by Diane Duane
“Pebbles,” Brianna said, finishing with the outlining of the interior walls and moving to the outer ones. “And that time Hansel and Gretel got home okay. The stepmother wouldn’t let them bring rocks the next time, though. That’s where the breadcrumbs come in. Hansel improvised with the bread the stepmother gave him. But the birds ate it…”
Dirk shook his head, still watching carefully to make sure the lines were being covered evenly. “What kind of parents take their kids out into the woods to lose them on purpose?” he said.
Brianna shook her head as she finished the second exterior wall and headed for the third one. “The story says the parents were starving,” she said. “Or afraid they were going to. But it still sounds kind of fishy to me. If everybody around there was starving, how come the witch had food? And enough of it to fatten Hansel up, too.”
Dirk shook his head again as he fished around in his pocket for something, came up with it: a couple more packets of sugar from the school cafeteria. “You missed a spot there…” he said.
“Yeah.” Brianna went back to do it again, then headed for the fourth wall. “I mean, it’s all very strange. What’s the moral?”
“Being an honest woodcutter doesn’t pay well?” Dirk said as he ripped the sugar packets open. “Don’t get married twice? Stay out of the woods no matter who takes you in there? Become a witch and always have plenty to eat?”
Brianna snickered as she finished the last wall. “Maybe,” she said, “there isn’t a moral?” She stepped away from that last corner and took a turn around the blueprint, checking to make sure that all the outlines were properly covered.
Dirk was shaking his head. “Always a moral,” he said, and broadcast the contents of one of the packets over the design: then sprinkled the contents of the second one in front of where the door would be. “Sometimes they just hide it better than usual.” He glanced up as Brianna finished her round. “You ready?”
“All set,” Brianna said.
Carefully Dirk placed the ginger root in the middle of the blueprint, in the place prepared for it, and stepped back. Then —
It was a twofer spell, so there was no way around it: they had to hold hands. This was the prospect that had given Brianna delicious shivers when considering what it would be like with Arthur—but now she only felt excited to see what was going to happen. When she took Dirk’s hand—which he held out to her without really looking at her—the only shiver Brianna got was because his hand was cold. Can he really be nervous that this might not work? Brianna thought.
He had his laptop open now, and Brianna had her notebook: the electronic resource and the magically written one had coordinated with each other so that each was now carrying the complete version of the spell. Together they began to read the invocation to the Universe and the listening Aion-spirit of Magic, the force within everything that made witchery work: and with that solemnity done, they went on to the concrete stuff, the instructions for the spell that were more like the ingredients of a recipe than anything else. Normally this part of a spell bored Brianna—but this afternoon, for some reason, she started to feel like laughing out loud when they got past the mystical stuff and started invoking the chemical fractions of the ginger root which produced the prestress / reinforcement part of the spell. “Sesquiphellandrene, bisabolene, farnesene,” she and Dirk chanted together, and Brianna had to choke back a snicker as she wondered who, or where, Farnes was: “cineol, citral, gingerol, shoagole, zingerone!”
“Sounds like Italian food,” Dirk said under his breath: and then they both cracked up together.
And in mid-laugh, the spell took, and took off. The ground humped and bucked, the lines of the diagram writhed and slid and then reared up proud of the ground, getting taller and thinner, shifting their shape and color. Oh no, Brianna thought at first, did we get something really wrong?—because the color was green. But then she realized that she was seeing the ginger root starting to do its business, its virtual leaves growing outward into the spell-pattern, sheeting up along the uprearing lines of the floor plan, then flattening out and spreading sideways and upward like some odd veiny green wallpaper. And up after them went the flour, going weirdly liquid and spreading itself across the green leafery like confused wallpaper paste as the walls grew and stretched upwards. It had only been a few breaths now since the Italian food joke, but the walls had already reached the height of Brianna’s and Dirk’s heads and were growing higher still. Brianna craned her neck to see the roof forming, its peak pointing itself, the chimney sprouting upward in the midst of the whole business like an afterthought.
“Almost there,” Dirk said under his breath.
“Are you sure?” Brianna said. “Did we forget something? Look at it, it’s still green, what if it—”
— and all at once, the green faded, darkened. “That’s the dessication routine cutting in,” Dirk said. Brianna breathed out, relieved, for there was no mistaking it: the flour stopped looking pasty, started looking brown. A heavy scent of ginger filled the air. The color of the walls darkened further: golden brown, dark brown—
“Here we go,” Dirk whispered. All in a rush, with a strange crackling noise that at first sounded like paper burning, the ornamental sugar routine went off. Once more the fizz and sparkle of spell artifact seemed to be everywhere; for a few moments, as the crackling noise got louder, Brianna wondered if they’d plugged too much energy into that part of the spell. It was running enthusiastically all over everything, like yellowy-white sheet lightning. But the crackle faded away, and Brianna saw the skin of mint-wafer roof-til start growing down over the roof, watched the licorice chimney-pot form at the top of the chimney, grinned as ribbons of red spiral down the white tubes of the candy-cane drainspouts. Rock-candy icicles formed at the roof corners, icing-sugar snow piled itself tastefully over the nougat windowsills: the windows sheeted over with perfect sugar glass an inch thick. A very creditable fake wood-graining ran down the textured gingerbread-and-halvah front door. And on either side, as the last of the spell effect grounded itself out and fizzled away, there they were, on either side of the door: two twisted pillars, one slightly golden and one slightly green, both clear as glass.
Brianna shook her head, let go of Dirk’s hand, and went up to one of them. She licked her finger, touched the column with it, and then licked her finger again. No question: it was sweet.
“Barley sugar,” she said. “You joker you.”
“Boaz and Jachin,” Brianna said. He went over to scratch at the surface of the nearest wall, got back a few satisfactory crumbs of perfectly baked gingerbread, and then leaned against the wall, grinning, dusting a little confectioners’ sugar off his denims.
Brianna shook her head, so impressed. After a moment she looked over at him. “How do you know all this stuff?” she said. “How do you know so much, and nobody knows that you know so much? And you’re so—” She shook her head, waved her arms, hunting for the word, not finding the right one. “Useful!”
Then Brianna was shocked at herself, and horrified, thinking maybe she’d said the wrong thing. Mostly what guys wanted to hear, in her experience, was that they were cute, or strong, or something like that. But Dirk just smiled. “Useful’s good,” he said. “You could be a lot of worse things than useful.” And just for once, he looked her in the eye.
She blushed, looked away.
“Useful’s good,” Dirk said again, and this time he looked away too. “Look, though, we should take this down before the humidity changes too much. The Law of Contagion won’t be flouted: the effect’s going to keep trying to spread if you don’t put a stasis around it. And you don’t want to do that until you’ve got it where you want it, finally.”
“Yeah,” Brianna said. She reached between the pillars of the doorway, pulled the top half of the Dutch door shut by its wrought-licorice handle, and checked to see, in the keyhole underneath it, what they had both expected to see there: a gold-leafed, hard sugar key. Brianna turned it, pulled it out.
&n
bsp; The whole house simply faded away into the air, leaving nothing behind but some dusty confectioners’-sugar lines on the crabgrass, like the limit lines of a peculiar-looking tennis court. In the midst of the lines lay the ginger root and a scatter of whole wheat flour. Brianna went to these, picked them up, and dumped them into the flour bag, making sure she got plenty of the flour to guarantee the contagion effect would duplicate the house correctly. “I guess we just keep this somewhere dry until Friday—“ She counted days in her head. “Wow, it’s only three days!”
“During which we don’t have to do much,” Dirk said, looking satisfied as they headed back toward the house. “Except watch everybody else going insane doing last-minute stuff on their projects.”
“Excuse me,” Brianna said. “There’s still the posters and the visual aids.”
“Oh, you won’t need any help with that,” Dirk said, sounding most insincere. “You’re perfect for handling that kind of heavy lifting—”
Brianna snickered. “Just get your butt on inside,” she said, “and check my spelling.”
***
Between homework and other after-class business, Friday afternoon came around all too soon as it was; and Brianna was starting to feel the strain as early as Thursday night. By Friday morning, when Dirk stopped by the house to help her carry everything over to school, her nerves were in tatters. “Don’t you think we should put it up and take it down just once more,” she said to Dirk, as they rolled up the last of the display materials, “to make sure it, you know, goes up and down all right—”
“You just want to fiddle with it for anxiety’s sake,” Dirk said. “You’ll start draining energy out of the spell, and it won’t work right tomorrow. Let it be.”
“But if we—”
“Do what Arthur’s probably doing with his right now,” Dirk said, “and start obsessing with it? I don’t even want to think about it.”
They were standing over the dining room table, looking at the main poster, STEREOTYPES AND SORCEROUS REALITY: AN INTERCULTURAL CONTEXT, before they rolled it up into the last of the mailing tubes that Brianna’s dad had brought her home from work. He had already left for the day. Now her mom came wandering in from the kitchen wearing a set of faded sweats that had been respectable once, perhaps during the Jurassic, and Brianna could barely spare the energy to be mortified by them, she was so keyed up. “Does that sound too pompous?” she muttered. “Should I have put it all in caps like that, does it look like we’re shouting? Shouldn’t we—”
“No,” Dirk said. “Yes. And no. Come on, Bri, this isn’t going to get any easier.”
“It looks lovely, dear,” Brianna’s mom said. Brianna let out an exasperated breath, because her mother said that about everything.
“No,” her mom said. “Seriously. You’re going to be a big hit, and what’s his name, Arthur, is going to wish he hadn’t been so dismissive. Just you wait.”
Her mom kissed her goodbye, and patted Dirk on the shoulder as he finished with the mailing tube, and more or less pushed them both to the front door. “We’ll be down around starting time,” she said. “About four, is it?”
“Four thirty,” Brianna said. She was astonished to find that she was actually shaking. I am such a wimp! I can’t believe it! Oh, what if this doesn’t work –
And that was the state her brain was in until nearly three-thirty, when the ParaScience Fair setup began. Mr. Johannson and the other parascience teachers were all in their glory, running in and out between the school gym and the parking lot next to it, ordering people around. Mrs. Levenson, Brianna’s parascience teacher, looked as unnerved as Brianna felt, though she couldn’t understand why: it wasn’t as if Mrs. L. has any pressure on her or anything— ”Brianna,” Mrs. L. said, pushing her curly hair back and trying to look in several directions at once. “No, Richie, not there, we can’t have a sprite so close to that fire elemental, you’re going to have to move down to table fourteen! That’s right. Brianna, what is it?”
“We were supposed to set up in the middle of the gym,” Dirk said, “but that whole area’s full already. Looks like the original setup plan got thrown out. Where are we supposed to put our project?”
“This is your little house, isn’t it?” Mrs. Levenson said, running her hands through her hair again and looking harried. She always looked a bit like an ostrich at the best of times: now she looked like she might suddenly turn into one—an alarming prospect, since shapechange was a specialty of hers.
“Uh, not so little, Mrs. L,” Brianna said, glancing around her nervously. “We’re going to need a fair amount of room—”
Mr. Johannson, on his way into the gym, stopped next to them. “Dirk,” he said, “Brianna. The house?”
“That’s right.”
“It’ll have to be out here,” he said. “Put it over there.” He pointed toward the end of the parking lot. “Nothing flammable?”
“Oh, no,” Brianna said.
“Fine, then he won’t be a problem.”
“He?” Brianna said, or rather squeaked. “Uh, Mr. Johannson—”
Too late. He was heading back into the gym. And “down there”, holding his arms out over the blacktop and reciting a preliminary spell, was Arthur Etchison.
“No choice, I guess,” Dirk said under his breath. “Bri, don’t freak.”
Together they made their way down the parking lot to where Arthur was standing. Near him were Donna Mbele, and a few of Donna’s friends—Michele and Laurene and Belle—looking on with that expression of interested hangers-on everywhere. As Brianna and Dirk headed for them, those heads turned, and the expression on the girls’ faces got strange. Amused: in one or two cases, a little nasty.
Arthur, for the moment, wasn’t looking. He had his eyes closed, and under his outstretched arms, an anvil was taking form. Brianna looked at this with some skepticism. “Shouldn’t there be a stone under it?” she said.
Arthur opened one eye. “Brianna,” he said. “Dork.”
Brianna’s eyes narrowed. She glanced over at Dirk, who was standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking completely unconcerned. “Prince Arthur,” Dirk said.
“Shouldn’t that be ‘king?’” said Laurene, sounding hostile. It looked bad on someone so small and blonde and delicate.
“Takes more than just a sword,” Dirk said. “Bri, let’s get these put up, shall we?”
The two of them had a parking place to themselves. They uncased and unrolled the posters and other visual aids they’d brought, and put them up on their stands at the top of the parking place. “Bri?” Dirk said.
She was watching Arthur and his anvil. It was completely manifested now, soulsteel that he had called up out of the earth just as she’d suggested someone might. And now he produced more steel, a small ingot of it this time, sourced from one of the local steel mills: the only thing about this process that didn’t have to be magical. Finally, Arthur reached into a case down by his feet and produced the flint hammer. It had been sung over to talk it into being harder than the steel or the anvil. Brianna knew exactly what the words would have been: she’d told him half of them. But now it was Donna who was holding Arthur’s spare hand and helping him say the words, with just about the same half-swooning look that Brianna probably would have been wearing.
“Brianna,” Dirk said.
She turned. He was holding out the shopping bag to her, the one with the flour and the ginger root in it. “Let’s get this laid out,” Dirk said.
Brianna felt her face going tight with anger. “I’ll do it,” she said. “The way I’ve been obsessing over it, I’ve got it by heart…” And she started pacing out the outline of the house, sprinkling the flour there, not looking up any oftener than she had to: because Arthur was hammering the steel on the anvil now, and the sound was getting into her head and giving her the beginnings of a headache—as were the amused grins of the girls around Arthur. Talk about a comedown. Starts out with something really hot, a magic sword, winds up with cookie dou
gh…
Brianna turned her back, finished the third wall of the house, turned the corner of the design and started laying down the fourth one. In the midst of this, out in the secondary parking lot, she heard a sound she’d have known anywhere: her mom’s car door shutting. Here they come. And they’ll see me and Dirk with a cookie house, and Arthur doing something really cool— She started to get angry.
Bri, Dirk said inside her head. You want to get a grip on that.
No I don’t, Brianna thought. Because no one here knows what I can do. No one thinks I’m all that smart, or that serious. I’m usually kind of the fluffy one. They’re gonna think you did most of this.
Dirk was quiet for a moment. Brianna let out an angry breath: she knew that kind of silence. It usually meant embarrassed agreement.
You don’t strike me as all that fluffy, Dirk said. A fluffy person wouldn’t have pulled together all the cultural-context stuff, that makes this actually mean something instead of just being something that goes boom like a fake toy volcano. And a fluffy person would definitely not use the words ‘archetype’ and ‘fetishistic’ in the same sentence.
He was trying to make her laugh: but she wouldn’t do it, because inside her head, blocking the laughter, was the sound of the hammer. White fire was going up from the enchanted flint. Inside the anvil and the metal Arthur was forging, the spell he was reciting as he hammered was having the desired effect. The steel writhed, shuddered, and abruptly lengthened itself, bursting into blade like a flowing bursting into bloom. The fire was completely magical, so it didn’t burn: crosspieces burst out of the hilt end of the blade, and Arthur dropped the hammer and seized the sword by its new hilt. Then he held it up high, and it glittered, and green fire ran up the blade, making Arthur looked like a superhero. The light of the sword’s fire caught in the eyes of all the girls around him.
He ignored them, though. He looked at Brianna, and his smile was unusually mean. “See what you could have had,” it said. And aloud he said: “No matter what else you do—you blew this.” And he looked at Dirk. “For him.”
