All the Colors of Magic

by Valija Zinck

  That woke Penelope from her trance. What? Oh, no, she simply had to have this book! Quick as a flash she jumped up and grabbed the book out of G.E.’s hands, exclaiming, “But yes, Granny, I think it’s a really great idea! I’ll have a look through it and see if I can figure it out. And I won’t tell Mom.” Not waiting for a reply, she darted upstairs and into her room, clutching her booty tightly to her chest.

  Penelope locked her bedroom door and leaned against it. She waited, her heart pounding. When she was quite sure she couldn’t hear Granny Elizabeth in pursuit, she closed the window and sat down on her bed with the book. The wonderful book. The wonderful book that had belonged to her father.

  Trembling a little, she spread her hands over the shimmering cover. The leather binding felt very soft and inviting, and strangely familiar somehow. There was no title written on the front or on the spine.

  Penelope closed her eyes for a moment. “Right,” she muttered, turning to the first page.

  Come into the Center

  The Studies of Alpha Regius

  So it did have a title after all—a very strange one. And what a strange name the author had too. Who was Alpha Regius? She started to leaf through the book. First there was a picture, but Penelope could only hazard a guess at what it was supposed to represent. It looked a bit like a wheel around which, somehow, many people were being whirled. In the center of this wheel was a figure with hands spread.

  On the next page was another picture. Again, something that looked like a wheel, with a lot of people around it, and in the center a quiet figure that wasn’t moving, just standing still. On the third page, another wheel with a figure in the middle, and on the fourth page, another.

  This was all very odd. A little disappointed, Penelope continued to leaf through the pages, and was surprised when, after five more wheel pictures, she turned to a list of contents:

  Come into the Center—Part One

  On seeing

  On realness

  On friendship

  Penelope’s eyes scanned the lines, searching for … well, she didn’t know what, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a recipe for ointment. Maybe some kind of clue that would tell her about her father. Perhaps On seeing would tell her how she could see him?

  She flicked to the relevant page and blinked. Green-gold letters scrambled wildly across the paper, interspersed with silvery-blue vine illustrations, growing across the page as if they were alive. Penelope couldn’t make out a single word, sentence, line, or any kind of context. No wonder G.E. couldn’t figure out this book!

  She was about to turn the page when something changed. Whether it was down to her eyes or the page, she couldn’t say—but all of a sudden, the letters made sense:

  Behind what’s behind, always lies what’s before,

  You need the below, if above you wish to soar.

  Well, this was better: Even though Penelope didn’t understand yet what the writing meant, at least it was in full sentences now. She read the lines again, this time aloud: “Behind what’s behind, always lies what’s before. You need the below, if above you wish to soar.” She felt the sound of the words inside herself, sensed them striking a chord within her.

  Suddenly—and Penelope could have sworn they weren’t there before—she spotted some more words on the bottom corner of the page:

  To see through the eyes of another:

  “Hex videris”

  “Hex videris?” Penelope murmured. “Hex videris … sounds weird.” To see through the eyes of another—that was a bit easier to understand than all this “behind” and “before” stuff. Perhaps she could try looking around the kitchen through Granny Elizabeth’s eyes—maybe she could just call out “Hex videris!” and then she could see for herself if the sink needed cleaning. Penelope giggled softly, then returned to the contents page, running her finger along the lines.

  On rain training

  That sounded interesting.

  On shadow training

  That sounded even more interesting.

  On forgetting

  On going back

  On the invisible

  Every single chapter sounded so interesting!

  On wealth

  On flying

  On flying? Penelope’s heart leapt. She flicked through the book rapidly, searching for the page. Hopefully she’d be able to make out the letters, hopefully she would understand. She was suddenly so excited that she had to compose herself a little so she didn’t tear the pages. And then she was there, on the page.

  Her heart thundered in her chest. There were no pictures, no vines, no strange gold letters: In black text on a white background, clear and easy to read, stood the words:

  If you are the fire, and you want to be in the air,

  Take root in the ground until it calls you there.

  Pour the water down from the top,

  Close your eyes, and lift yourself off.

  “Semus triokko!”

  A light bulb flicked on in Penelope’s head. Of course—this explained everything! Pour the water down from the top … her lake-sodden hair must’ve been the difference between her first few attempts at flight and her ability to rise up into the trees. So that was it! You just needed water to complete the whole thing, to complete the four elements: fire, air, earth, and water!

  “I’ll try that,” Penelope said to herself. “But not right now. Tomorrow. And not in here, or I might hit my head on the ceiling.”

  She hid the precious book under her mattress, got ready for bed, and went to sleep, exhausted.

  Why does time move about eighty times slower at school? Penelope had often wondered. And right now, as well as wrestling with this philosophical question, she was also pondering the age-old math puzzle: How much longer till the bell rings?

  Even though Mr. Potts was possibly the nicest teacher in the world, Penelope simply couldn’t summon up any enthusiasm for his math lessons. What was the point of learning all this stuff? What would anyone ever need to use it for? When would she finally be able to get out of here? Out and home to Alpha Regius, and then later to the stone circle, with a large bottle of water in her backpack and—

  “Penelope?”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Yes’?” boomed Mr. Potts.

  “Er … I thought you just said my name?”

  “That’s correct. I did say your name.”

  “And … er, why?” asked Penelope.

  “Why? Now there’s a question, my dear. And it could just possibly have something to do with the fact that I would like an answer from you.”

  “Seven point nine two,” said Penelope. That was the figure written on the piece of paper that Pete was holding up behind the teacher’s back.

  “Very good, Penelope. You never cease to amaze me,” said Mr. Potts approvingly. “That really was a very good bit of reading! And of course I must give a shout-out to our Pete for his accurate transcription, not to mention his beautiful handwriting!”

  Penelope went red, and Pete looked down in embarrassment. Mr. Potts had obviously been practicing seeing through the eyes of another as well.

  * * *

  When school was finally over, and Penelope was eating dinner with her mother and Granny Elizabeth, there was a knock at the door of the dragon house. It was the postman. “Sorry, running a bit late today,” he said. He plonked a parcel on the table. “Here’s another heavy package for the esteemed Mrs. Elizabeth Burke, and here’s the rest of your post.” He smiled, wished them a good day, and was gone again.

  The day’s post included a rehab center authorization for Granny Elizabeth, who had visited the doctor after her dizzy spell in the field. A rest cure was when somebody went away and rested in order to improve their health, and Granny was to go to the coast in a month’s time. She seemed rather pleased about it, but not as pleased as Penelope was. A three-week rest cure for her grandmother meant three weeks of intensive studies for Penelope, for she’d be able to spend hours on end putting her
Alpha Regius studies to the test. What a wonderful thought!

  * * *

  “I’m going out,” Penelope called to her mother after she’d finished her homework. She stuffed a large bottle of water into her backpack and opened the front door.

  “Goodbye, my darling. I’ll probably be at my rehearsal by the time you get back,” Mrs. Gardener said, fetching a baseball cap from the table and handing it to Penelope. “Take some sun protection, please. Oh, and did you borrow my scarf? The one with the roses on? I’ve been looking for it for ages, and I can’t seem to find it anywhere.”

  “Your scarf?” Penelope had hung it back on the clothes hook after she’d found it in the swamp forest, hadn’t she? “Umm, no, I haven’t borrowed it. But ask Granny—she’s pretty good at ‘borrowing’ other people’s things.” Penelope hopped down the wooden steps.

  “Penelope?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please be careful.”

  Penelope swallowed and nodded. Did she have I’m going flying now written across her forehead or something? Sometimes it was as if her mother could see right into her head.

  The heat had parched the ground, turning the grass around the stone circle into stalks of straw. Sweat poured down Penelope’s face and stung her eyes. It would have been more comfortable to practice in the shade, of course, but shade meant trees—and Penelope definitely didn’t want to risk another collision.

  Setting her baseball cap on the ground, she opened her backpack and took out her water bottle. Now she was ready. She stood in the middle of the stone circle, slowly unscrewed the cap of the bottle, and held it above her head, ready to pour.

  “Ready?” she said aloud. “Yes? OK, let’s go!” She closed her eyes and concentrated on her feet, rooting them in the hard, dry ground. She felt the soles of her feet tingle, braced herself for the electric shock running through her body, then poured most of the water over her head. “Semus triokko!” she shouted.

  Her feet lifted off the ground, slowly at first, then gathering speed until she was shooting upward like an arrow. The wind rushed past Penelope’s ears, the air temperature around her dropping sharply. Her stomach somersaulted as she glanced down, the landscape below her growing smaller, the buildings quickly as tiny as dollhouses. Wispy clouds scudded past, but still she kept climbing. She needed to figure out how to stop, or she’d never get back to the ground—or else she’d have turned into an ice cube by the time she did.

  Grasping the bottle in one hand, she reached quickly into her hair with the other and pulled. Immediately she lurched forward onto her belly, her body spinning around on its own axis, but she was still climbing upward. Penelope dropped the bottle and reached into her hair with both hands, pulling desperately.

  Tschschsch! Her upward trajectory finally ground to a halt. She gave a sigh of relief. She was so high now that the icy mountain air hurt her lungs. All she could see of the world below her was a faint gray-green haze, veiled by clouds.

  “Holy swamp cow, why is nothing ever straightforward?” she complained. “And why does everything have to be so extreme?” Shivering with cold, she pulled her hair again and began her descent. Gradually, the stone circle reappeared, and she was back in the warmth of summer. She gently lifted her hands from her hair and paused midair, lying on her front, then waved herself forward—the movement was like swimming, really—and immediately slid along like a fish.

  Interesting! Now that Penelope was lying on her front, she found she could fly through the air like a red feather, slow, weightless, and silent. She propelled herself forward. The meadow flew past, then a field of corn, and then a field of rapeseed. She flew over rows of cabbages—a hare bounding energetically between the lines—and skimmed the tops of whitethorn and hazelnut hedges. She saw a pair of ducks waddling in a dried-out pond and waved to them as she flew on over a pine wood and out the other side, where horses stood motionless in the sun. Fields of red poppies and blue cornflowers flashed by, their colors vivid against the parched ground. Penelope gaped in wonder, a quiet joy spreading through her: Viewed from up here, the world was simply, dazzlingly beautiful.

  A flock of birds suddenly appeared on her flight path. Instinctively, Penelope pulled on one side of her still-damp hair, and immediately turned in that direction. She chuckled: This was so easy!

  “Did you see that?” she called out to the birds. “Now, that’s what I call super-strength hair control!”

  The birds flew off, ignoring Penelope’s new discovery. But that didn’t matter, because Penelope just pulled her hair again and flew after them.

  “It’s a special edition—it’s called Galactic Penelope! You might find it useful too. I’ll try and get you some, if you like.”

  The birds didn’t like: They made another sharp U-turn and flew toward the herd of horses, but Penelope kept following, as smoothly as a veil drawn through water. Before the birds reached the pine woods, they started to descend. Penelope flew very low and made a slightly bumpy landing in the middle of a cornfield.

  Laughing, she plopped down onto the dry ground, stretched out her arms and legs, and looked up at the sky through the pine trees. I was up there, she thought. I was right—I was right! I can do it, just like the birds—I can go up, I can go straight, I can come down. There was a choir singing a hymn in her heart. But suddenly, the conductor of this choir gave the signal for “total silence,” and Penelope sat up with a start.

  “The bottle! I’ve got no water left!”

  She hadn’t thought this through properly. She should never have landed here, because without water, she couldn’t get high enough to fly back. She was going to have to walk back home—and it was a long, long way on foot. Grimly, she pushed the sharp corn leaves apart and started to work her way through the field.

  By the time she arrived back at the dragon house late at night, Galactic Penelope was aching all over.

  Tom and Pete were so fidgety the next morning at school that they fell off their chairs twice during the German lesson, and ended up getting black marks from Mrs. Norton. Penelope, on the other hand, sat completely motionless at her table, far too tired to even move, let alone fidget. She was still aching and exhausted after yesterday’s long walk home. If Anna-Lea hadn’t nudged her and pushed a small folded note onto her desk, she would quite possibly have fallen asleep and got herself a black mark too. She unfolded the note, curious. She instantly felt better, because it read:

  A trip into town with Tom and Pete, and as many films as she wanted? Penelope smiled and wrote back, I’m in. But she didn’t pass the note back to Anna-Lea—instead, she screwed it up and threw it when Mrs. Norton’s back was turned. It hit Pete squarely on the forehead. Pete jumped, grinned, and pushed the note over to Tom as Mrs. Norton turned back to the class. Penelope wrote, Die Katze frisst nicht die Spinne in her exercise book with an angelic expression on her face.

  She hurried home after school. There was a lot to do: First of all, she wanted to ask her mother about tomorrow’s movie theater excursion, and then there was the problem of the water bottle to solve—how could she guarantee a steady supply of water when she flew? She also wanted to see if she could find an ointment recipe anywhere in the Alpha Regius book. That would make G.E. happy, and besides, Penelope could do with something like that herself after yesterday’s exhausting walk home. She was covered in scrapes and bruises.

  Granny Elizabeth was kneeling down in the vegetable patch in front of the dragon house, between the celery and the carrots, doing some weeding. She looked up as Penelope hopped up the wooden steps. “Ah, there you are. You can give me a hand. Lucia needs some peace and quiet, and I’m going to tackle these dratted creeper corms. As it’s hardly rained this year, maybe we can knock them on the head once and for all. The pointed shovel’s over there,” she said, tugging at a stubborn root.

  “Maybe later, Granny!” Penelope called out cheerfully. She had no intention of doing any weeding right now. She wanted to tell her mother about Tom’s movie theater vouchers first, e
ven if she did need peace and quiet. She quickly slipped into the house before Granny could protest.

  “Mooooom! Guess what happened today?”

  Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the wall.

  “Mom?” Penelope put her backpack down and went over to the table. Her mother didn’t say anything, but simply nodded to the envelope in front of her. A gray envelope with a sticker on it.

  “Has he only sent five dollars again?” Penelope’s lip trembled slightly. She didn’t want to think that the man who was her father could do such a thing.

  “No,” said her mother tonelessly. “He’s sent sand.”

  “Sand?”

  “Yes. Sand and feathers. Look in the envelope. That’s what he expects us to live on this month.”

  Penelope took the envelope. She could feel little grains through the paper.

  “If I could get my hands on that man, I’d …” whispered her mother. “Why can’t he just stop this? He can keep his stupid money as far as I’m concerned—I can manage without it. But why does he have to torment me like this? Hasn’t he got anything better to do? What’s he getting out of all this? I’ve never done anything to hurt him. Never. I don’t understand … we loved each other so much.”

  Penelope was at a loss for words. She didn’t understand it either. She wanted to comfort her mother, but had no idea how. Her chest felt tight; in the same spot where music and happiness had been only yesterday, a choking feeling was taking root. The feeling spread through her lungs. Penelope had never felt so full of rage, had never felt such an uncontrollable fury as she felt toward the man who had sent this envelope. And that anger drove her upstairs and into her room, where she pulled the book out from its hiding place under the mattress.

  I’ll find something in here. Something that will hurt you, Leo Gardener. I swear it.

  Her hands shaking, she leafed past the wheel pictures in search of the book’s contents page, but there was nothing but grayish pages tangled with green tendrils, one after another.