All the Birds in the Sky (25 page)

So. He had a USB drive that he’d brought home from the Ten Percent Project office, which was the size of two peas—but when he texted Patricia, she said it couldn’t be something he’d borrowed. She needed something he owned himself, free and clear. That ruled out the electronic components and tools littering his desk and shelves, which were all technically on loan from Milton.

Laurence rummaged through his desk. Pencils, pens … that little figurine of Mega Man was pretty tiny, move that to the top of the list. He started a pile, and rummaged through drawers and boxes and closet shelves, trying not to wake Isobel. And then, all at once, he knew.

“Oh no,” he said aloud. “Not that. No no no. Fuck. Fuck no.” He couldn’t breathe. Like an asthma attack, or something. All of the joy he’d felt earlier slipped away as if it had never been there, and he felt instead like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus with a sharp steel toe.

He stayed up most of the rest of the night, searching and searching. But he never found anything that counted as a real possession and was smaller than his grandmother’s ring.

He brought it to Patricia the next morning, eyes sore from lack of sleep. “This is the only thing I have of my grandmother’s,” he told her. “She gave it to me when she was dying.”

“I’m sorry,” Patricia said. She stood in the doorway of her apartment building, in a bathrobe. Maybe he’d woken her, but he doubted it.

“She said it was her mother’s, and she wanted to pass it down to a granddaughter, but I was her only grandchild,” Laurence said. “She wanted me to give it to whoever I married, and then to our daughter, if we had one.”

“I’m really sorry,” Patricia said.

“I was going to give it to Serafina,” Laurence said. “As an engagement ring. I promised my grandma I would give it to my bride.”

Patricia didn’t say anything, just stared in her purple robe. Her hair was a pile of tangles.

“I really have to give it to you? We can’t just call it quits?”

“You really have to. Or your friend might get sucked back into that place. Or you might, instead.” When she put it like that, the ring was a pretty small price to pay.

“You knew it was going to be this.” He handed it to her, still in its tiny, tiny velvet box. Actually, with the box, it was
almost
bigger than a toy car he owned. But not quite.

“I knew it would be something like this.” Patricia put the ring into the pocket of her robe, where it barely made a lump. “Or the spell wouldn’t have worked.”

“Why couldn’t it just be something like, I have to stand on one foot for an hour? Why does it have to be my most valued possession, and the linchpin of my courting strategy? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Do you want to come in and have some toaster waffles?” Patricia stepped back and held the door open. “I can’t talk about this out here, in the open.”

The toaster waffles failed to materialize, but instead she had locally made organic Pop-Tarts, which were probably better. They sat on the gray lumpy sofa, where Deedee and the other roommate had been watching
Jersey
Shore
every other time Laurence had been there. Patricia kept glancing over toward the hallway for any signs they were stirring or listening in to this conversation.

“So I might have mentioned there are two kinds of magic.” Patricia handed Laurence a blueberry pastry and a mug of English Breakfast.

“Good and bad, I’m guessing,” said Laurence, not quite having his mouth full. Patricia’s bathrobe was splayed out on the sofa next to him, and he wondered if he could grab the ring while she wasn’t looking. But then he remembered the part about someone getting pulled back into the nightmare dimension.

“No, though that’s a common misconception. There’s Healer magic and Trickster magic. Back in the day, many people believed Healer magic was good and Trickster magic was evil—but Healers can be judgmental control freaks, and Tricksters can be super-compassionate and basically save your life.”

“Like last night,” Laurence said.

Patricia nodded. “The Healer and Trickster schools formed over hundreds of years, out of lots of local traditions from all over the world. And there was a time, in the 1830s, when the two groups went to war. The world could have been torn apart. But there was this woman named Hortense Walker, who realized that the two types of magic worked better if you could combine them. You could do amazing things if you mastered both Trickster and Healer magic, way more than you could do with either type alone. Plus you were less likely to go over the edge into becoming a control freak or a lying jerkface.”

Laurence was already jumping ahead to the implications. “So if you want to accomplish something major using magic, you need to trick someone, or heal them. So you’re helpless without a patsy, or a sick person?”

“I wouldn’t say helpless. I spent years training to use these skills in lots of different situations. I can use Trickster magic to transform myself, even with nobody around. And if someone attacked me, I could ‘heal’ them so hard they’d feel it for a week.”

“Thanks for explaining.” Laurence ate the last corner of his blueberry pouch and then washed it down with the rest of the tea. He had a hundred more questions, but he wasn’t equipped to hear any more answers right now. He sank deeper into the broken upholstery of the couch. He would never, ever be able to pull his butt out of this sofa, he was just going to get dragged in deeper until he was swallowed, as if by a Venus Asstrap.

Every quadrant of Laurence’s soul was yelling for him to get the hell out of there before he lost more than his grandmother’s ring and his freedom of speech. But then he thought about the other promise he’d made the night before. The one he made of his own free will.

“I said I wouldn’t ever run away again,” Laurence said. “And I won’t.”

“Good.” Patricia let out a breath that sounded like she’d held it for ages. “More tea?”

“Sure.” Laurence found a marginally more comfortable arrangement on the couch, and Patricia handed him a fresh hot mug. They drank tea together in silence until Patricia’s roommates woke up and started giving Laurence the hairy eyeball.

22

PATRICIA HAD SPENT
years wishing she could run away to learn real magic. Then one day, she turned herself into a bird, and a man came to take her to the witch academy. Dreams? Fulfilled.

Eltisley Maze had two separate campuses, and they were as different as a cloudless summer day and a blizzard. Eltisley Hall had grand stone buildings over six hundred years old, and nobody ever raised his or her voice there. Students at Eltisley walked single file along the gravel walkways, wearing blazers, ties, and shorts, with the school’s crest over their hearts (a bear and stag face-to-face, holding a flaming chalice between them). You addressed your teachers or upperclassmen as Sir or Miss and ate in Formal Hall in the Greater Building. The Maze, meanwhile, was a disorienting jumble of nine-faced buildings and looping walkways, where you could wear whatever you pleased. You could sleep all day, do drugs, play video games, do anything you fancied. Except that you would find yourself trapped in a room with no door (or toilet) for weeks, until you learned some crazy lesson. Or you would be tossed into a bottomless pit, or chased around for days by people with sticks. Or you would find yourself unable to stop tap-dancing. Or pieces of you might start falling off, one by one. Nobody told you anything in The Maze.

Once, Eltisley Hall and The Maze had been two separate schools, representing two styles of magic that were at odds, but now they were joined because magic had been united, at great cost. The passage between them was a sandy hedge-lined walkway that only opened at certain times.

Patricia would spend weeks mastering some delicate healing art at Eltisley Hall, and then they would send her back to The Maze and she would be so confused and tangled up in herself that she forgot all her fancy skills. She would solve some nonsense puzzle at The Maze and figure out how to do some clever trick, only to be sent back to Eltisley Hall, where they’d drum endless rules and formulae into her again, and she would lose the twisty shape she’d been holding in her mind.

This would have been enough to make her cry into her pillow every night at lights-out (at Eltisley) or impromptu naptime (at The Maze). But also, Patricia missed her parents, whom she hadn’t even said goodbye to. For all they knew, she was dead. Or living in some alley like an animal. She wanted to tell them she was okay, but she wouldn’t know how to explain. Not to mention, she’d left her cat, Berkley.

The Head Teacher at Eltisley Hall was a gentle old lady named Carmen Edelstein. She wore her silver hair in a dignified pageboy and always had an elegant silk wrap around her neck and shoulders. Carmen encouraged the students to come to her with any problems or questions, and Patricia soon found herself confiding in the old lady—but she learned the hard way that she must not mention her encounter with some sort of Tree Spirit a few years earlier. Magic was a practice and an art, not a spiritual belief system. You might have your own private spiritual experiences, just like any normal person—but believing you had a direct line to something great and ancient was the beginning of Aggrandizement.

“Trees
do not talk to people,
” said Carmen Edelstein, her usual cheer replaced by a worried scowl. “You had a hallucination, or someone was playing a trick. This is why it’s terrible that we get so many students so late, after they have already experimented on their own. Those bad habits can be a nightmare to unlearn.”

“It was probably a hallucination, sure.” Patricia squirmed in her stiff chair. “I remember I had eaten a lot of spicy food.”

The Head Teacher at The Maze was Kanot, whose face and voice changed every time you met him. Sometimes he was an elderly Sri Lankan man, sometimes a pygmy, sometimes a giant white man with a crazy neck-beard. Patricia soon learned to recognize Kanot by certain tells, like he way he rolled his shoulders or narrowed his left eye—if you failed to identify him or misidentified someone else as him, you would find yourself at the bottom of the deepest pit in The Maze (other than the bottomless one, that is). People said that if Kanot ever wore the same face twice, he would die. Whenever you met Kanot, he’d offer you a terrible bargain. Patricia did not try to tell Kanot about the Tree.

Patricia had no real friends at Eltisley Maze. She was friendly with a few of the other kids, including Taylor, who had messy mouse-brown hair and ungainly, twitchy arms and legs. But the main cliques at the school never found a place for Patricia, especially after it was clear that she kind of sucked at most of the school assignments. Nobody wanted to befriend someone who was both nerdy
and
bad at homework.

If you went out into the tree line near Eltisley Hall at a certain time in the late afternoon or after lights-out in the Eltisley dorm, you might have seen a teenage girl with dark brown hair and big wondering eyes looking up at the trees and saying, “Are you here? What’s your deal? Is Parliament in session?” And chattering to the birds, which just glanced at her and flew away.

You could never tell how long you would spend at either Eltisley Hall or The Maze—it could be days, weeks, or longer. At one point, Patricia spent seven months in The Maze, until she managed to hide from the teachers and the other students and they all spent a week looking for her. But instead of going back to Eltisley Hall, she was led out into a yellow-grass field, where Kanot himself ushered Patricia and some other students into a great wooden airship, which was whale-shaped except it had more fins, with an interior that was covered with rococo nuts and berries.

Today, Kanot was a heavyset bespectacled African-American man with a Tennessee accent and a bomber jacket. “Here’s the idea,” he said when they were already over the Alps somewhere. “We drop each one of you guys in a small town, someplace where you don’t speak the language. No money, no supplies. And you find a person who needs healing, someone hurting real bad, and you heal ’em. Without them knowing you were ever there. Then we come get you.” Kanot offered to let the students out of this assignment in exchange for letting him hide some stuff in their bones, but nobody went for it. So instead, he started shoving kids one by one out of the airship’s hatch, which looked like the doorway of a French chateau, a few hundred feet up. No parachute.

Patricia managed to slow her descent so the impact just knocked the wind out of her. She staggered to her feet, in a field miles from anywhere. Then she wandered until nightfall, when she saw the lights of the town, behind her. The first few people she found seemed healthy enough, but then she noticed an old woman hunched over a bowl of soup in a small restaurant or bistro. The woman was coughing and her skin looked gray, and Patricia could glimpse an ochre scar poking out of the neck out of her yellow blouse. Perfect. Patricia crept toward the woman, only to get a faceful of soup and what sounded like accusations of thievery in some Slavic language. She ran.

A week later, Patricia was starving and running out of places to hide in this town, with its dingy white plaster walls and muddy roads. She could no longer talk to animals, and she had failed to master the skill of understanding human languages other than English. Plus, she could only heal a sick person with whom she’d built a certain rapport.

“I am so not going to sleep in these same clothes again tonight,” Patricia said aloud, in English. The shopkeeper in the tiny grocery saw her and chased her out, shouting guttural syllables. Patricia ran down the narrow twisting streets, sharp inclines paved with cobblestones, until she had lost the shopkeeper. She squatted behind a stone wall and looked at the only thing she’d been able to steal: a dusty bottle of Chiang Mai brand chili oil.

“This better work.” Patricia tilted the bottle so the words “WARNING RED-HOT” were upside down. The thick liquid singed her throat. She started to gag, but she made herself drink the whole thing. Once the bottle was empty she pulled herself into a shivering ball. Her head ached. She wanted to weep, for everything she’d lost and all she’d failed to gain.