4.21: Scars

“Peter wants to sign us up for a treasure hunt competition,” Saina said. “Are you up for that?”

We were lying on our backs in a lush, green meadow. I stared up at the wispy white clouds (light, no hint of grey) drifting above and took the time to actually consider the question. I was taking the advice of my therapist, Dr Peterson, and trying to discern what sort of things upset me. Nobody except for my close friends seemed to have noticed my embarrassingly public freakout at our last pit comp, and I certainly didn’t want to tempt fate with another one.

Problem was, most of the things that seemed to upset me were stupid. Even the wrist thing – what, the spellthing had held me still by my wrist against my will one time and now my body had decided that wrists were just off-limits? That was so stupid. I’d nearly drowned twice, and had no more wariness of water than would be expected after its danger had been proven. I’d taken a lot of dangerous and painful falls, including the one off the school roof during the event that had changed my entire life, but I had no fear of heights or climbing at all. But oooh no, not my wrists.

The wrists were the least stupid thing I’d found. Everything else on my list was so dumb that I had to be misreading my own body’s reactions somehow. I looked up at the clouds and told myself, for the hundredth time, that there was no possible way that I was actually afraid of rain.

“What’s involved in the treasure hunt?” I asked.

I felt Saina move beside me, shrugging her shoulders in the grass. “A bunch of tokens are hidden in a complicated area, behind puzzles and stuff. They help you find the big treasure, and the team to find the big treasure wins. I think this one is a tunnel network.”

“Like the school?”

“Yeah.”

Hmm. I was pretty sure that wouldn’t bother me. I never had a problem in school, after all. But on the other hand, there would probably be puzzle rooms and stuff – would it be too much like the Labyrinth of Dreams? Would some stupid traum – I mean, some stupid bad memory jump up out of nowhere and catch me off-guard?

No. No, I didn’t think that would happen. Plenty of stuff had happened to me at school that would have brought that kind of thing up, if it was going to come up. It should be fine.

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “I used to play a treasure hunt game with a friend before I came here. Could be nostalgic.”

We stared at the sky in companionable silence for a bit, before something completely random struck me. “Hey,” I said. “What was your family’s spell, anyway?”

“What?”

“The one your lineage gave up to use the Pit instead. I just realised that you talk a lot about how people have all these romantic notions of the glory days and the ancient abilities of your line or whatever but I have no idea what they actually were. I assume you had a cool spell, and weren’t just super powerful because you happened to own an expensive palace in the desert.”

“Ha. My ancestors were seers.”

“Well, yeah, I assumed that much. With Duniyasar and all. What did the spell do, though? Keep your family safe, like Fionnrath’s?”

“No, my ancestors couldn’t see the future. They saw the present. The World’s Eye allowed its caster to share the senses of other people. Up to eight at a time, legend says, although apparently more than two or three got confusing.”

“What, like spying on people?”

“No. The connection was two way; both the caster and the target could see and hear with each others’ eyes and ears. The target could shut down the connection, if they wanted; it only worked if both parties allowed it. It was one of the most useful spells in the entire world.”

“I can… see how it would be kind of useful? To transfer information?”

It was astoundingly useful. Before the invention of long-range electronic communication, the speed of communication was the major bottleneck in so many things, in so many societies. It determined the size and layout of empires, the outcome of wars, everything. Normally a spell like that wouldn’t have a truly useful range, but a caster seated in Duniyasar could connect to people almost halfway around the world. Imagine the commanders of separate naval battles in the same war, hundreds of kilometers from each other, able to see how each others’ battles were going. Merchants able to check on the farms half a world away and make their purchasing decisions. Royalty able to communicate in real time without having to visit each other. Not a very impressive spell today, of course, when even commonfolk all carry the same ability in their pockets, but extremely powerful at the time. At home we have shelves of books that were just different laws on charters on things my ancestors weren’t allowed to use the spell for, to avoid accidentally building a kingdom or something.”

“Creating Refujeyo doesn’t count as kingdom building?”

“Why do you think the high Crone of the time was so eager to set a good example and move her family to using the Pit as soon as it was possible? She had to make a choice between old traditions and a new world, like the other founders. Nobody would’ve stood for her bringing that spell into a world where she intended to shirk the duties and responsibilities that came with it.”

“So now it’s…?”

“Sealed away somewhere. My guess? It’s probably a core part of the enchantment for the intranet. I don’t know, though. I’m not an enchanter.”

I nodded, slowly. Making enchanted objects was hard. Really, really hard. It was a really advanced form of runecrafting, that involved trapping an entire spell in a runic circle without a human host, in ways that I couldn’t hope to understand. Quite a lot of mages had passed their Master level certification by making a single, stable enchanted object, which had the nice side effect that Refujeyo had a whole bunch of things like enchanted force field beds lying around like it was nothing.

But what else could you do with a spell like that? Back when the Pit was new, and the runic labyrinth containing all those spells was untested and probably far less elaborate? It’s be pretty embarrassing, politically, if it got out and attached itself to the latest Surya matriarch or patriarch. Pretty dangerous, even, since they’d already have a spell from the Pit. No; you’d have to lock it away inside something, and it certainly sounded like a good basis for an intranet. They had to make the magical crystal intranet somehow. Saina was probably right.

We lay about doing nothing for awhile longer, until Saina had to go to class. I headed for my room. Max was there, but he wasn’t reading or writing for once – he was building something. Some kind of model, out of wooden sticks.

I was about to ask him what it was, but he just said, “There’s mail for you,” and chased the thought out of my mind.

“From my parents?” I asked, grabbing the letter. It was thick. Really thick.

“How should I know? All of your mail looks identical from the outside.”

“Well I’m sorry that we don’t have a family crest to mark our correspondence with, Your Majesty.” I checked the return address; it was from my parents! I tore it open.

There was barely even an introduction, beyond the normal ‘I love you’s. They’d gotten straight into detailing the techniques of every cursebinding method they could remember trying. I remembered most of them myself – the rhymes, the charms, the salt and silver – but occasionally I found some rite or item I’d forgotten about. It hadn’t felt like this much, when we’d done it – pages and pages of old practices, desperately trying them all in the hope that something would stick. Had we really done this much?

I barely skimmed the pages. I was looking for something specific. I didn’t care what I’d chanted backwards or what we’d hung on the doorframes, I wanted to know who had cut a binding sigil into my chest.

Nothing on the first page. I checked the second. Hmm, nope. Not surprising; the list wasn’t in chronological order, and the complicated stuff was probably at the end. I checked the third page.

After skimming the entire list and finding no mention of it, I went back and read the list more thoroughly. No, I hadn’t missed it – it wasn’t listed. A third reading failed to make the information I wanted materialise.

I swore and threw the letter to the floor. Pages scattered everywhere. Max looked up from his model. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s not here. There’s an exhaustive list of the special types of tea they bought from a cursebinder for me, but no mention at all of cutting me up as a baby.”

“Mmm.” He carefully balanced a couple of sticks in the middle of some kind of complicated stick nest. “Why would they keep hiding that?”

“Because they’re ashamed, obviously! As they should be! But this is information we need!”

“I can get it some other way. It’s not as critical as – ”

“Of course it is! You don’t have to lie to me to, I don’t know, avoid pressuring me with my family or whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish. You need to understand these runes, right? And this cursebinder is the only person we’ve found who still uses these runes, and they’re good at it. We need them.”

“I’ll find another way. I’m good at research. You don’t need to push – ”

“It’s important to me, too!” I snapped. “I’m sick of my parents treating me like… ugh! I just, I just need them to tell me what they did.” It shouldn’t matter. They’d been desperate, and the binding had worked, and it had healed so well that I’d never even known it had been done, right? So it had been the correct decision, right? They’d done what was best for me, and for everyone else, and it hadn’t bothered me at all until Malas had found the ‘scars’ long after the fact; it was, by any measure, the right decision. Nothing for them to be ashamed of, nothing for me to feel so betrayed about.

So why couldn’t I help but feel betrayed about it?

Max’s face was calm and unbothered in that Acanthos Social Mask kind of way. What right did I have to bitch about this kind of thing? His childhood had been a lot worse than mine. I forced myself to calm down, for now. I could bitch to Kylie later, or maybe Hua. (Although I seemed to have accidentally given Hua the impression that my parents were terrible people already, so maybe just Kylie.)

I’d just… thought I’d gotten them, this time. I thought I’d convinced them to be open with me. And, okay, maybe it was a bit hypocritical for me to be upset about this since I’d spent the whole school tour deliberately manipulating them, but I felt like I’d convinced them to take me seriously, to trust me. And they were still trying to conceal this.

Maybe they hadn’t put it in the list because they didn’t remember it?

No, that couldn’t be right. They’d included the cursebinding teas; there was no way that getting somebody to slice open their infant had slipped their minds. Especially since, for it to have healed so perfectly, it must have been done slowly and carefully, one of two cuts at a time that were then allowed to heal perfectly before the next cut was made. How long would that have taken? There were so many lines in the pattern.

“Max, do you still have the diagram of my chest runes?”

“Hmm? Oh. Yes.” he shuffled through some papers, then handed me Malas’ sketch, along with his own similar runic design. I started counting the cuts, then gave up. There were too many to have been cut one at a time. It would have taken a good year or so.

So that meant… what, exactly?

Something else was odd, too. What was it?

I laid Malas’ sketch over Max’s diagram and tried to figure out what exactly was bothering me about it. The two were nearly identical. Malas’ sketch was far lower ‘resolution’, for lack of a better term, and a few lines were different – Max’s diagram probably wasn’t as mathematically perfect as the cursebinder’s, and Malas’ sketch might not be a perfect copy of my chest either, Malas probably wasn’t an artist – but they were still quite…

The two were nearly identical.

The two were nearly identical.

That was… pretty weird, wasn’t it?

I analysed the pair more closely, looking for where in particular the errors were. I held Malas’ diagram over my chest to confirm. Just as I’d suspected, most of the biggest discrepencies were over my breasts. That wasn’t surprising; skin grew over time and distorted the patterns in it. The discrepencies didn’t render the pattern unrecogniseable; my breasts weren’t very large. But that, in itself, was weird, wasn’t it?

My entire body was a lot larger than it had been as a baby. So if my growing skin could distort it, why was the pattern so coherent, so near-perfect? Why was it recogniseable at all? It should be a bunch of stretched-out, disjointed lines, shouldn’t it? If it was somehow magically impervious to distortion, then it shouldn’t have distorted at all. The only explanation was that my skin hadn’t grown very much since these cuts were made.

These marks were recent. Within the last, I dunno, three years or so? Biology wasn’t my strong suit.

That… made absolutely no sense.

I had an intricate pattern of scars on my chest, scars that had to have come from when I was well old enough to remember, and I didn’t remember them at all. What? How? Had somebody messed with those memories, too? That didn’t make any sense. Malas had been pretty clear that they’d been well healed by the time he first inspected me, on my first day at Refujeyo. I was pretty sure nobody had been sneaking me memory-wiping potions while I was still living among the nemaganti. Why would anyone do that? Also, I’d be healing for awhile, so they’d have to drug my parents, my friends, everyone at school… no, that just didn’t make sense. Even if I wanted to indulge thoughts of, I dunno, secret government cursebinding projects or something, that would just be straight-up impossible to pull off. Had Malas been lying? No. Not that I’d put it past him, but he had no reason to lie. He’d thought, at the time, that they were old scars from self-harming. Why would he lie about that?

Something was wrong here. I was missing something. I had to be.

This didn’t make any sense.