Patricia Wrede - Across the Great Barrier

The ember glowed more brightly. The threads smoked, then flared up. They didn’t last long, but they lasted long enough to set fire to the tinder. Quickly, I put a larger piece of kindling up against the tinder, and then another as soon as the first piece caught. In a few more minutes, I had a small but steady fire burning. I added a middling log, then another, and adjusted the grate. As the stove began to heat up and the chill left the kitchen, I woke up.

I felt terrible, all achy and stiff, and my chest felt cold. I got up and poured some water into the washbasin to splash my face, then paced a little to get some of the kinks out. Then I sat down to answer letters, the way I’d promised.

I didn’t get much written. I’d been asleep longer than I’d thought, and before I’d written out more than three polite replies, Miriam and Frank were knocking at the door to take me back to the hospital to see Lan.

The fresh air felt good, and without thinking too much about it, I relaxed and started world-sensing. Philadelphia was a busy, bustling city, much larger and with more variety than Mill City, and I wished I could have seen more of it under better circumstances. The walk to the hospital was much too short.

When we reached Lan’s room, Frank opened the door for me. I hesitated at the threshold. Nothing had really changed since morning except maybe the angle of the shadows. Mama looked up, and I stepped into the room.

Something heated and thumped hard against my chest, like a spark thrown from a fire when a chestnut pops. I yelped in surprise and fell forward.

FRANK CAUGHT MY ARM TO STEADY ME. “WATCH YOUR STEP!” HE said, and I could tell that he hadn’t noticed anything unusual except me tripping over the threshold. I shook my head, partly to clear it and partly because I didn’t see how anyone could not notice that something was wrong. The whole room felt sick and smoky green, like something nasty had gotten burned in the fireplace, and suddenly I knew why I’d felt so tired and dizzy when I left the hospital earlier.

I moved closer to the bed, wondering how long I could stand to stay. Papa made room for me. Mama had the only chair, and she was still holding Lan’s good hand. I leaned over to stroke my brother’s hair. I could feel his magic, sputtering and popping like water dropped on a hot iron pan. It was as crooked as ever any of my Avrupan spells had been, and without thinking I shoved at it a little to get it back in place, the way I’d been shoving at my spell work for the past two years.

Lan made a whimpering noise. Mama jerked and clutched his hand. “Lan?”

He didn’t respond. His magic was still crooked and sputtering, though maybe not quite so much as it had been a minute before. I started to shove at it again, but I remembered the canning jar I’d melted back at Professor Torgeson’s office, and decided I’d best not try too much of that. I didn’t know what to try instead, though. All I knew was that Lan’s magic needed straightening out, and right away.

Frank and Papa leaned forward, but neither of them so much as glanced at me. I realized that they hadn’t noticed what I’d done, any more than my teachers at the upper school had ever seen that I was using Aphrikan magic alongside my Avrupan spells. They only saw the results.

I brushed my fingers through Lan’s hair again, wondering what I could do. It never occurred to me to say anything to Frank or the other doctors. They’d had a week, and Frank had told us they’d tried pretty much everything they could think of. All the Avrupan spells, anyway.

I found myself wishing that Wash was there, even though I’d never once seen him do any healing. In fact, the only really major magic I’d seen him do was when he got Daybat Creek flowing past the landslide. I remembered him trying to explain to Professor Torgeson how he’d done it. Aphrikan magic works from the inside, I thought. But how do you get inside a person?

The hot spark at the indent of my chest got hotter. I reached out with a tiny trickle of magic, the smallest I could manage, and poked at Lan with it like I was trying to get his attention. I felt a reaction in my magic, even though Lan didn’t stir a bit on the bed. I poked again and pointed, picturing in my head how everything was supposed to feel, especially where the crooked bits needed to come straight.

Slowly, I felt Lan’s magic start to move. I made encouraging noises in my mind, though I didn’t think Lan could hear. It went faster and faster, like the water soaking into the dam at Daybat Creek. I held my breath.

And then I felt everything click into place, like setting the very last piece into a puzzle. Lan’s magic stopped popping and sputtering, and the hot ember on my chest faded away to nothing. The sick, smoky feeling in the room began to fade, too, like someone had opened a window and let in a breeze.

I looked around. Nobody else had noticed anything, not even Frank. I thought that was more than a little odd, since he was a magical doctor as well as a medical one. Then I thought about saying something about what I’d done, but I decided not to. It didn’t seem to have made much difference, and I was pretty sure that Mama and Papa would fuss at me for interfering if they knew.

An hour later, Lan stirred. “Lan?” Mama said.

“He’s — I have to get someone,” Frank said, and practically ran out of the room. He came back a few minutes later with another doctor, and right away they shooed all of us back to the waiting room. Mama was quite cross about it; if she hadn’t been so worried and tired, she’d have given them a piece of her mind.

After a long while, Frank came out, looking hopeful for the first time in days. “Lan’s doing a lot better,” he said.

“Is he awake?” Mama asked.

“Not yet,” Frank said, and he didn’t sound like he was hedging or trying to be optimistic. “Probably not for a while. But he’s responding to the healing spells and — well, it’s too soon to say, still. But he’s improving.”

“I want to see him!”

“We can come back in the morning, Mama,” Frank said, and Papa agreed.

We all went back to the hotel in a much more hopeful frame of mind. As I changed for bed, I thought about the hospital and Lan’s magic, wondering all over again whether I ought to tell someone that I’d poked it until it went back into place. I bent over the washbasin and caught sight of myself in the standing mirror.

There was a round, red mark on my chest, about three inches below my collarbone. It looked like a burn. I straightened up, and the little wooden pendant I always wore, the one that Wash had given me almost two years before, dropped into place on top of it.

I stared at it in the mirror for a minute, then slowly lifted the cord over my head. I dangled it in front of me, staring. I almost expected it to look charred, or maybe to suddenly start glowing, but it just hung there, a plain, polished whorl of wood the size of a robin’s egg, with a hole at one side for the cord.

Staring at the pendant wasn’t going to tell me anything new. It certainly wasn’t going to tell me why it had heated up enough to leave a burn on my chest when I walked into Lan’s hospital room that second time. I hung it back around my head, knotting the cord shorter so the wood wouldn’t rub against the little burn. As soon as I’d finished washing, I turned down the lamp, climbed into bed, and started the Hijero-Cathayan concentration exercise.

It had been a while since I’d practiced, so it took me a lot longer than I wanted to get into the floaty state of mind that told me I was doing the concentration exercise properly. By the time I did, I was half asleep, but I made myself focus on the wooden pendant, and once again, the spells came clear.