I woke with a gasp, with white and blue and red lights still sshing through my mind the way they’d torn the night apart, and I felt like I could still hear the echos of multiple voices screaming. I’d been... trying to reach more details of the memory? Or trying to flee from it, and that was why I’d woken up? Why did that keep nagging at me, and why did waking from it always leave me with such a sick feeling of fear and loss?

  As usual, I’d switched to my own human form to sleep, though I’d set up the tent while in my centaur form so I had plenty of room and it shouldn’t be obvious to anyone else that there was anything unusual going on. Since I had no idea what time it was, just a feeling that it was still early, I stood up and changed back to centaur before opening the tent and stepping outside.

  The forest around us was still, but I could hear birds starting to sing, one here, one there. The sky was beginning to pale, and the stars were barely visible at all, so the sun must be close to breaking. Not that we’d be likely to get a good view of that, surrounded by the Greenelk Forest as we were.

  “Are you all right?” Terenei asked, his voice soft as the misty shadows.

  I blinked and managed to focus on him, wishing for my felid eyes that could see easily in this lighting. “Bad dream. I won’t be able to go back to sleep. You?”

  “Appreciating the moment.” I could hear the smile. “If you come here, I’ll show you. I don’t want to lose this angle.”

  He wasn’t in front of his tent, but off to one side of the little campsite of five tents circling a firepit next to the grassy verge. He’d chosen, in fact, the slope of a small rise that we’d avoided since it would be inconvenient for tents. Moving as quietly as I could so my hooves wouldn’t disturb the others, including the two ornithians drowsing on their tethers, I made my way over to him.

  I could kneel down as I was, or...

  I sighed. “Okay, keep this to yourself, please, because I’m not entirely comfortable with the whole world knowing I can do this.” I reached out and spun the dial to human.

  “That’s not an ability I’ve seen before. Common in your world?”

  “Impossible in my world. The Quincunx seems determined to offer me possible lives here. This is how I normally look. I’m just finding I’m more comfortable when I blend in better.” Well, that, and my centaur form including that kind of calm confidence that banced the caffeinated energy of my felid form.

  “That’s understandable, although it sounds like it might be rather disorienting. Come sit down?”

  I settled myself on the grass next to him, legs crossed. The pre-dawn air had just enough of a chill that I was gd I’d put my chocote-vanil-cherry sweater on over my blue shirt instead of my grey jacket.

  Terenei had what was clearly a book of some sort tilted so it was against his body, which I assumed was the sketchbook he’d brought out at lunchtime when a bird had nded near us. Once I was down, he let it drop outwards so I could see the surface.

  The page he was working on had a very faint backlight, not enough to confuse eyes that were night-adapted, but enough to make it possible to see what he was doing.

  Bck lines on the page reflected the stark outlines of the trees against the sky and hinted at the textures of the different kinds. The sameness of the trees gave it an odd kind of symmetry but it somehow wasn’t repetitive at all, distance and angle standing in for variance in height and size, and the slope gave him a slightly higher perspective. At the top of one tree was the silhouette of a bird of some kind, caught in an instant of spreading its wings, and farther over swooped a smaller shape that I thought might be a bat. One end still wasn’t done, and showed only a couple of sweeping strokes marking out the skyline.

  “Wow. That’s striking. I know I already heard about you being a good-enough, sorry, devoted-enough artist to have picked up a bit of magic, but that’s really gorgeous, and with nothing right now except some shadows.”

  Terenei chuckled. “I’m going to switch to watercolours very soon, once there’s a little more colour to show, instead of bcks and greys and hints of blues, but there’s beauty in shapes too. One of these days, I’ll tag along with Serru and go farther away from Coppersands than just a night or two out, so I can find new things to draw and paint.”

  “You haven’t before? Aside from the school, I mean.”

  “Oh, a few times, for a few days, here and there, but usually whatever reason I have for being there ends up taking all my time. Family things, usually. She invites me every time she wanders through. I always want to say yes, and my grandfather always says I should, but someone needs to run the shop so he can work.” While he spoke, his pen was back at work, filling in the open end while his eyes flickered back and forth between the page and the scene in front of him. “There are others who could do the job, of course, but I’ve been doing it long enough that I don’t need to interrupt often with questions.”

  “Family is complicated. If it weren’t for mine, I’d be really tempted to give up on trying to get home.”

  “You like it here that much?”

  “It’s very different in a lot of ways. It’s... peaceful. A lot of things just make sense. And you’re right about it being disorienting to be a male human and a female centaur and a male felid and whatever happens at the next site, but also... maybe I could figure out who I am, without a lot of cultural baggage that’s been muddying the waters my whole life.”

  “That sounds like a good reason to stay. Missing your family sounds like a good reason to want to go home. That’s not a dilemma I envy.”

  “We don’t even know whether the Quincunx will give me a way home. It’s just the only way Serru and Aryennos could think of. I have to try.”

  “They’re almost certainly right. I can’t think of anything else either. We could ask at the school. I don’t think there’s a specialist in the Quincunx or inter-world metaphysics, but there are usually a few who specialize in the more abstract and theoretical aspects of magic and they might have other suggestions.”

  “Maybe. The Quincunx is doing unsettling things but I’m in this far, and it might not be a good idea to stop early. From what Aryennos can find, we can’t rule out that the Moss Queen and Zombie King might have done that, although I think those two might have just been really unpleasant people long before that.”

  “Mm. An excellent point. Magic doesn’t like loose ends. The sun’s starting to come up, look.” He flipped the page in his book to a fresh one, and fished around in the bag lying on the ground beside him, a lightweight cream backpack with a fp-covered drawstring mouth and inch-wide straps and a short handle on top, heavily fringed with several shades of teal, because of course it matched perfectly. He produced a ft wooden box with a lid that slid off entirely, exposing a narrow compartment along one side, and a triple row of tightly-filled compartments I couldn’t make out properly. Also from the bag appeared a gss jar with a wide thick base, which he opened and set on the ground next to the box.

  I fell silent to watch as, on the faintly-backlit page, Terenei captured the rising of the sun: the long shadows of the trees, the glorious colours of the sky, the glow of light along the bottom of the few long zy clouds, the silhouettes of waking birds and squirrels, all of it through that drifting ghost of early-morning mist that gave it an unworldly and ethereal atmosphere. As the light around us increased, the hint of backlighting faded away, so it was only an normal page, but that clearly made no difference at all to the swift work of choosing brushes, dipping them in the water and finding which of the watercolour bricks with scarcely a gnce down, and bringing the image to vibrant life.

  That wasn’t some kind of magical enhancement. It was impossible to mistake the intense focus to the exclusion of all else, the experienced motions born of endless practice, the confidence and precision. Terenei was, very simply, an excellent artist.

  Technically, the painting itself didn’t really glow or change. I could see that.

  And yet, it somehow felt like it should, like if you gazed at it long enough you’d see the dawn continue on into morning.

  How could a watercolour painting feel like it captured more of the reality of the scene than the best photograph ever could?

  Right then, I finally got what Serru and Aryennos had tried to expin at the Seashell, and Terenei and Nurea had tried to expin over lunch. Magic here wasn’t something separate from who someone was and whatever it was that made them feel alive. It was an intrinsic part of it. They couldn’t break it down for me because it was a struggle for them to conceive of magic in isotion. The school we were expecting to reach tomorrow or the next day didn’t teach magic—it taught a refinement of art or craft, although I wasn’t at all sure that there was a distinction between them here.

  “There,” Terenei said at st, holding up the book at arm’s length. “I’m happy with that. It came out well enough to be worth getting up early.”

  “That’s beautiful. You’re amazingly good at that.” I deliberately avoided words that came to mind, ‘gifted,’ ‘talented,’ and their kin. I didn’t think I’d heard anyone use them at all, and I suspected they wouldn’t even come out transted. I was quite sure that more extreme words like ‘prodigy’ and ‘virtuoso’ and ‘savant’ would fail. Skill came from work and passion: I’d heard that in variations multiple times. It was possible that an implication that skill came easily as a result of an inborn advantage could even come across as insulting. It might not, since so far no one was easily offended, but I wasn’t taking the chance.

  “Thank you. I still have a lot to learn and a lot that needs practice, but in some things, I can turn intention into reality.” He gnced sideways at me, the dawn light gilding everything and casting heavy shadows. “There must be something other than healing that you do. Doctors and wardens and paramedics, in my experience, are deeply passionate about helping others, but they have other things when they aren’t working.”

  I shrugged. “When I was in high school, that’s mandatory education that everyone in my part of my world has to attend until usually your te teens, I experimented. I did some sketching, my art teacher encouraged me to keep exploring and experimenting. I taught myself to py a guitar out of a book, and that had some good moments.” Not only because it could be a useful way to charm a girlfriend or boyfriend without getting tongue-tied.

  “A guitar?”

  Had the word not transted properly? It felt like it had. “It’s a very common kind of stringed musical instrument.”

  Terenei flipped the sketchbook to a new page and picked up his pen. “Show me what it looks like? Your own, not just a generic example of the type.”

  I accepted them, but not without some discomfort with the idea.