After that stormy day together in my room, it was like nothing had changed, but “like nothing” didn’t mean “nothing”. She still insisted on sleeping under the tree and wouldn’t let me help her cook and bombarded me with words to learn. However, the stubbornness she had carried around before eased up. It was hard to put into words, more like a feeling, how I felt around her. I didn’t feel… unwelcome. Like it was okay for me to sit next to her when we ate or walk beside her when we went around.

Whatever the change, our daily life stayed the same. We woke up and dealt with nature’s call, I brushed my teeth with ash while she had some kind of paste and toothbrush, then she taught me words all day, breaks for meals. More and more words, grammar, dragged into the swamp that was tenses and how sentences were different for first-person and so on.

As nice as the language had been to learn so far, it turned out that verbs were different depending on gender: one for not-people, one for men, one for women, and a polite one that you used if you didn’t know the person. At least, that was how I understood it and she hadn’t corrected me when using it like that. Having learned some French before, I found some comfort in objects and animals not being gendered.

Although I wasn’t the fastest learner, I honestly tried. The more that actually stuck in my head, the easier it was to stick more in, sticking them together. Remembering a table with all the different tenses of verbs was difficult, but I could remember a few sentences easily enough. “I was hungry, I am hungry, I will be hungry.” That sort of thing.

That she taught me all around the camp and the nearby forest, sometimes I remembered where I learned something more than I remembered what I learned. The sound of the stream when I’d learned “where” or the warm sunset when I’d learned “moon”. Some words, I remembered her lips, how they moved when saying the word, like “family”. A beautiful word that started and ended with a smile.

For all I learned, I wasn’t much good at speaking it. Listening or reading, I could understand the verbs easily enough, but always messed up which one to use when I had to choose.

Still, it was already enough that… if she left… I could find a village and actually talk to the people there. Not very well, but I wouldn’t be some crazy woman speaking in tongues. So I was thankful to her for that. Thankful for her company, thankful for her letting me borrow some of her things to cook, thankful for the meals she cooked for me.

I hoped I had the words to tell her that before she eventually did decide to move on. Until she did, I dared not even try to ask her, afraid the only thing keeping her here was that she had forgotten to carry on travelling.

So we went, day by day, another week, two passing—her weeks with only six days. In her calendar, it was the twenty-first day of the fourth month… she thought. Without a tree to keep a tally on, she wasn’t sure if she had missed a day or counted twice since leaving the last village.

An interesting thing, her way of tallying was to make a square with one diagonal; for days, you could do a second diagonal: a square with an x inside. I started doing it like that too.

Overwhelmed at the start, lots of interesting things had slipped past me. Well, interesting was pushing it, but things. The forks she had were three-pronged; when I noticed, I thought it was because she was travelling, but I asked her and she told me this was normal, only some forks with four for certain foods. To keep her hair in a ponytail, she had a hair clip that was like a bow—an archery bow. She pulled back the “string” and slipped her hair through, then it sprung back and clamped her hair in place.

A similar world, yet vastly different. That was without considering magic or those jelly creatures.

Something similar I was happy to find was that the people here also celebrated birthdays. “In the first month, on the twelfth day, nineteen years ago,” Hyraj said.

It took me a while to give mine, easier once I remembered I had already worked out Hatty’s birthday, so I just had to count from there. “Thirteen month, twenty-five day,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Ah, eighteen year ago.”

“Eighteen…” she muttered, lips pursed for a moment before our eyes met and she relaxed. It looked like she had something to say, but didn’t say it. Maybe something I couldn’t understand yet.

The conversation my innocent question had started already at an end, we fell into silence, which was unusual for the morning. Some evenings, she seemed to take pity on me and would read her book alone until dinnertime. Otherwise, well, she had endless patience for teaching me.

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But now there was silence. Not uncomfortable, but unnerving. I wondered if I had reminded her of her family and upset her.

It did me no good to overthink these things, so I focused on the weaving. However, I only pulled one flattened reed through before she stopped me, her hand touching mine when I went to get the next reed. Looking up at her, she had a smile. Well, as close to a smile as she gave, more in her eyes than her mouth.

“This,” she said, pulling back her hand, fingertips sliding across my hand and feeling hot as they did. Distracted by that, I was slow to copy her as she made a loop with her thumbs and forefingers, something I had seen her do before when casting magic.

Excited by that, I kept glancing between my hands and hers, trying to get each of my fingers into the exact same position as hers.

One second passed, two…. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to explain, but, if she didn’t know how, why did she choose now? Seconds after seconds trickling past until she finally spoke.

But all she said was, “This,” and started moving her fingers.

Focusing again, I watched and tried to copy. Her thumbs and forefingers slid along, overlapping, shrinking the circle in the middle, so that was what I did. Slow and steady, just about everything she did unhurried. Slowly, curling my fingers when my hands couldn’t move any closer, hole the size of a coin and—I couldn’t curl my fingers any more?

Looking at her, she also still had a circle. Our gazes met as I glanced up and she showed me that smile again.

“Squeeze, squash,” she said, her words simpler for me when it wasn’t a language lesson.

I didn’t know what I was squashing. It reminded me of, like, a trick. That there was something about my body that meant I couldn’t curl my fingers all the way when my hands were in this position.

But she hadn’t tricked or teased me before, so I kept trying. It wasn’t like there was something hard in the way and, when I tensed, the circle did shrink, it just pushed back when I stopped tensing. So I took in a deep breath and tried, strained, whole body tense as I put my all into it.

Smaller, growing smaller and smaller, just a pea-sized hole and—

It popped, loud and sharp, like a gunshot with the TV turned low, giving me such a fright I jumped back, throwing my hands apart. Took me a second to realise my eyes were closed. Opening them, I stared down at where my hands had been and there, swirling in an unfelt breeze, was like a mist, glittering every colour imaginable—and probably colours that couldn’t be imagined—as the sun filtered through it.

Then it left, not blown away, but melting as if it was fog or ice crystals hanging in the air.

Once the last trace of it was gone, I felt a rush of excitement, giddy, immediately looking at Hyraj with a smile so wide it hurt. “Magic!” I said.

She let out a sigh, her head tilted to the side, then she said, “Magic.”

I wanted to do it again, so used to learning things by repetition, but I caught myself and waited for her teaching. Waited, waiting as the seconds passed.

“This,” she said, holding just one hand out in a half-circle.

Frowning, I copied her. She wasted no time and brought her hand to mine, making one circle between both of us, and I felt a tingle. Such a tiny feeling, I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it.

The next moment, I didn’t have the luxury to think about it, a flame appearing in the circle our hands made. Small, barely feeling the heat, but a real fire—no, a magical fire. It didn’t burn in ambers and crimsons or even the ghostly blue of a gas flame, kind of shimmered like that magic fog.

That confused me since, well, I had seen her make fire that looked like real fire, only difference that it didn’t leave soot or ash behind.

After a few seconds, the flame disappeared as suddenly as it came. “How magic feel?” she asked, pulling back her hand and breaking the circle.

Confused, I said, “Hot?”

She sighed again, this time more exasperated. “This,” she said, her hand coming back.

Focused this time, I felt the tingle when our forefingers and thumbs touched. Tried to follow it. Almost electric, a buzz, running a little deeper than my skin, and it grew as the magic flame appeared again. Ignoring the heat, closed my eyes to keep my focus on this feeling.

“Metal,” I said, the best word I knew for it, yet it probably sounded stupid without knowing about electricity and wires.

“Metal?” she muttered.

I wished I knew the word for tingle or buzz or anything close. “Hot and cold and circle,” I said, still doing my best with what little I had.

“That it is?”

Smiling, I couldn’t think of a better answer she could have given.

We did it a few more times, Hyraj very aware how best to teach me by now, and then she moved on to the water magic. Again, it was different, not making a stream of falling water, but a ball of magic water that glittered, the way it seemed to move like there were tiny waves travelling across it.

The strange sensation running through my forefinger and thumb was similar. A tingle, a buzz, so similar that I couldn’t tell a difference. Maybe there wasn’t even supposed to be one.

“How magic feel?” she asked.

I didn’t know the word for “same”, so just said the same thing: “Metal. Hot and cold and circle.”

She stared at me, her eyes a little narrowed and lips a little thin. How she normally looked. But, right now, we were so close, just a step away from each other, her eyes so big. I had forgotten how pretty they were, like a tropical sea circled her pupil.

Breaking me out of my daze, she squeezed my hand, held it. “Louise magic, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, not sure how else to answer that question.

However, there was something funny about how she’d said it: I was magic.