Gift of the Unmage (16 page)

Senic’ta, the moon of September—the moon under whose bright light you were supposed to reap what you had sown. And here was Thea’s
harvest—with herself ensconced in what she had once called the Last Ditch School for the Incurably Incompetent. This place—the only place free of magic in a world where magic ran free—was this really the only place where someone like Thea could hide, in plain sight, from those who waited to use her for their own ends?

Cheveyo had been a last resort. Thea had been sent to him in order to break a seemingly impregnable barrier, to bring down the wall that stood between her and the gift of magic that ought to have been hers by right. The ruse had succeeded better than anyone could have dreamed—but it had also given Thea a knowledge of danger that nobody had banked on her having. Now she could see the perils that lurked in the illusion of that golden dream held out to her like a shiny bauble to a child.

Whatever it was that she had, the Alphiri wanted. And they were waiting for it. She had thought she had been right not to mention her fears and suspicions when she had returned home, but that had been before she had encountered Corey on the ferry. Thea sometimes found her heart beating very fast, as though terrified, at some thought she had not quite pinned down in
her own mind. And it was about the Alphiri, always about the Alphiri….

Back on the red mesa, Thea had asked the single important question:
What do I need to know?

It was astonishing how alive and vivid Cheveyo’s catechism was, here, beyond his world, beyond anything he had ever known. Thea allowed herself a small smile as her hand went to the three feathers that hung around her neck.

Patience, Catori
…

If there were answers, and if she dared not use magic to seek them, the orb of the full moon rising in the heavens would turn a new page for Thea. Things that might have been hidden under a veneer of magic in the world that she knew could well be exposed when that magic was removed…and the only thing left behind would be the stark facts behind the choice she had made long ago.

1.

W
ITH JUST A HANDFUL
of students, the Academy was a quiet and dignified place, its stately buildings shaded by ancient trees. Those students who were present strolled without hurrying, drifting through the woods and courtyards, taking their time. It all changed almost overnight with the beginning of the new school year.

The returning students began to arrive as the merest trickle, a week or so before school officially started, much as Thea herself had done. That trickle turned into a steady flow, and then into a torrent. The windows on the redbrick buildings resembled wide-open eyes, as though the entire school had just been shaken awake from its summer slumbers by the slamming of car
doors, the scraping of trunks and suitcases being carried up the stairs, by the shrieks and shouts as friends encountered each other in corridors.

Thea, together with a handful of other new people, lurked self-consciously at the fringes of the student body, in the wake of the first student rush. For Thea this lurking-on-the-fringes thing was nothing new, really—she had done something like this all her life. The pattern, however, was different this time. The fringes had usually been achieved after she had first been cultivated by those eager to gain social cachet by hanging around celebrity—what Thea had once, in a bleak little heart-to-heart with her Aunt Zoë, called Seventhology. It usually lasted just long enough for the groupies to discover that they weren’t getting what they thought out of the bargain and begin drifting away. Meanwhile, all sorts of other groups, the kind Thea might have wanted to join and be a part of, passed her by, apparently without so much as being aware of her existence. She had had only a bare handful of people in her life who were what she thought of as friends, and even they hadn’t lasted longer than a couple of years apiece.

But there was something at Wandless
Academy that Thea had never had the advantage of before: a roommate like Magpie, who seemed to know everybody and who, in turn, seemed to be on everyone’s “To Do” list when it came to rekindling friendship connections for a brand-new school year. Thea was introduced to half of her classmates before classes started and was already accepted as Magpie’s sidekick at lunch on the first day of school.

“Hey! Tess! Over here!” Magpie yelled, half rising from her seat beside Thea, and waving vigorously at a dark-haired girl with elegant gold-rimmed eyeglasses who had just walked in with lunch tray balanced in one hand and a bulging book bag in the other. The girl waved awkwardly with the bag, barely managing to avoid dumping the contents of her lunch tray on top of an oblivious student seated at the next table, and started to thread her way to where Magpie had cleared a space for her. Depositing the bag on the floor with an alarming thud, Tess slid the tray expertly onto the table with one hand while swinging her legs over the bench.

“Hey,” she said. “New year. New idiots. I’ve already had to start training people in etiquette.”

Magpie giggled. “What did they bring in this time?”

“A bag of Sweet Spells,” Tess said. “This one newbie gave a handful to my roommate. She’s yet another newbie, and she doesn’t know any better, and she offered me one—and I suppose
I
should have known better and recognized them but, hey, my mind was elsewhere, so I had one. At least I scared those two good and proper. Good thing Mrs. Chen was right there.”

“You okay?”

“Still have this,” Tess said, pushing up a sleeve and showing an angry red rash on her forearm.

“You allergic to candy?” Thea said.

“To magic,” Magpie said laconically. “That’s why she’s here. If she eats anything made with an ingredient of magic, content or process, she might choke to death.”

“I thought magic wasn’t supposed to work here,” Thea said to Magpie.

“It can
work
here, it’s just that there are rules against it
being
here. For obvious reasons,” Magpie said. “You and I, we’re exiles from that world. We don’t fit, we don’t belong, we can’t perform magic. With Tess it’s far more serious. The stuff can kill her. This place is more than a
haven for magic refugees. It’s a sanctuary.”

“You mean you can’t
leave
this place?” Thea said, turning to Tess.

“Sure I can. My family is pretty good about things,” Tess said. “But they
know
. We don’t eat anything prepared with magic. My mother makes her own bread, with real flour and real yeast, and she kneads the dough herself. My brother and I couldn’t go trick-or-treating at Halloween, because people
will
give out Sweet Spells or Enchantmints, or even just apples with a gigglespell put on them. The first and last time we went—I think we were five or so at the time—my dad was with us, and if he hadn’t been there to do first aid I could have died right there.”

“Wow,” Thea said. “What happens?”

“I can taste the stuff,” Tess said, digging her spoon into her mashed potatoes. “Not like this—these are real potatoes, and they’ve been prepared and cooked by hand. No magical shortcuts.”

“If they’d used a spell to make it come out creamy…?”

“My throat would close right up,” Tess said. “I can’t breathe. And then I get the rash. You new?”

“My roommate, Thea Winthrop. She’s a magidim, like me,” Magpie said, making belated introductions. “Thea, this is Tess Dane—we came up through middle school together. We were roommates for a semester before Mrs. Chen decided to split us up.”

“Hi,” Tess said, spooning potatoes into her mouth, and then paused, doing a double take. “Wait a minute. Winthrop? Why is that name so familiar?”

“My given name is
Gala
thea. Galathea Winthrop. I used to be famous,” Thea said abruptly. “You might have read about me in newspaper archives somewhere.”

An expression of understanding crossed Tess’s face, and perhaps an echo of sympathy. For a moment Thea heard it whispered, far away, the inglorious echo of her childhood:
Oh, Thea…
But in the spirit of Wandless Academy and the unspoken rule of no prying that seemed to apply here, Tess merely nodded at Thea.

“Welcome to the madhouse,” she said with a small smile, and turned back to her mashed potatoes.

They finished lunch in companionable silence, and then Magpie fished in her back pocket, com
ing up with a tarnished broken boxchain necklace, a silver daisy charm with a sparkling crystal as its centerpiece, the stub of an old movie ticket, and finally a crumpled class schedule.

“What’s your next class?” she asked Tess, dragging her finger along her schedule to find her own. “I’ve got Dead Languages.”

“You’re taking Latin?” Thea said.

“I had to take something.” Magpie shrugged. “Languages I’m good at.”

“I’ve got computer studies,” Thea said.

“With Twitterpat?” Tess said, looking up. “Me too. Me and Terry both.”

“Twitterpat?” Thea repeated with a grin. According to her own class schedule, the computer science teacher’s name was Patrick Wittering.

“Pat Witter. Patwitter. Twitterpat,” Tess said helpfully. “Just watch his hands.”

“Okay,” said Thea, still grinning. “Who’s Terry?”

“Her brother,” Magpie said. “I have no idea why anybody would want to futz around with those infernal machines.”

“For the same reason that you took Latin,” Tess said. “One has to take something. And at
least it’s marginally
useful
, huh, Thea?”

“Maybe she could learn how to program in Latin,” Thea said.

Magpie giggled. “You two deserve each other,” she said. “Go, torture your machines. Say hi to Terry for me.”

Patrick Wittering looked barely older than his students, his long, dishwater-blond hair tied back in a funky ponytail. He wore sandals on bare feet, and Tess, nudging Thea in the ribs, imparted the information that those were his preferred footwear all year round; he just added socks in winter. Perhaps it was the minimal age difference, the simple fact that it wasn’t that long ago that he had been behind a school desk himself, but he seemed to have an instant and casual rapport with his classes. If he knew that every single one of his students addressed him as Mr. Wittering in class and referred to him as Twitterpat behind his back, he seemed quite unperturbed by the idea.

Tess snagged three computer stations as they arrived for class; Thea took up one, and the other was claimed by Tess’s brother, who turned out to be her twin. They had the same huge hazel
eyes in long oval faces, and they even wore their hair more or less the same, with Tess’s only marginally longer than her brother’s.

“Terry, this is Thea. Galathea Winthrop,” Tess had said by way of introduction, laying a light emphasis on the surname. It was that unspoken subtext in the Academy—the introduction that gave one’s identity and one’s reason for being at the school, all in as economical a fashion as possible.

Terry’s eyes had sparked with recognition—it was obvious that he knew Thea’s name—but he did no more than grunt and nod.

“Some of you I know from last year, back in middle school,” Twitterpat said, starting the class. He did have a tendency to talk with his hands, just as Tess had said. As he spoke, his fingers were curling as if making spell gestures, though obviously he was doing nothing of the sort. For some reason Thea found herself thinking about Mrs. Chen’s words:
In order to know what it is that we do not do here, we have to be aware of what can be done
. Twitterpat looked as if he too might have known the taste of magic sometime in his life…known it well. He was still speaking. “Others have just joined us. Before we can learn more, we should figure out just how much we already
know. So. You’ve got a somewhat jumbled set of arbitrary data in front of you. Let me see you organize it using the computer.”

Terry grunted and tapped a set of keys on the keyboard. A grid appeared on the screen of his monitor; he typed furiously for a few moments and then leaned back, arms crossed, eyes flickering across the screen. Things seemed to be happening there, but from her angle Thea could not quite see what.

“What
is
he doing?” she whispered to Tess.

“Oh, leave him alone,” Tess retorted. “He thinks he’s beyond all of this. He thinks he should be doing college-level stuff.”

“Can he?” Thea said, impressed despite herself. She tapped her own data into her computer, looking at what tools had been left for her to use. There had been two computers in Thea’s home when she was very young, one Paul’s, one Ysabeau’s; both Anthony and Ben had eventually added their own. Thea could play a mean game of computer solitaire, and she had used it for writing assignments and, under parental control, research on Terranet, but that was as far as she had gone—this assignment was a new thing for her.

“He’s a self-confessed
genius
,” Tess said, giving her brother a teasing glare. “He was only top of his class all during middle school. He’s probably going to stay in this class only long enough to impress Twitterpat, and then he’ll be off on some road to glory all by himself. Brothers. Always thinking they’re a superior class of being.”

“I know,” Thea said, sighing. “I have six of them.”

Tess shot her a sympathetic look. “You poor thing.”

“That’s very good, Terry,” Twitterpat said. He had come up while the girls had been whispering and was scanning Terry’s monitor closely. His hands came fluttering up to his face, and he beat a contemplative tattoo on his cheeks with his fingertips.

Terry grunted.

“Let me see….” Twitterpat leaned over Terry’s shoulder and touched a few keys. A few things blinked, rearranged themselves; the grid redrew itself around the new array. “Very good, very good indeed. What about you, Tess?”

“Working on it,” Tess said, bending her head over her keyboard.

Twitterpat nodded and smiled, dropped his
hands, then lifted one and let it drift briefly in Thea’s direction, recalled it to his side. “New this year?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you had much background?”

“No, sir,” Thea said. “My father has a computer, for e-mail and storing stuff on, and Mom does, too…but we weren’t allowed to use them much.”

“I see.” The hands danced again, as though he were typing in midair, retrieving information. “You are…Galathea.”

“Thea,” Thea corrected him. “Sir.”

“Of course. Well, carry on.
Very
good, Terry.”

Twitterpat walked off and then stood, watching another student’s screen over his shoulder.

Terry leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, staring at his screen.

“He can’t be
done
already,” Thea muttered.

“Oh, he’s always done,” Tess said.

Terry flashed her a smug smile, and then flicked his eyes back to his screen.

“Does he talk?” Thea said a little sharply.

Terry turned and stared at her, and Tess flicked her hair back with one hand, tapping the keyboard with the other.

“Only when he has something essential to say,” Tess said. “He kind of…got turned off talking at an early age. You know how I can’t put anything magic-made into my mouth?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s kind of allergic to magic, too. Except with him, it’s speech—he can’t utter a word with a magical shading without choking on it. Literally. He can’t
talk
about spells, let alone speak one. His tongue swells and his throat closes and he turns a neat shade of sky blue.”

“But not
every
word one utters is magic….”

“You want to bet?” Tess said, typing furiously, her hair falling forward to hide her face. “In our family? My mom’s older brother is Kevin MacAllan, the head of the Federal Bureau of Magic, and she works in the department—few words spoken in our family are free of magic. It’s hard enough to make sure that I don’t eat anything with magic in it, but it’s far harder to keep a child quiet all the time because a stray word he utters could kill him. That’s why we’re here—Terry was packed off to Wandless when he was practically in kindergarten. They kept me out in the mainstream a little longer, but it proved just as impractical in the long haul—I’ve been here
since grade school. We go home for the holidays, but he pretty much doesn’t say a word all summer because it could kill him to try. It takes him a while, once we get back to the school. He does have a voice, he just needs to remember that it’s safe to use it, here.”