4.02: Critical Updates

“Out at Duniyasar, when your spell warned Max about breaking the world, it gave us all some advice. It told me that if I was stuck, I should rely on what had gotten me out of the Pit twice before.”

Kylie did some quick math in her head. “You hadn’t started pit comps then, so…?”

“So it probably meant my Initiation and the Labyrinth of Dreams thing, yeah.”

“And what got you out?”

“My sense of direction. In the Initiation, I was in a forest and kept getting turned around, and it was a matter of orienting myself. In the Labyrinth, well, you were there. I paced out Max’s runes and kept us oriented toward the middle. So I guess I’m gonna get lost in another literal maze or something? Definitely looking forward to that, sounds great.” I brushed my fingertips over my scars again. “It… it also told me that I needed to pay attention to my scars.”

“For someone like you, that’s pretty vague advice. Given how many scars I imagine you have.”

“Yeah, but there’s only two that are weird and suspicious. Malas says there’s something on my chest that… well, I have to get around to talking to my parents about that, not much I can do about it here. And here, on my arm.”

“Ah. Your Tooth Scars.”

‘That’s the thing! It… okay, this is dumb and minor, but… these scars don’t make sense.” I explained the stretch marks indicating I’d used healing potion, went over the timeline again, and used the wall to demonstrate how I couldn’t have cut my arm open in the tooth castle like I’d assumed. “So, um. Do you remember how I got this wound?”

Kylie shook her head. “Sorry. I don’t actually remember all that much from that whole thing. I was mostly focusing on channelling my spell, or on resting up and trying to get my head together to channel my spell again. But it’s probab – ”

“I know it’s probably nothing. But everything I think that about turns out to be something, so.” I shrugged.

To be honest, I hoped it was something. I hoped that the dumb scar on my arm was what Kylie’s spell and the spellthing in my dreams kept teasing me about. Because otherwise, I was supposed to be paying attention to whatever Malas had found on my chest, and that meant having an incredibly awkward conversation with my parents that I definitely wasn’t ready to have. I still didn’t know how to feel about… all that. Or even if they had cut me, but who else would have? They had to have known, at least. I didn’t remember it, which meant I was too young, which meant that I was young enough for them to very definitely be aware of any injuries I was getting, especially ones that were neat and tended enough to heal invisibly. I just wanted to go back to… not knowing about that. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Maybe the weird scars on my arm held the key to everything, somehow.

Hey, I could dream.

“So you think Fionnrath’s Destiny is on some deep-cover mission to start a war with Refujeyo.”

“Well… probably not? I mean, it doesn’t make much sense when you say it like that, but it’s probably here for something, right?”

“Is that why you told the Magistae I had it?”

Oh. I had done that, hadn’t I? I’d explained everything that happened, because I knew that Magista would do what she could to protect Max. I hadn’t actually told them what Kylie’s spell was, but I’d been so distracted by needing to tell Magista everything about Max’s situation that it hadn’t even occurred to me how easy it would be to figure out.

“Ah. Sorry. I… I panicked, a bit. I was trying to protect Max and I didn’t think. Sorry.”

“It’s fi… well, it’s not fine, but they’re going to find out at some point anyway, I guess. So.” She shrugged.

“It was a shitty thing to do, though. I shouldn’t have said anything without talking to you about it, first.”

She shrugged again.

An alarm beeped on my tablet. I checked my messages and scowled. “Right, I promised I’d meet up with Fiore today.”

“I have no sympathy. You’re the one who jumped ship.”

“I didn’t jump ship. Putting this all on Alania just makes all of us, including her, look incredibly suspicious, and she has got an actual job beyond stopping us from getting killed or arrested. I just got a new surveyanto, I didn’t move out of the country. It was a tactical decision. It’s not a big deal.”

“You don’t even like the Fiore. You think he’s annoying and obnoxious.”

“If I couldn’t work with people who were annoying and obnoxious, I wouldn’t be able to work with myself, so.”

“You not being able to work with yourself would explain absolutely everything about you, actually.”

I rolled my eyes and headed off to see my surveyanto.

“Kayden!” Fiore greeted me congenially as I strode into his office and slumped into a seat. Socks immediately jumped into my lap, purring. “How have you been?”

“Just fine,” I said, scratching Socks’ ears on demand, as was her right. “How about you? Enjoying the exciting world of teaching?”

“Well, you know how students are.” He busied himself with preparing tea. “You certainly seem happier than our last meeting.”

I was in a more normal frame of mind than our last meeting, at least. I took a moment to consider my response. The point of getting Fiore involved in any of this was to have another adult in our corner, one who wasn’t one of Alania Miratova’s friends, so it was possible to actually do things without looking like being part of some big conspiracy. The trade-off, in this case, was that Fiore thought there was a big conspiracy, and probably wanted to figure out what it was and how to pull it apart. I was perfectly fine with that. Anything that kept him invested in helping me, anything that I could use to pull favours out of him to help my friends when necessary, was fine, but it put me in a tricky position.

I didn’t want to lie to Fiore. I didn’t want to manipulate him, at least I didn’t want to manipulate him on a level greater than he was manipulating me. That could get very messy and awkward when the lies were eventually found out. So I had to give him enough information that was useful, or at least that looked to him like it was useful, to keep him interested in helping me, but obliquely and honestly enough that when this all fell apart it would look like I hadn’t been deliberately stringing him along. Fiore feeling like he’d overestimated my importance in the long run and dropping me was fine. Fiore feeling like I’d cheated him absolutely wasn’t. I was happy playing a pawn to get what I wanted but I absolutely didn’t want to risk becoming anyone’s political opponent.

He’d obviously called me in to probe for information, so. Some suspicion-confirming ego-stroking, and a taste of information that’d become public knowledge too soon for him to find useful, but that would confirm that I could be useful, especially if I didn’t seem to know it wasn’t useful. That would work.

“You know Kylie’s spell?”

“Yes?”

“You were right about what it was. Lydia Nic Fionn came here to teach her to handle Fionnrath’s Destiny.” I paused, giving him a half-second to feel quietly smug. “Lydia’s dead.”

There was a clatter, as Fiore dropped a teaspoon into a freshly prepared cup and splashed tea everywhere. His back was to me while he prepared the tea, but I could tell he was trying to look unshocked as he mopped up the spill and said, “That’s unfortunate.”

“Mm.”

He picked up the cup to clean underneath it. “How did she – ?”

“She tried to kill Kylie.”

He dropped the cup this time. Giving up on hiding his surprise, he turned and stared at me. “Why?”

I shrugged. “Politics. Who cares? But I hope for their sakes that they don’t send anyone else. Kylie’s my mage. I’m not letting her get hurt.”

Fiore, to his credit, made an effort to hide the automatic flicking of his eyes to my arm, where my familiarity mark sat under my sleeve. Aside from a somewhat odd frame of mind while Kylie was actively dying (which… a lot was going on right then, emotionally and physiologically), I hadn’t noticed any psychological effects of the familiarity bond beyond the kind of preoccupation you’d expect when you constantly had to manage someone else’s magic in your body. But other people didn’t know that. Most people made their pets into their familiars, and some of them expected me to be clingy and possessive like their familiars were. I wasn’t too proud to use that assumption to my advantage. If Fiore happened to draw the conclusion that my attachment was magically compelled and he could buy my favour by protecting my mage… good. Protecting Kylie and Max was why I was here in the first place.

It probably didn’t help the whole possessive familiar misconception that I had been getting kind of protective of my friends. But that wasn’t specific to Kylie. I was pretty sure that had less to do with fancy magical bonds and more to do with the fact that every time we took our eyes off each other for too long, one of us nearly died from stupid magical bullshit.

Fiore looked at my expression and drew a conclusion that, in retrospect, I probably should have expected. “Did you kill her?”

“No!”

“Then how – ?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He’d find out about Max soon enough. No reason for me to tell him everything; if I got into the habit of doing that, it’d be obvious when I had nothing to tell him, and he’d learn pretty quickly that I didn’t know anything useful about Alania.

Besides, Max wasn’t the one I wanted him focusing on right now. I accepted the tea being handed to me and gripped it in both hands, ignoring the uncomfortable heat. “If they send someone else,” I said, “to come and kill her, I won’t let them. But they might just try to steal her. If they can bribe or threaten her to go to Fionnrath, I’ll have to go with her, and honestly that doesn’t sound great.” I paused. This next bit was the tricky bit. I didn’t know anything about Fiore’s morals; I had no idea whether he’d protect students just because it was the right thing to do, which was why I needed to make sure he had other incentives to help. If he read ‘forcing Kylie and Kayden to go to Fionnrath’ as ‘breaking up Alania’s little group of suspicious young wizards’ and saw it as the solution to a problem, I could be making things a lot worse. I had to make sure he’d draw the opposite conclusion. So I scowled and said, “I don’t get why Alania told them about Kylie and invited them here in the first place. She was so damn insistent on bringing Lydia here and look where it got us. She must be really ticked off about Lydia’s death.”

“You haven’t seen her since?”

“No. I came straight to you. I don’t want to deal with Fionnrath after they tried to kill my mage.” Too far? Might be bordering on too far. Time to stop.

“Well,” he said, sounding thoughtful, “I’m sure that things will work out. Oh, and nobody has come near her family, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know.”

I nodded. Were her family in more or less danger now? Less, because after Lydia’s death the rest of Fionnrath probably wouldn’t bother with coercion attempts? Or more, because they might want revenge? How much did Fionnrath as a whole know about what had happened? Was it even public knowledge that Lydia had come to Refujeyo?

Not my problem. There were other people to worry about that, surely. So long as they were leaving Kylie’s people alone, whatever internal diplomatic nonsense might be going on was their own problem.

I stood up. “Thanks.”

“Always ready to talk, Kayden.”

I nodded and left, kind of awkwardly. I couldn’t help wondering how Kylie and Max would fare after we figured out how to sacrifice me like the prophecy said. Would things be easier or harder for them, politically, without the familiarity complication? I’d just have to do my best to make the transition smooth, with the time I had left.

I just wished I knew how much time that was.