Free Gift of the Unmage by Alma Alexander

sunset, and he did so without appearing to pay attention to what he was doing at all. His fingers seemed to move independently of his will, reaching for a touch of orange to blend with the thread of bright gold he already held ready, trailing ribbons of improbable scarlet and keeping in reserve the hues of the sky darkening into purples and deep blues on the far horizon. WhenThea tried to reproduce what she had seen him do, she grasped at nothing and watched empty air flow through her fingers. And when he clicked his thumb against his middle finger in a loud snap to summon the little flame with which he often lit their path if they stayed out after sunset, perching it atop his staff, where it shimmered brightly without burning the wood, it seemed a simple matter. But when Thea duplicated that snap, exactly and precisely and sometimes even more sharply than Cheveyo could, she summoned precisely nothing.
    As the days wore on, it was beginning to seem depressingly familiar. There were tasks others did without thinking that Thea could not perform when she poured every ounce of her energy into them.
    She had crept out of Cheveyo’s house one evening and climbed to the top of the mesa, clambering behind rocks that hid the pueblo from sight, in time to watch the splendor of the sunset. She remembered Cheveyo’s sunset, the one she had seen him weave into his pattern, and tried to reach for the light and color, to will it to come to her hand. Every fiber in her strained to do it, every last bit of passion and yearning shecould muster was thrown into the task. But the sun sank inexorably behind the horizon, taking its colors with it, and Thea finally sighed, hanging her head, having failed to achieve her objective yet again.
    Cheveyo’s voice, when it came from behind her, startled her into nearly falling off the boulder she had been perched on.
    “You need to be one with the sun,” he remarked almost conversationally. “You’re stalking the light instead.”
    Thea turned to face him, her eyes sparkling with frustration, impatience, defiance. “How long have you been standing there?”
    “Long enough,” he said, typically cryptic, no answer at all. He sighed, leaning a little more heavily against the staff from which he was rarely parted, and lifted his eyes to the sky where, in darkening amethyst, hung the pale golden orb of the almost full moon. “It might have been better if they had sent you here after Crow Moon waned. This is the moon of difficulties and obstacles and hard roads. It would have been better if you had come in Grass Moon instead, in the moon of calm and of belonging….”
    Thea had followed his glance, and now, after scrutinizing the moon in question, turned her own eyes back to his face.
    “I know I ask too many questions,” she said, “but tell me about the moons.”
    “Where you come from, they do not mean anything?” Cheveyo said, giving her a question-for-a-question answer, the kind she hated the most.
    “Depends on who you talk to,” Thea said, parrying, crossing her arms across her narrow chest and lifting her chin.
    “Cay’ta, Canyan’ta, Tuani’ta, Mura’ta, Sui’ta, Taqu’ta, Chuqu’ta, Sunyi’ta, Senic’ta, Loviqu’ta, Matay’ta, Raqu’ta,” Cheveyo said, almost chanting, speaking a language Thea did not understand. She stared at him, strangely taken by the music of his words, but completely mystified.
    Cheveyo, seeing her expression, smiled. “Here,” he said, “every full moon has a name, and the moon hangs in the sky in the name of something—it may be strength, it may be sorrow. You came here when Canyan’ta was in the sky, the Whispering Wind Moon—the moon that heightens sensitivity, opens eyes. Perhaps that is why you stood on the Barefoot Road so early,once, while that moon was still in the sky.”
    Thea’s heart sank a little. “So if the wrong moon is in the sky, I’ll never do it again?”
    “There are moons when it is good to start on journeys, and