4.09: Return

Some food, a good night’s sleep in a familiar bed, and a couple of hours in a workshop brewing potions put me in a much better frame of mind, with some much needed perspective. Plenty of kids had parents a lot less supportive than mine, and did just fine. I wouldn’t need to see Mum for another six months or so, so for now, I could just concentrate on the actual important things, like schoolwork and Max’s magical theories, and prophesied threat of very probable death as a sacrifice, which hurt less.

I was good at not thinking about things that upset me. It would be fine.

I was also good at potions. And surprisingly decent at runes, these days; I’d expected to always kind of hate them, the way I kind of hated reading and writing, but I was just about ready to test up a grade ahead of most of my peers. Maybe it was some kind of unconscious desire to be good at the kinds of magic I could actually do, with my stupid spell not being castable. Maybe it was something about the instinctive logic of how runes fit together, more like a machine or a flowchart or a map than like a paragraph of writing. Maybe it was just sheer practice, sicne we seemed to be constantly dealing with the damned things in mysterious and sinister circumstances. Whatever. Point was, I was academically above average in two whole subjects for once.

And my favourite of them was potions.

I’d been working on Lorelei’s Broth of Dreams, one of the simpler memory potions I’d wanted to try, and while I’d make sure to get it tested before actually drinking the thing, I was pretty sure I’d nailed it, first try. Really, I should’ve started with something else if I wanted to ‘pay’ Magistus for his help and sell to students; the Broth wasn’t really useful for exams. It was a recall potion that required the drinker to be asleep. But it was simple, could be made with ingredients I had on hand, and suited my personal purposes just fine.

I finished up about ten minutes before my first potioncrafting lesson of the semester, which was good timing. I took a dose with me and headed in early. Instruktanto Costa was already at her desk.  She smiled at the little jar in my hand. “Another one?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. Hand it over.” She took out a clean paintbrush and three strips of paper, each about a metre in length, striped in rainbow colours. I handed the jar over; she inspected it in the light for several long seconds before giving it a cautious sniff. “Hmm. Lavender. A sleeping draught?”

“Close,” I said.

“Hmm.” She dipped his brush in and swept it across the first strip of paper. Some of the coloured stripes changed on contact with the liquid; most remained the same. “Oh! A recall potion. Kalu’s Crystal – no, with the lavender, it has to be the Broth of Dreams, right?”

I nodded.

“Nice! I thought the memory potions might gather some interest. Although, if this is for exams, you might want to look into another one. Can’t take a test while you’re asleep.”

“The waking ones are more complicated. I wanted to ease in.”

“Fair enough. Just let me finish the check.” She painted the potion over the other two paper strips, studied the colour changes, and then carefully put a drop on her tongue. After several seconds of quiet focus, she gave a single, judicious nod. “It should be safe,” she said. “And effective, too – that’s a remarkably clear violet on the amblie reaction. You must have gotten a really clean separation for the first decanting.”

“I have a lot of practice at decanting.”

“Ha. I’ll bet.”

The class had started to file in, so I took my seat. Then, for the first time in several weeks, someone took the seat next to me.

I looked up in surprise. Saina smiled at me. “Hi,” she said.

Here’s the thing about taking testosterone. It has, um. A fair few effects on the body and mind. Hormones affect different people differently, of course, but I’d been warned of the kinds of things to expect. Some of it was obvious – the voice, the hair, the, uh, sweating (which didn’t seem fair, because I wasn’t building any more muscle, and it was just ridiculous to get the sweat without the easier muscle building, wasn’t it?), and then there was the mood stuff, which was a bit more ambiguous because I wasn’t great at recognising my moods at the best of times, but. One of the things was, well, in the months since I’d started, I’d noticed pretty people in a more… physical way. A directly and insistently physical kind of way.

This was pretty normal, for puberty, so I’d just kind of dealt with it, and adapted. And it didn’t bother me any more, it had ceased to be a problem.

Except, apparently, for with Saina. Because after a couple of months apart and the general background worry that I’d never seen her again, her sudden presence directly next to me was, well. I was very aware all over again that Saina was very pretty.

So instead of saying something suave and cool or even just friendly and lighthearted, I just stared at her for a few seconds and choked out, “You’re back.”

“Yeah, well. Classes.”

“I thought I might never see you again.” Oh, come on – could I have phrased that any more pathetically? I knew what Saina looked like. And, um, smelled like. Could I just get a grip, already? I cleared my throat to clarify. “I mean, I know we’re all kind of trapped until we graduate, but with…” I glanced around to make sure nobody could hear us and lowered my voice a little… “your family and everything, and I’m sure your mum was worried – ”

“Oh, she was nothappy. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to convince her not to send a bodyguard with me. Doesn’t matter how undiplomatic that would’ve been, or that I was the one putting myself in danger and not the school, or that I wasn’t even in all that much danger since the prophecy turned out not to be about me at all. She was this close to making me choose between a bodyguard at school or a nice safe private apprenticeship to finish my schooling. It took half the family to talk her out of it.”

“So no wild, daring adventures this semester then, huh?”

“None that she’ll find out about. Secret adventures, I’m all up for.”

The lesson started then, so we had to shut up. I kind of pretended to pay attention to whatever the instruktanto was talking about until it was over, and then we went to Saina’s bedroom.

Not in a weird way. It was just that, after the whole Heiress prophecy, most of our conversations seemed to take place in her room or a potioncrafting workshop. We sat in our usual spots on cushions on the floor, resting our shoulders and heads on the force fields of unclaimed beds, and talked.

“Is everyone alright?” Saina asked. “Max and Kylie and everyone?”

“Oh, yeah. Kylie’s recovered fine. Max, um… gets quiet, if you bring the whole thing up, but we haven’t for a while, so. I think he’s fine? It’s hard to tell with him, sometimes.”

“Ugh, legacy mages.”

“You’re a legacy mage.”

“Believe me, I know.”

“So he’s alright, then? They found him innocent? I tried to find out what was going on, but nobody would tell me anything.”

“We… don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Nobody’s told us anything! They brought us back to the school after the Duniyasar thing, I had one meeting with my lawyer, and then…” I spread my hands. “Dead silence.”

“Really? Nothing?”

“Nothing. Maybe it turns out it wasn’t a big deal and everyone’s just decided to forget the whole thing.”

“More likely, everything’s cocooned in too much red tape to move, because it’s political.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“So everyone’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop?”

“Story of my life. I am waiting for so many shoes to drop. An entire shoe store is just going to fall on me out of the sky one day.”

“Heh. I know what that’s like.”

We fell into a short silence. To fill it, I said, “Does Peter know you’re back? He’ll be super excited to be able to book us for more pit comps.”

“Hammond knows. I’m sure he’ll pass it along.”

More silence. Saina broke it this time.

“I’m glad you’re all okay,” she said quietly. “It was my fault that Kylie was in danger, and Max had to – ”

“How on earth could any of what happened be construed as your fault? And don’t say something like, ‘oh, if I hadn’t given Duniyasar to Kylie, maybe nobody would have tried to kill her!’, because that’s both wrong and ridiculous on multiple levels.”

“Of course not,” Saina said. “But she was only in danger because I was distracting you. Everyone was wasting time trying to protect me instead of the person who actually needed protecting.”

“Because we misinterpreted a prophecy. It had nothing to do with anything you did. We made a mistake.”

“If I had’ve told Mum and gone into protection with her instead of put you all in danger over my own stupid preferences, you wouldn’t have had to waste your time on me.”

“We didn’t waste any time on you,” I mumbled. “I like spending time with you.” After a short, awkward pause, I continued, “Anyway, we probably would have till assumed the prophecy was about you even if you did that. It’s not like we would’ve been in a better position to figure out it was Kylie. And without you, we never would have gotten to her in time to save her. So. Not your fault.”

“I should have done more. Max shouldn’t have had to – ”

“I distinctly remember you going for Lydia with a switchblade, and Max having to hold you back.”

Saind flushed. “It wasn’t a switchblade. Just a normal blade.”

“Whatever.” My tablet beeped at me, offering a welcome break from what was quickly threatening to become an awkward conversation. I checked the message. It was from Kylie.

Just talked to Taine Cooper. Apparently there are three Aussie witch initiates this semester. We should introduce them to the Coven, but he refused to contact them for me no matter what I tried, so we have to think of something else.

Three! That was… both more and less than I thought there’d be, somehow. I wrote back.

Fuck him, we don’t need teacher help. One of our legacy mage friends has to know a legacy mage initiate. We’ll just ask around until we can find someone who can pass on a message for us.

Before I could write more, I got a message from Fiore, asking to meet immediately. I sent what I’d written to Kylie and groaned.

“I have to go,” I said. “My surveyato wants to talk about something important, apparently.”

“That’s never good. What did you break?”

“Nothing! I have no idea what I could’ve done to cause trouble this specific time!”

Fiore was wringing his long, spidery fingers when I arrived at his office, his jaw tense, but he still flashed me an indulgent uncle kind of smile as he waved me into a seat. He sat across from me, steepled his fingers, and watched me closely for an uncomfortably long time.

“Are you unhappy here, Kayden?”

“I – what?”

“At Skolala Refujeyo. Are you unhappy here? Do you want to be somewhere else?”

What had brought this conversation on? “It’s… fine, here? And why would it matter anyway? I’m nowhere near graduating, and I’m trapped until then.”

“Not… necessarily. There are other options. If you had the desire to explore them.”

What? Was Fiore trying to talk me into an apprenticeship? That didn’t make any sense. I wasn’t a good enough student to be in demand as an apprentice; the only unique thing a master might be interested in was my status as a familiar, and then they’d need Kylie, too. Oh, no – did he mean Fionnrath?

I couldn’t leave. Almost all of my friends were here, I had potions I wanted to try, the Hero and Child prophecy could be best dealt with here, there were those new witch initiates who I wanted to be there for…

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said firmly.

Fiore looked surprised by this. “You’re not trying to leave us?”

“Uh… no?”

“Hmm. Well, that makes things easier and a whole lot more complicated, I suppose.”

“What things? What’s going on?”

Fiore slid an official-looking letter across the desk to me. “Your parents are pursuing legal action against the school. They’re accusing us of child abuse and demanding that we void your contract and send you home.”