I left the mice behind and boarded a metal house on wheels they called a “bus.” I found a seat and looked out the window to wave goodbye one last time to the only people I knew in this entire world. But I couldn’t see them. The mice were too small.
As I sat, waiting for the thing to move, I started to get strange feelings about the humans on the bus. One almost sat next to me. I turned to look at her. She was a young adult woman with a haunted, faraway look in her eyes and a baby in her arm, bundled in a thick blanket.
Our eyes met and she jerked back. Could she see my green skin in this darkness, or was she wondering what my horn was? I felt her fear, and felt something else, too: that she was someone who has had no exposure to weirdness like me. I thought, no, I knew that it would be dangerous to expose myself to her.
I turned away from her face and looked out the dirty window into the cold night, so she didn’t catch a glimpse of the monstrosity I really was. Something about me must have bothered her. She didn’t try to sit next to me. Nobody else did either. Better for everybody.
As the bus travelled across this vast land, I gaped at the new things I saw. Mangrato was a tiny locus in Pananima, and though I’d heard about how big the Mundane World was, it was still unbelievable to me. This machine, this bus, travelled in more or less a straight line, at high speeds, for a very long time, yet didn’t reach the end of this world. How big is the Mundane World?
I was exhausted but too nervous to sleep, jolting out of half-sleep every time the bus driver announced a stop. In the middle of the night I arrived at Stoneprior and stepped out into the freezing night. I walked to Jody Curator’s house on memorized directions from Gretchen Flix.
The house was dark.
I walked onto the porch and raised my fist to knock on the door but hesitated. I was going to ask a big favour here, and it wouldn’t do to wake her in the middle of the night as an introduction. It was cold, but I’d slept through worse. I curled up on the front porch and finally the sandman drew me in.
#
Light from the windows played on my face, waking me. I stretched my body, sore from sleeping on hard, cold wood, and peeked inside. A bird transformed into human form boiled water at the stove. She wore a nightgown and a bathrobe. I waited until her tea was done before knocking on the door.
She opened the door and looked me up and down, not particularly bothered by how I looked. “Hi.”
“I was sent by the mice. I have these for you.” I pulled the glasses out of my jacket and handed them to her, my hand quaking as I shivered in the cold.
She took the glasses and bounced her hand up and down as though estimating their weight. “Want to come in?”
I nodded, wiped my boots on the mat, and stepped inside. I could not believe how warm it was in there, even though I couldn’t see or smell any fire. What magic kept the house warm? This Jody Curator was a powerful wizard.
She asked me to sit, but her furniture looked so pristine that I felt bad dirtying it with my filthy, snowy clothing. I stood.
She placed the glasses gently on the coffee table, murmured some words and twitched her fingers. “What sort of creature are you?”
I unwrapped my head, revealing the horn between my eyes, my green skin, and the fleshy protrusions from my chin. “I’m from Pananima. The mice freed me. I helped them get Vivian out of there. They asked me to return these glasses they borrowed. And they… Well, they thought you might be able to help me.”
“Help you.”
“I’m a monster, and I now I’m in the Mundane World. I have a few dollars and if a human looks at me too closely, I could die.”
Jody Curator pursed her lips, thinking.
“I mean, you’re a bird wizard, so maybe you could help me.”
“The mice told you I was a bird?” She didn’t look happy at that. She was getting fidgety, twitching her head in a birdlike way. She’s trying to figure out a polite way to throw me out.
“Well, yes, but it’s plain to see.” My tiredness got the best of me and I finally sat in a chair, trying to get as warm as I could before she made me go back out into the cold.
She looked down at her body as though checking to see if the illusion had faltered. It hadn’t. “You mean you can see through my transformation?”
“Yes. I see things as they truly are. I see you, both as a bird and in your human form. Both at once.”
“Now that’s interesting. And very useful. What else can you do?”
I looked around the room and saw a small potted plant. I reached out and touched a leaf with my fingers. “Nothing much useful. Gathering laundry, fetching water…” I focused my soul into the little plant, and it produced a cherry.
Jody sat up sharply. “You can use magic to produce food from plants?”
Another bird dropped down from the ceiling then, startling me. He poked his beak into the cherry and swallowed a bit of it. “It’s good!”
“That’s my husband, Gavin.”
“What, is that actually useful?” Forcing a plant to make fruit was useless magic back in Mangrato, where food was abundant in the forest.
“Oh yes.” Jody was smiling, now. “You can stay here with me. Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”
That was the first day of my long, strange relationship with Jody Curator, as her servant, ward, apprentice, and, eventually, friend.
