Witches are politely ignored by customs on undefended borders as long as no clans are giving either government particular trouble. As long as she's in the air, obviously a witch and not a human dressed up as one to play a stereotyped character on television, she doesn't even have to dip down and show her clan tattoo to prove that she's descended from those who give allegiance to the Olympic clan. (Clans still refer to themselves by geography, though her teacher is as Olympic as she and lives on the other side of the continent and cloud-pine hasn't gotten any faster recently.)
Isabella touches the symbol inside her left wrist: two concentric circles, two lines. It doesn't mean anything, it's just unique, simple, easy to draw on the floor in herbs or honey or lighter fluid for a spell that refers to the coven.
"If only you were a proper Harry Potter owl," Isabella tells Pathalan, "I could send you for the book, you'd be able to carry it all by yourself, and I could be working out the kinks in this latest impossible assignment."
"Perhaps you wish I were an albatross," says Pathalan dryly, coasting through the air in her wake. "To fetch and carry and be not a bit like you at all."
"No," laughs Isabella. "Owl's fine. Soft and see-in-the-dark."
"It's never dark," says Pathalan. "Never quite."
She approaches the city, and attracts attention; witches are known but hardly common. A teenager - not even old enough to look properly ageless and spectacular like Metis Imestha, her teacher, or even Ranata Ekamma, her mother - dressed in raggedy black silks that whip around her in the wind, soaring over the streets on cloud-pine, is more unusual still.
Isabella Amaraiah coasts to a stop outside the correct address - witches can benefit from Google Street View even when they do not use streets - and descends to ground level.
"Thank you," says Isabella through gritted teeth, because she did ask to keep updated on that kind of thing. She doesn't want to be blindsided by the kind of love witches can fall into. She suspects that her parents should never have married, but while Ranata may stray here and there on adventures with this clan sister or that friend from Asia or some teacher of crafts lately north from Brazil, she can never manage to stay away from Charlie too long, too aware of how he can die, too aware of how she'll regret any missed minute with him when he does and she's young still.
Isabella is glad to exist, but she does wish it could have come with less inconvenience to the both of them, Charlie alternately wishing his wife would come home and despairing of her flighty nature and Ranata alternately bored to tears with Forks and pining for her mortal beloved.
Picking up the book is simple. Isabella puts it in the black bag that she wears slung over her shoulders, sort of like a cross between a purse and a knapsack, and walks out the door again. Metis could have sprung for overnight shipping, but why would you do that when you have an apprentice?
Now it's time to find someplace that sells passable lunch and refuel for the flight home. Isabella looks around for restaurants.
Isabella shrugs. "It was already bought. It was held for me." And, because she doesn't see anywhere good to eat, she says, "Do you happen to know of a good restaurant? It doesn't have to be nearby if you can direct me there." She gestures at the pine. Her accent is a very witchy Pacific Northwest. Her father had half the raising of her before she could fly, after all, and she's not old enough to have drifted to the "generic witch" accent altogether.
(She doesn't mean that. She's pleased that she and Path are protected against mind-affecting spells, she really is. But it's not usually as relevant as her clumsiness is.)
"Well," she says, "what do you and your daemon call each other?"
"I think the fox was a female a minute ago," he whispers in Isabella's ear.
Isabella doesn't outwardly react to this.
But she does think of a name.
"Kas Petaal," she says. He probably doesn't know enough witch religion to know that she's named him after the only deity in the pantheon with a male aspect outside of her divine-daemon, although the entity is normally referred to as though fully female anyway because all the rituals are designed to rhyme with female pronouns. (It is perfectly acceptable to name people after goddesses. Amariah is a goddess, in fact.) "You can be Kas and the fox can be Petaal."
"I didn't think humans settled any later than witches," Isabella said. "I have a cousin whose daemon didn't settle till she was almost seventeen - he loved being a tiger, he resisted the pull to bird shapes as long as he could, I think that's why. Eighteen. Wow. And I've never heard of daemons changing sex at all."
"Guess we're just special," says Kas. And: "Check it out: lunch!"
He has found them a restaurant. It is small and extremely charming, with a hand-painted green sign that seems to imply it sells very happy snowmen.
(It's clearly not a secret. Petaal was changing like that in the middle of the street, half in clear view; Path's eyes aren't that unusual.)
The restaurant owner comes back to take their orders. Kas remembers and reproduces Isabella's, adds his own, and hands over his menu.
Apparently deciding that it's warm enough in here, Petaal takes his red fox shape, pushes Kas's hood back, and curls up in it with his nose and front paws resting on Kas's right shoulder.
Isabella's phone rings. It plays witchy music, wordless acapella vocals, until she answers it. "Yes, Metis?" she says. "Yes. Waiting for lunch. I'm hoping to fly straight back without stopping on the way. No. Of course. Not yet. Yes, if it's just that I can send Path. Shouldn't slow me down at all. Okay. I'll be back this evening."
Isabella hangs up the phone. "She needs a second original print of the receipt for the book," she tells her owl. "The clan library's going to want it for their insurance or something."
Path makes a sighing noise. "I'll be right back, then," he says, and he lets himself out of the restaurant with the next group to open the door and wings his way back to the bookstore.
Pathalan is back pretty quickly. He pecks at the window, and Isabella gets up to let him in. He stashes the extra receipt in her bag and goes back to sitting on her shoulder and nuzzles fluffy feathers on her cheek. Isabella murmurs the answer to his question in his ear, then drinks more soup; Path steals a bit of meat out of it.
Isabella grins back. "Witches trade in favors, services, that sort of thing, not in money, but Metis is pretty modern for someone who was born in the 1700s, and she'll trade for things like 'the use of a credit card in your name for a year'. If the Carmichaels' kid gets sick again I think they'll want a history of not complaining about the favor while it's in progress. We don't even use it that much."
"When a witch in my clan is born, someone - often her grandmother, sometimes another relative or a friend of the family - performs a ritual to give her a certain embedded blessing - an ability or a protection or something. We learn to do our own magic a little later than clans that don't do this, because the birth blessing sucks up some of our power. And the person doing the blessing can't pick exactly what it is, although they can pick which goddess to invoke and that steers it some."
"Mind-affecting spells act like I don't exist. They're not common, but they're nasty," says Isabella. "Courtesy of Evisa Iannakara. I think the relevant portfolio item was solitude. My great-grandmother was aiming for art. She wanted a painter, a runecaster. I can runecast but I need to make them big and they don't turn out very pretty."
"Oh, it's when the ritual involves writing symbols onto a surface, instead of being primarily oriented around verse or herbs or sacrificial power. It's kind of an artificial distinction. Plenty of heavier-duty magic involves all four and even little stuff can have two of those."
"There's a bunch of theories. I don't find any of them creditable except the idea that goddesses won't listen to anybody else. And that's only because I can't figure out how to ask Evisa Annakara and get a reply. I don't think it can just be genetics. If a witch's son has a kid with a non-witch woman all of whose male ancestors were also witches' sons, they will not have any witch children even if they have a dozen baby girls. Their kids won't even live to be 200 or be able to do tiny verse charms."
"Just unexpected." She finishes her soup. "I went to school with humans for ten years, I know strippers exist, it's just an odd concept. Witches don't even have a nudity taboo. In clan enclaves the silks only go on when convenient. It isn't as though we get cold."
"I don't personally know of any witches who choose to be prostitutes, but someone might have taken it up at some point," Isabella says. "I'm not sure how prevalent hiring them is but I suppose it's probably not literally nil; there are a lot of witches in the world. The concept is less bizarre, at least."
"Well, I mean, taking off one's clothes is a perfectly ordinary activity that most people do at least once a day. I wouldn't trade - pay - to watch someone eat cereal, or fetch the newspaper, or drive to the mall, and if I heard that there was a thriving industry around doing those things for an audience - just that, without it being part of a musical or a TV show or something - then I would be confused. It's like that."
"Fair enough. I could easily be missing something. So now it's like discovering that there's a form of performance art where people dance to music and eat cereal, and this is highly skilled work because otherwise they'd spill their milk, and lots of people feel motivated to watch cereal-eating dancers in particular instead of going to see Cats."
"We just wear this kind of thing," she says gesturing at the silks tied around her person and knotted to each other. "We're not big on owning stuff. There's a bolt of black silk in the house, so I won't be trapped in the house unable to go out without getting arrested if I accidentally set them on fire while I'm doing a ritual with flames. It'd take about five minutes to tear and tie another set. Maybe ten."
Isabella thinks. "If it is, it's not given a lot of emphasis. The witches who've been married talk about falling in love with men who were brave or talented or powerful. The witches who prefer to see women tend to just date each other and avoid the mess of falling for mortals. I've heard 'I knew I wanted him when I saw his beautiful eyes' but not 'I knew I wanted him when I saw his sharp outfit'."
"I know you're not a witch's daemon, but don't you ever come away from him?" he asks the fox.
"He stays put. She can't stand to, and she knows he'll be gone in the next fifty or sixty years so she has to keep coming back to make the most of their time. But she can't stand that little town he lives in. He gets to miss her or be unhappy that she's unhappy. It's worse when he takes time off work and tries to go somewhere with her. It could barely be more awkward if his daemon needed to live in freshwater and hers in salt. But he just has a wolverine, nothing too inconvenient. Purely a personality matter. If she weren't a witch I think she'd have left him."
"Oh," says Isabella, "every goddess has about fifty portfolio items and I haven't got them all memorized, but off the top of my head, witches address her about their sons or husbands, sacrificial magic, things to do with or going on during the new moon or autumn, ambiguous things in general, food, injury - but not healing, just the injury - and any object of obsession."