Gift of the Unmage (2 page)

“It was an exercise, as simple as that. We were
supposed to take the cube and turn it into that sphere, just as Anthony did it. Everyone else managed it, pretty much, although it took some of them half an hour to get it right. They kept me back when the class left—they always do it—‘Keep trying,’ they said, and just sat there and pretended not to watch me…. Aunt Zoë, it’s like there’s this
wall
and I can feel it right there in front of me and it’s cold and tall and completely impossible to get around. And I’m on
this
side of it, and the cube is on
that
side, and that’s all there is to it. I could have sat there until the middle of next week and it wouldn’t have helped.”

“I know it’s upsetting,” Zoë said, “but that isn’t what’s really bugging you. I’m guessing you brought the whole mess home and then went and listened at keyholes again, my dear child.”

Thea threw her a defiant glance. “How else am I supposed to know?” she demanded. “Anthony would simply have used a spy spell. But I can’t. I’m useless. I’m completely pathetic.”

“You are most certainly not so. You—”

“In fact,” Thea continued doggedly, as though Zoë hadn’t spoken at all, “I’m so totally hopeless that they’re sending me to the Last Ditch School for the Incurably Incompetent.”

Zoë’s head came up sharply. “What?”

“I heard them talking about it in the kitchen.” Thea sniffed, her eyes full of sudden tears. “They said…th-they said they would let me finish out the year in my own class, and then they are sending me…sending me…somewhere, I didn’t quite get that. Somewhere, in the summer, for someone to give me private lessons, or whip me into shape, or something. And if they can’t—if I fail even at that—then I have to leave the school, and go to
that place
.”

“Which place?” Zoë asked, honestly confused.

Thea shrugged her shoulders with a violence that threatened to rip seams in her anorak. “You know.
That
place. The only school anywhere that has absolutely no Ars Magica in the curriculum.”

“The Wandless Academy?” Zoë said, raising her eyebrows. “They’re thinking about sending you there?”

“The Last Ditch School,” Thea said stubbornly, clinging to her own definition.

“Thea, it’s hardly that bad…,” Zoë began, in tones of sweetest reason, but Thea was not in the mood to be reasonable.

“Uh-huh,” Thea grunted. “And then everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s the scrap heap of everything magical, Aunt Zoë. It’s the place where they send those who will
never
amount to anything, just so that they can get enough of a mundane education to be able to do something for a living. And now I’m supposed to go there. And I’ll have that stuck to me all my days. The one who failed. The one who sucked at things so badly that even her own parents washed their hands of her. And Anthony is going to sit there in his dorm room at Amford University, studying for his high thaumaturgy degree or whatever it is that he’s doing these days, and he’s going to
smirk
at me for the rest of my life.”

“Do you have any idea as to who’s supposed to be ‘whipping you into shape’?” Zoë asked.

“I’m not sure,” Thea said. “I just heard them talking. Why?”

“It might not be so bad, depending on whom they choose,” Zoë said. “You’ve done such things before, you know. Like Madame Bellaria, for example, or last year, when—” She closed her mouth with a snap.

Thea looked up. “What?”

Zoë bit her lip. “Nothing.”

“No, what?” Thea said, her blood thoroughly up. “Madame Bellaria taught me the violin, or at least tried to until they figured out I just didn’t have the perfect pitch that was required, and last year…What do you mean?”

“Well…,” Zoë said unwillingly. She didn’t want to lie, not baldly, and yet giving Thea any kind of hard-to-take truth right now wasn’t going to help. “Let’s just say that Bellaria is a Chanter Mage as well as a competent violinist, and that was the year you sang yourself to sleep every night, and they thought that music magic might be your path. And last year, when they sent you to stay with your Aunt Sarah…you know your Uncle Adam is a Class One mage, don’t you? And he did spend a lot of time with you that summer.”

Thea stared at her. “They never said anything to me,” she said. “Although it makes sense now that Uncle Adam made me practice incantations every night before bedtime. He said it would help me…sleep.” Her expression became thunderous again. “Nothing happened, of course,” she said. “Maybe, if they’d told me what they were doing…”

“There are plenty of people out there who do
private lessons, as it were, and some of them are a lot of fun,” said Zoë gently.

“Some fun,” Thea said. She captured a stray strand of hair with the corner of her mouth and chewed on it furiously. “They tried it the cheating way and obviously it didn’t work. Now they’re going to make me go to slave camp. You know what it’s going to be like. It’s going to be a whole wretched summer of frying my brain trying to make cubes turn into spheres or levitate stones. And the cubes are going to stay cubes, and the stones are going to stay firmly on the ground, and then I’ll come home from wherever it is that I’ve been, and Dad’s eyes…”

“I’ll talk to your folks,” Zoë said. “I’ll see what I can find out, okay? I’ll come back and tell you. In the meantime…”

Thea shot her another mutinous look. “What?”

“It might be an idea to try extra hard for the rest of the school year,” Zoë said. “If you manage to keep your Ars Magica teachers placated with just small things, they may let you…”

“No, Aunt Zoë,” Thea said bleakly. “Mom and Dad won’t let that happen. It was okay for Frankie to repeat a year—but not me. Never me.
They won’t let them hold me back. Frankie merely sucks at it. With me…it’s different. There’s a point to prove. I can either do it big like I’m supposed to, or they’ll make sure I don’t do anything at all. It’s all magic or no magic for me. I’m a Double Seventh; if I fail, I totally fail. I can’t be a flicker—I must be a bonfire, or I must be out….”

“Thea,” Zoë began, a little alarmed, but Thea extracted a hand from her anorak pocket, pushed her wayward hair back behind her ears, and tossed her head. The gesture appeared almost angry, but when she looked up again her eyes were full of tears and there was so much misery on her face that Zoë bit her lip and simply gathered the girl into her arms. Thea clutched at her aunt’s anorak collar with both hands and wept into her shoulder.

“Daddy’s eyes,” she sobbed. “I can’t come home again and look into Daddy’s eyes…. I swear, Aunt Zoë, I’d rather
die
than make him go in and have to tell everyone that he’s finally given up all hope in his oh-so-special daughter…. I can’t
help
it, I want to do well, I want to do well so badly….”

“I know, hon. I know.”

Zoë rocked Thea against her, letting her cry herself out.

2.

A
s it happened, Zoë knew exactly what Thea meant. There was something in Paul Winthrop’s eyes when he looked at his youngest—there was hope and frustrated love and bitter disappointment he tried very hard to hide but sometimes didn’t quite manage to tuck in behind his usual screen of calm acceptance. Zoë could remember that hope and a fierce pride that had burned in those eyes on the day that Thea had been born—one could even catch a glimpse of it in that famous front-page photograph that had started the Thea Book as he stood beside his wife and their squalling bundle of potential glory.

He had still been a Howler man then—a trained tamer of feral libraries gone wild in the wake of a carelessly uttered word or phrase. Grimoires were temperamental books, sometimes with a life of their own, unpredictable and often dangerous; they were usually kept well apart from the main part of any library, but even so accidents happened every so often and the
consequences could be dire. An ill-chosen word, a set of syllables that somehow fit into some arcane spell, that was all it took—and it was almost impossible to keep a tight guard on one’s tongue every moment of every day. Allowed to drop too close to a grimoire that had its “ears” tuned to that particular combination, such utterances would accidentally release ill-focused and sometimes downright malicious spells and cantrips into the world.

Zoë remembered the first time she had met Paul. She had been visiting the remnants of one such library as a sophomore in high school—her teacher had taken her whole Ars Magica class out to the warded building, under the protection of a Class Two mage, for the students to experience firsthand the repercussions of magic gone bad.

The first thing that greeted them, carefully pointed out by the teacher, was a gargoylelike face newly warped into what had been a perfectly ordinary door when the class had arrived at the library. It looked frozen in an expression of pure defiance, only its eyes mobile, following the class with a malevolent glare as they had filed past it—and that had been just the beginning.

There had been a lot of whispering and point
ing as they crowded in. Most libraries had a back section carefully watched over by its own reference librarians, a place where books related to magic and spells were kept, and where the presence of neophytes or unsupervised students was frowned upon. Not many of the students in this particular class had even been allowed near those stacks. The rumors and weighty warnings that surrounded them like a miasma of peril were actually visible to someone like Zoë, a purple fog in which things rumbled and flashed dangerously like rolling lightning in a thundercloud. She had always had a healthy respect for that particular section in any library.

But now there was a patina of that purple, a ghostly echo of it, everywhere. The entire interior of the library was one bizarre thing after another: peacocks with human faces flitting in between the stacks, an odd sort of whimpering coming from the forbidden bookshelves in the back, a strange flickering in distant corners. The walls had been upholstered in striped wallpaper, and whole sections of vertical stripes had braided themselves into complicated designs, turned into leering faces with eyes that followed the visitors around the place with unnerving concentration,
or had shredded themselves into smaller pieces that were trying hard to form themselves into writing. Zoë and one of her classmates had seen a particular wallpaper stripe detach from the rest, curl into a circle, extrude eight spindly legs, drop to the floor, and start scuttling down the carpet toward the girls’ feet. The classmate had been unable to suppress a small scream; the shepherd mage had turned to deal with the problem, but before he could do anything a man simply stepped out of the wall and squashed the stripe-spider with his shoe.

“Not to worry,” he said cheerfully. “They can’t hurt you. Not anymore. The place is warded against mischief, and all that remains is to shut it all down. I’m working on it.”

“I thought you were done, Paul,” Zoë’s teacher had said, a little sharply. “I wouldn’t have brought the children if I’d known you were still working on it.”

“Nearly done,” Paul said, and actually winked at Zoë.

Her lips parted in a smile, and she dropped her eyes. She was fifteen years old, and he was dark-haired, bright-eyed, and devastatingly handsome.

“Just don’t go into the back of the stacks,” Paul said to the teacher, his manner brisk and businesslike again. “Anywhere else is fine. I left the elevators to the last, because they got rather creative. They’re safe now, you might want to show the kids. I think they’d enjoy it.”

Zoë’s classmate, the one who had screamed, had looked up at Paul and simpered.

He merely caught Zoë’s eye again, smiled, and waved a hand in the direction of the teacher. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll just be tying up a few loose ends in the back.” Something scampered past the nearest set of shelves, and darted into the shadows. Paul whipped his head around.
“HEY!”
he bellowed. “Come back here!”

He loped off after the intruder, and Zoë’s simpering classmate’s smile broadened into simple adoration. “Isn’t he something!” she said in a small breathless voice. “That’s Paul Winthrop. My father was in the same class at Amford with his dad. We know the family—seven sons, he’s the youngest—and they’re all flat-out gorgeous….”

“Don’t you ever think about anything else?” Zoë had snapped.

Paul had been right about the elevators—the
class had spent a hilarious half hour riding up and down the chatty pair of elevator cars that had acquired the personalities of bickering four-year-olds. They’d snatch at passengers with a sulky “Mine!” and made people promise on a ride up that they wouldn’t take the other elevator down, and then whimper in an injured manner if people broke their word. They could be effectively distracted by singing a nursery rhyme in the elevator car, or by any sentence that started with “Once upon a time.” The shepherd mage opined that this was what came of having a children’s section of the library opposite the elevators; and the Ars Magica class teacher had suggested archly that the situation might have been far worse. By the time the class left the area, the elevators had degenerated into telling each other knock-knock jokes on the top floor, and then falling down laughing all the way to the subbasement.

The second time Zoë had run into Paul Winthrop had been maybe a year later, when she’d tagged along with her older sister Ysabeau to an open lecture at Amford University. She had actually been pointing at him, telling Ysabeau about the occasion of the library visit, at pre
cisely the moment that he’d turned around and happened to look at them. Scarlet with embarrassment, Zoë had wished that she could drop through the floor. But, incredibly, he had smiled, and then he’d come over, and somehow she wound up introducing her sister to the Howler man…and the next thing she knew she was carrying Ysabeau’s flowers at her wedding, and everyone was talking about the marriage of the two seventh children and the glittering possibilities of their progeny.

Zoë wouldn’t have wanted to swear to it, but despite the protestations on both sides that they’d simply fallen head over heels in love with one another both Ysabeau and Paul had decided to marry each other with a solid dose of clearheaded pragmatism.