“I was one of those trained. The training begins young; you learn your letters by puzzling out your first incantations.”
He paused. I was thinking you learn your letters by puzzling out your first incantations. You didn’t use the word “incantation” here unless you really wanted to get in someone’s face. What kind of a dreeping canty is that was rude enough to get you sent to detention if a teacher heard you.
Val sighed. “My country is very old; its history runs deep into the earth; our word for cobeys means ‘hole in the earth.’ ‘Gvazakimu.’ ‘Earth hole.’ ‘Earth . . . bottomless.’ ‘Earth profound.’ It is hard work, weaving the earth together again, across such a chasm.”
He fell silent again. I had been listening to him and not watching the shadows. I glanced at them now and discovered that a lot of them had slid down off the walls and were pooling around his feet, and over the back and arms of his chair. Oh, yuck.
“I have wondered,” he said. “I have wondered from the first. Since I stepped off the plane and joined the immigration queue. There were—shadows—in the airport arrival hall. There were shadows on the hands of the young woman who stamped my new visa. There were many shadows in the small room where I was scanned and scanned again, and questioned, and questioned again. There were shadows on the face of the doctor who clearly did not like me, did not like my kind, and would have refused me entry if he could. This was so plain I knew that there was nothing there, that the shadows were only shadows, that what I was seeing was only the result of having had no sleep in thirty hours.”
“And of leaving your home forever,” said Mom, “and coming to a strange country. A strange world.”
Val nodded. “Yes. I was very tired. . . . I had grown so tired that I had let them take my magic away. I was so tired I let them take everything away.” He shrugged, his odd, dramatic, Oldworld shrug, and it was as though I saw him shrugging off a mountain or half a planet. “I thought it would be worth the loss, after . . . They took it all away, and sent me here.”
“Not everything,” I said. I tried to use my calm voice again, but the memory was making it hard. “They didn’t take everything. That time I came out to the shed and—and—what was that?”
“That was such bad livnyaa,” he said. “You knocking just then. Livnyaa, luck—a kind of magical luck—which is to say not luck, because there is no luck in magic. The—the skha, the web, or mesh of power, is very close—much too close for luck, for accidents. I wondered that that happened—that it happened with you, Maggie. I had brought a few old things with me to this new world—things that had been with me for a long time, but which had been denatured, when they took everything else, to be only what they appeared to be: a stone, a cup, a wooden wand beautiful only for the grain of the wood. I had been increasingly troubled—for a week or a fortnight before that day, Maggie—with a sense that some one or more of those things were . . . stirring. Were coming to life once more. They should not, and they should not have been able to. But I had to admit to myself that I kept them as if they were still tools of magic. Do you remember that you thought me mad that I will not have my ’top or pocket phone in the shed? You do not mix things of scientific power with things of magical power. I told myself it was habit, superstition. . . .
“That day, Maggie, I had been turning those old tools over, searching for any sign of returning power—wondering if I were capable of seeing such a sign, even if it were there. I had picked up the small wooden rod that had once been a very powerful tool when you knocked, Maggie, and it—I do not know how to describe it—blazed. That is what you saw. That is what you interrupted.”
“Why on earth did you say ‘come’ to me?” I said angrily.
“I didn’t,” said Val. “I said ‘nah! Nah!’—no. It sounds much like ‘come,’ heard through a door.”
I goggled at him. But I couldn’t not believe him. I couldn’t. Involuntarily I thought about him tapping out Mom’s fender after I’d dented it. I thought about all the times he hadn’t ratted to Mom when I’d been horrible to him at the grocery store. He had even told me that he had never been to a supermarket till he came to Newworld. In the town he lived in it was all little shops: you bought meat from the butcher who wrapped it up in paper for you, and vegetables—sometimes with the farmyard dirt still on them—from the vegetable stall, and bread from the baker. If you lived in the village you could smell the fresh bread baking every day. I could feel something hard and cold in my chest cracking. It hurt.
“What did you tell Mom?” I said. “After I came screaming indoors? I was expecting to be grounded for a week at least for—for—” I looked at their drawn, anxious faces and didn’t say what I’d been going to say. “For rudeness?”
“I told her as near to the truth as I could without admitting to my history,” said Val. “I told Elaine I had an old charm. I admitted it was illegal. It was one of the few things I had from my old life. I believed it had been destroyed as a charm. That is true: my luggage was examined even more intensively than I was. I did not believe any live thing would have been passed by Newworld’s border scans, which are notoriously thorough. Despite this it had held some grain of power within it somewhere—and this had regenerated. I told her it would not happen again. I was myself very shaken.”
I remembered his face that day. Yes, he had been very shaken, even if I had misinterpreted why. “Has it?” I said, more sharply than I meant. “Has it happened again?”
There was a pause. “Yes,” said Val. “I’m afraid so.”
“Oh, Val,” Mom murmured.
“Yes,” repeated Val. “But if this had not happened, we would not be having this conversation. For what that is, perhaps, worth.”
“Why not?” I said. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Maggie—” said my mother.
“It is reasonable that she asks these questions,” said Val. “Why is that these things that have happened leave me open to what you are telling me today. I have not seen my shadows—my gruuaa—since I woke up in the hotel room the day after being successfully passed into this country. In hindsight now I think that I have spelled myself not to see them, with some fragment of that skill I should no longer have. But—Margaret—I would not have said that you were crazy, if you had told me this thing I could not believe. I would have thought there was something awakening in you—something I had been emphatically told did not exist in Newworld any more—but that might, perhaps, be roused by my history. I do not know how I would have answered you, however, because the compact was that they took all of my magic. But if I had no magic left, my wand should not have begun to accrue skha strength again. If it did . . . then perhaps the shadows, the gruuaa, were also as you saw them, and not only a reflection of what was happening to you.”
“Anyone who reads fairy tales should know never to let a magician keep his wand,” I said, firmly not thinking about what might be happening to me. I might almost choose being crazy. “Even if you’ve beaten him and taken his magic away.”
“I have wondered about that too,” said Val. “Wondered about that since before the beginning—since before they finished with me, and told me to come here. I am less surprised that your Watchguard and Overguard do not read fairy tales, but my countryfolk certainly do. It is also curious to me that two of my ex-colleagues from the Commonwealth are teaching the physics of the worlds at Runyon University.”