You may wonder something at this juncture, murderous reader; the same question has troubled me for a very long time. Why did magic manifest in me, me in particular? If magic is a species of thought, shouldn’t it be a universal human property? I’ve observed my power long enough to know how it quickens in response to strong emotion, especially rage. But if everyone who feels justified rage—which is to say, by far the larger part of humankind—possessed the same degree of power, well, the world would have burned long ago.
I have no satisfying answer to this conundrum. I can only speculate that magic is in everyone, only generally too deep to access. That what might appear to be a gift is in fact a defect of certain minds, a flaw in their construction: a thinness that lets magic rupture the protective upper layers of thought and so escape.
And when it does escape, it shows itself no better than any other force subject to human will. That, in the end, is my argument with magic: that it is human.
Blood lacquered Darius’s face ruby-dark; a pink bubble of blood-tinged mucus clung to one nostril. I was up on one elbow, dizzy and shaking, while Gus crouched nearby sifting frantically through matted leaves. I couldn’t guess what he was doing until he came up with a downy gray feather, and I felt a lurch of understanding. Oh, I’d been so ready to condemn Gus for what he’d done to his mother, but now I had murdered—murdered over a hand on my hair.
Gus held the feather to Darius’s lips, and it fluttered.
He looked at me. “Catherine, can you walk?”
I couldn’t understand the significance of the question. Did that feather’s stirring mean that Darius was alive, or was Gus telling me in coded language that it had only been the wind?
“I have to go get help for him, and you—you can’t be here when they come. Wait, let me look you over. Just in case.” Gus left Darius and began quickly, methodically turning over the folds of my skirt, inspecting my cuffs. I was just lucid enough to grasp that he was looking for specks of blood. “All right, you look fine—you should brush off the leaves—oh, but those could have come from anywhere!” He hesitated, then rose and pulled me to my feet. The thrum of his shaking hands transmitted through my arm. “We can’t wait. He could still die. Hurry home, and I’ll figure out what to say.”
He turned me in the direction of the path, and pushed. The momentum took possession of me, and I started to run, still too numb to fully comprehend. But with each step a ghostly understanding shifted higher in my mind, until by the time I reached the bridge I could no longer help but recognize it:
Darius’s injury might well be construed as accidental. But suppose it weren’t? And if the old man died—
Gus was taking an enormous risk to protect me. I shouldn’t allow it, I thought hazily. I should tell the truth.
But the truth was incredible, impossible. Telling it would change nothing. Was that a sufficient reason to withhold it? I couldn’t tell.
It was the end of the afternoon when I reached home—supper would be late, though at least I’d set some beans to soak that morning, and Anna had started the fire. My brothers banged and clamored on all sides as I began cooking with detached, agitated movements. Now and then I was gripped by the awareness that I did not know whether or not I was a murderer, and my stomach muscles would clench as if I were vomiting. How could something so momentous, so essential to my identity, be so far beyond my control?
Once the simplest possible stew was simmering I slipped out to the woodpile and fell in a heap, and there I stayed. I felt myself diminished to an arrangement of negligible things: a smear of shadow by the wheelbarrow, the tremor in my back, wood smoke—
The scaly prickle of a bird’s claws pinching my wrist.
“He’s going to live,” the bird sang with that layering of voices, its own and Gus’s—it was a sparrow this time. I jerked upright and met the inscrutable darkness of its star-specked eyes. “Now you see, Catherine, don’t you? Why there’s nothing else for us, and nowhere else we can go?”
When I turned, there was Anna, watching the scene with grave unsurprise. We’d never spoken of magic, but I believe she always knew—knew, perhaps, by an apprehension of her own hidden nature. Whatever became of my odd little darling? Did she live with quiet acceptance, or with volatile defiance? If she’d ever come to Nautilus, surely she would have sought me out?
Yet even in Nautilus, I have sometimes imagined her face in the crowd.
“I told you,” she said, not without bitterness. But then she leaned in and kissed my eyebrow, and clung awhile with her head nestled on my collarbone.