Davian was examining himself in a mirror when Cedric descended the stairs and found him on the second floor. The house had been quiet for a while, and wherever Adam had been thrown, he did not attempt to reenter. Davian was looking at the cut on his left cheek, examining it from several angles, and obviously displeased at what he saw.
Cedric crossed over, invariably appearing in the reflection while he walked behind Davian, but then stood off to the side and watched the Mage inspect where the glass had flown past his skin and left a mark.
He was tired, so though he tried to stand, after a while he sat in the plush blue chair that was in the hallway. Cedric looked at Davian, who was still looking at himself and had not yet addressed the wound on his right calf. It was no longer bleeding actively and the blood had dried so that it caught around the hair in places and the broken skin and streaks of blood mostly obscured where there was a tattoo of a word or phrase in a foreign script that was beyond his interpretation.
Cedric was silent and just watching, and then he looked up at the Mage’s back and said, just barely above a whisper, “D’you want me to get something for your leg?”
He frowned intensely, which Cedric saw reflected by the silver.
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage for one evening?”
Cedric felt shame seep into his heart and he looked away just as Davian turned around to look down at him in the chair.
“I thought we had these chaotic outbursts of yours under control,” Davian said sternly. “Have you been using the Dreamcatcher?”
His follow-up was pitiless. “I’ll take it back if you’re not going to use it.”
Cedric was still looking at his knees, so his voice was guilty as it was quiet, but the Mage was perfectly capable of hearing his plea.
“I…” Cedric began, and his eyes twitched and threatened to let forth with tears he did not want. “I have been using it, and it helps—”
He searched for somewhere to hide his eyes.
“I’m just so tired when I get out of bed in the morning,” Cedric said weakly. “I don’t feel like I’ve slept… at all.”
“I don’t give a damn what you feel like!” Davian retorted. “That’s part of growing up! Get used to it!”
Cedric’s eyes were open and wet and an uncomfortable amount of air was flowing unbidden into his tear ducts but still they did not release.
“You had gone months where you were able to keep this at bay and tonight you lost control at the worst possible moment! Do you have any idea what we could have lost?”
He held up his fingers and made a gesture that hurt Cedric to see, and he pushed his lips closed while the Mage spoke.
“We were this close to losing everything we’ve been working for.”
Cedric did not say anything at first, because he was trying to focus on not letting his face fall into tears and when he finally had a grip on himself and he thought he could speak at an appropriate volume, he looked up and tried to make eye contact.
“Davian, I’m… sorry.”
“‘Sorry’ doesn’t cut it! ‘Sorry’ doesn’t repair my library now in shreds and ‘sorry’ doesn’t do a damn thing to give me back the time I’ve spent telling you the same damn thing over and over again.”
“‘Sorry’ is merely a word until it becomes action.”
Davian turned back toward the mirror.
“It will take me days to repair the damage that’s been done. I could have sent him back to the hole from which he crawled.”
“But, no,” he said. “You were afraid.”
Cedric did not look up because it was true.
“What you’re afraid of truly baffles me,” Davian said. “The way you quiver and shake, one would think you had never been brought into the light, lifted out from the darkness.”
“You’re like a trembling leaf; afraid of your own shadow.”
He turned away from himself, but only half of him was toward Cedric.
“I taught him, Cedric. He is what he is because of my mercy, because of the choices I made on a night long ago.”
Cedric looked up then, and saw the blackness in his eyes.
“I gave him life,” Davian said. “And I can just as easily take it away.”
And Cedric did not really know how to respond to that, but he noticed how very still his body had become because he was hearing the Mage.
He had heard, and he remembered to do something, and he wasn’t sure who or what had told him to do that, but he opened his mouth and did it anyway.
He asked a question.
“What was he looking for?” Cedric asked, slowly, as if he had to endure pain to do so.
Davian lowered his eyelids to blink and remoisten his eyes, quiet for just a moment as he considered the question posed by his pupil. The air was heavy when he began to speak, and the past bore down its weight upon the living men.
“When I adopted Adam as my son, I had been alone for many years after the death of my wife. I had loved her so completely that it took me a long time to regrow what I had given to her and lost after she died.”
“I had to learn again that there was still beauty in the world,” he said, mournfully.
“Adam was a dutiful boy, sharp as a whip, and for many years we were very happy,” Davian said. “He lived here, with me, in this house, a house that had not yet held the sound of the laughter of little children.”
“I was away from him for a time because I had to see to what remained of my family estate in England. It was a difficult journey and a matter that had to be treated very carefully, as I could no longer claim I was the ninety-year-old man to whom the land and title rightfully belonged.”
“I surrendered the inheritance, but what I brought back with me was far more valuable.”
He was glowing then, as if the ghosts were dancing in the room before them, and they were playing music only Davian could hear. “Lila was the light of my life; her very presence plucked me up from falling into the deepest pits of despair. I would have loved her even despite mortality, but to find that she possessed a keen and effortless way with any task of magic put before her—”
“And Adam was glad to have a sister, and loved her too,” he said. “I don’t think that anyone who knew her could have not loved her. But he was of a tender age, and perhaps it was in part my own fault for not seeing it, for forgetting what it is to be a young man, and a young man who was torn in tragedy from the circumstances of his birth.”
Davian’s face wore something different then. “Something very contemptible forms in the mind of a man who finds a rival to his mind within the body of a woman.”
Cedric shifted a little then, because his mind was tangled and he felt uncomfortable.
“I had a very special book in which I wrote down all the wonderful and beautiful things about our little family,” Davian said. “Because I had already seen enough of the world to know that when something makes your life worth living, you must hold on to it tightly, and cherish it, so that the light can endure even though the darkest night.”
He paused. “We were both devastated when she passed. A flower cut short just as it had begun to bloom.”
Cedric was listening to Davian, who continued. “I fell into my studies and became reclusive. In that way, yes, I failed him because I had failed myself. And when I turned away from the light of the world, he turned away from me, and sought from others what he could not find within himself.”
“He came to me many years later, and I was gladdened to receive him, and for a brief moment of time, we were a family again.”
“And I—” Davian laughed then, a little laugh that punctuated his self-deprecation. “I was in my cups one night, a vice if I ever had one, and I told him of my diary.”
Cedric sat still and watched the Mage, seeing the face, and the skin, and the blood he had not fully wiped from his cheek.
“Some men cannot see a girl as a girl, a woman as a woman, or a mind as a mind,” Davian said. “They see their own weakness reflected, and they think if they take the conquest before them and refashion the woman as their own—”
He stopped then, because he was suddenly done telling his story, and he quickly looked very tired and morose.
“My apologies, Cedric,” Davian said. “I am quite spent and I have a long task ahead of me to get my affairs in order.”
Cedric looked at him, and he looked back.
“I must rest and regain my concentration. We will get back to where we were. Please do not think me too rude to turn you out at the late hour, but—”
“I will call for you.”
Cedric waited for a moment, and tried to place everything he had seen and heard and witnessed in his mind because he did not want to forget. He went downstairs and put on the black leather jacket he’d been wearing when he entered the home that night.
The air was cold, and part of him was glad to be alone, and glad that the Magicademy would be asleep when he returned at the end of his journey. But when he got to the end of the block and descended the stairs to get to the underground platform, he was still shifting the collar beneath the neck of his jacket because try as he might, it just did not feel quite right.
Cedric took every problem set that was offered to him, but not once had he ever turned one in.
And because his name was never to be found on a class roster, he had never received a grade and he had no way to know whether he actually understood anything he was being taught.
Even though his work would never be dashed in red pen, he still made an attempt at the procedures presented by the professors. But he often purchased the older and cheaper versions of a textbook, if he had one at all, so that sometimes the handouts referenced figures that weren’t there, or sections that were moved or missing entirely.
When he encountered enough roadblocks, because he knew he wasn’t even supposed to be there, and though he didn’t want to, he got tired and gave up.
And sometimes, even after he’d sat through several hours of lectures on standing waves and redshifts, he left the University feeling like he wasn’t any wiser than he had been that morning. And he thought this was probably his own fault, because sometimes he caught himself thinking about magic instead of mathematics and he knew he was caught between two worlds and not fully engaging with either.
Cedric had started going to the University a little over a year ago. Davian had complained to Myrtle that Cedric was not being properly attended to, and that a man of his age needed money to manage his own matters, rather than always needing to come to her begging for a handout. So she obliged and opened her wallet and gave him a twenty when he asked, but soon that was not enough either, and Davian took to making sure the boy always had enough change to finance a trip to Manhattan.
And when Cedric did not have to fear feeling the lint at the bottom of an empty pocket, he allowed himself a treat every now and then and what he liked most of all was seeing things that he had never seen before.
When he crossed through the turnstile and entered the tunnels, the first thing he did was look at the map posted on the wall, and if he had enough time before he had to return for dinner, he picked a place he had never been and went there, stepped into the Sun to see something new, and walked through the streets until he again wanted to sit down.
And that was how he found the University.
Because he was not too young and not yet too old, no one asked him any questions when he went through the iron gate and found his way to the back row of a lecture hall with a hundred other faces that didn’t look too much different than his own.
Sometimes, when he was thinking about integrals instead of invocations, he forgot all about the things that troubled him about where he was going and what he was doing with the strange gift of a life that he found himself living.
On one Thursday afternoon, when he was feeling somewhat lighter because he had forgotten about the fact that he had not heard from Davian in several days, a strange woman with hazel eyes approached him as he walked into the brisk fall air.
And after she said hello, she said her name was Daisy.
“I’m… Cedric.”
“Hi Cedric, I’m Daisy.”
He looked at her and squinted his eyes a little because he’d already heard her say that.
They were walking away from the lecture hall and down a walkway and there were twenty students walking the same way as they were and they were talking to themselves and not looking at them.
“Have you had any good dreams lately?”
Cedric looked at her, and she was smiling and calm and did not look anything like the other students he had observed and he made an assumption about what she wanted from him and looked away from her.
“I’m sorry—” he said. “I’m an atheist.”
She laughed then, and it was strange because it had been a long time since he’d heard someone laugh like that.
“You’re funny, Cedric!” she said. “I like you.”
He did not say anything.
“What was your class about today?”
Cedric thought, and he thought maybe she was another student, and though he hadn’t thought that before when she’d opened her mouth, maybe he’d been wrong, and she was trying to flirt with him, but then he had a stomach ache and he noticed out of his peripheral vision that the clouds were grey-white and it could be threatening to rain so when he said a thing, he wasn’t really sure if it was true or not, but he said it.
“Stellar parallax.”
“Oh!” she said, and he looked at her for only a split second, because it was hard to look at her. “Is that like The Starry Night?”
“I—” he said, nonplussed. “No, I don’t think so.”
He didn’t know what her game was, or what she was trying to pull or get out of him and he really just wanted her to go away so that he could be—
“Well, Cedric, keep looking up!”
Daisy disappeared then, fading into the crowd without pushing anyone because she was gliding and dancing between more than she was marching through.
There were only seven people living in the Magicademy now. Zahra had left a couple of months ago because she’d begun her freshman year at one of the colleges in the city, and she had moved into an apartment so that she did not have to commute to school.
Zahra had never been one of the loudest voices in the creaky old house, but when she left, there were two that made up for it tenfold. Owen, now fourteen, was finding his voice, and when the cords in his throat squeaked and jolted to find their proper pitch, it was even more discordant because he was usually directing it in deference to Friday Perkins.
And Friday had recently turned thirteen, a fact that she did not let anyone forget. When her self-proclaimed growth spurt went on for months, she claimed one of the corners of her bedroom as the chart that should have been kept since her birth, and every month she took a blade and carved a new mark on the wall.
With Zahra gone, the chain of girls shifted, and Friday abandoned the bunk above the desk and proclaimed the bed set on the floor as her own. And she told Myrtle that she thought it was time Suyon stopped sleeping in Myrtle’s room and she said it was because at ninety-four years old, the woman had earned some peace and quiet.
But Suyon still did not say a word.
She had struck up a bit of a kinship with Elmer, who, though one might never know it, was only three years her senior. And usually, in the evenings, when Owen and Friday were off somewhere making racket enough for eight, Elmer and Suyon were moving chess pieces set on velvet so that they made hardly any noise at all.
Cedric was outside, and though it had been an unseasonably warm day, there was a chill that was rising because the heat of the Sun had moved somewhere else on the Earth. He liked to cut his fingernails outside, and he preferred to keep them short and clean because he didn’t like it when the ends scraped against the things he touched or got dirty or broken.
And he never chewed them.
He had seen someone cutting their nails on the subway once, and it had made him somewhat more angry than the transgression probably deserved. The act had seemed wrong in a way he could not fully articulate, in part because he knew someone else would have to sweep up their leavings at the end of the line, but further still because he was not so sure that the clippings should be destined for the garbage. So when he cut the nails outside, he was enjoying the fresh air and he was freed from the compulsion to chase after the ones that missed the can and landed on the carpet, and yet, he was not so completely sure that they belonged in the garden either.
And he could not finalize the conviction or question of whether humans were more like Earth, or more like plastic.
“Hey Ced?”
It was Eloise, and she had come to find him in the backyard, where he was sitting on one of the steps that led from the deck to the grassy plain. He looked back and up at her, and a gentle breeze was moving her hair around her face.
“Is it okay if I sit down?”
Cedric blinked and said, “Sure,” and then he moved a step down and off to the side, because sometimes when he was too close to Eloise, he felt a sort of field around her, something like gravity, except that it compelled him to move in the opposite direction.
Then he looked up at her and she didn’t say anything and was just staring at the grass and it seemed very unlike her.
“You… alright?” he asked.
She sighed, and it was a heavy thing, and even though she let the breath out of her lungs, she didn’t seem any better.
Eloise didn’t look at him. “No,” she said. “I guess… I’m not alright.”
She moved, and she smoothed her skirt, which didn’t matter so much because she also had dark grey leggings underneath. She was wearing the red flats that she wore sometimes, which Cedric liked because she often didn’t wear outfits that had much color, but then, neither did he.
She looked like she was going to say something, but couldn’t, and she just sort of erupted with an awkward, “How are you?” and he knew it was weird because she said it too loud for it to follow from what she said before.
“I…” he said. “I’m okay.”
“You’ve been home a lot this week.”
“Heh,” he said. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Everything okay?”
In his mind flashed the memory of burglars, broken glass, and blood. But all that seemed like small potatoes when he looked at Eloise’s face pulled with worry.
“It’s okay enough.”
She laughed a little, and he thought she was laughing to keep from doing something else.
“Ced, I…” she said softly. “I want to talk to you about something. And I told Zahra and she freaked out, so I guess I have to ask you not to totally freak out too.”
And because she was already trying to stack the deck in one direction, he tried to lean to the other.
“…What’s up?”
She brought her hands together, probably because the warmth of one hand against the other was the only safe and predictable thing she had in this moment.
“I want to move out,” she said.
And Cedric’s heart dropped a little, but he was not so entirely blind about where he’d been going night after night.
“That’s alright,” he said. “You’ve been here for a long time, right?”
Her eyes were askew and she smiled a bit, but she wasn’t exactly happy in the remembering. “Yeah,” she said. “Since before I can remember.”
“Maybe it’s good then,” Cedric said, trying to bolster her spirit. “You do more than your fair share around here.”
“I thought maybe I’d move in with Zahra,” she said, and then she stammered. “I mean, I don’t know if that would work out, exactly, but maybe if one of her roommates moves out, or wants to leave at the end of the semester or something…”
She trailed off.
“I’ve always been…” she said, and he looked at her. “I’ve always been here.”
“You gonna get a job?” Cedric asked quickly.
“I, uh—” she said. “I guess I’ll have to.”
“I know it’s not glamorous work,” Cedric said, trying to encourage her. “But I bet you could find a job waiting tables. It’d be like what you do here, except—”
And they both tried to talk at once.
“Except you’d be getting paid.”
She laughed again, but it was that quiet laugh that wasn’t really a laugh, because it was actually very sad and she did not want to look at him, and then she talked but he did not.
“We’ll see, but…”
And when she said this, he just looked at her, and waited, and he remembered how Davian had chided him, so he tried to put on a good face.
“I just want to get out of the house,” she said. “And I’ll figure out a way to get the money, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold down a job, but maybe I can find some other way to make it work, I don’t know, I just—”
Cedric held his breath.
“Cedric, I—” she said. “I could die.”
And he did not know what to say, so he—
“I’ve been told that it’s not a death sentence, and maybe I have five, ten, who knows how many years, but…” she said, quietly. “I just don’t know.”
He didn’t say anything for a second or two or three but he was desperate to say something and it was hard even to say her name but he tried, and he just said “El—”
“It’s not like it used to be,” she said then. “I’ve been taking the medicine and doing the treatments and—”
“It’s lupus,” she said. “I have lupus.”
And it was a word he’d heard, and at the time it had gone over and through and beside him because he’d had no reason to pay attention. And now he suffered in ignorance.
“Does—” he asked. “Does Myr—”
“No,” she said. “No she doesn’t.”
And for the first time, they caught each other’s eyes, and then they fell away again.
“And I don’t want her to know either. I’ve been seeing an outside doctor.”
“But—” he started.
She interrupted him, because maybe she knew what he was going to say. “There’s nothing she can do for me,” she said. “Heal a scratch, a cut, a broken leg; okay—”
“But this isn’t that kind of problem.”
And he just looked at her, and he knew he was pleading.
“That’s why I have to move out,” she said. “Because if I stay here and she finds out, then I’ll never be able to leave.”
And though he tried, he felt his nerves quiver, like they did so often, and when they did that, he often lost sight of the distance, and only existed in that shaking.
“Does what they give you…” he said, slowly, “actually work?”
And he looked at her, and he knew she was concealing because of the way she looked away, and how her voice changed.
“I guess I’m a little sleepy more often than not, and I have to pee in a cup and give blood every now and then to make sure my levels are alright and—”
“You should tell her,” he said, and it was more resolute than he planned, and when the words escaped him, he thought he’d kicked too hard and he regretted it, because she just looked at him and didn’t say anything and her eyes were heavy and sad.
“I can’t, Cedric,” she said finally. “I can’t tell her.”
“What do you mean you can’t tell her?” he asked. “She could help you, actually do something that matters; more than some regular asshole who went to Harvard and thinks he has any idea what the fuck he’s doing.”
Eloise didn’t say anything for a minute.
“I just want to know what it’s like to be free,” she said. “What it’s like to be on my own.”
Cedric did not say anything because everything felt like barbs he didn’t want to throw.
“It’s not today,” she said. “I’m not even leaving tomorrow. Just… maybe someday.”
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