Page 73 of A Winding Wave of Magic
As soon as he said that, we rounded up the last switchback and found ourselves on a rocky part of the trail where the trees opened up again. Not the summit, but the highest we could get without climbing the rock and mud ascent to the peak. A view of the Manzanita Beach stretched out below us, visible through some of the trees. A crescent-shaped strip of beach that guarded the town from the water threatening to swallow it up.
“Come here.” Jonathan beckoned with an outstretched hand. “Will you take off your glove?”
I swallowed, then did as he asked. He did the same.
“Promise not to probe?” He was joking, but there was a clear undercurrent of sincerity in his request.
I raised a doubtful brow, and he blinked, over innocent, making me laugh.
“I promise,” I said. “Well, I’ll try not to, anyway.”
“Fair enough.” Jonathan grinned, green eyes glittering. His face appeared to be lit from within. “Close your eyes.”
He took my hand. Immediately my vision was filled with Manzanita Beach. But instead of the seascape I had just Seen, it was as if the lines of the land, the ocean, the beach, the town, everything, were moving, constructed by ambient, multicolored, microscopic lights that twinkled in utterly gorgeous chaos.Certain parts seemed to be dominated more by some colors than others. The ocean, for instance, was full of every blue imaginable, while the forest glittered with immeasurable greens.
“Oh,” I breathed, taking in the prismatic world around me.
Slowly, my perspective—hisperspective—turned, and the tiny particles became more fluid and more stable as we examined the larger objects around us. The rocks on the ground were darker, glimmering grays, somehow less mobile but never fully still. The trees, on the other hand, were more fluid as streams of other particles drifted through their branches. Many of them had a slow pulse, as if they were asleep.
Then Jonathan’s gaze turned on me. I was, in a word, a rainbow, with some particles constantly moving, others more still, like the rocks. A definite tinge of brilliant cerulean pervaded my system, which seemed to be even more fluid than the trees, moving with the rhythm and time of the waves below us. I gasped and watched as the energy of oxygen coursed through my lungs and filtered through my bloodstream as, in turn, my nose released other, changed energy of carbon dioxide.
Gradually, the particles began to dim, and I registered the effort that Jonathan had to exert in order to See the world that way, much less make requests of it. Eventually, our surroundings faded to their normal self: a mixture of the earthen browns, dark greens, smoky grays and slate blues of the coastal climate. The world I knew.
Jonathan dropped my hand, and my regular sight returned to me.
“Wow,” I breathed. “Oh, wow.”
23
POETRY AND A FIRE
A roar of fire
has split my heart
without him I die.
— LÍADAN, “LÍADAN TELLS OF HER LOVE FOR CUIRITHIR”
By the time we had come back down the mountain, I was giddy like a child, tripping on Jonathan’s heels and begging for more beautiful glimpses of his Sight. It felt strange to think of it as such, a term so close to a seer’s identity, but I also couldn’t think of any other way to say it. In a way, my Sight seemed woefully misnamed—he actually used his eyes for his, while I used my mind and touch, and really all my senses.
“Last time, I promise,” I wheedled. “Something small. You don’t have to look at everything again. Just a tree, or a branch even. A clod of dirt.”
Very few times in my life had I experienced the kind of moments that made the world tilt on its axis. The first was whenI learned I was a seer, that my mother and Grandmother were also seers, and that my father was definitely not. I was five.
The second was, of course, when my father died.
The third was when I read W.B. Yeats for the first time as a nineteen-year-old college sophomore and a recitation of “The Stolen Child” plucked the strings of my watery soul.
The fourth and only other was the first time I’d touched a manuscript in the Burns Library and watched the poet I revered come to life and tell me secrets no one else knew.
That was nearly six years ago. I had almost forgotten what it was like, this sudden euphoria. How it filled the soul and banished everything else.
Jonathan chuckled and stopped in front of the enormous stump of an old-growth cedar. For the fifth time, he held out his hand.
“Just for a moment,” he said as I whipped off my glove and took it.
Was it me, or was he enjoying these excuses to touch just as much as I was? A thrill of pleasure ran up my arm even through the blankness in his thoughts. He was shielding again—not as skillfully as a seer (with Penny, I wouldn’t have even known), but somehow he was managing it. I still didn’t know how.
