Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free PDF Page B

Not yet.”
    “Sleep.”
    He closed his eyes.
    There was a crack as though the world had been torn apart. Then came the thunder. Leta screamed as she felt it roll over her, through her, and down beneath her into the earth. The ancient oak, split through its heart, trailing limbs like shattered bone, loosed sudden, dancing streams of fire. Rain fell then in vast sheets as silvery as the sleeper’s eyes. Leta couldn’t see anything; she was drenched in a moment and sinking rapidly into a puddle. Rising, she glimpsed the light shining from the cottage windows. She stumbled out of the mysterious world toward it; wind blew her back through the scholar’s door, then slammed the door behind her.
    “I saw—I saw—” she panted.
    But she did not know what she saw. Ansley, his attention caught at last by something outside his books—the thunder, maybe, or the lake she was making on his floor—looked a little pale in the gloom.
    “You saw what?”
    But she had only pieces to give him, nothing whole, nothing coherent. “I saw his eyes close. And then lightning struck the oak.”
    Ansley moved then. “Oh, I hope it won’t topple onto my roof.”
    “His eyes closed—they were like metal—she put him to sleep with her eyes—”
    “Show me the tree.”
    She led him eagerly through the rain. It had slowed a little; the storm was moving on. Somewhere else in the wood strange things were happening; the magic here had come and gone.
    They stood looking at the broken heart of the oak, its wood still smoldering, its snapped boughs sagging, shifting dangerously in the wind. Only a stand of gnarled trunk was left, where the sleeper had been sitting.
    “Come away,” Ansley said uneasily. “Those limbs may still fall.”
    “But I saw two people—”
    “They had sense enough to run, it seems; there are no bodies here. Just,” he added, “a lot of wet clothes among the bushes. What exactly were those two doing?”
    “They’re your clothes.”
    “Oh.”
    She lingered, trying to find some shred of mystery left in the rain, some magic smoldering with the wood. “He closed his eyes,” she whispered, “and lightning struck the oak.”
    “Well, he must have opened them fast enough then,” Ansley said. “Come back into the house. Leave the laundry; you can finish all that later.” His voice brightened as he wandered back through the dripping trees. “This will send the toads out to sun....”
    She did not even try to tell Dylan, for if the young scholar with all his books saw no magic, how could he?
    Days passed, one very like the next. She cooked, washed, weeded in the garden. Flowers she had rescued from wild vines bloomed and faded; she picked herbs and beans and summer squashes. The scholar studied. One day the house was full of bats, the next full of crows. Another day he made everything disappear, including himself. Leta stepped, startled, into an empty cottage. Not a thing in it, not even a stray spider. Then she saw the scholar’s sheepish smile forming in the air; the rest of his possessions followed slowly. She stared at him, speechless. He cleared his throat.
    “I must have mistranslated a word or two in that spell.”
    “You might have translated some of the clutter out of the door while you were at it,” she said. What had reappeared was as chaotic as ever. She could not imagine what he did at nights while she was at home. Invented whirlwinds, or made his pots and clothes dance in midair until they dropped, it looked like.
    “Think of magic as an untamed creature,” he suggested, opening a book while he rained crumbs on the floor chewing a crust he had found on his table. “I am learning ways to impose my will upon it, while it fights me with all its cunning for its freedom.”
    “It sounds like your garden,” she murmured, tracking down her gardening basket, which was not on the peg where she hung it, but, for some reason, on a shelf, in the frying pan. The scholar made an absent noise, not really