Patricia Wrede - Across the Great Barrier

Next thing I knew, I was standing in a forest. I took a deep breath. It looked like one of the grub-killed woods we’d seen in the West, all bare trees and silence. I was scared, but nowhere near as scared as I’d been when I’d thought I was drowning.

I still had my hands tight around the silver rope, only it wasn’t a rope anymore. I had just one strand of the braid. The other two had disappeared. The strand I held ran off into the forest in front of me. I turned around, but I didn’t see it anywhere behind me. When I looked down at my hands, I realized that the strand vanished half a foot behind my fingers. As I moved my hands forward along the strand, the back part disappeared six inches past my grip. I wondered what would happen if I dropped it, but I wasn’t about to try it to find out.

I tugged, but nothing happened. Either there was too much cord to pull toward me, or it was fastened to something too far away for me to see. I sighed. I didn’t want to stay where I was, and I really, really didn’t want to go wandering around this wood without a direction. That only left one choice.

I slid my hands along the silver cord and started walking.

I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING TO BIRDSONG AND BRIGHT SUNSHINE. The last I could remember of the dream was walking and walking, with the silver cord slipping through my fingers and disappearing behind me. I didn’t remember getting anywhere, though I’d have sworn I’d walked a long way. That was dreams for you, I thought, and put it out of my mind.

That was the last time I had the drowning dream. Since it hadn’t ended with me drowning and waking up scared to death, I didn’t feel any urgency about talking to Professor Torgeson about it any longer. I might have talked to her, anyway, if one of the daybats at the menagerie hadn’t hurt a wing and made things extra busy for the next couple of days. By the time things settled down, classes had started and the professor was busy with her students. After a while, I forgot about it.

I didn’t forget about practicing my Avrupan magic, though. At first, I only worked on the householding spells, because I had to do those for chores, anyway, so all I had to do was quit using Aphrikan magic to shore them up. I worked on one spell a day, so that I wouldn’t get caught on account of doing my chores slowly and have to explain. By the end of the month, I had all my regular chore spells down cold, and I was starting in on things like the general storage spell that we only had to cast once or twice in a year.

What really surprised me was that getting the spells right was fun. Now that I was actually thinking about what I was doing, I could use my Aphrikan magic to sense where the spells were going wrong, and then figure out how to fix them. Even so, breaking the habit of using Aphrikan magic to force my Avrupan spells to work right was hard. If I didn’t pay attention every single time I cast a spell, I forgot and did it the way I’d gotten used to. And every time I did that, it made it harder to remember the next time.

My Aphrikan magic was a lot better, too. I’d never been taught anything except world-sensing and foundation work, and I hadn’t noticed much of any change in how I did those since Miss Ochiba left. Oh, they’d gotten a bit easier with practice, but that was all. Even so, I’d kept on with practicing my Aphrikan world-sensing every morning, just as I’d started doing out in the settlements. After that last dream, I started trying to keep my world-sensing up all the time again, except when I was doing Avrupan spells. It was a whole lot easier to do in Mill City than it had been out in the settlements, and a lot more comfortable, too.

That fall, my sense of the world opened up unexpectedly. Up until then, I’d only ever been able to sense my own spells clearly. I could tell when someone else was casting magic, and I could sense really strong spells like the Great Barrier Spell and the working that Wash had done at Daybat Creek, but that was about all. During the trip with Wash and Professor Torgeson, my world-sensing had gotten more sensitive — I could feel everyday things that were farther away, and even things that were out of sight behind trees or rocks — but as soon as I started using my Aphrikan world sense to learn my Avrupan spells properly, I started being able to sense other people’s magic.

First I noticed that I could sense some everyday spells without particularly looking for them, the same way I could sense people and animals and chairs. Things like the fly-block spell, or the minder spell that Mrs. Callahan always put on the kettle of beans to make sure they didn’t burn. The spells didn’t stand out or seem unusual; they were just there. After a bit of work, I found that I could sense other folks’ magic even when they weren’t casting spells. I could feel a lot more normal-strength spells, too, and I could even tell a magical creature from a natural one without looking straight at them and concentrating. And I had less and less trouble keeping my world-sensing going.

The changes seemed important, but Wash was still out in the settlements and no one else in Mill City understood much about Aphrikan magic. I thought about writing to Miss Ochiba, but I hadn’t seen her for nearly two years and I felt funny just up and writing out of the blue. So I wrote to William instead.

For once, William wrote back right away. He had a lot of questions, and every time I answered one batch, he sent me a letter with another set. He even asked Miss Ochiba — I still couldn’t think of her as Professor Ochiba. All he could tell me was that she’d looked very pleased when he’d talked to her, so I was probably doing something right.

Lan wrote, too, but not as often. He wasn’t much interested in how my Aphrikan magic was going, really, though he tried to tell me I’d learn more of it faster if I got more schooling. He skipped right over the parts of my letters where I told him I was having to relearn all my Avrupan spells pretty much from scratch.

In October, the young mammoth in the menagerie got restless again. Professor Jeffries took to having some of his animal husbandry students come by to help with the calming spells, and one of them, Roger Boden, stayed even after November came and the snow fell and the mammoth calmed down.

Mr. Boden was a bit taller than I was, with red-blond hair, blue eyes, and a square, solid build. He was gentle and quiet, good with the animals, and always polite to me. He was also one of Professor Jeffries’s favorite students, and he made me very nervous.

After all, I’d gotten my job by doing pretty much what he was doing: hanging about the menagerie and offering to help out and pestering Professor Jeffries with questions. Only there wasn’t enough work at the menagerie to hire on another person, so if Professor Jeffries decided he wanted better help, he’d have to replace me. And Mr. Boden was better, by any measure; he was two years older than I was, a lot handier with Avrupan magic, and a lot more knowledgeable about animals, especially wildlife, on account of having finished two years at the Northern Plains Riverbank College already.

One afternoon, late in November, he came over as I was putting away the last of the spell-casting supplies and said, “Excuse me, Miss Rothmer, I was wondering …”

“Yes?” I said with a tiny sigh. I’d been looking forward to being done for the day, but Mr. Boden hardly ever spoke to me unless he needed something. “What can I do for you, Mr. Boden?”

“I, ah, was wondering … if you are finished for the day …” He hesitated. “If I might walk you to your home.”

“Oh!” was all I could think to say for a good long minute. “I — yes, I’m nearly done. That is … I would like that.”