The shrieking yowl of the wind dropped to the crackle of a thunderstorm that was still a little too close. The trees were re-becoming trees. The insane silverbug sparkle was no worse than when you stand up too quickly and briefly feel dizzy. The sun came out again; the only shadows belonged to things I could see, like trees and benches and the railing of another little footbridge. And Casimir. He was staring at me like he’d never seen a human girl before.
“Casimir—” I said, or croaked.
To my astonishment—and a cross between horror and maybe the biggest thrill of my life—he picked up the hand he had been holding earlier and kissed it. He said something in a language that wasn’t English, and then flung himself down and over onto his back, flinging his arms out to either side. Which was a pretty good description of the way I was feeling too.
My knapsack had made it through—whatever had just happened—too. It sat a little behind where Casimir and I had been kneeling, all sort of hunched up, like someone sitting with her legs drawn up and her arms around them, her shoulders as high as they’d go and her face pressed down hard against her knees. I reached out and stroked it gently, over the pockets where the kami and Takahiro’s new mascot were.
Casimir’s pose reminded me a little of my algebra book. I looked at it, lying flopped open where I’d left it. I’d torn out twenty pages or so. It looked like more. I was so dead for mutilating a schoolbook.
On the other hand, we were in fact both alive, Casimir and I. One of the top still-attached pages of the book curled up briefly, which wouldn’t have been surprising except that it was curling against the mild breeze, which was all that was left of the wind. Okay, maybe all of us were still alive. Margaret Alastrina, I started to say to myself . . . and stopped.
I patted delicately at my shoulders. I wasn’t sure how far Hix had extended or retreated. Something moved. Something rubbed ever so gently down the side of my face. I didn’t think it was a foot. It might have been another face. I thought, I want to say her scent shimmers, but how does a smell shimmer? “Hix?” I murmured, and the light almost-weight around my shoulders gave a faint acknowledging shiver. “Thank you,” I said, and the patting thing against my face felt briefly like tiny kisses.
Casimir sat up. “I am sorry,” he said. “There is no excuse for my carelessness. I must plead that I have only been in your country for a fortnight, and everything about it is still strange to me—including the air, the wind, the ground under my feet, the sound of a river in its bed. It is all a language I do not speak, and do not understand what I am hearing.”
“Sorry?” I said. “Why are you sorry?” I thought, I should be apologizing to him that almost the first thing my country does to him is try and kill him. And if he hadn’t had this dumb idea about seeing me again, he would be somewhere else. I looked up at the sky. It looked like the sky always looks on a clear autumn day.
“I should have recognized the approach of a nazok,” said Casimir. “Nor did I sense your gruuaa. I am more dependent on my chabeled than I knew.” Now he looked up at the sky. I wondered if clear autumn days in Ukovia looked the same. “I am as dislocated here as if—as if—” He made a gesture with one hand. “It is much stranger here than I was expecting, so much stranger I was becoming afraid that studying at Runyon might teach me nothing I can use.” He looked down, and at me, again. “I thought, the other night, when I heard the word from the old prophecy, that it was a fault of my hearing—the foreigner who mistakenly believed he spoke your language. But I could not help being curious—and in Ukovia we are taught not to believe in coincidence. And you . . .”
He tailed off and I thought, You what. “Prophecy,” I said slowly and carefully.
“Yes,” he said. “When you came into the restaurant the other night, and your friend called you mgdaga. It is an ancient prophecy in Ukovia: the mgdaga is a young woman who can”—he murmured a few more words in what I assumed was Ukovian—“who can mend the breaks between universes. Who has a natural affinity for the physics of the worlds.”
“No,” I said.
“Most are legendary but a few have been identified as historical persons. There were never many, and there has not now been one in hundreds of years; our magicians say perhaps it always was only a tale, there were merely a few young women who seemed to fit the description. I was puzzled that I would hear of a mgdaga in Newworld, and more puzzled that the name should apparently be used so casually. I still do not understand—but—but it does not matter. The guldagi—spirits—of the between-worlds manifest and proclaim you.”
What?
“It is the equations of this world that gives the strength, yes? This is an acceptable art in Newworld? Who taught you? They cannot have known it would be so harshly tested, but then if mgdaga is a casual epithet they will perhaps not have known whom they taught. I would very much like to learn—if perhaps some scrap of it can be taught. It is exactly to learn such practical tools that I am here.” He touched my poor book gently. “Perhaps we—you—we if you will allow—should carry some pre-marked pages after this. If this is a true toruna I fear there will be more use for them.”
I could feel my mouth pulling itself into that “I don’t understand and I’m sure I don’t want to” smile. Jill and I used to see it on the face of our first-grade teacher a lot. “Whatever you’re talking about—it’s nothing to do with me. Jill calls me Magdag when she wants to be especially annoying. I don’t know what happened just now. I don’t even know if that was . . .” I couldn’t say “cobey,” as if saying it out loud would bring it back. I didn’t want to admit that that part of what he was talking about might be true. But none of the rest of it was. None.
He began to look unhappy and confused, which would make two of us. “I don’t . . .” And then his face changed again: dismay, disappointment. “Is it that you may not speak to me of these things because I am not a citizen of your country? I did wonder, some of the questions they asked, before they would issue me a visa. I don’t know—”
“What?” I said. “Citizen? Country? What are you talking about? I have no idea what just happened—I can’t even squash a silverbug, it makes me sick! I don’t know why I wrecked my algebra book! I mean—not to—know, not like I can tell you. I—I just—” I reached up and touched Hix, and felt that almost-but-not-quite imaginary flicker against my cheek in response. Meeting her last night for the first time had almost been too much for me—this morning I almost ran away when she climbed up my arm for the first time—and now here I was using her for reassurance.
Casimir’s eyes had followed my hand and his expression softened a little. “Ah,” he said.
“Can you see her?” I said. This entire conversation was so far off my radar I didn’t know what galaxy I was in any more. And I was getting farther away from the one I knew with every word. Especially the words I didn’t know.
“I can see the edge of a darkness,” he said. “A shadow that is not quite your body or my body or the trees. I would not see—her?—if I were not thinking of the mgdaga, who I would expect to have attendant guldagi—and whose gruuaa indeed held me here while you addressed the nazok. But I believe the gruuaa cannot fully appear in this wo—here,” he said. “They are one of the guldagi.”