Chapter Four #2
“Then keep your dress in your mind.” He said it so plainly that it was hard to be embarrassed by it, though not impossible.
She nodded. “All right. Creature and self.”
“The third thing,” he said, “is not to lose your head when it works.”
“What a charming instruction.”
“A necessary one.” He came around the table and into the cleared space.
“Your sight will change. Your balance will change. The sounds in the room may strike you differently. You’ll have a new body arranged in a new way. It will feel wrong at first because it is wrong at first. The first time most fairies manage a proper transformation, they panic.”
“And then?”
“They turn back.”
“That sounds harmless enough.”
“It is, unless they thrash about first and destroy things.”
Ina looked at the shelves. “Again with the library.”
“I know the importance of what is in this room. You should too.”
He stopped in front of her. “When you change, remember that you can return the same way you began. Hold yourself in your mind. See your own body clearly. Not only your face. Your whole shape. Your dress, your shoes, your hands. If you can think your way into the other form,
you can think your way back.”
She took a breath and let it out. “You make it sound almost simple.”
“It’s logical.”
“That’s not the same thing as simple.”
“Exactly.” He stepped back and tipped his head toward the open space. “Come.”
Ina joined him on the floor between the tables.
The room seemed much larger there without furniture between them.
She could hear the constant motion of the burrow court city outside one of the high windows.
Somewhere deeper in the palace, a door shut.
For another odd moment, Ina wondered how much of what happened in the library could be heard outside it.
Karai folded his hands behind his back. “Begin with the heron. Stand still. Don’t rush.”
She planted her feet and closed her eyes.
At first it felt foolish. Not magical, not queenly, not promising.
Foolish. She pictured the bird from the painted pages.
Too broad. She corrected it. The beak came out wrong in her mind.
She tried again. Long legs, backward-bending joints, wide wings, narrow head.
She tried to imagine the whole bird at once and lost the feet.
She added those back in and lost the body.
“Too vague,” said Karai softly, like he could tell what she was thinking.
She opened one eye. “Don’t say that while I’m doing it.”
“Then do it better.”
She closed her eye again and started over.
This time she tried to build the heron piece by piece. Neck. Head. Beak. Shoulders. Wings folded in. Long legs. Feet planted in mud. She held the image.
Then she remembered she also had to picture herself. The whole thing collapsed immediately.
She opened her eyes. “This is ridiculous.”
“It’s work,” he replied, not unkindly.
“Why can’t this be more like learning light magic?”
“Light doesn’t have a fixed shape.”
She huffed once through her nose at the insufferable logic and tried again.
The next few attempts did nothing at all.
Once she thought her hands tingled, but when she opened her eyes they were exactly the same hands, with ink still at the edge of one finger from the council notes.
Another time a gust of air lifted loose papers on the table behind her, which made Karai say, “That would be wind, and unless you plan to arrive at the ball as a hurricane, it’s not helpful.”
She glared at him.
He did not care.
She studied the books again. She went back to the skeleton drawing. She stared so long at a painted heron’s knee joint that her own legs began to ache in sympathy. Karai made her describe the bird aloud, which she resented until it worked better than silence.
“Long beak. Longer,” he repeated slowly.
“Fine. Longer beak. Eyes set wider apart. Neck folded in an S when resting.”
“Better.”
“Body lighter than it looks. Legs thin, but not frail.”
He nodded once.
She stood again.
This time she remembered to picture her own dress as well – the sea green shirt with its pearly threaded patterns, the skirt in the same color, the lighter underlayer.
The thin belt at her waist. The shoes on her feet.
Fairy and heron together. Her own body passing into the bird’s shape without shedding what belonged to it.
Nothing.
Again.
Nothing.
A third time she got far enough into the thought that her skin gave a quick hard shiver from head to heel. Then it was gone.
“I can’t do it,” she groaned.
Karai did not answer quickly, which annoyed her more than contradiction would have. At last he said in that familiar soft tone full of immeasurable patience, “You can. You will. You’re getting angry before you’ve earned the right.”
She shot daggers at him with her eyes. “Maybe you’re being too calm.”
He shrugged. “It hasn’t failed you yet.”
He had her there, holding her gaze.
She looked away first.
The room had grown warmer. A line of hair had come loose against her cheek. She pushed it back impatiently and set her feet again. The heron. Herself. Her dress. Legs, neck, beak, wings. Fairy, then bird. Bird, then fairy.
Nothing.
Her frustration rose so quickly this time it felt almost premeditated. She shut her eyes hard and forced the image into place with more anger than grace.
The change hit her in one clean sweep.
Not slowly. Not gently. One instant she was standing on two fairy feet in the library, and the next the floor was all the way down there and the ceiling was brushing her head.
Her body lurched upward and forward into wrongness.
Her balance shot away from her. Her arms were gone.
Her face had become a weapon. Her legs had become some impossible arrangement of sticks and hinges.
Her dress fell in a heap somewhere.
Ina opened her eyes.
The world had changed shape. The room had spread outward into streaks and planes she could not read quickly enough.
The books and table edges looked wrong. The light was too bright in one direction and too flat in another.
She tried to steady herself and found that her feet, if they could even be called feet, were in the wrong places and much too far below her.
She toppled. One wing, enormous and wholly unfamiliar, flung halfway open with a beating rush that struck air and panic together, and several bookcases along with them. Something hard was knocked to the floor. She felt, rather than saw, Karai moving below her, toward her.
The heron vanished.
She was back in her own body before she had fully hit the ground, stumbling the last step with bare skin and no dress and far too much of herself suddenly returned all at once.
She made a sound she would later deny, caught sight of her clothes on the floor, and then abandoned every useful thought she possessed and ran straight into Karai.