Nathan Marsh
“Emily,” I say, intercepting Ivy’s grandmother as she stalks out of the house. “Let me deal with this.”
“Nonsense!” she says. “That girl’s got to learn to respect the teachings I’ve given her.”
“You’ve got to let her off the leash a little bit,” I say. “She knows what she’s doing, she’s not looking for something she can’t control, and she’s not trying to bring up anything dangerous. Let her live just a little bit tonight.”
“I’ve strictly forbidden her from doing any invocations!”
“Look. Ivy works hard, she studies hard, she’s the very picture of good behavior. Everything in her life, she does with a tremendous amount of self-control and strict adherence to rules. She needs to have some outlet, some part of her life where she’s not penned in by rules and expectations.”
“Says the one who never follows any rules,” Emily said.
“Says the old grandmother teaching her granddaughter the old arts of the wild women? Or has the twenty-first century finally tamed you?”
“This is not the way she should be rebelling.”
“This is exactly the way she should be,” I tell her.
Emily opens her mouth to argue with me some more, but I hold up a finger to silence her.
“You’re on the road again in what – two days?” I ask her. “How are you going to stop her from working when you’re seven states away?”
“This is why I’m trying to teach her to not work on her own, whether I’m here or not.”
“Emily. Relax,” I say. “You’re going to have to let her become her own woman and her own witch eventually. Eighteen years old is as good a time as any. Remind me again of how old you were when you first started working alone?”
“It was a different time then,” she says. “And I didn’t have half the power Ivy does. If I had, some of my mistakes then might have actually gotten me into serious trouble, if not killed.”
“You also had less than half the self-discipline Ivy has,” I tell her. “And no disrespect to your great aunt Marja, but she was nowhere near as good a teacher and mentor as you are.” I can tell Emily wants to keep arguing with me, but I don’t have time, so I bring out the best I’ve got. “Remember. Marja’s grandmother also kept her on a very short leash. Never let her work alone, or explore, or make her own mistakes to learn from. What kind of witch do you want Ivy to be? Careful, fussy, tentative, and weak like your great aunt Marja, or strong, fierce, and daring like you?”
Emily glares at me.
“I’ll go watch her, make sure nothing goes wrong, that she doesn’t overdo it with the power she’s got and bring up something she can’t handle. Just let her off the leash a little bit tonight. She’s an adult in the eyes of everybody else now, and she’s going off to college in a few months. If you don’t let her start stretching out now…”
I know she still wants to keep arguing with me, but she doesn’t have much. We’ve been over this many times, and I always come out ahead. I can’t really blame her, though. Ivy’s parents were killed while she was still young. With Ivy being Emily’s sole descendant, her family and her teachings both die if anything happens to her. So it’s not only her bloodline, but literally hundreds of years of tradition and study and work at stake.
Emily sighs deeply, and says, “Go, then.”
I turn to sprint into the woods.
As I get closer to Ivy’s circle, the power she’s putting into her invocation starts to thrum deep inside of me. I can tell that her execution is flawless. I have to stretch out my power, feeling for her, trying to interfere with her work without her noticing. I actually have to stop running and hold still so I can focus on what I’m doing.
I keep my power going until her gate fades away, then continue running as quietly as I can. She’s cleaning up inside of her space when I intentionally make a noise to catch her attention.
I can see the boundary of the circle she’d cast in her space. I note with approval that she’d put in the extra effort to make it a bi-directional boundary, one that demons cannot cross from either direction. I walk up to the edge of it and ask if I may come in to help her clean up.
She does not invite me to cross the boundary, so I can’t truly evaluate how powerful and effective it is. It’s enough to keep me from crossing it without an invitation, and I’m no weakling. But I’m curious as to just how strong it is, what exactly she would be able to contain or exclude with it.
Once she’s finished cleaning up her space, she crosses the circle one last time, and it dissipates with an electric crackling I can hear but she can’t. She holds her hand out to me. It feels cold and damp to me, but would probably feel warm to a mortal.
“Having a rough night?” I ask, as we start walking the trail back to her house.
“No,” Ivy says. “I just like coming out here sometimes to enjoy the quiet at night. How about you? Do you often wander the woods three miles from home in the middle of the night?”
“I’m actually doing very well tonight,” I say. “Sometimes, when things aren’t so well, I wander out here and farther, but right now, I’m out walking because it’s a beautiful night and I’d like to see what these places look like when I’m in a good mood.”
Ivy gives me a gentle look. Sometimes I think I’ve played up the rescued orphan card a bit too much, and she looks at me with an exclusively sisterly affection. I don’t know that she’d ever see me as someone that could mean something much different to her.
“What can you actually see out here at night?” she asks.
“When the moon is out, you can see a lot. You must know, if you come out here, too.”
“True,” she say. “And you do have really good night vision.”
Good doesn’t even start to cover it. A running joke with her, Kate, and Carl is how often I forget to turn my headlights on after dark, because I don’t need them.
As we come out of the treeline by her house, I ask, “Do you need me to come up with you, or is it safer for me to be on my way?”
Ivy thinks about that for a moment, and decides to bring me with her. “Can you just pretend we were out walking for the last hour or so?” she asks.
“Think your grandmother will buy it, that I just happened to be wandering through your yard at nearly midnight on a school night, and you happened to see me and come out?”
“If it were anybody else, no. But you? When are you not wandering around the woods all around town?” Ivy asks.
We walk in the door, and the kitchen light is still on. “Well, look who you managed to summon up,” Emily says.
I smile and nod at her.
“You’ve always told me that wherever there’s trouble, I’ll find it,” I say.
“I wasn’t out causing trouble,” Ivy says.
“Relatively speaking,” I say. “I mean, trouble for me is actual trouble. Trouble for you is what?”
She looks sideways at me.
“You are only four days ahead on your homework instead of five when you decide to go out for a walk instead of finishing up?”
She gives me a playful slap in the arm.
“I should probably head home, though,” I say.
Emily offers me a ride, clearly dying to know how Ivy’s summoning had fared, but I’d rather walk home on my own. Watching Ivy perform her first serious work of magic on her own, seeing how tightly controlled, how careful and how strong she is, gives me a lot to think about.
Our Ivy is growing into her own, and there’s a lot more to her than either her grandmother or I suspect.