Except that my towel was clammy and no longer helping.
It had been nice when I first got here, but it had absorbed all the water it was going to, and it was getting uncomfortable. I pulled it off my shoulders and dropped it onto a nearby “sofa,” if that was the right name for something that grew up out of the floor and was made solely out of wood. But it had little butt-like indentations in the seat, so I guessed you were supposed to fill them, only I wasn’t sure.
I wasn’t sure of much, because I was standing in a tree.
It was another thing besides the people that kept throwing me off balance. Because it wasn’t a tree so much as a tree. Huge and leafy and taking up pride of place at the end of the concourse with the portals. It was hollowed out near the top, creating a cozy room with none of the saw or chisel marks you might have expected. Instead, it looked as if it had simply grown this way, with a satiny, slightly uneven floor, where occasional knots in the wood poked up as if defying whatever spell had been used to make it, like the way a few tiny branches popped out here and there from the otherwise smooth walls.
And from the sofa, I noticed. All around where I’d just dropped my towel. I picked it up, and sure enough, one little butt depression now looked like a Chia Pet, with the indentations full of tiny oak trees.
I swallowed and glanced around, but everybody was too busy yelling at each other to notice. I put the towel back down and edged away, only to realize that that hadn’t really helped any. Because the same thing was happening wherever I stood.
My jeans had soaked up a lot of water, and gravity had carried it down my legs into my equally soaked shoes. And now it was growing a tiny garden wherever I stepped. I danced back a couple of paces, but that only made it worse; small green footsteps followed me everywhere I went, and oh God, now I was trashing their living room, too!
I bumped into somebody, and thankfully, it was Saffy. I guess she’d gone off to fetch another towel, which she handed to me. “You okay?” she asked, seeing my worried face and bitten lip.
“I think I did something,” I whispered, and nodded at the sofa, which was now more like a forested lump in the middle of the room as the greenery spread across the seat. I could just imagine some of the ladies deciding to sit down and getting saplings up the bum.
“What?” She looked confused. And then she seemed to get it. “Oh, don’t worry. Happens a lot,” she told me. “It’s how they tell the tree what to make.”
“What?”
“Water. You put it wherever you want something, and it grows up to meet it. Like that.” She nodded outside the window, at the staircase we’d climbed up on.
It was a beautiful thing, winding around the outside of the trunk, with steps and banister flowing seamlessly out of the wood. If you climbed as far as you could, as we had at the invitation of a group of wand-wielding witches, it left you six or seven stories above the concourse. Which kept drawing the eye.
At least, it drew mine.
For my whole life, magic was something you had to hide, something done in secret behind closed doors and warded windows. Something that human society could never be allowed to see, or at least to remember, because they outnumbered us so greatly that exposing ourselves would be a disaster. Magic or no, we’d be on slabs getting dissected in a matter of days, and probably wiped out shortly thereafter, like every other humanoid type who’d ever tried to inhabit this planet alongside the dominant species.
Homo sapiens sapiens didn’t share well, and they bred like rabbits.
But we didn’t, so we had to be careful. Only this wasn’t careful. This was magic in all of its colorful, glittery, in-your-face glory.
“Cool, huh?” Saffy asked. She pulled out a wand and murmured a spell, and the saplings retreated back into the wood again, but she didn’t move off. She seemed to be enjoying my reaction.
“I don’t get it,” I whispered. “How is this here? The portals alone—”
“Are routed through Faerie. That way, the Circle has no way to detect them, because the power isn’t coming from here, or even from a source they understand.”
“They go to Faerie?” I asked, because I didn’t see how that helped.
“They’re routed through Faerie,” she corrected. “Some do stop there; others just use it as an anchor for the line and whizz on by.”
“What?”
“It’s clever, really,” she said patiently. “The covens discovered that they could anchor a portal in Faerie, then use it to spawn multiple portals elsewhere. They’re all connected, like a train on the subway that uses a single track. But there’s many stations on the line, and only one of them has to be in Faerie in order to use its energy.”
“Its energy?”
“Elemental magic. The covens use a bastardized version of fey magic, you know?”
I nodded. That much I did know. Mainly because Rhea had been raised partly by the covens before joining the Pythian Court. I’d seen her fish for elemental magic the fey way, using a wand with a tiny blob of her own power at the end, like a lure, which the natural magic of earth glommed onto like a trout taking bait. In that case, it had been lightning from a storm outside, which she had been able to control and direct like a weapon against some very powerful magic users.
Very powerful magic users who had subsequently been blown through a wall.
The Circle’s form of magic also involved capturing the magical energy of the earth, to supplement what their bodies made naturally. But they did it slowly, over time, using talismans like the jewel in Billy’s necklace, which collected magical power and stored it like a battery. They viewed their method as sensible, safe, and responsible, and saw the covens’ use of wild magic as unstable and dangerous—rather like they viewed the covens themselves.
But I had to admit, the covens’ version was more exiting, latching onto the wild magic of the world and taking it for a ride instead of waiting for it to build up in some battery. It also allowed the covens to outlast the average war mage in battle, formidable though the Circle’s mages could be, because they were mostly using wild magic against them. They only needed to expend a small portion of their own power with each spell, to give the wild magic something to hold on to.
It had always seemed strange to me that the Circle had won the war anyway, but then, I didn’t claim to be an expert on magical history.
“But aren’t portals just doorways cut into a ley line?” I asked. “And there aren’t any ley lines over this far.” At least, I didn’t think so.
“Oh, there are ways to extend them,” Saffy said, without explaining what those were. “And since the portals make a stop in Faerie, some of the fey come here to trade,” she added, nodding at the concourse. And at the large green creature heading our way. I stared some more, because that seemed to be all I was doing today.