4.31: Future

When Kylie and I got back to our room, Max wasn’t there. That wasn’t unusual, but the absence of his magic-absorbing wooden model was. I checked the school map for his location and was completely unsurprised to find that he was in the hospital ward.

One of Malas’ apprentices was organising medical supplies in the ward, looking kind of awkward. The awkwardness was probably because they were clearly ignoring Malas and Max, who were having a very loud argument behind one of the bed curtains that wasn’t closed quite enough for the soundproofing enchantment to be working.

“It’s not even a very deep burn,” Max was protesting.

“That’s not the point! You could have been badly hurt! Every time I see you, you’re more reckless! I can’t protect you from every medical danger, Acanthos, and your surveyanto can’t protect you from every political one!”

“I haven’t been uncovering any more dangerous school secrets, if that’s what you mean.”

“Not what I was implying!”

“Then I don’t see why my experiments are any of your business!”

“If this had happened in Alania’s lab, you would’ve been shielded. So where were you? Does Alania know about this?”

“My whole life doesn’t revolve around Alania’s projects!”

“No, but if you’re keeping whatever did this from her, then I’m forced to conclude – ”

Kylie cleared her throat loudly. Awkward silence fell.

After a few seconds, Malas pulled back the curtain. “Apologies for the delay. Are either of you hurt?”

“Nope,” I said. “We saw that Max was here. Wanted to make sure that he was alright.”

“He’s perfectly fine. Some very minor burns and splinters. It doesn’t even technically need my help, I only treated it to avoid scarring.”

I glanced at Max. His sullen face was mottled with a few bright blue flecks of magic, as were his hands and forearms. None of the flecks were alarmingly large, or on anything important.

“I can go, then?” Max asked.

“I have no grounds to keep you,” Malas said.

“Great.” He strode out. Kylie and I went to follow.

“Kayden,” Malas said, “while you’re here, may I have a word?”

“Uh… I guess?” I reluctantly hung back while Kylie went after Max. “What’s up? You already checked me for familiar problems last week.”

“This isn’t about that,” he said. “I simply wanted to ask you if you had any interest in a career in medicine.”

Whatever I’d been expecting Malas to say, that hadn’t been it. “Uh… what?”

“Medicine. As a career. I hear that you’re quite skilled at basic potioncrafting, and started with medical potions.”

Yeah, to avoid having to see you when I get hurt.“Where did you hear that?”

“Insturktanto Costa is an old friend. Anyway, I don’t have much use for potions myself, given my spells, but they’re a useful tool for most mage doctors. And somebody with mage medical qualifications and a skilled hand at potioncrafting could do very well for himself in the commonfolk world. I understand that you still maintain quite strong relationships from your past?”

“I, uh. I was thinking of just going into, y’know, generic potioncrafting as a career, maybe.”

“A stable career. A lot of people in your position spend their working lives recreating potions to test that they’re still viable, which is a very secure position. Or there’s theory and potion development, of course. But they don’t pay nearly as well as medicine, nor would they give you the opportunity to live wherever you wanted in the world, among mages or commonfolk. Think about it.”

“I’m not… really smart enough to be a doctor.”

Malas waved a hand dismissively. “If medicine required a lot of intelligence, my current apprentices wouldn’t be able to do it,” he said, ignoring the stare of the apprentice sorting medical supplies. “Medicine requires hard work, ingenuity, and a strong stomach, all of which I know you have. Eventually you’ll learn how to not do every stupid thing that pops into your head immediately, and from then on it’s just a lot of training and a healthy dose of problem solving skills. You’d get along with most of my current apprentices, I think.”

Most of his current… it finally clicked into place why we were having this conversation. “Are you offering me an apprenticeship?”

“Yes. I believe you’d be able to graduate from one of my apprenticeships faster than you would through the Refujeyo school system for an equivalent level of mastery, if that’s your concern. And, obviously, you wouldn’t have to leave campus for your education.”

“I, uh…” ‘I don’t like you,’ I didn’t say, because that would be kind of petty and mean and childish. Also, I didn’t think Malas would think it was relevant. He didn’t seem the type to consider likeability to be an important part of being someone’s master.

‘I’d feel too awkward doing that because I’m secretly planning to sabotage your locus an kill you and just looking at you is making me feel unbearably guilty,’ I also didn’t say, for obvious reasons.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. I was not going to think about it. “What happened with Max there?”

“You’d know better than me,” Malas said. “Look, Kayden. Whatever nonsense you’re up to, I’d consider it a favour if you left Max out of it.”

“W-what? I’m not up to any kind of nonsense!” I squawked in a very convincing way.

“You’ve been conferring with the other cursed students, yes? Roping in the initiates?”

“The coven’s a support group for when we have to deal with too much stupid mage bullshit! We can have a support group if we want!”

“You call it a cov – ? Yes, well, that’s none of my business, but Max – ”

“Max has nothing to do with our little social club. He’s not a witch.”

“Nothing to do with it? So there are other reasons he’s suddenly interested in ancient runic languages that he says are all over Duniyasar, a place currently owned by Kylie? Why he keeps showing up with minor injuries indicating absolutely reckless research of some kind? He’s just really into the history of Duniyasar all of a sudden, is he, and it has nothing to do with Kylie’s magic or what happened with that Nic Fionnrath? Nothing to do with any kind of stupid scheme you two are pulling him into?”

I stared. “If you think that anything the three of us do together involved Kylie or me dragging Max into anything, you aren’t as good at creepily stalking us as you think.”

“Kayden. Listen. Max is… he is a focused, inquisitive person. An easily obsessed one. Usually those are good qualities in a researcher, but if misdirected – ”

“Misdirected? Oh, you’re still mad at him for that thing under the school. For going down and exposing all of your school’s deep secrets or whatever. You’re worried about him finding out some terrible – ”

“I’m worried about students breaking into the maintenance areas of the school, trapping themselves and nearly dying! This isn’t some conspiracy of deep secrets!” Malas snapped, as if he hadn’t erased our memories to protect his secrets. “Usually, I’d consider that kind if ingenuity to be an excellent trait in someone like Max, if he can control it well enough to not get himself killed! And if you’re dragging the Nonus Acanthos into whatever disruptive nonsense you’re – ”

“His name is Max.”

“And his title is the Nonus Acanthos, whether he wants it to be or not. If he wasn’t prepared to handle that, he shouldn’t have gone through the Initiation.”

“What have you got against Max, anyway, if you’re not still butthurt over the school tunnel thing?”

Malas muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like, ‘why did I pick a career that involves working with so many children?’ I resisted the extremely childish urge to cross my arms and  petulantly remind him that by Refujeyo standards, we were adults.

“That boy is going to be my boss in a decade,” Malas explained, “if he doesn’t die pointlessly over some stupid science experiment first.”

“He – what?”

“Look at him. I remember Alania at that age; they were exactly the same. Do you think there’s even a slight chance that Max won’t end up on the Council? He could lead it within twenty years, if he wanted.”

When Alania was that age? “How old are you? Never mind, not important. Max hates politics.”

“No, he hates his family. He’ll happily do as much politics as he needs to to keep things running smoothly, and he’ll enjoy it, not because he had any particular natural interest in it but because he will be good at it. They all do. For a young legacy mage that doesn’t want to deal with family all the time, one of the best paths forward is to get a prestigious political job that his family can brag about in a place where he doesn’t actually have to see them all that often. Everything about his history, from the controversy of being chosen by his grandmother despite his youth, to becoming Alania Miratova’s lab assistant at such a young age, to successfully creating a human familiar as a teenager, will give him as much leverage as he wants to creating a lab and doing politics on the side. He’ll make a great scientist and Council member, and live the peaceful but powerful life of his dreams. If he doesn’t do something incredibly stupid and explode, politically or literally, before he manages to graduate. So whatever little off-the-books project you’re diverting yourself with, please, leave Max out of it. For his own good.”

“We’re not doing anything!”

“… Mmm.”

I walked out of there, feeling kind of dazed. It felt odd to be speculating on our futures, medicine or politics or whatever, when I already knew that none of that was going to happen. Whatever the fallout of destroying the Pit was going to be… well, Max might still become a politician, I supposed, depending on whether we all ended up in jail or not, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be by not rocking the boat or doing anything dangerous.

Not doing anything dangerous was very firmly off the table.

Being Malas’ apprentice might have some short term advantages, I supposed. Keeping an eye on him couldn’t hurt, although it was entirely possible that he was only making the offer because he wanted to keep an eye on me. More practically, learning about how healing worked might help me figure out the binding on my chest. There had to be a way to make the whole thing make sense.

I’d been cut, a lot, very carefully and very precisely, in a way that had healed perfectly. It had happened recently enough that the skin growth was minimal, but it’d been before I’d gotten to Refujeyo. I didn’t remember it for… some reason. Maybe I’d elected not to remember it, to escape a geas or something. Maybe it had been part of the price of the treatment, and I’d agreed because a curse binding I didn’t know about was infinitely better than a completely unbound curse. Maybe my memory had been wiped without my knowledge or permission; the cursebinder could’ve dosed me with a memory potion before we even began and kept me on it the whole time, but that seemed unlikely. It would’ve been hard to hide the healing wounds if I didn’t know what was going on at the time. Also, why wouldn’t they want to be known, with a skill like that? It didn’t make sense.

Okay. Okay. I was misunderstanding something, making a wrong assumption somewhere, maybe. Or I didn’t have enough information. One of those two things. Let’s try again. Someone with very precise surgical skills had cut into my chest many times, and it had healed perfectly. I could trust Malas to be accurate about that.

It must have happened after I was fairly grown, given how little the pattern had been deformed by growing skin. Hmm… maybe I should actually look at how skin grew, to be sure. I could look at tattoos. Did anyone tattoo babies? There had to be cultures out there that tattooed babies, right? That might give me an idea of whether things were expected to stretch and deform, and by how much. If I was wrong about the skin growth thing, then that meant it could have happened when I was a baby, after all, and I should try to ask my parents again.

It must have happened before I got to Refujeyo. This wasn’t something some mage had done to me secretly or something. Malas had detected it the first time he’d scanned me, which had been on the day I’d arrived, and it was already fully healed by then. And no mage had accosted me or anything beforehand, unless you – hmm.

Wait a minute.

I spun on my heel and marched right back to the ward. “I have questions about your spell,” I told Malas.

“Ah, yes, I thought you might be worried about that.”

“You… did?”

“If I die while you’re my apprentice, my spells won’t kill you in search of a new host. You’d be ineligible, because you already have a spell. They won’t touch mages.”

“Wait, you have apprentices who aren’t mages?”

“Of course. You don’t need a spell to be a doctor.”

“And you weren’t a mage when you were an apprentice?”

“Not until the previous kuracar died, no.”

“Oh. I kind of assumed – that’s not what I wanted to ask about. I have questions about how you, y’know, see stuff. Your prophecy.”

“What about it?”

“You can see past injuries.”

“I can see evidence of them, yes. I can’t see into the past, but healed flesh is never quite the same as  grown flesh.”

“And that’s how you saw that my chest had been cut up. By seeing how it healed differently.”

“Yes. There are interruptions in the collagen in the skin on your chest. And everywhere else on your body, because you injure yourself a lot, but the pattern on the chest was very clear due to the lack of other injuries. Interruptions in the capillary networks, too, although that’s a lot less reliable, because capillaries will burrow into anything.”

“So the, the skin cells or whatever, are all just fine?”

“Yes, it’s very well healed.”

“Right. Thanks.”

I left again, a suspicion in my mind. I might be wrong. I probably was. Honestly, I couldn’t see how I could actually be right, but this suspicion was going to bug me until I at least checked. And if I was right…

It was time to go and meet my cursebinder.