8:18
“It’s Magick? How the birds work?”
Patti looked at Ivan and shook her head. “Of course it’s Magick. You just explained to me with some detail that it’s Magick.”
“I mean, its your Magick, right?”
A huge grin came from somewhere deep inside Patti, curving her lips even as it buoyed her spirit. “I think it is.”
“So, share with the class?”
“Kind of hard, but I think music in a universal language that crosses language, if that makes sense.”
“Not completely.” Ivan stared hard at the cardinal perched on his hand.
Patti looked around. The blackbird still perched on the bench. The sparrow still sat in the tree. Various other birds still drifted around overhead. Everything about the world looked the same. To her eyes. Unchanged.
Since Ivan hadn’t been privy to the world-shaking revelations happening inside Patti she guess she got it. But to her, everything looked different. Not so much brighter but… brighter? And not so much louder but… definitely louder.
The birdsong playing as background soundtrack from the moment she’d walked into the aviary had been turned up a few notches. It wasn’t that it sounded louder in her ears. More like it sounded louder in her… Magick? If that was a thing, and it felt like it was a thing, she suspected it was because her brain had finally caught up to what her heart had realized first upon entering this space.
“Do you hear the birds singing?” she asked Ivan, her tone sounding distant and distracted to her ears. Or maybe it was just she couldn’t hear it for the Song weaving with her Magick to form a tapestry on her soul.
Giving up his prodding of the cardinal’s leg, Ivan jerked a look at her. “The birds aren’t singing. I noticed it because it was weird.”
“Ohhhhh,” Patti nodded her head, real slow like. “They are. But,” she tilted her head back to look at the floating birds, getting lost for the moment in their drifting patterns and the echo of rhythm inside her that matched. “You can’t hear it.”
“Okay,” Ivan’s tone took on that special slowness that said ‘let’s just humor the crazy person’. And Patti got it. Because he didn’t get it. It was up to her, if she wanted to, to make him get it.
She shifted her attention to the cardinal he held. “It’s going to hurt me to watch this and maybe I won’t watch it, but I think you need to take that bird apart.”
“And what am I looking for?”
“You’re looking for something that would make it possible to use music like a computer language that tells the bird, or the birds, how to, well, everything.”
“You think someone figured a way to use your kind of Magick, like radio signals, to control them?”
“Maybe?” She drew the word out real long. “It’s possible, right?”
Ivan thought a moment, then said, “Anything is possible. That’s kind of at the root of my abilities. Taking theory and making it real. So, yeah.” His expression took on a calculating air. “Can you-” he thrust the hand with the cardinal at Patti, “take this?”
Patti reached out, tentative, then testing her idea she pictured the cardinal stepping from Ivan’s hand to hers then hummed a few fluid bars as she focused her intent and her Magick, channeling it through the air and to the cardinal. On her shoulder Sass picked up the thread of the hum, adding to it with their own. The cardinal tipped its head, then made a clacking sound with its beak and stepped lightly onto Patti’s hand.
Excitement burst inside of her. Patti raised her eyes to catch Ivan’s, ready to share her joy, but he had stooped to remove the bag from his shoulder and was rummaging through its depths.
“I’m going to need a-” he paused and pulled out some kind of metal doodad – look tools besides a screwdriver or a hammer were not Patti’s thing – then set it besides him on the ground. “Yeah, that’ll work. And also an expanding-” He continued to do this for several meros in which the cardinal sat still on Patti’s hand, its weight somehow reassuring rather than freakish like it had been before she maybe figured this stuff out, and he built up quite a pile of doodads and brick-a-brack and other stuff he put a name to that quickly slid right out of Patti’s head.
While Ivan did whatever he was doing Patti looked at the cardinal. The cardinal looked back. Really, it was hard to believe it wasn’t a real bird, the way it was looking at her like it was thinking whatever thoughts birds thought while looking at someone. Sure it was just sitting on her hand and that wasn’t really a very bird like thing but… Ugh.
“I can’t do this.”
Ivan looked up from his bag. “Do what?”
“Let you kill this bird.”
“I’m not going to kill the bird.”
“But you’re going to cut into it. Take it apart to figure out how it works. That feels a lot like you’re going to kill the bird and dissect it.”
“I’m not going to kill the bird.”
At Patti’s mulish look Ivan heaved a sigh and then worked his features into something that he probably thought was sympathetic or maybe professional or whatever he was thinking but he wasn’t the one with the cardinal sitting on his hand and looking at him with bright little bird eyes. With what sure seemed like bright little bird thoughts behind them.
“Look,” he said, his tone real measured and rational. “It’s not dissection its surgery.”
“Tell that to the bird.”
“I will.” With that he rose, walked over to Patti, and crouched down to the look the cardinal in its bright bird eyes. “I need to do surgery on you. I promise you will be fine. You won’t even be able to tell you had the surgery when I’m done with you.”
Patti blew an exasperated breath. “I feel like your condescending to me.”
Ivan looked up at her. She could see his patience starting to slip just a little but he kept his tone even. “I’m not condescending. It is surgery and the bird will be fine. Look,” he reached forward and ran a finger over the bird’s head. The bird didn’t flinch from the touch. Not that was saying anything like it trusted Ivan or anything but it did something towards assuaging Patti’s concerns. “I’m very gentle.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Only the ones I’m going to do surgery on.”
“That doesn’t make you sound like a creep at all.”
This time Ivan visibly rolled his eyes. Patti guessed even a seasoned politician had his limits. Then again, she didn’t really think she’d pushed him *that* far. Pulling his finger from the cardinal he rose to his full height. “This has to be done.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty much. Maybe. I don’t know, but its worth a shot. It won’t hurt the bird and it could tell us something.”
“I question how many scientists said that before performing a vivisection on someone.”
Ivan took a really deep breath. It expanded his chest it was that big.
Patti looked at the cardinal again. It was standing there, perfectly still. It didn’t seem scared. ‘Are you scared?’ Patti shoved at the bird. It didn’t reply. She didn’t really expect it to. Not really. Not in her heart. Well, maybe in her heart, but her brain got that it wasn’t going to respond without a push of Magick and she hadn’t pushed Magick at it. So, she did.
She gathered up her concern about the process Ivan was suggesting, then wove it around a thread of a melody inside her, and pushed it on with a hum and some Magick. The cardinal cocked its head. It seemed pretty clear the Magick had hit. Patti felt the thrum of it, connecting her to the bird. But she got nothing back. Guess it wasn’t going to give her the easy answer then.
Drawing a deep breath and letting it out on a sigh she thrust her hand with the cardinal towards Ivan. “Fine. But I don’t think I can watch.”
“That’s okay.” He did a quick visual sweep of the area. “I need a surface to work on. I prefer not to do it on the ground.”
“I saw a table with two chairs, one of those lacy metal looking things, a little ways in. Would that work?”
“Probably.” Ivan delicately closed his hand around the cardinal and lifted it from Patti’s hand. “Show me?”
“Sure.”
Ivan looked at his bag and the things he’d piled beside it. “Can you grab my instruments?”
“Yeah. Sure. I can do that.” Patti walked over and scooped the instruments up. Or tried to. There was a lot of them. Too many for her hands so she pulled her shirt out to make a temporary bag and scooped the items into it then rose and indicated Ivan should follow her. She lead him deeper into the aviary to where she’d seen the table and chairs set up under a large Asian Maple tree.
He followed behind her, nodding at the table. “That will work. Put the instruments on it then you can duck around somewhere. I’ll call you when I’m done.”
Patti placed the instruments on the table then backed away. “Okay. Call loudly. I’m going to just go. Over there. Somewhere. Not here.”
Before she could reconsider and yank the cardinal from his hands, Patti stepped back and walked vaguely in the direction of the farthest glass wall, a distance enough away that there was no chance of her seeing, or overhearing, anything he did. Instead she sat down on the edge of a stone fountain. The flow of the water into the basic relaxed her mind and the birdsong flavoring the air washed over and through her.
With her mind relaxed like that she began to pick out rhythms to the rising and falling songs. It made her think there was something to the whole ‘programmed language’ thing because there was too much of a rhythm to the bird calls, too much of a synchronicity that nature didn’t provide. At least in the sounds it made. Too much chaos for that.
It was kind of one of the things Patti loved about sound. There was structure and rhythm to it. Like take the beat of hearts. Definite rhythm. But everyone’s heart beat was different. Sure if you were intimate with someone, sometimes your rhythms aligned but mostly all those rhythms, of breathing and blood pulsing and the way your feet hit the ground and the patterns all those made was unique to each individual thing.
Birds didn’t synchronize their songs. Maybe sometimes geese did, but that was a communication thing where they shared information on where they were flying. But geese were as likely to make a raucous cacophony as they were to make orchestrated sounds. The birds here? They were making a weird harmony, a hum building between the notes of their calls, that definitely felt more like pattern than coincidence.
Hopefully Ivan could figure out something about it with his, quote unquote, surgery on the cardinal. At least Patti hoped so. Otherwise, she wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do in this place. It was just too big and there were too many things to find a small piece of glass in it.
She looked at the trees and the grass and the flowers and the birds and the birds and the birds and the glass walls and the glass ceiling and she just started getting overwhelmed by the potential in those details. There had to be a clue and Patti was really hoping that the patterns of the bird songs, which tellingly neither Kim nor Ivan heard but she did, proved to be it.
The play of water on the stone lulled her, the bird song and its patterns teased her, and faced with the wait until Ivan called she let mind play with one of her favorite topics – the Magick of music. Thinking about it she suspected she’d always had an understanding of music as something universal and special. Even before she understood her Magick she’d wondered about the appeal of music to people. Like why did people sing along to music – doing so in places where they wouldn’t do other things like dance or, she didn’t know, other things that drew eyes to them.
In her experience people tried to blend in, to not draw attention. Yet, a song came on the radio and nulls would sing along. Sometimes at the top of the lungs. Sometimes while in their car at a stoplight with the windows rolled down. And if someone looked at them they were as likely to shrug and give a look like ‘what you gonna do?’ rather than ‘ugh, don’t look at me!’.
Also, take the way people memorized song lyrics. Countless lyrics. Without considering how they did it. If they needed to memorize a poem, which, let’s be honest, was basically what lyrics were, they might struggle. They might even fail. But, bam, Piano Man played and everyone in a bar would sing it, word for word, not missing a lyric. Why was that? People, not just those with Patti’s Magick recall, had hundreds of songs memorized. That was some kind of Magick there, even if its wasn’t something people realized they were tapping into.
Take that example of people singing along and together too. Like there people were in a bar. Doing their thing. Some drinking to remember. Some drinking to forget. And, oops, there Patti went stealing a lyric. It was hard not to since there were so many songs and they so spoke to the human condition so they became embedded in the collective vocabulary. But, anyhow, yeah, so some people drank at bars because of what was in their heads. Some drank to loosen their inhibitions so they could do those behaviors that drew attention but their minds and society told them was wrong. Some people didn’t even drink at bars. They socialized. Met friends. Ate. Played pool. Flirted, often with the aim of taking someone home to stave off the loneliness if only for a night.
And, wow, that got melancholy real fast. Sass might have sensed this – Patti still wasn’t sure exactly all or what the mouse could do – because they stood up and gently pet Patti’s neck. Patti turned to look at Sass then ran a finger softly down Sass’s head and back. “Hey.”
Sass peeped, then nuzzled Patti’s finger.
“You think music is a universal language, separate from words?”
Sass nuzzled her finger again then gave a sleepy ‘peep’.
“Yeah. I didn’t really expect an answer. It just occurred to me the way people can have all these individual needs or drives in a situation, like at the bar, and they all go about in this frenzy of conflicting ones. But a song they all know starts playing and damn if they don’t all get drawn to listen to it, like music, or the Magick of it, overrides all those individual drives and replaces them with a group connection. At least until the song ends. You know?”
“Squeak.”
Focused on her quiet musings Patti didn’t hear Ivan until he was almost next to her. “Nice fountain.”
Patti jerked her hand from Sass and pressed it to her chest. “Damn, man. You scared me.”
“You were having a nice conversation. I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Smooth.” Patti might have said more had the cardinal sitting on Ivan’s hand not grabbed her attention. “Hey! It doesn’t look any different. Did you decide not to vivisect it?”
“First, I didn’t vivisect it. Second, I told you I’d put it back together so you wouldn’t be able to tell I did anything.”
“First, you kind of contradicted yourself there. Either you vivisected it and put it back together like a pro or you didn’t vivisect it.”
A chuckled burst from Ivan. No really. It clearly burst from him. His quizzical expression distinctly telegraphed that. All rearing back ‘eh?’ and flashing teeth. It was sorta charming. Like puppies were sorta cute.
“I put it back together. Like a pro.”
“So, what did you find? In small words, because you know I’m asking but I probably won’t follow if you use big ones.”
“I think you’d follow.”
“I know myself. I know music and I know people but if you start talking high-level engineering I’ll start thinking about music and people and what purple tastes like and if the milk in my fridge is past its drink-by date.”
Another laugh startled from Ivan. He scratched his ear with the hand not full of cardinal. “Yeah. I guess I can see that. The simple answer is this,” he hefted the cardinal, “is a construct. One hundred percent wires and switches, sensors, servos, and actuators.”
“Losing me.”
“Actuators are small motors that mimic the way muscles move. Sensors are what give the construct feedback that mimics our senses.” He held his hand out so Patti could look at the cardinal which lay in Ivan’s palm like it was sleeping. Or dead. Nope. She wasn’t going there. Ivan holding a sleeping bird was a lot easier for her brain to deal with then his holding out a bird corpse to her. “This baby has light-dependent resistors that act like eyes as well as microphones for ears. And at the heart of it is an analog of a cpu that interprets all that data. Or, not really an analog, because it does have a cpu, just not the kind most people think of when you say that.”
“CPU?”
“Central Processing Unit. Computers have them. That’s where most people would know the term from but,” he gave Patti a droll look, “Magickers.”
“Servos?”
“Servos are, well to keep it simple, servos are how radio signals communicate with robotics. Or, in this case, constructs. Only, this little guy doesn’t read radio signals. It reads Magick. Also, it has a battery but that battery doesn’t store electricity, it stores Magick.”
“You’ve seen something like that before?”
“Sure. I’ve made some. But nothing quite this sophisticated. It also has a pin processor set up to play through a piezo speaker.”
Patti figured her eyes glazed, because Ivan smoothed his goatee with the fingers of his unladen hand and his expression shifted to thoughtful. “You ever seen one of those cards that when you open them they play a song?”
Patti nodded. “Yes.” She had.
“They have a small processor in them and they are powered by a little battery. It has a clock which is a resistor-capacitor subcircuit. If you use a potentimeter you can hijack the circuit.”
“Hijack the circuit.” Patti wasn’t even going to pretend she was following and Ivan seemed to get that.
“It’s really not relevant to this. I’m just impressed with the technology in this construct. What you need to know is the construct has a processor. It was set to play a specific group of sounds. A song. But, we can-”
The light dawned in Patti’s head “Hijack it! So, we could make the bird sing a different song.”
“Sure. We could do that. But I was thinking more along the lines of make it do something different. That’s what I think you are doing with your Magick. Your Magick is changing the instructions the servos are receiving. Or, more like, your Magick is replacing the signals.”
“Yeah. Okay, this is all interesting,” Patti could barely keep her eyes from rolling at just how interesting. As it was her brows did lift and the corner of her mouth turned up and the light in Ivan’s eyes said he was reading her signals, kind of like he said the bird could. “But how does this help us find the piece of the lamp?”
“I’m not sure it does.”
“Then why are you explaining all this?”
“Because,” Ivan looked sheepish, “it’s interesting?”
“Super. Super interesting.” This time Patti did roll her eyes. Which cast her gaze up towards the glass ceiling. To a discolored piece of glass on that ceiling. “Uh, Ivan?”
“Yes, Patti?”
Patti pointed a finger upward. When Ivan just looked at her she vigorously pumped her arm, poking that finger repeatedly at the ceiling. Adopting an “oh!” expression, Ivan tipped his head back to follow the direction of Patti’s finger. She could tell the moment his gaze settled on the discolored piece of glass. “Is that?”
“The piece? Could be. Do you have a magnifying device in that bag of yours?”
“I do. Here,” he thrust the cardinal at her. Patti took it, careful not to squeeze. It lay in her palm. Warm. Not completely unmoving. It was mostly quiescent but there was a definite feeling of delicate breathing and a fluttering small heart. Or, a motor. Or servos and levers and processors and all that other stuff Ivan had just explained.
Honestly, the concept of ‘a motor’ was an easier thing for her brain to process. Process. Ha! Someday, not today, maybe she’d ask Ivan to explain if he thought of a heart as a motor and where he stood on how the body functioned. But, wow, totally a thought for another day!
She thought all this as Ivan dug in his bag then drew out a rectangular metal box about the size of a cigarette case. He proceeded to unfold the front of the box, revealing two lenses that appeared to be on some kind of spring mechanism. It was all very steampunk. Which was to say Magicker high-tech.
Ivan rotated the box so the lenses were pointed out and pressed two smaller optics in the other side of the box to his eyes. He directed the viewer towards the glass ceiling, then made some fine adjustments of a knob mounted towards the side of the box closer to his face.
“That is,” he said after several mikros, “a glass bird.”
“I’m assuming you don’t mean a construct or something else.”
Ivan lowered the viewer from his eyes and looked at Patti. “It looks like the piece of the lamp.”
“Which just happens to be on the ceiling above our heads. Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
“I’d say that’s weird or really coincidental but-”
“The House,” they said in near perfect harmony.
“Argues a certain amount of purpose there, if it arranged for the piece to be there when we were about to question how to find it,” Patti suggested.
Ivan tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling and the speck on it that was the piece of the lamp like it personally affronted him. “I still have my doubts.”
Of course he did. Science people! Either he came around to a different viewpoint or he didn’t. No use banging her head against that proverbial rock wall. At this point, at least.
Leaving him to his doubt, because that kind of conviction you didn’t challenge, Patti looked at the bird resting on her palm. “So. Now we have a where. How do the birds help with the how?” Yeah, that wasn’t convoluted. “I mean, if the thought is the birds are here to help and we don’t need them to help find that,” she pointed at the ceiling, “it must mean they are meant to help us get it.”
“That’s solid reasoning, if you assume the birds are meant to help us.”
“You have doubts?”
Ivan shrugged. “I know. On the face of this it seems like we’re being presented with clues and tools to complete our task. But maybe its coincidence.”
“Let’s shelf the philosophy for now. Can we use this,” Patti lofted the cardinal in Ivan’s direction, “to get that?” Another point at the ceiling way above them.
Ivan tilted his head back to contemplate the ceiling. Then he shifted his attention to the bird. Then back to the ceiling. “There are a number of factors to consider.”
“Like?”
“Like,” he did another quick visual assess, stopping with his attention focused on the cardinal, “can the cardinal support the weight of the glass piece or would it knock it down to the ground where it would break.”
“Okay. And?”
He raised his gaze to study Patti with almost as much intensity as he had the bird. She started to feel sympathy for a virus under a microscope. Or a really interesting mechanism about to be picked apart to see how it worked. “And can you use your Magick to make the cardinal do what we need it to.”
Patti looked at the cardinal, just lying there in her hand. She squeezed it slightly, figuring it would move or at least show some signs it was being squeezed. It didn’t. “It isn’t moving.” Yes, stating the obvious, but she figured she’d get that out there. “Did you break it when you vivisected it?”
Ivan gave her a droll look. “Again, not vivisected,” that established, he moved on, “And it isn’t broken. The Magick in the battery I explained leaked out when I was doing my examination. Here,” he reached over and gently ran his finger along the bird’s lower body from between its legs to its throat. Stopping there he concentrated, eyes half-closed, and breathed out slowly. Like he’d breathed life into the bird, the cardinal shifted in Patti’s hand and lifted its head to look at her with bright eyes.
“Son of a-” Patti jerked a look at Ivan. The look he returned was full of quiet pride.
“It’s always cool when they do that.”
“I’ll say.”
The cardinal shifted in Patti’s hands. She felt the muscles, or whatever it had that passed for muscles, shift as it stirred its feathers then shifted its feet under it. Its small claws dug into Patti’s palm. Not really painful, but not super pleasant either.
“Let me.” Ivan reached over and gently took the bird from Patti, cupping its back in one large hand and placing it gently on the fingers of the other. It took its perch, like fingers were the most natural place for it to do so, and then swiveled its head to look around. Patti might have been projecting but she thought she saw a bit of confusion on its face. Like it knew it had been one place, closed its eyes, and when it opened them it was in another.
Yeah, definitely projecting. Construct, she reminded herself. She had to keep thinking of the cardinal as a construct and not a creature with a mind and a heart and a will of its own. Otherwise this was really not going to work. She knew her Magick seemed to want it to work but she also knew that her heart and her mind had control of that Magick and it didn’t get to do what she didn’t want it to. Most of the time. Look, it might be a conceit but, damn it, it was a conceit she’d die defending.
Yep. “So, how is this going to work?”
Ivan looked at the glass ceiling, looked at Patti, then pursed his lips. “You tell me.”
“No. You tell me.”
“You tell-” A grin broke on his lips like the sun broke on the horizon come dawn. It was that breathtaking. Damn, he was one fine looking man. And, wow, that was really not anything to be thinking right now. But, she mentally spread her hands and waved them in Ivan’s direction. Like, eh? It was like passing by the Mona Lisa and not looking. Or hearing Ch’il bel sogno di Doretta and not stopping to listen and weep a little.
Back on point! “So I focus my intent and my Magick and those servo things pick it up and the bird does what I ask?”
“That’s the theory. Yes.”
“What’s the verdict on whether the cardinal can support the weight of the lamp piece?”
Ivan looked up at the lamp piece then back at the cardinal. “Partially it would depend on whether the piece is embedded in the ceiling or just sitting on it. Because if its part of the ceiling the cardinal has to pry the piece out of it, which adds impetus and force and could cause issues.”
“And how do we know that?”
Ivan scratched the back of his neck. “We don’t. Communication with it would be one way. You to it. It’s not like one of those drones with the cameras we can use to view with. That’s way beyond this level of sophistication. Actually,” he reached around and smoothed his goatee and his gaze went somewhere else, “that could be an interesting-” he blinked and dropped his hand. “Not for today. But,” he poked his tongue in his cheek and looked into the distance a mikro before focusing on Patti again. “Anyhow. I think our best bet is for you to get the bird to go up and grab the piece. It either is loose and it can just do it or we’ll see its putting in effort and you can call it back then we can reassess.”
“Okay,” Patti rubbed her hands together and looked at the ceiling and the glass piece that was their goal. “I can do this.”
“Yes. You can.”
Patti shifted her focus to the cardinal, still blinking and looking around like it was confused. Sorry, buddy, Patti sent it silently, you may be about to get a whole lot more confused.
Clearly picturing the piece of colored glass standing out against the clear glass pane in the aviary’s arched roof then adding in the image of a bird flying to collect it, mixing in a longing to have that colored glass as well as more amorphous feelings of being happy, being safe, and of the excitement of attaining a prize, Patti relaxed the part of her that held back her Magick and set it free to select the song the cardinal needed to motivate it to fly.
She expected Corinne Bailey Rae or maybe Annie Lennox again. What she got was Katy Perry’s Fireworks.
Her Magick usually picked songs that would resonate with her intended audience. She’d always suspected it was an extension of empathy, similar to what Gwen could do but only focused on music. Patti slanted Ivan a look even as she continued to sing. Since he was the new factor here, she was laying the song choice firmly at his doorstep. She made a note to poke him later about his possible love of a good dance-pop anthem.
When she sang the next line the cardinal turned its head and looked at Patti. She let loose the floodgates of her Magick, singing directly to the bird, not letting herself feel any doubt that this word work. Just feeling that clean energy lofting her from within and hoping for the cardinal to feel it to.
C’mon, buddy!
The cardinal fluffed its feathers, stretched its wings, and took off from Patti’s hand, the rhythm of its wing beats matching the lift of Patti’s voice as she sang.
When she got to the part about being a firework she lifted her hand, pointed her finger towards the sky the cardinal soared through the part that gleefully bounced the words over multiple syllables.
Next to Patti Ivan lifted his shoulders up and down, all subtle like, picking up the rhythm of the song. Patti turned and pointed at him, pulsing in time to the song playing through her mind and the Song dancing on the air.
They both turned and looked as the bird soared for the glass ceiling, gliding towards the darker glass like it was laser targeted. It stopped near the glass, hovering but not making any other movements towards the lamp piece.
Patti anchored the thought of the cardinal collecting the piece in her mind and her Magick. Not so much the how but the excitement of finding something, of figuring out how to dig it free, of grabbing it in her talons, and soaring away with her prize.
As she sang the line about a rainbow following a hurricane something pinged inside of her, plucking the chords of her Magick. A rainbow! The promise of joy at the end of a storm. She wove that into the Song, sending it spiraling on her voice.
Next to her Ivan put the magnifying device to his eyes, tracking the cardinals progress. “Keep going,” he muttered under his breath. “Keep going.”
Whether his words were for the bird or for Patti she took them to heart, pouring her all into the Song.
“Yes,” Ivan whispered, “almost there.”
Encouraged by the words Patti leaned into the next lines of the Song.
Ivan lowered the viewer and shoved it in his bags, then he made a fist and pumped it in time to Patti’s singing. She didn’t need a view to see the cardinal winging back towards them, its flight pattern closer to a drunk bumblebee than a graceful bird suggesting it was adjusting for added weight. Patti put everything into the next lines, willing her Magick to buoy the cardinal.
“Aah!” The cardinal wavered on the air, causing Ivan to yell. His sound of concern mingled with Patti’s singing. She seized the sound, wove it with her voice, and sent it out, imagining it like a cushion of air to keep the cardinal in the sky. As the bird drifted down towards them Patti could swear she saw a glow in its chest, suffusing the red feathers on its under body so it looked like a tiny fire.
She imagined her Magick flowing into the bird, feeding that fire, giving it what it needed to remain aloft.
The bird dropped down, a piece of red glass in its talons, circumnavigating both Patti and Ivan to land with a solid thump on the ground. It released the glass to stagger sideways and Patti dived to scoop it up in her hands. Tears burned in her eyes as she lifted the bird up and laid a kiss on its soft head. Next to her Ivan had a fist pressed to his lips. There was a suspicious shine to his dark eyes and he bit his lip as Patti sang one last line in a slow tempo, putting her thanks and her pride in the cardinal into the words.
She broke off to sniffle. “You did good, little bird.”
“Damn.” Ivan stopped and swallowed hard. “That worked.”
Patti slanted him a glance. “Did you doubt it?”
“Uh, yes.” Ivan stooped down and picked up the lamp piece. It was in the shape of a rose, slightly smaller than the palm of Patti’s hand and worked in exquisite detail with tiny pieces of red glass in subtly differing shades making up the bloom and green pieces forming the leaves and a portion of stem.
Patti shifted her attention from it to the cardinal. “I know you can’t understand words but thank you.”
With that she softly lifted her hand to the sky, pulling back her Magick to let the cardinal fly as it would. At the last moment she left a tiny tendril of the Magick there but she cut all ties to it. Just left it, a gift to coil in the mechanical chest of the bird. It was the littlest gift but it was one she could give, willingly, as the cardinal had given them its help.
She followed the bird’s path through the sky until it alighted on a tree limb a short distance away and began to preen its feathers. Once more she was struck by how life-like it was. Then again, everything The House produced seemed real. Was she surprised the bird seemed so?
Looking around the aviary, gaze going to the glass roof, the trees, the birds, and then to the fountain playing its liquid tune against the stone of the the basin, she mouthed a silent thanks. Ivan might not believe it had sentience but Patti wasn’t so sure. She might not be able to get him to believe but, for her, The House was helping them. Whatever its motives, and she wasn’t going to spend time on those thoughts now, it was helping them and she gave it her thanks, just like she had the bird.
Taking a deep breath she looked at Ivan and said in a voice with just a little wobble. “Let’s get out of here.”
He nodded his agreement and lead the way back to the windowsill. Once he reached it he turned back and offered her a hand. While she was fully capable of hauling her own ass up onto the sill she was still a little shaky from the outpouring of Magick and the wonder of seeing the bird, and by extension The House, respond to her need, so she took his hand and let him help her up and out of the aviary.
If she sniffled a little, pausing on the windowsill to look back into the aviary before stepping onto the marble floor of the room at the center of the maze… Well, she made no excuses. Fuck excuses. That had been awesome. And beautiful. And maybe even a little paradigm changing.
Ivan stepped out behind her. His head turned and Patti followed the movement, seeing Dempsey and Gwen leaning against the edge of the table and talking quietly.
“Hey!”
Dempsey broke off speaking to Gwen and turned at Ivan’s call. “Hey.”
“You get your piece?’
Dempsey waved at the sky where a mirror with a gold frame and reflective silver surface now sat on the ribbon above the loop where the bracelet hung. The words “and see my” in white ran along the length of the handle.
“Cool.” Ivan nodded then walked over to the table. Despite his height he couldn’t quite reach the lamp shade to place the bird piece so he braced his hand on the surface and leaned in, buying the distance he needed to stretch and settle the piece at the end of the ribbon.
He stepped back and looked up. Patti did the same. The word “Beast” showed along the bottom of the bird, a trick of the light – or probably Magick – picking them out. The fragmented message now read from the harp to the bird “back to my palace and see my beast”. The phrase didn’t strike a chord in her memory. Chances were they needed all the pieces before whatever was supposed to happen happened. But at least they were making headway.
Patti tracked backwards noting the piece towards the beginning of the ribbon, the portrait of a young woman with brown hair dressed in yellow stood out sharply on the sky. Really, too sharp, considering it was a projected image. But… Magick. Along the dark frame of the portrait the word “wish” stood out in white. A blank space still bracketed that piece to the right – a vague rectangle that was probably a book if the pieces corresponded with the stained glass images – and a vague blob at the start of the ribbon which was likely a rose.
They just needed – Patti counted across the ribbon – two more pieces – the book and the rose. Hope that the others would be as lucky as Ivan and she at gathering their piece filled her heart. Maybe it was the Magick from the aviary still flowing through her, the sense of satisfaction and pride, but whatever it was made her think that they would succeed.
After all, The House had picked them for a reason. Even if Ivan didn’t believe that, Patti was really starting to.
Enter The Woods 