February Thaw by Tanya Huff Read Free Book Online

she moved all the bits that were supposed to move. "You have done it. Yeah."
    As Alynne helped her to sit up, the wizards cheered. By the time she was standing, the mutual admiration they'd built rebuilding her had begun to fade. By the time she'd walked carefully over to the chair and sat down, they'd begun fighting again.
    The small explosion took them totally by surprise. Shocked into silence, they turned to face Carlene who blew out the match and tossed the rest of the firecrackers back on the shelf. "Thank you for what you've done. With your help, my mother has given birth to me twice. It's been a long night, you're probably all very tired. Go home and rest."
    "That is all then?"
    She looked down at her hands then up at seven identical expressions. "Unless you want to stay for breakfast."
    They had to fight about which time zone left which wizard the most tired, but eventually they left – simultaneously as they'd come, unwilling to allow any one of them to have the last word.
    When the workshop was quiet, Alynne sat down and picked up the Slinky. "Can I ask you a question? What happens when this new body grows old and dies? Do you become fire again?"
    "I don’t know," Carlene admitted, running her fingers through the ragged remains of her hair. "But then, you don't know what happens to you when your body grows old and dies either. No one does."
    "...I was so looking forward to seeing how the experiment came out."
    The Slinky whispered from hand to hand. "I’m having myself frozen so I can come back to a better world."
    "Better?"
    "Well, George Lucas'll have the Star Wars movies done anyway."
    Which reminded her. "You know, the wizards didn’t bring me back. You did."
    Alynne looked up and grinned. "Yeah, I know, but let them have their moment."
    "You've been great right from the beginning of this."
    "Why not? Your whole problem was that in spite of being fire, you were still Carlene."
    "Well, yeah but..."
    "If you were still Carlene, then the only thing that had changed was your appearance."
    "True, but..."
    "You were still you and I was still me and I'd be pretty small if I dumped you because you looked different. If I was going to do that, I'd do it now. At least until your hair grows back in."
    "I guess if you put it that way, it's elementary."
    The Slinky stilled. "You’ve been waiting to say that all night, haven’t you?"
    Carlene grinned. "Hey, I’m only human."

This story takes place in the same mythos as “ Burning Bright.” I had so much fun with my cranky wizards, it seemed a shame not to use them again. Or some of them anyway. Because I'd left Toronto in 1982, the Toronto in this story didn't exist when I wrote it ten years later and now, well, now it's a little piece of Toronto preserved in amber. (You can trust that I'd have had something to say about the addition to the Royal Ontario Museum had it been completed when I was writing.) Oh, and Isabel's answer in her chemistry class... I got part marks for that on a grade 12 test. I suspect that by the time he got to my paper, the teacher was looking for something, anything that would make him laugh.
     
    I almost seem to remember that I'd intended to write a couple more stories about Isabel and Godfry, but it just never happened. Or, more precisely, it hasn't happened yet...
When the Student is Ready
    The first time Isabel saw him, he was rummaging in the garbage can out in front of The Second Cup at Bloor and Brunswick. He wore a filthy "I love New York" T-shirt, a pair of truly disgusting khaki dockers barely hanging from skinny hips, and what looked like brand new, high top black canvas sneakers of a kind that hadn't been made since the sixties – at least not according to her father who moaned about it every time he had to buy shoes. His dirty blond hair and full beard were streaked with grey, as well as real dirt, and both skinny arms were elbow deep in cardboard coffee cups and half eaten snack food.
    She couldn't take her eyes off of him,