Armus blinked. “All right,” he said. He turned and began poking experimentally at the homunculus’ unresponsive legs.
“You really are the brains, aren’t you?” Essi asked, staring at Armus.
“Of course,” Maribelle replied.
Essi smiled.
“Mari,” she said, “this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
BRIGHT STREETS OF AIR, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Originally published in Battle Magic (1998).
In this war of words, my best friend Jessamine has all the advantages. She speaks faster than I, and with more heat.
I set a pansy-decorated teacup in front of her on my kitchen table, then take my place across from her. Westering sun strikes through the window on a bowl of oranges, lifting the true color out of them in a way no other intensity of light can do. Light silvers the cobwebs near the ceiling, too; I hadn’t realized how long it’s been since I dusted. I’m an indifferent housekeeper, but I always have cookies.
A plate of chocolate chip cookies sits between us on the yellow tabletop. I baked them this morning. I love that smell.
I curl my hands around my teacup, treasuring its warmth. The tea I have chosen for myself is smoky and black, with gunpowder notes. Jessamine has chamomile, as she usually does.
As I reach into my pocket to take out the fossilized spell I just found in the hills, Jessamine extracts her palmtop computer from her purse, sets it on the table by her teacup, and flips up the lid so she can stare at the tiny screen. Electronic light the color of foxfire glows on her face. “Wait’ll you hear this one, Ellowyn,” she says. “My best yet. And…
I lay my spell on the table. It looks unimpressive. They usually do. Just another river-rounded sandstone egg, fine-grained but unremarkable brown, though my fingertips itch from the sparks of potential in it.
“You won’t believe what it does,” says Jessamine.
It is too much to hope that she will be excited by my find. She never is. She has no interest in the past. Her favorite word is upgrade.
“What is it this time?” I ask. “A formula for shrinking parked cars so more can fit into available space? A spell to make everybody’s clocks run just fast enough that people will arrive on time wherever they go? Something to make your VCR understand the exact right moment to start and stop recording so you never lose the first few seconds of a program?”
“Better,” she says.
“You’ve debugged the Internet?”
She bites her lip. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have guessed that big. “Less global than that,” she says.
“But your spells are always global.”
“I made this one especially for you.” She sips her tea.
Tingles of apprehension creep up my back. I don’t like her even considering tailoring a spell for me. We have been friends for ages—since days of cobblestone roads and horse-drawn vehicles, since men delivered ice and milk to one’s home. We have watched each other’s choices all these years and had our own thoughts.
We come together for tea every week. Jessamine casts her spells out into the world and I cast mine, and we sometimes work at cross purposes, but we try not to cancel each other out. I don’t always approve of what she’s doing, and I know she doesn’t care much about my concerns either, but we almost never speak aloud our doubts. Censoring each other is not something we do.
“Plus, I have a new delivery system,” Jessamine says, smiling down at her tiny computer. “Infrared data transfer.”
She is speaking a language I have no desire to learn.
She taps the screen with a small black stylus, angles the back of the computer toward me, and a red light strobes into my eyes.
It hurts.
Blinking does not stop its invasion. I can see the light even through my eyelids, and I feel old and paper-thin for the first time in a long while.
What is she ensorcelling me with? Does she want to hurt me? Weaken me? Kill me? Only because I’m not sure I like the devicing of this century in all its manifest glory?
I collapse back in my chair, feeling like a marionette with cut strings. The pulsing pain of the red light ceases. For a moment all I feel are myriad aches, screeches from muscles that haven’t scolded me in years.
My mind falls open, like a flower forced by time-lapse photography to bloom.
Then Jessamine’s true assault begins. Snowing down on my unguarded edges, the structure of her reasons, the imprint of her influences, the chemistry of her choices. My mind lies quiet as her beliefs and impulses press down on it, and then I understand everything about her.
I feel her delight and terror in everything newest and next. Her burnished curiosity that wants to poke copper fingers everywhere. Her impatience with anything slower than she.
Her buried fear that if she sits still long enough so many things will catch up to her.
I crank open my eyelids and stare across the table at my friend, and then I am my friend. Her desires shape and restrict me; her joy flares through me and her fears gnaw at my heart. Falling gold and scarlet leaves of memory drift against a celadon green backdrop that is the edge of her consciousness. I can touch any leaf and tumble into one of our yesterdays.
I pick one, let it rest on my palm. It flattens against the skin, a damp silken kiss.
Sixty, seventy years ago. I am back in Brooklyn in the middle of a sweltering summer, and Jessamine and I are sitting side by side on steps in front of a brownstone, holding ice cream cones, mine strawberry and hers chocolate. Except I remember this moment from my own memory, too, and I had the chocolate cone. The ice cream melts faster than we can lick it, flowing down across our fingers, cool and sticky. In this moment we are only girls together without thought, lost in delicious taste, sweating and sticking to each other without caring, reaching across to offer tastes of each others’ cones.
It is a moment most like this present one in how close we feel to one another.
I blink and I am back in my own head. Yet the whole tapestry of Jessamine’s thoughts and motivations still weaves through my mind, inextricably tangled, forcing me to filter past it. I cannot tell where she begins and I end, and I feel hopelessly confused.
Jessamine has come around the table and is standing over me. “Are you all right?” she asks, her amber eyes staring into mine. She leans forward, presses her palm to my forehead. “Ellowyn? Are you all right?”
I shudder deep and long. Webs of foreign feelings drape my thoughts, feelings not my own, feelings that force me to feel them. Thoughts I don’t want to own flicker through my brain.
I stare at my kitchen with stark clarity, see the careless stains on the cupboard doors, dustmice under the outthrust cabinets, spiderwebs in the corners, scratches in the dishes, all the things I don’t mind because I don’t wear my glasses in the house. There is that smell of orange peels rotting in the bag under the sink. I never notice that; I don’t mind mold; things are only doing what they are supposed to do, everything changing into other things across time. But now this odor affronts me.
“Ell? That spell wasn’t supposed to hurt you! Ell?” Jessamine grips my shoulder.
I try to cast the invasion out of my mind, but it is knitted and knotted too tightly to me. I struggle to reclaim myself. Everywhere in me are shards of someone else.
I feel my age. I let out a long breath and stop fighting, and all of Jessamine snaps into place within me. I feel…brisk. I sit upright. I gulp tea. Its smoky taste no longer pleases me, but I know I don’t want chamomile either.
“Are you all right?” Jessamine asks for the fiftieth time, perhaps. Why should I pay attention to her when she is already inside me?
“Leave me alone,” I say. I rise and go to the cupboard, find a tea called Plantation Mint that I usually share with my neighbor James when we play gin
rummy on Sunday night and watch 60 Minutes.
That’ll do. I drop a teabag into a new mug. I put the kettle on the stove and turn on the burner. (Where’s the microwave? Oh. I don’t have one. Tomorrow I’ll get one.) I run water into the sink until it’s hot. I dump soap and sponges in, and then I begin to scrub.
It is odd. I wear glasses for distance, and Jessamine doesn’t. I never knew what she saw when she looked at my house, and I never tell her what I think about her chrome and glass furniture or her love of plastic fabrics. A guest doesn’t criticize the host’s house no matter how long they have known each other.
“Ell?” Jessamine shakes my shoulder. “Stop it. What are you doing?”
There is dust everywhere. Housekeeping has never been my strong point. I scrub a film of ancient cat vomit off the linoleum and fight with myself. To care, or not to care? Well, says Jessamine in my head, simplest if we spell it away, and that way both of us can relax.
I sit back, drop the sponge on the floor. My hands flash through a series of mudras. I feel the dust and dirt shifting away to somewhere it can be more comfortable, and my house becomes a strange sacred space outside of the normal world where things will not stain it. Jessamine is happy here.
I, Ellowyn, feel as though I’ve sliced off my roots.
From the living room come the screams of three different cats. I jump up and run there and see that the couch where they usually lie in a furry heap is repelling them. They scramble in air, trying to swim to safety, but the table repels them, and the carpet. They float, claws extended, an inch above the ground. Their cries become more frantic.
“What did I do? What did you do?” I cry, snatching at my frantic cats, who cling and claw and screech.
“Damn, I forgot about cats. This is a people-only house now,” my internal Jessamine says with my mouth.
“Well, stop it! Change it back! Stop it!” I am talking to myself.
“You’ll have to free the hands.” My second voice is an approximation of Jessamine’s, higher and more forceful than my own.
I am supporting Sprite’s hind legs with my right hand. Fleet clings to my shoulders, and Dobro stands on my left forearm, his paws wrapped around my upper arm. They all moan, an eerie, ascending sound like the end of the world.
“What happened?” Jessamine asks from behind me. Her voice is thin with fright.
I turn and force Sprite and Fleet into her arms. “Your silly spell,” I say in my own voice, “your silly banish-dust, repel-pests, eternal-stainfree spell has turned my house into a tomb.” Hands freed, I shape the mudras again in reverse order, stumbling a little because this is not my usual spell method. The Jessamine overlay in my mind prompts me, sighing all the while. She craves cleanliness that is close to hermetic, and now I know why all the way down to my bones. I can remember the apartment where Jessamine lived before we met, filth and cockroaches and rotting food, her mother’s older sister spreading pestilence and chaos everywhere around her in a way that Jessamine did not learn until later was magical.
Such stains, set deep into her image of her childself. Such a compulsion to escape them.
I shape my hands around the final mudra, and my roots regrow; the house is connected to the everyday world once again. The cats, still moaning, drop to the floor and vanish into their safest hiding places.
Jessamine is crying. We both go to the bathroom to put Neosporin on our bleeding scratches and to spell for healing. “Ellowyn, what happened?” Jessamine says.
“You should know,” I say. “It was your spell.”
“It wasn’t supposed to work this way!”
“What did you imagine it would do?” Now, from my view of the inside of her mind, I know what the spell was: a spell of total understanding. I can even ferret out her thinking about it, why she devised it: she is lonely in her passions, and she only wanted me to appreciate them more than I do. We have been getting together for years. We are best friends. Yet, there has been this film between us, areas we have kept separate from each other where we might clash, and finally her frustration about this place where she is still and always alone built to the bursting point.
And, in her straightforward Jessamine way that sometimes frightens me, she reached for what looked like the best solution. Make me understand.
“I thought maybe you’d listen to me,” she says.
I stare at a particularly long cat scratch on my arm and listen to the conflict in my head. My body needs protection. I dab some antibiotic ointment on my index finger and look at the red edges of my wound. My Ellowyn self has sympathy for the microorganisms that have found this entrance into blood heaven, the ones I am about to kill. My Jessamine self is appalled that I even hesitate. I smooth the ointment along the scratch and sigh.
“How can I hear you now?” I ask. “I have voices in my head.”
Her nose is pink with stifled tears. “I’ll uncast it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it would work like this.”
“You can’t uncast it,” I say, because I know how carefully she built it, and which of the ingredients are permanent. I stare at my face in the mirror, and two people look out of my eyes. I fear that once the Jessamine inside me has time to look around and analyze things, she will gradually send more and more of my true self to sleep and happy dreams until she is all that is conscious in me.
I hate this thought. Fighting has never been my strength, though.
I get the Band-Aids down from the cupboard, and, moving with uncharacteristic determination, slap them onto myself and Jessamine where they will do the most good. Jessamine’s pathological hatred of infection spells out of me as I work. I don’t even think as I mouth these words. I know they have been a mantra for her over the years.
Cats, part of me thinks with disgust. Horrible messy things. No more events like this! We have to get rid of them!
Horror curls through me. The cats are my companions, my friends. They greet me when I return from anywhere. We all live our separate lives in this shared space, and intercept each other for caresses. I love them.
In my head, Jessamine apologizes for her thought, but I know she still thinks it. Finally I understand why the cats never come into the kitchen while Jessamine is visiting me. She has a repel spell for all animals. She cannot rid herself of the conviction that they carry disease.
No. I can’t live like this.
We head back to the kitchen. I make yet another cup of tea, this time English Breakfast, fully loaded with caffeine. While the water heats, I take Jessamine’s little computer, tap the screen with the stylus to find the spell-processing program, scroll through the spell she constructed. It is just as I remembered: Jessamine exact, Jessamine elegant, all parts interlocking so tightly that I can’t get a fingernail in to split it apart. What about transmission errors? I check the data-sent log, and it says SENT OK. Frowning, I set the computer on the table and discover Jessamine staring at me, her face pale.
“What?” I say.
“You know how to use it,” she murmurs, and then I feel the backlash, the Jessamine in my head reflecting the other Jessamine’s outrage at someone even touching this computer, her precious friend, making it do tricks without asking.
“Oh, this makes me tired,” I say. I make my tea and slam the kettle down on the burner, denting its edge, full of rage and fatigue from fighting this self forced on me.
I sit.
I see the egg-shaped spell, golden as earth, that I found in the hills, and a sweet taste touches my tongue.
Before my interior Jessamine can stop me—I had no idea that she had these shudders under her skin all the time, worries always that edges are not clean, that touch is not safe—I cradle the spell in my hands. Comfort seeps into me. This spell’s history isn’t entirely clear to me. I only know someone cast it a long time ago, and that it worked beautifully, so beautifully that the E
arth reached up and made it into treasure in memory of its power. No spell that hurts anyone ever gets pearled like this.
Part of me wants to fling the ugly, dirty thing from me, banish it from the house. The other part turns the spell over and traces the glyph of welcome on the grainy sandstone surface. Answering warmth wakes under my fingertip. The spell is joyous with its own power. I cup my hands around it and taste its flavor, waiting for the spell to tell me what it does. Juicy sourgrass stems, cinnamon, wheatbread, green grapes—a harvest spell, of sorts.
Harvest.
What would I plant? What reap?
This experience of having the Other inside me. Already planted. Already grown and flowered. Fruit, unbearable fruit. Can I harvest it now and lay it away?
I stroke the spell, trace some glyphs of inquiry into it. The Jessamine in my head watches, quiet, not protesting.
The red warmth of wine answers my touch. The spell accepts my alterations.
“Will you go quietly?” I ask.
“Oh, yes,” she says with my mouth. And past all her fears and worries, I feel the great flood of love she feels for me, the gratitude and exasperation and choked delight and longing, the leaves of so many shared memories, laughter and starlight and wonder, times we pushed each other away but came back, times we asked hard questions and stayed for hard answers, times we surprised each other.
For a moment I think, I can live with this.
Then she says, “Let’s go, Ell. You can’t live with me. You know it and I know it.”
It is her hand in my hand that lifts the stone to my mouth, her lips in my lips that press the opening glyph into the spell’s skin.
The rock melts. The spell opens. Shimmering gold and green light weaves around me, and I see orchards flowering with spring rain, leafing out green with summer’s sun, sturdy and strong from earth, air, water, sunfire, all mixed with each fruit’s own signature. Jessamine grows strong and ripe inside me. For a little while I am afraid that I will be cast into dreams indeed, leaving Jessamine alone in my head.
The Witch and Warlock MEGAPACK ®: 25 Tales of Magic-Users Page 73
