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I turned the stone over in my hands, exasperated. "But look, it's just a rock!" I held it up so the shaggy figure sat across from me could see. A deep voice rumbled out of it. "Exactly, look at it. A volcanic rock, unless I miss my guess, and you know about heat and fire, so what do you think it could tell you about that?" The fire was burning low, and River Shoulders seemed exasperated too. He was a sasquatch, 9 feet tall and heavily muscled, and not used to "the unnatural thickheadedness of wizards" as he called it. But he continued. "A river-rock by its smoothness, so it must know what it is to be battered by water. But you found it naked on the ground, so it must have seen the endless wind. You know rocks, and would you say that a rock doesn't know about earth?" At this he stood up, clearly wanting to give a better demonstration. "My father taught me, and he had talked to wizards on the other side of the ice who spoke like this, who spoke like you do about the way Mother Earth can be divided up, but for me you have to know all of this at once and understand and - " He was walking around the fire as he talked, and he cut himself off, blurring into the shape of a hawk that flapped, then soared once around the tent by the fire before blurring back into his vastness, returning to the cigar which he picked up and started puffing gently.
"I feel like I need someone else to teach me about shape-shifting then I can come back here and you can tell me about all the other cool stuff you can do." Here was deep in the forest on a reservation in Northern Wisconsin, near the dirt road where my car was parked, where me, Maggie, Mouse and River Shoulders had been for the first week of August as River Shoulders tried to teach me something about magic, and Maggie and Mouse enjoyed the summer holidays. They were asleep now in the tent behind me, where I would have been if I hadn't been applying my unnatural thickheadednes to the problem of shape-shifting in the River Shoulders style. Tonight he was having me focus on a rock, and while I'm no stranger to meditation, I much prefer my magic much less Patrick Rothfuss and more Ben Aaronovitch, aka in keeping with the scientific method. So far the method of experiment had got me through:
"Does your weight change?" - Yes, River Shoulders could perch on my shoulder as a hawk with only my mild discomfort from his claws attempting to pierce my duster.
"Where does the extra mass go?" - I mean wasn't it obvious that he was just turning into a hawk? Apparently that was enough for him.
"What happens to your brain?" - River Shoulders as a hawk could squawk the number of fingers I was holding up, and he clearly had his brains at the other end, what more could I want?
All of which brought us back to the fact that his three days explaining to me how to get in contact with the earth and my three days trying to pick apart the actual nuts and bolts of it had got us nowhere, all of which brought me here where I wasn't learning any other cool stuff. "No, no, no, you have it all wrong, this is what I'm saying, you've got it all backwards, if you did it that way you wouldn't have any idea what it means to understand the earth and so you wouldn't be able to do any of that!" he said, gesticulating wildly before handing me the cigar. At any point before the last week if a sasquatch had been anywhere near so vehement I would've been running away, or at the very least cowering in fear, but the last week had put me through a lot in the not-being-scared-of-River-Shoulders line of things, even if the actually-managing-to-learn-magic line of things had seen only failure. So I just took a contemplative puff of the cigar, then looked back to the box of cigars I'd brought, in the mouth of my tent. I'd thought 25 would be more than enough, but at the rate of one a night I was no longer so confident that we would outpace the box. I'd been planning on gifting the remainder to River Shoulders as thanks for putting up with me. It looked like instead I might have to thank him by knuckling down and learning as quickly as I could. We'd already had to restock the food, even with River feeding himself. I went back to focusing on my rock. They hadn't been cheap cigars.
That night I tossed and turned, unable to sleep well at all. The next morning I woke up slightly surly to the sound of twittering birds. I struggled to identify the birds I could hear and wondered when the dawn chorus would stop. Wasn't August a bit late in the year for it? A thought bubbled at the edges of my consciousness. Maybe something I'd been thinking about last night? I focused for a second, then gave it up for lost. I turned to look at Maggie, her dark hair swept across her face, still at an age where she looked simply angelic in her sleep. Mouse was curled up by the doorway of the tent, which we'd borrowed from the Carpenters and had been their overflow tent for their older children when there were too many to fit even in their massive main tent. It was just a little on the large side for the three of us, which as far as I was concerned was perfect. We'd also borrowed sleeping bags and mats and a camping stove and chairs, and a hundred other things that made camping slightly easier. Overall it was turning out to be a pretty cheap vacation, which I imagined was why the Carpenters had all the equipment - even with the up-front cost it was still a lot cheaper than flights and accomodation for their vast numbers of children.
I got up out of my sleeping bag, which was harder than it sounds with my almost seven foot frame, and pottered about getting ready to make coffee on the camping stove. I opened up the tent with the coffee-making accoutrements, stepping past the massive frame of River Shoulders by the ashes of last night's fire. I was a little nervous to be away from the castle, especially with Maggie, but between myself, River and Mouse, most nasties would be crazy to cross us, even if they could work out where we were, even if they came at night or when we were otherwise unprepared - Mouse's senses were great even without his supernatural abilities, so we should have plenty of warning, and I'd checked the nearby Nevernever, and it seemed as safe as the Nevernever ever is. Mouse slipped through the doorway of the tent, joining me on my way to a stream that River assured me was fed by clean, clear springs. As I filled up the coffee pot, Mouse found a tree to do his business against. We walked back to the tent, I set up the pot on the stove and soon it was bubbling away nicely. Despite his lack of interaction with his own son when he was young, River was fairly good with children. He was quiet and relaxed, so despite his threatening size, Maggie wasn't particularly intimidated by him. He'd been teaching her to recognise the birds, navigate by the sun and track animals on our daily walks through the forest. So far, she seemed to be doing pretty well, picking it up quickly and accurately. I wondered when she would be better at it all than I was. River snorted, then stretched, lazy as a cat in the sun, before slowly standing up. "Good morning hoss Dresden." he said.
"Good morning River, and please, call me hoss Harry," I replied. As the coffee boiled, Maggie got out of the tent and brought over a camping chair to sit by the stove.
"Hey dad," she said.
"Hello munchkin," I replied as I poured out a cup of coffee into a mug.
"What are we getting up to today?"
"Well I'm afraid I'm going to have to spend a few hours staring at a rock"
At this Maggie giggled, then said "Well I guess I've got some reading to be doing then." She and Mouse had been reading the Hobbit in the sun while I worked with River. "Actually, can we go swimming?" she asked.
"Of course Maggie," I replied.
"Would you mind if I joined you, Miss Maggie?" asked River, his voice rumbling from his chest.
"Of course not, Mister Shoulders" came Maggie's polite reply.
"Well then," I said, "I guess we'd better get to it."
We ate some breakfast - oatmeal for me and Maggie, some venison Maggie had helped track for River and Mouse, washed down with coffee and water from the stream. We got dressed, then made some sandwiches, and River butchered some meat for his and Mouse's lunch. Then we had a short walk through the forest with towels (including many for Mouse so he wouldn't have to air dry), swimming costumes, our lunches and of course my much-needed rock. Soon, we arrived at a moderately sized lake which was our preferred swimming spot. It was fairly deep, surrounded and overhang by trees, except for the Western edge where there were a few rocks being warmed by the sun, where we got set up. We stripped down to our swimming clothes and ventured in.
After splashing around a bit, we did a loop around the lake, looking for interesting trees or leaves and occasionally venturing onto shore to retrieve said leaves. Mouse found one that was all skeleton, the flesh of the leaf all decayed so that only a web of veins was left, and River noticed a collection of trees that from a certain angle looked like an old man bent over a walking stick. By the time we'd done a loop, Maggie and Mouse were fairly tired, so they got out, and Maggie toweled Mouse off while me and River continued to do laps of the lake - myself to quiet the power of the winter mantle and River mostly because he enjoyed the feeling of the water on his skin. River and I chatted as we did loops of breaststroke, exchanging stories - my own escapades often extremely violent and River's stories about nature and how it had changed and stayed the same over the last thousand or so years - how tribes had risen up and fallen, how humans coming from across the ocean had suddenly meant half the human population had died of disease, then these new humans had gradually encroached until all that was left of the past were a few wild places. Then River peeled off and I switched to doing lengths of butterfly, and suddenly I began to feel the exertion. Maggie and Mouse were building little boats, Mouse finding and retrieving leaves and sticks and Maggie turning them into contraptions with little non-functional sails that floated across the lake. Every now and again I would come across one of them and have to steer around or suddenly slow down, lest my wake flood them. River was off, both drying off and hunting and foraging mushrooms, nuts and berries so we would have enough food without constantly having to stock up at the store. Me and Maggie had been eating meat with them at dinner times, cooking it as well as the mushrooms on the fire. I'd been practicing the heat shield spell I'd seen Hannah Ascher use to great effect, using it to get hot things out of the fire, one of the more frivolous uses of magic I could imagine.
Soon I was nearing tiredness, and started swimming around, enchanting the boats so they would sail in circles for a while. At last I was exhausted, and came up onto the rocks to dry off. We'd brought a few books for our vacation, including some large print editions mostly for River, and Maggie and Mouse were reading happily as I toweled off. So I got out my rock. I was trying to turn into my cat, Mister, because apparently it was easier to turn into something you had a clearer picture of. I wondered how Listens-to-Wind, who had also been taught by River Shoulders, understood it, and whether he had had similar difficulties. Dismissing the thought, I focused on the rock, and tried to understand it. I weighed it in my hand, looked intently and carefully at it, seeing the curves, the imperfections, then focused on my idea of Mister - his fur's softness, his weight on my chest, his yelps and yowls and yips. I made the effort of mind I associate with magic, and imagined I could smell more keenly, but it was just the breeze washing the scent of the forest over me. Mouse chuffed quietly that Maggie could turn the page. I remembered back to my time as a ghost, when I'd figured out from scratch how to do magic with memories, and even further back to my time first learning to use magic consciously, when I had consistently failed for many repititions before it finally clicked. I wondered if this was like that. I remembered back to Tera West, who had first taught Billy Borden and the Alphas to transform with an incantation, and they'd had to strip first to do it. I wondered why River didn't have me using an incantation or undressing before trying to change. I guessed that when he'd learnt he probably hadn't worn clothes, though I wasn't sure.
So I set up a screen made out of some towels and a couple of sticks to shield me from Maggie's view, and stripped out of my trunks and towel. It was a bit chilly in the late morning, and although the sun made it slightly warmer, I felt goosebumps rise on my arms, though without the accompanying feeling of cold due to the winter mantle's effects. I sat down and crossed my legs, and once again went through the ordeal of focusing on my rock, this time imagining all of nature as encapsulated by my rock, the rivers and mountains and clouds and forests and everything that nature creates. I focused on my idea of Mister and chanted "Felis, felis, felis". Suddenly there was a crack as my rock hit the ground, my eyes felt sharper and my nose keener. I walked over to Maggie and Mouse, stalking around them, feeling the stretch in my paws and all-permeating wet-dog smell from Mouse. They looked up from their book. "Oh dad, wow! This is great! You're Mister now!" Mouse barked excitedly. Maggie reached out a hand to my nose, which I sniffed, then she stroked my fur. God, that felt great! It was no wonder cats wanted to be stroked all the goddamn time. It was such a vibrant experience my brain felt like it would come out of my ears, the smells and the different sights and the new sensations, like those from my whiskers. I mean it was like suddenly being able to hear! I walked up to Mouse - he was sniffing furiously at the air, as though there was something new on the breeze. "What is it, boy?" I tried to say, but it came out as "Mrrowl, mrrowl." I walked back behind the screen, focused ony myself, and chanted "Humano, humano, humano" under my breath. Suddenly I was back to myself. I laughed out loud, "Yes, yes, yes!" I shouted. I slipped my trunks on then ran out to Maggie and Mouse.
"Mouse thinks you smelt weird" said Maggie. Mouse happily circled me.
"He's happy you're back"
"So am I, little one, so am I"
We ate lunch, and during lunch River came back and joined in. I gleefully told him what I had done. "Why didn't you tell me how much easier it would be without clothes on? I've tried again since and that seems like the major difference"
"Ah, that's what I'd forgotten. I was wondering why it was taking so long. Though come to think of it, it did take Listens-to-Wind about a month to figure out."
"A month! We could've been here for a month!"
"Well it's not like you wizards have much to worry about - you have lots of time to spend."
"I mean, Maggie has to go back to school in a month. Anyway, what's next?"
"Next? Well you have to learn to transform with clothes on, surely? And more animals. And we'll spend some time with deer and things to see what you think it's like. And then I guess we'll see."
I opened a portal to the Nevernever. "So River, something less heavy than you, ok, and do it when I'm over on the other side" I stepped over. The Nevernever here was quite a bit like the real world - it was a forested area with tall trees and some foliage underfoot. "Okay, River, go!" I shouted. Suddenly there was a pile of green goo a few feet away. "Of course it doen't violate conservation of mass, of course!"