Magic Lessons by Justine Larbalestier Read Free Book Online Page A

stop giggling?”
“Less phallic.” Jay-Tee cracked up again. She gingerly returned the piece of wood to the box and pulled out a large pointed tooth that looked like it had come from a big cat. In no way did it resemble a penis.
The sight of it stopped my laughter. At least it wasn’t human. I shivered, remembering the thirty-three teeth that had tumbled out of a hidden compartment in Esmeralda’s hairbrush my first day here. Were they magical objects? Or souvenirs?
Esmeralda cleared her throat. “The first rule of magic is to use as little as you possibly can.” She was looking directly at me. “This makes it hard to teach. But to avoid madness, you have to use a small amount of magic once a week.”
“Must be easy for you to remember, Tom,” Jay-Tee said. “You just have to do magic every time you brush your teeth.”
“Yeah, right,” Tom said. “You should—”
“How do you know?” I asked, cutting off Tom. “Once a week? What happens if you do it once every two weeks or once every 153 hours?”
“Once a week worked for my mother, it’s worked for me, and for your grandfather and his parents. It’s the time specified in the texts I’ve found that touch on the issue. Once a week to avoid insanity, using only the smallest of magics in order to live as long as possible.” It sounded like she was quoting.
“I imagine,” she continued, “it might be more or less for different people, but, frankly, I have not experimented. The stakes are too high.
“Every time you use magic, you make your life shorter. I use as little as possible. This is especially crucial for you two.” She looked at me and then at Jay-Tee, who looked down. She didn’t have to say why it was crucial for us. We both knew that we’d used up too much already. But then, so had Esmeralda. She was riddled with rust. I wondered how long she had left. Months? Weeks? Was she afraid of dying?
“But in order to use only the tiniest amounts,” Esmeralda continued, “you have to understand it.
“The three of you see magic differently. Yet you have to remember that all magic is the same. It’s a system of energy that magic-wielders have the ability to control. No matter what metaphor you use for understanding it—”
“What’s a metaphor?” Jay-Tee asked.
“A figure of speech. Like saying someone has a heart of stone.”
I didn’t think much of her example. My grandfather’s stone heart definitely wasn’t a figure of speech.
“Every magic-wielder understands how their magic works in terms of some metaphor. For Reason and me, magic is made of mathematical patterns. Tom understands it as something made up of shapes, of materials, like the clothes he makes.”
“You,” Esmeralda said, smiling at Jay-Tee, “think of magic in terms of the connections between people—a web, you said. But no matter how we think about what we do—what metaphors we use—we all do the same thing: we manipulate energy.”
“If it’s just a metaphor,” Jay-Tee said, “why can’t I smell what Reason smelled?”
“There’s no such thing as just a metaphor. The way you understand magic shapes how you work your magic. Your understanding of it, the metaphor you use, is what your magic is . Metaphors make reality.”
How could that be true? Metaphors couldn’t make the world; they could only help us understand the world, and sometimes they got in the way. I thought of all the examples Sarafina had taught me, everything I’d read about the history of science. People used to think about the world as if it were a map or a table: flat, something you could fall off the edges of. Their flat earth existed at the centre of the universe with the sun rotating around it, heaven floating above and hell below. The metaphor did not make reality; it stopped people from seeing reality. When Copernicus said the world was spinning on its axis and orbiting the sun, the people of his day were horrified. They couldn’t see beyond the edges of their metaphor.
“But how .