By the time I was wending my way home with the basket of semidry clothing, I was pleasantly sunned and splashed. The last of the moisture in my skirt dried while I pegged the clothes by the chookhouse, but I still hadn’t seen Bastian. I was disappointed but not really surprised; he was quite likely to be looking for someone who could break the rest of the curse. The fright and weariness of the previous day’s adventures had faded overnight, leaving behind a sense of adventure and accomplishment. Akiva’s rare approval had been sweet, and it had convinced me as all Bastian’s protestations had not been able to, that I had in fact done magic. I wanted to do more.
When I got back to the house, Akiva wasn’t in the garden. Surprised, I put my head around the back door, and was further surprised to see her sorting through the herbs on her work bench. I didn’t remember Akiva staying in the house during the day before.
She said: “Don’t hang off the door, child. If you’re coming in, come in.”
I indicated the collection of phials that Akiva had separated from the rest. “What are those?”
Akiva, choosing to take me literally, rattled off a string of names: some that I knew, more that I didn’t. “Sit down if you want to learn.”
I did so, curling the fingers of one hand into a tight fist in my pocket. I didn’t dare show the full extent of my joy in case Akiva changed her mind, but I was fizzing with suppressed excitement. As it was, she reprimanded me almost immediately for fidgeting and slapped the hand that I was turning bottles with.
“If you think I want a flurry of continual movement next to me, you’re very much mistaken,” she snapped. “Do you know what this is?”
I inspected the glass jar with a wrinkled nose. “Yuck. Honeyblossom.”
“What do you know about it?”
“It stinks,” I said, sitting back to get away from the cloying honey-scent of it. “Gwen uses it for love potions.”
There was a saturnine gleam to Akiva’s eyes. “Does she? Yes, they used it for that when I was a girl, too. Piffle.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Because it’s natural sugar and nothing more. You might as well make a love potion from sweetcane.”
“And it would taste better,” I agreed. Akiva’s lips gave the tiniest twitch upwards, and she held up another jar, this one thinner and tube-shaped.
I gazed into swirling green that seemed to make faces at me, and found myself shocked. “That’s lillypilly oil!”
Now where had she been hiding that? I had poked my nose into every phial and jar on this workbench: I would have noticed something as contraband as lillypilly oil.
“Familiar with it, are you?” said Akiva, with a short crack of laughter.
Since lillypilly oil was used only by the very rich or very desperate, I ignored this remark as the mockery it was, and said, eyeing the vial in fascination: “Someone I know had some. It’s for dreams and forgetting.”
There was another dry cackle from Akiva, but she said: “That’s close enough. Three drops of lillypilly in a palmful of honeyblossom, then stirred warm into a cup of fresh water– what does it make?”
“Something you keep drinking because you forget how much it stinks,” I said, grinning. The remark earned me a clip over the ear but it was worth it, because just for a moment, Akiva had grinned too.
“A longer lasting sleeping draught, you stupid child. Honeyblossom makes the lillypilly cling a little longer, and the water dilutes it so that the sleep feels natural. Fresh water, mind, and free running. Still water collects too much residue to use.”
“All right,” I said, since she seemed to expect me to say something. “Still water is bad, honeyblossom clings, and lillypilly is only for a few drops at a time.”
“Close enough,” Akiva said again, and went on.
Akiva was a good teacher. Unlike Gwendolen, who was always annoyingly helpful and earnestly determined to make sure I understood absolutely everything, she was quick and to the point, explaining only if I asked a question, and sometimes not even then. Her dry voice, with its short, terse sentences, was easy to listen to and easier still to remember.
We spent the afternoon making two potions. Teas, Akiva insisted on calling them, much to my disgust. Apart from the lillypilly oil, my gloomy suspicion that the herbs and roots she used were medicinal only and without any magical qualities, was confirmed.
“Which is quite enough to be making mistakes with,” Akiva added dourly, raising one brow at my crestfallen face. She wouldn’t tell me the use for which the teas were made, and I sank my chin crossly in the palm of one hand, glaring at the bottles as if they could be induced to tell me themselves.
“Tea making is touchy work,” she said, corking the second finished bottle. “One wrong step and you’ll have a villager curling up on your floorboards, dead.”
I brightened momentarily, eyes glittering. I hadn’t thought about the possibility of poison.
“And if you want to know what they do, work it out for yourself, ignorant child,” added Akiva, raising the other brow at me. I tried not to look so obviously bloodthirsty.
“You know what the ingredients are, the rest should be simple.”
“Cough syrup,” I said, making a face at the first. I gazed at the second for some time, deliberating. “And . . . a rheumatics tea?”
“Rheumatics, eh? It’s bone strengthener, child. That sailor from the village has a young wife who’s with child again, and I promised that I’d give her a tea next time. The first young boy is forever breaking his collarbone or his arm.”
“How do you know she’s with child?” I demanded. There hadn’t been visitors to the cottage for weeks.
Akiva gave me one of her looks. “It’s not any magic of mine, child: the young sailor was on shore leave three months ago. She should have found out by now.”
I blinked a little at Akiva’s casual way of mentioning such things. Babies were usually a matter for blushes and coy subterfuge.
“What about the cough mixture?”
“I had a vision,” she said, and I looked up at her suspiciously, unsure if I was being laughed at or not.
“Really?”
“Maybe, maybe not. You seem to have an unhealthy desire for everything to be accomplished through magic, child.”
She sighed, and hobbled away to the door, beckoning me to follow. “Shift yourself. I can see I’m not going to get any peace until you do some real magic.”
She led me out through the front garden but turned off the path immediately after the white gate. I found myself once more in that vast, pathless forest that Akiva had called deep forest.
“Now,” she said abruptly, coming to a sudden stop. “Close your eyes.”
I did as I was told, and stood there with my eyes scrunched shut, feeling the grass soft and damp beneath my feet and the unexpected warmth of a beam of sunlight on my face. The forest stirred around me with all the usual rustles and chirrups, and beside me I could hear Akiva moving in the abrupt, jerky way that older people move. Nothing remotely magical happened.
I shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, and had my ears promptly boxed for my pains.
“I can’t hear anything!” I complained, feeling misused. I didn’t open my eyes because I didn’t put it past Akiva to hit me again if I did.
“Did I say anything about hearing? I don’t want you to listen, I want you to feel.”
“Oh,” I said, in surprise; because as soon as she said it, I knew what it was that I was supposed to be sensing. Beneath my feet, not in the grass nor yet in the soil; not real, yet not unreal, were faint but definite threads, gleaming with magic or perhaps magic themselves, crisscrossing and stretching far. Mentally, I followed the one that ran by my big toe, and caught a clear, vivid sense of smooth lush hills, and a stretch of green. The dancing green! I realised, even as my brain protested at this impossible form of sight. My eyes snapped open, glittering with excitement, and the dancing green abruptly vanished.
“If you want to see both at
once you’ll need to practise,” Akiva told me, catching my look of indignant confusion. “The energy lines are a tool for you, but they’re no good if you can’t see them with your eyes open. No more questions until you come to me and tell me that you can.”
I agreed, my excitement mounting; because at last I was within reach of magic, real magic! Akiva left me there, and I closed my eyes again, confident that it would not be long before I mastered the art of it.
One short afternoon was enough to teach me that this was very far from being the case.
I returned to the cottage shortly after the triad sank, discouraged and inclined to give up. It seemed that the only way I could see the forest lines was with my eyes closed: the minute I opened them, the glowing lines vanished.
Akiva laughed rudely at my woebegone face. “You’ve had a few lucky spells go right and you’re suddenly convinced you’re the next great enchantress. You have a slight gift but it’s nothing out of the ordinary; you need to practice like any other young apprentice.”
I flushed hot and dark. There was enough truth in the accusation to make it sting. I had very much wanted to believe that I had a special gift.
“Exactly, child,” said Akiva. “Wash up for dinner.”
After some time I rather forgot about trying to see the energy lines. It was just too hard.
Akiva had given me every afternoon off to ‘get to know the forest’ as she said, and I felt myself as free as a bird. There was so much to distract me in the forest: wonderfully climbable trees; old, dry riverbeds crying out to be explored; and the opportunity of seeing Mother and Gwendolen every freeday when I came to the village to buy meat.
In fact, I would probably have continued quite happily in my state of lazy ignorance, content merely to wander through deep forest, if it hadn’t been for what happened on the day of Gwen’s thirteenth birthday.
It was a month or so since I had met Bastian, and I was wandering in deep forest. I was aggrieved because Akiva had called me a feckless, shiftless child, and had told me irritably not to come back home until I had learned something; and I was annoyed because I had seen nothing more of Bastian though it was now more than a month since I had helped him. Akiva had given me permission to go to Gwendolen’s birthday party, but from her grim tone this morning I had an idea that this permission was in danger of being revoked. I wasn’t particularly keen on the party, but I would be very much annoyed if I missed out on the abundant spread of party edibles.
I stomped crossly through the forest, scowling at the blackbirds and alternately opening and closing my eyes in a vain attempt to see the lines with my eyes open. Sometimes I thought I had done it, when with my eyes half open I could see a vague, vein-like net spread over the forest; but by the time my eyes were fully open, the nebulous structure had vanished. My time was fast running out: one of the triad had slipped over the horizon, the other two quickly approaching it; and when they, too, sank, I would be too late to go to the party.
A little after the early evening sunlight began to coat the leaves of the forest in warm gold, I began to be aware of a vibration to the forest, elusively real yet not real, that set my bones warmly buzzing in my skin and my teeth in my head. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was a strong sensation, and I looked around me, frowning; expecting from the strength of it that the vibration must come from something visible. But around me there were only trees and grass, and it gradually occurred to me that the sensation had started in my toes and made its way upward.
“Hah!” I said in surprise, closing my eyes. In the darkness I saw the line, glittering gold and pulsing, that ran directly under the soles of my feet. I cast a curious look around at the other energy lines but they were all the same quiet green of the forest, and none of them were vibrating. My interest piqued, I followed this thread to a tiny clearing with a fast-flowing stream that wound its way through the trees. I gazed at it speculatively for some moments, wondering what it was about this particular stream that had caused the energy thread to vibrate so strongly. There was a white disturbance frothing at the edge of the stream, air bubbles joyfully breaking the surface of the water, and after some moments of frowning contemplation it occurred to me that someone was swimming.
Lucky! I thought, enviously. As I watched, the water parted with a surge near the opposite bank, and someone stood upright, waist deep in the stream. It was Bastian. He was in his human form, rather cleaner than I had last seen him, and quite naked if his bare chest and torso were anything to judge by.
He seemed to see me at the same moment as I saw him, because he waved, tossing glittering gold droplets of water into the air.
“Little witch, come through!”
He surged toward the nearer bank, and I realised in some shock that, naked or no, he was about to climb out. My eyes snapped open, and Bastian and the stream vanished. The energy line beneath my feet throbbed, and I heard him muttering something derogatory; then the thread gave one, massive hum, and Bastian was there in front of me with a huff of forest-scented air. I was relieved to see that although he was still dripping, he was also clothed from the waist down.
“Why did you run away?” he demanded, shaking water from his hair. It made him look like wolf-Bastian.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I still can’t see the lines without my eyes closed.”
He shrugged. “Not everyone can. Perhaps you won’t be able to.”
“But Akiva told me not to come back unless I had learned something!”
“Learning what you can’t do is still learning,” Bastian pointed out. I didn’t find this helpful, and gave him a scorching look to inform him of the fact.
“I can do it,” I said grittily. “I just need time.”
Bastian threw himself down on the grass and stretched out. “Time we have. Go ahead.”
“I’m tired now,” I said, in the mood to be contrary. “Tell me who put the curse on you instead.”
“Who is not as interesting as how,” he countered, looking lazily up at me. I think he was trying to change the subject. Then he seemed to relent, and added: “I fell in love with an enchantress.”
“She put a spell on you because you fell in love with her?” The question came out unexpectedly like an accusation, and to my surprise, a tinge of red came to Bastian’s cheeks.
Immediately I pounced. “Liar!”
“Human bodies!” Bastian said in exasperation. “I must be out of practice. Very well, little witch; I did court an enchantress.”
“And?” Again there was a touch of red in Bastian’s cheeks.
“And two other women,” he admitted.
“You were courting two other women at the same time?”
“That’s the shortened version for young ears,” Bastian said shortly. “Take it from me, little witch; never court three women in the same town.”
“I’m not going to court anyone,” I told him. “I’m going to be a pirate, and pirates don’t marry.”
“Is that so? Obviously I should have come to you for advice, but it seemed a little late for celibate piracy by the time Cassandra was pointing her finger at me.”
I frowned and sat down, crossing my legs, and returned to the point of contention. “Why were you courting three women at once?”
“My dear child, three women is the minimum requirement for happiness: one never finds the qualities one requires in any less than three, much less in one woman.”
“It serves you right,” I said. I disliked the smooth undertone of arrogance in his voice.
Bastian was startled. “I beg your pardon?”
“It serves you right. If someone did that to Gwendolen I’d curse him, too. If I could.”
“Woman’s spite,” Bastian retorted in annoyance.
“It’s not: it’s teaching you a lesson,” I told him. “If a lady did the same to you–”
“I’d shrug and move on,” interrupted Bastian.
“You wouldn’t; you’d try your best to make her fall in love with you really and trul
y,” I argued, realising as I said it that it was true. It was exactly what Bastian would do. I took advantage of his unusual silence to continue. “If a girl treats a man false he can go away and travel, and forget. Women have to sit at home and remember through every chore and moment that when he said this it was a lie, and when he said that it was in order to get something. There’s no getting away from yourself and all the people who know you’ve been made a fool of.”
Bastian cupped his hands behind his head and eyed me balefully. “And what do you know about it? Who broke your youthful heart?”
“No one, and I do know. When Father died Mother was never the same again, and it was better for her, because she knew he’d always been faithful. When you sit there longing for someone and then remembering that they’re not worth longing for, it’s worse.”
He gave a derisive snarl. “Saccharine. Poppycock. No woman is worth that amount of soul-searching.”
“You’re embittered and old,” I said excusingly, watching with interest the coughing fit that came over him. “Gwendolen says that often happens to men in middle age.”
“Middle age!” gasped Bastian, sitting up to catch his breath.
“When you get middle-aged and embittered you need someone to care for, Gwendolen says. Mother had me and Gwen to look after. It seemed to take her mind off things.”
“I’m not surprised,” Bastian retorted sourly, recovering himself. “You would have been a horrible little handful. In fact, I imagine you were much the same as you are now. I’ve a good mind not to help you with your magic.”
“I don’t need your help,” I said defiantly, and climbed to my feet.
“Oh, really?” One of Bastian’s eyebrows went up. It was obvious that he was taking it as a challenge. “And who scared you into performing your first acts of magic, I would like to know?”
I eyed him in fascinated wonder. “You’re trying to make an attempt to eat me into a virtue!”
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