I climbed onto the stool and it was warm with her body heat. I put my eye down to the eyepiece.
I did indeed see stars. But they weren’t as bright as she described. And there was no line of three bright shining stars in the pattern. Instead, they looked like a glowy mass at first. There were two reddish ones that looked like eyes, and twinkling hood of dimmer stars around it. These stars were so faint they just made the sky glow, like the Milky Way.
“Do you see stars, Connor?” Urdo asked me quietly.
“Yes, but they are nothing like what Beth described,” I said. “I don’t understand. Did you move the gears or something?”
“Just tell me what you see.”
“Two red dots, like eyes, and a hood of bluish glow around them, forming a mountain or a triangle, sort of.”
“Ah,” she said. She pulled two sheets out of a pile of star charts. She showed one to Beth first.
“Yes,” said Beth, “that’s the pattern. That’s what I saw.”
“Orion,” said Urdo, “The Hunter.”
She showed me another sheet, and it did indeed resemble the constellation I’d seen. I realized now that’s what they were, constellations.
“Loki,” she said, “The Thief.”
“So we saw different things?” asked Beth.
“Of course. When using that particular lens, everyone sees the thing they will become.”
I looked at the telescope in awe. I reached out a finger and tapped it. “This thing is magic.”
Urdo laughed. It was a sound I’d never heard her make before. Her laughter was muted and smooth.
“No,” she shook her head, “We don’t use magic. We only use science of a sort that other people have forgotten. Or which, perhaps, they haven’t yet dreamed.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Urdo looked at me for a moment, as if deciding if she should answer or not. I stared back, certain it had not been a silly question.
“If you went back in time to the most brilliant inventors of centuries past, such as Ben Franklin or Leonardo Da Vinci, and you showed them a working television or a computer, what would they think of it?”
“They’d be amazed,” I said.
“Certainly. And what if you showed it to the common folk?”
“They would call it witchcraft,” said Beth.
“Exactly,” said Urdo, gracing her with a rare smile. “Any technology, sufficiently advanced, will be considered magic by someone who doesn’t understand it.”
“But why did we see different things?” I asked, daring another question.
“What you see shows you what you are, or what you will become.”
“I’m going to be a thief?” I asked. “I’ve never stolen a thing.”
She shook her head. “Perhaps you will be something quiet. Something that can move unseen.”
I thought about it, and realized I’d always been a schemer. Thieves were tricky. I wasn’t sure I liked the whole idea. “Something like a cat? My sister is a cat. Danny and Thomas would love to chase my tail off.”
“Does everyone see something different?” asked Beth.
She nodded her head. “Yes, unless they are mundane.”
“What do mundane people see?” I asked.
Urdo lifted a graceful hand into the air and directed her finger out into the open slit that revealed the gray skies. “They see only the sky and the clouds and the falling snow.”
I turned to Beth. “So you aren’t just a normal girl after all,” I said.
Beth’s eyes widened. “Then what am I?”
Chapter Twelve
Urdo lifted her head as if she heard a distant call. I thought I heard something, but couldn’t be sure. Urdo twisted her long neck around without moving the rest of her body. She looked up into the gray daylight that came in through the slit in the sky.
I wanted to ask her if she heard something, but she so obviously did that I couldn’t bring myself to ask a silly question like that. Beth and I glanced at each other and shrugged.
Finally, she turned her head around again to face us. “You two are of interest. I must leave you for now.”
She walked over to the tiny square door and put the silver key in the lock. It clicked.
“Um,” I said, “Shouldn’t we be going down to the basement? Everyone will be getting ready for the Hussades.”
She smiled at me with half her mouth. “I doubt you will be missed.”
It was my turn to frown. The Hussades were obstacle challenges and the competition required you to change your shape in various ways to cross the obstacles. Her remark indicated that we wouldn’t be important because we couldn’t change into anything. I crossed my arms.
Then she did something quite unexpected. She turned into a hawk.
First, her head narrowed. Then her face extended forward, poking out at us. The nose grew to a point, then became harder and longer and began to curve downward into a beak. The beak shifted from pink to whitish gray. Her nostrils became tiny slits on the top of the beak.
I could hear Beth breathing next to me, quick, shallow puffs of fright. Her hand groped for mine and clasped it. I didn’t say anything, I was too stunned. I was as surprised and amazed by the process as Beth was. I knew people changed, everyone did it, but for us it was like changing your clothes. It was something you did in private. You simply didn’t stand in front of people and openly shift your form. Doing so would allow others to see all the intermediate forms, sometimes odd, embarrassing or disgusting sights would emerge during this time.
The black, stretchy clothes Urdo wore beneath her cloak accommodated her new shape easily. Specially designed, they fit her in either form. As a hawk, she didn’t shrink in size as Sarah did when she became a blue jay. She became a huge hawk of human weight with a wingspan of perhaps twenty feet or more. The wings grew into sight, arching up over her back. They loomed up higher than her head, and then she folded them down on her back again.
“Connor,” whispered Beth. She squeezed my hand very hard.
I squeezed back lightly, but didn’t say anything. I felt it was best that we simply stood there quietly.
Feathers were sprouting everywhere now. They were reddish brown and long and thick. Since she was bigger than any natural hawk, those feathers were over a foot long and they rustled as they popped out of her skin. Her beak opened and we watched her teeth recede in her mouth.
She shook off her boots one at a time. Yellow wrinkled skin covered her taloned feet.
She opened her wings and snapped them once, experimentally.
We backed away reflexively, up against the roll top desk. Beth still gripped my hand.
“That was most unusual, Principal Urdo,” I said diplomatically.
She looked down at me. Her eyes had the same hard glint in them they always had. In any form, she seemed to have the cold predatory eyes of a hawk.
“Things have changed, little thief,” she told me. The words sounded deeper coming from her altered throat.
I was immediately upset. I didn’t like to be called a thief by anyone. I’d never stolen a thing in my life. It wasn’t fair. I opened my mouth to protest, but she brushed past us. She hopped up onto the brass tube of the telescope. Her talons scrabbled a bit, but she managed to climb up the polished tube. When she reached the roof, she ducked her head down, folded her wings tightly and squeezed out into the open sky.
“She’s leaving us,” said Beth.
Once out in the open, Urdo unfurled her great wings and gave an unearthly screaming cry. I’d heard hawks before, but only at a distance and only from their relatively tiny beaks. This cry was like that of a dinosaur. It was long and loud and full of pride. Beth and I both hunched down our heads and clasped our ears.
She took off then, with powerful strokes of her wings. In a moment, she was gone.
We ran to the slit and craned our necks, but she was nowhere in sight.