barometric pressure

[cumulonimbus]

Her name's Isabella, and she prefers Bella, and she's called Stormy.

She has never slept through a stormy night since she was a baby. Till she was seven her mother thought she was scared; her mother reassured her that the thunder couldn't get her, her mother told her over and over that it was just a sound and she should try to sleep. Bella told her she was wrong, but Ranae thought she was just putting on a brave face, denying fear so she wouldn't look babyish.

When she is seven she drags her mattress out the back door in the middle of a stormy night, flops onto it in the rain, and sleeps like a log in the pouring storm, and after that her mother realizes what is really going on in her head when she tells them storms don't scare her.

The mattress is ruined. Ranae replaces it. That one is destroyed the next time Bella is left unsupervised during rough nighttime weather.

Ranae gets her a hammock.

When Bella is eight she learns to really touch the weather, not just with her skin but with her self. It's delicious. She can't do it all day, so she still plays and goes to school and sleeps and eats and writes and reads books - but she does it a lot. Stolen moments, here and there, where she can feel the raindrops and the air - she can reach farther and touch the clouds - she can skim the tops of the clouds and the dry rarefied winds above them - she can reach farther and farther, grab shards of sunlight -

Sometimes it is a little hard to come back, but she gets tired if she stays out too long.

She can change stuff she touches. She can "breathe", and the wind will swirl this way or that. She feels like she is the sky, sometimes, when she's in deep, and the sky-self is even clumsier and harder to control than her regular body, but she can move it if she tries. (This is also tiring, but she gets better and better with practice.)

By the time she is nine, weather happens around her all the time. It's mostly humidity, and temperature - the air is dry when she's happy, wet when she's sad, hot when she's angry, cold when she's calm. But sometimes rain comes to comfort her - even indoors - sometimes winds kick up and break Ranae's good china, sometimes there are tiny playful bolts of lightning, and they seem to like Bella, but just as though they were badly trained puppies that doesn't mean they won't bite other people.

Of course Ranae takes her to a magic-checker. But the magic-checker insists on doing his tests indoors, in a nasty stuffy room, and no weather to touch at all (there's barely oxygen), and Bella is unhappy and nothing happens because the air is behaving in a very unskylike way. The tests all turn up negative. Bella goes home. Ranae writes it off as "just one of those things", though when prompted for a list of those things, she cannot produce one.

Bella plays with the sky. Work small, be big. Feel small, think big. She makes tiny little breaths, because they're easier to control; but she inhabits the biggest storms that she can, stretching miles across and miles high, a billion drops of rain. She sinks deep into the tiniest snowflake crystals and puffs of air and beams of sun to feel how they work; but she imagines being the whole sky, over the whole world, and dancing.

By the time Bella is ten, she no longer makes indoor weather unless she chooses to. (It is always very dry where she keeps her notebooks.) It rains in the vicinity of Firebird City exactly twice weekly, as more would harm local flora, but when it does rain it's usually a doozy, intense thunder that shakes the windows, lightning that crackles between the clouds. Sometimes she calls down just a little bit of lightning, when Ranae's not looking, and it touches her outstretched hand, and she feels all aglow and invigorated, like instead of being the sky the sky is being her.

Comments

[cumulonimbus]

"I almost followed a cloud too far," Bella says solemnly. "I should learn how to do it safely."

[iwillgetyou]

"Yes, you should," Mathilde agrees.

[cumulonimbus]

"What's Winding Circle like?" Stormy asks while Ranae is processing this upheaval.

[iwillgetyou]

"Well, I happen to know the woman who runs the girls' dormitories, so you won't have anything to complain about there," she says. "The whole temple is laid out like a spiral, with one winding road that circles in from the main gate, hence the name. Most of the adults there are temple dedicates, so you'll see them in blue or red or green or yellow robes, and the novices in white. But you don't need to dedicate yourself to the temple, or even plan to, in order to learn there. Some very famous mages have gotten their educations at Winding Circle and gone on to have their careers elsewhere."

[cumulonimbus]

"Like who?"

[iwillgetyou]

"Do you know any famous mages?"

[cumulonimbus]

"...I have some written down. I can't remember without going and looking."

[iwillgetyou]

"If you go and look, I'll tell you if they were educated at Winding Circle," she says.

[cumulonimbus]

Bella goes up the stairs, carefully taking each step, and comes back down with a notebook after a minute. "We did a unit on magic in history," she tells Mathilde. "I wrote down all the great mages the teacher talked about." She hands over the notebook, opened to the correct page; in neat but childlike handwriting it lists a large number of great mages, ranging from "Crane" to "Sandrilene fa Toren".

[iwillgetyou]

Mathilde dutifully goes over the list and names all the Winding Circle mages she knows about.

It's about a third of them, including the first and last.

[cumulonimbus]

"Cool," says Bella. She takes the notebook back, closes it, and goes to put it away again.

[alicornucopia]

"So - I hate to harp about finances - but no tuition, what about living expenses?"

[iwillgetyou]

"Winding Circle can cover it. That's not to say they won't appreciate you contributing what you can, but you don't have to."

[alicornucopia]

"Can I come with you to help settle her in?"

[iwillgetyou]

"I think that will be fine."

[alicornucopia]

"All right. I'll write Charlie that letter, then," and Ranae goes off to fetch paper.

[cumulonimbus]

Stormy comes back down the stairs.

"Can I bring all my stuff? Will they let me sleep outside?"

[iwillgetyou]

"You can bring as much stuff as we can carry on the way. You'll have to ask Dedicate Honey about sleeping outside. There might not be anywhere outside for you to sleep; most of Winding Circle is in use somehow or other, even the outdoor parts."

[cumulonimbus]

"I have a hammock. Can't I put the hammock somewhere?" asks Stormy. "I've been sleeping outside since I was seven!"

[iwillgetyou]

"If there's somewhere to put your hammock, Dedicate Honey will find it," Mathilde assures her.

[cumulonimbus]

"I don't want to have to sleep all shut up inside," says Stormy. "It's stuffy."

[iwillgetyou]

"I'll make sure to tell Honey that."

[cumulonimbus]

"Good."

[iwillgetyou]

She smiles.

[cumulonimbus]

Charlie's eventual return letter accepts Ranae's judgment on their child's education, and the trip to Winding Circle is undertaken.