Jane and Arthur Carey
October 12, 2012 8:29 PM
Of Waterfalls and Magical Theory by Jane and Arthur Carey
A waterfall was just beginning to take shape on the canvas in front of Jane, an image not unlike that of the waterfall-shaped fountain further still in front of her, when she heard the door of the art room open and footsteps on the floor behind her. She smiled at her painting without turning around. Precisely on time, as usual, unless a very strange coincidence was taking place. She raised her brush and carefully placed a white dot on the painting. “Hello,” she said. “I brought those books you wanted to see.”“Thank you,” Arthur said, as painfully, self-consciously formal as ever. He had, though, learned over the past year not to rush so much, and he came over to look at what she was painting. “Painting from a model?” he asked, glancing between the painting and the fountain.
“Nearly,” said Jane, tilting her head to examine her work. It was, of course, not good enough. It never was. But she thought that with enough work, after she did the same painting enough times, over and over again, she could eventually get to a version of it that she could be happy with displaying. “I’m going to fill in natural surroundings.”
Arthur frowned, looking between the two again. “Natural waterfalls don’t – “ he seemed to struggle for a moment to find the right word. “Flow so smoothly,” he finished at last, gesturing the fountain to emphasize his point. The water just barely disturbed the surface of the pool beneath it as it fell into it. There was barely even any noise; she had to listen closely to hear anything well enough to be sure of what it was even when the room was nearly silent. “Not over the rocks or into the water below them.”
Jane smiled. “Exactly,” she said. He shook his head and sat down on the next stool, giving her a slightly too-intense look. Jane didn’t comment on it; she was getting used to it. Arthur was a bit intense in general, she thought, and she would rather he didn’t try to hide it than that he did. She liked to know what she was dealing with, and thought she didn’t find it difficult to tell when he was trying to hide something, figuring out what that was could be more of a challenge. Sometimes.
“What are you planning to do with all these paintings, anyway?” he asked. “Every time we meet in here, you’re painting when I get here, or making a pot or - something of that sort.”
“I have to decorate my house somehow,” Jane said cheerfully, cleaning the brush she had been using. She didn’t know if the room would automatically do things like that or not, but it just seemed polite to her. “Jethro and I aren’t the children of heirs, you know.” She was the sister of one, in all the ways that mattered, but Edmond’s biological father had left them all but destitute; she’d heard Morgaine baldly admit to Father that she’d had to stoop to selling heirlooms and spells just to keep the larger portion of the family – not to mention the rest of pureblood society – from realizing just how bad things had been at one point. “Let’s look at these books,” she said, going over to her bag and sitting down cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall, to take out the books in question, a pair of dark, somber-looking tomes usually reserved for students in her Advanced Defense Against the Dark Arts and Potions classes.
“Thank you,” Arthur said, sitting down beside her and taking one with an expression that could only be called greedy, for the moment it existed. He flipped through some damp-spotted pages, but then seemed to make himself, through an effort of will, remember his manners. “Have you had a pleasant week?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Jane said. “We’ve been looking at Legilimency and Occlumency in Defense.”
Arthur looked at her with real interest. “You don’t say,” he said.
“We can look at that later,” she said. “For now….” She looked at the book he was holding, and he did, too. “Curses.”
“Such a pleasant topic,” Arthur drawled. His eyes were still intense, but his demeanor had relaxed; he was much more agreeable in general once the books came out and they were discussing things that, put into practice, could either kill them or worse, get them throw into prison. She almost found that disturbing, at times, but more because she felt something similar herself than because she was worried about what he might do. “I’m assuming that we’re not going to try any of these out?”
“It seems best not to,” Jane said mildly. “Unless there’s someone whose family you want to curse for all eternity?”
“No,” Arthur said, smiling slightly at the joke. “Do you?”
“Not at the moment,” she said, but then grew serious, seeing an opportunity to discuss something interesting sooner than planned. "Probably not ever, if I'm right about the cost. I think there would have to be one, for that kind of magic. Something for something else.” She toyed with the paintbrush still between her fingers, the bristles damp where she’d cleaned them. “Everything I’ve read – so far – only hints at it, but when you put enough bits and pieces together….” Jane shrugged. “Well, we don’t ordinarily use magic that dramatic for a reason.”
“Of course,” Arthur said, looking at her half-curiously, half-warily. He did not, it seemed, know what to make of her thinking so much of that, even though that was, in theory, what they were doing here altogether – thinking about things, thinking through things, arguing, consulting original texts, consulting anything they could get their hands on, finding answers. It was an amusing enough thing to do. “But what do you think of what we do normally perform?”
“What the textbooks say, I suppose,” Jane said. “It’s purpose that determines most things. What we do here can be good, neutral, or Dark, but it’s much more finite than the long magics,” She smiled twistedly. “Normally, they can only even kill you once,” she said.
“I’ve read that Dark magic is determined by the will to domination,” Arthur remarked.
“That’s one theory.”
“But all magic is inherently about domination,” Arthur said. “Don’t you think?” Jane looked at him, surprised; normally, she could predict very well what Arthur said, she saw him more as a sounding board for theories than as someone who proposed them, at least until he developed his thinking a little further. She wasn’t displeased, though. He continued. “If I put you under the Imperius Curse or I Transfigure that paintbrush into a snake, either way, I’ve changed the order of things without consulting it, haven’t I?”
Jane tiled her head. “Are you taking a position where all magic is inherently equal, then?” she asked.
“No,” Arthur said, then hesitated. “I don’t know. Under your theory, any magic could be used without being Dark magic. That hardly seems….”
“No,” Jane agreed, bowing her head so her hair fell forward to conceal her face. She didn’t know what her expression was. “No, it doesn’t.” She twirled the paintbrush between her fingers again. “But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily untrue,” she made herself continue. “I think your presentation has flaws, but it could be…in the right direction, I don’t know.” She looked up. “You mentioned the Imperius,” she said. “I suppose the Intermediate class has gone over that again?” Arthur nodded. “I’ve read that you can’t use the Unforgivables unless you enjoy them,” she said. “Imperius especially…I think you could really want to use the other two from hatred as well as pure sadism." She pictured her father, half-dead on a floor a thousand miles away, and then pictured the person responsible, and tried to imagine it. "If loving one thing made you hate another enough….”
"I think I agree with you," Arthur said coolly, looking fixedly at a point to the left. For a moment, she entertained the thought that she wasn't the only one with a past - but no. Nothing else about him made her think that, which meant that he probably did not. "I can imagine it."
"Of course, it wouldn't help," she said. "Revenge. It wouldn't help whoever it was you loved."
"The - whoever - would know I cared enough to do something about it," he replied. "Even though doing so might be to my detriment."
She looked closely at him and wondered again, in spite of his vocabulary, if it was right, what they were doing – her, handing advanced knowledge to a fifth year, last year a fourth year, basically just because he’d asked, and both of them wanting to push past theory and into practice on a number of things outside the usual curriculum anyway. She knew that if it came to that, she’d be in more trouble than he would, since he was merely curious and too young to know better, where she was, legally, an adult. “Well, I'll make a note never to do any damage to your family, then," she said.
Arthur nodded solemnly. "I think we're both better off as friends," he said diplomatically.
"Yes," Jane said. "I'm going to paint a little longer while you read," she said, deciding, again, that it was better not to ask again why he had proposed their search for - to use his turn of phrase - important but forbidden knowledge in the first place. Part of it, no doubt, was just the drama of it - she detected in him a love of theater - and the sense of superiority to his classmates; maybe that was even all of it. South Carolina was not known for going any further, though they understood as well as anyone that it was better to know than not to know.
"Of course," he said, looking relieved - he was always too eager to get straight to the topic of the moment, she thought - and, without further ado, began to do so even before she got back to her painting.
At a distance, she noticed, before she sat down, the waterfall was looking much more like a waterfall than she'd thought it did when she was sitting before it. It wasn't, though, exactly how she had planned for it to look; she paused for a long moment, deciding whether or not to keep going or to start over from scratch.
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Jane and Arthur Carey
Of Waterfalls and Magical Theory
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Jane and Arthur Carey
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