Tides of magic, p.8
Tides of Magic, page 8
The tea Thalassa was sporadically providing definitely helped, but there was more going on than that. It was time for her to start asking some questions.
Thalassa was kneeling on a thin cushion, secateurs in hand, thinning out some of the plants that grew in the bed between the main house and the other two buildings – the shed and the little stand-alone unit she called the studio. She looked round when she heard Charley arrive, telling her to head in while she finished off the patch of garden.
This time Charley made the tea, and it was only tea. Supermarket tea bags, nothing magical. She looked at Thalassa as she waited for the jug to boil. This was who Charley had paid seven years of her life to. Seven years, without even checking her credentials.
“Any leads on the missing guy?” Charley asked, putting the bee frames on the table.
“Nothing concrete. I don’t think there’s anything unusual about his disappearance, but I did some divinations for him and gave him suggestions on where to look. Not much else I can do.” Thalassa examined the frames. “I see someone thinks he can apologise in wooden squares. Well I’ve had worse in my life.”
It was the segue Charley needed, even if it was a bit of a reach. She asked Thalassa the question she’d really been dwelling on. “So what is your story? How did you end up here, and how can you do magic and stuff like that?”
There was a long, seemingly endless pause.
“You don’t have to tell me if it’s private or something,” Charley said, forcing herself not to tremble as she passed the cup and saucer across.
“You don’t get much private round here, in a place like this. No such luck. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. They’d do better in life if they would mind their own. But I can’t curse them all. I will tell you the story if you’d like, though?”
“Yes please,” Charley replied, sitting down and wondering if she had just gone and lumped herself in with those whose lives would be much better if they were to mind their own business. She wasn’t sure it mattered. She was used to being judged and a little more wouldn’t hurt her.
“A long time ago I washed up on this here shore. It will have been 1836 if I’ve done my calculations right. Before the treaty. The motu looked very different then, and changed very quickly. Of course, I was too young to understand any of what was, let alone to predict what was to follow. Less than a year old, too young to speak or remember even my name, tied to part of what had been a ship with strips of cloth as if in a desperate hope I’d survive. No information on where I came from. I’ve researched ships that were wrecked or believed wrecked around that time and found nothing. People used to guess at where I might be from: Spain, Italy, even Turkey. I suppose we’ll never know. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway – even if someone else survived the wreck, they’d be long dead.”
“Right here, on this beach?”
“Right here, so I’m told. It’s the closest I have to a home, I suppose. The sea is the closest I have to a parent. But someone must have tied me to that flotsam believing there was a chance I would live, and as it happened so I did.
“It was, I was told, pure chance that anyone found me, someone up here to fish, and this squalling half-dead baby on the beach, so cold I should have been dead and probably half-starved as well. They took me home and fed me up, and I was passed from home to home for a while, homes I don’t remember but I assume treated me well. Later there was something more formal set up in Dunedin – not a children’s home yet, but they paid people to foster us orphans. I got a couple of years schooling, on a ship would you believe, before they built an actual classroom.
“Anyway, I was sent from the last foster family to help a farmer’s wife with many kids when I was 14, that’s what they were training us up for. That was hard work, but they were good people, always plenty of laughs and plenty of kai on the table. One of her boys, a bit younger than myself – he fancied himself a bit of a scholar, was one of the first to go to the university when it opened. He had an idea what was going on with me, nicknamed me Thalassa after the Greek goddess, and it stuck. But I was always drawn back here, and as soon as I could, I returned.”
“Did you ever marry?” Charley asked gently. It struck her she’d become much more confident talking to Thalassa, and Thalassa had become a lot more forthcoming in answering her questions.
“Me? No, no. There were men, of course. There probably would have been women had the times been different. I always said I’d think about marriage when I understood who I was better, and, well, here I am. Plus it’s hard to make a lifelong commitment once you realise you’re going to have such different lifespans. But anyway, that’s enough about me. What about you, where are you from?”
“Oh, er, Tauranga, I guess. I was born there. Moved to Dunedin about two and a half years ago.” It was a quick subject change, and she noted that Thalassa had said nothing about how she came to have magic. But still, she’d just revealed so much more than Charley had previously known.
“Before that. What’s your heritage? Your genealogy? Your whakapapa?”
Charley scratched the ground with her shoe.
“I don’t know. Probably English. I think my granddad said part of our family was Scottish. All my grandparents were born here though, at least, Tauranga or Waikato, I think.”
“Hmm. Look into that. You might find something interesting there. And even if you don’t, it’s good to know where things started. Where you’re connected to. Magic is all about pulling the strings of existence, and some of the most powerful can stretch back a very long time. Also it’s just good form to be able to say where you came from, understand?”
Charley could see Thalassa’s indignation, but she sensed sadness behind it too. “I understand. I’ll ask some of my family what they know when all this is over.”
Thalassa nodded in Charley’s direction, which Charley understood to mean something vaguely approximating a thank-you. You wouldn’t get more than that out of Thalassa, she reckoned, and there wasn’t really any use in trying.
“We are going to find your sister, you know. Gordon needs some time to calm down and get over nonsense from years ago. He’s just being defensive. Not a bad one – I’ve known him since he was a pēpi, even if he spent a lot of his life elsewhere. This place draws nearly everyone back eventually, and he was no exception. Once he’s had a stiff drink, a good night’s sleep, and a filling breakfast, he’ll be over here with information. Whatever he knows – and I don’t think he’s the enemy here, but I think he knows something – we’ll find out soon enough.”
“He told me he needed to sort some stuff out.”
“Yes, well. He’ll do what he needs to do to save face, but he’ll come through eventually.”
Charley understood not to push Gordon any more, but she was dammed if she was just going to kill time. Not that there was exactly much to do to kill time in this place, either. But she did know exactly where was a good place to go if she was looking for information.
True looked unsurprised to see her, while Ollie waved shyly from the middle of a loop of toy train track.
“So, what is it you want to know?”
“I was wondering if you could help me work out which boarding school Gordon went to. Gordon who runs the caravan park. I know it’s random, but it seems like it might be important.”
True scrunched up her face.
“It was one in Dunedin, wasn’t it? Why not just ask him?”
“You saw his little fight with Thalassa, didn't you?”
“Good point!” True replied, pulling a fussing Allie onto her knee. “Mind you, they’ve been ticking each other off for a while, I don’t think it really surprised anyone that they finally came to blows.”
“Yeah, so he’s not exactly being cooperative, given the circumstances, but it’s important. Any ideas on how I can find out? Anyone who might know?”
Charley expected to be sent up some winding path to visit someone with a gruff voice who had known Gordon all his life but didn’t really appreciate visitors. That seemed to be the norm in places like this. Instead True had another – better – idea altogether.
“Newspapers,” True said, reaching over her daughter to log in to her laptop. “There’s a good chance he ended up – maybe there was a rugby team or maybe he got a scholarship? Some of the local papers used to publish everyone who passed their exams, which was a bit stink for those who didn’t I suppose, but they also used to publish all the divorces, which was worse. So there’s a database called Papers Past; it’s run by the National Library and they have searchable scans of all sorts. We can start by just plugging his name in and selecting a date range and seeing what comes up. How old do you reckon Gordon is?”
“Uhhh.”
“Okay, well we don’t need to be too precise, I’m going to say about 60 but we can plug in a whole range of dates. And we think it was Dunedin so I’ll reduce it to Otago publications for now, but we might want to end up looking a bit wider. Okay, and here were go.”
They both watched as the little wheel span round indicating that results were being generated. Then it moved to a display page where both of them ran their eyes up and down looking for results that might be relevant.
“Could that be him?” Charley asked, pointing as True scrolled through the results. “It says one of them is called Drever, though it doesn’t give a first name.”
“One of a group of sixth form students who fundraised for repair and restoration of the war memorial. Well, that gives us a year and three possible schools, and… let me check…” She searched fast. “Only two are boarding schools. Let’s see if knowing that can help us narrow the search results down. There are a few here with sports teams, but look at this. It doesn’t mention Gordon specifically – it doesn’t mention anyone by name, but it’s one of those schools.”
It was an article with a headline that read: ‘Scandal at School – Police Tight Lipped’. The actual text was very vague, several young people were caught indulging in “behaviour that doesn’t fit the morals of this nation”.
“Is that a euphemism?” Charley asked.
“No, I don’t think so. There’s some discussion of financial gain further down. I don’t think it just means they were fucking or anything that innocuous. I think they were involved in an actual crime – I mean, what we would consider an actual crime – but the newspaper doesn’t want to state what, or they’ve been told not to for whatever reason. I think if they were trying to find out it would be more rah-rah our reporters are on the case. Four boys.”
“Well that doesn’t feel coincidental.”
“No, and let me try something else.” True typed quickly. “Yeah, see, look, here’s the exam results for that year and no sign of his name for either school. He either failed everything – which is unlikely at a school like that, if you’re prone to failure they get rid of you long before that – or he was no longer there by that point.”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean he was one of those kids.”
“No, for sure, and we’re not even certain it’s the same school. And it could be something like that happening – whatever that was – made his parents think badly of the school and move him somewhere else, for example. But it looks like we have something mysterious happening with members of Gordon’s year group.”
“Indeed,” Charley said assuredly. “I don’t suppose there’s more we can find out about what the incident is?”
“You want me to follow that up, or did you just need the name of the school?”
Charley nodded, thinking. “I’m kind of interested in anything related. There’s something going on and I don’t know how it all connects up.”
“Leave it with me and I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow morning.” True paused. “Look, do you feel safe? Like, I’m sure Gordon’s fine and it was probably just someone had weed or something else where a giant mountain ended up being made of a molehill, but I know you’re kind of alone here and you’ve been staying at his campground... let me know if you need somewhere to stay or if anything feels wrong, okay?”
Charley felt herself start to flush. It was kind but she felt terribly awkward. Somehow she managed to get her words out sounding fairly normal.
“Yeah. I think he’s okay but will do. Thank you.”
#
Charley struggled to sleep that night. Every noise seemed loud in the quiet of the near-empty holiday park. She was uncomfortable on her thin mattress but didn’t bother to move. She felt so far from home – if, indeed, Dunedin was home. Everything was starting to feel like a dream.
She held out her hand and tried to make the blue orb grow on her palm with no success. It occurred to her that maybe it was all a cheap trick. Probably magic didn’t really exist, it was just an illusion with a combination of cheap special effects and suggestibility. But Melissa was still gone, and quite possibly in a dangerous situation – maybe at sea, maybe held captive – and what was Charley’s alternative? To go back to social media postings and handing out fliers in the Octagon while knowing that she’d failed to follow the one actual lead she had? That didn’t sound like any way to live.
Besides, if Thalassa didn’t actually have powers then she couldn’t actually take years of her life. Surely if she was a scam artist she’d extract all the money she could.
It was all such a mess that she didn’t know what to think. Finally – finally – they had been getting somewhere, and having to put the brakes on now, to wait, to sleep, was unbearable. She wanted to rush out and find her sister, she wanted to force people to tell her what she knew.
But she knew waiting was her best chance. It just felt impossible.
Chapter eight
Charley was woken by knocking on the door of the cabin. She groaned, looked at the leggings and T-shirt she’d slept in and decided they were sufficiently close to actual clothes to greet whoever it was in. She made it barefoot across the room and opened the door to daylight and Gordon, who was actually looking kind of sheepish.
“You ready to go? I think we need to go talk to Thalassa.”
Even with the changes of underwear and socks and the couple of additional T-shirts she’d picked up from the Warehouse during her trip with Thalassa a couple of days before, Charley’s choice of clothes was limited. In some ways, it was easier to manage them that way. Somehow, shaking, knowing she was on the verge of some relevant information, knowing that today might be the day she found her sister or lost her forever, she pulled on her jeans – that she probably needed to wash again, but they’d do for today – and grabbed her phone and the cabin key.
She didn’t say anything to Gordon as she joined him outside and slipped on her shoes, or as the two of them walked up to Thalassa’s place. She wasn’t angry so much as she had no idea what to say. When Thalassa opened the door Charley expected her to throw something at Gordon, but instead she just raised her eyebrows and took a seat.
“Decided to show yourself, then.”
“Don’t push it, Thalassa,” he replied, also sitting. Charley took the chair between them.
Gordon scratched his beard. “Right, so. I’ve been noticing a few things that are a bit weird, and now I think they might be related to what happened to your sister. I don’t have the answer for you, but maybe you’ll be able to use what I tell you.” He took off his ring and presented it to them. It was so much clearer now, almost glowing blue and turquoise, glinting in the light. Just like the other one. “The Chelicerata Society. It was an old group, my recruiters said. Mostly members of established, well-to-do families, but one of my classmate’s brothers was involved and he recruited a couple of us.”
“That’s a fancy name,” Thalassa remarked.
Gordon shook his head. “We thought it was just a name for the group. To make it sound… intimidating.”
“Listen to him. Same type of people who are in parliament talking about banning the gangs, and they’ve got their own patches…”
“Thalassa, please,” Charley said, hoping her tone came across as more pleading than annoyed. She turned to Gordon. “What did you do?”
“Well, we had oaths and ceremonies and stuff. The usual secret society things.”
Thalassa snorted. “Charley went to normal day school, and I barely went to school at all, you’ll forgive us if we don’t know what’s normal in a secret society.”
Charley’s school had not, in fact, been normal, and only a combination of Melissa being a star student, even at 13, and her parents’ money had gotten her admitted. For all the good that had done anyone. But she decided that this wasn’t the time to be bringing that up.
“The society was involved in some dodgy stuff. It may have been the more dramatic kind of smuggling once, but by our time It was a very boring tax and duty evasion scam. I was a scholarship kid, but I got caught up with the entitlement of the others. Honestly, I think it was more about getting one over on the government than making money for them, but it was about belonging, and yes, about the money for me. The rest of my family needed it.
“But the older ones, they talked about worshipping the spider like it wasn’t a joke. They weren’t taking the piss, y’know, and it wasn’t just a symbol. They told stories about how it was a serious smuggling ring back in the day, and they used magic to transport goods somehow. Of course, we felt they were just getting on a bit, either that or messing with us. We mostly just wanted something exclusive to be part of.
“But then we got careless, and some of us got caught. The older members of the society helped out with legal stuff and we did a deal, so I didn’t end up going to prison, but it got me kicked out of school. Didn’t have the success my parents hoped for, but I did okay.”
“And you ended up back here,” Charley said. “Everyone seems to.”
“Aye, it’s a nice enough place, especially for the retirees. The holiday park keeps me busy but isn’t too hard on me. Don’t have anyone breathing down my neck – the wife does her bits and I do mine, and when it’s quiet I sit out with a nice book or go fishing. Isn’t really anything more a man could ask for.”
