4.10: Dream a Little Dream

I skimmed the letter. It said basically what Fiore had.

“Oh, this is really bad timing,” I said. “And bad in general. Fiore, we have to shut this down right away.”

“You don’t want to leave?” he asked again.

“I can’t! Kylie is here!”

“Do they know about the familiarity bond?”

“No, and they absolutely cannot find out. They won’t understand; all they’ll see is something else putting me in danger, something they weren’t consulted on, and then they’ll pursue this forever. But we have to deal with it before it gets out of hand, because if Refujeyo refuses and they keep pushing and the Australian media get even a whiff of a story that looks vaguely like ‘the mages are kidnapping your children’, then what’s that going to do for cursed kids who need this place?” I had my disagreements with Skolala Refujeyo, and I was never going to forgive Malas for how he’d withheld information to essentially trick me here, but there were kids out there with curses who needed to come here and learn to control them beforethey screwed up their lives in some horrible way. We didn’t need that kind of mess. “Do they have a legal case?” I asked.

“Technically, no. This isn’t Australia and Australian law doesn’t apply here. But, if the Australian government gets involved…”

“Then there’s politics,” I moaned, putting my head in my hands. “And they will get involved, if the media gets involved, which will happen if my parents don’t get results. We have to deal with this before it gets that far.” I peeked at Fiore through my fingers, an idea striking me. “You know. It might be possible to get them to simply drop the case. You used to come up here a lot to check up on di Fiore when you weren’t teaching here.”

“Yes?”

“So. That’s allowed. People coming in to check on family members. Refujeyo is pretty secretive; my family doesn’t know much about us. That’s probably where a lot of their worry is coming from.”

“Are you suggesting we invite them over for a tour?”

“Why not? They’re doing this because they’re concerned for my safety. During the holidays, we had a fight about… well, it doesn’t matter. Point is, I’m making choices that they think I’ll regret, and they want me home so they can stop me from making those choices. If we can convince them that this place is safe and good for me, then I can probably get them to drop the case.”

“I wouldn’t call your history at Refujeyo safe.”

“They don’t need to know about that, though. We can make everything look safe for a couple of hours.”

“Hmm. Yes, that might work. Alright, I’ll draft a letter. I’m relieved that you’re on our side with this, Kayden.”

I rolled my eyes. “If I was trying to leave, I wouldn’t go crying to my parentsabout it.”

“Of course not.” Fiore sounded amused.

I left him to his letter drafting and headed off to get ready for my next lesson. This was yet another thing I really didn’t need.

That night, I got ready for bed, shut my curtains, and pulled out a dose of my newly brewed Broth of Dreams. Now, to make absolutely sure I’d gotten it right, with a field test.

I made sure I was comfortably situated before putting the potion to my lips. Lorelei’s Broth of Dreams was a recall potion that worked in one’s sleep, as the name suggested, so it included a fairly strong sedative. For people who had a lot of good memories to call on, it tended to be used more as a sleep aid than for its primary purpose. But that wasn’t what I wanted it for.

I intended to relive a fairly unpleasant memory tonight.

The potion stung my throat with lavender and pepper as I swallowed it down. Immediately, my whole body felt heavy; I managed to get the glass onto my bedside table before succumbing to the desire to just sink back into my blankets. With the last dregs of my rapidly fading will, I dragged my right arm over to touch the scars on my left. Two semicircular scars, torn open somewhere in the Labyrinth of Dreams… where had the injury occurred? What had happened?

The darkness was complete.

I felt like I was falling, but it was more than that. More than the absence of gravity felt when in freefall. A vertigo not just of movement, but of light, of sound, of temperature; I felt like I was poised on the edge of time, waiting for input that didn’t come, Unable to move, unable to do anything – or perhaps I was doing things; how would I know? I had no sense of where my limbs were. No sense of what my limbs were.

Then there was pain. Input, at last! I grabbed onto it for orientation. A jagged edge of… something. An edge of a concept? Did that make sense? It was so hard to think. No; it was easy to think, it was just hard to think coherently, when I had nothing concrete to think about. Some things hurt to think about and some didn’t, but I couldn’t remember which was which without any context to –

There! A voice. Not a real voice; the illusion of one. Like a voice in your head. It was saying something important.

“Followed by the speaker’s Kiss – ” Fionnrath’s Destiny said in my mind, every syllable grating against my thoughts before fading again.

“Deep in shadows of the scars – ” it added a while later, unhelpfully, with a lance of painful nausea.

“ – to truths hidden deep in time,” it finished, leaving me alone in the silent darkness once more.

“What does that mean?!” I wanted to scream. Maybe I did scream. I couldn’t hear or feel it. I couldn’t hear or feel anything.

Except the cold stone under my cheek, I supposed. And the shaking of my shoulder. And Max frantically calling my name.

I wrenched my eyes open. “What?” I mumbled into the floor. I couldn’t see much beyond the blankets that had fallen out of bed with me, and it was too much effort to lift my head to look further.

At the sound of my voice, two people sighed in relief.

“Are you alright?” Max asked. “Can you get up?”

“No,” I mumbled.

“I’m calling the janitors,” Kylie said.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You’re fine but you can’t get up?”

With a supreme effort of will, I pulled my arms forward and lifted myself up onto my elbows. But this was too much work, so after a few seconds I let my head collapse back down onto my arms. “I took a potion. It had a sedative in it.” It was hard to think, now that I was awake. My head felt like it was full of cotton wool.

“Oh,” Max said. “Having trouble sleeping?”

Shaking my head seemed like too much effort, so I didn’t. “Recall potion. For dreams. Sedative went fine. Recall didn’t.” I twisted my head enough to see Kylie. “Did you prophesy something just now? Something about a kiss?”

“Um. No? I was just chilling out when you screamed and fell out of bed.”

“Sorry.” I let my eyes close again. “The Destiny was being annoying. I’ll explain in the morning.” My head hurt.

“Kayden, do notgo back to sleep.”

“M’tired.”

“Oh my god! At least get back into bed!”

“Too far.”

“Kayden, there’s a forcefield on your bed; if you fall asleep down there we can’t lift you onto – ”

I didn’t hear the rest of Max’s sentence.

I woke up sometime later, sore all over, on something soft and warm. I was lying on a bunch of spare pillows and blankets, under a thick doona. I pushed myself to my feet, stumbled, and went to get some water.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Kylie said from her own bed. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah.” I felt… fine, mostly. My head still hurt a bit. No, it didn’t hurt, it was more like the threat of pain, like having a bruise that feels fine so long as you don’t touch it. A sort of instinctive awareness that my head could hurt quite badly, if I used it wrong.

That was… probably not a great sign. Maybe I should go and see Malas.

I poured myself a glass of water and gulped it down. “What time is it?”

“Early.”

“Really? Wow. I feel pretty well-rested. I’d assumed I’d slept in.”

“No, you probably just slept really deeply from the magical sedative. What was that all about?”

“Oh, nothing important. I just – is Max up? I don’t want to explain this twice.”

“I’m up,” came Max’s blanket-muffled voice from behind his bedcurtains.

“Right. Memory recall potion. Lorelei’s Broth of Dreams. I know I made it properly; I had it checked. But I didn’t get the memory I wanted, so I must have screwed up somehow.” I glared at the scars on my arm, like it was their fault.

Max pushed his head around the curtain. “Andrea Costa checked it, you mean? And said it was fine?”

“Yeah.”

“But it didn’t work?”

“No. I’m not really sure why.”

“You get anything?”

“Not really. It was really unpleasant, actually. Just a hallucination of Fionnrath’s Destiny telling me garbled nonsense that it wasn’t actually prophesying.”

Max looked questioningly at Kylie, who shook her head. “You were with me. You know I wasn’t prophesying.”

“Hmm. Well, there you go then. Sounds like being a familiar reacts badly with magical potions. Hardly surprising.”

“It doesn’t, though,” I said. “Socks can take potions just fine.”

“Socks is a cat. Magic is weird with humans. Of course, there’s an obvious way to test – what memory were you trying to access?”

“I was trying to figure out how I cut and healed this arm. You suggested several ways it might have healed, and I want more information.”

“We were together a lot of the time in the labyrinth. There’s a good chance I saw it. I’ll take the potion and try to remember tonight, and if I can get a result where you couldn’t, it’s probably the familiar thing.”

“I’ll try, too,” Kylie said. “In case I saw and Max didn’t.”

“You guys don’t have to do that,” I protested. “Nothing that we saw down there was pleasant; you don’t have to go through – ”

“We’re going to, though, so let’s save time and skip the argument,” Kylie said.

“Knowing if there’s something unusual in the way that potions interact with you could be important data,” Max agreed. “Anyway, when you figure out how that healing potion reactivated on your arm and revolutionise potion making, I intend to steal some of your credit by assisting in this early data gathering.”

“Won’t you have too much fame from your discoveries already? All those award ceremonies will cut into your reading time.”

“Nonsense. I’ll coast on the fame, avoid ever having to do more actual research, and have all reading time.”

“Why am I rooming with nerds again?” Kylie asked the ceiling.

“Hey,” I protested. “I’m not a nerd. He is the nerd around here. I’m clearly a jock.”

“Magistus is a jock. You’re too skinny to be a jock.”

“I have muscles! You just can’t see them because I prefer voluminous robes.”

“Like Alania, the Ubernerd.”

“That doesn’t track,” Max cut in. “Sure, Alania is the ubernerd and wears big robes, but I’m also definitely a nerd and wear tight, fitted robes, so – ”

“So you dress like a snobby rich kid, and Kayden dresses like an old lady nerd,” Kylie concluded.

“Why do we room with this girl, again?” I asked Max. “She’s mean.”

Kylie playfully stuck her tongue out at me, before closing her bedcurtains to get ready for the day. I should probably do the same, I figured.

As soon as my mind started to feel normal again.