Among Others

do a magic for protection, and to find a karass. I had an apple—I’d had two and kept them together for a few days so they were used to each other, even if they didn’t come from the same tree, and then I ate one of them, so it was part of me, and I used the other one. Apples connect to apple trees and the tamed growing world, and to Eden and the Garden of Hesperides and Iduna and Eris—and also once I kept an apple in my desk, in the grammar school until it got ripe and riper and then soft and bruised and was a sweet-smelling sack of sap, and only when it started to mildew on the outside did I throw it away. That was a strong connection. In Ancient Persia, and now in some parts of India I think, they practice “sky burial” where they put dead bodies out on platforms and the birds eat them and they decay in sight. It must make for strong magic, but it must be terrible when there’s someone you know and you can watch them falling apart like that. Cremation might not be magical, but at least it’s clean.
    Anyway, I also cut my finger a little bit and used blood, I know it’s dangerous, but I also know it’s powerful.
    I saw the fairy who spoke to me that first time here, up in the tree. There were other eyes in the branches, but I didn’t recognise any of them and they didn’t speak. I don’t know how to make friends with them and get them to trust me. They’re different from our fairies, wilder, further from people.
    Even with all that feeling like left luggage I have, even with Halloween, I have never felt so much like half a person as I did last night. It felt as if an arm had been cut off, as if I was accustomed to holding things in both hands and now I had to struggle along with one, only magically. And yet—I didn’t try to do a healing on that. I didn’t even think of it until now. Or on my leg either. I wonder if I could? It feels as if it’s dangerous to try, that even trying what I did was dangerous, trying for a karass. Maybe I shouldn’t have extended it beyond the protection, which I really needed to do. Doing magic for things you want yourself isn’t safe. Glorfindel told me that. Most of what I want I can’t have for years, if at all. I know that. But a karass shouldn’t be impossible, should it? Or too dangerous to try for?
    Of course, it’s impossible to know whether it worked. That’s always the problem with magic. One of the problems. Among the problems …
    I’m exhausted today. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he’s snoozeworthy at the best of times. I keep yawning. But maybe tonight I will sleep without dreams. We’ll see.
    S ATURDAY 1 ST D ECEMBER 1979
    Today in the library, the male librarian stopped me. “You ordered Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains ?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    “There’s never been a British edition, so I’m afraid we can’t get that for you.”
    “Ah,” I said, disappointed. “Thank you anyway.”
    “I’ve noticed you’ve been doing a lot of interlibrary loans,” he said.
    “She said, the librarian said it would be all right,” I stammered. “She said it was free because I’m under sixteen.”
    “There’s no problem, you order as many books as you want and we’ll get them for you,” he said.
    I relaxed and smiled at him.
    “I just noticed that a lot of them are SF, and I wondered if you’d like to join our Tuesday evening SF book club.”
    A karass, I thought. Magic does work. My eyes filled up with tears and I couldn’t speak for a moment because I was choking on them. “I don’t know if they’ll let me come in from school,” I said, ungraciously. “What time is it?”
    “We start at six, and usually go on until about eight. It’s right here in the library. I understand that the process for girls from Arlinghurst who want to go to outside classes or educational activities is that they need a parent’s signature, and a teacher or a librarian’s signature.”
    “They agreed about the library,” I said.
    “They did.” He smiled at me. He’s going a bit bald on top, but he’s not very old, and he has a lovely smile.
    “And it would be very educational,” I went on.
    “It certainly would,” he agreed. “I don’t know if you could get a signature by this Tuesday, when we’re discussing Le Guin, but the Tuesday after we’re discussing Robert Silverberg, who I’ve noticed you seem to like.”
    I wrote down the information about it and collected my books and went and sat in the bakery cafe