A Rational Magic || ONC2022

Nine || How To Smuggle A Fairy Into Your House

Katriel doesn't do very much after Adalia ditches him with us, surprisingly. He just... stares.

"D'you think he's alright?" I ask, just to see if Anya has any long, difficult science word to explain it.

And she pauses, so she does, and she opens her mouth as if to say it... and then she doesn't.

"Floating," she concedes. "He's not really here right now, if you want to put it that way. Or he might just be in shock."

"I'd be pretty shocked if you abandoned me in a word I'd never seen before, yeah."

"Not... not that shock." Anya sighs, looking about ready to punch something. "Like medical shock, like you might see after someone... I don't know, gets stabbed and loses a load of blood."

"Again, I'd be pretty shocked if that happened to me."

"Lani, this is serious!"

"It wasn't half an hour ago, apparently."

Anya cast a brief look over at the motionless fairy, and then groaned. "We're gonna have to work out how to hide him for a week, aren't we?"

"Surely it can't be that difficult?"

"I don't think he can do magic like his sister can, funnily enough," she says, and I feel stupid for not working that out earlier. "So he probably can't hide his wings... and even if he can, if he could, how would hiding him be easy?"

"Just... uh..."

In truth, I have no idea what I was thinking. Hiding a fairy would be easy if he wasn't the average height of a ten-year-old, but... he is the average height of a ten-year-old.

"Exactly. So..." She huffed, the sort of sound that says 'do I have to do everything around here?', and strode over to shake Katriel's arm.

Violently.

"Ow!"

"You with us? Good. D'you know how to get back up there?"

She waved vaguely towards the hill we'd rolled down, which seemed to be behind some sort of haze.

"Just walk? How do you think you got down here?" Katriel sighed, as if he thought we were being idiots. "I'm more likely to be the issue here."

"Well, come on, race you to the top!"

I grabbed his wrist and dragged him along after me, leaving Anya to stand there stunned for several beats. Sometimes her reaction time is... less than stellar.

But she does tend to be the faster runner.

The 'barrier', if you could even call it that, posed no problem to me. Kat, however, stumbled, and... well. I was glad we weren't trying to do a three-legged race.

"Ha!" Anya laughed, sprinting past us both.

Honestly, challenging her to anything she is most likely to win at is the easiest way to get her on your good side again.

Or maybe it's just because she knows I 'hate losing'.

(I'm not a sore loser, in reality. It's easier to fool her if you kick off when you've lost your third game of Monopoly, or something like that.)

As it turns out, she doesn't actually get to what's left of the top of the hill much sooner than we do, and I sneak in a jab as we make our way back the way we came, forgetting the fairy trailing behind us. For the time being, at any rate.

Still, Anya's in a much better mood now, which is all I can hope for at the moment.

~|•

"Sara and Soren, are you serious?"

"They do live here?" Anya sighed.

"Yeah, no problem there," I groaned. "The issue is we need to get Katriel inside without them seeing?"

"Shame you can't fly."

"Mhm... where's your room?"

"Up there, see that gable?" Anya waved her hand so vaguely at the roof that it was a miracle either of us could tell what she actually meant.

"Ah, so I just... what about that window, the one closest to it?"

"That's our aunts' room. We're not allowed in there."

"God, the logistics of sneaking a fairy into a house are surprisingly difficult to work out," Anya commented, looking about as stumped as I felt. "This isn't gonna work. We might just have to... I don't know, tell Aunt Sara?"

"You'd better not," Katriel said. "The fewer people who know I'm here, the better. That's what Father always says, anyway... about himself, you know."

"Your dad comes here often?"

"Not here, but yeah, to this world. He's a Gateway Fixer — that's why Adalia and I were sent up here to investigate your Breach."

"Huh. That's interesting."

As Anya continued to interrogate him (subtly), I tried to think. Aunt Jessica's room was off-limits, the junk room was impossible to move around in, and the bathroom window was far too small to wriggle through, even for someone the same size as Katriel. Plus you couldn't get to any of those windows without learning how to fly.

The only other room upstairs was therefore Soren's... but could it be accessed?

"Give me a second!" I told the other two, who ignored me completely, and ran off to see.

The drainpipe. It was the only way to get up to a first-floor window, and that was the only way we were gonna get Katriel inside without anyone else knowing.

All we needed... all we needed was for that pipe to be near enough to Soren's window.

And it was.

Of course, he was smart enough to close his window, but that didn't matter. It wasn't like he locked his bedroom door.

When I told Anya and Katriel that I had the answer they'd apparently just given up looking for, Anya didn't look particularly convinced.

"You're sure this would work?"

"As long as it doesn't break halfway up, I think I'll be fine," he reassured us both, really, because a similar thought had struck me as I came back to the pair.

"We're gonna have to open it, of course, but that can't be difficult. Now hurry up, Anya, they're gonna think we got kidnapped if we stay out here much longer."