“Uncle Earn,” I said again, before anybody could get over being surprised, “if I’m such a dangerous person, why did you let my cousins pick on me all that time? And why do you keep egging everyone on to badger me?”
Uncle Earn just gaped at me, and the anger inside me grew. I saw that he’d never even thought that plaguing me might make things worse, and he wouldn’t have cared if he had thought of it. He’d only ever cared about showing everyone he was right.
“If I was going to do evil to someone, it wouldn’t be to Papa and Mama or my sisters, who haven’t ever done anything bad to me,” I said. Then I thought about some of the punishments Mama and Papa had handed out, and about some of the pranks my sisters and brothers had pulled on me, and I added conscientiously, “Well, they haven’t done anything bad out of pure meanness, anyway.”
I looked Uncle Earn straight in the eye, and my anger nearly boiled right over. And then along with the anger, something else woke inside me, something that was already just as strong as the anger that had been building up for all my life. Magic.
“If I was going to do evil,” I said slowly, “I’d do it to those who’ve troubled and tormented me, over and over.” I couldn’t help smiling as I spoke, because it felt so good to say what I’d been thinking for years. “I’d do it to you, Uncle Earn,” I told him. And then the magic and the anger swirled together and exploded out of me, right at him.
CHAPTER 15
MAKING MAGIC IS NOT AN EASY THING. IT TAKES FOCUS AND CONcentration, on top of years of study to know the exact right combination of words and objects that will do just what the magician wants it to. If you get one tiny thing wrong, the spell can fizzle like a wet firecracker, or worse yet, turn back on the magician in some unexpected way. Or tear into the people standing around nearby.
That’s what they taught us in school, anyway, and I believed it. I’d seen enough times what happened when Miss Ochiba’s older students got careless—looking like they’d been dipped in green paint was the least of it. Papa’s students were more careful, but they were also doing harder spells, so when things did go wrong it could be pretty spectacular. Once when a spell went wrong, it punched a hole the shape of a duck in every pane of glass in every west-facing window in every building for three blocks around the magic lab, in spite of all the shields and mufflers they had up.
But when all that muddle of magic and fury burst out of me at Uncle Earn, I knew that even though I hadn’t been focused or concentrated or even practiced it as a spell, it was going to do exactly what I wanted. Not what I’d told it to do or meant for it to do, because I hadn’t thought about either of those things. It was going to do what I wanted. And what I wanted right that minute was for Uncle Earn to pay for all his meanness, and pay handsomely.
For one tiny snip of a second, just as that magic left me, I knew all that and I was happy to know it. Then, in the next instant, I was terrified. I grabbed for that mess of magic, trying to pull it back before anything dreadful happened, the way sometimes you can catch a sentence right at the edge of your teeth before you actually say it and get yourself in trouble.
I didn’t quite catch this, but I did something. The angry tangle of magic fell apart right before it got to Uncle Earn. The air filled with a cloud of sparkles, bright enough to see clearly even in the daylight. Uncle Earn flinched and batted at them with his hands, like he was trying to shoo off a cloud of gnats. The crowd of people who’d gathered around us all gasped. Papa and Lan stared at me with identical expressions of surprise and alarm.
The sparkles floated higher, hovering over the crowd like fireflies, except they twinkled like the sun on lake water instead of blinking slowly. They hung there for near a full minute before they winked out, while I stood there panting and hoping they wouldn’t do anything but sparkle. Uncle Earn kept batting at them until they rose too high for him to reach. Then he started sputtering at me instead. I didn’t understand most of it, until he turned to the people behind him and said, “You saw her attack me! You all saw!”
People stirred at one end of the crowd and started moving off. Uncle Gregory came through them toward us and gave the rest of the onlookers a glare that got them moving, too. He put one big hand on Uncle Earn’s shoulder—Uncle Gregory was the biggest of my uncles by a fair margin—and said cheerfully, “Earn, you’re drunk as a skunk. You’d better come along before Janna finds you, or you’ll hear about it for the next month.”
Uncle Earn sputtered some more, but he didn’t have much choice. When Uncle Gregory decided to move someone along, he moved. I found out later that as soon as Aunt Tilly heard there was a ruckus going on, she’d hunted up Uncle Gregory and told him that poor Diane had been through enough already, and it was his house and his responsibility to see that nothing more happened to spoil the party. So he had come straight over to put a stop to whatever was going on.
Papa watched for a minute, then said, “Eff, you’re overwrought. Lan, take your sister into the house and find somewhere quiet. I’ll be along in a minute.” He sounded very stern. He didn’t wait to see that we did as we were told, but started purposefully after Uncle Gregory and Uncle Earn.
Lan nodded even though Papa didn’t see, and grabbed my arm. As he hustled me away, he asked, “How did you do that?”
“I don’t know!” I said. I pulled my arm free. “I didn’t do it apurpose. It just happened.”
“Well, you’re in for it now,” he said. “Uncle Earn isn’t a good enough magician to spot anything but those sparks you did, but Uncle Stephen is, and so is Aunt Irma, and they were both watching. It’ll be all over the family in no time.”
I just nodded miserably. Uncle Earn would have me arrested for real this time, and I didn’t even care. All the things everyone had been saying about me for all those years were true. I’d almost hurt Uncle Earn badly, and I’d been happy about it. That wasn’t right, no matter if he deserved it. And Papa and Lan knew it, too, or they wouldn’t have looked at me the way they had.
By the time Papa came to find us, I’d sunk into a black despair. Papa took one look at me and sent Lan away, then held me for a while, as if I was a childing of three instead of near grown. Then he asked me to tell him what happened, from the beginning. When I finished, he told me he was going to put a dampening spell on me until we got back to Mill City. It’d work on my magic like a soggy blanket smothering a fire, so there wouldn’t be any more accidents. Once we got home, he said, I’d have to take a whole long list of tests to see how and why I’d been able to let loose a spell like that and then stop it cold.
I nodded, though I didn’t see that it mattered whether I agreed or not. Papa told me I was overexcited and overtired, and made me lie down until it was time to leave, so I missed the rest of Diane’s party. If I thought about it at all, I was glad. It wasn’t even a punishment; it’d have been worse to go back out and see everyone looking at me sideways and whispering and backing away as I was sure they would. I didn’t want to spoil Diane’s party the way Rennie had spoiled her wedding, not any more than I’d already done.
On the way back to Aunt Tilly’s after the party, Lan told me that everything had gone fine for the rest of the evening. John Brearsly even laughed when Diane fussed about Uncle Earn and me, and told her that there was no harm done that he could see, and that it’d make a good story to tell at their fiftieth anniversary. That made me feel a little better. At least there was someone who didn’t mind what had happened.
The next morning, Papa took me into Aunt Tilly’s music room and did the magic-dampening spell. I didn’t understand most of it. All I had to do was stand in the middle of a clean sheet while he ground some herbs and sprinkled them in a circle around me, then burned some other plants and sprinkled me with water and I forget what else. He didn’t explain it, and I was still too miserable to ask questions, before or after.
The dampening spell made me sleepy, and even when I was awake, I felt as if I was walking around in a thick fog. I didn’t like it at all, but at least I didn’t have the energy to fret over the dark looks and the scared whispers that swirled around me for the rest of our stay in Helvan Shores. Truth to tell, the memory of it is still foggy, even after all this time.
As soon as we got back to Mill City, Papa cleared the spell off me. Right away I was almost as miserable as I’d been back in Helvan Shores. When I said as much to Papa, he told me not to worry, that as long as I was away from Uncle Earn’s “irritating influence” it wasn’t likely that anything else would happen for a long time. By then, I’d have the training to control my magic.
