Gift of the Unmage by Alma Alexander

the uneven ground. His left swung free by his side as he walked, and there was a shimmer around the fingers that suddenly caught Thea’s eye. Her mouth fell open as she realized what she was seeing—Cheveyo wove light as he walked, effortlessly making a complex skein with his fingers and then unraveling it with his thumb so that streamers of light flowed back from his wrist like strange ribbons until they faded and melted back into ordinary air, as though their magical presence had never been.
    It felt like a habit, something so ordinary to him that he wasn’t even aware that he was doing it, but it was beautiful. Thea stared, mesmerized, at the play of light in those long fingers, until she stumbled over a rock she should have seen butfailed to notice in time. She staggered, tried to regain her balance, but it was too late, and her ankle twisted underneath her, depositing her on the ground.
    She grunted.
    Cheveyo stopped, midstep, without turning around. Fading half-woven strands of light still hung from the fingers of his stilled hand. He said nothing, merely waiting.
    “I’m fine, thank you,” Thea said, scrambling gracelessly to her feet and staring ruefully at the long scrape on her shin, which was starting to bead blood.
    “That is good,” Cheveyo said.
    And he was off again. Striding, humming, folding light.
    Thea limped after him in stubborn silence. She had gotten scrapes before. It wasn’t going to stop her, wasn’t going to let him show her up.
    She forced herself to concentrate on his hand instead, to watch closely every small movement, every nuance of the woven light as it fell from his fingers.
    “Very good,” Cheveyo said suddenly, and Thea came to an abrupt stop, almost running him down. She blinked, surprised.
    “What?” she said, staring around her, almost as though she had just woken up from a dream. “Where…Where are we? What is this place?”
    The broken wilderness they had started out from was gone—they stood instead on what seemed to be a wide straight road, flat, solid. Above them the sky had turned milky with cloud, hiding the sun, giving the land an air of being lost and timeless.
    “This is the Barefoot Road,” Cheveyo said, his voice almost gentle. “You did well. You are here.”
    Thea glanced down at his feet, and then her own.
    Cheveyo’s were bare now, without even sandals to protect the soles of his feet from stones. Thea’s own were still encased in the sandals she had put on that morning.
    But so had he. He had been wearing sandals. She had seen them. She had been following those sandaled feet for…for how long? It felt like she had been walking for hours.
    “But I am wearing shoes,” she said instead, pointing out the obvious.
    Cheveyo actually smiled.
    “Yes,” he said, “but standing on the BarefootRoad is only the first step to walking it. You have done well to come this far.”
    “The song you hum,” Thea said unexpectedly. “What is it?”
    “You have heard it before.”
    “Yes. I think so.”
    Cheveyo nodded. “This is the kind of question you should think on. The answers are within you—the answers to all important questions are already within you. It is in learning how to ask the questions of our lives that those questions are answered, Catori. If we ask the right question in the right way, the answer lies hidden inside it, waiting to be discovered.”
    “You never give me a straight answer,” Thea said.
    “Did I not just tell you there is no such thing?” Cheveyo said with another unexpected smile. It had a strange effect on his face—it softened his cheekbones, allowed the habitual expression of stern dignity to dissolve into something that was almost joy.
    “Why am I here?” Thea said after a silence.
    “There is the Road,” Cheveyo said.
    “I am here because there is a road,” Thea echoed blankly.
    Cheveyo merely stood and looked at her, his eyes glittering, opaque with a black shimmer like obsidian.
    Thea gave a huge theatrical