4.102: Preparations

Over the next few weeks, we planned. We gathered supplies. We hung out with our loved ones when we could.

I packed everything I thought we’d need. Food, water, first aid kit. Lighter, knife, some light climbing equipment. Oxygen tanks, for a part of the journey that I really wasn’t looking forward to. We made copies of the map of the way out, disguised as runic circles; if we failed and our stuff was found, we didn’t want anything that could possibly trace back to the janitors, and that meant we couldn’t take anything obviously from the tablets that Max… that that janitor… had given us.

We made four maps. One for my bag, one for Kylie’s. One for my pocket, one for Kylie’s. Just in case.

The tablets themselves, we just tossed into the Lake of Inquisition, once we were certain they had no other relevant information on them. They’d end up among the piles of garbage under the lake.

And on the day before we left, I sat at my desk, and I prepared to write three letters.

Chelsea and Melissa’s letters were hard, but I knew basically what I wanted to say, at least. I drafted and redrafted them a few times until I was finally… well, not happy with the results, but thoroughly exhausted with revising them. I sealed them in envelopes, and got out a fresh piece of paper.

I stared at the photo of my parents that I kept on my bedside table. The wooden photo frame was thick, and clunky, and a garish yellow, except where it had been taped back together after that time I’d broken it during my initiation semester. I still remembered so clearly, kicking it across the room, and finding Chelsea’s tracker concealed inside the frame. A little message that I wasn’t alone. Wherever you are, we are. I’ll find this tracker, Kayden; I always do.

And in the frame, my parents, smiling out at me.

I put pen to paper, and wrote the most difficult letter of my life.

I didn’t give myself a chance to revise it. I knew that if I did, I’d just end up endlessly rewriting the thing until I ended up with nothing but word soup. I sealed it quickly away, and went to find Magistus.

“I need one last favour,” I told him. “But you can’t ask any follow up questions.”

“Um,” he said. “Alright.”

I handed him the letters. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen,” I said, “but if you don’t hear from me for one month, I need you to make sure these letters get to their destinations, okay? Don’t use the school mailing system. Get them delivered, or use commonfolk mail, or whatever, just don’t let them pass through Refujeyo’s systems. I need you to promise me that no matter how things shake out, no matter what you hear, these letters will get home, alright?”

“Kayden, what the hell is going on?”

“No follow up questions. Will you do this for me?”

He looked at me for a long moment. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can do that.”

“And don’t read them.”

“Of course.”

I relaxed. The letters were safe in Magistus’ hands. He’d handed me his sister’s package; he knew what he was doing. Most of my friends were either probably under regular scrutiny or surveillance, or never under scrutiny and didn’t know how to handle it, or not close enough to me to trust with a task like this. But Magistus could be trusted, and he was a legacy mage who knew how to handle scrutiny, and there was no particular reason for him to actually be under scrutiny right now. My best chance of safely getting those letters home lay with him.

And now, I was… ready, I supposed.

As ready as I was going to get, at any rate. One good night’s sleep, one final morning (Kylie and I planned to go mid-afternoon, just in case anything last minute came up), and… everything would be over, one way or another.

I took a sleeping potion that night. Sue me. I was way too keyed up to go to sleep normally and there was no way I was going to save the world unrested. I psyched myself up to talk Kylie into taking one too, but no argument was necessary; she took the draught from me and drank it without comment.

I did regret my decision when I closed my eyes, and opened them in the cabin from my Initiation, the spellthing grinning at me from across the table.

“You again,” I said.

“Apparently.”

“It’s been a while.”

“I suppose it has.”

“And are we meeting again tonight for any particular reason, or…?”

It shrugged, its shoulders moving in that unnerving way that suggested a very unusual bone structure. “I’m your subconscious. You tell me.”

“I would guess,” I said, “that I’m probably very nervous.”

“Nervous?”

“Scared as all shit. Absolutely fucking terrified. And there’s nothing I can to except sit here and be terrified, until it’s go time.”

“Well, if you’re that scared, you could just go early. You’re not waiting on anything. Awaken the scout and make the journey.”

“Can’t. We took sleeping potions.”

“Ah. Probably sensible, given the circumstances.”

I sipped the tea in my hands. It was absurdly weak, basically just hot water. “I really fucking hate you, do you know that?”

“Real me or fake me?”

“Um, both?”

“Well, you’ll be destroying real me soon enough. Perhaps fake me will also disappear, once I’m dead.”

“Here’s hoping.”

Outside the cabin, it rained. The sound set me on edge, as always; I wanted to check the door, to make sure it wasn’t stuck, to make sure I wasn’t trapped, to make sure I was safe.

I resisted the urge. I knew that the door was stuck, and I was trapped. But I was safe, despite the thundering in my ears. This was just a dream. I was safe; I was just going to be trapped until I could wake up.

Stupid sleeping potion.

In the morning, I checked my supplies one last time. Fully stocked first aid kit, including sterilising alcohol and every potion I could make that might be even slightly useful. The hardest wearing clothes I owned, for the journey. My most lightweight basic climbing gear. (Ugh, I should’ve gotten some climbing practice in over the past fortnight, just in case. I was so out of practice!) Spare thread and cloth, two knives (both sharp), scissors, needles. Non-perishable, high calorie food for three days. Water for one day and water purifying tablets for a week. A lighter. Waterproof matches, in case the lighter broke. A runecrafting pen, paper in a waterproof container, one of Max’s notebooks that acted as a sort of rune dictionary. Max’s wand, with a few spare cartridges of ichor – after a moment’s thought, I stuck that one in my pocket instead, a sort of symbolic way of keeping him with me today. Oxygen tank and mask.

I packed everything except the wand, clothes and oxygen into a new waterproof backpack and triple checked that every seal was in place. I’d probably check the seals again before we left after lunch. I checked my tablet to make sure that it was fully charged.

I had a lot of messages. That wasn’t unusual; everyone was messaging me a lot now that they knew they wouldn’t be able to soon. There was probably no point in replying to them today.

One from Fiore caught my eye. He wanted to see me, make sure everything was alright before I headed off to Fionnrath. I should probably see him. Say goodbye properly. He had been my surveyanto for awhile, and while his motives were questionable, he’d done right by me. I should at least thank him.

He wanted to meet as soon as possible, which was good for me because I had very limited time. I set a time, had a quick breakfast, and went to see him.

“Kayden!” he said with a broad smile, waving me in. His office looked a little more chaotic than usual. He picked a sleeping Socks off a chair, ignoring her plaintive yowls of protest, and we sat down.

“So,” he said. “Fionnrath.”

“Yeah.”

“After all that work you put into avoiding the place.”

“I know, right? I could’ve saved myself a geas. I feel kind of stupid now. It just turned out to be the best place for us, I think.”

“You think being a familiar in Fionnrath is better than continuing your training with Malas?”

“Well, we have Kylie’s future to think of, too.”

“Kylie is perfectly capable of graduating from Skolala Refujeyo and making a career for herself. And I was always under the impression that she was very much against trapping herself in that town.”

“What’s this about?”

“I just want to make sure that you’re doing alright, Kayden. This is out of character. I want to be certain that no one’s forcing your hand.”

I stared at him. What was the game here? Did he know that Sekura Refujeyo were trying to pin me as an accomplice to Cheryl, that this was our way out? He probably did know, right? We’d discussed how Cheryl was framed, he’d been probing me for information on her whereabouts. He might even believe I was actually guilty of helping her. So what was the game here? Trying to convince me to stay and face Refujeyo justice? How did that gain him anything?

Or maybe, just maybe, he really was concerned for my welfare?

I supposed that none of it really mattered, now. “And what if someone was forcing our hand?”

He handed me a little bottle of orange juice, opened a bottle for himself, and sipped it. “Well,” he said. “You might not know this about me, but I don’t really like losing. And I, along with Malas and Miratova who also do not like losing, put considerable effort into making sure that nobody would jerk you around the country against you will. So if that were happening, I think it’s important for you to know that you have people around you who are invested in making sure it didn’t.”

Right. Okay. Well, all of this was irrelevant now. I just needed to exchange some platitudes with Fiore, get out of here, and get to saving the world.

My heart was thundering fast enough to feel like an engine. I probably looked nervous. Fiore probably thought I was nervous about this conversation, about Fionnrath. Whatever.

“It is what it is,” I said.

“Well, it doesn’t have to be.”

“It kind of does,” I said. I took a gulp of orange juice.

“Why are you going to Fionnrath?” Fiore asked, just as I went to swallow the juice.

I spat it out. The little that had trickled down my throat was nauseating. Was this rotten? It smelled fine, but an awful, nauseating feeling was spreading down my throat, through my chest…

The feeling didn’t last long, and only as it faded completely did I recognise the sensation.

Magic.

“Did you drug this?!” I asked.

“Ah.” Fiore stood up. “I forgot that you could feel that.”

“By the Points, you did! What the hell?!”

“Kayden, I’m going to have to insist that you stay calm.”

“That I stay calm??!”

“You are not in any danger here. I need you to – ”

“Go to hell!” I stood up, and made for the door, but Fiore was fast, and already blocking it. I stepped forward.

“You really should sit back down,” he said.

I stepped forward again.

He shook his sleeves back. “Are you really going to make me do this the hard way?”