Sunshine

My parents split up when I was six. I didn’t see my grandmother for the first year after. It turned out that my mother had gone so far as to hire some wardcrafters—smiths, scribes, spooks, the usual range—and on what money I don’t know—to prevent anyone in my dad’s family from finding us. My father hadn’t wanted to let us go, and while his family are supposed to be some of the good guys, it’s very hard not to do something you can do when you’re angry and it will get you what you want. After the first year and a day he had probably cooled off, and my mom let the fancy wards lapse. My grandmother located us almost at once, and my mother, who can drive herself nuts sometimes by her own sense of fairness, agreed to let me see her. At first I didn’t want to see her, because it had been a whole year and I’d been sick for a lot of it, and my mother had to tell me— that sense of fairness again—what she’d done, and a little bit, scaled down to my age, of why. I was only seven, but it had been a bad year. That conversation with my mother was one of those moments when my world really changed. I realized that I was going to be a grownup myself some day and have to make horrible decisions like this too. So I agreed to see my gran again. And then I was glad I did. I was so happy to have her back.

She and I had been meeting at the lake every few weeks for a little over a year when one afternoon she said, “I don’t like what I am about to do, but I can’t think of anything better. My dear, I have to ask if you will keep a secret from your mother for me.”

I looked at her in astonishment. This wasn’t the sort of thing grown-ups did. They went around having secrets behind your back all the time about things that were horribly important to you (like my mom not telling me she’d hired the wardcrafters), and then pretended they didn’t. There’d been a lot of that that nobody explained to me before my parents broke up, and I hadn’t forgotten. Even at six or seven I knew that my mom’s wardcrafters were the tip of an iceberg, but I still didn’t know much about the iceberg. I didn’t know, for example, that my father might have been a sorcerer, till years later. And sometimes grown-ups said things like “Oh, maybe you’d better not tell your parents about this,” which either meant get out of there fast, now, or that they knew you would tell anyway because you were only a kid, but then they could get mad at you when you did. (That this had happened several times with some of my dad’s business associates is one of the reasons my mom left.) But I knew my gran loved me and I knew she was safe. I knew she’d never ask me anything bad. And I knew that she really, really meant it, that I had to keep this secret from my mother.

“Okay,” I said.

My gran sighed. “I know that your mother means the best for you and in many ways she’s right. I’m very glad she got custody of you, and not your dad, although he was very bitter about it at the time.”

I scowled. I never saw my dad. Once my gran had found me he started writing me a lot of postcards but I never saw him. And the postmarks on the cards were always blurry so you couldn’t see where they’d been sent from. All the postmarks were blurry. Two or three a week sometimes.

“But she’s wrong that simply keeping you ignorant of your father’s heritage will make it as if that heritage doesn’t exist. It does exist. You can choose to be your mother’s daughter in all things, but it must be a choice. I am going to provide you with the means for making that choice. Otherwise, some day, that heritage you know nothing about may get you in a lot of trouble.”

I must have looked frightened, because she took my hands in hers and gave them a squeeze. “Or, perhaps, some day you will be in a lot of trouble and it will get you out of it.”

We were sitting on the porch of the cabin by the lake. We’d been walking earlier, and had picked a little posy of wildflowers. She’d fetched a mug from the kitchen and filled it with water, and the flowers were standing in that, on the rickety little table that still sat on the porch. We’d been walking in the sun, which was very warm, and were now sitting in the shade of the trees, which was pleasingly cool. I could feel the sweat on my face drying in the breeze. My gran pulled one of the flowers out of the mug, put it between my two hands, closed my hands together over it so it was invisible, and put her hands over mine. “Now, what have you got in your hands?” she said.

This was a funny sort of game. I said, smiling, “A flower.”

“What else could you have inside your hands instead? What else is so small you can hide it completely, doesn’t weigh very much, doesn’t itch or tickle, is so soft you can barely feel it’s there?”

“Um—a feather?” I said.

“A feather. Good. Now, think feather.”