4.12: Past Performance

“You’re distracted,” Saina noted as I sprinkled powdered liquorice root into a flask with a tiny spoon.

“Just focused,” I lied. I could feel Fionnrath’s Destiny moving throughout my body, and I imagined that I could feel it in my brain, too, eating it away. I didn’t need to be thinking about this; whether I was right or wrong, there was nothing I could do about it. I needed something else to focus on. I needed to focus on this damned memory potion.

“Careful!” Saina grabbed my hand before I added too much root. Her fingertips were cool and soft. Well, uh, that was a decent distraction, too, I guess.

“Th-thanks.” I put the spoon down. Her hand disappeared from mine.

“I’ll just go get the – ” she tripped.

I caught her.

I’d boosted Saina up enough cliffsides during pit comp practice to know how heavy she felt in my arms, and she seemed lighter than usual. Had the stress of the whole Heiress thing made her lose weight? Or had I become stronger? Or was it just the atmosphere of –

She traced a single finger lightly along my jaw.

I kissed her.

It wasn’t like kissing Magistus. Kissing Magistus was easy, because he knew what he was doing. With Saina, it was clear that neither of us had a clue; after the second time I somehow pinched my lip between her teeth and mine, I gave up and instead kissed her jaw, her chin, her fingertips and, in a sudden fit of daring, her collarbone.

She put her hands on my shoulders. “Kayden.”

I stopped. She was tense in my arms. Oh, fuck. Oh, I’d misread the situation, hadn’t I? I was an arsehole! Fuck!

“Sorry! I misinterpreted – ”

“No! No, you didn’t. I just, um.” She swallowed. “I’m engaged.”

I stared. I hadn’t even known that she was dating.

“You’re what?!”

“Engaged. I just… thought you should probably know.”

“Oh! You think? Really?” I ran a hand through my hair. “Just to be totally clear here, you have been flirting with me, yes?”

“Um, yeah. A, a bit.”

“Even though you’ve got a boyfriend.”

“No, I have a fiance.”

“That’s worse!”

“It’s not like… it’s an arranged marriage.”

An arranged marriage. The cold fury that rose in my heart caught me off guard. “Which arsehole – ”

“It’s not like that! He’s a friend! A good friend. Our parents set it up, but we’re… we’re going to go through with it. Even though we don’t feel like that about each other. It’s a good match.”

“You’re going to marry someone you don’t love because your parents said so?”

“I do love him, just not in that way. And I’m going to marry him because it’s a good idea. We’re close, we respect each other. Strong, happy marriages have been built on a lot less. Not everybody gets to marry the cute boy they saw making a hotdog kebab at a party.”

“The hotdog kebab was the first time we met. Are you saying you fell in love with me at first sight?”

She blushed. “That’s not the point. The point is, we have an arrangement.”

“Uh, yeah, for marriage.”

“A different arrangement. Nobody’s even planning a wedding until we’re both nineteen and graduated at craftsperson level, whichever comes last. So, until then, we don’t consider ourselves committed to each other. We’re engaged, but we’re not dating.”

“So that means… what, exactly?”

Saina sighed. “I like you. A lot. To be clear, I mean both in a friend way and a romantic way. If you feel the same, and I’m guessing you do, then I’d like to… you know. Explore that. But anything we have has a time limit. After I graduate, I’m getting married.” She swallowed nervously. “If that’s a dealbreaker for you, I understand. That’s fine, that makes perfect sense, and you don’t need to explain. I just… thought you should know.”

“I… I think I need to think about this.”

“Yeah. That, that makes sense.”

We both looked at our half-finished potion. An awkward silence stretched between us.

“Should we maybe make this another time?” I asked.

“Yeah! Yeah, I’m really busy today, anyway. We should clean this up and go.”

“Yeah.”

We cleaned up, mostly in silence, and I retreated to my room. I’d hoped for some space to think with everyone in class, but Max was behind his curtains, and I could hear him writing something.

“Kayden?” he called, shortly after I’d entered.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember the first time we all went to Duniyasar and the Prophecy gave individual advice to everybody?”

“You mean when it said extremely ominously that you were going to break yourself three times and break the world?”

“Yes, yes, that time. Did you record that?”

“I… think so?”

“Can you send me the recording?”

“Worried about your fortune?”

“No, that’s not important. But the other ones might be.”

“Uh… sure. I’ll see if I can dig it up.”

“Thank you.”

I sent the file and sat back, mind spinning. The Destiny, and brain damage, and the danger posed by my spell. Saina and her arranged marriage. My parents and the tour we had to arrange for them, and oh fuck, I’d agreed to go to that graduation party on the weekend too, hadn’t I?

I still had to figure out how to ‘prepare its heart in offering’, to deal with the spell in my heart. I had to figure out – well, I didn’t have to, but it would be nice to figure out – if Fionnrath’s Destiny was doing anything to my brain, to my mind.

I glanced at my bedside table. I’d prepared Lorelei’s Broth of Dreams for Kylie and Max the previous night, and I’d left the bottle out. There was maybe one more dose in there.

The random, disjointed sentence fragments that the Destiny had spoken to me in my dream were still fresh in my mind. It had spoken of the ‘speaker’s Kiss’, and shadows of scars, and truths hidden in time.

And I didn’t have any classes on that afternoon that I couldn’t skip.

“I’m taking a nap,” I announced to Max, before pulling my bedcurtains closed and downing the potion. Speaker’s Kiss, Speaker’s Kiss, Speaker’s Kiss…

I stood in a cottage, while the rain thundered outside. No matter how I pulled on the door, it wouldn’t open. The spellthing stared me down with its perfectly symmetrical eyes and smiled, revealing a wide jaw filled with identical teeth.

“Drink up, dear.” It indicated a steaming mug of tea on the table.

“Why won’t this door open?”

“Because you haven’t finished entering the building. You can’t leave until you enter, can you? That would be nonsense. When we enter somebody’s home, we drink tea.”

I leaned harder on the door, but it wouldn’t budge. I headed back to the table and, with some trepidation, picked up the teacup.

“To your health,” the spellthing said, raising its cup.

“And yours,” I replied, raising mine. I went to take a sip of what was basically just water (it hadn’t steeped nearly long enough, it had been in that pot for seconds, it was like the spellthing didn’t even know how to make proper tea), and stopped.

Something was wrong here, and I’d just figured out what it was.

I put the cup back down. “Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, “but I really must be going.”

The spellthing’s smile became a lot less friendly. “You thank me for my hospitality, but you won’t honour me with basic politeness?”

“How polite is it to try to trap your guests here forever against their will?”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean, my dear.”

“Really? You told me that I won’t be able to leave this place carrying that tracker, right before you dropped it in your teapot. And now you expect me to drink it?”

“Ah, so you did notice. Such a pity. You really are fun to have around.”

I tried the door again. Still stuck. “Let me go.”

“I told you, you haven’t finished entering yet.”

“So if I drink tea with you, you’ll open the door, but I’ll still be trapped in this forest anyway? If you wanted to trap me in the forest, why even tell me about the tracker in the first place?”

“Well, it’s hardly fun if you don’t have a chance, is it?”

“Your stunt with the tracker doesn’t give me a chance either. So how can it be fun?”

“Hmm. That is a good point. Alright, dear, how about this – answer my three riddles, and I’ll release you from your obligation of manners and open the door for you.”

“Any other options?” I asked.

“Of course. You can simply stay with me forever.”

“I’d die of thirst within a few days.”

“Perhaps, but time means little here. It could seem like years.”

“Years experiencing the agony of slow dehydration? No, thanks.”

“It’s that or the riddles, my dear.”

“Fine. Ask your riddles.”

“Here is the first. If a collection of synaptic impulses is a thought, what is a collection of thoughts?”

Did that even count as a riddle? “Uh, a mind?”

“Here is the second. If a collection of thoughts is a mind, what is a collection of minds?”

“A society.”

“Here is the third. If a collection of minds is a society, what is a collection of societies?”

“Um… the planet?”

“Excellent. Those are my riddles, and I must inform you that you got all three of them wrong. A mind, really? A mind? What an arrogantly human answer! You see a barrier, here,” it tapped my head, “preventing the thoughts within from connecting with the thoughts without, and decide, oh, that must be meaningful. These thoughts are trapped together so there must be something special about them, and you bundle them together and call them an individual, decide that you somehow exist. A mind! Really! What is it about minds that delude themselves into thinking that minds are real, or important? I’m sorry, my little dear, but you lose. And I – ” The spellthing leaned closer, and in a panic, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

“You said you’d let me go if I answered your riddles! You never said I had to get them right!”

The spellthing leaned back, looking puzzled for a moment. Then its grin widened further, impossibly wide until it seemed like its whole head would split open, and it tipped back its head and laughed. “Oh! You are fun! But technically correct, which really is a pity. I suppose you must be going, but how about I give you a kiss to remember me by?”

“Uh… no, thanks.”

“Next time, then. Instead, for the entertainment, I will give you a gift – the answer to the first riddle. The other two, you will have to find for yourself.” It reached past me to push the door open, and whispered in my ear, “A collection of thoughts is a dream.”

I got the hell out of there.

Behind me, the spellthing yelled, “Travel safe! And move quickly, my deer; there are hunters out there bigger than me, with a stronger taste for venison!”

I woke up, and sat bolt upright. Hardly daring to breathe in case the dream faded, I traced the lines of the scars on my wrist with my fingertips. Two semicircles, like a bite mark, but far wider than any human jaw.

As wide, perhaps, as the jaw of the spellthing that I’d met during my Initiation.

I stared at the scars for a bit, and then, very slowly, got up. I must have been asleep for awhile, because Kylie was back from class; she and Max were discussing something quietly, and looked up at me in surprise.

“Kayden? Are you – ?”

“It’s not me,” I breathed. “The prophecy. About the Hero and the Child. It’s got nothing to do with me or my spell. It’s…” I swallowed. “It’s so much worse.”