Jo Walton: Among Others

There was a sign on the rusty iron railings at the top of the Phurnacite road. “Land Reclamation Project. Mid-Glamorgan County Council.” It lifted my heart, because it reminded me of the march of the Lords of Gondor. We had called this place Mordor, and it had fallen. There were no hell-flames now. Some of the trees were showing a little spring green. No fairies were about. My leg was hurting a bit, probably enough to keep them away.

The chimneys were cold and all the windows were broken. It was pathetic, a five-year ruin, not yet crumbled enough to seem like a fairy fortress. The sign about dogs was hanging at an angle. The dogs, if there ever had been dogs, were gone with the workers. The dark pool still looked evil, though there was grass around the edge now. I walked around to the other side of the factory where I could lift up my eyes to the hills and sat in one of the alcoves. I wanted to rest so that my leg would get down to a normal quiet background pain the fairies could put up with. I read A Touch of Strange , which is brilliant, and beautifully written, though a bit weird. It’s short stories. I’m glad at least one of the things Wim gave me is good.

After I’d finished it, instead of starting Gate of Ivrel , I tried to see if I could get the pain to go out of my leg the way acupuncture does. It isn’t really magic, except that it is. It’s not magic that reaches into the world and changes things. It’s all inside my body. I thought, sitting there, that everything is magic. Using things connects them to you, being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic. Fairies are more in the magic than in the world, and people are more in the world than in the magic. Maybe fairies, the ones that aren’t lost dead people, are concentrations, personifications, of the magic? And God? God is in everything, moving through everything, is the pattern that everything makes, moving. That’s why messing with magic so often becomes evil, because it’s going against that pattern. I could almost see the pattern as the sun and clouds succeeded each other over the hills and I held the pain a little bit away, where it didn’t hurt me.

Glorfindel came first, and then all the others behind him. I’d never seen such a parade of fairies, not even last year when we had to stop Liz. Looking at Glorfindel with my insight about magic and everything, I decided I should stop calling him that, stop trying to fit him into a pattern I’d found in a story. The name wasn’t his, not really, though names are such useful labels. The fairies were all around me, surrounding me, very close. Nobody had told me to bring anything special, and I hadn’t, but I was ready.

The sun was starting to sink behind the hills. Glorfindel, without speaking, led us all back to the pool. I should have known it would be there. I stopped beside it. Mor came up to me. She looked so young, and also so remote. I could hardly bear to look at her. Her expressions were like a fairy’s expressions. She was like herself, but she’d moved away from who she was, into magic. She was more fairy than person already. I took my penknife out, ready to cut my thumb for the magic, but Glorfindel—I can’t think of him any other way—shook his head.

“Join,” he said. “Heal.”

“What?”

“Broken.” He gestured at Mor and me. “Be together.”

The fairy who had given me my stick came forward.

“Make, stay together,” Glorfindel said. “Stay.”

“No!” I said. “That’s not what I want. That’s not what you want either. Half-way, you said, at Halloween. I could have done that then if I’d wanted to.”

“Stay. Heal. Join,” Glorfindel said.

The old man fairy touched my stick, and it became a knife, a sharp wooden knife. He mimed plunging it into my heart.

“No!” I said, and dropped it.

“Life,” Glorfindel said. “Among. Together.”

“No!” I started moving away from the knife, slowly, because of course, it was also my stick, and without it slowly was the only way I could move. Mor picked it up and held it out to me.

“Beyond dying,” the old man said. “Living among, becoming, joining. Together. Healed. Strength, reaching, affecting, safe always, strong always, together.”

“No,” I said, more quietly. “Look, that’s not what I want. Last winter, maybe, right after it happened, but not now. Mor knows. Glorfindel knows. I’ve gone on. Things have happened. I’ve changed. You might see me as half a broken pair, and you might see my death as a way of tidying up loose ends and getting more power to touch the real world, but that’s not how I see it. Not now. I’m in the middle of doing things.”

“Doing is doing,” he said, which I found much less reassuring than before. “Help. Join. Act.”

Mor held out the knife, blade towards me. There were fairies all around me, tangible substantial fairies pushing me towards the knife. The knife I knew was substantial. I had been leaning on it for weeks. I had been making a magical connection with it, as it had with me.

“No. I don’t want to,” I insisted. “A little blood and magic to help Mor, to help you, if it would help you, yes, I agreed to that, but not to death.”

What would Wim think? Worse, what would Auntie Teg think, who had no idea about the fairies, who would think I’d come up here without saying a word and killed myself? And how about Daniel? “I can’t,” I said.

I tried to move backwards, away, but they were pressing against me, pressing me forwards towards the knife.

“No,” I said, again, firmly. They were all around me, and the knife was closer than ever, and the knife wanted my blood, my life, tempting me to become a fairy. If I was a fairy I could see the pattern of the magic all the time. There would be no more pain, no more tears. I would understand magic. I’d be with Mor, I’d be Mor, we’d be one person, joined. But we had never really been that, and that would be all. I took a step backwards and started speaking as calmly as I could. “No. I don’t want to be a fairy. I don’t want to join. I want to live and be a person. I want to grow up in the world.” The calmness helped, for the same reason the Litany Against Fear helps, because fear is something the magic uses. And rejecting it in my heart helped even more, because the other thing it was using was whatever of me did want to become a fairy, had always wanted that.

In front of me was Mor, the knife, and behind her the pool. All around me were fairies. I reached out to the knife with my hand. Whatever else it was, it was wood, and wood loves to burn, burning is in the pattern of wood, the potential fire that is the sun’s fire. The sun was setting, but the wood leapt to flame, and I was flame, I was a flame contained in my own shape for a moment, and then I was a huge flame. The land here knew flame. Here the hell-flames had burned, here coal from the mines had been processed to lose its smoke and poisons. Coal wanted to burn, knew burning even more than wood. The fairies fled from me, all but Mor, who was holding the burning knife and connected through it to me. We were two huge mirrored shapes of flame.

I didn’t have an oak leaf, and we weren’t near the door to death, but I was fire and she was fire and I had the pattern and I loved her. She was not me, but she was in my heart, she always would be. “Hold tight, Mor,” I said, and, though she was flame she smiled her real smile, the smile she used to smile on Christmas morning when Gramma was alive and we would wake up to see the balloons hanging in the hall that meant Father Christmas had been and there were stockings waiting to be to opened. I opened a space between the flame and where death fell in the pattern, and I hurled her through it, knife and all, and then I closed it up again and sank down, dampened the flame until I was in my own shape again.