Grace steps in, and with a few whispers, she softens the sky into a light blue, rises a magic-made sun over the trees, and Billy’s snow begins to melt. Green vines twist slowly out of the ground, extend their full length, and burst into bright tulip flowers.
My turn. I whisper, “Glisten,” as I focus on the sky over our sanctuary, watch it deepen into a piercing, brilliant shade of blue. “Fly and sing,” and the chirp of birds fills the space with the sweet tune of June. And then, just because I’ve been practicing tactile manipulations the past few evenings, I infuse a honey-scented, heavy moisture into the air. I feel it press against my skin like a warm cloth.
“Wow, Joan,” Ral says.
I break my attention to find all three of my teammates staring at me. “All right?” I say hesitantly.
“Better than all right,” Grace answers quietly.
But that’s all. We move on. Because this isn’t about any one of us, it’s about all of us. Because there isn’t any time to stop for praise.
Ral pinches out our manipulation, and the trees, flowers, and birds all crumble, whirl into a fine dust, and fade into nothing. Then he conjures a stone altar—identical to the one back in the clearing—that rumbles up from the ground. We file around it, two on each side, as Ral passes each of us a bottle of water from the crate we brought out to the sanctuary. “Begin,” he whispers.
We’ve brewed sorcerer’s shine every evening since we’ve teamed up, but each time I touch my bottle, images of Mama’s final night threaten to cripple me—her remains swirling into dust, me slicing my arm open in a desperate attempt to perform a blood-spell and banish my magic. So every time I brew, I have to close my eyes and just surrender to my magic, the magic that’s always hungry to make something, do something, be something more. Heat surges through my fingertips, and a strange cross between adrenaline and euphoria floods through my veins, rushes to where my skin touches the glass. Sure enough, the water inside starts sizzling, churning, before it relaxes under my grasp. Then, only then, do I release my bottle and take a look around.
Four bottles of shine now rest on the top of the stone altar. If you mixed them up or drank them, you wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other. Rosy, glowing, sparkling, powerful. I’ve got no idea what the other sorcerers outside of our foursome are brewing, but they’ve got to be killing it to match what we’re putting out.
“God, I could use a hit of this,” Billy mumbles. “Been a long day.” He touches the top of his own bottle. “Hell, every day here is a long, backbreaking day.”
Without a word, Ral reaches over the altar, grabs Billy’s bottle, and dumps its contents onto the ground.
“Hey, what the hell!” Billy protests. His shine hits a patch of grass at my feet, corrodes the earth into a shallow hole, and dries with a thin sheet of sparkling dust.
“We never drink it,” Ral says solemnly.
“I know that, I was just messing around.”
“Really?” Ral sizes Billy up. “I’ve caught you eyeing Stock, Rose, and Tommy at the warehouse these past couple nights, when they’re riding their own shine-highs, looking all wistful.”
Billy averts his gaze. “I’m just taking notes on the competition.”
“I’m serious, Billy. We can’t afford to get weak, not now.”
“I’m tired is all, okay?” None of us can protest or argue with that. He adds with a huff, “Christ, Ral, you’re like my mother.”
We dump the remainder of our shine into the grass, release our four-sided sanctuary, and trek back through the thick woods to the clearing. We’ve practiced every day as a foursome, sometimes in the clearing, and sometimes out here in the woods, since the day after I first arrived. Grace had a strong sense that she and I would work well with Ral and Billy, after Gunn forced the pair to demonstrate their magic for the rest of us. Grace pegged them as hardworking, open, prone to collaborate—and as usual, she was right. She approached them that night at dinner, while I hung back in the clearing, trying to tease my magic into something more, and offered them an alliance. I think to both Grace’s and my surprise, Ral and Billy accepted.
And we work pretty darn well together. We’ve found our rhythm. Ral’s the closest thing we’ve got to a ringleader, which is a natural fit for his big-picture magic, and his role as family man back home. And for as brutish and one-way as Billy can be as a human being, he’s a sensitive sorcerer, who keeps our magic stitched together when Ral’s grand ideas have a couple holes in them. Grace, a master amplifier, is of course our details specialist, embellishes our magic and ensures that our manipulations sing. She also has a habit of keeping mental tabs on us, making sure we all feel heard and respected.
And me? Somehow I’ve become a strong jack-of-all-trades. The fact that I practice every minute I can—every chance I get to forgo sleeping and eating to make sure I’m as strong as I need to be, for Ben and Ruby, for whatever Gunn has in store—well, that sure as heck helps.