The next day, after going through the chores and language lessons, Hyraj sat me down by the stream.

I felt more settled today. My mood had always been like a wave, building up and then crashing down. Thought it was hormones; at least, that was what, like, the world said. Jokes, headlines, teachers. But I was still like this even without my period.

Anyway, yesterday’s emotions now felt distant. Those feelings that had felt overwhelming now a sigh. Whatever happened, life carried on. I just needed to keep walking forwards.

The stream flowed and gurgled, loud so close. A quiet loud. Unless there was heavy rain, nothing out here really needed to be talked over. A normal voice would do.

“Magic is threads,” she said.

I nodded by instinct, but that wasn’t a gesture she knew. Well, it was now because I had done it so much, in her culture a rude thing to move your head when talking or being talked to. She hadn’t told me much, only to tilt my head forward if I ever met someone important.

“When you squeeze, the threads join,” she said; I knew enough to make sense of that, but what she said next was gibberish to me. Words I didn’t know.

She looked over, a sigh slipping out.

“When the threads join… magic becomes not magic,” she said, a little slower and louder.

I thought over what “not magic” meant and guessed it meant real. Because that thread had been different, I just didn’t know how. Well, that was what this lesson was for, right?

“Magic like dream, not magic like rock?” I said, the awkward comparison I came up with.

After a moment, she did a gesture with her hand, tapping her thumb against her other fingers; it kind of looked like a silent, one-handed clap, but was how she nodded. Shaking your head was like a shooing gesture using only your wrist, arm staying still.

“Dream is not real, rock is real,” she said, using the word that had lost me before. “When the threads join, magic becomes real.”

It still didn’t quite make sense to me. “Not real magic is hot?” I asked.

“Is it?”

She leaned over and plucked a blade of grass in one hand, then made a ring with her other. A tiny fire appeared. She held the grass above it and I expected to see it steam and shrivel up and eventually catch fire, but I didn’t see that at all. As if there was a breeze, it sort of squirmed, that was all.

Nothing actually happened to it until she lowered it into the fire itself. Although hard to see well, it looked like it sort of fell apart, colouring the ball with a green tinge for a second or so, then there was nothing.

I swallowed the lump in my throat.

Trying to keep my voice level, I asked, “Magic… eat me?”

She snorted. Not a loud one, but she definitely snorted—the closest I had ever heard her to laughing. Apparently, I’d asked something stupid. Cheeks feeling hot, I looked away, shy.

“The magic won’t eat you. Magic eats… carrots, onions, those things. You and me… pain. See?”

At that last word, I turned back in time to see her reach out to the magic fire with her other hand. My body sort of seized up, wanting to stop her like if I saw a child reaching for something hot, yet knowing not to touch her, that she was an adult and knew what she was doing.

So I watched, frozen, as her hand came close to the ball of flames. She didn’t wince, but I could see how tense her face grew. Not a small pain. All she did was touch the edge of the fire, then jerked back her hand, drawing in a deep breath and letting it out with a shudder.

“See? Not eaten,” she said, showing me her hand.

I wanted to hold it up to my face to make sure it was fine, but held back. What I could tell at a glance was that it looked very clean, no trace of any dust or dirt, which wasn’t necessarily magic. She liked to keep clean when she could.

But that her hand was so clean made the redness of her pale skin all the clearer. I didn’t know if that meant anything, though. It looked sore, like a burn that needed to be run under cold water, but she didn’t flinch when I touched it.

“Not eaten,” I whispered.

For a moment, I was overwhelmed with wanting to kiss her finger, so used to doing it for the younger kids whenever they hurt themselves. I didn’t do it, but I wanted to. Hated the thought of her hurting.

Softly holding her finger, I said, “Hyraj no pain, okay?”

Couldn’t look her in the eye, afraid I’d tear up. So I just held her finger and waited. It wasn’t like I could make her promise, after all.

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After a long few seconds, she said, “Okay.”

I let out a sigh, let go of her hand, let my hand fall down, relieved.

She cleared her throat, then picked up where she had left off. “When magic is real, you can… make fire or water. It is like braiding, but not. How you make clothes by making… rings of thread,” she said, illustrating by making a circle with each hand, interlocked. A chain.

Or rather, knitting? “Yes, I know that.”

Her hands relaxed, her right hand making the “nodding” gesture again. Really, she had probably done that a lot before and I hadn’t noticed, not paying attention to her hands. Now I knew, I did notice her do it often.

“For first, you can make the thread into one ring. More rings is…. One ring first,” she said, maybe unsure how to explain or deciding it wasn’t necessary for me to know.

There I went trying to guess her thoughts again. Never going to learn, was I?

Whatever the reason, that was the end of her lecture and, hands out, we moved on to the practical. I felt more confident about it today, even though I had no clue if I would do at all well. She’d told me what to do and what to expect and that was more than she had done so far.

Not that I was complaining.

So I made a ring with both hands and so did she, then she summoned a ball of magic fire, leaving it in my care. Before squashing it, I just felt it. It wasn’t hot. I knew that, so tried to feel it. The buzz, the prickle, the pressure… what was the heat? Was it pain? A new feeling that my brain just assumed was like something similar I had felt before?

I had no reason to think magic was at all like a wire, but I knew a wire heated up because of resistance. Maybe it was like that. Magic flowed through me and bumped and rubbed against whatever it flowed through, making heat.

Whether I was right or wrong, I couldn’t know, so I moved on from those thoughts. She had told me magic was threads and squeezing them together made them real. That was why, when I shrunk the ring, I could see a wriggling thread. The longer I squeezed, the more threads squashed together?

Focusing, I breathed out and then pushed my hands together, not with all my strength, but enough to make them budge. The ring was barely smaller, but it was smaller.

I held my hands there and waited. Second after second, trying to keep my breathing normal. Seconds… and then I caught a glimpse of something real. Impossibly thin, flickering in and out of sight as it danced around, but there.

Before I let the excitement get to me, I remembered the next “step”: I was supposed to turn the thread into a ring… somehow.

For now, I just stared at it and stared and hoped something would eventually come to mind. It didn’t, though, at least not before the magic faded away. Yesterday, my muscles had given out before the magic had. Today, the magic stuck around for quite a while, feeling like a good minute. And as it faded, it became easier to squeeze, but that didn’t make the thread of real magic any bigger.

“Louise try more,” Hyraj said.

She didn’t sound happy or upset, didn’t look it, just patiently teaching me at the pace I managed.

So I learned at the pace I could. A slow, meandering pace, day after day where we spent the evening by the stream, a ball of magic hovering between my hands, thin thread dancing. I tried to feel everything I could and looked closely only to find nothing more to it.

Still, every evening, she summoned that ball of magic for me, neither complaining nor teaching me more.

Almost a week passed and all I had to show for it was that I could make the thread a little thicker. What she wanted me to do, I wasn’t any closer. At no point had I felt like I was even moving the thread at all—never mind making it into a circle.

Well, I doubted she enjoyed watching me fail so much that she wasn’t helping me on purpose, so I guessed there was nothing more to it. Something I just had to discover. I hated that, like being at school again and getting back a bad test result. Failing at something I didn’t know how to do better and that no one could teach me to do better.

But there was no test, not here. She didn’t tell me I could do better, didn’t say we would try something else today and come back to that another time, just sat down with me, doing the same thing over and over until we were hungry.

So I kept trying.

The stream trickled, leaves rustled, my own breaths louder than the wind as I stayed focused. So focused that, Hyraj jumping to her feet, I fell over. Before I could even gasp, she pulled me up and pushed me toward the camp.

“Run!” she said—I guessed she said. She was in front of me the next moment and dragging me forward, her hand squeezing mine so tight it hurt. But I ran, soon the one dragging her.

I didn’t question her. Trusted her. Flashes of a truck, of Hatty. Ran, heart pounding, pulse so loud in my ears that I hoped there was nothing I needed to listen out for. Ran like the woman who had always been so unhurried had told me to.

What had felt like such a short walk down became such a distance back up, not even sure we were going there. My room wouldn’t stop anything scary. She had her sword on her. Was I missing something?

I was.

We reached the camp and, not knowing where to go, I fell back a pace, let go of her hand as she surged past me towards her backpack, tied to a branch so nothing rifled through it while we were gone. She didn’t bother untying it, simply snapped the whole branch as she dragged it down with her weight, lifting off the ground a moment.

Still hanging off the broken branch, she yanked it open and tossed out everything at the top until she reached what she wanted.

I stopped close to her, saw the strange thing in her hand, and then heard what I hadn’t heard before, a guttural growl that rumbled through the ground more than the air. My body wanted to freeze up, mind blanking, but flickers of Hatty were like fire in my veins, keeping me moving.

So I turned and saw the creature, the thing which left all the animals of the forest so skittish. Like a horse, but its neck and legs were shorter, covered in a mattered fur the colour of dried blood, maybe dyed with it. Stained tusks stuck out from the corners of its mouth, completely straight. It scratched at the ground, not with a hoof, but more like a paw, and it let out a loud snort.

It wasn’t terrifying like a dragon or certain other mythical creatures. However, it still scared me. I hadn’t seen any wild animal bigger than a squirrel or fox, nothing that would face a human, ready to charge. A very real fear like seeing a man with a knife down a dark alley.

Then a flash of light, crimson lightning, a bright rope that launched from behind me to the beast in the blink of an eye, buzzing, a crack like a whip. The next moment, the creature howled, smoke rising from blackened fur, that lightning already gone and yet burned into my sight.

Another moment and the animal fled, bounding off in zig-zagging leaps as if trying to put as many trees and bushes between us as it could. Maybe it was.

Finally, I turned back to Hyraj, saw her standing there with narrowed eyes and a thin mouth, still but for her deep breaths. In her hand that now hung down at her side was a wand. At least, it was long and round and used for magic, so I called it a wand, but the dark colour of it gleamed like metal, a grainy black, sort of like TV static.

This was magic.