Chapter 11: The Theory of Magic

“Without belief,” Archbishop Simon explained to me in a mixture of Saxon-English and Much Later Latin, via several steps of translation and clarification, “there is no such thing as magic.” He paused to brush a bit of breakfast from his sacerdotal robes before he continued. He either didn’t notice or ignored the rest of the stains.

“That explains a lot,” I thought to myself, though I didn’t say it out loud. He was a nice old guy and he’d taken us in, given us a floor to sleep on, and fed us dinner the night before and breakfast in the morning. He was trying in his own way to explain what was incomprehensible to me. I could at least try to be courteous.

Nevy and her mother were both sitting in on my first lesson in magic, because the archbishop was a renowned teacher of magical theory. You can always learn something new from listening to an expert, even if he’s just touching on the basics. I reminded myself that I believed in Nevy, whom I instinctively trusted not to lie to me, so I needed to suspend my disbelief in magic.

“Each of us exists as part of a whole,” Simon continued. “We aren’t alone in this world. We aren’t islands. Everything is connected to everything else. If you sit on a bench you are connected with it. If your feet are on the ground you are connected with the earth. If you take a breath, you are connected with the air. This is so?”

I agreed that it was, cautiously taking the baby steps along with him.

“If you think about your mother, are you connected to her?”

“Lightly,” I told him. “She’s dead now.”

“Still, she was alive before. My own mother is long dead. I still think about her, sometimes I even talk to her. Your mother gave birth to you. At one point she was the most important person on earth to you. The connection was very real, wasn’t it?”

I had to admit he was correct, whether I knew where the explanation was going or not. My mother was a nut. I knew it, and even she admitted to it occasionally. She had been my nut.

“The same applies to friends and acquaintances and to pets. Nevianne called you here from a far distant realm, so far away that you aren’t sure where you are. You have the name, and you have the singular talent of slipping from reality realm to reality realm. Already you are connected, breathing our air, standing on our earth, and acquainted with quite a few of our people. And you’re connected with four horses, and with the animals you killed for food.”

“True,” I agreed.

“You influenced the horses when you drove them. Leofgif influenced you when she taught you to drive. You influenced Nannakussi when you defeated him. You influenced the women and children of his tribe when you made them widows and orphans. Influence is not magic. But magic is influence.”

“That’s basic logic,” I agreed. Whether I accepted the existence of magic or not, A was all of B, but B was not all of A.

“Good, good, good! You’d be surprised at how many people can’t see the simple distinction. So now we come to the cat.”

“The cat?” I asked. I didn’t know where he came from, or how we came to him.

“You build a box,” Archbishop Simon told me, causing a bell to ring in the back of my mind. “You put the cat in the box and nail it shut, nice and tight. What will happen when you put the box under your bed for the night?”

I didn’t tell him it was impossible, since we were sleeping on the floor. “You don’t know until you open the box,” I answered. “He may run out of air and smother. He may have just enough air to survive the night. He may be in a coma because there’s not quite enough air. So he may be alive or dead or neither.”

“Precisely,” he agreed.

He’d invented Schrödinger’s cat, less a single atom. Nevy gave me a flattering look at my answer. I liked it when she was proud of me. It’s funny how that works.

“If you have the talent for it,” he continued, “you influence the outcome of the cat’s night under the bed. Some people have no talent for magic, just as some people have no talent for games or for mathematics or rhetoric. Conversely, there are people who are very talented. Some witches and wizards are powerful, some aren’t, and some are weak. The strength of your disbelief says you are potentially very powerful. When most people disbelieve, their opinions don’t matter. You suppress magic for half a mile in every direction. You see?”

Assuming magic existed in the first place, and I had potential, that made sense. “So how would I influence the cat?” I asked.

“What would you expect when you opened the box?”

“It would depend on the size of the cat and the size of the box, I guess,” I responded after a bit of thought. “Maybe the temperature and the humidity.”

Archbishop Simon beamed at me, showing all the teeth in his head. I tried not to look. “It would depend on your expectation. With the cat in the box, you must expect some condition, one way or another or the other. Period. Given your power, if you expect the cat to be dead, he will be. If you expect him to be alive, he will be.”

“What if I don’t have an opinion? If I’m just curious?”

“Then he will be one or the other or the other. But usually you’ll have an opinion, even if slight. Your will is what will determine the outcome for the cat.”

“Yes, but...”

“How did your servant know to gather his men and come to attack your coven?” he demanded abruptly.

“I have no idea,” I replied honestly. Nannakussi had told us. It didn’t seem really believable.

“But what did he tell you?”

“That Palégos awakened him and gave him his marching orders,” Nevy supplied, making a face at me.

“While the wizard was safe in his secret lair many miles away and Nannakussi was asleep in his longhouse next to his wife and daughter,” agreed the archbishop. “Can you think of another way for Palégos to call up his minion?”

“No,” I admitted. I couldn’t even think of that way. They hadn’t invented the telephone here, at least not yet.

Why should they, if they could project visions?

“Yet Nannakussi is now your servant, through Conqueror’s Right. He owes you truth in all things. As your servus, to tell you a lie risks death for himself and his family. As dominus you have that right. And he is a Lenape, who are an upright people, honest to a fault. So how do you believe he was alerted? Can you think of any other explanation?”

“No,” I admitted once again. I felt like I was starting to repeat myself.

“Blædswith warned you of their coming, and of their intent. How did she do that?”

“Once again, no idea.”

“And you believed her, without doubt?”

That was precisely what happened. I had believed Blæda, no doubt in my mind. I still wasn’t sure why.