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Winter came and swallowed autumn and blanketed the land of Matauc with frost and sheets of snow. The longhouses puffed smoke from their chimneys and the land became silent. Emrys trudged through the layer of snow in only tunic and trousers. He pulled the straps round his chest that led back to the sleigh where Fionnuala lounged, drinking tea.
“You look cold,” she said. Steam rose from the cup in her gloved hands. She wore a wolfskin cloak with the hood raised over her head.
The moons shone overhead, all of them forming a vertical line as if one sat upon the other and Etain, the smallest, resting on the horizon. The wind tore over the land. Frigid and piercing, howling its way between the hills to assault Emrys and Fionnuala.
But Emrys didn’t feel it. His barefeet caused the snow to melt and steam with every step. He called back to her and asked, not for the first time, “Why am I pulling you?”
“I do not like the snow.”
He squinted at the rising hill before him and took a deep breath. The fire flowed within him keeping him warm. His skin burned but caused him no pain. Despite the mastery at controlling the fire, he still had not created fire outside of himself. Fionnuala told him it would come, that he had too much fear, held to control too tightly. She told him that’s why he could control and manipulate the fire within him, even though he couldn’t emit it again.
“It’s an advanced skill,” she had said.
But it came easy to him. Or at least easier than projecting fire out into the world or sparking it from the heat within himself. He felt the fear she continually pointed to. When the fire flowed into his hands or into his throat, he didn’t know how to let it go. And so it burned and raged within him, until he quieted it to a simmer while he breathed smoke or steam.
Digging his toes into the dirt, he rushed up the hill, dragging her sleigh along. Though he controlled the fire, he could not control his breath as his body screamed from the exertion of dragging the sleigh and a grown woman up the hill. Halfway up the hill, he dug in for another push and his foot slipped. He fell and the sleigh dragged him back down to where he began.
Fionnuala came to his side and offered him a hand. He took it and she pulled him up.
“That was very good.”
“You always say that when I fail.” The snow melted on his trousers and tunic, soaking him. Rebuilding the fire caused it to steam as he warmed.
“You are too hard on yourself, Emrys. It takes a lifetime to become what I’ve become.”
It all seemed so difficult. So painful. “Will it get easier?”
“No. But you will improve and your confidence will improve with your ability. Together, they will make it feel easier. You must always remember that magic is wild and dangerous. Without patience, attentiveness, and confidence, you will cause great chaos to yourself and the world around you.”
“Doesn’t really make me feel better.”
“I’m here to instruct not to coddle.”
Emrys snorted. He sometimes thought of Fionnuala as a friend but she often made a point of clarifying their relationship. She remained aloof, not only to him, but to everyone in the clan. “Have you seen the skywhales yet?”
She cocked her head. “The what?”
“The machines the strangers flew here. Have you seen them?”
“Yes.”
“My father having you look into them?”
“No.”
He smiled. “Just curiosity then. Come on, let’s go take a look.”
He unstrapped the sleigh from him and walked back up the hill, trusting she’d follow. When he heard her boots crunching the snow, excitement thrummed within him. She was a warlock but her expertise was magic. He knew the mechanical world. Or at least believed he did. Compared to most in Matauc land, he was likely the foremost scholar. But when these machines crashed into his home, he came to understand how far behind he was even in this.
He didn’t know magic or machines. Not the way others did. No matter how many books he had read or all the things he’d tried to teach himself, he still knew nothing about anything.
Only clan politics. Which was all his father wanted him to know.
He pushed away the thoughts of his father. His dying father. And carried on to the skywhales.
And there she was.
Mari.
Even buried beneath wolfskins, he knew her from the way she waved her arms and gesticulated towards the flying machine. When she turned to face the large man beside her, who must’ve been Lyosha, he saw the glint of her dark glasses, confirming. Lyosha had a wide piece of paper stretched between his big hands.
She pointed back towards Emrys and he stilled for a moment, like she knew he approached. Knew he was there. Watching her.
He’d come to know her in the weeks since Gynhaeaf in the limited way people who cannot speak learn from one another. He found it fascinating how perplexed she and her companions were by Ariana’s eye and arm. They had no such similar technology or ability, yet they made ships that sailed through the sky carried by mountains of air trapped within steel and canvas.
It was all much simpler than he thought. Almost mundane, really. Enormous canvas bags filled with something lighter than air that allowed them to float into the air. He didn’t understand how they kept from soaring off into the higher realms where the moons and stars resided but he assumed it was about balancing weight. Finding the right upward and downward pressure. The propulsion through the sky was also simple. Burning fires created steam and the steam powered the engine propelling the ship forward. Like a train.
A train in the sky that sailed and steered like a ship on the seas.
He hurried to meet her but tried not to show his excitement to Fionnuala. He preferred to speak with Mari alone for dozens of reasons. Chief among them was her intense focus on him. But, too, he found it easier to communicate with her when there was no one else to bounce off or pay attention to.
In a way, an intimacy had grown between them, especially as winter trapped most inside doing the kind of tasks he’d always associated with winter. Because the season turned so rapidly, most of the pickling and preserving was done after the first frosts. The weaving and dying of wools, too, carried them through the winter.
But Emrys was able to avoid all that. He was about his father’s business, learning magic, trying to learn Mari’s language.
The failure at both stung less when she turned to him and removed her glasses and smiled and waved her hand. “Hello, Emrys.”
The way she said his name. Had he not been burning within already, her accent would have melted all the snow, scorched away any bite of cold. It was a delicate thing, his name in her voice. Such softness with the Em and then her R rolled in the back of her mouth rather than the front, and she elongated the end of his name, holding it longer than anyone he’d ever heard.
He raised his own hand and spoke in her language, “Good evening, Mari.”
She laughed every time he said her name and he loved her for that. Would bow down, kneel down, beg her to stay always with him so long as she just kept looking at him like that.
She spoke something to Lyosha who smiled wide at Emrys. “Hello, Emrys.” His own accent harsh and rumbling, the vowels thick in his mouth and the consonants strangely off-kilter. Not like Mari’s accent but not like anything Emrys had ever heard either. Lyosha rolled up the scroll he had been showing Mari and tucked it into his thick coat. He bowed and went back into the airship.
Mari hurried to him and said, “Cold?”
He shrugged, not knowing how to explain in their limited vocabulary why he needed no cloak. Instead, he pointed at Fionnuala and spoke in Mari’s language, “She Fionnuala. Teacher.” Then to Fionnuala, “She’s Mari.”
Fionnuala cocked her head and spoke in a torrent of language Emrys didn’t understand. It wasn’t the Eirish she’d spoken in the past, but something else. Something familiar.
Mari squealed and slapped Emrys in the arm, laughing.
He turned to her and saw the excitement there. Her eyes wide and smile wider.
She said, “You are fool, Emrys.”
And he loved her. Wanted to always be her fool. Wanted only to hear her call his name. Say it slow. Say it every day.
She spoke in her own language to Fionnuala and Fionnuala spoke back and only then did he understand her excitement.
He stared at his teacher in confusion and some amount of frustration. She spoke, the words flowing like liquid from her mouth, and then Mari responding in kind.
Mari took Fionnuala’s hands but Fionnuala pulled them back and stepped away and more language poured out of her and Emrys became so annoyed both at the rudeness and the deceit.
He interrupted her, said, “You lied to me.”
Mari blinked and turned to him. “Emrys?”
It flowed over him. Through him. Embarrassed to show his anger, his annoyance, but he couldn’t control this. Not this time. He said, “You knew her language this whole time and you left me in darkness, in deafness for weeks!”
Fionnuala crossed her arms, eyebrows low. “Didn’t know they spoke Faroise. Didn’t know anything about them.”
“You’ve been to their ship!”
“No,” she shook her head. “I had seen it. I have seen it.” She nodded towards the airship. “But I did not go in it.”
Emrys opened his mouth to unleash more of his anger. All the days scrabbling in the dark, trying to communicate, trying to breathe fire, to pull magic from the world around him, from within himself. Failure. Always failing.
Before the words came, she raised a hand and said, “You can fight me or you can begin, right now, a new lesson.”
Mari said, “Emrys?”
Fionnuala responded and Mari hooked her arm through Emrys’.
Unbalanced, Emrys asked what she said.
Fionnuala said, “I told her you were tired. And hungry.”
Mari said. “We eat.” She pointed back to his father’s longhouse.
And nothing could have mattered less than his frustration.