Worldweavers: Gift of the Unmage

by Alma Alexander

  “Wow,” Thea said. “What happens?”

  “I can taste the stuff,” Tess said, digging her spoon into her mashed potatoes. “Not like this—these are real potatoes, and they’ve been prepared and cooked by hand. No magical shortcuts.”

  “If they’d used a spell to make it come out creamy…?”

  “My throat would close right up,” Tess said. “I can’t breathe. And then I get the rash. You new?”

  “My roommate, Thea Winthrop. She’s a magidim, like me,” Magpie said, making belated introductions. “Thea, this is Tess Dane—we came up through middle school together. We were roommates for a semester before Mrs. Chen decided to split us up.”

  “Hi,” Tess said, spooning potatoes into her mouth, and then paused, doing a double take. “Wait a minute. Winthrop? Why is that name so familiar?”

  “My given name is Galathea. Galathea Winthrop. I used to be famous,” Thea said abruptly. “You might have read about me in newspaper archives somewhere.”

  An expression of understanding crossed Tess’s face, and perhaps an echo of sympathy. For a moment Thea heard it whispered, far away, the inglorious echo of her childhood: Oh, Thea… But in the spirit of Wandless Academy and the unspoken rule of no prying that seemed to apply here, Tess merely nodded at Thea.

  “Welcome to the madhouse,” she said with a small smile, and turned back to her mashed potatoes.

  They finished lunch in companionable silence, and then Magpie fished in her back pocket, coming up with a tarnished broken boxchain necklace, a silver daisy charm with a sparkling crystal as its centerpiece, the stub of an old movie ticket, and finally a crumpled class schedule.

  “What’s your next class?” she asked Tess, dragging her finger along her schedule to find her own. “I’ve got Dead Languages.”

  “You’re taking Latin?” Thea said.

  “I had to take something.” Magpie shrugged. “Languages I’m good at.”

  “I’ve got computer studies,” Thea said.

  “With Twitterpat?” Tess said, looking up. “Me too. Me and Terry both.”

  “Twitterpat?” Thea repeated with a grin. According to her own class schedule, the computer science teacher’s name was Patrick Wittering.

  “Pat Witter. Patwitter. Twitterpat,” Tess said helpfully. “Just watch his hands.”

  “Okay,” said Thea, still grinning. “Who’s Terry?”

  “Her brother,” Magpie said. “I have no idea why anybody would want to futz around with those infernal machines.”

  “For the same reason that you took Latin,” Tess said. “One has to take something. And at least it’s marginally useful, huh, Thea?”

  “Maybe she could learn how to program in Latin,” Thea said.

  Magpie giggled. “You two deserve each other,” she said. “Go, torture your machines. Say hi to Terry for me.”

  Patrick Wittering looked barely older than his students, his long, dishwater-blond hair tied back in a funky ponytail. He wore sandals on bare feet, and Tess, nudging Thea in the ribs, imparted the information that those were his preferred footwear all year round; he just added socks in winter. Perhaps it was the minimal age difference, the simple fact that it wasn’t that long ago that he had been behind a school desk himself, but he seemed to have an instant and casual rapport with his classes. If he knew that every single one of his students addressed him as Mr. Wittering in class and referred to him as Twitterpat behind his back, he seemed quite unperturbed by the idea.

  Tess snagged three computer stations as they arrived for class; Thea took up one, and the other was claimed by Tess’s brother, who turned out to be her twin. They had the same huge hazel eyes in long oval faces, and they even wore their hair more or less the same, with Tess’s only marginally longer than her brother’s.

  “Terry, this is Thea. Galathea Winthrop,” Tess had said by way of introduction, laying a light emphasis on the surname. It was that unspoken subtext in the Academy—the introduction that gave one’s identity and one’s reason for being at the school, all in as economical a fashion as possible.

  Terry’s eyes had sparked with recognition—it was obvious that he knew Thea’s name—but he did no more than grunt and nod.

  “Some of you I know from last year, back in middle school,” Twitterpat said, starting the class. He did have a tendency to talk with his hands, just as Tess had said. As he spoke, his fingers were curling as if making spell gestures, though obviously he was doing nothing of the sort. For some reason Thea found herself thinking about Mrs. Chen’s words: In order to know what it is that we do not do here, we have to be aware of what can be done. Twitterpat looked as if he too might have known the taste of magic sometime in his life…known it well. He was still speaking. “Others have just joined us. Before we can learn more, we should figure out just how much we already know. So. You’ve got a somewhat jumbled set of arbitrary data in front of you. Let me see you organize it using the computer.”

  Terry grunted and tapped a set of keys on the keyboard. A grid appeared on the screen of his monitor; he typed furiously for a few moments and then leaned back, arms crossed, eyes flickering across the screen. Things seemed to be happening there, but from her angle Thea could not quite see what.

  “What is he doing?” she whispered to Tess.

  “Oh, leave him alone,” Tess retorted. “He thinks he’s beyond all of this. He thinks he should be doing college-level stuff.”

  “Can he?” Thea said, impressed despite herself. She tapped her own data into her computer, looking at what tools had been left for her to use. There had been two computers in Thea’s home when she was very young, one Paul’s, one Ysabeau’s; both Anthony and Ben had eventually added their own. Thea could play a mean game of computer solitaire, and she had used it for writing assignments and, under parental control, research on Terranet, but that was as far as she had gone—this assignment was a new thing for her.

  “He’s a self-confessed genius,” Tess said, giving her brother a teasing glare. “He was only top of his class all during middle school. He’s probably going to stay in this class only long enough to impress Twitterpat, and then he’ll be off on some road to glory all by himself. Brothers. Always thinking they’re a superior class of being.”

  “I know,” Thea said, sighing. “I have six of them.”

  Tess shot her a sympathetic look. “You poor thing.”

  “That’s very good, Terry,” Twitterpat said. He had come up while the girls had been whispering and was scanning Terry’s monitor closely. His hands came fluttering up to his face, and he beat a contemplative tattoo on his cheeks with his fingertips.

  Terry grunted.

  “Let me see….” Twitterpat leaned over Terry’s shoulder and touched a few keys. A few things blinked, rearranged themselves; the grid redrew itself around the new array. “Very good, very good indeed. What about you, Tess?”

  “Working on it,” Tess said, bending her head over her keyboard.

  Twitterpat nodded and smiled, dropped his hands, then lifted one and let it drift briefly in Thea’s direction, recalled it to his side. “New this year?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you had much background?”

  “No, sir,” Thea said. “My father has a computer, for e-mail and storing stuff on, and Mom does, too…but we weren’t allowed to use them much.”

  “I see.” The hands danced again, as though he were typing in midair, retrieving information. “You are…Galathea.”

  “Thea,” Thea corrected him. “Sir.”

  “Of course. Well, carry on. Very good, Terry.”

  Twitterpat walked off and then stood, watching another student’s screen over his shoulder.

  Terry leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, staring at his screen.

  “He can’t be done already,” Thea muttered.

  “Oh, he’s always done,” Tess said.

  Terry flashed her a smug smile, and then flicked his eyes back to his screen.

  “Does he talk?”
Thea said a little sharply.

  Terry turned and stared at her, and Tess flicked her hair back with one hand, tapping the keyboard with the other.

  “Only when he has something essential to say,” Tess said. “He kind of…got turned off talking at an early age. You know how I can’t put anything magic-made into my mouth?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, he’s kind of allergic to magic, too. Except with him, it’s speech—he can’t utter a word with a magical shading without choking on it. Literally. He can’t talk about spells, let alone speak one. His tongue swells and his throat closes and he turns a neat shade of sky blue.”

  “But not every word one utters is magic….”

  “You want to bet?” Tess said, typing furiously, her hair falling forward to hide her face. “In our family? My mom’s older brother is Kevin MacAllan, the head of the Federal Bureau of Magic, and she works in the department—few words spoken in our family are free of magic. It’s hard enough to make sure that I don’t eat anything with magic in it, but it’s far harder to keep a child quiet all the time because a stray word he utters could kill him. That’s why we’re here—Terry was packed off to Wandless when he was practically in kindergarten. They kept me out in the mainstream a little longer, but it proved just as impractical in the long haul—I’ve been here since grade school. We go home for the holidays, but he pretty much doesn’t say a word all summer because it could kill him to try. It takes him a while, once we get back to the school. He does have a voice, he just needs to remember that it’s safe to use it, here.”

  “This isn’t working,” Thea said, frowning at her screen.

  “Wrong software,” Tess said, peering at Thea’s computer. “You can do it with that, but it’s harder than it should be. Try the other spreadsheet.”

  “Which?” Thea said.

  Tess reached out with a pen and tapped an icon at the bottom of Thea’s screen. “That one.”

  “I don’t know that one,” Thea said, staring at the screen that came up, pulling down menus to examine their contents.

  “Easy,” Tess said. “Just pretend you’re playing hopscotch.”

  Thea shot her a startled look and then sat forward, face cupped in the palms of both hands, and stared at her computer. Things seemed to blink and rearrange themselves—on screen or in her mind—and her frown suddenly cleared. “Oh!” she said. “I get it!”

  Terry looked over and smiled wolfishly.

  “Oh, just ignore him,” Tess said instinctively, not even turning to look at her brother.

  Twitterpat bade them farewell at the end of class with promises of doing something far more interesting very soon, once he had had a chance to look at their work.

  The next class was mathematics, where the twins and Thea were joined by Magpie, who had another protégé in tow—a tall, thin boy with a shock of dark red hair and an expression of lugubrious resignation on his long face.

  “This is Ben Broome,” Magpie said. “He’s new this year, too. I saw him moping by himself just outside Latin on the way over here and he seemed lost, so I steered him in the right direction. His dad’s Bernard Broome. The chemist who won that prize last year, for the new fuel, remember? When the Alphiri sold us that great fuel that only worked for six months and then never again? Ben’s dad figured out what the matter was and fixed it. They’re making a whole new kind of car for it now.”

  “Hi, Ben,” Thea murmured.

  Terry uttered something between a greeting and a growl. Tess just smiled.

  Mr. Siffer, the mathematics teacher, had iron-gray hair cropped close to his skull, wire-rimmed glasses, and a frown that seemed genetically coded into his face.

  “For those new to the school,” he barked, “I can’t stress this often enough—we teach real mathematics here. The science of numbers. None of that mathemagic drivel that you might be used to in all those soft schools you went to. No spell-solving of equations, no cheating, no number demons or fractionators, no transformations—other than those defined by the laws of geometry. Nothing but old-fashioned number crunching. Anyone I catch cheating will regret it. Is that clear?”

  The class nodded mutely, as one.

  “Good. Then we shall all get along very well. I reiterate, no cheating will be tolerated.”

  “If most of us could cheat in the way he thinks, we wouldn’t be here,” Tess muttered. “He has a reputation, you know.”

  “For what?” Thea said.

  “They say he was once a very promising mathemage,” Magpie said. “And then he walked past a construction site minding his own business one day and a beam fell from a crane and hit him in the head. He’s never been quite sane since….”

  “Chattering shall cease,” Mr. Siffer said with a cold stare. “Now. We have a lot to do.”

  “He’ll be sweet as brown sugar tomorrow,” Ben Broome volunteered in a low whisper.

  Magpie looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “I heard about him. He’s been here forever, and there are tales…later,” he said hurriedly, as Mr. Siffer turned gimlet eyes in his direction.

  “Mr. Broomstick, is it?” he inquired silkily.

  “Broome, sir,” Ben said in a small voice. There were a few titters in the back of the classroom.

  “Well, Mr. Broome,” the teacher said, “one more word out of you—or your cronies over there—and you will all be given detention. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m afraid he’s stuck you with a nickname, all right,” Magpie said later, as they left the mathematics classroom, with a few whispered catcalls of “Hey, Broomstick” following them out of the room. “Now what’s this about him being sane tomorrow?”

  “Not sane. Sweet. He won’t even remember calling me ‘broomstick’ tomorrow. Aw, blow. He won’t remember, but everyone else will.” He kicked the toe of his sneaker against the scuffed wall.

  “Never mind. We’ll still call you Ben. It won’t be a total clean sweep,” Magpie said with a not quite innocent smile.

  Tess snorted, and even Terry let out a guffaw. Ben glowered at her, and then realized he was being teased. He grinned back wanly and wrinkled his nose, screwed his eyes shut and froze, holding his breath. The others held theirs for a moment, too, and then Ben unscrewed his face and sniffed, his eyes watering.

  “What was that?” Magpie said, her own nose twitching in sympathy.

  “Thought I’d sneeze,” Ben said. “You know how it ambushes you sometimes just behind your nose, and then you don’t. Something’s been tickling my nose all morning, and I can’t tell you what. And it shouldn’t, not here. I can smell magic, but here it should be clean. Back in my father’s lab…”

  “Back in the lab, it was the Alphiri magic you could smell, right?” Thea asked.

  Ben shot her a startled look. “That’s how it started, yeah,” he said. “Then it all fell apart, real fast. Six months after that first whiff I caught, I suddenly couldn’t stop sneezing. I was in Ars Magica class at my old school, and the smell made my sinuses want to explode. I was homeschooled one year, because I couldn’t go to school anymore. It’s been really bad in the past couple of months. My father sometimes puts a block on me for a few hours, but then it’s back, and it’s worse than ever. And then even that didn’t work anymore because my dad would come home from the lab and I’d smell him as soon as he came inside and start sneezing like a maniac.”

  “So you’re allergic to magic, too?” Tess said.

  “No, it isn’t that,” Ben said. “Not really, not quite. It’s just that it’s getting worse, and they thought putting me here might help desensitize me. I don’t know what triggered it, unless it was that one time when Dad was redistilling that damned fuel for the twenty-fifth time, and something went wrong, and it escaped into the lab and I got a whiff of it. But so did he, and a lab assistant, and at least one of the cleaning staff. And none of them got it. Just me.” He sniffed again. “And I can smell something…something…. I don’t kno
w. It isn’t really there, maybe it’s just a memory of it….”

  “You smell what? Magic?” Magpie was fascinated. “You do know most of the teachers would get the whiff of it—old Siffer himself was a mathemage, you said so yourself—but none of them have used it, not for years. Maybe it’s just that: the memory of magic.”

  “If that’s it, then I’m doomed,” Ben said morosely. “If just the memory of magic is enough to set me off, I will never be fit for decent society again.”

  “And who’d be decent society?”

  The voice was unfamiliar, but came from within their group—it took Thea a moment to realize that it was Terry who had spoken.

  “Welcome back,” Magpie said, smiling. “Look what you’ve done, Ben—you got him talking. Now he’ll never shut up again.”

  “Sorry,” Ben said, glancing up at Terry. “Um, present company excepted….”

  “Sometimes magic is so overrated,” Tess said, tossing her hair back. “Think of it this way—by the time Siffer is done with us, if the magic in the world went away tomorrow we could still figure out how to calculate the square root of minus one, and nobody else in the world would be able to do it—not without mathemagic.”

  “You can’t calculate the square root of minus one,” Ben said earnestly. “Not even mathemagic…”

  “Lighten up, Sneezy,” Magpie said, cuffing him on the shoulder. “She knows. Well, I’ve got Environmental Studies after the break. What about you guys?”

  It turned out that they had all taken that particular elective. Their teacher was a willowy blond woman with narrow hands, long fingers, and ears so pointed she could almost have passed for Alphiri. Certainly Ben seemed startled by her, and Thea felt a distinct urge to start looking over her shoulder again. The teacher, whose quiet voice ensured silence as everyone strained to hear her, spoke with a soft foreign accent and introduced herself as Signe Lovransdottir.

  “Norwegian?” Tess wondered in a whisper.

  “Icelandic,” Ben hissed back.