Tides of magic, p.9
Tides of Magic, page 9
“Let’s go back a bit,” said Thalassa. “You said there were stories about using magic to move goods.”
Gordon scratched his head. “Right. Of course, they were all just stories to us, and not all of them were consistent. But as far as I remember, the idea was a ship would unload the contraband onto some offshore island, and they worked out a deal with the sea spider to move it to land.”
“So Chelicerata includes sea spiders now?”
“It’s not the literal Latin class,” Gordon said, sounding frustrated. “It may not be closely related to any normal kind of spider, but in my book if it’s got eight legs, it’s a spider, and it made for a good name... Have you come across something like this, with all your sea magic stuff?”
“Not a sea spider specifically. But enough to make it believable. Extremely ill-advised, but believable.”
“See, I know you do weird stuff. Magic, one might say. Granted, I’ve never seen you at it but you get results, far too often for me not to take it seriously.”
Charley glanced at Thalassa. If yesterday’s show didn’t count as magic, what did? Thalassa shook her head, just a little, as Gordon continued.
“So I’m going to accept magic’s a thing. But even then I find this one tough to believe. That said… there have been things going missing, drinks and snacks and stuff. While I was wearing the ring. So maybe…”
Charley held her breath, not believing what she was hearing. “If she got teleported out to sea using one of the rings, can’t you just use yours to bring her back?”
“The ring never worked for me. Not for any of us who were still around in my day. I think they got us to try when we were initiated, but at the time I thought it was just part of the ritual.”
“Artifacts like that rely on the user having a certain degree of innate magical aptitude to trigger them,” Thalassa explained. “It’s beginning to look like Melissa could be one of those people.”
“So you could use it, then?”
“It’s a dangerous thing to experiment with, Charley. I think we need to retrieve her the old-fashioned way. The last thing we need is all of us getting trapped, or worse.”
Charley felt herself deflate. She turned back to Gordon. “So if we can’t teleport her, do you know where this island they used to put stuff on is?”
“Only roughly, a bit north of here up the coast. Do you want me to talk to Lawson about getting his boat out?”
“Yes…” Charley started to say, but Thalassa raised her hand.
“Not today, I’m afraid. The weather…”
“We can’t let that stop us! She needs rescuing.”
“We don’t have a choice. There’s a storm coming in, a big one. Getting ourselves capsized and drowned won’t do her any good, will it? Tomorrow, I promise.”
From the dining hall of the holiday park, where she had been lurking because it had chairs and tables that made it easier for her to type and catch up on emails, than lying on the bed or having the laptop on her knee, Charley could see how the weather was changing. She gazed out through the window pane. The storm was coming in, as Thalassa had predicted. Gordon had, perhaps as some sort of peace offering, given Charley an extra blanket and some chocolate, and she had TV loaded up onto her laptop so she was feeling well prepared to ride this one out.
But then Gordon hurried back in, an anxious look on his face, and told her there’d been a warning that the river might flood. Everyone would need to be prepared.
Charley hurried to her car, took direction from a young woman in a hi-vis vest and gingerly drove along the road and on the track around the back of the holiday park. She gripped the wheel as she turned to place it in the narrow gap between two caravans. Near everyone was doing the same, getting the vehicles up to the highest ground they could and away from the banks of the river. Children were confined to their homes, and sandbags distributed, just in case, to the most low-lying houses. A place this isolated had no one else to rely on.
The dark clouds were gathering visibly, out to sea, and the wind was already gusting. All this and Melissa was trapped somewhere, maybe exposed somewhere that might be affected by the storm – perhaps devastatingly – and there was nothing, so far as she could tell, that Charley could do about it. She didn’t ask if this was simple weather or something more, something – and she was scared to think the word – magical. She didn’t feel like there was any point in asking anymore – the two worlds were increasingly becoming one, as if the distinction between magic and science was merely arbitrary, as if it just didn’t matter to her how something happened, only that it did.
In the main grounds of the holiday park, Charley spent some time helping Therese gather loose items and put them in sheds, unhook the swings from their frames, lower and remove the flags at the entrance. Gordon was going round the permanent residents, checking they had what they needed. Charley paused, briefly, to watch him. His conversation with Thalassa showed he’d forgotten most of what had unfolded between them. Thalassa had admitted as much – denying it was anything she did, just that most people didn’t have capacity to retain strong memories of magic. How much else were the people here forgetting?
She sighed, bringing her focus back to more immediate concerns. She considered her little wooden cabin with its thin walls, and just in case, made sure her things were packed away and put them in the dining hall which was much more securely constructed.
Sandbags were being transported in wheelbarrows and on small carts. Charley joined in, stacking them around the doors and ranch sliders of the houses of people she didn’t know. As she hurried down to the shore, some more empty bags someone had found in a garage under her arms, she caught sight of Thalassa.
Thalassa was on the beach drawing much more intricate patterns than the ones she had made when Charley had first arrived, what seemed like a lifetime ago. Across them, she was laying lines of sea glass and coils of seaweed. Charley assumed she was somehow sheltering the settlement from the storm, but something about her demeanour looked almost as if she was inviting it in.
Charley wasn’t sure she wanted to know, and she definitely wasn’t going to ask Thalassa. Even if she wasn’t so preoccupied. But she was intrigued by what she was doing, and, telling herself she’d run if it got bad, she stayed to watch, leaving the sandbags to a more burly local and clasping her coat around herself.
It began to rain seriously, heavy but perhaps not unusually so. It wasn’t like Charley hadn’t experienced a storm before – unlike almost everything else that had been going on recently, this at least felt within the range of normal calamities. She forced herself not to think about what it would be like for Melissa. There was nothing she could do about it, no way she could be found and, if need be, rescued, until the storm had passed, so it really wasn’t helpful or sensible to put too much thought into it.
Thalassa was conducting rituals that made no overt sense but were spectacular to watch. She threw five shining objects into different points along the line of the shore, and they radiated a thin light from within the water. It was as if a protective wall or veil was being erected between the ocean and the settlement. The rain was doing nothing to wash away her sigils. Thalassa was small but she was a powerful presence standing there – the storm bringing in a cold light, the wind in her hair and her arms in her air, performing magic against the storm.
Charley was beginning to wonder how much of what Thalassa did was actually necessary for the magic, and how much was just for some sort of dramatic show. She definitely knew by now Thalassa put effort into looking like a magic practitioner, and while it was true she needed some support walking, a regular cane would probably have done quite well enough.
Unless she actually used that staff for magic, of course.
She wasn’t the only one watching Thalassa, though others were clustered further back, not hiding exactly but not so exposed either. The storm raged out at sea and Thalassa seemed to hold it back, not putting it off entirely but directing it, managing it. It was windy and Charley couldn’t tell if the water that splashed her face was rain or the wind whipping up seawater, but either way it wasn’t as heavy as it had been earlier. She didn’t quite feel she was dressed for the weather and had no idea why on Earth she would do it in any case, but nevertheless, she found herself walking forward towards the sea. The wind tugged at her hair and her clothes, but it was nothing to what lay ahead. Out there, by the waves, Charley watched as Thalassa worked with the storm.
Then she caught something from the corner of her eye, off to the left. She snapped her head round towards it, as if she knew before she saw it that she needed to react, needed to be on high alert. An amorphous shape among the clouds, undulating and turning from over the hills, perhaps mistakable for a cloud itself just by looking, but it came with other, impossible, dimensions. It carried a power that made Charley want to run, want to sink to her knees and curl up behind a rock, hoping it hadn’t found her. Thalassa was holding up the whole sky, and if she’d noticed this she was in no place to deal with it.
It grew, coming towards the settlement; it was ugly and sickly, a yellow death glow filled with danger, and she backed away almost without realising it until she felt a wave break over her ankles. Charley didn’t know how to deal with it but she raised her arms and gathered all her energy anyway. She stood firm even though it took all her will, even though it felt like something was trying to topple her over from all directions. She’d never felt so powerful but nor had she ever felt so small. And she unleashed the light. Blue hurtling into the air, as the storm rolled in. It was just beginner’s magic, simple stuff, more show than substance. And this was hardly the time to be putting on a show.
But then Thalassa – who Charley could have sworn was far away down the beach only moments ago – was beside her. “Well done, child,” Charley heard in her ear. “You’re learning.” And then the world went dark and cold and she was drowning.
Chapter nine
The bed Charley awoke in was far comfier than her holiday park bunk – even though her whole body was aching and her head was throbbing, she could tell that much. The sheets were so soft it made her want to cry. Everything was eerily quiet. Another moment and she realised the pyjamas she was wearing were not her own. She tried to blink and look around but it was overwhelming, and she heard herself groan out loud. Her brain wasn’t so much broken as it was completely full, unable to take in any new information.
“You awake, child?” came a voice. The room was dimly lit, and fortunately, no one thought now was the time to change that. Small mercies indeed.
Charley tried to reply, but she didn’t think it emerged like any sort of coherent language. Nevertheless, in only a few moments, Thalassa was in the room beside her.
“I see you’ve woken. I’ll get you some tea.”
The last thing Charley wanted to be doing was making herself upright again to drink anything, let alone hot tea, but somehow, with the surprisingly gentle encouragement of Thalassa, she was sitting on the high bed with her legs dangling, drinking a cup of tea. It was less unpleasant than her previous medicinal tea experiences – it smelled, for want of a better term, more traditionally medicinal, and was a mid-brown colour. When she had finished it she felt both better – in the sense that she was in less pain – and deeply, deeply exhausted, as if she’d only just realised how fatigued she was. Putting the cup and saucer down on the bedside cabinet she swung her legs back into bed, sank into the mattress, and slept as if she had been awake for days.
Sunlight glowed through the curtains. Charley struggled to work out if it was morning, the same or a different day. Awkwardly rising in pyjamas that definitely weren’t hers and yet fit her perfectly, Charley drew aside the curtains and looked out at the sea. The waters were calm and endless, the clouds clearing ahead of what looked like was shaping up to be a very nice day, but the beach and road were strewn with driftwood and debris.
“Morning,” Thalassa said, pushing open the door gently.
“The storm...?” Charley asked, sitting back down on the bed. “What happened?”
“You slept right through it, I’m afraid. What do you remember?”
Charley felt like there was something much bigger than herself going on. And she didn’t know how much to trust Thalassa with it – Thalassa who had taken seven years from her life. And now was not the time for processing a strategy. “Uh, just going down to the beach, I think,” she lied.
“It was my fault. I’m so sorry. You got caught up in some of the magic I was doing and ended up falling in the water. It was nasty and cold, and I suspect you were already in a bad way because of all the stress you’ve been under. How are you feeling now?”
Charley struggled to think of an answer. To even grasp at the edges of what she’d experienced, and then to try to work out what Thalassa knew, and what she wasn’t telling her… it all felt like too much. "Better?” she said tentatively. “A bit tired.”
“That’s to be expected. I’ve washed and dried the clothes you had on; let me know if I need to ask for anything to be brought over from the park.”
Suddenly Charley felt so small and disconnected, the smallest in the universe she’d ever felt, as if she were a rag doll being thrown around in a huge warehouse or the back of a lorry, where there was so far to fall and nothing to cushion her.
“My phone,” she said, distraught.
“It was in your pocket when you went into the water. I’ve put it in some rice. It was only in the water briefly, so hopefully it’ll be okay once it’s dried out. And before you look at me, no, I can’t do magic on it, it would fry the internal processing unit. Magic can help you with a lot, but in this particular instance you’re better off with rice. I’ll check on it soon.”
“Thanks,” Charley said, feeling lost without it but not sure how to express that to Thalassa. There was nothing in particular she wanted to do online, she just needed the comfort of it. She wanted to be connected, to get in touch… “Melissa!” she cried suddenly, propelling herself off the bed. “We were meant to be going to find Melissa.”
A wave of dizziness hit her and she sat back down abruptly on the bed. It seemed she was going to be little use to her sister or anyone else.
“Careful,” Thalassa said. “Yesterday has drained us both.” There was a kindness in her voice that Charley hadn’t recognised before. “We’re heading out as soon as we can, don’t worry. I’m not letting you down.”
Charley perched numbly on the edge of the bed, feeling overwhelmed by the fact that people – and Thalassa, in particular – were being so kind to her, when she had done so little to deserve it, hadn’t really done anything as of yet, hadn’t even had chance to show them she was properly a person, to prove herself to them.
“Thanks,” she said. She searched to try to find a question that would help her understand what had happened. “Uh, what magic were you doing? Was it to protect Inver Aora from the storm?”
“That was part of it,” Thalassa said slowly. “The part I’ll tell most people, because even if they still don’t believe me they’ll at least believe my intentions were good. But mostly I was there to talk to the storm. To appease the forces within it and to hear what they have to say.”
“By forces,” Charley said. “Do you mean like spirits or gods or...”
“I mean forces of...” Thalassa stopped abruptly, pulling back the net curtain. “Looks like you’ve got a visitor. Would you like to borrow a house coat?”
True’s face was all worry, all sadness, and it would be ridiculous to think that was just about Charley – someone she’d only known a few days. Charley was tempted to ask what was wrong, but instead she took the offered hand-sewn wheat pack and the chocolate and reassured her that she was fine.
True perched on a chair in the corner of the room. “I should have warned you this place can be dangerous.”
“You kinda did,” replied Charley, feeling her body swinging between hot and cold erratically.
“Clearly not well enough. I know it’s pretty, and it’s not bad, but it’s just not like other places.”
“And yet you all come back to it. I know, you have family here, but everyone seems to even though there’s not much work. Even Anahera who everyone says was desperate to get away.”
“Oh, we all said we hated it at that age. Let me take the wheat pack and put it in the microwave for you.”
Charley felt the skin of True’s hand brush against hers as she reclaimed the wheat pack, suppressed a gasp as something shivered through her. Something that wasn’t anything to do with having been caught in a storm.
A couple of minutes later, True returned with the hot wheat pack and handed it back to her, then opened her bag. “I also brought some books. I don’t know what you like, but if you get bored…” She passed over a small stack of battered paperbacks, what looked like a detective story and a romance and a couple of others.
“I really appreciate it, just this outsider turning up and everyone’s been so kind to me.”
“You’re in trouble. Everyone’s going to want to respond to that. It’s okay, really. As long as…” – she pointed with her thumb to the next room – “…doesn’t teach you to throw that blue lightning around or anything.”
Charley chuckled nervously. “Oh, you remember that, then?"
“There are a few of us who see these things, even though they’re hidden from most. Our families have been here a long time. Thalassa does her stuff and it’s a bit weird, but she’s given a lot to the community, especially when she was younger. Or so I’m told.”
“You look after your own,” Charley said, at once understanding, but feeling like she’d grown up in a place where that was an alien concept. More judging people on what church they did or didn’t go to than looking after anyone. She felt herself relax and laughed along with True’s chit-chat. She wasn’t intimidating like she’d first seemed.
