understand.”
I stared in surprise. The Rennie I’d known five years before would have fired right up with some excuse. This Rennie wasn’t giving out excuses, or at least…
“Scared?” I said finally. “Scared of what?”
“Lots of things.” Rennie shivered. “Losing Brant. Losing…other things. Being stuck in Mill City forever. Becoming an old maid.” She glanced at me for the first time since I’d started in on her, then looked away again. “If it’s any comfort, I’ve paid for it.”
Paid? I didn’t say anything, just sat there for a long time while the shadows deepened. Then Rennie sighed. “Eff, do you have any idea what it’s like to live a life without magic?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve been trying for five years.” Her voice sank to barely more than a whisper, though there was no one near enough to overhear. “It’s hard. Harder than I’d ever have believed. These people—most of them grew up this way. They don’t understand; they’ve never known anything else.”
“They’ve only been out here for five years,” I said. “They must have seen plenty of magic before that.”
“Seeing isn’t the same as doing.” Rennie’s voice stayed low, and I leaned forward to be sure to hear. “Brant’s a dear, and more understanding than most, but even he—everything takes twice as long and three times as much effort to do. Even dusting! And everything has to be planned out ahead of time—so long for the dough to rise, so long for the wash water to heat, or the bread won’t be done ‘til an hour past dinner and the clothes will still be on the line at midnight, because you can’t use magic to hurry anything along or make up for lost time.
“But it’s the little things that are the worst. Do you know how horrible it is to climb into a stone-cold bed every night in winter? Or to hear a mosquito whining around your head in the dark when you’re trying to sleep? Or worse, to find your baby crying and covered in bug bites every morning, when all that’s needed to prevent it is a five-second spell that any twelve-year-old can do without thinking?”
“That’s why you put the spell on the fly-block netting,” I said softly.
Rennie gave me a startled look. “I couldn’t stand it anymore. Brant doesn’t know; he thinks the bugs have stopped because of some nasty herbal mixture I soak the netting in every week.”
“It’s not just the netting, though, is it?”
“How did you—” Rennie stopped, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “Never mind. I forget sometimes just how much magic can do, if you put your mind to it. The people here…well, a few of them know enough to sense a strong, active spell if they go looking for it, but most of them haven’t had enough training even for that. That’s why I stick to small spells.”
“I can see why you’d want to magic the fly-block netting,” I said. “But the other things—is it really worth breaking the rules, just to make things a little easier?”
“Yes.” The word had the intensity of a shout, though Rennie’s voice couldn’t have carried past the edge of the stoop we sat on. “And it’s not just to make things a little easier.”
“It’s not?”
Rennie raised her chin, and I saw a flash of the old, bossy sister I remembered. “No, it’s not,” she said firmly. “I don’t expect you to understand, because you’ve never had to go without spell casting. But going without magic is like…like going without your eyes, or your hands, or your legs. Sometimes it builds up inside me until I could just
“That’s awful,” I said. But Rennie had always been one for seeing a mule and saying it was a mammoth, so I asked, “If it’s that bad, how can anybody stand to be a Rationalist at all?”
“It’s different for the ones who believe what the Rationalists say,” Rennie said. “If you really do think magic is a crutch, then wanting to use it just proves how much you’ve been leaning on it and how important it is to give it up. And the ones who’ve been Rationalists all their lives, like Brant, don’t know what they’ve missed.”
“I suppose,” I said. I fingered Wash’s pendant again, and wondered if what Rennie was talking about was anything like what had been happening to me. If it was, it wouldn’t do me any good at all to join the Rationalists. All the magic I’d been so worried about wouldn’t stop building up just because I wasn’t using it; in fact, if Rennie was right, not using it at all would only make things worse.
We sat in silence for a while, until Papa and Wash and the boys came back from dinner. Professor Jeffries and Mr. Harrison had been invited to stay with Mr. Lewis, since Brant and Rennie really didn’t have room for all of us. As it was, we had to shove the table over and lay out bedrolls in the main room for Wash and the boys. Papa got the big bed, Rennie and Brant used a hay mattress they’d made up ahead of time with the baby in its basket beside them, and I shared with the two little ones. There was hardly a bare spot wide enough to step on by the time we finished laying everything out, but at least everyone had somewhere to sleep.
I lay awake for a long time that night. First I thought about all the things Rennie had said. I didn’t feel mad at her anymore, though I was still of the opinion that she might have thought a little less about her own self and a little more about all the rest of us. But she’d always been like that. I couldn’t get her voice out of my head when she’d said she’d been young and scared. She’d only been two years older than I was now.
Whatever had been in her head when she ran off with Brant, it was five years too late for anything except saying “sorry,” and she’d done that. I could hang on to what was left of the hurt, or I could decide to let it go and move on. I remembered Aunt Mari saying that Papa should write Rennie out of the family, and the way Aunt Janna and some of the others had talked, and I decided that whatever else I was going to do, I wasn’t going to turn out like them. Rennie claimed she’d done the best she could at the time, and that would have to be good enough for me now.
Once I had that settled in my mind, I rolled over. I could tell from the sounds of their breathing that everyone else was asleep, but I still couldn’t get to sleep myself. So I started the concentration exercise Miss Ochiba had taught me back in the day school, when I’d been so worried about losing my temper with Uncle Earn. It was a good way to relax even when I wasn’t fussed or upset about something.
It only took me ten or twelve deep, slow breaths to get the first floaty feeling that meant the exercise was working. I kept breathing, counting six in, pause for a three-count, six out, pause, and let my mind float in the darkness.
Then I realized that even though my eyes were closed, I could see a glow in the dark. The wooden charm Wash gave me was glowing.
My eyes flew open. The room was pitch-black. I couldn’t see a thing. I fished the pendant out from under my chemise. It still felt like it was glowing, but there wasn’t any light at all.
I was so startled that I lost my grip on the concentration exercise. The feeling faded, and I was just lying there in the dark, holding Wash’s charm. I thought about that for a minute, then closed my eyes and started counting my breathing again.
It took me a lot longer to get the floaty feeling this time, but when I finally did, I got the glow feeling back right along with it. I didn’t bother opening my eyes. I just kept breathing, and tried to do the Aphrikan world-sensing at the same time.
I expected it to be difficult to keep doing both things—the concentration exercise and the Aphrikan sensing —especially since Miss Ochiba had said the concentration exercise was a Hijero–Cathayan technique. But the two went together like molasses went with pancakes. All of a sudden, everything was much clearer. I could sense Rennie’s fly-block spell, and what was left of the spells she’d used to patch Albert’s trousers and lighten the washtub and keep the pots from boiling over.
But the spell on the pendant was different. I could tell what all the other spells were or had been, but Wash’s charm was…slippery. Every time I tried to look at it, it slid away. So I stopped trying to look at anything in particular, or even think about looking. I just breathed and floated and let whatever I could sense just
All of a sudden, the spell on the charm came clear, just for an instant. It wasn’t one spell; it was a gathering of spells all layered together. Some of them felt like Aphrikan magic, some like Avrupan magic, and some like nothing I’d ever seen or felt before. All of them worked together, hiding and absorbing and using and feeding and changing the magic that fed through it.
That moment of insight didn’t last long, but it didn’t need to. I’d gotten a good, hard look at how that pendant worked, and I remembered. I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness. It wasn’t any small working that Wash
