by Terah Edun
“Including this?” Mae asked incredulously.
“Including you,” Donna Marie said confidently as she leaned in. “You have guts and smarts when it matters Maeryn Darnes. If you’d only unlock your magic you would be unstoppable.”
Mae shrugged uncomfortably. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be unstoppable. She’d settle for just capable enough to cure her sisters.
Thinking of that she lowered her voice and whispered, “So what now?”
As she did, she looked around behind her to see that her stepmother was still back out in the hallway. Her sisters and father, for whatever reason, hadn’t responded to the commotion if they’d heard it.
Donna Marie lowered her chin for a moment and tapped her fingers on a wooden barrier as if she was long in thought.
“Mae, I think you’re ready. I know you’re ready, but…” the foreign woman said hesitating.
“But what?” Mae pressed turning to her with a frown on her face.
Mae was well aware she could be using the stalling as a tactic to draw her in to an irresistible option but still she couldn’t help it. The foreign woman had doubts?
“Mae did you see what I did there with my gifts?” Donna Marie asked carefully and quietly. “I mean did you really pay attention?”
Mae nodded and gulped. “It was unimaginable. Something that’s impossible.”
“Not impossible, just taking quite a huge concentration of my power,” Donna Marie assured.
“So it’s the level of power that it takes that allowed you to do what you did?” Mae asked.
“No, the transfiguration I was able to accomplish is an aspect of my own mage identity. An inheritance if you will,” Donna Marie corrected. “It’s something I can do that I’ve yet to see another mage accomplish. Similarly I think you will have your own abilities as well.”
Mae said, “It sounds like it will be mystery.”
“Not for long,” a confident Donna Marie assured her. “You’ll be able to learn all kinds of things.
“With you?” Mae said skeptically. “I thought you just said your powers were proprietary?”
“No, I said they were inherent,” Donna Marie leaned forward with a whisper. “Every mage’s power is unique and specific to their cores. I can manipulate natural substances to retain new forms but only temporarily and at great cost.”
Mae blinked. “So that capsule you made for Ember?”
“Similar in manner to this,” Donna Marie said with a nod as she indicated the previously warped stone floor. “Although this took much more effort simply because I had the stone interacting with another living being, and not killing it, while transforming the stone out of its natural state.”
“It was a very tough process to accomplish,” Donna Marie admitted as she continued.
Mae looked at her amazed. “But you hardly looked affected.”
“Not physically no,” Donna Marie said. “But drawing simultaneously on my gift in multiple locations is taxing, which is why I actually had to give some castings up.”
Mae was intrigued. She wondered what castings the foreign woman was referring to. Surely not her sister’s? Mae thought horrified. No, not possible.
The foreign woman continued as if she hadn’t said anything too unalarming and Mae kept quiet as she heard Ember’s name.
“In fact how I transfigured this stone floor is also how I did it with your sister, Ember,” the foreign woman continued. “I used the elements available, in this case the forest itself and specifically the tree she was leaning against.”
Mae filed that information away. It looked so different from the dark séance she had witnessed her stepmother participating in. For one, Donna Marie seemed to almost commune with whatever element she was using. Her stepmother and her cohort’s casting had not looked at all consensual, how could it when the two participants whose life forces were being drawn out of them were trapped in an illness the whole time?
“So the door too was you practicing transfiguration?” Mae asked.
“It was a more basic casting than transfiguration,” Donna Marie counseled. “Same principle but I was merely allowing the door to remember the shape it had once been and to reconfigure itself back into that state.”
“But you think I could do something like that,” Mae asked shocked.
“Well, we won’t know until we fully unlock your gifts,” the foreign woman said with a smile. “But I could give you a taste of what it would be like now.”
Mae looked furtively over her shoulder.
“Here? Now?” Mae furtively whispered. Her family surrounded them in every level of the greater holding and would surely be coming here very quickly as well.
“It’s just a glimpse,” assured Donna Marie. “Using the trigger of my magic we can ask yours, though dormant, to form the shape it most…desires.”
“Desires?” Mae murmured.
“Yes,” Donna Marie said with her eyes sparking in excitement. “And with that we’ll not only have an idea of what type of magic you’re capable of casting but just what it is your family has hidden away for so long.”
Mae twisted her lips as she thought about it.
“One question,” she said. “Will the ‘shape’ effect my ability to hinder you with the casting we’ve been planning?”
“It shouldn’t,” Donna Marie said with a shrug. “With us working in a group of three we’ll be able to smooth out any individualities in order to call on sheer power to initiate what you need.”
Mae blew out a relieved breath, “Alright then. How do we do it?”
Mae couldn’t resist, it was all so tempting.
And so far, Donna Marie had managed to preserve her life with this magic more than once. If she could do the same, and they could do it for her siblings in conjunction, it was worth the risk.
“Easy,” Donna Marie said. “Hold out your hand.”
Apprehensive Mae held out a trembling hand as she wondered what Donna Marie planned to do with her.
Bleed her palm?
Transfigure her skin?
Read her destiny in the swirls of her prints?
But to start all she did was cup Mae’s slightly shaking hand and raise her arm up so that Mae’s hand was parallel to her own body and mid-height between the two of them. Then the foreign woman took her opposite hand and formed a half-cup above Mae’s upturned flesh.
Instantly there was a glow about Donna Marie’s fingers and Mae watched in heady anticipation as to what she planned to do. But she didn’t have to wait long. The glow extended down from her fingers and into her palm. Then instead of gathering there it fell down in a circular dome pattern until they were both staring at sphere glowing with silver light hovering midway between her palm and Mae’s.
Donna Marie began to play with the silver sphere as she pushed it into Mae’s palm with ease. The only thing Mae felt when the magic past through her skin was a slight sensation of pressure at first and then just an itch.
After the second time of the sphere passing through Donna Marie’s hand and back into Mae’s it began to take on a new color. The brilliant silver transitioned in the fiercest orange. To Mae it looked like they had the sun between their hands.
“It’s wonderful,” Mae said. “How are you conjuring it? Is this also transfiguration?”
“No,” Donna Marie said with intense satisfaction. “I only called up the gift. But this gift is yours.”
“What is it?” Mae asked astonished as a delish thrill went through her at the idea that
she could be doing this.
Donna Marie smiled. “I can only tell what it looks like from aural perspective. Your gift seems inclined to flare into bright tangerine-adjacent colors. While you might have noticed that mine’s tends to flare with metallic silver.”
“And what do the colors mean?” Mae asked eagerly.
“So much and yet not enough for me to hazard a guess about your specific gifts other than to say I think they’ll be quite volatile,” Donna Marie sa
id.
“Volatile,” Mae murmured in disappointment. She didn’t like the sound of that.
“Don’t worry,” Donna Marie assured. “That could mean any number of things but I’m almost certain it ensures you great power and that is the most important part of this. Power to cast your spells…once you fully unlock you gift.”
Mae rubbed her right hand on her throat absentmindedly. The idea of removing the tattoo for even a temporary span made her nervous. The idea of doing so permanently only to unlock something Donna Marie described as volatile made sweat bead down her back.
“Are you alright?” the foreign woman asked in concern.
“Its quite a revelation to get through,” Mae said as raised her eyes.
Donna Marie gave her a grin. “Do you know what I found out in my early teens once tested for my gift?”
Mae shook her head mutely.
In a conspiratorial tone, Donna Marie said, “That my gift was going to be pragmatic and stable. My earth casting instincts were supposed to lead me toward a desire for the familiar, to be laggard at times, and wholly stuck in my ways. And yet here I am, halfway across the world into foreign lands and discovering new things every day. So you see, to be of one gift doesn’t define who you are, just a part of what you’ll become.”
Mae bit her lip and nodded, somewhat relieved.
She didn’t really want to turn into an ill-tempered and powerful caster. She still wanted to be who she was.
“Again?” Donna Marie said with a mischievous look as she held out her hand.
This time Mae didn’t hesitate and held out her hand. It took seconds for the beautiful ball of flames to reactivate and this time it was a mixture of silver and bright citrine. So beautiful that she gasped in awe.
An awe that was broken when she heard her stepmother shout from across the room, “Maeryn Darnes, what do you think you’re doing?”
Mae quickly dropped her hand and the flame disappeared as if it had never been there before she guiltily turned to her stepmother who was watching her with a disapproving look.
“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Mae countered. “Her magic saved us.”
“That may be so, but her people’s ways are different from ours,” her stepmother snapped back. “Their women do strange things.”
“Strange things like use their magic to save our lives?” Mae snapped as she whirled around, at once hurt and incensed at the idea that if Donna Marie was unnatural in her stepmother’s eyes, then so was she.
“Yes,” her stepmother said as she came forward and spread her hands in a beseeching gesture. “And the lady knows I’ll never forget what she did for us, but its not right for us Mae.”
“But what if there was more?” Mae insisted. She desperately wanted to ask if her stepmother’s opinion of the foreign woman would change if she and Mae could use that very same magic to save her daughters.
“What more?” her stepmother pressed. “There is a fine point between acceptable magic and heretic acts.”
“You’re one to talk about heresy!” Mae snapped, unable to hold herself back.
It was just so wrong, to look at Donna Marie and women like her as so strange, foreign, unnatural when Mae knew for a fact her stepmother was practicing the dark arts with male heretics herself.
The room went completely silent as her stepmother huffed out a breath and asked, “What is that supposed to mean?”
Mae gulped as she realized she’d backed herself into a corner and there was no way out.
Not without the truth coming out.
Not without putting herself into more danger than she ever had before.
The question was could she trust her stepmother? Was there a possibility that what she’d seen in this very sickroom and Ember’s interpretation of the actions that had taken place was wrong?”
15
“Well,” her stepmother demand. “Explain yourself this instant Maeryn Darnes.”
Mae felt Donna Marie reach out to her from behind her.
She whispered only one word, “Don’t.”
Mae felt her entire body trembling at the effort to hold back the truth. She just wanted it out. Tired of all the secrets and lies and even more, she was offended on behalf of the foreign woman. At most times if you asked her, well Mae couldn’t stand her. But out of all the adults in her life, family and strangers alike, this one was the one who had been as truthful as possible with her. She may have held some things back but she had never out-and-out lied to Mae. Unlike her stepmother standing before her. Unlike the great-aunt she had confronted in the hallway.
That was not even taking into account that she had also saved their lives and she was a guest of their family holding.
Which is why when it came down to it…Mae felt like she owed her.
So she acquiesced to the female mage’s spoken wishes and muttered to her stepmother, “Nothing.”
“What was that?” her stepmother responded harshly.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Mae snapped harshly. “I just…had hope.”
“Hope for what Mae?” her stepmother asked in exasperation. “What could you possibly want that you don’t already have? That your family doesn’t provide for you?”
Mae’s head snapped up at the words thrown in her face.
“It’s not about not having something that my family can’t give,” Mae cried out in protest.
“Then what is it?” her stepmother pressed with urgency in her voice.
Mae waved a wild hand while losing control for once.
“You’ve known me since I was Gareth’s age!” Mae said. “Can’t you see what I’ve always wanted. What the boys have always have? It’s not fair!”
“Magic is not for girls, Mae” her stepmother said in harsh voice. “Get that through your obstinate head.”
Mae stuck out her lip. “Says the elders, says the grandmothers. What about what the young want?”
She truly was asking.
“Mae what has gotten into you? How dare you be so disrespectful to your elders,” her stepmother asked as she looked genuinely shocked.
“It’s not disrespectful!” Mae cried. “Its just the quest for the truth.”
Her stepmother shook her head in complete disappointment as she responded, “It’s like you’ve become a completely different person in the space of a week.”
Mae didn’t know what to say, the truth or a lie? She could tell her she’d been kidnapped, told she was mage, found out her male relatives were performing heretic rites, and was pretty sure the woman in front of herself was involved in keeping her own children sick, but Mae didn’t think blurting it all out at once with no proof would help anyone.
Least of all her siblings.
Fortunately at that moment Donna Marie stepped in.
“Mistress Darnes we’re all under a tremendous about of stress it would seem,” the foreign woman said with a kind look in her eyes.
Mae’s stepmother turned to her reluctantly as if she’d forgotten the other woman was even present.
She pursed her lips in displeasure as she said, “I’m so sorry to involve you in this. Truly I respect your people’s traditions but they are not for me or my stepdaughter to participate in.”
Donna Marie immediately responded with a pleasant nod as she said, “Of course, I understand. Cultures vary and traditions are of paramount importance. It is I who should be apologizing to you for exposing such a young woman to things she could not possibly comprehend would be so divisive.”
Relief flooded Mae’s stepmother’s face.
“Yes, you understand,” her stepmother rushed to say. “I did not mean to be rude or offend you.”
“No offense taken,” Donna Marie said with a casual wave of her hand. “Your family is under a lot of stress just in your daily lives. Words are often said that we do not mean in such a time.”
Her stepmother nodded and followed her hands in front of her serenely.
“I’m grateful for your understanding,�
� her stepmother replied.
“And of course,” Donna Marie continued with a kind look in her eyes. “You have our deepest sympathies for your children’s suffering.”
“Thank you,” Mae’s stepmother said with tears brimming on her eyes.
“Have you seen them yet?” Donna Marie asked with honey in her voice. “It might make you feel better after all you’ve been through in the past hour.”
Hello, I was here too! Mae wanted to say but she kept her mouth shut. Clearly Donna Marie was more of a talented diplomat than Mae had given her credit for.
“I… “her stepmother said while pressing a hand uncertainly to her throat. “I think that might be a good idea.”
“Excellent,” Donna Marie said beaming. “And just in time too, as my people have returned.”
A voice from the hallway had Mae and her stepmother turning to face the entrance where a heifer had so recently barged through and turned the room into chaos. Fortunately aside from a few broken chairs, there was no sign that the event had even occurred. Donna Marie had even repaired the door and frame which had been bashed in by the heifer’s strong brute force.
“We’ve returned the cow to its pasture,” the first guard said sheepishly as he ran his fingers through his hair while the three women watched them.
“Good,” the foreign woman said with a smile at once. “Then perhaps you two can escort myself and Mistress Darnes out into the gardens. She needs some quality time with her beautiful daughters and some sunshine.”
The second guard nodded and hurried to say “Of course.”
They ambled over to the exit to the outside garden and waited. Not looking the least put out at being assigned escort duty.
Probably because as long as they keep Donna Marie in eyesight their leader doesn’t care what they do, Mae thought ruefully.
“Shall we?” Donna Marie asked as she crooked her elbow out toward Mae’s stepmother and the woman put her right arm over her lent hand.
“Let’s,” her stepmother said gaily. “I’m sure the children would like some new visitors. We try to have a different person talk to them every day but the same family members do get boring day-in and day-out.”
