Fantasy & Science Fiction - JanFeb 2017

by Spilogale Inc.

  She put me in a cage on the desk in her bedroom, where I and my parents never, ever went. We didn't know if she booby-trapped her room on purpose or left careless spells around that could be triggered by a touch. Either way, Maura had perfect privacy in her room. The cat never came in here, either.

  The cage was a big one, with several levels, ramps, and toys. Maura had had a pet hamster once. Something unfortunate happened to it during one of her spelling experiments. She'd cried for days.

  The cage bottom was covered with shredded paper. There was a crockery bowl of water, and another with apple slices, torn bits of bread, and some cheese in it. She locked the door. "I need to know where you are, that you're safe, while I figure out the reverse spell," she said. "Sam, I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"

  She almost never did mean.

  I chirped at her. She frowned. Then she ran from the room.

  * * *

  CAGED LIFE was boring after half a day.

  At first I explored my new senses.

  My sight was very bad. Nearby things had detail, but anything farther than a foot was a blobby blur, and colors had bled out of everything, except shades of gray, blue, purple, and an intensification of violet that was almost like light shining, almost like a sound.

  Smells were so much stronger, most of them enticing, even when I knew they would disgust me if I were my human self. Everything Ma or Pa cooked. Traces of Maura's botched spells, and her successful ones. Her spell-makings in the cabinet on her desk—her own supply of all the herbs, fruit, stems, and tubers we sold at market, and other ingredients she had bought or her wizard teacher gave her. Anything she had tracked into the house—fertilized dirt, plant traces, decaying things, animal droppings, water clean and stagnant. Weather. Other rats who had been in the walls. The cat, the carpets, the history of the house. The distinct scent of each of the humans living here, which shifted depending on how recently they had showered and how sweaty they had gotten and how they felt. Trace scents of my former human self. Dirty laundry, the soap Ma washed the clothes and sheets with, the sunlight drying spell she used, and, under the bed, rotting fruit where Maura had tossed apple cores. Bouquets of dust. Lots of intriguing things I couldn't investigate.

  So much information came to me from the quivers of my whiskers. I sensed the shape, size, and texture of things in my cage just by walking past them. Even in the dark, I built a map of everything around me by paying attention to what my whiskers and nose told me.

  I heard what happened all over the house. By swiveling my ears, I could change the focus of sounds around me. I heard Ma and Pa calling my friends, trying to track me down, worrying and wondering, and Maura worrying and wondering with them. Our parents questioned Maura, but even though Pa had a bit of wizard in him—he could always tell when I was lying, for instance—he couldn't tell when Maura was. Ma's housewitch spells had very little effect on Maura, being tailored for managing inanimate things.

  Whatever calming magic Maura might have, it wasn't working very well on Ma and Pa.

  I couldn't do anything about their distress, so I tuned it out.

  Slaughter came to Maura's door and meowed, but the door only opened when Maura came or left, and the cat always hid when Maura was around.

  I had nowhere to go, not much to do, and not much to see, except when Maura came in for the night, and even that wasn't interesting after she actually fell asleep. Maura brought me bread and cut-up fruit once a day, which made a nice change. Otherwise she avoided her own room. I heard and smelled her studying spells in my room next door.

  Spelling studies. Hadn't I cast a spell on my cat? I could study, too.

  I thought about changing myself into something smaller that could fit through the bars of the cage. I squeaked and gestured. Nothing happened.

  I tried casting spells on the cage door to unlock. Nothing.

  My stomach rumbled. Fruit and bread were not what I craved, and Maura never brought me enough of either to satisfy.

  A beetle wandered into my cage. It had a harsh, stinky smell with an edge of iron, and my rat self wanted to eat it. I imagined the crunch of its hard shell between my teeth, the squirt of its soft, wet internal organs onto my tongue, and my mouth watered. Still—

  "I wish you were a leg of lamb," I said in squeaks, and laid my paws on the beetle's back. Warmth gathered in my stomach, then flowed up my arms and out of my paws.

  The beetle turned into a tiny but complete roast leg of lamb, with all my favorite seasonings. I devoured it, even crunching the bones, then took a nap.

  That evening, Maura gave me a roll. As soon as she left the room, I squeaked to the roll, "I wish you were a pound cake." It turned into a pound cake the size of the roll. Delicious.

  I had magic. I had a power! I could turn food I wasn't interested in into food I wanted.

  Fizzy with excitement, I touched the bars of my cage and wished them into pretzels. Salty and delicious. I ate my way out of my prison and stayed to eat more, a mistake, for Maura came in while I was munching through the forest of pretzel bars and cast another cage around me. "What happened?" she asked, crushing some of the leftover pretzels between her fingers. She stared at me and the remains of the cage.

  She peered out the open window, her face pinched with fear. She placed my new cage carefully on the floor under her desk and closed the window after doing a few unsuccessful spells to reveal the presence of an enemy. They weren't crafted small enough to point to me.

  Was I her enemy? In my previous body, I had teased her without mercy. Were I she, I might have done something nasty to me, too. I never wanted to hurt her, though, and I was pretty sure she hadn't meant to hurt me.

  I waited until she went out, then changed my new cage's bars into soft, fresh breadsticks. This time I ate my way out and paused just long enough to conduct an experiment. I put my hand on the breadsticks and said, "I wish you were bars again," but it didn't work; they stayed bread. A limit.

  I scooted under Maura's bed, dodging dust dragons and rotting apple cores. I turned a rat-sized section of floorboard under the bed into mashed potatoes and ate my way into the house's substructure.

  In the spaces between walls, floors, and ceilings, I explored the hidden skeleton of the house. I appreciated my new ability to run up walls and wedge myself into narrow cracks, and I enjoyed the rich weight of scents, the whisker map I made without even thinking, the embrace of sounds and smells that brought me so much information the dark didn't scare me anymore.

  I crafted peepholes in most rooms of the house, turning knots into nuts and gnawing my way through.

  I explored the house while my family was outside working.

  Slaughter found me when I ventured into the human spaces. Sometimes she carried me as though I were a kitten. Sometimes we hid together in the backs of closets or under the living room couch to take naps. She let me hug her, and she purred, enveloping me in comfort and love.

  In my explorations, I discovered secrets.

  Ma had a secret stash of photos in an envelope taped to the underside of her dresser. I managed to ease them out of the envelope without untaping it. I found pictures of a much younger Ma with a man I didn't recognize. It was difficult for rat-me to see the pictures. I had to drag them out from under the dresser one by one so the light fell on them, and then I climbed up on a shoe so I could look down and see the whole picture. In one, Ma and the stranger, smiling wide, held up fat fish. I couldn't remember Ma ever fishing, or smiling that wide. In another picture, the man aimed the camera toward the two of them, and they were kissing. Ma had her eyes closed, and she looked so relaxed, an edge of smile lifting her cheek, as though she were holding laughter inside. The man's eye glanced toward the lens, and he looked sly. The third picture showed the two of them at Harvest Festival, wrapped together in ropes woven from corn husks, dancing the dance for couples who planned to marry, with people cheering all around them.

  Not Pa. What had happened?

  I found one of Pa's secrets under a pi
le of magazines in a basket beside the table where he and I worked on the farm accounts. There were three small, slim books of advanced wizarding spells.

  Pa's magic was minimal. All of these spells were beyond him. But he had written notes on all the pages. Questions, alternate ingredients, results—always "Nothing apparent." I borrowed one of the books and hid it under the big, squashy sofa no one ever moved. Slaughter and I slept there together, and I studied the spells in the evening. They didn't work for me, either.

  One of Maura's secrets was in the attic, where we stored things we might repair or need later. She had a guitar up there. I saw her craft a sound cocoon around herself and the guitar, and I saw her playing it. She frowned a lot. Maybe she had found something that wasn't as easy as breathing for her, and she didn't want us to know there was anything she did badly.

  * * *

  Maura had been taking wizard lessons from the town librarian, though the librarian wasn't much of a wizard. Our normal school was not equipped for students who showed wizard-sign at such an early age; wizards were supposed to manifest in high school, by which time they would be enrolled in proper wizard schools with teachers who could control them. The librarian located elementary wizarding books Maura studied on her own.

  We had stepped up production of dragon brains in hopes of sending Maura to a good school. After she graduated from six years of advanced wizardry study, she would be able to command the best rates for her skills, and maybe help us improve the farm and give Ma and Pa a comfortable old age.

  Most of these plans depended on me being active in farm maintenance, though. Pa had hurt his leg in a fall last autumn, and he hadn't recovered well, despite Maura's using healing charms on him. We didn't have enough savings to pay for a cure doctor in the nearest city, and the longer we waited, the less likely it was anybody would be able to change things. Ma's talents were household ones; she could mend clothes and unburn burnt food, cleanse windows with words, but she couldn't affect flesh.

  I had shouldered a lot of Pa's work, happy to be useful, growing stronger every day. I knew lots about our routines and was learning more as fast as I could. I wanted to be a farmer the rest of my life.

  I couldn't help with the farm as a rat, even with a food spell. I could help best if restored to myself. If that didn't happen—

  I could lead a comfortable rat-wizard life. I had all the food I wanted, and I would never have to worry about taking care of anyone else.

  I crept up under the kitchen floor and listened to my parents and my sister during supper.

  "Where is Sam?" Pa asked. "It's three days he's been gone! He's never done that before. Sam's not visiting the Tomkins the way you said, Maura-chick. I called over there and they haven't seen him. Where did he say he was going, again?"

  "Maybe it was the Adeltwishers," Maura said. My best friend was Rob Adeltwisher. Ma and Pa didn't like the family because they had no farm of their own. They got by with wildcrafting, harvesting things in the forest and selling them, and creating small, elegant, useful spells—flavor adjustments for food, mending spells you could use on clothes and nicked and tarnished metalware, spells for light. Sometimes they went hungry. They weren't land-settled, but lived in a house wagon that could move them wherever the hunting was good. They had been parked on a lot down the road from us the past three years, near a finger of forest at the base of the hills. They had no phone.

  Ma said, "Maura, I don't like you mucking about in the brain barn. You leave the chores half done, and the dragon brains are getting puffy with ideas and upsets. And what have you been doing to our wereweeds?"

  My sister sniffled. "I'm doing the best I can."

  "You'd think such a talented girl could do better," said Pa. "Stick to studying your magic. Lady knows how I'll find time to do Sam's chores and my own, but somehow I'll manage."

  Ma said, "I'll give you a hand with the wereweeds. I've laid in a good supply of spell stitcheries; I can afford to spend time elsewhere until after our next market day."

  "Good," said Pa. "I'll go out to the Adeltwishers tomorrow and fetch Sam home. What's got into him? He's never run off before."

  Ma rapped her fingers on the table, horses galloping. "Maura, are you making our worries go away? I think we should be more upset about Sam's disappearance. If you're mindbending us, stop it right now."

  "I never—"

  Silence.

  "Unmuffle us, Maura," Ma said.

  A hesitation. Then the sharp smell of pickles, vinegar, and peaches.

  Ma and Pa both jumped to their feet.

  "Maura, what have you done to your brother?" Pa yelled.

  "Did you kill Sam?" Ma said. The silence after her words was like thunder.

  "He's not dead. He's just transformed," Maura said, her voice squashed. "I've been working on unspelling ever since it happened. I've got most of the kinks worked out. I'll get him back, Ma. I promise."

  "What did you do?" Pa said, in the quiet voice that meant he had a storm inside.

  "Sam's a rat."

  "The traps!" Ma cried.

  "I tripped them all and put them in the hall closet with an unsee spell around them," Maura said.

  "The cat!" Ma said.

  "The cat didn't kill him," Maura whispered. "When I found him, he and the cat were sleeping on his bed together."

  "When was that?"

  "The day I changed him."

  "Do you know for a fact that your brother is still alive?" Pa asked. His words had a weight of frost on them that made me shiver.

  Maura cried. "I caught him and put him in a cage the day I changed him, but he escaped," she said, between small sobs. "Twice! The cages turned into food, and he ate his way out. I don't know how that happened. I've done seek spells, and I can't find him. I've been working and working on reverse spells. I think I have one that'll work—"

  "You cast on him without a planned spell?" Ma's voice was quiet.

  "I was mad and hurt," Maura said. "I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to! Then he ran away. I couldn't find him." A sob. "I searched and searched. I can't find him."

  "Sam!" Pa yelled. "Sam, are you in the house? Come here!"

  In the dark under the floor, I thought about this. I could come, now, emerge, and Ma and Pa would see me as vermin. Shame swamped me for the first time since my transformation. I missed my human life, and I liked being a rat. I had fashioned a comfortable life for myself. I hadn't thought about my human view of rats: despised pests that harmed crops, spread disease, damaged supplies, and corrupted structures. Unclean, sneaky beasts, worthy only of being killed.

  How could I let them see me like this?

  "Sam!" Ma shouted. "Please come out!" Her voice held fear and pain.

  I stilled, held my breath, tried to get myself to move. I felt as paralyzed as I had when the cat picked me up by the scruff.

  I was so diminished. So much smaller and less powerful and less helpful than the good son I had been.

  "Sam," Ma and Pa said together.

  "Do you think he went outside somewhere?" Ma asked after a minute. "Maura, can't you craft a better seek spell?"

  "I'll try again," said my sister. "Maybe Mr. Corazon has a better book for that. I'll ask him."

  I squeaked. I didn't want her to make a seek spell that would work.

  "Sam?" Ma said.

  My belly was full of sour churning. The taste in my mouth was defeat. I couldn't let them go on not knowing what had happened to me, no matter what I looked like now.

  I crept up through the hole I'd made a day earlier behind the refrigerator. Slaughter, curled in her cat bed beside the stove, heard me and meowed.

  "The cat!" said Pa. "Holy heckfire! The cat!"

  "The cat didn't hurt him," Maura said.

  I scuttled through shadows until I was near the kitchen table, then emerged and darted to the center of the rag rug, out of stomping range.

  I turned and stared at my family. I squeaked, and they looked at me.

  My family were blurry gray
giants among blurry gray mountains of furniture. I smelled their emotions: vinegar surprise, hot-pepper anger, warm, buttery love from Ma; baking-bread love from Pa; and caramel love and salt-water dismay from Maura. No lightning ozone of intent to attack, at least. I heard their breathing, the shuffle of their hearts pushing blood through their veins.

  Ma knelt near me—a giant who smelled of laundry soap, onions, roasted beef, the salamander stones that powered our oven and stove, the ice-giant spell we used in the fridge, cotton thread, sweat, and the lemon balm she put in her hair-rinse. "Oh, Sam," she whispered.

  My body quivered with the urge to flee. Holding still was hard.

  Pa edged forward on his knees and held out a hand to me. I sniffed his fingers and whisked them, mapping the rough texture of his calloused skin, smelling the grime of work in the dragon-brain barn, with hints of stinkweed, earth, and the wooden handles of farm tools. I touched his thumb with one of my hands. He lowered his hand, put it palm down on the floor.

  Maura came to me, too, crouching but still giant, her scents the many herbs she used in wizardry, the nose-burning vinegar of magic, the softer smells of her sweat, and the salt water of tears. "I've been working really hard, Sam," she said. "The hardest in my life. I have the spell ready."

  I stood on my hind paws and stared up at her. I blinked, swiveled my ears toward her. Her breathing hitched.

  Did I trust her to spell me again?

  She had turned me into an excellent rat without any preparation. Her wizard powers were strong.

  I couldn't still my trembling, but I stayed where I was.

  "I'm going to spell now," she said. Then she spoke in wizard language and moved her hands. The vinegar and cinnamon smell grew so strong my nose bled, and the words made me wish I could close my ears.

  Change came.

  Everything in me shifted and grew as I stretched up into an approximation of the boy I had been. I shed fur and most of my augmented rat senses. My bones crackled as they lengthened, and my muscles restrung themselves with exquisite pain, pain so strong it swallowed me. I was blind, deaf, impervious to anything but how much I hurt.