditating in the garden. “You should be able to feel the currents of power in the ground,” he said. “There are quite a few here, and they’re very strong.”

  Eleanor closed her eyes and wondered what she should be feeling, exactly. “I feel a little warm,” she said finally.

  “Good!” Martin said.

  “I think it might just be the sunshine, though.”

  Martin moved her to the shade and had her try again. Eleanor sighed and closed her eyes again, breathing deeply like Martin had told her to do. She could smell the lavender and the mint, growing nearby, and the scent of the roses from the cottage. Overhead, there was a bird singing, two notes over and over like a woman calling her cat. A breeze lifted her hair and she heard the leaves rustle a little. Further away, she could hear some children playing.

  Time passed. Eleanor didn’t want to admit that this wasn’t working—he might send her back to the square. But her legs were falling asleep. “I need a break,” she said.

  “Perhaps this isn’t working,” Martin said.

  “Maybe I just need more practice,” Eleanor said.

  “I think it’s more than that,” Martin said. “I think you’re blocking your own power somehow. It’s probably because of the abuse you suffered—the cruelty of the old fortune-teller, and the priest. We need to work on that, first.”

  Martin had made Eleanor a bed on the hearth, but that afternoon he put up a curtain in his herb-room to give her a corner of her own, and then sent for a man to build her a simple bed. He took her back to the market—she was afraid that he might leave her there, but instead he bought her two warm blankets and had her measured for a dress that wouldn’t be so ragged, and shoes. Eleanor had never owned shoes before, but she decided that she wouldn’t get her hopes up too high until she actually had them on her feet—he could still change his mind.

  The next morning, Martin got out paper and ink and started to teach her to write. He wanted her to write a letter to her foster-mother, he explained, even though she was dead—telling her that Eleanor knew that the old woman had lied to her about her future, and saying that Eleanor wasn’t going to listen to her anymore. “It’s sort of like a spell,” Martin said. “We’re trying to break her hold over you.”

  So Eleanor worked hard on her writing, her hand shaking a little as she traced the letters, she was holding the pen so tightly. It took days of work before he pronounced her letters legible; her hands were sore and tired after the hours spent bent over the paper. But finally she was ready, and he brought her a clean piece of paper. “Tell her how you feel,” Martin said. “Don’t hold anything back.”

  Eleanor didn’t know how to write a letter; she had never received one. She didn’t know what to say. But Martin was waiting, so expectant, so she wrote, “You said I didn’t have a future, but I know now you were lying.” She thought for a moment, then added, “You were a cruel, bitter old woman. I heard the neighbors say once how sorry they felt for me.” Then she felt guilty, so she added, “Thank you for feeding me, though.” Martin made her cross that out: “She only fed you because she wanted you around to serve her. It wasn’t out of any sort of affection.”

  “But she found me in the field where people leave the babies they don’t want,” Eleanor said. “I didn’t like her, but if she hadn’t taken me home, I’d have died.”

  “Maybe someone else would have taken you,” Martin said. “Someone kinder.”

  So Eleanor wrote, “I wish someone else had taken me home, instead of you.” Although privately she thought it was just as likely that someone like the priest would have taken her—someone worse than the old woman.

  When Martin was satisfied with that letter, he had her flip the paper over and write a letter to the priest, as well. That one was easier; Eleanor didn’t feel guilty at all for the way she felt about the priest. “You told me my power was evil,” she wrote. “Well, it isn’t, and you were evil for saying so, and for wanting to shut me up in the cellar. How would you like it if I shut you up in my cellar?”

  Then Martin buried the paper in his garden, while Eleanor watched. Eleanor wasn’t sure what the point of that was—maybe her old foster-mother would get the nasty letter in the afterlife, but the priest was still alive on the other side of town. And even if she dug up the letter and sent it to him, it wasn’t like he was going to change his mind about magi. He might even show up and try to drag her away—the old woman’s nephews had given her to the church, after all.

  When the project with the letters was done, Martin told Eleanor that he was sowing some herbs and he wanted her to help encourage them to grow quickly. In her shoes and her new dress, Eleanor knelt beside him in the garden, helping him to dig in the earth. The fat slimy earthworms made Eleanor cringe, but she did her best to hide her squeamishness. Martin gave her the seeds to plant, except she wasn’t entirely certain what she was supposed to do with them. She tried to concentrate her attention on them, thinking, grow, grow, grow. Then she and Martin smoothed the dirt back over the seeds, and went back into the house.

  Those seeds never came up at all. Martin had to replant them himself, a week later when it was clear that they weren’t going to sprout.

  Eleanor was afraid that Martin would send her back to the marketplace for this, but instead he just looked sorrowful. “You’ve turned your power around,” Martin said. “I think it’s because you still think you’re evil.” The next day, Martin brought home a small looking-glass. He showed Eleanor her reflection; she was startled by the grubby little girl who stared suspiciously out at her. “This is you,” Martin said. “I want you to look at your face in the mirror and tell yourself that you aren’t evil.”

  The face in the mirror looked skeptical. “You aren’t evil,” Eleanor said, trying to sound reassuring, but the face didn’t look reassured.

  “No, no, no. Say it like this: ‘I am not evil.’“

  “I am not evil,” Eleanor repeated dutifully.

  “I am a good person who will accomplish great things.”

  “I am a good person who will accomplish great things.”

  Martin nodded and gave her a string of beads. “I want you to repeat that once for every bead, then turn the string of beads around and do it again.”

  Eleanor said nice things about herself into the mirror until she was hoarse. When it became clear that she was going to lose her voice if she kept it up, Martin made her a cup of lemon tea with honey and told her to think the nice things instead. Eleanor tried for a while, but eventually she got bored and started thinking about leviathans. “Can you turn yourself into anything?” she asked, when she was done with her tea.

  “What?” Martin looked up from his book, very startled.

  “I told you about peeking into
a book at the church....it said that a powerful water-magus could turn himself into a sea-monster.”

  “Ah,” Martin said. “Well, earth-magi don’t turn themselves into sea creatures. Water doesn’t much like us, remember? We don’t want to spend any more time in the ocean than we have to.”

  “So what can you turn yourself into?” Eleanor asked.

  “I can turn myself into a hart,” Martin said. “I have to be careful, though, or the Baron’s huntsmen might shoot me for the Baron’s supper.”

  “Do you think I could do that?”

  “I think you have the potential to be more powerful than me,” Martin said. “You might be able to become a wolf, perhaps. Very powerful earth-magi can turn themselves into sphinxes.”

  “What about air-magi and fire-magi?”

  “The best of the air-magi can turn themselves into gryphons, and their equals among the fire-magi can become dragons.”

  “I want to try to learn to change my shape,” Eleanor said.

  Martin looked like he was going to object—to say that she was trying to learn to run before she learned to walk, which is what he’d said when she said she wanted to learn to heal—but then he shrugged and said, “Worth a try. Let’s go outside.”

  Martin had Eleanor close her eyes again, in the garden, and try to feel the currents of power in the earth. Eleanor still couldn’t feel anything, but she thought that maybe if she were actually trying to do something, she might be able to figure out what he was talking about. Martin said that this first time, he wanted her to try to turn herself into something very small—a field mouse. He told her to picture the field mouse, to imagine herself with a small, pudgy body smaller than her own fist, gray fur, a stringy tail...

  Eleanor wasn’t very fond of mice, so she pictured herself as a squirrel instead. Gray fur. Bushy tail. Black eyes. That funny hop—

  After hours and hours of imagining herself hopping around the yard, however, all that had happened was that her legs had fallen asleep again.

  That night, after dinner, Eleanor sat by the hearth, staring into the flames. Martin came to sit beside her. “I think,” Martin said, “that you just aren’t trying hard enough.”

  Eleanor wasn’t sure what to say. She thought she was trying hard, but she wasn’t nearly as tired after a day of trying to become a squirrel as she’d been after a day scrubbing floors in the church. Maybe she should be that tired—maybe she would be if she really were trying. What she felt like she’d been doing was trying to climb a wall of perfectly smooth glass, with no handholds or footholds. She could work as hard as she could without ever getting really tired, because there just wasn’t all that much she could do.

  “Maybe we’ve been going about this wrong,” Martin said.

  The next day, he told her to change into her old dress again, then set her to work building a stone wall in his garden. Eleanor spent the day hauling rocks and piling them up. She’d grown soft, in her weeks and weeks of learning to write and pretending to be a squirrel—the rocks were heavier than they looked, and her hands were sore and blistered at the end of the day. The next day, Martin had her move the stone wall to the other side of his garden. Then back again. And again. Her hands started to get calluses again. This was every bit as tedious as her work in the church, but at least she didn’t have to spend the day damp, and when Martin looked at her, she felt that he was truly trying to see the best in her, rather than the worst.

  It was after two weeks of repeatedly building and tearing down the wall that the summons came from the Baron. Martin came to fetch Eleanor in the garden. “The Baron has asked that I bring my apprentice,” he said. “That’s you, Eleanor.” Martin had Eleanor wash her hands and face, and put on her new dress again.

  Despite including her in the summons, the Baron hardly looked at Eleanor. “There’s trouble on the northern border, Martin,” he said. “I’m sending some men-at-arms and I expect that they’ll be able to take care of it, but you’re a good healer and I’d like you to go with them. Your apprentice, too, if you think she’ll be able to do any good.”

  Eleanor was pretty sure that Martin didn’t think that she’d be able to do much—but he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “I’ll bring her with me, my liege,” Martin said.

  “Good. I have horses waiting for you.”

  Eleanor didn’t know how to ride, but getting on and telling the horse to go didn’t turn out to be all that hard. Staying on could be a bit of a trick, she discovered at one point; Martin insisted that she get back on straight away, which she did.

  “Will there be a battle?” Eleanor asked Martin as they rode. “Will it be very dangerous?”

  “Trouble on the northern border is usually just the northern lord sending down a few of his sons to harass our farmers,” Martin said. “I don’t think the Baron expects this to be anything else, or he’d have sent more men.”

  But when they rode over a hill the next day, they could see smoke rising in the distance—far more than just a few boys would have justified. Then a messenger galloped past them—“Run,” the messenger gasped. “There’s hundreds of them.”

  Eleanor looked at Martin. “We’ll keep going,” Martin said. “Our help is needed, and there may be something we can do.”

  They tethered their horses to a tree some distance from the battlefield and moved in quietly. The battle, such as it had been, was over; the soldiers who still lived had been chained and placed under guard.

  There was a low moan behind them. Martin rose quietly and moved towards the sound; Eleanor followed him. In the long grass, they found one of the Baron’s men-at-arms, wounded but alive. “Give him a drink of water,” Martin said, then laid his hands on the man’s arm and closed his eyes.

  Eleanor took out the waterskin to give the man a drink; he swallowed eagerly and then whispered, “They outnumbered us ten-to-one. This is more than a raid—I think they mean to establish a permanent hold on this land.”

  Eleanor was only half listening. The man’s wounds were closing before her eyes; Martin’s brow was beaded with sweat. Earth-magic. Eleanor stared, knowing with absolute certainty that she couldn’t have done that—not without being able to sense the earth-power that Martin had talked about. She closed her eyes briefly, questing for it in the ground around her, but—nothing.

  Wait.

  Further away, there was something. But not—she was fairly certain—earth-power. As she tried to focus on it, she seemed to lose her grip, as if it flickered out of her grasp.

  When she opened her eyes, Martin was staring at her. “Do you feel it?” he asked anxiously. “The earth-power isn’t especially strong here. But—”

  “No,” she whispered. She looked up at him, and when he met her eyes, he drew back a little.

  “What’s wrong, Eleanor?” Martin asked.

  Without answering, Eleanor stood up and walked towards where she’d felt the power. Yes, something inside of her said. Yes, this way. This way.

  She reached out again, and this time, the power stayed put. A strange warmth crept through her body, starting with her feet and reaching to the top of her head and the ends of her fingers. She knew instinctively that this was not power you could See with—or Heal with. This was some other sort of power.

  “Stop right there! What are you doing?”

  It was one of the northern soldiers shouting at her, and she realized—too late—that she’d wandered out from under cover. From behind her shoulder she heard a voice shout, “Eleanor!” Martin’s voice—one of the northern soldiers started towards him, sword drawn.

  “It’s a magus!” the soldier shouted, and Eleanor’s stomach sank. These must be men like the priest—who believed that magi were evil. They’d kill both her and Martin—I have to do something. Eleanor reached again for the power—

  There was a whirling like wind in her ears, and then she heard men screaming in terror—but not Martin. Her vision was very strange; for some reason, she seemed to be looking down at the soldiers from a grea
t height, and all the colors seemed to be brighter. The northern soldiers were all running away from her, and the chained-up soldiers of the Baron were all looking as if they’d like to.

  Her legs flexed, and suddenly she was in the air, wings creating great gusts of wind under her. Now the northern soldiers were running away in earnest, and she discovered that she could breath great gouts of flame after them. She flew after them for a mile or two, just to be sure that they’d keep running. Even then, it was tempting to keep after them; her head was spinning with delight, from the sheer pleasure of flight, from finally discovering a power she could tap.

  Eleanor returned to the battlefield on human feet. Martin and the man he’d healed had freed the prisoners, and some of the Baron’s men had started for home. Martin wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m as bad as your foster-mother,” he mumbled. “Saying that you weren’t trying hard enough—I’m a fool. Can you forgive me?”

  Just at that moment, Eleanor would have even forgiven the priest, if he’d apologized to her. “Martin, you were so kind to me. You did the best you could.”

  “There is a powerful fire-magus in the Barony,” Martin said. “I can take you to her, to have her teach you.”

  “Maybe someday,” Eleanor said. “Right now, I’d just like to fly some more.”

  Giving Martin a kind smile—because he had been kind to her—Eleanor turned around and reached for the fire-power again. With one thrust from her powerful legs, she launched her dragon-body into the air, and flew up, and up, and east towards the sunrise.

  THREE WISHES

  I WROTE THE original version of “Three Wishes” for a short story writing class I took in college. We had peer critique, and the other students were torn between really liking the characters and finding the plot weirdly dissatisfying. It was dissatisfying because I was in a Fiction Writing Class with a professor who considered SF and fantasy to be Not Real Literature, so I’d tried to write a fantasy story without any actual magic. Once I was freed from the need to pretend to be literary, I could turn it into the story it wanted to be from the beginning.