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[207]

Anen turned out to be a little bit late, which was bad from the perspective of my mom in the kitchen. She can get her children to do as much work in ten minutes as it would take an hour to accomplish on normal days. This, time it was Wren and Feld scurrying around with dust cloths. I could honestly claim that I had been up studying late, slept in late, and needed a bath before she shows up. I keep waiting for someone to notice how I smell faintly like a campfire. I even offered to make up the fire in the visiting room because of it, but now I can get it out of my hair. I’ve been so sloppy about hiding the details, that if we hadn’t been expecting company today, I would never have gotten away with it. Of course, on normal days I would have had time for a bath--well, on normal Holy Days where we don’t have EI.

I don’t have time to warm the water, so I chatter as I scrub. I hate being cold and wet, but it doesn’t matter this time, I’m so glad to be clean. I pour the goo from the soap dish and rub it through my hair and jump when the wet pile on the top of my head drips onto my back. I grit my teeth and plunge my hair into the cold, rubbing furiously.

“She’s here!” Wren yells through the door. “Anen is here!”

“I’m coming,” I counter, only I don’t yell. Wren likes to think that she is as old as I am, but that extra year and a half sometimes makes a big difference.  

By the time I get my hair pulled back so that it’s not as noticeable that it’s wet, my mother and Anen have seated themselves and are running through the list of polite things to ask each other.

“It’s nice to see you,” I say in my best polite voice when I enter the room. I give her a hug and over her shoulder I catch my mom’s look of relief that she won’t have to work so hard to think of things to say. If the weather and what everyone is doing at school runs thin, then they can always talk to me--or more likely they can talk about me. They’ve used that one for years as a way to squeeze another ten minutes of conversation out of the visit, although recently it doesn’t work as well because they will never agree with how they should dispose of me after I finish EI.

“I hear that your Exam is next week,” Anen begins.

My stomach does a flip-flop. “That’s right,” I agree, wishing that someone could appreciate the incredible acting job that I’m doing. Not only am I haunted by memories of blood and fire from the night before, not only is my stomach twisted like a knot about my Exam, but I can smile and bite into a slice of bread and butter without any hints of what I’m really thinking.

“I remember when your father took his Exam,” she continued. “He was flooded with offers for apprenticeships. He was even offered an apprenticeship with an engineer. He’s so good with his hands, and he showed real magical potential when he was in EI.”

“That’s why he’s so good at fixing things,” I tell her. My mother winces. It’s always been a sore point with her that my father fixes everything himself. She can stand it because it saves money, but she completely ignores the tinkering he does with machines and crystals in his workshop. I’ve always wondered if he did any filtering, which would mean that I could ask him about it without worrying about being lectured and forbidden--which is what I’m sure my mother would do if she found out. But maybe my father is a good actor too, because I can’t ever see anything definite, and so I don’t ask. If I don’t ask, then what I do may be dangerous, but at least they haven’t told me not to.

“I’m sure that our Kestrel will do just fine,” mom says, firmly pouring hot cider from the silver carafe into the little silver cups. Normally, we don’t use this set, but my mom is determined to show her mother-in-law that she has never lost her refinement, despite her marriage into a colorless family. I’m pretty sure that Anen just finds it annoying.

“Of course,” Anen says. My bright future is one of the few things that they can agree on. “She is perfectly capable of becoming an engineer or even a magician.”

“I don’t know that she has the mechanical turn of mind that her father has,” my mother counters. “So perhaps a magician to start with, though, with her background of course she would be eligible to pass into a philosopher’s internship.”

“I’ve always thought that her talents leaned--” Anen begins the parry with her verbal sword, but I’ve heard this one too many times.

“Oh dear,” I say picking up the pot that is still a quarter full. “It looks like we’re out of cider. I’ll just run to the kitchen for a minute to get some more.”

They’ll keep it up. Anen will bring up becoming a greenwoman, and mom will counter with solicitations. And by the time they settle on future options for work or engagement, I will will have to crawl under the table. So I retreat to the kitchen to wait it out a little. I’ll get back into the conversation later. When they’re done with me, they’ll both be too tired about fighting over a girl’s options to go immediately to Wren, so they’ll skip to Feldspar. They are a little bit calmer about which girls he should think about soliciting since it’s too far in the future to disagree about more than just the old argument of a colorful house or a colorless family.

Wren is hiding out in the kitchen too. “Don’t you want to see Anen?” I ask her.

“Not while that’s going on,” she says, flicking her eyes toward the visiting room. “She’s much more fun to talk to after Mom leaves to go see what trouble Mallee is in.”

I puff out my cheeks and let the air escape slowly. “You may have a point.”

Then I notice that Wren is holding something, something small in her hand that she keeps twisting around.

[216]

1) I open my mouth and then shut it again. If Wren is hiding something, then she can tell me if she wants to. Right now, I have enough going on without offering to listen to everyone. I fill up the carafe with hot cider that is gently steaming on the stove. I should probably get back in there. I still need to be social before I can start sorting through my own life a little bit. I can’t take one more thing right now.

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[206]

2) Wren looks up at me, and I can’t do anything but sit down across from her. “What is it?” I ask with a sigh.  Mom will be annoyed if she has to come looking for me, but there is obviously something that she wants to tell me. How much more complicated can my life get?
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