The Autumn Prince

38. Bare Necessities

"She said it didn't make any sense," Becca continued. "The Fferyn was—I don't really understand how she explained it, but I don't think there are many things that can make a spell do things it wasn't made for. A skilled mage, or something really powerful. Or something dangerous."

"You're not making this better, Becks," Rachel said.

"Then let me finish." Becca shot back. Rachel blinked in surprise, but kept her peace. "Meg said Tom is the only one who has the potential, the only one who could have changed the spell, but if it was only corrupted, it should have just stopped working."

"Obviously, it didn't."

"Yeah, and that's why she was confused." Becca went silent, pulling thoughts into words. "Okay, imagine trying to write a letter but you don't have anything flat to put the paper on. If the surface is a little uneven the letters might be wobbly, but you can still read it. If the paper is so bumpy that it doesn't look like words anymore, it's not a different letter, it's just a mess. If the spell worked but it's not what you meant, then it had to come from somewhere else."

"But I didn't do anything," I objected. "I was scared half to death."

"I know, that's what I told her, and she agreed. She said there wasn't any way you could have learned even the smallest part of what it would take to do something like that. It would take centuries of study, and even then it would be really hard."

"Then it can't be Thomas," Katherine said firmly.

"But it can't be anything else," Becca said again. "Meg said the tree proves it."

"You told us she didn't know anything about the tree."

"She doesn't know what it is, but she knows it shouldn't be there. It doesn't show up in the Veil."

"So?"

"So the shapes in the Veil, the stuff we see through the hagstone, are like overlapping shadows of other worlds, but we can only see the ones that are close to us, and that's why we don't notice any real differences. The tree—it only exists here, nowhere else, and Meg said that's not possible. Tom's the only other impossible thing on the island." She stopped and all three watched me carefully.

"Thomas?" Katherine prompted, waiting for me to respond.

"You think I'm going to freak out, don't you?"

"You're not?"

I sighed. "Maybe I'm just burned out, but this is way above my head. If the people who live this stuff every day are confused, I don't know what I can do about it. Maybe they're wrong."

They all seemed relieved, and Becca actually allowed herself a small smile. "There's some good news too. Meg said the Fferyn is working, it's just different."

"Does that help?"

"Well, yeah" Becca nodded, her excitement surfacing. "Meg said when an artifact breaks, the matrix collapses, but that's just energy. It's the connections that make spells work, and with an open matrix, like the one in the Fferyn, it builds new connections all the time, especially when you use the same spells over and over."

"Like neural networks in the brain," I added.

"Kind of, I guess. The druids tried to patch it up, but because the matrix was dead it couldn't make new connections. Meg said they locked the imprints of a few common spells and that's the best they could do.

"But now it's fixed, and all of the shortcuts are gone. The matrix is active, the impressions are fading, and if I want to use it, I have to learn to make spells from scratch."