A Sudden Wild Magic

Zillah reached a floury hand for her own cup of tea. “Security really is that tight then?”

“Lord, yes!” said her sister. “All the people working on the capsule think we’re taking it up into space to meet UFOs. They think we’re a bit mad, but they trust us. Some quite skeptical ones are seriously rethinking their position on aliens. And I’m the only one of the Ring who ever goes near the capsule. We don’t want the pirates noticing we’re all interested in a certain warehouse.”

Zillah relaxed further. Mark was never likely to have been there. She let the devastating misery of that discovery ebb away and laughed a little. “Isn’t the Ring taking a bit of a risk, leaving it to you? You know what you’re like with machinery. Jerry swears the dishwasher blew up last time just because you looked at it.”

Amanda’s eyebrows peaked in that stare of hers. It must terrify her students! Zillah thought. “I was being deliberately negative then, Zillah. When I monitor the capsule, I’m entirely positive. If things blow up when I look at it, it’s because our designer got them wrong. I know what I’m doing. I’ve studied the plans until I know them backwards.”

And really! Amanda thought as she stared at Zillah, Zillah could be unspeakably irritating at times. They were very alike, she and Zillah. This was probably the reason why they got on so well most of the time and clashed so furiously for the rest of it. Zillah had the same clear features as Amanda, but hers were softer and tawny. Where Amanda’s hair was straight and raven black, Zillah’s sprang into a cloud of wiry tendrils, with red lights. Both had the same strangely luminous eyes, though Zillah’s eyes were blue. And Zillah had, Amanda was positive, at least as strong a talent for magic as her own, but — Amanda sighed, and drank tea to cover the sigh. One of the irritating things was that she was always having to look after Zillah and always failing. Over and over again. Knowing, from her own bitter experience, what Zillah’s life was like, Amanda had rescued her from their mother as a teenager and made sure she went to college. Result: Zillah dropped out, saying apologetically that university was not her scene, and disappeared. A year later Amanda had found her making baskets for a living somewhere in Yorkshire and fixed her up with what she herself considered a proper job in London. Result: Zillah disappeared and turned up working in a record shop a few months later, saying she felt that suited her more. By this time, Amanda had resigned herself to the fact that Zillah had an extremely low opinion of her own worth. Mother’s fault. Amanda let her get on with the record shop and tried instead to induce her to train that magic talent of hers.

“It gave me tremendous self-respect,” she told Zillah over and over. “I know you’ll find the same. And what you’ve got is strong. But as it is, it’s wild. You really could do damage, to yourself and other people, unless you learn how to use it.”

Zillah, as always, meekly agreed to Amanda’s plans. For a while she did study, almost diligently, with a circle of witches in outer London. Amanda encountered her at one or two ceremonies and felt proud whenever they met, because a number of people — Mark and Gladys among them — told her that her little sister had at least the potential of Maureen Tenehan. Amanda harbored fond notions of seeing Zillah selected for the Ring. Result: Zillah vanished again, saying she was not sure she had any talent at all. When Amanda next traced her, she was eight months pregnant. She said, in her usual apologetic way, that she had decided she needed to be a single parent.

“Oh, don’t talk nonsense!” Amanda had almost screamed at her. “How are you going to support the child? Who’s the father, anyway? Can’t he help?”

“Not really,” Zillah explained. “He’s happily married, and I didn’t want to upset him, so I didn’t tell him.”

She had obdurately refused to discuss the child’s father any further. Amanda, to this day, had no idea who was responsible for Marcus. The only thing to do seemed to have Zillah and the baby to live with her own family. It was lucky the kids liked Zillah and that Amanda’s husband, David, was so easygoing, because there were times when—

The bowl of pastry mix tipped, pivoting sharply on the edge of the table. Both sisters shouted with one voice, “Don’t, Marcus!” Zillah shot a hand out and grabbed the bowl. Amanda, with a swift gesture, halted the avalanche of dry crumble in midair and guided it back into the bowl.

“Gladys would approve, but everyone else would call that a waste of magic,” she remarked.