You know, sooner or later, there had to be bad weather on Yule morning.
I'd thought I'd experienced bad weather on Yule before. There was one year when the dawn was completely hidden by cloud, and the new day loomed rather than broke, and there were two years it rained. But on one of those nights the rain turned to snow and then stopped just before we went out, so we didn't actually get rained on, and when the sun came up, the world was white. The other time, we did get drizzled upon, but just as the sun came up--brilliantly, through a break in the cloud--the rain turned rather dramatically to snow.
In point of fact, the "bad" weather those years only served to make the dawn more dramatic and lovely.
This year, though?
This year the weather well and truly sucked.
It began with rain around midnight, first intermittent, then harder and harder, but I wasn't worried, because I unthinkingly assumed the storm would break before dawn. It didn't. Instead, it intensified, the wind rising till we could poke our heads out of the Meditation Hall door and hear broken branches falling in the Formal Garden and along the evergreen row behind the building.
Inside, the party continued. Every year, we hold an all-night party, and students who have otherwise left campus for the season, graduates, allies, and even some family (like the Sprouts) all come in and fill the Mansion with music and merriment. The Sprouts and the masters don't usually join us until the morning, they have their own party on the fourth floor, but some of the masters come down for an hour or so. This year, the party was no different. One advantage of having Kit here is that a lot of people play instruments or sing--she loves to teach music and does it well--so our parties tend to involve giant jam sessions. And the room is lovely and filled with food and drink and wonderful people and it feels like the center of the world.
But then around four in the morning, Greg came down to find Kit and whispered urgently in her ear. She whispered back, and then they both went upstairs. A few minutes later, Allen came down and rather casually spoke to several of the senior novices. Then, one by one, they all slipped upstairs. Most of us didn't notice. I did. And June noticed me noticing.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"I don't know that anything's the matter," I said. "But Allen just magicked up the students who were going to organize the walk up the mountain, and I don't know why."
"You don't?"
"Should I?"
"Do you want to walk up the mountain in this?" she asked.
Uh, no, I didn't. She had a point. My embarrassment must have showed on my face, because she laughed at me.
"Did you think a weather-witch was going to fix conditions for us?"
And the thing is, I'm sure there are weather-witches on campus, and I'm not certain their magic isn't effective. But I can imagine Charlie responding to such a proposal, and I don't think he'd like it. He'd say that the real magic occurs when we adjust ourselves to the world, not the other way around.
In the end, we didn't go up the mountain. It was too dangerous. Instead, we waited until twilight was well underway, and then walked out to the Edge of the World and stood there for a few minutes in the blowing 35-degree rain, turning our backs to the wind, our rain ponchos blowing up and flapping, letting rain in to soak our cloaks, until someone shouted "SUN'S UP! WELCOME YULE!" into the wind.
I imagine they relied on a clock to find the right moment. Dawn was not discernible at all.
We all turned and trudged back inside, and found there the entire master's group waiting for us in the Great Hall, all as sopping wet as we were. And they launched into "Here Comes the Sun," their traditional Yule morning carol, which definitely sounded ironic under the circumstances. We all laughed and clapped, and then Joy ordered us all upstairs and into warm showers, cautioning us not to come down until we were dry and comfortable.
When we came back down, there were the Sprouts and various other guests, and a hot breakfast with plenty of hot chocolate, and gift bags for everybody and presents to open, and we spent the rest of the day playing with our presents like children.
All the while, the temperature outside was dropping and, almost unnoticed, and ice storm was busy glazing the ground and the roads and the trees, and everything else. That was alright with me at the time, as I was at the center of the world, but our guests were trapped with us, and I'm sure many families traveling for Christmas had their plans interrupted.
Towards the late afternoon, the storm finally blew off and the sky cleared. Greg, invigorated by his mid-holiday nap (this year under the Yule tree, wrapped up in a blanket like a present) drew my attention to the sunset--the trees to the west of the back driveway were glowing with magic, unconsuming fire, the light of the setting sun shining in the rime ice on every twig in their high, massed crowns.
"That's gorgeous," I said, completely redundantly, but sometimes one has to.
"I've thought the weather gorgeous all day," he said, in his dry, somewhat formal voice. "The magic that gives us gorgeous weather consists in knowing the weather to be gorgeous."
He and Charlie are suite-mates, I recalled.
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