and my ears will listen

[truthwright]

Time goes by. Shura's mother lets her cut a cloudpine branch, and she and Helen go flying together.

Helen celebrates her eighth birthday by baking all her favourite people a cake again. And then she goes away with Kas, to Iceland and Russia and back by way of Alaska.

When they fly in, Kas on Petaal's cloudpine and Helen on her own, Helen is wearing blue jeans and a pink T-shirt.

Comments

[carillons]

"I'm peculiar too," Helen asserts. "Not all the same ways, but I am."

[alicornucopia]

Shura shifts her weight. Nicoa has been hiding under her silks; he peeps a shrew-nose out from a gap in them at her waist.

[carillons]

Kalavar turns into a bee and buzzes away from Petaal to hover between Helen and Shura.

[alicornucopia]

Nicoa hops out of the silks and turns into a jerboa for a bouncy landing, going a few hops forward.

[carillons]

Kalavar buzzes down and becomes a chinchilla.

[alicornucopia]

"Do we have to understand this thing or think it isn't weird?" Nicoa asks her.

[carillons]

"No-o," says Kalavar. "But if you think it's bad weird, or you don't want to be near us when we do it, then we'll be sad."

[alicornucopia]

"It's - weird weird," Shura says. "Like if you were a cat with a turtle shell on."

[carillons]

Kalavar turns into a turtlecat.

"Like this?"

[alicornucopia]

"Like that," says Nicoa.

"And - I don't know if it means things, what if Kalavar isn't even a bird? Could you make her not a bird by doing not-witchy things? I never heard of anybody else trying," says Shura.

[carillons]

"What if I'm not a bird?" says Kalavar. "What then? I don't think I'm not a bird. But I don't know what being a bird or not a bird feels like, we're not that old yet."

[alicornucopia]

"But all witches' daemons are birds," says Nicoa. "If you're not I don't know what that means."

[carillons]

"Me neither," says Kalavar. "But if I'm not then I'm not, and that's just how we are. We won't know until I settle. If I do."

[alicornucopia]

"Are you really a witch," Shura asks slowly, "or just - a kind of peculiar that can do some witch things?"

[carillons]

"I don't know!" exclaims Helen. "I think I'm a witch. I can do all the witch things I've tried, so far."

[alicornucopia]

"Well," says Shura, "you do more witch things than Petaal. But not as many as the rest of us."

[carillons]

"Is 'wearing silks all the time' the kind of witch thing you mean? I don't think that's the kind of witch thing I mean. I mean the kind of stuff that mortals really can't do. I can do all that."

[alicornucopia]

"It's a witch thing. I guess maybe it's not the same kind," says Shura dubiously.

[carillons]

"I can do the kinds of witch things that are about being a witch," says Helen, "but I don't always decide to do all the witch things that are about witches deciding to do stuff some particular way. Because - if I just feel like doing something some way, and it's not hurting anybody just by me doing that, then that's important. Even if I don't have a really good reason, or if people think I'm weird, it's important that I want to do the thing."

[alicornucopia]

Shura mulls this over.

"I think," she says after a while, "you are probably pretty lucky that you have your dad and not somebody else's if that's how you are going to be."

[truthwright]

(Kas grins.)

[carillons]

"I am!" says Helen. "I love my spinach."

She smiles at him.

[alicornucopia]

"Okay, well," says Shura, "if I don't have to understand or think it isn't weird, I guess that's okay then."

[carillons]

"Okay," says Helen. "So do you want to go flying?"

[alicornucopia]

"Okay."

Shura hops on her cloudpine; Nicoa hangs from it as a little white cottonball of a bat.