Edie moved away from Derwen and Darcy to find an empty stretch of grass. Actually, it was about half grass, half clover, she saw as she sat down cross-legged with her bag behind her. She automatically scanned it for four-leaf clovers and found one. She reached out to touch it, wondering whether they affected her in any way. But they clearly didn't—at least not to touch, and not if someone looked at her using one. They would have figured out that she was part faerie months earlier if four-leaf clovers did anything to her.
But she was supposed to be working on water magic. She closed her eyes and relaxed in her seat. Between fire, air, and earth practice, she'd gotten pretty good at this unusual sensation of settling into her magic, and she did it now, cupping her hands in front of her.
Immediately, water bubbled up in her hands, overflowing them before she could catch herself and stop it. She dumped the rest of the water onto the ground and watched it slowly soak into the earth, grinning to herself. So she was good at this.
Actually, it felt very familiar. Maybe it was just that she'd practiced so much with the other elements that she knew exactly what she was doing this time, but she really felt like she'd done this before.
Could she have done it with Leila? Maybe Leila had taught her to do water magic, knowing about her heritage. But she couldn't bring up a memory of that, and she was sure that all the memories of their time together that Leila had hidden had now returned. And if Edie hadn't used water magic to water the trees in the orchard or anything like that, then she couldn't think of any reason Leila would have taught her water magic.
She concentrated on controlling it, creating just enough water to fill her cupped palms and not overflow, while she tried to remember. She still couldn't place the familiarity, but after a few tries, she could cut the water off at exactly the point that she wanted.
She lowered her hands to her cupped palms and drank the water she'd created. It tasted perfectly neutral. She must have created pure H2O.
She shook the water off her hands, then decided to see if she could create a tiny stream. She looked around until she found the highest spot that she could reach from her sitting position—the earth rose up a little bit to her right, so she felt the ground until she could pick the slope that did not point directly toward anyone.
She put her hand flat against the grass and set the water magic going. It bubbled up around her fingers at first, then started trickling down the tiny hill. It wasn't moving very fast, but most of it seemed to be absorbed into the earth.
A shadow fell over her. "Very good, Edie," Ginny said. "Looks like you're getting creative with it."
Edie looked up at her and smiled. "Water is easy for me," she said. "Much easier than any of the others. I could probably just create all my own water to drink." That seemed familiar, too, but she still couldn't place it.
"Be careful if you do try that," Ginny warned. "Magic will tire you out, and you may find that you're needing more water faster than you can create it."
So that was why they couldn't just create water and have it for free forever. Edie nodded. "I will."
"Now, why don't you try vanishing the water instead of just letting it flow? That should be more of a challenge for you."
Edie lifted her hand, stopping the water flow as she did, so that the little stream trickled a few feet downhill and vanished before it could get anyone wet. "Sounds good."
She filled her palms with water again as Ginny walked on to the next student. Stopping it from overflowing was easy now, but she couldn't quite figure out how to make it vanish. She could just dump it out, but she wouldn't learn anything that way.
She'd made the candle flame go out without any conscious intent. Surely she could do something like that with water. She tried removing her magic from it, then removing herself from her magic. Nothing changed.
What was the opposite of water? She could try doing fire magic to evaporate it, but that didn't seem quite right. She could concentrate on drying it. Just imagine a desert, make her magic really dry...
She tried everything she could think of, but it didn't work. Maybe she was just too strong on the water side of the equation to get rid of it. She told Ginny so at the end of class, when they were dismissed, but Ginny didn't seem surprised or worried. She just said that it might be something to keep working on.