What had been a new routine soon became natural. We woke up, set off, foraged as we went, and then slept. Never spent more than a day in the same place, yet everywhere looked so familiar. The same trees, the same plants, the same sounds. Not to mention, the ground underneath a large tree felt the same wherever we were.

However, I never felt frustrated by that, didn’t feel like we weren’t making progress. My speaking still needed a lot of work, taking me a while to reply when we talked. Listening, I reached the point that I sort of heard everything in her language, not translating it to English to understand it, but I had to think of my answers in English to make sure the tense and gender and all that was right.

So one day, one week passed, ending up under another tree as another rainy day snuck up on us.

This time, our camp was rather cosy, an uprooted tree leaving behind a huge hole that had gradually filled in from around it, making for a sort of ditch. Another tree had loosely taken its place, keeping us covered, and the sides of the ditch kept away the breeze that made it through the treetops. Almost like a room.

Rain fell, the fire crackled, and we sometimes talked, sometimes sat there, plenty of time for me to think all sorts of useless things.

One thing that kept coming to mind as I watched the pot boil was magic. Since leaving, we hadn’t practised. I’d thought at first it was just because we were busy all day walking and then tired in the evening. Once we slowed down, well, I was so focused on our new routine.

Seeing her start the fire and partly fill the pot with water, it was fresh in my mind today. I tried to resist, thinking there must have been a reason, but no reason came to me. The only thing that made some sense was she was worried about me burning down the forest. That didn’t mean I couldn’t practise with water magic, though.

So I pulled together all my courage and said, “Hyraj?”

She hummed in reply, seeming tired, more sluggish than unhurried in how she turned my way.

I already wanted to forget about it, the thought of asking her to do anything when she was like this making me feel terrible. But it didn’t have to be today, I told myself, another day fine.

“I was thought—” Stopping myself, I took a breath and tried again. “I was thinking, are we not have magic lessons?”

The silence that followed gave me plenty of time to go over what I’d said and cringe over my mistakes. I hadn’t realised how difficult grammar was until I had to actually learn it.

“Honestly, I thought you had no more… interest in learning. It is a difficult skill for even the most talented. I thought that… no, that is my mistake,” she said, the last part muttered to herself. “Whether or not we have more lessons is up to your wishes.”

I felt a bit better hearing that, knowing that she hadn’t given up on me. “I wish to,” I said, trying to be clever and use the same word as her.

“That is it,” she softly said and fell into thought for a moment. “Then, rather than carry on what we had been trying, let us begin at the start,” she said, her hands settling into a familiar gesture. “Make a ring with both hands and try to… catch the magic. Although it is always there in knotted threads, they may close their hands and have nothing because magic is not real, so they must first be not real too.”

I would have been lying if I said I understood her explanation, but I doubted there could be a better explanation either. Magic wasn’t easy: she had said that, I had learned that.

Still, I took some time to think over her words. Magic was always there in knotted threads. I remembered the flash when she had scared off the beast, like a twisting and turning string had joined her wand to the beast. Had she sent magic along that string?

My thoughts drifting, I went back to her lesson. Touching my forefingers together and my thumbs together, I made the ring, strange doing this without her putting magic in for me. There was no warmth, nothing pushing my hands apart. Sure enough, I tried shrinking the circle, no resistance at any point.

Back to making a ring, I took in a deep breath and let it out. There was something special about making a ring. At least with fingers, not sure if other body parts worked. A loop and threads. I wished I knew more about knitting, remembering her saying something about how magic threads could be knitted together? Maybe that was just linking them.

Sighing, I thought that focusing really wasn’t a strength of mine.

So I stared at the ring and thought of how there was magic inside it. There was magic inside me too, magic from all the plants I had eaten. My vith. Plants I hadn’t just grown from seeds, but had even chosen from which plant to take the seeds, shaping them over and over to be more like what I wanted. Larger kernels for the wheat, longer stems for the reeds. Little by little, changing them—like magic.

There was magic inside my hands and inside the ring. All I had to do was make the magic in my hands real, and that would make the magic in the ring real. Or maybe making magic real was what I had been trying to do before.

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Whatever the “truth” was, I just knew I had to make my hands feel like they did when she caught the magic for me. That feeling of resistance, warm, making a loop just inside my skin. A magical circuit.

Now, if only I knew how.

The rain fell, our dinner cooked, and I stared at my hands until my stomach rumbled, no progress made. Magic lessons never changed.

I pushed myself up and scooped out the hichkle, one by one, and squashed them in a bowl, working it into a mash with a bit of wheat and water. We didn’t have much to use, but I had tried to make the most of it. My secret ingredient was added at the end: nuts with an almost garlic taste, mild like it had been roasted. Although I couldn’t make the mash creamy, the bursts of garlic kept it from just being a thicker porridge.

Hyraj was familiar with the flavour, but didn’t know what exactly it was called, I guessed the same way not everyone would know that the nuts in their salad were pine nuts. Anyway, I had found some dry cones under a tree one evening and thought to check out the seeds. Some work to get them, needing a couple days for the cone to dry, then smashed it open and took out the nut, couple days for that to cure, then cracked open the nut.

It was a common tree in these parts, so I kept a bunch in my backpack, some always ready to add in. Mostly saved them for the mash, though.

As for tonight, I charred some fresh beans over the fire, then popped out the peas to go with the mash. A simple mix of carbs and protein. We still usually ate fruit for lunch and porridge for breakfast, but there wasn’t much wheat left. No reason we couldn’t have mash for breakfast—except for the part of my brain that was very adamant that foods could only be eaten for certain meals. I was working on ignoring that.

Dinner ready, I served up for us and we ate in silence. Leaves rustled, the fire crackled, and our spoons clinked against the bowls.

When things were changing, new and exciting, time moved so fast, then slowed down to a crawl once you were used to it, except that was just how you felt. Time always moved at the same speed. Two and a half weeks, we’d been travelling. It felt like yesterday that the first rain fell. Yesterday was a very busy day, but never as busy as tomorrow.

My thoughts lingered there even after I finished eating and returned to staring at my hands, clinking behind me as Hyraj washed up. What would tomorrow bring?

I had avoided asking her so far, not really a reason to. Until we arrived somewhere with people, our routine would stay the same, day after day, week after week. However… I was kind of getting curious. “Where” still didn’t matter to me who knew nothing of this world, but the why—why Hyraj was going there—interested me.

After all, I knew why she had started travelling. Sort of. I hadn’t understood much back then and it wasn’t like I could have memorised the entire monologue. One sentence, sure, but she had talked for a good few minutes.

To prove herself. I wasn’t sure if it was to herself or to her parents, but she was proving herself. My impression, she was probably from a middle-class family, money to raise her well, but not like they could send people out to look for her. At least, I guessed she ran off.

Where would she go and what would she do there? I wanted to know. Maybe she knew about the family business, so would open a shop. Maybe a distant relative. Maybe there was some exciting thing like a magic tournament—that is, a tournament where people used magic. A magical tournament would be amazing too, maybe one where it gave the participants super powers to make it more exciting.

There I went, letting my imagination get the better of me. A deep breath in, a deep breath out, clearing my mind. It wouldn’t stay clear for long, but better than not even trying to focus.

The leaves rustled, dying fire crackled, and she clinked behind me, washing up. Magic was between my hands, ready to be caught in the ring of magic I tried to make.

Not today, though, my tide-like focus coming and going, but nothing ever happening. I gave up when I heard her putting everything away.

It was funny, feeling this not-quite frustration again. Some part of me didn’t quite believe I could do magic. After all, I was no one special. Hyraj clearly was. If this was a story, there was no doubt in my mind that she was the heroine and I was her plucky sidekick—and I didn’t even know what plucky meant.

She soon joined me, sitting down with a sigh. I wondered if she hadn’t slept well to be this tired. Usually, she had no trouble getting through the day.

Thinking of that reminded me of something else I’d found while foraging recently. So I scurried off to my backpack and took out a small bag she had lent me. Well, a spare handkerchief that I’d tied up with a reed string.

With that in hand, I walked back and offered it to her, asking, “Do you like it?”

She looked at me for a moment, then at the bag. Once she took it, I sat down, watching her. Before she even opened it, I could smell the almost familiar fragrance of lavender.

“This is frinchnef?” Taking out a leaf, she sniffed it, her face a little scrunched as she did. Looked quite cute, really. Like a curious puppy. “To think it came from a mere leaf that grows in the forest,” she muttered.

“Is it something strange?”

“I have always known this smell as a powder,” she said, scrunching up the leaf between her fingers, juices soon staining her. She sniffed it again, then flicked the leaf into the fire. A moment to clean her fingers on a handkerchief before she just held the bag near her nose.

Smiling, I said, “I’m glad I help you.”

She tittered, not quite a full laugh. “You have. Whenever I cramped up like this at home, I would have my bedding washed with lavender to help me sleep.”

“Do you cramped a lot?” I asked, thinking over if I had seen her like this before.

“Well, we call this moon sickness because it comes as strangely as the moons do, sometimes months passing before it returns,” she said, her other hand resting below her stomach. “It only makes sleep less nice for me.”

I went to nod, but caught myself as I raised my head, clapping with my hand instead. Although I had more I wanted to ask, it seemed rude to pry. Thinking of something else to talk about, though, I could only think of more prying questions.

So I gave in. “Do you have somewhere you are to travel?” I quietly asked, almost hoping she wouldn’t hear.

But she did, her ears very sharp. “Is it that?” she said, then hummed a moment. “We have no place in particular to go. We are to travel until the stormy season is near, then go down and see what we find.”

“Oh,” I said—a sound that meant nothing but a little amusement to her. She hadn’t told me why yet.

My question answered, all the things I had imagined collapsed down, leaving nothing more to ask. So I sat in silence with her beside me, the scent of lavender mixing with the dying fire’s smoke and the rain’s scent. Fresh and woody and soothing.

I hoped she slept soundly tonight, knew that I would.