Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  He waits, and I’m glad for it. Time to collect my thoughts. As if he knows I need it.

  “Would you deny it if I said yes?”

  I study him, seeing a bit more now that he’s closer to the light. I feel warm again. Would I?

  I reach for the stairs, leaning on the third one up as I find my feet. Stand up. Fyel is only a few inches from the floor. Any higher and he’d brush the ceiling. Were he level with me, I think he’d be about a hand’s length taller.

  My foot feels especially heavy as I approach him. I wave my hand through him. Once again, it passes without hindrance. For a fleeting moment, I wonder what he would feel like solid. How warm he would be, and whether his face would be rough or smooth against my palm.

  He floats away a pace. “You really should not do that when your hands are dirty,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s being mirthful or not.

  I look at my hand, not that I can see anything beyond its general shape in this gloom. “Why?”

  “I am not part of this world,” he explains yet again.

  I rub my fingers together, feeling a little grit there. “You can’t touch it.”

  He nods.

  “Then how did you get in here?”

  I detect a smile, I think. “I appeared.” Then, more solemn, “Tell me what happened.”

  I limp back for the stairs and sit. “Alger . . . He changed his name, did I tell you? Alger took me somewhere. I’m not sure where. To make cookies for an old woman. And I just . . . Something went wrong. My head hurt and I . . . panicked.”

  He’s quiet for a moment before asking, “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “It felt like I was remembering something. Something scary, maybe. I don’t know what. I just tried to run”—I chuckle once and heft my splinted leg—“and I found this shrine of three of the gods, and somehow I knew it was wrong.”

  Fyel hovers closer. “Wrong?”

  “Just . . . the middle one. I didn’t think it was what that god looks like.”

  He’s close enough to the weak light for me to see his smile. I like how he looks when he smiles. It eases the somberness of his face and my own tension.

  “Is that funny?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “You know something.” I lean forward on the stair. “How do I know what a god looks like?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I flip the question around. “Do you know what gods look like?”

  “Yes, some.”

  I perk. I had expected more stubborn silence. “Some?”

  “There are many gods,” he says. He drifts a little. His wings flap—glimmering just a bit as they do so—and he steadies himself. “I have seen the faces of many.”

  He says it almost casually. I stare at him, waiting for a grin or something else to give away the joke, but there’s none.

  I whisper, “What are you?”

  Now he hesitates. Floats a little closer. There’s only about two or three paces separating us. “I am a crafter.”

  “A what?”

  “A crafter,” he repeats. “A creator of things.”

  I grab the rim of the stair beneath me. My pulse quickens. “I don’t understand.”

  He thinks for a moment before saying, “My kind creates. We create many things, both in this world and in others. Plants, animals, mountains, rivers. We fashion them. We craft them.”

  My mouth has gone dry. I stare at him, taking in his whiteness and his bizarre wings, and croak, “Then . . . you’re a god.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Gods are far greater than the likes of me. They are omnipotent. They are ever reaching and bodiless. Crafters create things, but gods create souls.”

  He’s quiet again, giving me a moment to process his words. “Then you . . . are a builder.”

  “Yes.”

  “You build . . . everything? All of this?” I make a wide gesture, but I don’t mean this dank cellar. The trees and the sky and the birds and the sun.

  “Not all of it, no. That is far too great a task for any one being.”

  “Then what?” I’m at the edge of the stair. My skin pebbles into gooseflesh.

  “Earth, stone. Rock and sand and hills.”

  I think about this. “Did you make this cellar?”

  His lip quirks. “Man made this cellar, not I. Just its components.”

  “You helped make Raea.”

  “You have many questions.”

  “When I actually receive answers, then yes, I have many questions.”

  And I realize something, pieces of my memory sticking together at the back of my tongue. My pulse picks up even more. My chest heats and my fingers freeze.

  “It was you.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “In Carmine, when the marauders came,” I clarify. “The very ground came up and blocked one from me. In the cage, too, before I met Allem—Alger. And when I fell in the forest.” My foot throbs in agreement. “The earth . . . That was you.”

  He nods once.

  I cradle my head in my hands for a moment and close my eyes, trying to sort through all of these revelations. So bizarre. So outside my expectations. And I wonder, How much more is there that I don’t know?

  I backtrack. “If gods don’t have bodies, then how do I know what one looks like?”

  “They have forms.”

  “How many are there? Which one have I seen?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me.”

  Fyel takes another moment of silence. “I cannot . . .” A pause. “I cannot tell you, Maire.”

  “Why?”

  “If you deny—”

  “I won’t deny anything.”

  He takes a breath deep enough for me to hear it.

  I rub the bandage on my hand and remember that I haven’t yet finished my story. “But . . . I saw it, and I knew something wasn’t right. And then Alger . . . He was so angry with me. Scrubbed my hand raw. It’s red. All of it is.”

  “He hurt you?” His tone lowers, tightens.

  “Yes . . . I don’t know if he meant to, but . . . He was crying. It upset him that I was . . .”

  I lift my arms and twist them toward the tendrils of light. It hasn’t receded. They are still . . .

  “Red.”

  Fyel reaches forward a translucent hand but pulls back before it can pass through me. “Gods, Maire,” he whispers.

  “I know—”

  “No . . . this is wonderful.” His words are whispery and restrained.

  I look into his odd-colored eyes. Despite the darkness, I can see them better than I have before because of his closeness. They’re wide and hopeful and . . . familiar.

  “Why?” I ask, low-voiced, but as the word escapes my lips, the floor above us creaks with uneven footsteps. Bits of dust fall from the rafters.

  Fyel hovers away from the door. “Find it,” he whispers, and he vanishes.

  Alger opens the cellar door, blinding me with morning sunlight.

  I do not like it here.

  CHAPTER 13

  Find it. Why does it matter? What is it?

  I finger the crystal through my shirt, whipping my hand away when Alger’s face appears atop the stairs. I absently wonder if Fyel’s obsession with the crystal is due to a fondness for pretty things and smile to myself.

  “Up. Up the stairs.” Alger points to the stairs as though I don’t understand his words, then taps the top one with my cane. “Up up up, now, in the light. I must see. Come up. No more in there. Up.”

  I lean on the creaky railing along the stairwell and drag my splinted leg up each step, wincing by the time I get to the top. I’m eager to get my hands on the last of the regladia, and curse myself for the burst of anxiety with Daneen that worsened the injury.

  I wish I could understand myself.

  Alger steps behind me and grasps both my shoulders before marching
me into the front room and sitting me on that same wicker bench he led me to on my first day here. He takes a seat on the chair. Pauses. Stands and moves the chair over so it’s directly in front of me. Sits. Stares at me.

  I’m used to Alger staring at me, but it’s usually while I’m working, which makes him easy to ignore. But this—sitting in the direct line of his scrutiny, with nothing to do but stare back—this is awkward.

  I meet his chartreuse eyes. They are level and unblinking, constant. I wait for him to laugh, to cry, to say something odd and shove me off into the kitchen, but he doesn’t. He stares. And stares. And stares.

  I drop my eyes to my hands and startle myself. They’re so . . . red. Redder even than yesterday. Cherry-pie-filling red. Not quite dark enough to match blood, but there’s barely a hint of tan color left at all. I turn my hands over, investigating. Pull out the collar of my shirt. Red everywhere.

  Cleric Tuck didn’t recognize me. Alger wept at the sight of me. Fyel called my transformation wonderful. But what does it mean?

  I want a mirror. But maybe I don’t. No one is colored the way I am. There are peaches and whites and browns and creams and yellows, but not such a bold red.

  I pinch my hair and bring it forward. It looks redder, too, and darker. Not as red as my skin, though.

  “Do you know what this is?” I dare ask, lifting my gaze to Alger. His stare hasn’t yielded. “Why I look—”

  “Ssshhh,” he says, and continues to stare.

  “But—”

  “Sshh!”

  My hands collapse into my lap. I stare at the wall behind Alger, then move my gaze around the rest of the room, briefly checking for any sign of a jagged, iridescent crystal. Not surprisingly, I don’t find one.

  I study my feet. Reach a pinky under the bandaging and try to scratch an itch. I should really pry this boot off and wash up, if I can convince Alger to let me.

  Alger clears his throat and says, “I’m changing my name.”

  His voice in the silence startles me. I knit my eyebrows together. “Again?”

  He nods, grinning. “Shah.”

  “Shah?”

  “Shah.”

  “Is your name now.”

  “Yes.” He nods. “Shah. It has a nice ring to it. Mysterious. I can be mysterious.”

  I won’t argue that. “It sounds like the wind.” Allemas, Alger, Shah. It’s getting hard to keep track of them all.

  He claps his hands. “Yes! The wind. Now, I’ve decided what to do, and I’m going to tell you, Maire. I’m going to tell you what to do.”

  I wait. He grins. A few heartbeats pass.

  “You want me to bake you something,” I guess.

  “Yes! But not a cake. I hate cake.”

  I gawk at him, but only for a moment before rubbing my temples in tight circles. “You hate cake.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you asked me to bake it—”

  “Make something different.”

  Pulling my hands away from my head, I study their bizarre color. “How about pie?”

  “What is pie?”

  “Gods above,” I mutter, and pull myself to my feet. My stomach growls; I’ll have to snack while I work, which is how I eat most days. I snatch my cane from beside Alger’s—Shah’s—chair.

  “Something to make me smart,” Al—Shah—says, following after me. “So I’ll know what to do.”

  “What to do about what?”

  He laughs as I pick a bowl out of the cupboard. “About Maire.”

  “The donkey?”

  “You’re silly. She’s dead.”

  I nearly drop the bowl as I spin toward him. “Dead? What? When? How did she die?”

  He shrugs. “Make me smart.”

  I turn back to the counter, if only to hide my face from him. Was that why he stopped bringing her to the forest? But he has a faster way to travel, anyway . . . Gods, he didn’t kill her, did he?

  I fumble for flour and butter. He wouldn’t kill the animal without motivation, surely. Perhaps he simply left her in a cellar for too long and she starved to death.

  My stomach clenches, but not for hunger. Food has lost its appeal.

  Alger—Shah—really likes pie. I’m surprised he liked this pie, considering the foulness of my mood as I made it, but he enjoyed it enough to give me the supplies I need to change the bandages on my leg. He shoves me into the backyard to do it.

  “And move the rocks, there.” He points to where the rocks already lay.

  “That isn’t moving them at all.”

  “No, there,” he insists, shaking his finger. A foot to the left, then.

  He vanishes into the house, this time not bothering to lock his many locks.

  I stare at the miles of blazeweed before me and, sighing, lower myself to the slim porch. My ankle feels too loose when I pull off the wooden boot, and it throbs anew, despite the regladia in my belly.

  It looks terrible.

  There is no infection, thankfully, but the entire limb looks like it was mauled by a bear or large dog. The scars are violet and shaped into identical lines, zigzagging in line with the trap’s teeth. My ankle is malformed, bowing where it shouldn’t be bowing and bumping where it should be smooth. Even if I somehow manage to rid myself of Alg—Shah—I’m not sure it will ever return to normal, even with a surgeon’s help.

  My vision blurs. I wipe the back of my wrist over my eyes and take in deep breaths. It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m alive. I’m doing far better than others.

  I think of the marauders, of the screams, of the corpses, and shudder. At least Cleric Tuck is okay, I remind myself. I wish I knew the location of Daneen’s home so I could pinpoint where to find him should I ever escape. Near Ochre! I should have shouted. So he could find me. Fyel’s visits are comforting, but I need help from people who are corporeal—people who can do more than merely speak to me.

  I rub my eyes a second time and pull a rag out of the mixing bowl, which I’d filled with water. At the very least, I can get rid of the smell of unwashed, sweat-logged skin.

  When I’m done, I stretch my legs forward to give the injury a moment to air out. Reaching over the edge of the porch, I pinch earth and rub the soft grit between my fingers. I’m being too hard in my thoughts. I wonder where I would be had Fyel not warned me of the marauders. Had the road not risen up to give me a few extra seconds. I might be dead with the others.

  I sense him before I see him, as if the pressure of the air has changed. As if a storm lingers beyond the mountains, the scent of it carried on the breeze. I can see him better this time, but his form is thinner and his coloring is even paler than usual. It’s as if staying in this realm is wearing him out, which worries me. Has he lingered since his last visit, waiting for Shah to give us some privacy?

  My stomach flutters despite the piecrust and apples I reluctantly fed it. For a moment I want to drape the rag over my foot to hide its ugliness, but Fyel has already seen it, surely. And why should I hide it from him?

  “Do you like cake?” I ask.

  He hovers by the side of the house, just over the blazeweed. He raises a faint, translucent eyebrow at the question, an expression that once again nags at my missing memory.

  “I have never had it,” he replies.

  Unwrapping a length of bandage, I say, “Even on your birthday?”

  “No.”

  “Everyone has cake on their birthday.” Arrice made me honey cake for my last one—at least, for the anniversary of the day she found me. No one should make their own birthday cake, she had said the night before. Don’t you dare.

  “You are classifying me with human terms,” Fyel says, though a soft smirk plays on his lips. He looks at me differently somehow. More tenderly, perhaps. More hopeful. “Raean terms. Birthdays . . .”

  “I’ll make you a cake someday.” What kind of cake would Fyel like if he could eat it? What could I enchant it with? Maybe a healthy dose of honesty and compliancy. Yes. That would do nicely.

  “Tr
y to coax Alger into traveling,” he says.

  “Shah. He changed his name again.”

  Fyel sighs. “If you can travel, cover more space, you might be able to find the crystal. You need to feel for it, Maire.”

  I press the pad of my thumb into my necklace. Feel for it. I suppose I understand his meaning. Maybe I’ll sense it the way I just sensed him. “Okay.”

  I draw my sore limb toward my body, my red toes and red foot and red ankle and red calf, and begin rebinding it. “What does it mean? This.” I gesture to myself before looping the bandages around my ankle, which has swollen a little more after my jaunt to the shrine. “Why am I red?”

  That look intensifies in his countenance. So peaceful, so happy. “It means you are remembering.”

  “He knows, doesn’t he? Alger—Shah. He knows something about it. He doesn’t want me to remember.”

  I tuck the end of the bandage into itself and reach under my shirt to pull the crystal free. I turn it over in my hand and watch the sunlight dance off its edges. It really does look like spun sugar.

  Fyel hovers closer to me and reaches down, taking the crystal from my grasp.

  Taking it.

  My gaze switches between the pendant and his face. My stomach flutters as though full of newly hatched moths. “You can touch it,” I whisper.

  He nods once and turns the crystal over in his own long fingers. That peaceful expression is gone, replaced instead with a look of concentration. A line creases the center of his forehead, and I long to smooth it out.

  Tentatively, I reach up a finger. Maybe, if he’s touching this, I can touch him . . .

  My hand passes through him. He looks at me with those gamre eyes that I cannot describe. So close, yet . . . he’s almost not real.

  The crystal falls back against my stomach.

  “I do . . . ,” I begin, hushed, “I do trust you.”

  A glimmer of that peace returns to his face.

  Then it vanishes.

  “No!” Shah screams from behind the back door. He flings it open and stumbles over me. My heart leaps into my throat. I snatch the crystal and stow it under my shirt.

  Fyel’s wings beat once, sending him backward, before Shah scoops up dirt and throws it at him. To my wonderment, the grains leave tiny white spots where they land on his person.