4.61: Reaction

“Talk about wha – hey!” I flinched back in surprise as di Fiore shoved his way past me into the room and shut the door. “What? Get out!”

“No,” he said. He set his backpack on the floor. Bottles clinked inside. “You’re sulking.”

“I… what?”

“You’re grieving. I get that. But you’re way more sociable than this. Someone like you shouldn’t be grieving alone this much. You keep pushing everyone away, refusing to see or talk to anyone, and honestly? It’s getting a little old. I mean, I don’t give a shit, but I’m the one who has to listen to Magistus and Kylie worry about you, and their worries are getting a little repetitive.”

“So you came here to lecture me about spending more time with my friends?”

“No.” He pulled a bottle out of his bag and handed it to me. “I came here to get you drunk.”

“… What?”

He sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled out a second bottle, twisting the top off and taing a swig. “We’re going to sit here and talk about our dead friend and be really fucking sad, and drink an unwise amount of alcohol. That’s what we’re doing this evening. Kylie should be with your weird little witch group for awhile so we shouldn’t be bothered by anyone.”

“How did you even know about that?”

He looked at me like I was stupid. “How did I find out someone’s schedule? Is that a trick question? Now drink and tell me about Max.”

I looked over the bottle. It was unlabelled, and made of dark glass. It looked basically like a normal beer bottle, with a wider, more rounded base; I used these bottles all the time. They were usually used for potions.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Either mead or cider? The bottles aren’t labelled, so.” He shrugged. “Take your chances, I guess.”

I briefly considered trying to drag di Fiore into the hall and locking the door behind him. It probably wasn’t worth the effort. I sat on the floor and sipped my bottle, the immediately screwed up my face. I’d never actually drunk mead or cider, but based on how other people talked about them, I guessed that this one was cider. I’d expected it to taste good, but nope.

“Where did you even get these?” I asked. “Are we allowed to drink alcohol?”

“Generally, the school doesn’t allow unrestricted unsupervised access to intoxicants to teengers with spells living in their bodies, no. That sounds like a great way to get people killed. But my spell is under control and yours is completely fucking useless, so I’m sure we’re fine. These bottles are courtesy of Virgil Spines, by the way.”

“Who?”

“You know. Spines. Stocky kid, red hair?” He rolled his eyes at my lack of recognition. “Virgil Spines. He went to every single one of Magista’s parties?”

I shrugged.

“You stopped him from hitting me once?”

“That can’t be right. Why would I stop someone from hitting you?”

“By the seven Points, your memory is like a sieve. Anyway, he makes and sells alcohol.” Di Fiore took another swig from his bottle and grimaced. “I don’t think he’s very good at it.”

“You’re the Madja heir and you can’t even get hold of good illegal alcohol?” I asked. I sipped my cider. “Your uncle would be so disappointed in you.”

“By all means, dob me in to Fiore. I’m sure he’ll just be sooo disappointed to hear that I’m not spending my time at school building a quality moonshine empire. What else could I possibly be doing that’s a more valuable use of my time than that. Anyway. Max. He was a great guy, and the world is poorer without him. Losing a friend sucks.”

“I always got the impression you two hated each other.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

I sighed. “He would have fucking hated that funeral, you know? And they didn’t say one thing, not one goddamn thing, about him that was accurate. That was his family, and I don’t think they even bothered to get to know him. Or at least, he was too good an actor for them. Funerals are supposed to provide closure, and I’ve been trying to move on, but – ”

“They don’t,” di Fiore said. “Even good ones don’t provide closure. They give people a chance to say goodbye, but they don’t make the grief end.”

“You’ve lost someone. Someone close.”

“This isn’t about that. This is about Max. Tell me something about him.”

“… What?”

“Something they didn’t know, or say, at the funeral. Something actually true about him.”

I sighed. “He fucking hated being the Nonus Acanthos. Hated being called that by anyone.”

“I know he believed it was inappropriate to take the name until he’d actually graduated and proven himse – ”

“No, that was an excuse. He had a plausible reason to put it off, so he did, but he never wanted to take the name at all. I always kind of wondered whether he’d find another excuse after graduation, or maybe just tell his family to go fuck themselves. Probably not; they paid to educate an heir and he knew his responsibilities. He probably would’ve taken the name. But he would’ve hated it.”

“But he worked so hard to get the ole. Beat out older cousins, proved himself worthy of Octavia taking the risk. Why would he – ”

“People can do the same things for different reasons. Anyway, your turn. Something about Max.”

“He was such a fussy little knowledge snob.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you ever got into a disagreement about anything, he’d steer the conversation back to things he was an expert in and try to cow you with superior knowledge, then use that to act like he’d won the original argument. We’d be talking about what we should do for a group English project and disagree on the presentation format and suddenly we’d be embroiled in a half-hour argument about the history of magical classification. It was so fucking obnoxious.”

“Huh. I never saw him do that.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t have to do any group projects with him. Your turn.”

“He used to peel dumplings.”

“Peel dumplings?”

“Yeah. You know, dumplings? With the pasta covering and the filling inside? He’d peel them open, eat the filling, and then eat the pastry. Did it to sausage rolls, too. He ate sushi normally but that was about it.”

“What about ravioli?”

“I can’t believe I never got the chance to see him eat ravioli! Oh, man. I have no idea whether he would’ve peeled those.”

“Such dangerous information. Are you sure you want to share the sensitive details of the Acanthos heir’s fussy eating habits with the Madja heir? What if I made it known to the world that he ate dumplings weird?”

I snickered. “Do it. Max is dead, it won’t hurt him. Embarrass the shit out of the Acanthos family by telling everyone information about his unorthodox table manners, I dare you. Your turn.”

“I think I’m going to run out of Max facts before you do.”

“Talk about your person, then. The one who died.”

“This isn’t about her.”

“Why not? Max was a lot closer to me than he was to you, right?”

“Yes...”

“So this isn’t a fair exchange, is it? Talk about your person. Then I’ll talk about Max. That’s fair.”

“You have an extremely odd notion of fair.”

“I am slightly drunk on particularly bad cider. Give me a break.”

“Her name was Marie.” He sipped his cider. “I mean, technicallyshe was buried under the name di Fiore, of course, but I always knew her as Marie.”

“Oh! Oh, that makes sense!”

“What makes sense?”

“I’d been wondering for ages, why Max didn’t know you when you got here. He knew the Magistae and Clara from all the, the alliance-building parties or whatever, but he didn’t know you.” I pointed at him. “Because you weren’t the Madja heir when you were a kid. You’re a replacement.”

“Um, yeah. You didn’t know that?”

“No! How would I have known that? So who was Marie? How did she – ”

“Your turn. You’re deflecting.”

“I’m not deflecting!”

“Yes, you are. This is what you do when you’re upset about something, you deflect or you sulk. It’s your turn. Tell me about Max.”

I sighed. “He was afraid of magic.”

Di Fiore stared. “That cannot possibly be right.”

“He was. Terrified of it. Had his guard up in public most of the time, but if he had it down and someone cast spontaneously, he’d straight up flinch. Detested the force fields on our beds; spent as little time as possible behind them before I showed him how to circumvent them. Magic scared the hell out of him.”

“He was a magic scientist! He was obsessed with it! He put everything into fighting to become the Nonus Acanthos, and came here, and studied magic under his hero, who was a magical scientist!”

“Yeah, I know. He was obsessed with pinning the stuff down. I think it’s like… like an arachnophobe hates to see a spider in their house, right? But what they hate even more is to see the spider, and then lose track of it. He was obsessed with bottling and classifying magic, making it understandable and controllable. Take the ichor out, preserve it for later use, channel its power in easily predictable, replicable, controllable runes. He never shut up about historical classification systems and the properties of different kinds of spells; I think he kind of needed the classifications to be real, you know? I mean, all spells are different, and we just lump them together with similar spells and call that a spell type, but he was obsessed with the accuracy of different systems. Like if he could find the right one, find the specific types of characteristics that neatly sorted all spells into their groups without ambiguity, then they’d stop being ambiguous. They’d be something understandable. He was really, really into runes, toward the end. Different runic languages, and what he could make them do. How he could ‘program’ a magical effect by channelling power through them, instead of relying on spontaneous casting. He wanted magic to be predictable, and containable, and therefore safer.”

“Safer?! He created the first stable human familiarity link!”

“Well, we don’t know that for sure. There are records of other human familiars in the past. Anyway, we were all under quite a bit of stress that day.”

“Stress? From what? What happened?”

“None of your business. Your turn. Tell me about Marie.”

“She was my cousin.”

Oh. Oh! “She was Fiore’s daughter, wasn’t she?”

Di Fiore nodded. “His only child. The Madjas have a succession order based on absolute primogeniture. I was fourth in line, but we were closest. We always used to joke about how when she was the Fiore I’d be her head diplomat and cultural advisor, and together we’d elevate the Madja family to new heights.” He sipped his cider. “My siblings are both older than her, older by enough that by the time she got to Refujeyo, they were too old to be eligible. Still, I never expected to be here. She was so strong and so clever. There shouldn’t have been a problem.”

“She died during the Initiation, didn’t she?” That must be why di Fiore had refused to take the family name until he’d passed it.

“Yeah. Came out of absolutely nowhere. She was so capable; nobody even comsidered that it was a possibility for her. Your turn.”

“How much older than you was she?”

“About a year.”

“So you were just told, ‘surprise, you’re the new family mage’ and had six months to adjust? They just derailed your whole life and six months later you were here? What were were planning on doing before then?”

“It’s your turn.”

“Right. He… he was just so damn curious. Not just about magic; about everything. He’d be trying to explain some magical concept and he’d pull out examples of artificial intelligence, or how batteries are built, or how white blood cells work; just random stuff that had nothing to do with his obsession, but he’d learned about anyway. And I think that stuff was just as important to him. I mean, he wanted magic to be safe and all that, but if he hadn’t been pushed into becoming the Acanthos heir, I don’t think he would’ve cared about it at all? His obsession with magic and idolising Alania and everything he knew about magical history and science and all that… I think it was mostly just because he was coming here, because it’s what was going to be important in his life. If he hadn’t been earmarked for that, he probably would’ve just avoided magic altogether and become the world’s best chemist or a genius physicist or something, and been exactly as obsessed with that instead. He just wanted to know the world he lived in. Explore and engage with it in every way he could.” I sipped my cider. “Hey, is it warm in here? Is there something wrong with the, the magical air conditioning, or whatever?”

“It’s not warm, you’re drunk,” di Fiore said, rolling his eyes. “You haven’t even had enough to feel warm. By the Points, you’re a lightweight.”

“Yeah, well, maybe your friend’s shitty moonshine is just too strong.”

“I’m drinking the same stuff you are. You should be having a little bit of difficulty focusing and that’s it. Like being tired. Maybe a little dizziness.” He snatched the nearly empty bottle out of my hand. “Get better at handling alcohol.”

“I’m not dizzy at all, for your information. If you’re dizzy, maybe you’re the lightweight.” I stood up, and stumbled.

“Not dizzy?”

“Nope. That’s because my legs went to sleep.” I started to rub the pins and needles out of my legs. Pins and needles were in my hands, too. That didn’t make sense.

Wait. Yes it did. I knew this feeling.

“There wasn’t any magic in that cider, was there?”

“Magic? No. It was just cider. Hang on, your spell is dormant, right?”

“Oh yeah, that thing doesn’t do anything. Kylie’s magic is just a little restless.”

“Kylie’s – ?” di Fiore leapt to his feet, blood draining out of his face. “Shit! You’re a familiar!”

“Uh, yeah. You knew that.”

“I didn’t think! How does that work? Is her spell going to try to kill you?”

“What? No! No, it’s just a little sloshy.”

“‘Sloshy’?”

“It happens if something unpredictable upsets the flow of magic. It’ll settle down.”

“Like something that reduces your ability to focus? Do you need to focus on it?”

“Well, no. Not really. I mean, it stays under control just fine when I’m sleeping or distracted, so I don’t see that being a problem. It’s like… keeping your balance.”

“Drunk people frequently lose their balance.”

“Okay, it’s like maintaining body temperature.”

“Oh, you mean the first thing to go in a typical homeostatic cascade? And weren’t you just saying you were warm?”

“It’s not a big de – ”

“Bullshit.” Di Fiore grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the door. “We’re going to the kuracar. Right now.”