I scowled. I never saw my dad. Once my gran had found me he started writing me a lot of postcards but I never saw him. And the postmarks on the cards were always blurry so you couldn’t see where they’d been sent from. All the postmarks were blurry. Two or three a week sometimes.
“But she’s wrong that simply keeping you ignorant of your father’s heritage will make it as if that heritage doesn’t exist. It does exist. You can choose to be your mother’s daughter in all things, but it must be a choice. I am going to provide you with the means for making that choice. Otherwise, some day, that heritage you know nothing about may get you in a lot of trouble.”
I must have looked frightened, because she took my hands in hers and gave them a squeeze. “Or, perhaps, some day you will be in a lot of trouble and it will get you out of it.”
We were sitting on the porch of the cabin by the lake. We’d been walking earlier, and had picked a little posy of wildflowers. She’d fetched a mug from the kitchen and filled it with water, and the flowers were standing in that, on the rickety little table that still sat on the porch. We’d been walking in the sun, which was very warm, and were now sitting in the shade of the trees, which was pleasingly cool. I could feel the sweat on my face drying in the breeze. My gran pulled one of the flowers out of the mug, put it between my two hands, closed my hands together over it so it was invisible, and put her hands over mine. “Now, what have you got in your hands?” she said.
This was a funny sort of game. I said, smiling, “A flower.”
“What else could you have inside your hands instead? What else is so small you can hide it completely, doesn’t weigh very much, doesn’t itch or tickle, is so soft you can barely feel it’s there?”
“Um—a feather?” I said.
“A feather. Good. Now, think feather.”
I thought feather. I thought a small, gray-brown-white feather. A sparrow, something like that. There was an odd, slightly buzzy sensation in my hands, under her hands. It was a little bit sick-making, but not very much.
“Now open your hands.”
She took hers away from mine, and I opened them. There was a feather, a little gray-brown-white feather there. No flower. I looked up at her. I knew that one of the reasons my mom had left my dad was because he wouldn’t stop doing spellworking, and doing business with other spellworkers. I knew he came from a big magic-handling family, but not everybody in it did magic. I had never done any. “You did that,” I said.
“No. I helped, but you did it. It’s in your blood, child. If it weren’t, that feather would still be a flower. It was your hands that touched it, your hands that carried the charm.”
I held up the feather. It looked and felt like a real feather. “Would you like to try again?” she said. I nodded.
She told me that we only wanted to do little things this first time, so we turned the feather into a different kind of feather, and then we turned it into several kinds of flower, and then several kinds of leaf, and then we turned it into three unburned matchsticks, and then we turned it into a tiny swatch of fabric—yellow, with blue dots—and then we turned it back into the flower it had been to begin with. “First rule: return everything to its proper shape if you can. unless there is some compelling reason not to. Now we’ve done enough for one afternoon, and we want to say thank you, and we also want to sweep up any rubbish we’ve left—like sweeping the floor and wiping the counters after you’ve been making cookies.” She taught me three words to say, and lit a small bar of incense, and we sat silently till it had burned itself out.
“There,” she said. “Are you tired?”
“A little,” I said. I thought about it. “Not a lot.”
“Are you not? That is interesting. Then I was right that I had to show you.” She smiled. It was a kind, but not a reassuring smile. She was also right that I couldn’t tell my mother.
My mother had stopped bringing me out and taking me back after the first few visits, although she made me wear a homecoming charm. I realized later that this might have looked like the most colossal insult to my gran, but my mother wouldn’t have meant it that way and my gran didn’t take it that way. I hung it on a tree when I arrived and only took it down again when I was leaving. My gran walked me out to the road and waited till the bus came into sight, made sure the bus driver knew where I was going (the charm wouldn’t have stopped the bus for me if I’d forgotten to pull the cord, and I was still only a kid), kissed me, and watched me climb aboard. “Till next time,” she said, which is what she always said.
We played that game many times. I was soon doing it without her hands on mine, and she showed me how to do certain other things too, some of which I could do easily, some of which I couldn’t do at all.
One afternoon she pulled a ring off her finger, and gave it to me. “I’m tired of that red stone,” she said. “Give me a green stone.”
There were, of course, rules to what I had at first thought was a game. The more dense the material, the harder to shift, so stone or gem is more difficult than flower or feather. Anything that has been altered by human interference is harder than anything that hasn’t been, so a polished, faceted stone is more difficult than a rough piece of ore. Worked metal is the worst. It is both heavy and dense and the least decisively itself. Something that is handled and used is harder than something that isn’t, so a tool would be harder to shift than a plaque that hung on the wall, and a stone worn in a ring is going to be harder than a decorative bit of rock that stood on a shelf. It is easier to change a thing into something like itself: a feather into another feather, a flower into another flower. A flower into a leaf is easier than a flower into a feather. But worked metal is always hard. Even a safety pin into several straight pins is difficult. Even a 1968 penny into a 1986 penny is difficult.
She hadn’t told me any of the details, that first day, when I turned a flower into a bit of fabric. It showed how good she was, that she could create not just human-made fabric, but smooth yellow fabric with blue dots, instantly, with no fuss, because that’s what I was trying to do, and she wanted me to have a taste of what she was going to teach me, without fluster or explanation. But that had been nearly a year ago, and I knew more now.
The ring was warm from her finger. I closed my hands and concentrated. I didn’t have to do anything to the setting, to the worked metal. Changing the stone was going to be big enough. I had only ever tackled lake pebbles before, and they were pretty onerous. I’d never tried a faceted stone. And this was a ring she wore all the time, and she was a practicing magic handler. Objects that have a lot of contact with magic, however peripherally, tend to get a bit steeped. But I should still be able to do it, I thought.
But I couldn’t. I knew before I opened my hands that I hadn’t done it. I tried three times, and all I got was a heavy ache in my neck and shoulders from trying too hard. I felt like crying. It was the first time I had failed to change something: transmuting was the thing I was best at. And she wouldn’t have asked me to do something I shouldn’t have been able to do.
We were sitting on the porch again, in the shade of the trees. “Let us try once more,” she said. “But not here. Come.” We stood up—I still had the ring in one hand—and went down the steps to the ground, and then down to the shore, and into the sunlight. It was another hot, bright day, and the sky was as blue as a sapphire.
I wasn’t ready for what happened. When I closed my hands around the ring again and put all my frustration into this final attempt, there was a blast of something—I shuddered as it shot through me— and for the merest moment my hands felt so hot it was as if they would burst into flame. Then it was all over and my hands fell apart because I was shaking so badly. My gran put her arm around me. I held up my unsteady hand and we both looked.