The next evening we did something different. She laid a lighter spell on me that left me awake but relaxed. Then she taught me to do what she called meditate. I’d always thought “meditate” meant to think about something, but this was different. She told me afterward she hadn’t thought it’d go that well, first time. The spell had helped, but she told me my breeding was showing itself. It turned out we’d sat like that, straight-backed in two kitchen chairs, for half an hour.
When we were done, she began telling me things. I listened, but I didn’t really believe. I mean, part of me said she wouldn’t lie to me about things like that, but what she told me was flat-out unbelievable. My great-great-grampa had come from her world, she said, where her Sisterhood was breeding up strains of people for special purposes, like we breed up hogs and cattle and horses. This was because they were always in danger from “the ylver,” who had a lot more power than the Sisterhood, and the only way her people could survive was to get stronger and smarter, and be better at magic.
Anyway, Great-great-grampa had been an experiment, and it’d worked real well. Except for one thing: he hadn’t wanted to do what they told him. He was to breed a lot of different sisters, but he’d fallen in love with one of them, and her with him, and he didn’t want to keep on living as a stud horse. So the boss sister took her away, sent her off somewhere.
To make a long story short, he ran off to the nearest gate and went through it into Kentucky, coming out in Muhlenberg County. Afraid of being followed and caught, he headed north and crossed the Ohio River into Indiana, where he got work deadening timber long enough to make a stake and get married. Then he went on north again to Washington County, where he homesteaded the land our family’s worked ever since.
They’d bred up other studs besides him, but back in Yuulith where’d he’d come from, his progeny proved out specially good, so they tracked him by following his trace in what Varia called the Web. That was something they’d just learned to do; only a few knew how. Then they sent her to bear children by Will.
That’s what she told me, and knowing what I know now, I know it’s true.
Only now, she told me, it had all gone to waste. Most of the Sisters had been killed and the rest scattered. She didn’t know if any of her children were alive. The whole story seemed a little more real to me when she said that, from the way her eyes welled up. She’d never seen her children beyond a couple weeks old, except in the pictures I’d found, but they were hers, all she had.
After that she spelled me often, and did drills with me, twenty or thirty minutes at a time. To open up my magical powers, she said. I told her that’d be a waste of time, that I didn’t have any to open up, and anyway I didn’t want magical powers. I had my brain and my two hands and my muscles, and everything else I needed. She was magical enough for both of us.
She looked at me long and seriously. I’d never seen her more serious. “Darling,” she told me, “you do have them. They showed up more when you were little. Do you remember once when you were seven or eight, and you looked up at the corner of the ceiling, where I’d looked? Before Idri, my Evansville contact was my favorite sister, Liiset, and now and then she’d look in on me. Something Idri couldn’t do.
“She wasn’t there physically, but you sensed her spirit and translated it to her physical appearance—her face. You couldn’t have done any of that if you didn’t have the talent.”
I remembered, for the first time since that day. It’d been too spooky. “Seems like I’ve lost it since, though,” I said.
She shook her head. “How did you find the pictures? How did you even know enough to look?”