Free Chaos Rises by Melinda Brasher Page A

magic-wielder was
something. Not as good as beauty or wealth, but something. And Kreg
would finally notice her—Kreg who liked to sneak around doing his
clever mischief under the protection of spotty look-away
enchantments. Maybe she'd be brave enough, one day, to tell him
that his spells never worked on her. She never looked away, since
he was the most interesting thing in the whole village.
    By morning she'd convinced herself that every
squirrel or butterfly she'd ever seen had come in answer to her
summons. She tried to summon critters all day, as her mother made
her lie in bed and drink broth. Not so much as a fly came within
sight.
    When she felt better, she begged the healer
to train her.
    "Never been any good at summonings," she
replied. "I'd only teach you enough to get you in trouble."
Nevertheless she tried, over the months, to impart a bit of
magecraft, especially when it became clear that the hill tiger
hadn't been a coincidence. First it was a bat in the middle of the
day, squeaking and frantic. Then a baby hedgehog that wobbled after
her as if confused who its mother was. Hala tried to pinpoint when
it happened, or why, but it seemed to have no pattern. The healer
would sigh. "There's always a pattern. You just have to see it.
Find your essence. Work with it."
    By the time she turned fourteen, animals were
popping up everywhere. They'd wake to find that the neighbor's cow
had broken through their fence again and was eating the vegetables.
She got used to walking with cats twined around her legs, and
acquired a history of bee stings so long not even the beekeeper
could rival her. But it was never much more than an accident.
    "Stop!" her mother would yell in frustration
as she shooed away a hungry weasel or brought her broom down hard
on a nest of hoarder spiders that hadn't been there before.
    "I'm not doing anything," Hala would protest,
even if the house had just filled mysteriously with gnats or rats
or poison frogs. The problem was, if Hala actually wanted a hungry
weasel or poison frog, nothing ever showed up.
    She didn't even like animals all that much.
They were dirty, and smelly, and she didn't know how to relate to
them once she'd summoned them. Nevertheless, becoming a shepherdess
seemed the logical thing to do, since the creatures followed her
about even when she wasn't trying to summon them. The arrangement
worked pretty well, except when she lost one. She didn't dare face
the villagers until she found it. Once it took her six days,
despite trying her hardest to summon it.
    At least her gift wasn't a total loss. Three
days after her sixteenth birthday, she'd managed to accidentally
summon a magnificent stag, right in front of half the village, and
even if she never could help find their lost dogs, they still
talked about the huge buck. Best of all, Kreg had started talking
to her. He loved to hear the story of the hill tiger and loved even
better to tell his version of the encounter with the fifteen-point
stag.
    "So proud and strong, he was," Kreg often
said. And once, when they were alone in the woods at dusk, looking
for another, he sighed. "If I were an animal, I'd be a stag."
    Hala thought a raccoon was more his style,
him with the pranks and the tricks and the sneaking around.
Sometimes he even took her on his escapades, creeping into a
friend's house one night and hiding everyone's socks, painting a
silly face on stern old Farmer Torik's milk cow, hiding beetles in
the local bully's bed. They did it all under Kreg's look-away
enchantments that only worked if no one was watching out for them.
And after a while, people were always watching out for Kreg.
    He never teased her for her inability to
manage her magic, like some of the other villagers did, and soon
she found they could laugh together about her inadvertent visitors.
When she accidentally summoned a traveler's horse one afternoon,
summoned it so insistently that it threw its rider and broke down
the door of Hala's house, Kreg was the one