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“Master Olly, is it possible for a fire to burn only one thing?”
“Only one thing?”
“You know, like the fire you made for the Silver Eve festival. But instead of a fire that doesn’t hurt anything, one that only burns one thing.”
“What is it you’re wantin’ to burn?”
Coco’s smile wavered, her animated hands falling to her side, twisting worriedly into her skirt. “Master Olly, I have to tell you something.”
——
It was a stroke of good fortune that they had been given such a clear sky tonight. The individual stars were blurred, but Qifrey could still see the glow of their numbers sparkling in the sky. He could remember how they would look if he still had the vision he’d had even a month before.
He could just make out the atelier in the distance, the lights of the downstairs windows warm and inviting. The triangular shadow obscuring one of the windows grew, and then resolved into the figure of Olruggio climbing the hillside to meet him.
Olruggio sat down in the grass beside Qifrey with a small groan, likely a sign that he had spent too much of the day inside hunched over his desk. He leaned his weight back on his hands and tilted his face up to look at the clear night sky too. This really was a lovely spot, Qifrey thought. Far enough from the atelier that they wouldn’t wake their students. Close enough that Olly could come visit him whenever he liked if this went wrong.
They sat together in silence, eyes on the stars and the crescent of the moon rising over the hills. Qifrey knew Olly was waiting for him to speak first, but it took him a while of soaking in the warmth Olly radiated next to him for him to gather the courage.
“I suppose it’s time for me to confess my sins,” he said eventually. He folded his hands in his lap to keep them from trembling.
Olly turned his head to look at Qifrey. Qifrey shouldn’t have expected anything else, but he didn’t deserve the gentle kindness in Olruggio’s eyes.“What if you start with telling me your worries?” Olly suggested.
Qifrey almost laughed. He had an entire universe worth of worries swirling through his head like twisted galaxies. Where did he even start?
What if I die? Was the first selfish thought that untangled from the rest and rose to the front of his mind.
It had been months since Olly had first come to him about this plan, though he hadn’t been able to explain much about it at the time for Qifrey’s own safety.
The day had been cloudy, but it had been the kind of cloudy that turned the sky a blinding white instead of a gloomy gray. Qifrey had been standing just outside the atelier, pretending he wasn’t blinking tears from his eye as it tried and failed to adjust to the brightness, the pain in his head turning like a corkscrew right behind his eye.
“Qifrey,” Olly had said, coming up behind him. “I have a spell I need to show you.”
He had handed Qifrey a burning branch of Silverwood, the light of the flames highlighting the dark circles and haunted look in Olly’s eyes. Qifrey had taken the branch from him, and though the fire hadn’t burned his skin, he had felt something inside of him recoil in such a nauseating way, he had dropped the branch, which continued to burn to ash, leaving everything else on the ground around it untouched.
Olruggio hadnt been able to tell him much more than that. Only that Coco had told him what she knew and they had a plan to free Qifrey from the Silverwood if that’s what he chose. Olruggio would be ready with the spell as soon as Qifrey needed him.
Left unspoken was that both of them were afraid that any other reassurances would trigger the growth of the tree. Olruggio and Coco were keeping Qifrey safe by letting him concoct scenarios in his mind about all the ways it could go wrong, until the pain behind his failing eye was bad enough for him to risk the terrors he had invented out of his anxiety.
But now was the time for reassurances. The spell wouldn’t work unless they could get the tree to start growing. It was what Qifrey had so desperately been trying to avoid ever since he had learned a fraction of what the Brimhats had done to him from the Tower of Tomes, he wasn’t sure he even knew how to fully relax the hold he kept on all of his worries.
Qifrey took a breath to steady his heart, and then another, until he was able to pluck the most reasonable fear from his tangled hoard.
“If this works, it will most likely leave me blind. What will happen to the girls when I’m no longer able to be their teacher?”
“You won’t like this,” Olly said, rubbing the back of his neck in that way Qifrey knew he did when he was feeling awkward. “But Coco and I talked to Beldaruit.”
The shock of that statement was so great, Qifrey almost forgot he was supposed to be pulling his fears from his heart one by one like infected splinters. “You what?” he spluttered.
Olruggio dropped his hand from his neck and shrugged, unrepentant. “Beldaruit loves Coco’s loopholes. It was her idea to go to him, and I agreed with her that if anyone would overlook a few bent rules to keep you safe, it would be him.” Qifrey had to reluctantly agree with their logic. Beldaruit did love Coco’s loopholes. “He administered a version of the fifth exam for me,” Olly continued. “As long as there’s a qualified witch living in the atelier, no one will lose their home.” He nudged his shoulder into Qifrey’s. “I’ll be there to help, but you’ll still be their teacher.”
“Olly, I can’t be their teacher,” Qifrey’s voice wavered, too afraid to hope. “I won’t even be able to see their spells”
“Let me show you something. Close your eye.”
Qifrey heard Olly pull out his drawing pad, and the sound of his pen scratching out a spell.
“Give me your hand.” Qifrey held out his hand for Olly to wrap warm fingers around. He pulled Qifrey’s hand to his drawling pad, letting Qifrey’s fingers brush over the bumps and ridges on the paper.
“Can you tell what it is?”
Qifrey traced his fingers over the ridges with more purpose, concentrating on the shape that was putting itself together in his mind.”
“Your drying spell.” Qifrey said opening his eye. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t come up with it. This one was Agott’s. The others have been hard at work too. You’ll still be their teacher, and I’ll be there to be your eyes when you need them.”
Qifrey couldn’t help but laugh this time, though there wasn’t much humor in it. “They all knew? You did all of this behind my back?”
“They learned from best,” Olly said. He wasn’t wrong, but Qifrey’s stomach twisted with guilt over the sorrow in his voice. Olly’s thumb rubbed over the back of the hand he still held, bringing Qifrey back to the present. “What else?”
“The Brimhats,” Qifrey said. The shadow that had spread over his entire life. “They’ll still be coming for Coco, and even if this works and I am no longer bound to them through the Silverwood, they still have my right eye, and I’m bound to them through that. You’re the one who told me it was my job as a teacher to protect my students. What if I can’t protect them?”
Olly sighed. “I don’t like how much like combat magic it is, but we’ll practice sparring like the Knights Moralis do. I’ve seen how well you cast without looking already. And Coco has been looking into spells that can relay information to you without sight. She said she did something similar with you on Silver Eve.” Qifrey recalled the tiny smoke illusion of Coco accompanying him after she had been injured. “With some practice, I’m sure you’ll be just as capable against them as you are now.”
“You’ve really thought all of this through, haven’t you?”
“Not just me. Qifrey, the whole atelier is ready to help you. All of us will do anything to keep from losing you.”
Qifrey looked back up at the stars, unable to meet the sincerity in Olly’s eyes. “This life is all I’ve ever wanted,” he said. “And I’ve spent it all so terrified of losing it.”
“There’s something else still eatin’ at you,” Olly said, gently nudging Qifrey toward the confession that could break them apart. “Something that sounds more selfish than worrying how this will affect the girls.”
Qifrey looked at their entwined hands, wishing he didn’t have to admit to what he knew he needed Olruggio to know before Olly did this to help him. “You need to know how much I’ve wronged you.”
“The gaps in my memory,” Olly said simply.
Qifrey startled, the secret he was having such difficulty admitting to all of a sudden out in the open, leaving him completely off balance. Olly gave him a wan smile. “After Coco told me, I wondered how I had never noticed you needed help. I thought back on all of the times I can’t quite remember how I got from one place to another, or when I’ve woken up in strange places not sure why I would have fallen asleep there.”
Olruggio should have shoved Qifrey down the hill and been done with him. But here Olly was, sitting beside him, still holding his hand.
“I can’t ask you to forgive me for…” he paused and swallowed, “for violating you like that. It’s a poor excuse to say that I didn’t know what else to do,” the words Qifrey had kept closest to his heart, the knife he used to cut pieces off of his soul when he came too close to feeling content, came spilling out. “I told myself it was to protect you too, to keep you from having to lie about forbidden magic for me, or from seeing my transformation and having to live with the memory of it. So I took your memories of my secret instead. I never wanted to hurt you, but I was so afraid of losing this life, I tried to protect it in the most selfish way possible. I don’t know if what makes me Qifrey will die for the tree to live, or if I’ll live trapped in the tree, and I don’t know which idea is worse. Olly, I’m afraid,” he admitted, his voice cracking on the words. “I’ve been afraid for so long.”
“I’m not happy that you took my memories,” Olruggio sighed. “And if Atwert ever discovers how to restore memories, I want them back. But I forgave you for doing it as soon as I figured out why you did it,” his other hand reached out to wrap around Qifrey’s, cradling Qifrey’s hand between both of his. “I know now, and the only thing I ask is that you trust me to help you.”
“Of course I trust you.” Qifrey swiped at the moisture gathering in his eye with the hand that wasn’t held in Olruggio’s. “I’ve never deserved the kindness you’ve always shown me.”
One of Olly’s hands reached up to wipe a tear that Qifrey had missed.
“There’s one more thing you want to ask, isn’t there?” he said softly.
There was, wrapped tight around the fear of what would happen if he let Olly be that close. After that first time Olly had rescued him when they had been children, and then held him tight, repeating how relieved he was that Qifrey was alive, he had understood that the way Olly made him feel was somehow dangerous to him, even if Qifrey hadn’t known exactly what was happening at the time. Now he knew exactly what would happen if he asked the question he had wanted to ask Olruggio for so long, he couldn’t remember when it started.
“It isn’t fair to you.” It could still go wrong.
“Ask me anyway.” Olly’s thumb brushed over his cheekbone, warm and scarred with the results of a thousand experiments in ways help other people.
Qifrey wished there were some spell to etch this into his mind forever, Olly’s face close enough to see clearly, surrounded by the blurred halo of the stars he hadn’t been able to fully see in longer than he had been willing to admit. He reached up to trace the lines of Olruggio’s face with his hands, hoping that if he were able to do it again in the future, his hands would help him remember what Olly looked like.
There was nothing left to do but trust Olruggio to save him again.
“Will you kiss me?” he finally breathed.
Olly leaned closer without hesitation, like he knew exactly what Qifrey had been thinking. Qifrey had the slightest moment to think that Olly’s lips were as warm as the rest of him before Olly tilted his head to deepen the kiss. Qifrey’s heart stuttered in his chest and it became very hard to think about anything else.
Qifrey let himself get lost in the kiss, knowing he truly would lose himself. All of the anxiety in the world couldn’t stop the fact that he was exactly where he wanted to be, the safest place in the world he could ever imagine.
He felt it move through him with the comfort of the kiss, leaves unfurling, something that wasn’t him reaching out to the night air, knocking his glasses away as it stretched beyond the confines of Qifrey’s body.
Qifrey broke the kiss, staring one last time into the deep, deep blue of Olruggio’s eyes.
“Olly, you have to do it now,” he said. He was terrified that the last thing he would ever see was the look of horror on Olruggio’s face, but he was unable to look away, unable to give up the last few seconds of sight, blurry as it was now without his glasses. The fireball already blooming in Olly’s hand lit them both in a warm glow. Instead of horror, Olly’s face was gentle, only touched by a wistful kindness. The fingers of his other hand brushed Qifrey’s cheek one last time, and then reached for his hand, giving Qifrey something to hold on to.
“It’s gonna be okay Qifrey,” he said, and then they were out of time. Qifrey could feel the roots growing through him, bulging under his skin, ready to break through and sink deep into the earth. The flame touched the branch protruding from Qifrey’s eye socket and Qifrey braced himself for his world to explode into pain.
The pain never came. Warmth raced through him instead. This was Olly’s magic, he realized. Of course it wouldn’t hurt him. The thing it was burning wasn’t him. The fire engulfed him completely, swallowing up the figure of Olruggio against the night sky. The flames were too bright, and he had to close his eye against the pain of straining against their light. He could feel the warmth of the flames burning most intensely right behind his eye, in the spot where Qifrey’s headaches always started, before radiating out through the rest of his body, reaching every tiny tendril of Silverwood root and burning it all to nothing in his veins and muscles and bones.
And then it was over, leaving him panting and dazed. He noticed distantly that Olly was still holding his hand. Was that Olly’s voice calling his name? His muscles gave out, and he collapsed in the direction of the voice.
Olruggio caught him. For a long moment it was all he could do to press his face into the warm crook of Olly’s neck and try to catch his breath. He felt wrung out, like a terrible fever had finally broken, leaving him weak and aching with the absence of the roots that had been woven through his body for all of the life that he could remember.
“I’m all right,” he managed eventually, in response to the increasingly worried way Olly was saying his name. “I just need a moment.”
He felt some of the tension fall out of Olruggio’s muscles under him and it was only then that he realized Olly was shaking nearly as badly as Qifrey was, his arms around Qifrey, one hand on the back of his head, stroking through his hair with trembling fingers, over and over again. He must have lost his hat at some point, he thought idly, if Olly could stroke his hair like that.
Qifrey kept his face hidden against Olly’s neck while the night air cooled his skin and Olly’s fingers soothed his frayed nerves. He wasn’t ready to know yet.
They stayed like that for a long time, the only sound the insects chirping in the trees and bushes. Olly didn’t rush him. He let Qifrey hide in his arms like a child, his cheek against Qifrey’s temple, fingers in Qifrey’s hair soothing himself as much as they were soothing Qifrey.
So this is what it feels like, Qifrey thought. This was what it meant to feel safe. To be able to push away the worries of the world for a moment instead of grabbing them closer to wallow in their fear.
Qifrey wished he could stay here forever, frozen in this moment, where he was safe in the warm circle of Olly’s arms and nothing outside of them could touch him.
But he had students who still needed him to be there to make breakfast in the morning, and then figure out the new shape of their lives after that. Thinking about something as mundane as breakfast gave Qifrey the courage to stop putting off the inevitable. He lifted his head off of Olruggio’s shoulder and opened his eye.
“Anything?” Olly asked.
“No.”
He had expected it. He had known it was coming. He had even practiced for it, memorizing the layout of the atelier with his eyes closed, practicing putting his clothes on, cooking simple meals by touch and smell and sound alone after the girls had gone to bed.
The wave of grief was still overwhelming.
“I can’t see you.” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded small and lost.
“I’m right here,” Olly said, taking Qifrey’s hand and bringing it to his cheek. Qifrey traced the lines of his face, beloved and familiar and grounding. He knew where he was facing now, he wasn’t lost adrift in the dark of the hillside.
Olly turned his face and pressed a kiss to Qifrey’s palm. “I’m still right here, but I need a light to check you over.”
His knee stayed pressed against Qifrey’s, giving Qifrey something to orient himself against. Qifrey couldn’t see what Olly was doing, but he could hear the scratch of a pen on paper. A moment later, light bloomed into being. Qifrey automatically turned his head towards it.
“Can you see that?” Olly asked.
“Not exactly,” Qifrey struggled to put this new not-sight, but not exactly the full dark of blindness that he had expected into words. “I can tell that there’s light here.” He turned his head away from Olly’s lamp. “And none here. I can’t see the source of the light, or anything it illuminates.”
Olruggio’s fingers brushed under his eye. “Anything else? The headache?”
“Gone.” The relief of that cracked through the grief, a ray of light in the dark. “It doesn’t hurt.”
And if it was gone, if the Silverwood was truly gone that meant—
“Olly, will you kiss me again?”
“Always,” Olruggio answered, and then his lips were on Qifrey’s, and Qifrey couldn’t see the stars anymore, but in exchange he didn’t have to let Olly go. He could live with letting the rest of the stars go if it meant keeping the brightest one in his arms. If it meant he could pull Olly closer, down into the grass, their bodies fitting together.
The sky had felt too big around him, but with Olly over him, his world shrank down to a manageable size, the feeling that he was going to fall off the hill and float away into the dark nothing fading. The grass of the hill was underneath him, tickling the little bit of skin that was exposed on the back of his neck, the feeling of something solid on either side of his head were Olly’s arms, bracing his weight while his mouth caught Qifrey’s again, the heavy fabric of Olly’s cloak hung down around them, shifting with their movements, their chests flush together, their hips—
They both froze when Olly’s hips rocked against his. He couldn’t see Olly’s expression, but he could picture it. He could feel the way his muscles tensed, could hear the catch in his breath. “Is this okay?”
“Keep going. Please.”
Qifrey had just had his entire body lit on a much more literal fire by Olruggio, but the way Olly’s hips rocked against his stirred an entire different feeling of being engulfed by flames. His hands twisted into the fabric of Olly’s shirt at his back as he lifted his own hips to meet Olly’s, each thrust stoking the new flames inside of him. Eventually he pulled at the shirt enough to get it untucked in the back, so Qifrey was able to reach under and run his hands over smooth, warm skin.
Olly groaned as Qifrey ran a hand up his spine, trailing kisses away from Qifrey’s mouth, down his jaw, to the top of Qifrey’s shirt, where he was stopped by the straps crossed over Qifrey’s throat. Olly’s weight shifted over him, leaning it onto one arm so the other was free to loosen the first of the straps. Fabric fell away, and Qifrey’s stomach swooped like it had the first time he had used sylph shoes when Olly’s lips replaced his fingers.
“Qifrey, your shirt is the worst,” Olly grumbled against the newly bared skin.
That startled a laugh out of Qifrey, and all of a sudden he realized how free he felt. He couldn’t see it but he could feel the place where he had chosen to build his atelier around the edges of where Olly’s body was shielding him. The open sky and the night breeze. The rolling hills and the trees he would no longer have to look at and wonder how long he had before he joined their number. He had made his life here, and he would get to keep it. He laughed again for the sheer joy of being able to feel the joy without having to separate his heart from it with a wall of fear.
“Is this the first time I’ve heard you laugh for real?” Olly murmured, nuzzling his face against Qifrey’s neck, his beard tickling the skin he had managed to expose. Three straps now, Qifrey thought, though he was admittedly having a difficult time focusing. In another moment, Olly would have it fully unbraided.
“It might be,” Qifrey said half in disbelief. He wanted to know what else he could allow himself to truly feel now. What he could make Olly feel in return.
His hands found Olly’s belt. He had been to the bath in the Great Hall with Olly before, had seen Olly put this on, knew the clasp was—ah, there! The belt came free, and Qifrey was able to untuck the rest of Olly’s shirt and pull the waist band of his skirt and leggings down enough to reach the hard length of his cock.
Olly moaned into Qifrey’s neck when Qifrey’s fingers wrapped around him, stroking experimentally, gaining confidence with the sounds Olly was making acting as a guide.
Olly’s weight shifted to free his arm again, this time to ruck up the hem of Qifrey’s skirt, a frustrated groan replacing the more pleasant noises when he remembered that more straps awaited him.
Qifrey knew his undershirt was too complicated for this kind of spontaneity. That was part of the whole point, to make him feel locked up tight against anything that might worm its way into his heart, but Olly was making a valiant effort to undo it.
He got one leg unfastened, rubbing the heel of his hand against Qifrey’s still-clothed erection, making Qifrey arch into him. A thumb swiped over the head of Olruggio’s cock made Olly lose track of what he was doing, a delightful response, but one that didn’t help Qifrey’s current predicament much.
Finally enough straps were undone, enough fabric pushed aside to expose Qifrey to the cool night air and the delicious warmth of Olruggio’s hand.
”I’m going to roll us to your right,” Olly murmured into Qifrey’s ear, and Qifrey would have agreed to anything said to him like that, especially with Olly’s hand around his cock.
And then the eerie feeling of the void was at his back again, but Olly was warmth incarnate in front of him, his lips on Qifrey’s, his hands doing something to navigate all the pooled fabric of their disheveled clothes between them until their cocks were pressed together in the circle of their joined hands.
Their bodies fit together as easily as any of their spells, adjusting pressure and speed and angle until they fell into a rhythm that had their kisses turning half into desperate moans and gasps. Each thrust of Olly’s cock against his in the tight tunnel of their hands added fuel to the growing fire inside of Qifrey, until a final spark turned it to lightening arching down his spine and spilling out over both of their hands, every thought in his head except for the haze of pleasure gone. Olly groaned, his hips bucking harder into the new slick between them, and Qifrey was just aware enough to feel the spasms of Olly’s cock in his hand as he came too.
Heavy drowsiness crept up on him as they lay together, foreheads touching, breathing each other’s air. But the thought of getting caught on the hillside by one of their students, half naked and covered in stickiness and morning dew made Qifrey claw his way back to wakefulness.
He found the corner of his cloak to wipe his hand on, offering it to Olly as well. “It won’t show up as badly on mine as it will on yours,” Qifrey said.
Olly huffed a laugh. “It may be too late for that,” he said, but he let Qifrey wipe up what he could find of the mess by feel while he nuzzled his face into Qifrey’s throat like a contented whiskercat. Qifrey wished he could lose himself in fantasies of what else he could do to Olly with a bit more practice and perhaps a bed and a firmly locked door, but something cold crept into the warm thoughts.
“You knew the spell would work,” Qifrey said.
Olly went still. “Yeah,” he breathed out after a long moment, the soft exhalation raising the hairs on the back of Qifrey’s neck.
“How?”
Olruggio lifted his head, and Qifrey knew Olly was studying his face, even if he couldn’t see it.
“My sins can keep for one more day,” Olly said, pressing his forehead to Qifrey’s again. “Just let me be happy that you’re alive tonight.”
Qifrey wrapped his arms around Olly, pulling him close until his body started to relax again by fractions.
”All right,” he said, pressing his face into Olly’s hair. “But after tomorrow, no more secrets? From any of us?”
“No more secrets,” Olly agreed. “I don’t know what’s coming for us, but we’ll all be stronger if we can face it together.”
Together. Qifrey let the lightness that word brought fill him and chase away the lingering anxiety for another moment. One of his nightmares had come to pass and all that was left to do was learn to live with it. The burden of secrets had been mostly lifted, the poison burned out of his body, his sins forgiven by the man in his arms. The morning would bring new challenges, the future more dangers, but for the first time in his memory, he knew he wouldn’t be alone.