Your Magic or Mine? by Ann Macela Read Free Book Online

evening’s entertainment, but Gloriana was getting tired of the discussion. She was looking forward to heading for her own house on the other side of the farm.
    “I haven’t seen Cal Horner in a long time,” her father said. “He’s as feisty as ever. Have you heard any news about him, Antonia?”
    “He’s been pretty quiet, Alaric,” her mother answered. “I think he’s been putting his efforts into non-practitioner matters.”
    “Who were those two young guys, the mathematicians?” Bent asked.
    “A couple of hotshots with overinflated egos,” Clay muttered. “I remember Pritchart from undergrad days at MIT. His nickname was ‘Prick’ and he lived up to it. Looks like nothing’s changed.”
    “Mrs. Shortbottom certainly ‘pricked’ him,” Bent said, and everybody groaned. Daria punched her husband in the arm. Bent grinned.
    “Bernice Shortbottom’s been a thorn in everybody’s side except the Horners for years,” her mother observed. “She thinks Cal and Loretta are the saviors of us all.”
    “I hate to admit it in the face of family solidarity behind Glori,” Clay said, “but Forscher, Prick, and the rest of the mathematicians may have something with his equation. It may truly become
the
method of casting.”
    Gloriana could only stare at him while she made herself swallow the strawberry in her mouth. Whose side was he on?
    Daria, who had nothing in her mouth, took up the gauntlet. “What are you saying? Who was talking the other day about the ‘art’ of casting a computer spell? It certainly wasn’t me or your wife.”
    “Yes, who was telling me that I had to develop ‘my own’ casting process, not let myself be swayed by what others do?” Francie asked, waggling her fork at him.
    Gloriana smiled to herself. Clay had always been the nemesis of his two sisters. It was nice to see Francie didn’t let him get away with anything, either.
    “I think there’s room for both views,” her father said. “If I heard Forscher correctly, what was lost in the yelling was his call for experimentation and study of the equation and its uses. He recognizes the need and said so. Glori, you said, also rightly, if one good spell comes out of the formula, that’s great. I’ll admit, and my attitude may be where Clay is coming from, the equation appeals to the math in me. It may help streamline some of my auditing spells for a company’s books.”
    “And my computer spells,” Clay agreed.
    “That’s good,” Gloriana said, “as long as we look at the larger picture, too. Which is what I was trying to do, if you heard
me
correctly. Don’t sweep out the proven and traditional simply for the novelty of Forscher’s formula. People learn differently and cast differently. How many times are we told when we’re first learning to ‘protect our process’? And speaking of process, how are you coming on learning magic, Francie?”
    Francie grinned. “Fine. Casting a spell still puts me in a state of awe when I think about what I’m doing, but it’s great fun. It looks like my talents lie with computers, too, only more on the business applications side than the operating programs. Thank goodness. I have no desire to delve into systems architecture like Clay does.”
    “Have the genealogists traced your lineage for practitioner blood?” Alaric asked.
    “Yes, they’ve found one source, a multi-great-grandmother, and they’re having problems going back farther than her. Moreover, her children aren’t in the registry at all. It’s a tangled family tree.”
    “They often are, dear,” Antonia said.
    “She lived in a time and place of intense fear of black magic, and her family and descendants may have suppressed or denied their abilities. The consensus of opinion is that, since the talents were dormant in my line for such a long time, I might never have manifested mine without the mating.”
    “There’s still much we don’t know about our abilities,” Antonia said with a shake of her head.