Free Among Others by Jo Walton Page B

take the letters, though of course I can’t leave them either.
    I’m not at all sure about the end of The Magus . It’s even more ambiguous than Triton . Who would write the last two lines in Latin, which almost nobody can read? It’s a library book, but I have lightly pencilled in the translation over the page:
    Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover, love.
    So Alison will love him, I suppose, for whatever that’s worth. It wasn’t enough before. He only really wanted her when he thought she was dead.
    In the last part of the book, back in London, when Nicholas wants back into the mystery, whatever it is, is just how I don’t want to be. I should never have tried to talk to that fairy. Let someone else do something about Dutch elm disease. It isn’t my problem. I have finished with saving the world, and I never expected it to be the slightest bit grateful anyway. I’ve got this stupid boring one-note pain droning on at me, and I understand Nicholas only too well there, because who wouldn’t want that? But also, I don’t want to be pathetic like him.
    T HURSDAY 25 TH O CTOBER 1979
    It wasn’t raining, for the first time in ages, and my leg was feeling a bit better, so I went out in the half hour after prep. I went down to the edge of the playing field by the ditch, where I saw the fairy before, and made a bonfire out of all the letters. It was almost dark, and it burned up very brightly at once, with only one match. I suppose it might have been the photograph paper, because she’d burned part before so it longed for fire. “Oft evil will doth evil mar,” as Gandalf put it. Oft, not always. You can’t rely on it, but it does seem to happen quite often.
    I felt much better once they were on fire. A few fairies came out and danced around the flames, the way they always do. We used to call them salamanders, and igneids. They’re an amazing colour, where blue flicks over and becomes orange. Most of them were acting as if they couldn’t see me, or I couldn’t see them, but one of them was looking at me, kind of sideways. She turned the yellow of the spots on the elm bark when she saw me looking, so I knew she knew what I’d asked before. “What can I do?” I asked, pathetic, despite what I said yesterday about Nicholas.
    They all vanished when I spoke, but they came back after a moment. They’re not quite like our home fairies. Maybe it comes of not having ruins to live in. Fairies always seem to prefer places the wild has crept back into. We did Enclosure in history recently. The whole country used to have shared wild common places—like Common Ake, I suppose, where the peasants could graze their animals and gather wood and pick blackberries. They didn’t belong to anyone in particular, but to everyone. I bet they were full of fairies. Then the landlords got the people to agree to enclose them and make them into proper tidy farms, and they didn’t realise how squeezed they’d be without the commons until the commons were gone. The countryside is supposed to have those veins of wild running through it, and without them it suffers. This countryside is deader than cities in some ways. The ditch and the trees are only there because this is a school, and the trees by the bookshop are the edge of an estate.
    The fairies didn’t speak to me, not even a few words like the one on the tree. But the yellow one kept looking at me, cautiously, so I knew she had understood. Or rather I knew she had understood something . I can’t be sure what. Fairies are like that. Even the ones we knew well, the ones we’d given names and who talked to us all the time, could be odd like that sometimes.
    Then they all vanished again, and the papers were going to ash—they burned fast, being paper—and Ruth Campbell caught me and gave me ten order marks for starting a fire. Ten! It takes three house marks to cancel out one order mark, which is unfair to begin with if you ask me. But over this whole term so far,