Free Sunshine by Robin McKinley Page B

doing it without her hands on mine, and she showed me how to do certain other things too, some of which I could do easily, some of which I couldn’t do at all.
    One afternoon she pulled a ring off her finger, and gave it to me. “I’m tired of that red stone,” she said. “Give me a green stone.”
    There were, of course, rules to what I had at first thought was a game. The more dense the material, the harder to shift, so stone or gem is more difficult than flower or feather. Anything that has been altered by human interference is harder than anything that hasn’t been, so a polished, faceted stone is more difficult than a rough piece of ore. Worked metal is the worst. It is both heavy and dense and the least decisively itself. Something that is handled and used is harder than something that isn’t, so a tool would be harder to shift than a plaque that hung on the wall, and a stone worn in a ring is going to be harder than a decorative bit of rock that stood on a shelf. It is easier to change a thing into something like itself: a feather into another feather, a flower into another flower. A flower into a leaf is easier than a flower into a feather. But worked metal is always hard. Even a safety pin into several straight pins is difficult. Even a 1968 penny into a 1986 penny is difficult.
    She hadn’t told me any of the details, that first day, when I turned a flower into a bit of fabric. It showed how good she was, that she could create not just human-made fabric, but smooth yellow fabric with blue dots, instantly, with no fuss, because that’s what I was trying to do, and she wanted me to have a taste of what she was going to teach me, without fluster or explanation. But that had been nearly a year ago, and I knew more now.
    The ring was warm from her finger. I closed my hands and concentrated. I didn’t have to do anything to the setting, to the worked metal. Changing the stone was going to be big enough. I had only ever tackled lake pebbles before, and they were pretty onerous. I’d never tried a faceted stone. And this was a ring she wore all the time, and she was a practicing magic handler. Objects that have a lot of contact with magic, however peripherally, tend to get a bit steeped . But I should still be able to do it, I thought.
    But I couldn’t. I knew before I opened my hands that I hadn’t done it. I tried three times, and all I got was a heavy ache in my neck and shoulders from trying too hard. I felt like crying. It was the first time I had failed to change something: transmuting was the thing I was best at. And she wouldn’t have asked me to do something I shouldn’t have been able to do.
    We were sitting on the porch again, in the shade of the trees. “Let us try once more,” she said. “But not here. Come.” We stood up—I still had the ring in one hand—and went down the steps to the ground, and then down to the shore, and into the sunlight. It was another hot, bright day, and the sky was as blue as a sapphire.
    I wasn’t ready for what happened. When I closed my hands around the ring again and put all my frustration into this final attempt, there was a blast of something—I shuddered as it shot through me—and for the merest moment my hands felt so hot it was as if they would burst into flame. Then it was all over and my hands fell apart because I was shaking so badly. My gran put her arm around me. I held up my unsteady hand and we both looked.
    Her ring had a green stone, all right, and the setting, which had been thin plain gold, had erupted into a thick wild mess of curlicues, with several more tiny green stones nested in their centers. I thought it was hideous, and I could feel my eyes filling with tears—I was, after all, only nine years old—because this time I had done so much worse than nothing.
    But she laughed in delight. “It’s lovely! Oh my, it’s so— drastic , isn’t