Over The Sea (14 page)

Think! Think! No one is coming to help. But —

“I don't need an army,” I declared. “Because I have magic.” My heart was really driving on the Indy 500 now.

Did she have magic too?

“Oh, of course,” she scoffed, sending another glance at her court. “Magic. Easily available at every market stall.”

They rose, bowed, tittered. “Telling blow, Your Gracious Majesty!”

“Watch.”

I brought my trembling fingers up, and performed an illusion spell I'd been practicing to try on Faline when the time was right. I waved my hands, pointed at PJ — and the air glittered around him briefly, then cleared, and there was a huge pig snout over his nose!

Gasps of shock — and one muffled laugh from a man that got turned hastily into a coughing fit.

Glotulae screamed!

PJ looked around, bewildered. “What? What?”

“Get out! Get out!” The powder-smeared finger pointed at me.

“Oh, glad to,” I said loudly. “But just remember, those people like that cart driver are really Mearsieans, and if you mistreat them, you'll see me again. A lot!”

I turned around and walked out.

Glotulae screamed something at me, but it was hard to hear over PJ's sudden wail. He couldn't see the snout, for it was illusion only, but someone had obviously whispered it to him.

We could still hear their combined laments when we reached the outer chambers.

“Let's run,” I suggested.

We did.

I'd felt somehow that my name, and my being Clair's second, somehow constituted a sacred duty. I should never invoke the name and rank unless the cause was truly good.

And so I was apprehensive when we got back at last to the Junky and then reported up to Clair in the White Palace. I wondered if she'd be mad, or if not mad, disappointed in me, somehow feeling that I'd done wrong.

But she didn't. She grinned as we told the story, and nodded when I told her my last threat to Glotulae. “An excellent idea,” she exclaimed. “Good work, Cherene. I wish I'd thought of it!”

So I went back down to the girls feeling very high hearted indeed. In my experience, though adults were quick to punish the tiniest infraction, when you actually did something right, that was just what was expected — there was never any praise.

Here, everything was different. There were no grownups forcing you to do what they said, while expecting you not to notice how they didn't obey their own rules. Here there really appeared to be right and wrong — not just power and powerless — and so I struggled to do what was right. I struggled all the more because Clair never once told me to ‘do right'. It never seemed to occur to her that I might not; but when I did something right, I could see in her quick smile, the tone of her quiet voice, that she appreciated it. That she appreciated
me
.

Of course that part of me that was squashed so on Earth still relishes the struggle against evil, and I have to admit that few things give me more of a thrill than an easily identifiable villain to hate. And wasn't PJ and his disgusting mother just about perfect villains?

Well, ‘right' and ‘evil' still weren't always easy to define.

Like that first night, when we celebrated. I had introduced the girls to tacos, my favorite food. Janil had learned the ingredients and always had them on hand, and Clair put together a complicated series of spells — based on how ships got food from specialty restaurants on shore — so we could summon them when we wanted. The food gets prepared and then kind of disappeared from space and time, until you summon it back, all hot and ready.

And so, over a dinner of hot chocolate, we gloated over our successful mission, made up a new nickname for Glotulae (Dhana thought it a pretty name — liquidy sounding — and we all know how she feels about water) from some insults in English all strung together by their initials, making Fobogabaf. The sound of that word had sent them all laughing, especially Sherry. Even when we shortened it to ‘Fobo' she still smiled for a long time every time she heard it.

The night ended with a lot of threats about PJ and what we'd do next time we caught him ordering anyone to kill one of us.

Seshe, who had been silent, said suddenly, “Oh, he didn't really mean it.”

Irene made a big deal of rubbing her ears. “Funny, I thought I heard the words
Kill her
. Did I dream them?”

Dhana snickered.

“No,” Seshe said. “But didn't you look at his face, the way he was watching for a shocked reaction?”

Sherry's brow wrinkled. “What do you mean?”

“I think he wanted us to beg for mercy, so he could grant it,” Seshe said.

Irene hooted with laughter. Diana shook her head. Faline fell on her knees and started pleading in a fake voice for mercy, and the others laughed. Seshe went on eating, calm as always, but she didn't say anything more.

At least, not until we all parted to sleep, for we were tired after our long walking trip. I stopped her and said, “So you don't think PJ is all that bad, is that what you mean?”

Seshe wrinkled her nose. “I think he's horrid,” she said. “But that's because he was raised by
her
. She's got to be the worst mother ever, but he's just a kid. What else has he known?”

I got to the uncomfortable question. “So you think I was wrong about insulting him and all that?”

She shook her head. “I don't think anyone tells him the truth. I don't think his mother would permit anyone around either of them who told the truth.”

I thought about that as I lay in my hammock. (We had hammocks in the Junky, which took up less room than beds.) Telling him the truth. The truth had been insulting enough; did that mean Seshe thought insults that weren't true would be wicked? Even to creeps? Or was that acting like creeps?

Resolving to ponder this more, I drifted off to sleep.

Some days passed, during which we got a band of rain that lasted off and on the whole time. More rain, probably, than I'd ever seen in my life!

Not that I minded. Those days blended into a continual state of happiness. I worked hard at my magic and my riding during brief clear-ups in the sky, until the latter began to feel natural. Magic, alas, was not so easy.

But the first test came, and unexpectedly too.

See, we'd prided ourselves on a mission accomplished and a job well done — but I'd forgotten the parade that had caused me originally to go spy out the Auknuges. So we were all taken by surprise when Diana came running into the Junky the first day it was really clear, so spent she couldn't talk for what must have been a full minute. And considering how fast, and how long, she could run, it meant she'd come quite a ways at top speed.

She gasped, “Clair!”

I zapped up to the White Palace, and stood for a moment recovering. When the transfer blitz wore off, I said, “We gotta get some kinda intercom.”

Clair didn't even ask what that was. “Problem?”

“Diana.”

We went down by her transfer spell, and Diana told us in a hoarse voice that a whole slew of men were marching from Glotulae's city straight toward the forest.

I turned to Clair, appalled. “An army? What can we do?”

Clair gave me a grim smile. “I have some spells prepared. Will you help me?”

“You bet!”

Diana led us back through the forest, where we emerged on a gentle ridge and saw them in the distance.

“Perfect,” Clair said, surveying the ground before the approaching marchers.

She vanished, and Diana and I stood in silence, me hopping from foot to foot. A minute or so passed, and a dazzle and puff of air brought Clair back again, now holding a book.

As soon as she had blinked away the transfer reaction, she opened the book to a page, showed me a spell, and murmured it, her finger under the words. I saw at once what she was doing, and did the spell myself, strengthening and speeding her work.

We pulled water from underground, and from local streams, all of it saturating the road ahead so that suddenly those marchers found themselves struggling through an increasingly murky swamp. They toiled on, until one of them took a step and splorched up to the waist in liquid brown mud. Their ranks serried, then stopped.

We waited, watching then talk, gesturing a lot, while the one fellow was pulled from the murk by a couple others — all sinking up to their shins. Another fellow was ordered to go forward, which he did slowly, tentatively, like he was barefoot and the ground as hot and tarry as the playground at my old school.

Splurp! Two steps, and
he
sank up to his armpits.

They pulled him out, turned around and galumphed back to the Squashed Wedding Cake. Almost immediately Clair's and my spells disintegrated, permitting the water to filter right back to where it had been, but the retreating army never noticed.

When they were gone, we returned to the Junky and reported to the girls. We decided that we would have to spend each day in serious patrolling, at least for a while, but no one complained.

That night brought rain again. Clair and I sat on a balcony sheltered from the wind high in the White Palace, sipping hot chocolate.

I sipped cautiously, and was relieved to discover that chocolate tasted good to me again. A few days before I'd experimented with eating nothing but chocolate pie, my very favorite food. No, my favorite dessert. No one said a thing about healthy food. But after two days I felt crummy, and the sight of a pie made my guts revolt. Meanwhile, a soup Janil made smelled wonderful, and I ate two bowls, skipping dessert. In fact I'd skipped having sweet stuff until then. “I wonder if Fobo is nasty because she eats so many sweets. It sure can ruin your mood.”

“I don't know.” Clair rubbed her thumb round the rim of her cup. “But somehow I don't think sending her a plain meal of bread-and-cheese as a hint would work.”

“No,” I agreed.

Silence, as we listened to the patter of the rain, and sipped, and then I said, “If we stay as kids — and I plan to — will we live forever?”

“No.” Clair shook her white hair back. “I researched that as much as I could. It's sort of hard to find many records, but the few I have found make it clear that either the kids grow up eventually, and I guess die of old age — ”

“How? You go straight from being a kid to old?”

“I don't know, but that's what it seemed like. Or they get killed. Or vanish, like Mearsieanne.”

“Mearsieanne? You mean, your ancestor, right, not your mom?”

“Right. At least, she vanished from records.”

“Weird.”

Clair turned to me. “Soon the weather will get cold. I don't think you have ever seen winter.”

It was just a statement, but I was getting to know Clair by now. “Something new? Oh no,” I croaked, clutched my throat, and pretended to fall off my chair. First setting down my chocolate, of course.

Clair's eyes crinkled in mirth. “All right. I'll stop worrying.”

“I'm not going back,” I said. “I don't care if it snows for the next ten years. I don't care if you decorate the palace like the Squashed Wedding Cake.” I stopped, held my nose, and then said, “Well, maybe I'd just start living in the Junky. Wow, Clair, you have to see that place.”

“I believe you.”

I snapped my fingers. “Speaking of the Junky, we need us an intercom.”

“Which is?”

“Well, on Earth, it's a thingie connected by electricity, where you press a button and talk, and people at the other end of the house, or school, or whatever, can hear you. Faster than sending a messenger, you see? Good for emergencies.”

“Ah.” Clair nodded. She stared out, her brow faintly puckered, then said, “Tell me if I'm wrong, but is not electricity run along wires?”

“I think so. Radio isn't, though. At least, all the teenagers listen to their rock'n'roll on transistor radios, and those don't have wires.”

“No, but there are machines making the radio sounds that do,” Clair murmured. “Never mind. I think I know what to do. At least, I can't make sounds connect, but I can written words.” She flew up, and I followed her to the magic chambers.

“Now?” I asked in surprise. “I mean, shouldn't we wait for tomorrow?”

Clair looked over her shoulder at me in surprise. “Why?”

I opened my mouth, and then closed it. Of course! No one was going to yell at either of us for being up past bedtime!

For answer I just hugged myself and snickered, and Clair threw up her hands, shook her head, and then began running a finger along her shelves.

Soon we were busy at work experimenting.

And this time I discovered that I actually followed a lot of what she was doing as she tried one thing, then another, and then another, each time writing down her exact steps in her current practice book — and the results, bad or good. It was a lot like doing math. Fractions, say. Except in math you worked and worked and at the end you got nothing except an answer that might be right and might be wrong. If you were right, you just had to do more math. With magic, you went through all these meticulous steps, but at the end, if you were right, the spell snapped into place — and held!

When she at last settled on enchanting a desk blotter, and got it to work, she wrote out the series of spells in green ink rather than black. I'd been kind of lazy about keeping track of my own learning in my practice book (it was more fun writing up records) but once I saw her doing it, I resolved to do a better job with mine. You thus could see past mistakes and not make them again, as well as see your successful spells.

At last she had it.

“See, not paper,” she said, smiling in excitement. “It won't last. But the blotter lies under paper, it won't get in the way, but when we use these quills — ” She paused, murmured magic over a quill. You could almost see sparks, not physically, but in your mind, sort of. Then she touched the dry quill on the blotter, and a line appeared. “See? It's fast. Much faster than having to find ink, and mend the tip, which might be fatal in a real emergency. We just have to remember to keep the spells renewed.”