4.20: More Tour

“Anyway,” I said, “that’s the basics. What else do you want to see? The library? My favourite outdoor areas? I could show you my potion workshop. Well, it’s not my workshop, it’s just my favourite and I book it whenever I can.” This was a trick that Fiore had taught me, giving choices. We already had a list of the places we wanted to show my parents and what we wanted to highlight there, but by giving them choices, we could make them feel like they were in control and were getting a proper look at all the stuff they wanted to see. There was a slight chance they’d ask to see something we didn’t want them to, and we’d have to deal with that if it came up, but mostly they were just getting to pick the order of the rooms.

“Potion workshop?” Dad asked.

“Yeah, I make potions,” I said. “I’ve started selling memory potions to other students for a bit of cash. Legally! It’s totally allowed, it’s not like a drug ring or anything, don’t look at me like that.”

“Kayden’s potioncrafting teacher says that he’s quite skilled,” Fiore added. “Potioncrafting is a solid career path, and we like to encourage students to explore early to find out if they want to pursue such things.”

“Oh, really?” Dad asked.

I thought that the career thing might hook him. Before coming to Refujeyo, my future had been a major ongoing worry. My parents had been so worried that if news of the curse got out, it would make me unemployable, and while it was public knowledge at home that my curse wasn’t doing anything (yet), that was still the case. Showing that I had solid career prospects here should push things in my favour.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you my workshop.” I grabbed his hand and pulled him down the corridor, risking a small glance at Fiore as I did. Fiore gave me just the tiniest ghost of a nod.

The potioncrafting workshops weren’t that exciting. They were just rooms with worktables and equipment. I went through the room and explained what some of my favourite pieces did, not bothering to moderate my language for outsiders; it didn’t matter whether my parents actually understood me or not, so long as it was clear that I knew what I was talking about and was enthusiastic about it. I’d never been all that interested in school at home; I could see the surprise in Mum’s eyes.

After a while, I caught myself. “So, uh, yeah. This is where I made that healing potion I gave you guys that one time.”

Just then, the door opened and I realised that, like an idiot, I’d forgotten to check whether this workshop was actually booked. We should hustle out of the way.

Saina stood in the doorway.

Duh. This was her favourite workshop, too. We made potions together all the time. And I hadn’t told her about my parents visiting; she’d have no idea what was going on or what I was trying to accomplish. She looked, slightly puzzled, from me to the teacher and two visiting adults standing awkwardly in the room. “Oh,” she said. “Did we double book? I was just going to – ”

“No,” I said, “we were just leaving. Mum, Dad, this is Saina. Saina, we’re showing my parents the school.” She glanced from my parents, to Fiore, to the expression on my face. Then, she stepped forward into the room. And she… stood up, somehow.

It’s hard to explain. She just… moved in a way that moved the world around her, and made it look smaller in comparison. My parents hadn’t seen her move yet, they’d only seen her half-hidden by the doorway; they had no way to know that this wasn’t normal. She walked with a self-assured pace that said she was totally in control of herself and her environment, and that she was in charge and entitled to respect. It didn’t demand respect; it wasn’t aggressive, and it looked completely unintentional. It wasn’t arrogant or intrusive. She just moved like her importance and competence were fundamental truths not worth noticing.

It was kind of like looking at Max’s social mask on steroids. When she walked past me, I had to fight an instinctive urge to drop to my knees. Although… that might’ve been more of a ‘me’ thing. Saina’s presence had a pretty strong effect on me specifically at pretty much any time.

“Mr James,” she said, sounding nothing but pleased as she held a hand out to my father. He took it and honest to god kissed her knuckles. Seriously. “Mrs James.” She took Mum’s hand and clasped it for a moment in both of her own before letting go. “It’s great to meet both of you.” She glanced at me, a question in her eyes.

I answered it. “Saina’s my girlfriend,” I told them. It still made me feel kind of giddy to be able to say that.

“Oh,” Mum said faintly. She looked at Saina like she was waiting for her to disagree with me. I should probably be insulted by that.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet the people who raised Kayden,” was all Saina said. “He’s a great guy. You must love him very much.”

Okay, how did Saina know to push that specific button? I knew she was a highly trained politician, but she’d walked into this situation knowing nothing. She wasn’t a mind reader. Was she a mind reader? A second spell she’d never told me about?

“Of course,” Mum said, still seeming at a loss. “Have you two been… together long?”

No, but I didn’t want to say that outright. “We’ve been friends for a bit over a year and a half,” I said. “We share some classes.”

“Kayden’s insights into magical history are fascinating,” Saina said, which was just a straightup lie. My insights into magical history consisted mainly of ‘this is boring,’ ‘why did I take this class,’ and occasionally ‘oh, in my other schools they gave us completely the wrong impression of this event’.

“We should move on,” I said quickly before Saina oversold me too much. I was doing a lot better academically at Refujeyo than at my previous schools (probably because the standards were so low), but my parents would only believe so much. My dad shot me a knowing glance, which I assume was supposed to mean ‘Ooh, are we embarrassing you in front of your girlfriend?’ I didn’t protest. That was as good an excuse as any.

“You said there were outdoor areas?” Mum asked as we left.

“Yeah, of course. Fresh air and sunlight and all that. I’ll show you the island, come on.” I lead the way to Agreabla Insulo, the little island with the cabin and with Mae and Terry’s garden, tuning out Fiore’s description of the different outside areas and how great they were for health or development or whatever story he was spinning. I was busy kinda panicking.

Running into Saina had been alright. She knew how to give a good impression. Passing random students in the halls was fine; they barely looked at us. But what if we ran into Mae and Terry on the island?

I pictured Mae, bright red hair half-shaved to reveal her mage tattoo, dressed in ratty jeans with a coloured sweater slung over her shoulders being the only indication of her rank, offering my dad a cigarette.

I really should have prepared for this better.

My heart leapt into my throat when we came out onto the island and I heard voices, but they weren’t Mae and Terry’s. A couple of initiates were hanging out on the beach. They stared at us, openly curious, but seemed too intimidated to approach.

Best to avoid the beach, just in case. I lead the way into the trees. “Let me show you the cabin.”

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. No chance of rain. Someone, presumably Mae and Terry, had patched up the cabin a little more since I’d been there last; some of the sloppy repair jobs on the roof and windows were a bit neater, and two of the barrels had been replaced with actual wooden chairs.

“It’s a fun place to hang out,” I explained. “Some of my friends have been patching it up. Want to see their garden?”

I showed them all the interesting parts of the island, and Mum seemed satisfied. I glanced at Fiore, questioning. We had a few more outside areas to show them, if necessary, but everywhere we showed them carried the risk that they’d find something to dislike. Should we do more outside places, or move on?”

When they weren’t looking, he waved his hand in a so-so motion. This area was probably fine. Let’s push forward.

“You’ve got to see the library before you go,” I said. “Come on.”

Dad raised an eyebrow. “You hate reading.”

“Yeah, but it looks really cool.” He wasn’t wrong, but we’d decided that we’d have to show them something vaguely academic and I didn’t want them to interview any of my instruktanti. My instruktanti were all weirdos.

The library looked how it always did; tall, imposing shelves full of thick tomes. It didn’t contain any computers or shelves of DVDs or audiobooks; there was no need, when everyone carried their own tablets everywhere. There were printers and scanners, but for the most part it looked old, dignified and majestic.

Except for the students, of course. The handful of students scattered around the place were mostly making paper planes, playing games on their tablets, or generally procrastinating whatever they’d come to do.

Hua and Talbot were sitting at one desk. Hua was absorbed in a thick tome in a complicated alphabet I didn’t know (Chinese, presumably?), while Talbot sat back, fingers brushing over the surface of his tablet. I couldn’t see what he was reading – the screen looked flat and transparent to me, and if he was reading braille I wouldn’t recognise the characters if I saw them anyway – but judging from the movement of his fingers, he might have been looking at a graph? Or playing a computer game, maybe. It wasn’t important.

Unlike meeting Saina, this part was planned. I didn’t necessarily want to introduce my parents to my array of political friends, but they had sent me here specifically to deal with my curse, and I wanted to keep that in their minds.

“Oh, hey! Talbot! Hua!” I lead my parents over to the pair. “Mum, Dad, this is Talbot and Yuan Hua.” I paused a moment. “They’re cursed, like me.”

The pair looked up, and Mum and Dad both took a tiny step back. I realised why, too late – to them, the wind whipping around Talbot in the otherwise still air of the library probably looked very strange. Talbot’s spell was always moving, that was simply in the nature of any magic that was externalised as wind, but it usually wasn’t this active unless he was using it to sense the shape of something, or he was agitated.

Ah. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a great idea, after all. Talbot might accept Refujeyo as the lesser of two evils compared to his former master, but he didn’t exactly like or trust the place, and he was honest and straightforward by nature. Was he going to be able to do this?

Hua clearly noticed the same problem. “Calm down,” she told him in Ido. “We’re playing nice today, remember?”

“I am being nice,” he replied in the same language.

Switching to Ido myself, I said, “Guys. Rude. There are non-Ido-speakers right here.”

“It’s fine,” Hua said dismissively. “They don’t know we’re being rude, they’ll just assume we’re doing it because my English is terrible. Westerners always assume someone’s English is terrible until you prove otherwise.”

Hua got up and fixed my parents with a pleasant smile. “Mr James. Mrs James. Is good to see.”

Really? Really?

“It’s nice to meet you, too,” Dad said, a little awkwardly. They were actually buying it.

I kept my tone pleasant and conversational as I asked, in Ido, “Hua, what the fuck? Why?”

“Because it’s very funny,” she replied, equally conversational. In English, she said, “We have… group, for curse.”

“Support group,” Talbot chimed in helpfully, because apparently he was secretly evil, too. “The term you want is support group.”

“Support group! Thanks.”

In Ido, I said, “You’re the serious one! You’re the only one who never makes stupid jokes. Have you secretly been a troll all this time?” (Ido was a language with a severely limited vocabulary; words like ‘troll’ had had to be invented by the student body. The student body had attacked the task with gusto.)

“So sorry you had to find out this way,” Hua replied in Ido, not sounding sorry at all.

“Kayden,” Mum asked, “what language is that?”

“Ido,” I said. “It’s the school’s official language. Sorry.”

“Kayden is good at Ido,” Hua said. “Talk very good.”

Which was another lie; my Ido was barely passable. Why did everyone feel they had to lie about me to talk me up to my parents? Were my actual skills that unimpressive? Also, ‘talk very good’? I knew what Chinese speakers with rudimentary English sounded like; I heard them around the school all the time. So, presumably, did Hua. Not only was she pretending to be bad at English for no reason but to make fun of my parents, she was being deliberately bad at pretending that, because she thought it was funny that they wouldn’t notice.

“What have you got against my parents?” I asked in Ido.

“Literally everything you’ve told us about them,” Talbot replied, before switching to English. “Your son is lucky,” he told my parents. “When curses get out of control, the results can be very dangerous.” He stood up, picking up his white cane, presumably to make sure my parents noticed he was blind. (I mean… fair. I hadn’t noticed until he eventually told me.)

“I’m lucky to be alive,” he said, as unnecessarily melodramatic as always. His spell even flicked up his hair at the perfect dramatic moment as he spoke.

“Talbot learn very good control,” Hua said. “I not so good. Still learning hard.”

I’d expected Talbot to be the problem person, not Hua. “I hear it’s all about hard work, Hua,” I told her, “so we should stop interrupting your study time. It was great to see you guys! ’Bye!”

I let Fiore take control of the rest of the tour. We briefly visited most of the critical areas of the school, avoiding the gym, the Pit, and the hospital. I wasn’t going to explain the Pit to my parents, the gym had a few areas that I knew they’d disapprove of (like the giant rock climbing cliff), and the hospital had kuracar Malas in it. They’d seen Malas before as an illusory projection from Instruktanto Cooper’s wand, but he’d been a single colour and slightly translucent, making him look like just a guy. In the flesh, with those pupilless robins-egg-blue eyes, blue magic illuminating the mage mark stark against black skin and crawling up the veins in his arms, he looked… well, ever since I’d learned that his spells were technically too powerful for a body to contain and he was only alive due to their constant maintenance of his flesh, I couldn’t see him as looking like anything but a bunch of magic clumsily sewn into a human skin. Anyway. Best not to spook my parents with the best diagnostician and triage doctor in the world, if possible.

At the end of the tour, while we were waiting for Instruktanto Cooper to come and pick up my parents, Fiore left us alone. Mum watched me with moist eyes.

“You seem so happy here,” she said.

Happy? I… supposed so. Mostly I tended to be stressed out and annoyed at something, but they didn’t need to know that.

“We were worried,” Dad added. “Whenever you come home, you’re always so tense and upset. We thought maybe this place wasn’t good for you.”

“Well,” I said. “It is.”

Mum and Dad exchanged a glance. Mum spoke. “That’s good,” she said gently. “I’m happy for you. And so proud of you.” She swallowed. “But, you should stop taking the hormones.”

I crossed my arms. “No.”

“I’m glad you have friends here, but you’re a child! You shouldn’t be taking body-altering drugs at your age.”

“Actually, for puberty, I’m pretty old.”

“I’m your mother. I only want what’s best for you.”

I thought about what Fiore had said, about how anyone could be bought off so long as you arranged things so they wouldn’t feel guilty about it. I didn’t think he was right about everyone having their price, but the rest of what he’d said had merit. Sometimes, what people needed wasn’t to be beaten with facts, but an excuse to not feel bad about changing their minds.

“I know,” I said. “And you gave me what was best for me, when you sent me here. You always do.” I paused. “But, I’m not going off the hormones. That’s just a statement of fact. You can try to fight the school on this, try to make me come home, but you’ll lose. I need to be here, the law backs me up, and the school backs me up. You won’t be protecting me by fighting, because you can’t win. You’ll just be making things harder for me for no reason.” I let myself sound vulnerable. “I need you to trust me.”

“Of course I trust you, love,” Mum said. “I just… I don’t want you to make decisions that you’re going to regret. You’ve always been so reckless – ”

“Yeah, because we all always assumed I just didn’t have a future to worry about. Don’t look at me like that; you both know it was true. And now, because of Refujeyo, I do.” Unless everyone died during the birth of an eldritch spellgod, but they didn’t need to know about that.

“We’ll think about it,” Mum said, which is what she said when she’d been convinced to cave on something but didn’t want to admit it. She’d probably keep nagging me for a few months, but I didn’t think she’d go forward with legally challenging the school. Success.

“There’s one more thing,” I said.

“What is it, champ?” Dad asked.

I steeled myself. I didn’t feel good about this part. I was going to have to deceive them. I mean, I’d been deceiving them all day; I’d been deceiving them since getting to Refujeyo in the first place.  But this was different. This was about something sacred between us.

This was about the curse.

I reminded myself that they’d started it, what with the whole chest cutting and denial thing, and pushed on.

“We haven’t figured out how to get this thing out,” I said, indicating my heart. “The doctor thinks it’s because it’s tightly bound. But we can’t figure out how it’s bound, and we need to know that.”

“Okay,” Mum said. “How can we help?”

“I remember a lot of what we tried, to bind it. But not everything. We need details on everything that was tried. Everything you remember, anyway. If we know what worked, we can remove the curse.”

“We’ll have a think, and get that to you,” Mum promised.

“Thank you.” I gave them a hug. We said our goodbyes. I tried not to look too excited.

My parents would be off our backs, and I’d soon have the name of that cursebinder that Max wanted to track down. Or at least enough details that I could ask my parents for a name.

Perfect.