Page 13 of A Winding Wave of Magic
But the swans remember the sweet days that were.
— KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON, “THE CHILDREN OF LIR”
The sidewalk outside my building remained just as shockingly quiet as the car as I made my way into my building. Maybe it was the effects of the cold plunge, I rationalized as I unlocked the door with still-shaking hands. I’d always “touched the water” with a finger bowl at worst, a warm bath at best. I hadn’t done a cold plunge that way since I’d lived on the coast.
It had nothing to do with the stranger’s ability to See my own thoughts as well, I decided as I trudged up the stairs to my apartment on the top floor. Nothing to do with that oddly grounding, annoyingly direct gaze.
Even the door didn’t squeak when I opened it. I slammed it shut with a bang if just to prove a point.
Inside, the apartment was just as strangely silent. Aja’s open bedroom door informed me she was out, thank the goddess, but minor visions of her moving about the apartment should have flared up the moment I stepped inside.
Still, there was nothing.
My mind was blissfully blank.
“Well, that won’t last,” I announced as I kicked off my sodden boots and brought them over to one of the radiator heaters under the bay window of our small common area that looked out toward Cleveland Circle. I stripped off the rest of my wet clothes and set them up around it, then wrapped myself with a blanket and made for my bedroom.
A box sitting on the kitchen table stopped me. One marked with my name and address and little else.
It looked like a normal package. Roughly the size of a shoebox, the sturdy cardboard was slightly dented on one side, smothered with crinkled packing tape, and my name in large typed letters. I didn’t need to look to know who it was from. No one sent me packages like this except Gran.
Its arrival wasn’t necessarily all that out of the ordinary. But its coincidence with one of the strangest days I’d experienced in six years of living in Boston was.
“What’s in the mystery box this time, Gran?” I murmured as I eyed the package warily.
Penelope Monroe, whose attention to privacy was so great she easily fell into the realm of conspiracy theorists, never left a return address. On top of the lack of, she always cleansed her mail so it held no obvious marks of her handling. I tried to tell her that indicated more than anything who it was from, but she always shook off my chiding and said it wasn’tmeshe was worried about. She just wouldn’t tell me who, then, was worth her concern.
She liked a good test too, which was why I knew that as soon as I laid my hand on the things, I’d have to work to get to whatever was inside.
I drummed my fingers lightly on the table, trying to decide whether I should open the package or have my bath and ignore it. Anything Gran had actually taken the time to send me would occupy my attention completely. Her gifts made me listen whether I wanted to or not.
The first care package she ever sent me, when I was a freshman at Reed, supposedly contained a few saining bundles of juniper and cedar. But when I reached in to take one, I was overcome with such intense sadness and longing—Gran’slonging for me, as it were—that I had immediately burst into inconsolable tears and missed my first class of the morning.
Gran had never made any bones about the fact that she hadn’t wanted me to leave for school in the first place. “Well, at least it will be useful,” she had said unironically when I told her of my plans to continue studying Old Irish and Celtic Studies at Boston College, some years later. She hadn’t wanted me to leave then either, and it was only with the promise that I would come back that she relented.
I was still wary about the packages, though.
Tentatively, I laid my bare hand atop the box with my eyes closed. I was good at probing—better than most, despite my lack of discipline.Untrainable, Gran had said with some longing, the way any kind of expert approaches a challenge.
My mind was black for a moment, and for a moment, I wondered if something had happened in that pond.Or maybe when the sorcerer touched you, I couldn’t help but think. Maybe the unthinkable had happened, something I’d wished for as a teenager with no little shame.
Maybe my powers were gone.
But then, like water just starting to boil, something simmered to the surface. My palm tingled, and then the barrier I’d been expecting made itself clear.
She had used a kelp charm this time—easy enough, considering how abundant it was at the beach. Taut, but still giving. Room to stretch. I pressed with my mind’s finger, then a full hand, pushing and prodding, looking for weaknesses in the screen. Sometimes it broke when I did this. Sometimes it didn’t. I never knew when or how it might, only if it did, I’d instantly be?—
Overwhelmed.
I snatched back my hand, cradling it as though it had been burned.
Suddenly, my mind felt exhausted. My entire both wilted in nothing but a blanket.
I needed to sain. I needed a bath. This package could wait until tomorrow.
I took the half-burned bundle of dried juniper and a lighter from the box on the windowsill and brought them into my bedroom. There, I lit the end of the juniper, allowed it to burn for a moment, then blew out the flame so the end was a glowing, smoking ember as I walked sunwise around the room.
This was one of the first things Gran had taught me when I started the change, just one year after she’d taken me in. Saining, an ancient purifying technique that had been passed down through generations, was an indispensable tool for any seer. At home in Oregon, Gran tended a grove of juniper and rowan for the purpose, and we kept a driftwood fire roaring at the huge copper hearth, always starting with tinder from Gran’s trees to quiet the house. It didn’t last forever, but it provided relief. And protected us, she said, though I never really understood how.
