When I returned to the house, Violet was sitting in the kitchen by the woodstove, arms crossed and feet splayed out. Her face was dry, but it looked like she’d been a bit weepy herself. She looked up at me with the very same doleful expression Erris gave when things weren’t going well-eyelids slightly lowered, brown eyes soulful. The family resemblance had never been so clear.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Where’s Celestina?”
“She had things to do outside, she said.”
“Well, all right.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I started to go.
“Are you really going to learn magic?” Violet asked.
“Yes. I am. Someone must do something.”
“Can I learn with you?”
I didn’t really want to include her. It was her house, however, and her father’s books I’d be searching for information, so it felt wrong to tell her no. “I don’t know how far I’ll really get,” I said.
“We should ask Erris for help,” Violet suggested.
“Erris is in no mood to help anyone. He just wants to be alone every waking second. And even if he says yes, it won’t do me one bit of good, will it, because I am not a fairy.” I knew I was being snappish, but I just didn’t care to be nice at the moment.
Violet’s eyes widened at my tone. She coughed, and she was rarely capable of coughing just once or twice. It was as if she had to reach down and give her lungs a good resettling before she was done. Sometimes I think she only coughed when she felt like it, to remind us all she was sick and fragile.
“It’s no wonder he wants to be alone,” she said. “You’re so sour.”
“I’m not sour!”
“You didn’t like me from the start.”
“Because you’re spoiled, and you act like a child.”
“Then tell me how to act like a woman!” Violet suddenly tore from her chair and ran up the stairs, coughing and crying at once.
I wished I weren’t wearing trousers. I didn’t feel prepared for womanly instruction in them. Well, I’d be a poor choice to help her anyway. I wasn’t even a woman from this continent, and I certainly knew little about fairies. I sat down by the woodstove in the chair Violet had just vacated, yet I felt unsettled. Should I go after her?
Celestina, with her trousers and pickles and apple pie, was obviously growing into the sort of woman who would probably make a good rustic wife and mother, but I wasn’t that sort of woman, and I doubted Violet was either. Was it possible she had said those things because she truly wished I would talk to her? Was that why she’d asked me about falling in love?
I went upstairs. I found her flung onto her bed, face buried in the pillow, but door open, the classic pose of the young woman who hopes someone will notice her despair.
“Violet,” I said.
“I wish Ifra had been able to kidnap me!”
“Ifra? You know his name?”
“I asked his name before he left. Maybe he would have tried harder to kidnap me if I hadn’t been wearing hair bows. He probably doesn’t think I’m anybody.”
“Violet, you really don’t want him to think you’re anybody, and I don’t think you want to be delivered to King Luka. He doesn’t sound like a very pleasant sort of person.”
“I almost wish Erris hadn’t come to help me get well,” she said. “When I’m sick it doesn’t feel possible to leave the house, so I mostly don’t think of it, but I can’t stand it now. I feel like I could go mad. I don’t want to wait forever, especially if fourteen-year-olds are more grown up than I am!”
“Well, I’m not sure if I really know how to be a woman, myself. I’m only a few years older than you.”
“You aren’t wearing hair bows,” Violet said scathingly, yanking at the one still in her hair. The knot refused to release entirely, leaving her with ribbons dangling on her shoulder.
“But do we want to be proper women? Women in Lorinar don’t learn magic, and that’s what I think we should do.”
“Yes. All right.” She still looked sulky, but it seemed to cheer her up enough to slide off the bedspread.
We went upstairs to look for Ordorio’s magic books. There was still the locked door, which Violet rattled irritably, but I pointed to the next room. “I saw some books here. We can find the key for this door later.”
The books in the other room, alas, proved to be things like histories of Lorinar and encyclopedias of herb usage-perhaps useful at another time, but not for learning magic.
We went downstairs. Celestina was back and kneading dough in a bowl.
“Where were you two?” she asked. She sounded a little cross, like she knew perfectly well.
“Nimira was just talking to me about things,” Violet said. “I was upset.”
Celestina nodded. This seemed to appease her a bit. Maybe she was relieved I had talked to Violet.
I hadn’t realized how cold the upstairs had been until I was near the heavenly warmth of the woodstove again. Erris really should be by the woodstove, drying out. I stared out the window for a long moment, willing him to return.
“Where is Erris?” Celestina said, apparently reading my mind. “It’s cold out there.”
I had a sudden image of Erris’s wet gears clogging with ice, trapping him in a cold prison, and I shuddered.
“I don’t know,” I said. My throat was tight. “He wants to be alone.”
“I wonder if he wants to be alone as much as he thinks he does,” Celestina said. “When I burned myself, I said I wanted to be alone, but I didn’t. I just didn’t want people to look at me the way they did. He must feel kind of burned all over.”
I nodded slowly. “I just don’t know how to… I mean… I feel like he already hates me sometimes.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Violet said. “He talks about you. He says you’re such a good singer.”
That was almost worse. I didn’t want to be just a “good singer.” “I mean in some deep down way,” I said.
I couldn’t tell them how Erris and I had argued, how I felt or how I thought he felt. My pride was like a web of knots encasing me, holding everything in, and while the tension could be uncomfortable, it was more terrifying to think of everything spilling out.
“I know he doesn’t hate you,” Celestina said. “I see how he looks at you.”
“How does he look at me?”
“I don’t know. He just looks happy.”
I shrugged a little. “These are not the most convincing statements.”
“I think you should go find him and tell him to come sit where it’s warm.”
It was getting colder, and the sun was setting. She was right; he shouldn’t stay out, however comforting he found the outdoors to be at a time like this. I put on my coat and boots and headed for the shore again, pausing at the apple tree to regard the hoofprints of the fairy horse.
Past the apple trees, the forest started to thicken, and it already seemed dark here, with the bare limbs of trees casting complicated skeleton shadows, and the sun at my back to the west. A branch cracked beneath my sturdy shoe, and I heard Erris call distantly, “Nim?”
“It’s me,” I called back, stopping in my tracks.
“Can you come here? I’ve hurt my foot.”
There was nothing more he needed to say to set me running, terrified that he would be broken but just a little glad to be wanted and needed too.
I had once wondered if Erris had feet beneath his fairy shoes, back when he was a doll trapped at a piano. Now I came across him sitting on a fallen log, inspecting what appeared to be half of a foot. My heart sped up quite alarmingly.
“Don’t panic,” he said. “I think it can be fixed. Maybe the water weakened the wood, I don’t know.”
“Your feet…” They looked so unnatural that between his feet and the earlier glimpse of his insides, I was beginning to feel sick with what an alien thing he’d become-what an alien thing I’d turned him into.
He cringed with almost a hint of amusement, as if the situation were so unpleasant that he found it almost humorous. But I couldn’t find any humor in this. He held up the front half of his foot. It had a sharp piece of metal, like some sort of screw, jutting from it.
“What happened?” I said, walking over to sit beside him.
“Well, I haven’t felt quite right since I went in the water. My joints are a little sluggish. I guess I should have been more careful, but I was very upset and… a little desperate to feel alive. So I was running, like maybe I could shake off the stiffness, and I jumped off this tree trunk-and felt the snap.”
His feet were much like a cobbler’s form for making shoes, only with a joint that allowed a natural bend where toes would be. It appeared that the heel had cracked and the joint had broken off. I barely smothered my panic as he showed me the damage. I was always worried about him breaking down. In an ordinary person, the correlation between health and life was obvious, but I didn’t know if Erris could die if something happened to him, or if he would remain trapped in the body even if it broke. I could presume, however, that he couldn’t wake up if his mechanism failed and I couldn’t wind him. This was just a foot, but what if it had been something worse?
“I think it could probably be glued, or maybe I could get Lean Joe to help me fashion a new foot,” Erris said. “But… I’ll need help walking back to the house.”
I regarded him a moment. It was obvious I would have to touch him in order to help him.
“It’s all right,” he said, but he sounded distant. He held out an arm, and I helped him up.
He was still strong, and needed me mostly for balance as he hobbled along on one and a half feet. Still, his body was quite heavy, and his movements weren’t as smooth as before he went in the ocean. The house seemed very far away.
“Maybe you should wait here, and I’ll get Celestina,” I suggested, when I saw how slow our pace would be.
“I don’t want Celestina. Please. Just you. And let’s never mention this again.”
“All right. I certainly won’t.”
We were silent with concentration a moment, maneuvering past a space where the ground dipped and the depression was full of wet leaves.
“I think it will snow again tomorrow,” Erris said. In the morning, the sky had been a surprising blue, but now the clouds were back and the air smelled crisp. Wind rattled the bare branches of the trees.
I nodded. “Just stay by the woodstove tonight and get warm.”
“I will.”
We were quiet then, each of us no doubt with different but overlapping unpleasant thoughts.
Just before we got to the house, he said, “I am thankful for you, Nim.”
That was about the nicest thing he could’ve said to me just then. It made me strangely shy.
Erris, with the assistance of Lean Joe, mended his foot and sat down by the woodstove with a book. I was helping Celestina with the dinner, putting together a fish stew with salt cod, jarred tomatoes, and some rather withered-looking garlic, while she finished the biscuits.
Violet sat near Erris’s feet and scooped the cat onto her lap. “Uncle Erris?”
He lowered the book. “Hmm?”
“I want to learn magic. Fairy magic.”
Celestina looked sharply their way. “I really don’t think it’s a good idea to learn any magic until Mr. Valdana comes home.”
“I don’t think we can wait until he comes home,” I said. “What will you do if the jinn remembers Violet? If he tries to take her? We can’t hide her in the ocean.”
“She-I don’t think-” Celestina stopped and brushed flour from her hands onto her apron. “I suppose I should tell you this. I didn’t burn my face on a lantern. I burned it trying to do magic.”
“How?”
“I had some idea of how spells worked from reading novels about sorcerers, and I started trying to do magic on my own, without any training. It took forever to learn how to make fire, and I thought it would just be a little candle flame, but it wasn’t. It broke through my hand like a torch. For a terrifying moment I couldn’t get the fire to stop. I caught my hair on fire. My father was so upset I thought his eyeballs might fly right out of his head.” She winced. “They told everyone else it was a lantern, but Mr. Valdana knew it wasn’t. A lot of people guessed it wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to teach you magic properly when he hired you?” Violet asked.
“Oh, he told me when he took me on that he had no time to teach magic,” Celestina said. “But he could offer me a home where my parents wouldn’t frown at me and neighbors wouldn’t preach to me, and a fair wage.”
“I understand your fear,” I said. “But I have to learn. Even if it’s dangerous. I am not going to sit by helplessly while some magical villain hauls off the people I love.”
“I think we could be very careful,” Erris said, almost absently. He seemed to be considering the idea. “Fairy magic is very intuitive, and largely safe. Violet could start there. Human magic tends to be more agressive, but… Celestina, I understand that you are sort of the lady of the house in Ordorio’s absence.”
Celestina shrugged.
“I don’t want to usurp your position, but if we all had some magic, and time to plan, maybe we can thwart the jinn next time.”
She sighed. “I wish I knew what Mr. Valdana would say. But I won’t stop you. You are Violet’s uncle. I would just hate to see anything happen to any of you.”
I wondered if that was a fate we could escape, no matter which course we chose.