Gift of the Unmage (8 page)

Thea, aware that her mouth was hanging open in a most unseemly fashion, shut it with a snap. At least Cheveyo was relatively practical; if he summoned flame in magical ways out of the thin air around him, it was practical magic, applied to a practical purpose—lighting his way in the night. Grandmother Spider seemed more like she had stepped out of a fairy tale….

“Teaching tale,” Grandmother Spider said as though Thea had spoken her thoughts out loud. “And old Grandmother Spider is as practical as practical gets. If giving mankind corn that sprang from the bones of my avatar, whom I told them to bury in a particular field when she died, is not practical enough, just look around you.”

Thea swept her gaze over the cavern’s walls but could see nothing there except a handful of
what, in her own world, found its way into gift shops under the name of “dreamcatchers.” Grandmother Spider’s were impossibly delicate, webs spun so thin that they trembled in every breath of air that brushed them, strung within a frame of something fragile and transparent, like long slivers of glass.

It did not look very practical to Thea.

“And yet,” Grandmother Spider said, “these catch real dreams. When the Alphiri came for them, I sold them only the design, not the magic. Some of it clings, sure, because the purpose for which a thing is made is part of its magic. But no real magic, not for a dreamcatcher. The Alphiri would have asked too high a price for those, if they had got their hands on them.”

“The
Alphiri
?”

That was all Thea could manage to utter. The words contained everything—astonishment, fury, even a little fear. In the back of her mind the vision of her dream returned, vividly: the three Hawaiian-shirted Alphiri traders bending over Thea the child in that long-ago hotel room.

Grandmother Spider turned serene eyes on Thea. “The Alphiri,” she repeated firmly. “The World-eaters. They’ve been to many worlds
searching for the one thing they cannot find. They came but recently to your own world, a young world, ready and eager to trade its dreams even before the dreams knew their own nature. You yourself know this. They were at your door with a copy of the Trade Codex before you could talk—but it was the wrong world, and things never got past the beginning….”

“I remember the Alphiri,” Thea murmured. “They came when I was young. They wanted something from me.”

“They still do. They keep an eye on things from which they might make a profit.”

“You know,” Thea said, jogged into an unexpected memory, “my father sometimes brought home some of the weirder things he found lurking in the feral libraries after he cleaned up the backwash of the wild magic. There was a time he brought back a whole bunch of things that had somehow become actual living creatures. I remember, there was a peeve, and a chuckle, and a murmur, and a glance, and a chortle….”

“A chortle? What sort of creature would a chortle be?” asked Grandmother Spider with an almost impish grin.

“It was a bird, round and fat, much like a
robin,” Thea said. “A peeve was, well, more or less a piglet. A murmur was something with a lot of fur, but it was always asleep with its snout buried into its paws, I never did see its face. A glance was something that looked like a cat with wings, with these huge dark-lashed dark eyes. And the chuckle…I wanted to keep the chuckle as a pet.”

“Show me,” said Grandmother Spider unexpectedly.

Thea threw her a startled look. “How?”

“One of those,” Grandmother Spider said, with a nod toward the dreamcatchers on the wall. “Oh, you know how.”

Thea bit back a denial, and instead stared at the nearest dreamcatcher. The shape of the chuckle formed in her mind, the sweet little squirrel-like creature, auburn-furred, with bright black eyes like two round buttons and a high chittering voice that sounded like human laughter. The dreamcatcher shimmered once, and then its web flowed into an even mirrorlike sheen. The image of the chuckle took shape in the mirror, a reflection of the one in Thea’s mind.

She allowed herself a small gasp. The image shivered once, but held.

“Very cute,” Grandmother Spider said. “So
what happened to the chuckle?”

The red-furred chuckle in the image chittered a little, and then a child’s hand came into the image, finger outstretched, to tickle the beast at the top of its head. For a moment it seemed to enjoy the attention, closing its eyes and making its tail shiver with pleasure. Then it turned with startling suddenness and sank its tiny rodent teeth into the caressing finger.

The image popped like a balloon, and the dreamcatcher web was back.

“Ow,” said Grandmother Spider sympathetically. “That had to have hurt.”

“Well, Dad took it back the next day,” Thea said. “Mom insisted that I get a tetanus shot although Dad scoffed at that—how could such a creature possibly have tetanus?”

“How old were you?”

“I don’t know…four, maybe…five…something like that.”

“So what made you think of the chuckle right now?”

Thea thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “Except…except that there was something like that in the way that the Alphiri looked at
me
.”

“And how was it that they looked at you?” asked Grandmother Spider, crossing her arms in a manner that made Thea think that she was annoyed. But it wasn’t Thea that she was annoyed at; it was those long-ago Alphiri that had drawn her ire. She
disapproved
, and every line of her body said so.

“Like…like they wanted to keep me,” Thea said.

Grandmother Spider snorted in a most inelegant manner. “Offer, counteroffer, trade,” she muttered. “There’s nothing that can’t be bought and sold in their world.”

“You said…,” Thea began after a moment, hesitating.

“I said, ‘the wrong world,’” Grandmother Spider said, smiling. “I know all about worlds, my child. I have created many—but most of my children only get to live in one, the right one if they are lucky. If they choose the wrong world, they waste a life. Sometimes that is inevitable.”

“You can’t choose where you are born,” Thea said.

“Ah, but you can—and there are many reasons. And sometimes you get tricked into doing it. And sometimes it’s even a good thing. For you—if you
had been able to do all that they expected of you back in the world you chose for yourself, the Alphiri would have probably had you signed, sealed, and delivered by now. To perform whatever tricks brought them the largest profits. But you obstinately didn’t do magic in that world….”

“Couldn’t,” Thea corrected with a grimace.

“Didn’t,” Grandmother Spider repeated gently but firmly. “You knew the dangers, it seemed, even when they were unknowable to you.”

“But I could never do anything!” Thea said. “My entire family did, every day! Even Frankie, the ham-fisted little twerp, can do some. My father traps impossible things like chuckles and peeves into cages. My Aunt Zoë can see the color of the wind. My mother makes dough rise by saying words over it. My brothers do class transformations with a wave of their hand—well, except Frankie, but then he always was weird…and then there’s me…”

“And do you really think that your world is the same as your father’s? Frankie’s?” Grandmother Spider smiled. “Your Aunt Zoë’s? Cheveyo’s for that matter?”

Thea blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes we share worlds,” Grandmother
Spider said. “Not always the best ones for ourselves, but it is a world we share with people we love or respect or need to be near. And there is a price to be paid for that.” She frowned delicately, her face pale and thin-lipped, her eyes slanted and narrow. “I hate to say it, but sometimes I think the Alphiri do have something in that wretched Trade Codex of theirs.”

Grandmother Spider looked up again, lifting lashes that were now pale auburn and framing eyes of a startling emerald green. Thea sat in the midst of her shattered worlds, keeping as much of her dignity about her as she could, but there was a tremble to her lower lip that she could not quite control.

“Oh, sweet child,” Grandmother Spider murmured, reaching out to touch Thea’s cheek lightly.

“Then I don’t belong back there? Back with my family?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Grandmother Spider carefully. “I just said…that your world is not quite the same as any of theirs. You know how you throw two pebbles into deep water, and they both make circles, and there are places where the circles intersect?”

“Yes,” said Thea, keeping her words short, aware that she felt like nothing so much as bursting into tears.

“Well,” said Grandmother Spider, “it’s like…you’re in those intersections right now. You’re at the edges of their world. I didn’t say you didn’t belong there, it’s just that the center of your own world is not where you thought it would be, and it’s certainly not where your mother and father—or the Alphiri for that matter—think it is. It is my belief that you haven’t found that center yet.”

“But I still can’t do any magic in that world.
Their
world. Where it’s important.”

“It may be important for all the wrong reasons,” Grandmother Spider said. She smoothed Thea’s unruly hair away, tucking the usual stray strands that had escaped confinement back behind Thea’s ears. “Yellow, like corn silk,” she murmured, her own hair turning that color very briefly, as though in homage, before shading back into brilliant silver-white. The thought that accompanied the gesture was unspoken, but it was there, in the gleam of a loving eye.
Beautiful.

Thea sat up, her eyes quite wide.

Grandmother Spider laughed, but it was a kind
laugh, full of affection. “Well,” she said, “when you’re done looking like a startled owlet…I have you for a little while. We can speak of all of this, and more—there is time enough, when you are at the beginning of time. In the meantime…” She rose to her feet, a graceful, fluid motion, and waited as Thea scrambled to her own in response. “Are you ready?”

Thea wriggled her toes in their woven sandals. “Where are we going?”

“Out of the
sipapu
again,” said Grandmother Spider, “although it may not open into the same world as the one through which you entered.”

Thea blinked.

Grandmother Spider laughed again—she laughed easily, for sheer joy. “Don’t worry, my granddaughter. I will be with you. Hold out your hand to me.”

Thea obeyed, extending her hand palm up. In the moment her attention was focused on her motion, Grandmother Spider the woman had winked out of existence and, instead, a small brown spider sat in the palm of Thea’s hand.

“I know all paths,” the spider said, its voice the same high sweet trill that had invited Thea into this strange house in the first place. “I have
made myself small; I will sit behind your left ear and tell you what to do. Now go, let us walk under the First World’s bright stars together.”

2.

A
nd it was done, as though the words had conjured away the glow of the firelight and the shimmering dreamcatchers on cavern walls. Thea was out in the open, a wide flat plain; the sky was dark except for the stars, but the stars were huge and bright, and under their light alone it was possible to see quite clearly. The air smelled of sagebrush and of freshly fallen rain.

“Is this your world?” Thea asked, her voice a mere whisper. “It is beautiful.”

“Not entirely,” the voice in her ear said. “We all carry our own worlds within us. Some of this is you. For instance…”

Thea suddenly caught a whiff of something, a faint scent, evanescent, as though it came from far away; it was gone almost before she had had a chance to understand it. But it was a scent so comforting, so familiar, and so unexpected in the present setting, that she froze where she stood, her nostrils wide to the night air, trying to retrieve it.

The scent of wet firs after the rain. The woods of her home.

“Not here,” the spider said. “Memory. Although you could bring them, if you so chose. And we might still go there this night, you and I, because I would like to see this thing that you love so much. There is something wonderful about seeing a magic-wielder’s own world as wrought by their magic. But not yet. Think of it as ice cream. You can’t have it before dinner or you’ll spoil your appetite.”

There seemed nothing unusual at all in the way this strange creature knew all about ice cream and one of Thea’s mother’s favorite admonitions. Instead, Thea sighed and picked up on the larger thing.

“But it’s
that
world, and you just said I can’t do magic there….”

“I said you chose not to, for a reason,” the spider said, a gentle admonishment. “We’ll figure it out. If we have to go to your sacred places to do it, we will. But first, we will go to mine. To those, I know the way, and I know the safest passage. That way—aim between those two mesas there.”

“Which?” Thea said, narrowing her eyes. In
the shimmer of starlight everything looked alike, distant hills’ shapes blurring into one another; Thea had the uncomfortable feeling that she could walk in circles for days in this country and not even know it.

“Those. Where you’re looking. Perhaps following the
rim
of the canyon is wise….”

This last was an amused warning, because Thea had apparently been quite unaware that a few paces in front of her the ground dropped away into deep shadow, opening into a maze of canyons whose far edge seemed impossibly distant and speckled with stars.

“Sorry,” Thea said, backing up a couple of careful steps.

But the far side held her attention; it seemed to her that it was from there that the smell of green firs had come wafting over to her, and she could not seem to tear a gaze full of longing away from the far side of the chasm that opened at her feet.

“On the other hand…,” murmured the spider thoughtfully.

“Can you hear that?” Thea said suddenly, tilting her head to the side.

It was the music again,
her
melody, and it seemed to her that it was coming to her from
across the rift. From where the memory of the fir trees stirred in the shadows.

“Oh, yes.” The spider sighed. “Rushing winds and flowing water. We made a world to that once, the god of light and I.”