Gift of the Unmage (5 page)

He sensed the brewing rebellion and looked up, his dark eyes inscrutable.

“I know why they sent me here,” Thea said, putting her bowl down.

“Perhaps,” Cheveyo said.

“You’re supposed to make me find my magic.”

Cheveyo’s eyebrow lifted. “I am not supposed to
make
you do anything at all,” he said.

“Just so you know,” Thea said. “Nobody else has been able to teach me anything.”

“You have a high opinion of yourself, Catori,” he said tranquilly, putting away his bowl. “You stand alone, untouchable, unteachable. Is that your vision? I told you, you are nothing here except what you bring with you. You came into this world through your own
sipapu
, but that wasn’t your own doing—don’t let it make you think too highly of yourself.”

Thea blinked. “What’s a
sipapu
?”

“The navel of the world, the place where a people comes out of the womb and takes their place in the overworld.” Cheveyo nodded. “That at least is a good question. It asks something you do not already know and that cannot be learned by doing.”

Thea fingered the medallion that still hung around her neck. She had not taken it off the previous night as she went to sleep, and she spared a moment to be profoundly grateful for that—her father had said, “Don’t lose this.” The medallion might be her only way out of this place.

“You will leave this place,” Cheveyo said, as though he could read her mind, “when I let you go. When I say you are ready. That which you wear is a Pass to let you cross the threshold back—but the only way to that threshold lies through me. Remember that.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Thea said abruptly.

“Perhaps you should be,” Cheveyo said. “Sometimes fear is a good thing. All sane people have a little bit of fear. The only people who are completely unafraid are gods or fools, people who cannot be hurt and people who will not believe that they can be hurt. The rest of us do well if we know when it is good to be afraid.”

He got up and walked to where his feathered cloak hung on a rock protuberance on the wall, and flung the cloak around his shoulders without haste. His staff stood leaning on the same wall and he took it up with his left hand, turning his head fractionally to glance at Thea.

“Get your cloak,” he said. “The day grows no younger, and we should begin.”

“Begin what?” Thea said, and then pressed her lips together as Cheveyo’s eyebrow rose fractionally. She was asking the wrong questions again. Without further words she stumped muti
nously to where her own rabbit-fur cloak had been laid, and shrugged into it.

Cheveyo was waiting for her outside the cliff dwelling, his face lifted to the sky, as if he were scenting the wind. For some reason Thea’s mind leaped to her aunt, to Zoë’s strange juggling of senses. It seemed for a moment that Zoë and Cheveyo might have quite a bit in common.

But Cheveyo was not Zoë. There was nothing about him to suggest Zoë’s affection and her bright spirit, and the resemblance quickly shredded away.

“Come,” was all he said when she emerged, clutching the rabbit cloak about her.

There was a bite to the thin air, but the cold was dry and sharp, laced with smells totally alien to Thea; there was no rich aroma of fir forests, no smell of damp earth, nothing that she knew or was passingly familiar with. Her feet were bare except for the sandals, and the wind nipped at her ankles and at the exposed shins that stuck out below the rabbit-fur cloak. Thea curled her toes in the sandals and shivered once and then straightened her shoulders, lifting her eyes to Cheveyo’s face in what was almost a challenge.

She thought she saw the ghost of a smile light
up the corners of his dark eyes, but he looked away before she could be sure she had seen anything, and strode off along the path snaking on the edge of the ridge leading away from his front door. Once again he had simply assumed she would follow. He had, after all, told her to come, and expected her to obey.

Thea smoldered inwardly. Always independent-minded and frequently indulged in her wishes, she did not take easily to being ordered around. But she was alone here, adrift, still unable to piece together the puzzle of who Cheveyo really was and why she was here in the first place. She didn’t have the necessary information to make any logical decisions about anything, and she didn’t have the power to do anything that did not involve obeying Cheveyo’s instructions. So she smothered the resentment that nibbled at her with small sharp teeth and trotted off along the ridge in Cheveyo’s wake.

He hummed as he walked. She could hear him as she began catching up with him, a low resonant hum in the back of his throat. There was a melody to it, but Thea took a while to recognize its existence—it was as if a collection of random sounds suddenly coalesced into something differ
ent, something bigger than themselves. She found the melody disturbingly familiar, as if she had known it before, many years ago, and was now struggling to remember it, patching it together from half-recognized fragments.

Caught up in that, it took her far longer than it should have to realize what
else
he was doing as he walked.

With his right hand wrapped firmly around his staff, he was taking long strides and almost poling himself along the uneven ground. His left swung free by his side as he walked, and there was a shimmer around the fingers that suddenly caught Thea’s eye. Her mouth fell open as she realized what she was seeing—Cheveyo wove light as he walked, effortlessly making a complex skein with his fingers and then unraveling it with his thumb so that streamers of light flowed back from his wrist like strange ribbons until they faded and melted back into ordinary air, as though their magical presence had never been.

It felt like a habit, something so ordinary to him that he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it, but it was beautiful. Thea stared, mesmerized, at the play of light in those long fingers, until she stumbled over a rock she should have seen but
failed to notice in time. She staggered, tried to regain her balance, but it was too late, and her ankle twisted underneath her, depositing her on the ground.

She grunted.

Cheveyo stopped, midstep, without turning around. Fading half-woven strands of light still hung from the fingers of his stilled hand. He said nothing, merely waiting.

“I’m fine, thank you,” Thea said, scrambling gracelessly to her feet and staring ruefully at the long scrape on her shin, which was starting to bead blood.

“That is good,” Cheveyo said.

And he was off again. Striding, humming, folding light.

Thea limped after him in stubborn silence. She had gotten scrapes before. It wasn’t going to stop her, wasn’t going to let him show her up.

She forced herself to concentrate on his hand instead, to watch closely every small movement, every nuance of the woven light as it fell from his fingers.

“Very good,” Cheveyo said suddenly, and Thea came to an abrupt stop, almost running him down. She blinked, surprised.

“What?” she said, staring around her, almost as though she had just woken up from a dream. “Where…Where are we? What is this place?”

The broken wilderness they had started out from was gone—they stood instead on what seemed to be a wide straight road, flat, solid. Above them the sky had turned milky with cloud, hiding the sun, giving the land an air of being lost and timeless.

“This is the Barefoot Road,” Cheveyo said, his voice almost gentle. “You did well. You are here.”

Thea glanced down at his feet, and then her own.

Cheveyo’s were bare now, without even sandals to protect the soles of his feet from stones. Thea’s own were still encased in the sandals she had put on that morning.

But so had he. He had been wearing sandals. She had
seen
them. She had been following those sandaled feet for…for how long? It felt like she had been walking for hours.

“But I am wearing shoes,” she said instead, pointing out the obvious.

Cheveyo actually smiled.

“Yes,” he said, “but standing on the Barefoot
Road is only the first step to walking it. You have done well to come this far.”

“The song you hum,” Thea said unexpectedly. “What is it?”

“You have heard it before.”

“Yes. I think so.”

Cheveyo nodded. “This is the kind of question you should think on. The answers are within you—the answers to all important questions are already within you. It is in learning how to ask the questions of our lives that those questions are answered, Catori. If we ask the right question in the right way, the answer lies hidden inside it, waiting to be discovered.”

“You never give me a straight answer,” Thea said.

“Did I not just tell you there is no such thing?” Cheveyo said with another unexpected smile. It had a strange effect on his face—it softened his cheekbones, allowed the habitual expression of stern dignity to dissolve into something that was almost joy.

“Why am I here?” Thea said after a silence.

“There is the Road,” Cheveyo said.

“I am here because there is a road,” Thea echoed blankly.

Cheveyo merely stood and looked at her, his eyes glittering, opaque with a black shimmer like obsidian.

Thea gave a huge theatrical shrug and flung a strand of escaped fair hair back with a flounce. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“You will,” Cheveyo said, and in his voice was a river of tranquility. “You will.”

1.

A
FTERWARD, THAT
rush of triumph, the sense of real achievement triggered by Cheveyo’s sparse words of praise, became something of a bittersweet memory for Thea. It had seemed to her, just for a moment, that she stood on the brink of something—something that she had been blindly trying to get to all the years of her life. She had felt…She had searched for the right word for hours the night after she and Cheveyo returned from their first visit to the Barefoot Road…. She had felt
vindicated
. She had felt that there was a reason, after all, that she had been sent here to this wilderness and this strange closemouthed man whose every word created more mysteries than it explained.

But if that had been her first success, it was
also the last for quite some time. Cheveyo left Thea alone for a few days, except for drawing out gently but expertly some of the background that had brought her to him. Thea found herself telling him about her family, about her past, as they went about sweeping out the dwelling with a stiff broom made out of twigs and dry brush or getting water or preparing their meals. And then, without warning, Cheveyo gathered the two of them up again after breakfast one morning and set out once more to seek the Road. This time things did not go so well.

Thea could not remember their path being so strewn with rock and rubble on the first trip. She made no complaint and struggled gamely on for some hours, but it was a tough hike and she was panting and almost totally exhausted by the time Cheveyo abandoned that particular expedition with a thunderous scowl and turned them homeward—whereupon the trail seemed to magically clear up and they got back in half the time it had taken them to reach the point where Cheveyo had turned around.

After several similar attempts Thea eventually realized, with a familiar sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, that she was waiting for the
inevitable day that her teacher—she tried, without success, to think of him in terms other than that loaded word—would turn to her with that expression of disappointment that she had gotten so used to whenever magic was involved.

And she realized one more thing. She realized that she could not bear to see that expression on Cheveyo’s face. There had been something in his eyes on that first day on the Barefoot Road that had made her heart leap. Somehow, for reasons she could not yet put a finger on, Cheveyo’s approval mattered—more, perhaps, than anybody’s approval had mattered before. Even—and this caught her entirely by surprise—her father’s. On some very deep level Thea understood that Cheveyo was a different league of being from anyone she had ever met, that the “favor” Paul Winthrop had called in must have been greater than she knew.

There was a lot riding on this, apparently.

Thea found that she dreamed a lot in Cheveyo’s home—far more than she had ever dreamed before, or perhaps she simply remembered her dreams in greater detail.

It started out as replays, with herself the infant in the crib, with the Faele raining their ethereal
wish-gift blessings down upon her—mute like any infant would be, unable to ask questions, to demand explanations. She had never been told of their presence at her birth, so she had no way of knowing if this was a real memory dug out of some dark corner of her mind or if she was making it all up as she went along. Thea wished she could run out in the morning and ask her mother if the dream was a true one—or Aunt Zoë, who could be counted on to tell her the truth, even if her mother decided not to—but her family was far away in space and time.

And then the dreams changed, and she recognized them as real memories. They were very vague, distant, lost in the mists of early childhood, but these were things she did remember as having happened. Those memories, which came in her waking hours, were certainly not complete—she had been far too young when they had occurred. But enough had clung that Thea was able to actually recognize certain sequences of her dream as something already seen, already lived, already true. These were what the young Thea, at maybe four years of age, had once called the “Goobermint” years.

By the time the third Winthrop son, Charles,
was born, the bottom had largely fallen out of the feral library control market. Paul, good as he was at containment of wild magic, found himself in need of a new job to support his growing family. With his aristocratic family background—his was one of the oldest, most prominent mage families of the West Coast—his impeccable educational background (a summa cum laude undergraduate degree in Thaumaturgy followed by two specialist postgraduate qualifications from Amford University, the best graduate school of magic in the country) and a solid dollop of raw ambition, the choice was almost inevitable—politics. With two toddlers in tow, a babe in arms, and Ysabeau once again pregnant, the Winthrops moved from Washington State to Washington, D.C., and Paul joined the Federal Bureau of Magic.

The Double Seventh propaganda campaign moved into high gear. Charles was followed by Douglas, and then Edward, and then Francis. And then Ysabeau was pregnant again, and the TV cameras gathered around to watch and wait.

Media interest was not just confined to the American mainland. Journalists came from Britain, Sweden, Germany, Australia, Russia,
Brazil, India, and Japan, and as far afield as Lithuania, Iceland, and South Africa, hovering at the edges of the Winthrop family’s lives, waiting to document Thea’s first smile, first crawl, first word. Children sent poems for the Double Seventh, and a few of them had even made it into the Thea Book, carefully pasted in by Ysabeau.

But it seemed that interest in the affair had spread beyond just the human polity. The trading partners with whom Paul’s office had dealings sent representatives to visit Ysabeau as she neared her time. Some had tried to bring gifts—but accepting gifts from the Faele was known to be more trouble than it was worth, even if one knew enough about that particular polity to make sure that their offerings were phrased with sufficient nonambiguity to ensure straight dealing. This was probably why Thea’s original Faele dream was either pure imagination, or something deeply secret that her family had kept from the FBM pen-pushers, who would have heartily disapproved. But the Agency did allow a couple of short poems from the bards of the Dwarrowim to get into Ysabeau’s hands—the Dwarrowim, at least, could be counted on to write poetry for the pure beauty and joy of it and expect nothing in
return for it except appreciation.

The Alphiri had made discreet inquiries about possible franchise rights well before Ysabeau entered her fourth month of pregnancy. Thea knew about that, in theory, because the story was part of her family lore—she had always gotten a warm sense of being treasured and sheltered when her father’s response to the Alphiri offer was mentioned.

“We don’t sell our children,” he had told the Alphiri delegation.

The Faele may or may not have been hanging around the infant Thea—she had been far too young to know. But it had, in fact, been the Alphiri who were Thea’s own first real memory of encountering any of the nonhuman polity members.

She had been barely three. Drowsy with all the protection wards layered upon her, she had been taken along with her parents, her rather resentful older brothers left behind, on a national tour with the president following his reelection. The media had still been interested in her then, in a big way, and the flashing cameras that greeted the touring party as they climbed out of airplanes in a dozen American cities were equally divided in their focus
between the lure of Paul’s boss, the triumphant once-and-future president, and the smallest member of his entourage, carried in Ysabeau’s arms and knuckling sleepy eyes at the press.

The Alphiri had come visiting in a Florida hotel. Thea’s actual memory of the event involved herself wearing a particularly beloved outfit involving lots of yellow, walking around the air-conditioned hotel room. She remembered the three Alphiri for two reasons. One was their physical appearance, their tall angular frames, their odd pointed ears, and their long, long fingers. The other was their attempt to dress to human expectation, and the sight of Alphiri wearing bright Hawaiian-print shirts over red-checked golfing shorts with their strange feet thrust awkwardly into flip-flops had been enough to brand them into Thea’s imagination. She didn’t think she remembered the rest of it, until she returned in her dreams to that room and saw those Alphiri messengers again.

They had gathered around her, a trio of solemn faces on shoulders too sharply angled and legs too long to be human.

“We come,” the first one said to Thea, “as traders.”

“We offer knowledge,” said the second.

“For a good price,” said the third.

The Alphiri were always in the market for a good price.

It was entirely possible that these things had in fact been said to her parents and not to herself—but that wasn’t a given. The Alphiri were known to go straight to the source, and they had never quite grasped the concept of human children other than as pint-size human adults. But whether they had spoken to Paul and Ysabeau or to Thea herself, Thea could not recall any response to what they had said. Whatever the reality had been, in the dream three-year-old Thea had been dumb, unable to do anything other than stare at them out of eyes as large and as cobalt blue as Florida’s ocean.
What knowledge?
her dream-mind asked, but the Alphiri gave every appearance of not being able to understand, or not wishing to.

“We know you are seeking.”

“We have maps.”

“We have directions.”

Where am I going
?

In the real encounter, Thea would have been far too young to formulate such a question, and
anything the Alphiri said would have seemed entirely unconnected. But now, in the dream, Thea realized that they did, in fact, reply to what she had asked.

“We can show you the roads.”

“But we want something in return.”

“We want exclusive rights.”

Exclusive rights to what?

Again, the Alphiri in the dream seemed to respond directly to the questions she had asked.

“We will want a guarantee that we will have first claim.”

“First claim on anything you do, on anything you find.”

“We will pay well.”

What am I supposed to be looking for?

One of the Alphiri had gone down awkwardly on one bony knee and had taken Thea’s chin into his long-fingered hand, staring intently into her face.

“But we will want guarantees.”

“We want to know if it is all true.”

“We want to be sure.”

And then, more ominously, and this was a part of the dream-memory Thea knew had never happened in the way she was dreaming it but
somehow knew it to be a deeper truth, as though her dreams had made the Alphiri say out loud what they had been holding silent and close and wrapped in secrets.

“We will make sure.”

“We will find the triggers.”

“We will wake what needs to be woken.”

Their eyes were huge and somehow cold and cruel as the three Alphiri leaned in closer to her, scouring her with that look, trying to see somewhere deep inside her.

Thea-the-child whimpered; Thea-the-dreamer cried out.

What do you want from me?

But that seemed to be the one question her dreams would not answer. And she would wake—none the wiser, sometimes so tangled in the remnants of her dreams that it would take her long minutes to wrestle with what was not reality and come back to herself and her real surroundings—frustrated, thwarted, and often just plain furious.

Cheveyo had asked her what the matter was on one morning when she emerged from a particularly fruitless Faele dream-chase.

“I ask and I ask and I never get any answers,”
she had muttered, as cryptic in her own way as he ever was. Part of her didn’t want to share these dreams; another part reminded her that he was her teacher, and if there was any chance at understanding what she faced, he needed to know about these nightly battles of hers.

Cheveyo’s eyebrow had lifted eloquently, and Thea had tossed her head at the expression on his face.

“I know,” she said, “I
know.
I am asking the wrong questions again.”

“Sometimes,” Cheveyo said quietly, “I think it is more of a problem that you aren’t listening for the answers. If you aren’t told what you want to hear, you close your ears to the rest.”

“But I want to
understand
,” Thea said. “What’s the point of hearing things that haven’t a thing to do with what I want to know? The dreams…”

“Don’t whine,” he said.

He could be truly annoying. Thea ground her teeth in frustration at that gentle controlling tranquility.

“But what if they…,” she persisted, in the face of that admonition.

“The dreams will do what they need to do,”
Cheveyo said, sighing. “Patience. Patience and wisdom. When will you learn to sit still long enough for these to come to you?”

But it wasn’t only the Faele and the Alphiri who haunted her dreams. There were other things that came to her, and, by some instinct that she didn’t quite understand, Thea stayed silent on these dreams. They were woven around that melody that Cheveyo had hummed wordlessly on the first expedition to the Barefoot Road, the one she felt she was on the edge of recognizing if only she could keep hold of it long enough to figure it out. The one that Cheveyo had said was significant.

The melody came to Thea in her dreams as something high and ethereal, as though played on a flute or a soprano recorder, soaring effortlessly somewhere in the sky, hanging between the stars, looking down on the world it had made. Thea thought that it wasn’t
quite
the same as Cheveyo’s tune, that the reason she had thought she recognized his version was simply that it had reminded her of this one, the real one, the pure one, the one that she knew that she carried within herself all the time. In these dreams, she would find herself wandering alone in a place
that was all clouds and billows of white mist—it swirled around her ankles so that she couldn’t even see her feet, couldn’t tell what it was that she walked on, or even if she walked at all or just drifted through this nothingness, a cloud herself. And then she would hear it start, the music, weaving in and out of the mists, shredding the clouds into streamers and then taking them away altogether, and she would see a patchwork landscape full of snatches of well-known things—something that would tease her senses although none of it belonged together in the same time or the same place. There would be the richly scented and magnificent fir forests of her home, and a glimpse of the paved straight streets of a city she recognized, and then it would all change and flow into the shapes of the hills that Cheveyo had started to make familiar to her with their tramps through the mesas sculpted from smooth rock and red sand.