She knelt beside the stranger and pressed her own dark hand over the woman’s fair one.
“Be healed, wise one,” she said.
She looked to the water and saw that the clouds reflected there had turned to hills in a glade, and it was red, all of it, as the woman had said.
Again, the fear gripped her, but when she turned, looking for the woman, she saw that her hand rested only on the long flat grass that bent toward the water.
Laysia seemed troubled in the morning, and when Kate asked her why, she said only that she had fallen behind, been slow and blind, and that now she must hurry. Kate wondered how she could fall behind. This was not like school, with its homework and tests. But she saw the look on the woman’s face and kept quiet.
They were all dour that morning as they walked through the wood. An hour after the sun rose, the air was heavy. Wet beaded the leaves and clung to the weeds, weighing them down so they hung into the path. Even the tree bark sweated. Kate trudged beside Jean, who had started the walk ahead of the others but had dropped back to complain about the heat, the hike, and the long day ahead.
“I miss cars,” Jean said. “Do you know what my dream come true would be? My dream come true would be if somebody would drive by and pick us up right now.”
Jean had lots of dreams like that. At home she’d once said her biggest and best hope would be waffles for breakfast, and Mom had asked her where she’d learned such gaudy talk.
Now Susan, walking nearby, rolled her eyes.
“Dream bigger,” she said.
Kate thought about dreams. Not the wishing kind but the other, the kind that came to you without being asked for. She had the sense, sometimes, that she’d dreamed of places she couldn’t remember. She wondered if that was the only way home now.
“Do you know what my dream is, Jean?” Nell asked. “My dream is that my little sister would keep quiet for half an hour.”
Jean eyed her. “Dream bigger,” she said.
Laysia had moved on ahead. Now she called back to them to keep up. She still wore that strange look on her face, full of upset and worry and something else Kate didn’t quite know how to name. Maybe anger.
“We have much to do today,” she said.
In the clearing, she didn’t sit but strode almost to the edge, to look out at the sea.
“The great forces,” she said. “Light and air, fire and water. These are the tools the scholars of old used in battle.”
“Battle!” Susan said. “Light and air? Really?”
“I thought she said kids didn’t have to fight,” Jean whispered to Kate. “I don’t like the sound of this.”
Kate shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Below them, the sea pulsed out toward the horizon, fleeing the shore.
“Light and air,” Laysia said again. “Misdirected light, air with the force of a mountain thrown. These were the tools with which the sage kings took the lands around them. With these tools, they defended their kingdom, and with these they built the golden age.”
Susan was looking uneasily at Laysia.
“You said they couldn’t keep it up,” Susan said. “They lost to the Genius. How strong could they have been?”
Laysia glanced her way. That mix of fear and anger in her face unsettled Kate more than anything she said. “They lost then, yes, for the reasons I told you. They were strong, and yet he found their weakness. That is a weakness you will not have, so let me give you their strength, too. Let that be our hope.”
Kate agreed with Jean. She didn’t like the sound of this.
But she did turn out to like the lessons of that day, and the next, and the next. They were lessons on the fragile nature of light, how it bounced against you, like a ball, and rebounded to the eyes of whoever was looking. If you were careful and still, and kept your mind fixed on it, you could push that light away before it got to you. And no one could see you.
Jean saw the possibilities right away.
“Wish I could do that,” she said to Kate. “That would be a trick! Then Susan wouldn’t be able to see when I’m not listening!”
It was like that with Jean, Kate thought. Tricks. Maybe because Jean knew how to listen without even trying to. Though she’d complained about thinking thinking thinking all the time, back at the cottage, when the others were busy, Jean had made her Barbie into a teacher like Laysia, and Kate had fashioned sticks and stones and a little girl tied out of grass to be Barbie’s students. Jean had made the stones pop up and down when Barbie told them to, though she hadn’t even known she’d done it. Kate wished she knew that trick.
But she’d never had that knack, of doing things easily. So it took her a long time to think of light as something she could see, but as she’d learned to with air, she got used to thinking of it there, all around her, able to be moved and used. She imagined light like grains of sand, like dust caught in the sun. Untouchable but there, movable.
Susan was first to do it. Kate watched her, sitting on her knees in the grass, facing the far-off water. Then she wavered, like water herself. Kate blinked. Susan was there, solid — the familiar shape of her sitting under the sharp blue sky — then she wasn’t.
“Susan!”
Nell, who had been trying to make a rock disappear, with limited success, looked up. Her eyes widened. Jean, playing with her weathered Barbie,
